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Title: Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 20. July, 1877.

Author: Various

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Language: English

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Lippincott's Magazine

OF

POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE.

VOLUME XX.

PHILADELPHIA:
J. B. LIPPINCOTT AND CO.
1877.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1877, by
J.B. LIPPINCOTT & CO.,
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.
Lippincott's Press,
Philadelphia.

CONTENTS.

Literature of the Day, comprising Reviews of the following Works:

Our Monthly Gossip, comprising the following Articles:

A Cheering Sign, 258; A Crying Evil, 771; A Day at the Paris Conservatoire, 512; A Missing Item, 770; A Neglected Branch of Philology, 385; Another Defunct Monopoly, 386; Artistic Jenkinsism, 640; Brigham Young and Mormonism, 514; Fernan Caballero, 761; Foreign Leaders in Russia and Turkey, 765; François Buloz, 382; Friend Abner in the North-West, 254; How shall we Call the Birds? 256; Katerfelto in Repose, 387; "Les Naufragés de Calais," 637; Miridite Courtship, 253; Notes from Moscow, 509; Punching the Drinks, 130; Realistic Art, 639; Russian and Turkish Music, 636; The Coming Elections in France, 127; The Dead of Paris, 122; The Departure of the Imperial Guards, 768; The Education of Women in India, 515; The Modern French Novelists, 379; The Nautch-Dancers of India, 132; The Octroi, 763; The Religious Struggle at Geneva, 125; Von Moltke in Turkey, 129; Water-Lilies, 384.

Poetry:

[Pg 9]

Lippincott's Magazine

OF

POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE.

JULY, 1877.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1877, by J. B. Lippincott & Co., in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

DOWN THE RHINE.

THIRD PAPER.

EVENING CONCERT AT WIESBADEN.

Wiesbaden (the "Meadow-Bath"), though an inland town, partakes of some of the Rhine characteristics, though even if it did not, its notoriety as a spa would be enough to make some mention of it necessary. Its promenade and Kurhaus, its society, evening concerts, alleys of beautiful plane trees, its frequent illuminations with Bengal lights, reddening the classic peristyles and fountains with which modern taste has decked the town, its[Pg 10] airy Moorish pavilion over the springs, and its beautiful Greek chapel with fire-gilt domes, each surmounted by a double cross connected with the dome by gilt chains—a chapel built by the duke Adolph of Nassau in memory of his wife, Elizabeth Michaelovna, a Russian princess,—are things that almost every American traveler remembers, not to mention the Neroberger wine grown in the neighborhood.

Schlangenbad, a less well-known bathing-place, is a favorite goal of Wiesbaden excursionists, for a path through dense beech woods leads from the stirring town to the quieter "woman's republic," where, before sovereigns in incognito came to patronize it, there had long been a monopoly of its charms by the wives and daughters of rich men, bankers, councilors, noblemen, etc., and also by a set of the higher clergy. The waters were famous for their sedative qualities, building up the nervous system, and, it is said, also beautifying the skin. Some credulous persons traced the name of the "Serpents' Bath" to the fact that snakes lurked in the springs and gave the waters their healing powers; but as the neighborhood abounds in a small harmless kind of reptile, this is the more obvious reason for the name. I spent a pleasant ten days at Schlangenbad twelve or thirteen years ago, when many of the German sovereigns preferred it for its quiet to the larger and noisier resorts, and remember with special pleasure meeting with fields of Scotch heather encircled by beech and chestnut woods, with ferny, rocky nooks such as—when it is in Germany that you find them—suggest fairies, and with a curious village church, just restored by a rich English Catholic, since dead, who lived in Brussels and devoted his fortune to religious purposes all over the world. This church was chiefly interesting as a specimen of what country churches were in the Middle Ages, having been restored in the style common to those days. It was entirely of stone, within as well as without, and I remember no painting on the walls. The "tabernacle," instead of being placed on the altar, as is the custom in most churches now, and has been for two or three hundred years, was, according to the old German custom, a separate shrine, with a little tapering carved spire, placed in the corner of the choir, with a red lamp burning before it. Here, as in most of the Rhine neighborhoods, the people are mainly Catholics, but in places where summer guests of all nations and religions are gathered there is often a friendly arrangement by which the same building is used for the services of two or three faiths. There was, I think, one such at Schlangenbad, where Catholic, Lutheran and Anglican services were successively held every Sunday morning; and in another place, where a large Catholic church has since been built, the old church was divided down the middle of the nave by a wooden partition about the height of a man's head, and Catholic and Protestant had each a side permanently assigned to them for their services. This kind of practical toleration, probably in the beginning the result of poverty on both sides, but at any rate creditable to its practicers, was hardly to be found anywhere outside of Germany. I remember hearing of the sisters of one of the pope's German prelates, Monsignor Prince Hohenlohe, who were Lutherans, embroidering ecclesiastical vestments and altar-linen for their brother with as much delight as if he and they believed alike; and (though this is anything but praiseworthy, for it was prompted by policy and not by toleration) it was a custom of the smaller German princes to bring their daughters up in the vaguest belief in vital truths, in order that when they married they might become whatever their husbands happened to be, whether Lutheran, Anglican, Catholic or Greek. The events of the last few years, however, have changed all this, and religious strife is as energetic in Germany as it was at one time in Italy: people must take sides, and this outward, easy-going old life has disappeared before the novel kind of persecution sanctioned by the Falk laws. Some persons even think the present state of things traceable to that same toleration, leading, as it did in many cases, to lukewarmness and indifferentism in religion. Strange phases for a fanatical Germany to pass through, and a stranger commentary on the words of Saint Remigius to Clovis, the first Frankish Christian king: "Burn that which thou hast worshiped, and worship that which thou hast burnt"![Pg 11]

PROMENADE AT WIESBADEN.

[Pg 12]

LUTHER'S HOUSE AT FRANKFORT.

Schwalbach is another of Wiesbaden's handmaidens—a pleasant, rather quiet spot, from which, if you please, you can follow the Main to the abode of sparkling hock or the vinehills of Hochheim, the property of the church which crowns the heights. This is at the entrance of the Roman-named Taunus Mountains, where there are bathing-places, ruined castles, ancient bridges, plenty of legends, and, above all, dark solemn old chestnut forests. But we have a long way to go, and must not linger on our road to the free imperial city of Frankfort, with its past history and present importance. Here too I have some personal remembrances, though hurried ones. The hotel itself—what a relief such hotels are from the modern ones with electric bells and elevators and fifteen stories!—was an old patrician house ample, roomy, dignified, and each room had some individuality, notwithstanding the needful amount of transformation from its old self. It was a dull, wet day when we arrived, and next morning we went to the cathedral, Pepin's foundation, of which I remember, however, less than of the great hall in the Römer building where the Diets sat and where the "Golden Bull" is still kept—a hall now magnificently and appropriately frescoed with subjects from German history. Then the far-famed Judengasse, a street where the first Rothschild's mother lived till within a score of years ago, and where now, among the dark, crazy tenements, so delightful to the artist's eye, there glitters one of the most gorgeously-adorned synagogues in Europe. A change indeed from the times when Jews were hunted and hooted at in these proud, fanatical cities, which were not above robbing them and making use of them even while they jeered and persecuted! The great place in front of the emperor's hall was the appointed ground for tournaments, and as we lounge on we come to a queer house, with its lowest corner cut away and the oriel window above supported on one massive pillar: from that window tradition says that Luther addressed the people just before starting for Worms to meet the Diet. This other house has a more modern[Pg 13] look: it is Goethe's birthplace, the house where the noted housekeeper and accomplished hostess, "Frau Rath"—or "Madam Councilor," as she was called—gathered round her those stately parties that are special to the great free cities of olden trade. Frankfort has not lost her reputation in this line: her merchants and civic functionaries still form an aristocracy, callings as well as fortunes are hereditary, and if some modern elements have crept in, they have not yet superseded the old. The regattas and boating-parties on the Main remind one of the stir on the banks of the Thames between Richmond and Twickenham, where so many "city men" have lovely retired homes; but Frankfort has its Kew Gardens also, where tropical flora, tree-ferns and palms, in immense conservatories, make perpetual summer, while the Zoological Garden and the bands that play there are another point of attraction. Still, I think one more willingly seeks the older parts—the Ashtree Gate, with its machicolated tower and turrets, the only remnants of the fortifications; the old cemetery, where Goethe's mother is buried; and the old bridge over the Main, with the statue of Charlemagne bearing the globe of empire in his hand, which an innocent countryman from the neighboring village of Sachsenhausen mistook for the man who invented the Aeppelwei, a favorite drink of Frankfort. This bridge has another curiosity—a gilt cock on an iron rod, commemorating the usual legend of the "first living thing" sent across to cheat the devil, who had extorted such a promise from the architect. But although the ancient remains are attractive, we must not forget the Bethmann Museum, with its treasure of Dannecker's Ariadne, and the Städel Art Institute, both the legacies of public-spirited merchants to their native town; the Bourse, where a business hardly second to any in London is done; and the memory of so many great minds of modern times—Börne, Brentano, Bettina von Arnim, Feurbach, Savigny, Schlossen, etc. The Roman remains at Oberürzel in the neighborhood ought to have a chapter to themselves, forming as they do a miniature Pompeii, but the Rhine and its best scenery calls us away from its great tributary, and we already begin to feel the witchery which a popular poet has expressed in these lines, supposed to be a warning from a father to a wandering son:

JOHN WOLFGANG GOETHE.

GOETHE'S BIRTHPLACE.

This is the Rheingau, the most beautiful valley of rocks and bed of rapids which occurs during the whole course of the river—the region most crowded with legends and castles, and most frequented by strangers by railroad and steamboat. The right bank is at first the only one that calls for attention, dotted as it is with townlets, each nestled in orchards, gardens and vineyards, with a church and steeple, and terraces of odd, over-hanging houses; little stone arbors trellised with grapevines; great crosses and statues of patron saints in the warm, soft-toned red sandstone of the country; fishermen's taverns, with most of the business done outside under the trees or vine-covered piazza; little, busy wharfs and works, aping joyfully the bustle of large seaports, and succeeding in miniature; and perhaps a burgomaster's garden, where that portly and pleasant functionary does not disdain to keep a tavern and serve his customers himself, as at Walluf.[Pg 15]

JUDENGASSE AT FRANKFORT.

[Pg 16]

At Rauenthal (a "valley" placed on high hills) we find the last new claimant to the supremacy among Rhine wines, at least since the Paris Exhibition, when the medal of honor was awarded to Rauenthal, which has ended in bringing many hundreds of curious connoisseurs to test the merits of the grape where it grows. Now comes a whole host of villages on either side of the river, famous through their wines—Steinberg, the "golden beaker;" Scharfenstein, whose namesake castle was the refuge of the warlike archbishops of Mayence, the stumbling-block of the archbishops of Trèves, called "the Lion of Luxembourg," and lastly the prey of the terrible Swedes, who in German stories play the part of Cossacks and Bashi-Bazouks; Marcobrunnen, with its classical-looking ruin of a fountain hidden among vineyards; Hattenheim, Hallgarten, Gräfenberg; and Eberbach, formerly an abbey, known for its "cabinet" wine, the hall-mark of those times, and its legends of Saint Bernard, for whom a boar ploughed a circle with his tusks to show the spot where the saint should build a monastery, and afterward tossed great stones thither for the foundation, while angels helped to build the upper walls. Eberbach is rather deserted than ruined. It was a good deal shattered in the Peasants' War at the time of the Reformation, when the insurgents emptied the huge cask in which the whole of the Steinberg wine-harvest was stored; but since 1803, when it was made over to the neighboring wine-growers, it has remained pretty well unharmed; and its twelfth-century chapel, full of monuments; its refectory, now the press-house, with its columns and capitals nearly perfect; its cellars, where every year more wine is given away than is stored—i. e., all that which is not "cabinet-worthy"—as in the tulip-mania, when thousands of roots were thrown away as worthless, which yet had all the natural merit of lovely coloring and form,—make Eberbach well worth seeing.

Next comes Johannisberg, with its vineyards dating back to the tenth century, when Abbot Rabanus of Fulda cultivated the grape and Archbishop Ruthard of Mayence built a monastery, dedicated to Saint John the Baptist, which for centuries was owner and guardian of the most noted Rhine vintage; but abuses within and wars without have made an end of this state of things, and Albert of Brandenburg's raid on the monks' cellars has been more steadily supplemented by the pressure of milder but no less efficient means of destruction. When Napoleon saw this tract of land and offered it to General Kellermann, who had admired its beauty, he is said to have received a worthy and a bold answer. "I thank Your Majesty," said the marshal, "but the receiver is as bad as the thief." The less scrupulous Metternich became its owner, giving for it, however, an equivalent of arable and wood land. The Metternich who for years was Austrian ambassador at Paris during the brilliant time of the Second Empire, and whose fast and eccentric wife daily astonished society, is now owner of the peerless Johannisberg vineyards, among which is his country-house. Goethe's friends, the Lade and Brentano families, lived in this neighborhood, and the historian Nicholas Vogt lies buried in the Metternich chapel, though his heart, by his special desire, is laid in a silver casket within the rocks of Bingen, with a little iron cross marking the spot. At Geisenheim we are near two convents which as early as 1468 had printing-presses in active use, and the mysterious square tower of Rüdesheim, which brings all sorts of suppositions to our mind, though the beauty of the wayside crosses, the tall gabled roofs, the crumbling walls, the fantastically-shaped rocks, getting higher and higher on each side, and the perpetual winding of the river, are enough to keep the eye fixed on the mere landscape. At the windows, balconies and arbors sit pretty, ruddy girls waving their handkerchiefs to the unknown "men and brethren" on board the steamers and the trains; and well they may, if this be a good omen, for here is the "Iron Gate" of the Rhine, and the water bubbles and froths in miniature whirlpools as we near what is called the "Bingen Hole."

As we have passed the mouth of the Stein and recollected the rhyme of Schrödter in his King Wine's Triumph[Pg 17]—

RÜDESHEIM.

[Pg 18]

so now we peer up one of the clefts in the rocks and see the Nahe ploughing its way along to meet the great river. Just commanding the mouth is Klopp Castle, and not far warlike Bingen, a rich burgher-city, plundered and half destroyed in every war from those of the fourteenth to those of the eighteenth century, while Klopp too claims to have been battered and bruised even in the thirteenth century, but is better known as the scene of the emperor Henry IV.'s betrayal to the Church authorities by his son, who treacherously invited him to visit him here by night. A little way up the river Nahe, where the character of the people changes from the lightheartedness of the Rhine proper to a steadiness and earnestness somewhat in keeping with the sterner and more mountainous aspect of the country, is Kreuznach, (or "Crossnear"), now a bathing-resort, and once a village founded by the first Christian missionaries round the first cross under whose shadow they preached the gospel. Sponheim Castle, once the abode of Trithemius, or Abbot John of Trittenheim, a famous chronicler and scholar, reminds us of the brave butcher of Kreuznach, Michael Mort, whose faithfulness to his lawful lord when beset by pretenders to his title in his own family won for the guild of butchers certain privileges which they have retained ever since; and Rheingrafenstein, where the ruins are hardly distinguishable from the tossed masses of porphyry rock on which they are perched, tells us the story of Boos von Waldeck's wager with the lord of the castle to drink a courier's top-boot full of Rhine wine at one draught—a feat which he is said to have successfully accomplished, making himself surely a fit companion for Odin in Walhalla; but his reward on earth was more substantial, for he won thereby the village of Hüffelsheim and all its belongings. In a less romantic situation stands Ebernburg, so called from the boar which during a siege the hungry but indomitable defenders of the castle paraded again and again before the eyes of the besiegers, whose only hope lay in starving out the garrison—the property of the Sickengens, whose ancestor Franz played a prominent part in the Reformation and gave an asylum in these very halls to Bucer, Melanchthon, Œcolampadius and Ulrich von Hütten. Past Rothenfels, where towering rocks hem in the stream, like the Wye banks in Arthur's country on the Welsh borders; the scattered stones of Disibodenberg, the Irish missionary's namesake convent, which afterward passed into the hands of the Cistercians; Dhaum Castle and Oberstein Church, these two with their legends, the first accounting for a bas-relief in the great hall representing an ape rocking a child, the heir of the house, in the depths of a forest, and giving him an apple to eat,—we come to a cluster of castles which are the classical ground of the Nahe Valley. The very rocks seem not only crowned but honeycombed with buildings: chapels stand on jutting crags; houses, heaped as it were one on the roof of the other, climb up their rough sides, and the roofs themselves have taken their cue from the rocks, and have three or four irregular lines of tiny windows ridging and bulging them out.

Taking boat again at Bingen, and getting safely through the Rhine "Hell Gate," the "Hole," whose terrors seem as poetic as those of the Lorelei, we pass the famous Mouse Tower, and opposite it the ruined Ehrenfels; Assmanshausen, with its dark-colored wine and its custom of a May or Pentecost feast, when thousands of merry Rhinelanders spend the day in the woods, dancing, drinking and singing, baskets outspread in modified and dainty pic-nic fashion, torches lit at night and bands playing or mighty choruses resounding through the woods; St. Clement's Chapel, just curtained from the river by a grove of old poplars and overshadowed by a ruin with a hundred eyes (or windows), while among the thickly-planted, crooked crosses of its churchyard old peasant-women and children run or totter, the first telling their beads, the second gathering flowers,[Pg 19] and none perhaps remembering that the chapel was built by the survivors of the families of the robber-knights of Rheinstein (one of the loveliest of Rhine ruins) and three other confederated castles, whom Rudolph of Habsburg treated, rightly enough, according to the Lynch law of his time. They were hung wherever found, but their pious relations did not forget to bury them and atone for them as seemingly as might be.

BINGEN, FROM KLOPP CASTLE.

[Pg 20]

Bacharach, if it were not famed in Germany for its wine, according to the old rhyme declaring that

would or ought to be noticed for its wealth of old houses and its many architectural beauties, from the ruined (or rather unfinished) chapel of St. Werner, now a wine-press house, bowered in trees and surrounded by a later growth of crosses and tombstones, to the meanest little house crowding its neighbor that it may bathe its doorstep in the river—houses that when their owners built and patched them from generation to generation little dreamt that they would stand and draw the artist's eye when the castle was in ruins. Similarly, the many serious historical incidents that took place in Bacharach have lived less long in the memory of inhabitants and visitors than the love-story connected with the ruined castle—that of Agnes, the daughter of the count of this place and niece of the great Barbarossa, whom her father shut up here with her mother to be out of the way of her lover, Henry of Braunschweig. The latter, a Guelph (while the count was a Ghibelline), managed, however, to defeat the father's plans: the mother helped the lovers, and a priest was smuggled into the castle to perform the marriage, which the father, after a useless outburst of rage, wisely acknowledged as valid. The coloring of many buildings in this part of the Rhineland is very beautiful, the red sandstone of the neighborhood being one of the most picturesque of building materials. Statues and crosses, as well as churches and castles, are built of it, and even the rocks have so appealed by their formation to the imagination of the people that at Schönburg we meet with a legend of seven sisters, daughters of that family whose hero, Marshal Schomburg, the friend and right hand of William of Orange, lies buried in Westminster Abbey, honored as marshal of France, peer of Great Britain and grandee of Portugal, and who, for their haughtiness toward their lovers, were turned into seven rocks, through part of which now runs the irreverent steam-engine, ploughing through the tunnel that cuts off a corner where the river bends again.

Now comes the gray rock where, as all the world knows, the Lorelei lives, but as that graceful myth is familiar to all, we will hurry past the mermaid's home, where so much salmon used to be caught that the very servants of the neighboring monastery of St. Goar were forbidden to eat salmon more than three times a week, to go and take a glimpse of St. Goarshausen, with its convent founded in the seventh century by one of the first Celtic missionaries, and its legend of the spider who remedied the carelessness of the brother cellarer when he left the bung out of Charlemagne's great wine-cask by quickly spinning across the opening a web thick enough to stop the flow of wine. A curious relic of olden time and humor is shown in the cellar—an iron collar, grim-looking, but more innocent than its looks, for it was used only to pin the unwary visitor to the wall while a choice between a "baptism" of water and wine was given him. The custom dates back to Charlemagne's time. Those who, thinking to choose the least evil of the two, gave their voice for the water, had an ample and unexpected shower-bath, while the wine-drinkers were crowned with some tinseled wreath and given a large tankard to empty. On the heights above the convent stood the "Cat" watching the "Mouse" on the opposite bank above Wellmich, the two names commemorating an insolent message sent by Count John III. of the castle of Neu-Katzellenbogen to Archbishop Kuno of Falkenstein, the builder of the castle of Thurnberg, "that he greeted him and hoped he would take good care of his mouse, that his (John's) cat might not eat it up." And now we pass a chain of castles, ruins and villages; rocks with such names as the Prince's Head; lead, copper and silver works, with all the activity of modern[Pg 21] life, stuck on like a puppet-show to the background of a solemn old picture, a rocky, solitary island, "The Two Brothers," the twin castles of Liebenstein and Sternberg, the same which Bulwer has immortalized in his Pilgrims of the Rhine, and at their feet, close to the shore, a modern-looking building, the former Redemptorist convent of Bornhofen. As we step out there is a rude quay, four large old trees and a wall with a pinnacled niche, and then we meet a boatful of pilgrims with their banners, for this is one of the shrines that are still frequented, notwithstanding many difficulties—notwithstanding that the priests were driven out of the convent some time ago, and that the place is in lay hands; not, however, unfriendly hands, for a Catholic German nobleman, married[Pg 22] to a Scotch woman, bought the house and church, and endeavored, as under the shield of "private property," to preserve it for the use of the Catholic population of the neighborhood. Last summer an English Catholic family rented the house, and a comfortable home was established in the large, bare building attached to the church, where is still kept the Gnadenbild, or "Grace image," which is the object of the pilgrimage—a figure of the Blessed Virgin holding her dead Son upon her knees. These English tenants brought a private chaplain with them, but, despite their privileges as English subjects, I believe there was some trouble with the government authorities. However, they had mass said for them at first in the church on weekdays. A priest from Camp, the neighboring post-town, was allowed to come once in a week to say mass for the people, but with locked doors, and on other days the service was also held in the same way, though a few of the country-people always managed to get in quietly before the doors were shut. On Sundays mass was said for the strangers and their household only in a little oratory up in the attics, which had a window looking into the church near the roof of the chancel. One of them describes "our drawing-room in the corner of the top floor, overlooking the river," and "our life ... studying German, reading and writing in the morning, dining early, walking out in the evening, tea-supper when we come home.... There are such pretty walks in the ravines and hills, in woods and vineyards, and to the castles above and higher hills beyond! We brought one man and a maid, who do not know German, and found two German servants in the house, who do everything.... It is curious how cheaply we live here; the German cook left here does everything for us, and we are saying she makes us much better soups and omelettes and souffles than any London cook." Now, as these three things happen to be special tests of a cook's skill, this praise from an Englishman should somewhat rebuke travelers who can find no word too vile for "German cookery."

RHEINGRAFENSTEIN.

The time of the yearly pilgrimage came round during the stay of these strangers, "and pilgrims came from Coblenz, a four hours' walk (in mid-August and the temperature constantly in the nineties), on the opposite side of the river, singing and chanting as they came, and crossed the river here in boats. High mass was at half-past nine (in the morning) and benediction at half-past one, immediately after which they returned in boats down the stream much more quickly. The day before was a more local pilgrimage: mass and benediction were at eight, but pilgrims came about all the morning." Later on, when the great heat had brought "premature autumn tints to the trees and burnt up the grass," the English family made some excursions in the neighborhood, and in one place they came to a "forest and a large tract of tall trees," but this was exceptional, as the soil is not deep enough to grow large timber, and the woods are chiefly low underwood. The grapes were small, and on the 22d of August they tasted the first plateful at Stolzenfels, an old castle restored by the queen-dowager of Prussia, and now the property of the empress of Germany. "The view from it is lovely up and down the river, and the situation splendid—about four hundred feet above the river, with high wooded hills behind, just opposite the Lahn where it falls into the Rhine." Wolfgang Müller describes Stolzenfels as a beautiful specimen of the old German style, with a broad smooth road leading up over drawbridges and moats, with mullioned windows and machicolated towers, and an artistic open staircase intersected by three pointed arches, and looking into an inner courtyard, with a fountain surrounded by broad-leaved tropical water-plants. The sight of a combination of antique dignity with correct modern taste is a delight so seldom experienced that it is worth while dwelling on this pleasant fact as brought out in the restoration of Stolzenfels, the "Proud Rock." And that the Rhinelanders are proud of their river is no wonder when strangers can talk about it thus: "The Rhine is a river which grows[Pg 23] upon you, living in a pretty part of its course:... its less beauteous parts have their own attractions to the natives, and its beauties, perhaps exaggerated, unfold greatly the more you explore them, not to be seen by a rushing tourist up and down the stream by rail or by boat, but sought out and contemplated from its heights and windings.... In fact, the pretty part of its course is from Bingen to Bonn. Here we are in a wonderfully winding gorge, containing nearly all its picturesque old castles, uninterrupted by any flat. The stream is rapid enough, four miles an hour or more—not equal to the Rhone at Geneva, but like that river in France. One does not wonder at the Germans being enthusiastic over their river, as the Romans were over the yellow Tiber."

MOUSE-TOWER (OR BISHOP HATTO'S TOWER) AND EHRENFELS.

[Pg 24]

THE LORELEI ROCK.

Other excursions were made by the Bornhofen visitors, one up a hill on the opposite side, over sixteen hundred feet high, whence a fine distant view of the Mosel Valley was seen, and one also to the church of St. Apollinaris, at Remagen, at some distance down the river, where are "some fine frescoes by German[Pg 25] artists covering the whole interior of the church. One artist painted four or five large ones of the Crucifixion, Resurrection and other events relating to the life of Our Lord; a second several of the life of St. Apollinaris, and two others some of Our Lady and various saints, one set being patron saints of the founder's children, whom I think we saw at Baden—Carl Egon, Count Fürstenberg-Stammheim.... The family-house stands close to the church, or one of his houses, and seems to have been made into a Franciscan convent: the monks are now banished and the church deserted, a custode (guardian) in charge. We went one day to Limburg to see the bishop of this diocese, a dear old man who only speaks German, so E—— and C—— carried on all the conversation. The cathedral is a fine old Norman building with seven towers: it is undergoing restoration, and the remains of old frescoes under the whitewash are the ground-work of renewed ones. Where an old bit is perfect enough it is left."

A STREET IN LIMBURG.

Camp, a mile from Bornhofen, is an insignificant place enough, but claiming to have been a Roman camp, and having an old convent as picturesque as those of far-famed and much-visited towns. The same irregular windows, roofed turrets springing up by the side of tall gables, a corner-shrine of Our Lady and Child, with vines and ivy making a niche for it, mossy steps, a broken wall with trailing vines and steep stone-roofed recess, probably an old niche,—such is a sketch of[Pg 26] what would make a thoroughly good picture; but in this land there are so many such that one grows too familiar with them to care for the sight. Nearly opposite is Boppard, a busy ancient town, with a parish church beautiful enough for a cathedral—St. Severin's church, with carved choir-stalls and a double nave—and the old Benedictine monastery for women, now a cold-water cure establishment. Boppard has its legend of a shadowy Templar and a faithless bridegroom challenged by the former, who turned out to be the forsaken bride herself; but of these legends, one so like the other, this part of the Rhine is full. The next winding of the stream shows us Oberspay, with a romantic tavern, carved pillars supporting a windowed porch, and a sprawling kind of roof; the "King's Stool," a modern restoration of the mediæval pulpit or platform of stone supported by pillars, with eighteen steps and a circumference of forty ells, where the Rhenish prince-archbishops met to choose the temporal sovereigns who were in part their vassals; Oberlahnstein, a town famous for its possession in perfect repair of the ancient fortifications; Lahneck, now a private residence, once the property of the Templars; Stolzenfels, of which we have anticipated a glimpse; the island of Oberwörth, with an old convent of St. Magdalen, and in the distance frowning Ehrenbreitstein, the fortress of Coblenz.

Turning up the course of the Lahn, we get to the neighborhood of a small but famous bathing-place, Ems, the cradle of the Franco-Prussian war, where the house in which Emperor William lodged is now shown as an historic memento, and effaces the interest due to the old gambling Kursaal. The English chapel, a beautiful small stone building already ivied; the old synagogue, a plain whitewashed building, where the service is conducted in an orthodox but not very attractive manner; the pretty fern- and heather-covered woods, through which you ride on donkeyback; the gardens, where a Parisian-dressed crowd airs itself late in the afternoon; all the well-known adjuncts of a spa, and the most delightful baths I ever saw, where in clean little chambers you step down three steps into an ample marble basin sunk in the floor, and may almost fancy yourself a luxurious Roman of the days of Diocletian,—such is Ems. But its environs are full of wider interest. There is Castle Schaumburg, where for twenty years the archduke Stephen of Austria, palatine of Hungary, led a useful and retired life, making his house as orderly and seemly as an English manor-house, and more interesting to the strangers, whose visits he encouraged, by the collections of minerals, plants, shells and stuffed animals and the miniature zoological and botanical gardens which he kept up and often added to. I spent a day there thirteen years ago, ten years before he died, lamented by his poor neighbors, to whom he was a visible providence. Another house of great interest is the old Stein mansion in the little town of Nassau, the home of the upright and patriotic minister of that name, whose memory is a household word in Germany. The present house is a comfortable modern one—a château in the French sense of the word—but the old shattered tower above the town is the cradle of the family. At the village of Frücht is the family-vault and the great man's monument, a modern Gothic canopy, somewhat bald and characterless, but bearing a fine statue of Stein by Schwanthaler, and an inscription in praise of the "unbending son of bowed-down Fatherland." He came of a good stock, for thus runs his father's funeral inscription, in five alliterative German rhymes. I can give it but lamely:

Stein was born in the house where he retired to spend his last years in study: his grave and pious nature is shown in the mottoes with which he adorned his home: "A tower of strength is our God" over the house-door, and in his library, above his books and busts and gathering of life-memorials, "Confidence in God, singleness of mind and righteousness."[Pg 27] His contemporaries called him, in a play upon his name which, as such things go, was not bad, "The foundation-stone of right, the stumbling-stone of the wicked, and the precious stone of Germany." Arnstein and its old convent, now occupied by a solitary priest: Balduinenstein and its rough-hewn, cyclopean-looking ruin, standing over the mossy picturesque water-mill; the marble-quarries near Schaumburg, worked by convicts; Diez and its conglomeration of houses like a puzzle endowed with life,—are all on the way to Limburg, the episcopal town, old and tortuous, sleepy and alluring, with its shady streets, its cathedral of St. George and its monument of the lion-hearted Conrad or Kuno, surnamed Shortbold (Kurzbold), a nephew of Emperor Conrad, a genuine woman-hater, a man of giant strength but dwarfish height, who is said to have once strangled a lion, and at another time sunk a boatful of men with one blow of his spear. The cathedral, the same visited by our Bornhofen friends, has other treasures—carved stalls and a magnificent image of Our Lord of the sixteenth century, a Gothic baptismal font and a richly-sculptured tabernacle, as well as a much older image of St. George and the Dragon, supposed by some to refer to the legendary existence of monsters in the days when Limburg was heathen. Some such idea seems also not to have been remote from the fancy of the mediæval sculptor who adorned the brave Conrad's monument with such elaborately monstrous figures: it was evidently no lack of skill and delicacy that dictated such a choice of supporters, for the figure of the hero is lifelike, dignified and faithful to the minute description of his features and stature left us by his chronicler, while the beauty of the leaf-border of the slab and of the capitals of the short pillars is such as to excite the envy of our best modern carvers.

CONRAD'S MONUMENT, LIMBURG CATHEDRAL.

Lady Blanche Murphy.

[Pg 28]

EDINBURGH JOTTINGS.

Whenever Scott's landau went up the Canongate, his coachman knew without special instructions that the pace must be a walk; and no funeral, says Lockhart, ever moved more slowly, for wherever the great enthusiast might turn his gaze there was recalled to his mind some tradition of blood and mystery at which his eye would sparkle and his cheek glow. How by the force of his genius he inoculated the world with his enthusiasm about the semi-savage Scotia of the past is a well-known story: thousands of tourists, more or less struck with the Scott madness, yearly wander through the streets of old Edinburgh; and although within the quarter of a century since Sir Walter's death many memorials of the past have been swept away under the pressure of utility or necessity, the Old Town still poses remarkably well, and, gathering her rags and tatters about her, contrives to keep up a strikingly picturesque appearance.

THE CASTLE AND ALLAN RAMSAY'S HOUSE.

The Old Town of Edinburgh is built upon a wedge-shaped hill, the Castle occupying the highest point, the head of the wedge, and the town extending along the crest, which slopes gradually down toward the east,[Pg 29] to Holyrood Palace in the plain. Lawnmarket, High street and Canongate now form one continuous street, which, running along the crest of the hill, may be considered as the backbone of the town, with wynds and closes radiating on each side like the spines of the vertebræ. The closes are courts, culs-de-sac—the wynds, thoroughfares. These streets—courts where, in the past, lived the nobility and gentry of Edinburgh—are now, for the most part, given up to squalor and misery, and look like stage-scenes perpetually "set" for melodramatic horrors. The late Dr. Thomas Guthrie, whose parish included a large portion of this Egypt, used often to illustrate his eloquence with graphic word-pictures suggested by his experiences in these dark places. "The unfurnished floor," he writes, "the begrimed and naked walls, the stifling, sickening atmosphere, the patched and dusty window—through which a sunbeam, like hope, is faintly stealing—the ragged, hunger-bitten and sad-faced children, the ruffian man, the heap of straw where some wretched mother in muttering dreams sleeps off last night's debauch or lies unshrouded and uncoffined in the ghastliness of a hopeless death, are sad scenes. We have often looked on them, and they appear all the sadder for the restless play of fancy excited by some vestiges of a fresco-painting that still looks out from the foul and broken plaster, the massive marble rising over the cold and cracked hearthstone, an elaborately-carved cornice too high for shivering cold to pull it down for fuel, some stucco flowers or fruit yet pendent on the crumbling ceiling. Fancy, kindled by these, calls up the gay scenes and actors of other days, when beauty, elegance and fashion graced these lonely halls, and plenty smoked on groaning tables, and where these few cinders, gathered from the city dustheap, are feebly smouldering, hospitable fires roared up the chimney."

OLD EDINBURGH BY NIGHT.

These houses are built upon the "flat" system, some of the better ones having a court in the centre like French houses, and turrets at the corners for the circular staircases connecting the different flats. Fires and improvements are rapidly sweeping them away, and the traveler regrets or not their disappearance, according as his views may be sentimental or sanitarian. They are truly ill adapted to modern ideas of hygiene, or to those cunning modern devices which sometimes poison their very inventors. While we may smile at our ancestors' free and easy way of pitching things out of the window, we should at least remember that they knew nothing of the modern plague of sewer-gas stealing its insidious way into the apparently best-regulated households. But without entering upon the vexed question of hygiene, the fact is that where there is no reason for propping up a tottering roof except that it once sheltered some bloody, cattle-stealing chieftain of the Border, utilitarian sentiments carry the day; nor ought any enthusiast to deny that the heart-shaped figure on the High street[Pg 30] pavement, marking the spot where the Heart of Mid Lothian once stood, is a more cheerful sight than would be presented by the foul walls of that romantic jail.

RIDDLE'S CLOSE, WHERE HUME COMMENCED HIS "HISTORY OF ENGLAND."

The modes of life in old Edinburgh have been amply illustrated by many writers. Among the novel-writers, Scott and Miss Ferrier have especially dwelt upon them. The tavern-haunting habits of the gentlemen are pleasantly depicted in the "high jinks" in Guy Mannering, and the depth of potations may be estimated by Burns's "Song of the Whistle." As to the ladies, we should not have found their assemblies very hilarious, where partners for the dance were obtained by drawing tickets, and the lucky or unlucky swain danced one solemn minuet with his lady, and was not expected to quit her side during the evening—

The huge stack of buildings called James's Court is associated with the names of Boswell and of Hume. Half of it has been destroyed by fire, and precisely that half in which these two worthies once dwelt, but there is quite enough of it left to show what a grim monster it was, and, for that matter, still is. In Boswell's time it was a fine thing to have a flat in James's Court. Here Boswell was living when Dr. Johnson came to visit him. Boswell, having received a note from Johnson announcing his arrival, hastened to the inn, where he found the great man had just thrown his lemonade out of the window, and had nearly knocked down the waiter for sweetening the said lemonade without the aid of the sugar-tongs.

"Mr. Johnson and I walked arm-in-arm up the High street," says Boswell, "to my house in James's Court: it was a dusky night: I could not prevent his being assailed by the evening effluvia of Edinburgh. As we marched slowly along he grumbled in my ear, 'I smell you in the dark.'"

Mrs. Boswell had never seen Johnson before, and was by no means charmed with him, as Johnson was not slow to discover. In a matrimonial aside she whispered to her husband, "I have seen many a bear led by a man, but I never before saw a man led by a bear." No doubt her provocations were great, and she wins the compassionate sympathy of all good housekeepers when they read of Ursa Major brightening up the candles by turning the melted wax out on the carpet.

Many years after this, but while Boswell was still living in James's Court, a lad named Francis Jeffrey one night helped to carry the great biographer home—a circumstance in the life of a gentleman much more of an every-day or every-night affair at that time than at present. The next day Boswell patted the lad on the head, and kindly added, "If you go on as you have begun, you may live to be a Bozzy yourself yet."

The stranger who enters what is apparently the ground-floor of one of these houses on the north side of High street is often surprised to find himself, without having gone up stairs, looking from a fourth-story window in the rear. This is[Pg 31] due to the steep slope on which the houses stand, and gives them the command of a beautiful view, including the New Town, and extending across the Firth of Forth to the varied shores of Fife. From his flat in James's Court we find David Hume, after his return from France, writing to Adam Smith, then busy at Kirkcaldy about the Wealth of Nations, "I am glad to have come within sight of you, and to have a view of Kirkcaldy from my windows."

Another feature of these houses is the little cells designed for oratories or praying-closets, to which the master of the house was supposed to retire for his devotions, in literal accordance with the gospel injunction. David Hume's flat had two of these, for the spiritual was relatively better cared for than the temporal in those days: plenty of praying-closets, but no drains! This difficulty was got over by making it lawful for householders, after ten o'clock at night, to throw superfluous material out of the window—a cheerful outlook for Boswell and others being "carried home"!

BUCCLEUGH PLACE, WHERE THE "EDINBURGH REVIEW" WAS PROJECTED.

COLLEGE WYND, WHERE SCOTT WAS BORN.

At the bottom of Byre's Close a house is pointed out where Oliver Cromwell stayed, and had the advantage of contemplating from its lofty roof the fleet which awaited his orders in the Forth. The same house was once occupied by Bothwell, bishop of Orkney, and is associated with the memory of Anne, the bishop's daughter, whose sorrows are enbalmed in plaintive beauty in the old cradle-song:

ANCHOR CLOSE.

The tourist finds much to read, as he runs through old Edinburgh, in the mottoes on the house-fronts. These are mostly of a scriptural and devout character, such as: "Blissit.Be.God.In.Al.His.Giftis;" or, "Blissit.Be.The.Lord.In.His.Giftis.For.Nov.And.Ever." If he peeps into Anchor Close, where once was a famous tavern, he will find it entirely occupied by the buildings of the Scotsman newspaper, but the mottoes have been carefully preserved and built into the walls. The first is, "The.Lord. Is.Only.My.Svport;" a little farther on, "O.Lord.In.The.Is.Al.My.Traist;" and over the door, "Lord.Be.Merciful.To.Me." On other houses he may read, "Feare.The.Lord.And.Depart.From.Evill;" "Faith.In.Chryst.Onlie.Savit;" "My.Hoip.Is.Chryst;" "What.Ever.Me.Befall.I.Thank.The.Lord.Of.All." There are also many in the Latin tongue, such as, "Lavs Vbique Deo;" "Nisi Dominvs Frvstra" (the City motto);

Here is one in the vernacular: "Gif.Ve.Died.As.Ve.Sovld.Ve.Mycht.Haif.As.Ve.Vald;" which is translated, "If we did as we should, we might have as we would."

JOHN KNOX'S STUDY.

Near the end of the High street, on the way to the Canongate, stands John Knox's house, which has been put in order and made a show-place. The exterior, from its exceedingly picturesque character, is more attractive than the interior. The house had originally belonged to the abbot of Dunfermline, and when taken by Knox a very snug little study was added, built of wood and projecting from the front, in accordance with an order from the magistrates, directing "with al diligence to make ane warm studye of dailles to the minister John Knox, within his hous, aboue the hall[Pg 33] of the same, with light and wyndokis thereunto, and al uther necessaris." The motto of this house is "Lvfe.God.Abvfe.Al.And.Yi.Nychtbovr.As.Yi.Self." A curious image at one corner was long thought to represent Knox preaching, and probably still does so in the popular belief; but others now think it represents Moses. It is an old man kneeling, with one hand resting on a tablet, and with the other pointing up to a stone above him carved to resemble the sun, and having on its disk the name of the Deity in three languages: "ΘΕΟΣ.Deus.God."

Of the style of Knox's preaching, even when he was enfeebled by ill-health, one gets a good idea from the following passage in James Melville's diary: "And by the said Rickart and an other servant, lifted up to the pulpit whar he behovit to lean, at his first entrie; bot or he had done with his sermon, he was sa active and vigorous, that he was lyk to ding that pulpit in blads and flie out of it."

ROOM IN WHICH KNOX DIED.

Passing on down Canongate, once the court suburb, we come to Moray House, the former residence of the earls of Moray, and at one time occupied by Cromwell. It is now used for a school, and is in much better preservation than many of its neighbors. At the very bottom of the Canongate, not far from Holyrood House, stands the White Horse Inn. The house has not been an inn for many years, but was chosen by Scott as the quarters of Captain Waverley: its builders probably thought little of beauty when they built it, yet squalor, dilapidation and decay have given it the elements of the picturesque, and the fact that Scott has mentioned it is sufficient to nerve the tourist to hold his nose and admire.

A black, gaunt, forbidding-looking structure near at hand was once the residence of the dukes of Queensberry. Charles, the third duke, was born in it: it is his duchess, Lady Catherine Hyde, whose pranks are so frequently recorded in Horace Walpole's letters—"very clever, very whimsical, and just not mad." Their Graces did not often occupy their Scottish residences, but in 1729, the lord chamberlain having refused his license to Gay's play, Polly, a continuation of the Beggar's Opera, the duke and duchess took Gay's part so warmly as to leave the court and retire to Queensberry House, bringing the poet with them.[Pg 34]

WHITE HORSE INN.

The duchess was much sung by the poets of her day, among them Prior, who is now so little read that we may recall a few of his once well-known verses:

On the death of Duke Charles, Queensberry House came into the possession of his cousin, the earl of March, a singular man-about-town in London, known as "Old Q.:" he stripped it of all its ornaments, without and within, and sold it to the government for a barracks. It is now used as a house of refuge. On its gate are the following notices: "White-seam sewing neatly executed." "Applications for admission by the destitute any lawful day from 10 to 12." "Bread and soup supplied from 1 to 3, afternoon. Porridge supplied from 8 to 9, morning, 6 to 7, evening." "Night Refuge open at 7 P.M. No admission on Sundays." "No person allowed more than three nights' shelter in one month." Such are the mottoes that now adorn the house which sheltered Prior's Kitty.

A striking object in the same vicinity is the Canongate Tolbooth, with pepper-box turrets and a clock projecting from the front on iron brackets, which have taken the place of the original curiously-carved oaken beams. Executions sometimes took place in front of this building, which led wags to find a grim joke in its motto: "Sic.Itvr.Ad.Astra." A more frequent place of execution was the Girth Cross, near the foot of the Canongate, which marked the limit of the right of sanctuary belonging to the abbey of Holyrood. At the Girth Cross, Lady Warriston was executed for the murder of her husband, which has been made the subject of many ballads:

HOLYROOD AND BURNS'S MONUMENT.

Another version has:

The murder was committed on the 2d of July, 1600, and with the speedy justice of that time the punishment followed on the 5th. The lady was sentenced to be "wooried at the stake and brint," but her relatives had influence enough to secure a modification of the sentence, so that she was beheaded by the "maiden," a form of guillotine introduced by the Regent Morton. The original sentence was executed upon the nurse, who had no powerful relatives.

STONE ON WHICH THE COVENANT WAS SIGNED.

Directly opposite the Canongate Tolbooth is a very antiquated dwelling, with three gables to the street, which converses with the passer-by on envy and backbiting. It begins: "Hodie.Mihi.Cras.Tibi.Cur.Igitur.Curas" ("To-day, mine; to-morrow, thine; why then care?"). As if premising an unsatisfactory answer, it continues: "Ut Tu Linguae Tuae, Sic Ego Mear. Aurium, Dominus Sum." ("As thou of thy tongue, so I of my ears, am lord"), and finally takes refuge in "Constanti Pectori Res Mortalium Umbra" ("To the steadfast heart the affairs of mortals are but shadows").

In the plain at the foot of the Canongate stands Holyrood Abbey and Palace, which, with the exception of one wing containing Queen Mary's apartments, has been rebuilt within comparatively modern times. The abbey church is a crumbling ruin, although a power amid its decay, for it possesses still the right of sanctuary. This refuge offered by the Church was a softening and humanizing influence when private feuds were settled by the sword and the Far-West principle of death at sight generally prevailed: later on, it became an abuse, and gradually disappeared. The Holyrood sanctuary is the only one now existing in Great Britain, but is available for insolvent debtors only: it includes the precincts of the palace and the Queen's Park (five miles in circumference), but it contains no buildings except in that portion of the precincts extending from the palace to the foot of Canongate, about one hundred and thirty yards in a direct line. Within this limited district the debtor seeks his lodging, has the Queen's Park for his recreation, and on Sundays is free to go where he likes, as on that day he cannot be molested. It was a curious relic of old customs to read in Edinburgh newspapers in the year 1876 the following extract from a debtor's letter, in which he makes his terms with the sheriff: "However desirous I am to obey the order of the sheriff to attend my examination, I am sorry to be obliged to intimate that in consequence of the vindictive and oppressive proceedings of some of my creditors I cannot present myself in court at the diet fixed unless protection from personal diligence be granted. I will have much pleasure, however, in attending the court in the event of the sheriff granting a special warrant to bring me from the sanctuary, which warrant shall protect me against arrest for debt and other civil obligations while under examination, and on the way to and from the place of examination." The sheriff granted the warrant.

From Holyrood we fancy the traveler next remounting the hill into the Old Town, and seeking out the churchyard[Pg 37] of Greyfriars, whose monuments, full of interest to the student and the antiquary, are in themselves an epitome of Scottish history. The church has been ravaged by fire and rebuilt, so that it retains but little antiquity: the churchyard, on the other hand, has seen few changes except in the increase of its monuments as time has passed on.

Here the Solemn League and Covenant was entered into. It was first read in the church, and agreed to by all there, and then handed to the crowd without, who signed it on the flat tombstones.

Among the most conspicuous monuments in this churchyard are, on the one hand, that to those who died for their fidelity to this Covenant, and on the other the tomb of Sir George Mackenzie, king's advocate and public prosecutor of the Covenanters.

On the Martyrs' Monument, as it is called, one reads: "From May 27th, 1661, that the most noble marquis of Argyle was beheaded, until Feb. 18th, 1688, there were executed in Edinburgh about one hundred noblemen, gentlemen, ministers and others: the most of them lie here.

And so on.

Dr. Thomas Guthrie, who, as we have seen, found much inspiration in the scenes of his daily walks, sought to trace his origin back to this Guthrie of the Martyrs' Monument. "I failed," he wrote, "yet am conscious that the idea and probability of this has had a happy influence on my public life, in determining me to contend and suffer, if need be, for the rights of Christ's crown and the liberties of His Church."

The learning and accomplishments of Sir George Mackenzie were forgotten amid the religious animosities of his day, and he came down to posterity as the terror of nursery-maids and a portentous bugaboo under the name of Bloody Mackenzie. It is related that the boys of the town were in the habit of gathering at nightfall about his tomb and shouting in at the keyhole,

after which they would scatter, as if they feared the tenant might take them at their word. The tomb is a handsome circular Roman temple, now much dilapidated by weather and soot, and so dark and sombre as to make it very uncanny in the gloaming, especially to one approaching it with the view of shouting "Bluidy Mackenzie" through the keyhole. This popular superstition was once turned to account by a youth under sentence of death for burglary. His friends aided him in escaping from prison, and provided him with a key to this mausoleum, where he passed six weeks in the tomb with the Bluidy Mackenzie—a situation of horror made tolerable only as a means of escape from death. Food was brought to him at night, and when the heat of pursuit was over he got to a vessel and out of the country.

MACKENZIE'S TOMB.

The New Town of Edinburgh is separated from the Old Town by the ravine of the North Loch, over which are thrown the bridges by which the two towns are connected. The loch has been drained[Pg 38] and is now occupied by the Public Gardens and by the railway. The New Town is substantially the work of the last half of the past century and the first half of the present one—a period which sought everywhere except at home for its architectural models. In some of the recent improvements in the Old Town very pretty effects have been produced by copying the better features of the ancient dwellings all around them, but the grandiloquent ideas of the Georgian era could not have been content with anything so simple and homespun as this. Its ideal was the cold and pompous, and it succeeded in giving to the New-Town streets that distant and repellent air of supreme self-satisfaction which makes the houses appear to say to the curious looker-on, "Seek no farther, for in us you find the perfectly correct thing." The embodiment of this spirit may be seen in the bronze statue of George IV. by Chantrey, in George street: the artist has caught the pert strut so familiar in the portraits, at sight of which one involuntarily exclaims, "Behold the royal swell!"

THE NORTH BRIDGE.

But the New Town has two superb features, about whose merits all are agreed: we need hardly say these are Princes street and the Calton Hill. Princes street extends along the brow of the hill over-hanging the ravine which separates the two towns, and which is now occupied by public gardens: along their grassy slopes the eye wanders over trees and flowers to the great rock which o'ertops the greenery, bearing aloft the Castle as its crown, while from the Castle the Old Town, clustering along the height, streams away like a dark and deeply-colored train. The Calton Hill offers to the view a wide-spreading panorama. At our feet are the smoking chimneys of Auld Reekie, from which we gladly turn our eyes to the blue water and the shores of Fife, or seek out in the shadow of Salisbury Crags and Arthur's Seat the tottering arch of Holyrood Abbey. The hill is well dotted over,

which on examination prove to be monuments to the great departed. A great change has taken place in the prevalent taste since they were erected, and they are not now pointed out to the stranger with fond pride, as in the past generation. The best one is that to Dugald Stewart, an adaptation, the guide-books say, of the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates. The all-pervading photograph has made it so familiar that it comes upon one as an old friend.

The Burns Monument is a circular edifice with columns and a cupola. It has all the outward semblance of a tomb, so that one is rather startled to find it tenanted by a canny Scot—a live one—who presides with becomingly sepulchral gravity over a twopenny show of miscellaneous trumpery connected with Robert Burns. Everywhere in old Edinburgh we have seen going on the inevitable struggle between utility and sentiment: at Burns's Monument it ceases, and we conclude our ramble at this point, where the sentimentalist and the utilitarian shake hands, the former deeply sympathizing with the sentiment which led to the building of the monument, while the latter fondly admires the ingenuity which can turn even a cenotaph to account.

Alfred S. Gibbs.

[Pg 39]

A LAW UNTO HERSELF.

CHAPTER I.

On a raw, cloudy afternoon in early spring a few years ago a family-carriage was driven slowly down a lonely road in one of the outlying suburbs of Philadelphia, stopping at last in front of an apparently vacant house. This house was built of gray stone, and stood back from the road, surrounded by a few sombre pines and much rank shrubbery: shrubbery and trees, and the house itself, had long been abandoned to decay.

"Heah am de place, sah," said the footman, opening the carriage-door.

An old gentleman in shabby clothes, embellished dramatically by a red necktie, an empty sleeve pinned to his breast, sprang out briskly; a lady followed, and stood beside him: then a younger man, his head muffled in a close fur cap, a yellow shawl wrapped about his neck, looked feebly out of the window. His face, which a pair of pale, unkindled eyes had never lighted since he was born, had been incomplete of meaning in his best days, and long illness had only emphasized its weakness. He half rose, sat down again, stared uncertainly at the house, yawned nervously, quite indifferent to the fact that the lady stood waiting his pleasure. His money and his bodily sufferings—for he was weighted heavily with both—were quite enough, in his view, to give him the right to engross the common air and the service of other men and women. Indeed, a certain indomitable conceit thrust itself into view in his snub nose and retreating chin, which made it highly probable that if he had been a stout day-laborer in the road yonder, he would have been just as complacent as now, and have patronized his fellows in the ditch.

"Will you take my arm, William?" said the old man waiting in the road. "This is the house."

"No. I have half a mind to drop the whole matter. Why should I drag out the secrets of the grave? God knows, I shall find them out soon enough!"

"Just so. Precisely. It's a miserable business for this April day. Now, I don't want to advise, but shall we drive out on the Wissahickon and fish a bit? You'll catch a perch, and Jane shall broil it over the coals, eh?"

"Oh, of course I'm going through with it," scowling and blinking through his eye-glasses. "But we are ten minutes before the time. I can't sit in a draughty room waiting. Tell David to drive slowly down the road until four, Captain Swendon."

"Certainly, certainly," with the nervous conciliatory haste of a man long used to being snubbed.—"You hear Mr. Laidley, David?—We'll arrange it in this way, then. Miss Fleming and I will stroll down the road, William, until the time is up.—No, Jane," as his daughter was going to leave the carriage. "Stay with your cousin." The captain was his peremptory self again. Like every man conscious of his own inability, he asserted himself by incessant managing and meddling for his neighbors.

The carriage jolted down the rutted road. The little man inside tossed on the well-padded cushions, and moaned and puffed spasmodically at his cigar.

Buff and David, stiff in green and gold on the box, nodded significantly at each other. "He's nigh unto de end," said Buff. "De gates of glory am creakin' foh him."

"Creakin', shore nuff. But 'bout de glory I'm not so shore. Yoh see, I knows," rubbing his gray whiskers with the end of the whip. "I have him in charge. Mass' Swendon gib orders: 'Yoh stick by him, Dave.' 'S got no friends: 's got no backbone. Why, wid a twinge ob toothache he squirms like an eel in de fire—swears to make de debbil turn pale. It'll be an awful sight when Death gits a holt on him. But I'll stick."

Captain Swendon and Miss Fleming, left alone under the pines, both turned and looked at the house as if it were an open grave.[Pg 40]

"So it is here the dead are to come back?" said the captain with a feebly-jocular giggle. "We'll go down the road a bit. 'Pon my soul, the atmosphere here is ghastly."

They struck into the meadows, sauntered through a strip of woodland where the sparrows were chirping in the thin green boughs overhead, and, crossing some newly-ploughed fields, came suddenly upon a row of contract-houses, bold, upright in the mud, aggressively new and genteel. They were tricked out with thin marble facings and steps. A drug-shop glittered already at one end of the block, and a milliner's furbelowed window closed the other with a red-lettered sign, which might have served as a motto for the whole: "Here you buy your dollar's worth of fashion for your dime of cash."

"Ah!" cried the captain, "no ghostly work here!—the last place where one would look for any miraculous stoppage of the laws of Nature."

"Stoppage, you should say, of the social laws of 'gents' and their ladies, which are much more inexorable," said his companion. "Oh I know them!" glancing in at the windows, as she tramped through the yellow mud, with keen, amused eyes. "I know just what life must be in one of these houses—the starving music-teacher on one side of you, and the soapboiler on the other: the wretched small servant going the rounds of the block to whiten the steps every evening, while the mistresses sit within in cotton lace and sleazy silks, tinkling on the piano, or counting up the greasy passbook from the grocer's. Imagine such a life broken in upon by a soul from the other world!"

"Yet souls go out from it into the other world. And I've known good women who wore cheap finery and aped gentility. Of course," with a sudden gusty energy, "I don't endorse that sort of thing; and I don't believe the dead will come back to-day. Don't mistake me," shaking his head. The captain was always gusty and emphatic. His high-beaked, quick-glancing face and owlish eyes were ready to punctuate other men's thoughts with an incessant exclamation-point to bring out their true meaning. Since he was a boy he had known that he was born a drill-sergeant and the rest of mankind raw recruits. "Now, there's something terribly pathetic to me," he said, "in this whole expedition of ours. The idea of poor Will in his last days trying to catch a glimpse of the country to which he is going!"

Cornelia Fleming nodded, and let the subject drop. She never wasted her time by peering into death or religion. She belonged to this world, and she knew it. A wise racer keeps to the course for which he has been trained, and never ventures into the quagmires beyond. She stopped beside a tiny yard where a magnolia tree spread its bare stalks and dull white flowers over the fence, and stood on tiptoe to break a bud. The owner of the house, an old man with a box of carpenter's tools in his hand, opened the door at the moment. She nodded brightly to him. "I am robbing you, sir. For a sick friend yonder," she said.

He came down quickly and loaded her with flowers, thinking he had never heard a voice as peculiar and pleasant. The captain, a little behind, eyed her critically from head to foot, his mouth drawn up for a meditative whistle, as she stood on tiptoe, her arm stretched up among the creamy buds. The loose sleeve fell back: the arm was round and white.

"Very good! ve-ry good!" the whistle meant; "and I know the points of a fine woman as well as any of these young fellows."

Two young fellows, coming up, lingered to glance at the jimp waist and finely-turned ankle, with a shrug to each other when, passing by, they saw her homely face.

The captain gallantly relieved her of her flowers, and paraded down the road, head up, elbows well out, as he used, thirty years ago, to escort pretty Virginie Morôt in the French quartier of New Orleans. It was long since he had relished conversation as he did with this frank, generous creature. No coquetry[Pg 41] about her! It was like talking to a clever, candid boy. Every man felt, in fact, with Cornelia, that she was only a younger brother. He liked the hearty grasp of her big white hand; he liked her honest, downright way of stating things, and her perfect indifference to her own undeniable ugliness. Now, any other woman of her age—thirty, eh? (with a quick critical glance)—would dye her hair: she never cared to hide the streaks of gray through the yellow. She had evidently long ago made up her mind that love and marriage were impossible for women as unprepossessing as she: she stepped freely up, therefore, to level ground with men, and struck hands and made friendships with them precisely as if she were one of themselves.

The captain quite glowed with the fervor of this friendship as he marched along talking energetically. A certain subtle instinct of kinship between them seemed to him to trench upon the supernatural: it covered every thought and taste. She had a keen wit, she grasped his finest ideas: not even Jane laughed at his jokes more heartily. She appreciated his inventive ability: he was not sure that Jane did. There were topics, too, on which he could touch with this mature companion that were caviare to Jane. It was no such mighty matter if he blurted out an oath before her, as he used to do in the army. Something, indeed, in the very presence of the light, full figure keeping step with his own, in the heavy odor of the magnolias and the steady regard of the yellowish-brown eyes, revived within him an old self which belonged to those days in the army—a self which was not the man whom his daughter knew, by any means.

They were talking at the time, as it happened, of his military experience: "I served under Scott in Mexico. Jane thinks me a hero, of course. But I confess to you that I enlisted, in the first place, to keep the wolf out of the house at home. I had spent our last dollar in manufacturing my patent scissors, and they—well, they wouldn't cut anything, unless—I used to suspect Atropos had borrowed them and meant to snip the thread for me, it was stretched so tightly just then."

She looked gravely at his empty sleeve.

The captain caught the glance, and coughed uncomfortably: "Oh, I did not lose that in the service, you understand. No such luck! Five days after I was discharged, after I had come out of every battle with a whole skin, I was on a railway-train going home. Collision: arm taken off at the elbow. If it had happened just one week earlier, I should have had a pension, and Jane—Well, Jane has had a rough time of it, Miss Fleming. But it was my luck!"

They had returned through the woods, and were in sight again of the house standing darkly among the pines. Two gentlemen, pacing up and down the solitary road, came down the hill to meet them.

"Tut! tut! It is that Virginia lawyer who has come up to get into practice here—Judge Rhodes. You know him, Miss Fleming. There's an end to our quiet talk. That fellow besieges a woman with his click-clack: never leaves a crack for a sensible man to edge in a word."

Miss Fleming turned her honest eyes full on his for a moment, but did not speak. The captain's startled, foolish old heart throbbed with a feeling which he had not known since that day in the boat on the bayou when Virginie Morôt first put her warm little hand in his. Virginie as a wife had been a trifle of a shrew. Love in the remembrance often has a bitter twang. But this was friendship! How sweet were the friendship and confidence of a woman! Pretty women of late years approached the captain in his fatherly capacity, much to his disrelish. A man need not have his gray hairs and rheumatism thrown in his teeth at every turn. Miss Fleming, now, saw beneath them: she saw what a gallant young fellow he was at heart. He looked down at her eagerly, but she was carelessly inspecting the judge and his companion.

"Who is the fair-haired, natty little man?"

"Oh! Phil Waring, a young fellow about town. Society man. Too fond[Pg 42] of cards. Nice lad, but no experience: no companion for you, Miss Fleming."

A vague, subtle change passed over her. It was no definable alteration in mind or body, yet a keener observer than the captain might have suspected a readjustment of both to suit some possible new relation.

Mr. Waring and the judge joined them, and they all walked together toward the house, engrossed with their errand. Miss Fleming never expected from men the finical gallantry usually paid to young ladies, and even the gallant Virginian did not give it to her. The captain indeed, perceiving that she was occupied with Judge Rhodes, gave her up to his escort. "It is almost four. I will go down the road and find the carriage and William," he said, and left them.

Judge Rhodes, as they drew near the house, regarded it darkly: "Decay! death and decay!" waving his pudgy red hands theatrically. "A gloomy gate indeed, through which the dead might well choose to return."

"I should call it a badly-set stage for a poor melodrama," said Miss Fleming coolly.

"But your character is so practical! You are fortunate in that." The judge, who was a stout, bald man, gazed at the house with vague abstraction and dilating nostrils. "Now, I am peculiarly susceptible to spiritual influences. I have been since a boy as sensitive to pain, to, ah—sympathies, to those, ah—electric cords, as Byron says, wherewith we're darkly bound, as—as a wind-harp. I really dread the effect upon myself of the revelations of to-day."

Miss Fleming was silent. The judge, as she knew, was one of those shrewd common-sense men who, when lifted out of their place into the region of sentiment or romance, swagger and generally misconduct themselves, like a workman conscious of his ill-fitting Sunday finery.

One or two carriages drove up to the gate and stopped.

"Who are those people, Mr. Waring?" said the judge, dropping into his ordinary tone.

Mr. Waring put on his eye-glasses. He knew everybody, and had as keen an eye and strong an antipathy for eccentric characters in conventional Philadelphia as a proof-reader for false type. "There is Dehr, the German homœopath and Spiritualist," he said in a little mild voice, which oddly reminded Miss Fleming of the gurgling flow of new milk. "That woman marching before him is his wife."

"I know," muttered the judge—"strong-minded. Most extraordinary women turn up every day here. This one lectures on hygiene. Mad, undoubtedly."

"Oh no," said Waring—"very dull, good people, both of the Dehrs. Not two ideas to share between them. But there are a dozen tow-headed youngsters at home: they drive the old people into such out-of-the-way courses to scratch for a living. That man in white is the great Socialist, Schaus. The others are scientific fellows from New York and Boston."

"I wish Van Ness was here," said the judge, nodding ponderously. "Van Ness is better known in Richmond than any other Philadelphian, sir. Most remarkable man. Science is well enough as far as it goes, but for clear intelligence, give me Pliny Van Ness."

"No doubt," said Mr. Waring gravely. "Great reformer, I hear. Don't meet him in society. Of a new family."

"Mr. Laidley objected to his coming," said Cornelia.

"He did, eh? I'm astonished at that," said the judge. "I consider Van Ness—But Laidley had the right to object, of course. The meeting is one of the captain's famous schemes—to amuse Laidley. But they tell me that he knows he is dying, and has determined to bring a certain spirit out of the other world to ask an important question."

"I should think," said Miss Fleming dryly, "Mr. Laidley would always require supernatural aid to make up his mind for him. After I talk to him I have the feeling that I have been handling froth. Not clean froth either." When Miss Fleming made the men and women about her the subjects of her skill in dissection, her voice took a neat[Pg 43] incisive edge, suggestive of the touch of a scalpel. Little Mr. Waring, pulling his moustache thoughtfully, studied her for a moment without reply.

"Hoh!" laughed the judge. "You have a keen eye! There can be no doubt," suddenly sobering, "that Laidley has been uncommonly fast. But his blood is good—none better in Maryland. High-toned family, the Laidleys. Mr. Waring here could give you his life chapter by chapter if he would. But he would skip over the dirty bits as carefully as he is doing in the road."

"Laidley's life is so very nearly over," suggested Mr. Waring quietly.

There was an awkward silence of a moment.

"Now, I can't understand," blustered the judge, "how Captain Swendon can nurse that fellow as tenderly as he is doing. I've got my share of humanity and forgiveness, and all that. But if any man had thrust my wife and child out of their property, as he has done, he had better have kept out of my sight, sir. I know all about them, you see, for two generations. Captain's wife was a New Orleans girl—Virginia Morôt. It wasn't a matter of property: it was starvation. Poor little Virginie—pretty creature she was too!—would have been alive to-day, there's no doubt of it, if she could have had proper food and medicines. And there's his daughter! What kind of a life has she had for a girl with such blood in her veins? Why, if I should tell you the sum on which that child has supported herself and her father in Baltimore and here since her mother died, you wouldn't believe me. And Laidley did nothing for them. Not a penny! Under the circumstances it was a crime for him to be alive."

"What were the circumstances?" asked Miss Fleming.

"The property, you understand, was old Morôt's—Morôt of New Orleans. Virginie was his only child: she married Swendon, and her father came to live with them in Baltimore. The two men were at odds from the first day. Old Morôt was a keen, pig-headed business-man: he knew nothing outside of the tobacco-trade; worked in the counting-house all day; his one idea of pleasure was to swill port and terrapin half the night. Swendon—Well, you know the captain. He was a brilliant young fellow in those days, full of ideas that never came to anything—an invention every month which was to make his fortune. They quarreled, of course the wife sided with her husband, and Morôt, in a fit of rage, left the whole property to his nephew, Will Laidley. When he was on his deathbed, however, the old man relented and sent for Laidley. It was too late to alter the will, but he charged him to do justice to his daughter. Laidley has told me that much himself. But it never occurred to him that justice meant anything more than to keep the estate, and allow it at his death to revert to Jane and her father."

"Well, well!" cried Mr. Waring hastily, "that cannot be far off now. Laidley is so nearly a thing of the past, judge, that we might afford to bury his faults with him, decently out of sight."

"I can't put out of sight the years of want for Virginie and her child while he was throwing their money to the dogs in every gambling-hell in Baltimore and New York. Why, the story was so well known that when he came down to Richmond he was not recognized, sir! Not recognized. He felt it. Left the county like a whipped cur."

"Yet, legally, the money was his own," remarked Cornelia.

"Oh, legally, I grant you! But morally, now—" The judge had counted on Miss Fleming's sympathy in his story. Only the day before he had seen the tears come to her eyes over his hurt hound. He was disappointed that she took little Jane's misfortunes so coolly. "Of course this sort of crime is unappreciable in the courts. But society, Virginia society, knows how to deal with it."

"I happen to know," said Waring, "that Laidley's will was made a year ago, leaving the whole property to Miss Swendon."

"And he knows that in the mean time she is barely able to keep herself and her father alive. Pah-h!"[Pg 44]

"Really, Jane has quite a dramatic history, and you are precisely the person to tell it with effect, judge," said Miss Fleming, smiling good-humoredly, with that peculiar affable intonation which always numbs the hearer into a conviction that his too excessive emotion is being humored as the antics of an ill-disciplined child.

The judge grew red.

"Yes," continued Miss Fleming, her eyes upon him, "Jane is pretty. Your zeal is excusable." The road was muddy at this point, and she passed on in front of them, picking her steps.

"Damn it!" said the judge, "they're all alike! No woman can be just to a pretty face. I thought this girl had sense enough to lift her above such petty jealousy."

"She is not jealous," said Waring, looking critically at her back as he arranged his thin tow-colored moustache. "She is an Arab among her own sex. It's a common type in this part of the country. She fraternizes with men, horses and Nature, and sneers at other women as she would at artificial flowers and perfumery. I don't know Miss Fleming, but I know her class very well."

The Virginian, whose blood revolted at this censure of a lady, rushed to the rescue: "She's honest, at any rate. No mean feminine tricks about her. She's offensively truthful. And, after all, she's right: Swendon is a good-for-nothing, a well-born tramp; and Jane is hardly a subject for pity. She's a remarkably healthy girl; a little dull, but with more staying power in her than belongs to a dozen of those morbid, strong-minded women of yours in the North. I suppose I do let my sympathy run away with me."

They joined Cornelia and entered the broken gate. The door of the house swung open at a touch. Within were bare halls and rooms covered with dust, the floors of which creaked drearily under their tread. Following the sound of stifled voices, they went up to a large upper chamber. The walls of this room were stained almost black; a thick carpet deadened the floor; the solid wooden shutters were barred and heavily curtained. They made their way to the farther end of the room, a little apart from a group of dark figures who talked together in whispers. Miss Fleming noticed a nervous trepidation in the manner of both men, and instantly became grave, as though she too were more deeply moved than she cared to show.

The whispers ceased, and the silence was growing oppressive when steps were heard upon the stairs.

"Hoh!" puffed the judge. "Here is Laidley at last."

CHAPTER II.

It was not Laidley who entered, but Mrs. Combe, then the most-famous clairvoyant in the United States. According to statements of men both shrewd and honest she had lately succeeded in bringing the dead back to them in actual bodily presence. The voice was heard, then the spirit slowly grew into matter beside them. They could feel and see its warm flesh, its hair and clothing, and even while they held it it melted again into the impalpable air, and was gone. The account was attested by persons of such integrity and prominence as to command attention from scientific men. They knew, of course, that it was a trick, but the trick must be so well managed as to be worth the trouble of exposure. Hence, Mrs. Combe upon her entrance was received with silent, keen attention.

She was a tall pillar-like woman, with some heavy drapery of black velvet or cloth about her: there were massive coils of coarse black hair, dead narrow eyes of the same color, a closely-shut jaw: no point of light in the figure, but a rope of unburnished gold about her neck. She stood with her hands dropped at her sides, immovable, while her husband, a greasy little manikin with a Jewish face, turned on the light and waved the attention of the audience to her: "This is Miriam Combe, the first person since the Witch of Endor who has succeeded in materializing the shpirits of the dead. Our meeting here to-day is under peculiar shircumstances. A[Pg 45] zhentleman unknown to me and Mrs. Combe, but who, I am told, is near death, desires to recall the shpirit of a dead friend. Zhentlemans will reconize the fact that the thing we propose to do depends upon the states of minds and matters about us. If these elements are disturbed by unbelief or by too much light or noise when the soul shtruggling to return wants silence and darkness, why—it cannot make for itself a body—dat's all."

"You compel belief, in a word, before you prove to us that we ought to believe," said a professor from a Baptist college in New Jersey, smiling blandly down upon him. "Scientifically—"

"I knows noting of scientifics. I knows dat my wife hash de power to ashist de souls to clode demselves wid matter. I don't pretend to explain where she got dat power, I don't know what ish dat power: I only know she hash it. If zhentlemans will submit to the conditions, they shall zhoodge for demselves."

"Now, the ignorance of this man impresses me favorably," said the professor to his friends. "He is evidently incapable of inventing a successful trick even of conjuring. If any great unknown force of Nature has chosen him or his wife as tools, we should not despise the manifestation because the tools are very gross matter. They are the steel wire charged with the lightning, perhaps."

Dr. Dehr came forward and touched the motionless woman, shaking his head solemnly: "She is highly charged with electricity now, sir. The air is vital, as I might say, with spiritual presences. I have no doubt, gentlemen, before we part, that we shall see one of the most remarkable phenomena of the nineteenth century."

"How well she poses!" whispered Miss Fleming to the judge. "But the stage-properties are bad: the velvet is cotton, and the gold brass-gilt."

"Now, to me," said the judge emphatically, "there is a dreadful reality, a dead look, in her face. What Poe would have made of this scene! There was a man who could grapple with these supreme mysteries! No! that woman undoubtedly has learned the secret of life and of death. She can afford to be passive." The judge's very whisper was judicial, though pulpy.

It was not possible that the woman should have heard them, yet a moment after she lifted her eyes and motioned slowly toward them.

"God bless my soul, ma'am! You don't want me!" cried the judge.

Waring half rose, laughing, but with cold chills down his backbone, and then dropped into his seat, relieved: "You are the chosen victim, Miss Fleming."

Cornelia went up to the medium. She was confident the whole affair was a vulgar trick, but there was a stricture at her heart as if an iron hand had been laid upon it. The energy went out of her step, the blood from her face.

The woman laid her hand on her arm. "I need you," she said in a deep voice. "You have great magnetic force: you can aid this soul to return to life if you will. Sit there." She placed both her hands lightly on Cornelia's forehead. Miss Fleming dropped into the seat: she could not have done otherwise.

"Before we opens the séance," proceeded Combe, "zhentlemans can examine de cabinet and convince demselves dere is no trick."

The cabinet was a light triangular structure of black walnut, about seven feet in height, placed in one corner of the room, though with an open space between it and the wall. It moved on casters: the door was on the side facing the audience. Miss Fleming observed with amusement that the seat given her removed her to the farthest distance from this door.

"You will notish dat dere is absolutely noting in de cabinet but a chair—zhoost de walls and de floor and de chair. Miriam will sit there, and de door will be closed. When it opens you will see de embodied spirit beside her."

"Hillo!" cried the judge, "what's this behind the cabinet?"

"It is a window overlooking de garden: I had it boarded up to prevent you sushpecting me of trickery. But you sushpect mine boards, mein Gott![Pg 46] Exshamine dem, exshamine dem! Go outside."

The judge did so. "They are screwed on honestly enough," he said to the spectators. "A ghost had need of a battering-ram to come through that window. It opens on an area thirty feet deep."

The woman went into the cabinet and the door was closed. Steps were heard upon the stairs.

"It ish de zhentleman who calls for de shpirit to appear," said Combe in a whisper.

The door opened, and Laidley, supported by Captain Swendon, entered, giving a quick appealing look about him as he halted for a moment on the threshold. The dignity of approaching death was in his weak, ghastly face, and the judge rose involuntarily, just as he would have stood uncovered if a corpse had gone by. Laidley took the seat which the captain with his usual bluster placed for him opposite the door of the cabinet. Combe turned out the lights: the room was in absolute darkness. The judge moved uneasily near to Waring: "Don't laugh at me, Mr. Waring. But I really feel that there is a Presence in this room which is not human. I wish I had listened to my wife. She does not approve of this sort of thing at all: she thinks no good churchman should meddle with it. But there is something in the room."

"Yes, I am conscious of what you mean. But it is a physical force, not spiritual. Not electricity, either. It is something which has never affected my senses before. Whatever it is, it is the stock in trade of these people."

They were ordered by Combe to join hands, and everybody obeyed excepting the captain's daughter, who stood unnoticed by one of the curtained windows.

A profound silence followed, broken by a stifled sob from some over-nervous woman. The low roll of an organ filled the void and died. After that there was no complete sound but at intervals the silence took breath, spoke in a half-articulate wail, and was dumb again.

Pale nebulous light shone in the cabinet and faded: then a single ray fell direct on Laidley's face. It stood out from the night around like a bas-relief—livid, commonplace, a presentment of every-day death. Each man present suddenly saw his own grave open, and the world beyond brought within reach through this insignificant man.

"The spirits of many of the dead are present," said the sepulchral voice within the cabinet. "What do you ask of them?"

Laidley's lips moved: he grasped the arms of his chair, half rose: then he fumbled mechanically in his pocket for his cigar-case, and not finding it sank back helplessly.

"What do you ask of them? Their time is brief."

"I'm a very ill man," he piped feebly: "the doctors give me no hope at all. I want advice about a certain matter before—before it's too late. It is a great wrong I have done that I want to set right."

"Can any of the dead counsel you? Or do you summon one soul to appear?"

"There is but one who knows."

"Call for her, then."

Laidley looked about him uncertainly: then he said in a hoarse whisper, "Virginie Morôt!"

The captain sprang to his feet: "My wife? No, no! for God's sake!"

The light was swiftly drawn back into the cabinet and extinguished. After several minutes the voice was heard again: "The spirit summoned is present. But it has not the force to resume a material body unless the need is urgent. You must state the question you would have answered."

"I must see Virginie here, in bodily presence, before I'll accept any answer," said Laidley obstinately. "I'll have no hocus-pocus by mediums or raps. If the dead know anything, she knows why I need her. I have had money to which she had a—well, a claim. I've not spent it, perhaps, in the best way. I have a mind now to atone for my mistake by leaving it to a charity where I know it will do great good."

An amazed whistle broke through the darkness from the corner where the judge sat. The captain caught Laidley's shoulder. "William," he whispered, "surely you forget Jane."[Pg 47]

Laidley shook him off. "The money is my own," he said loudly, "to do with as I choose. But if Virginie can return from the dead, she shall decide for me."

"It's enough to bring her back," muttered the judge. "Do you hear that?" thumping Waring's knee—"that miserable shrimp swindling her child in order to buy God's good-will for himself!"

There was a prolonged silence. At last a voice was heard: "She will appear to you."

The organ rolled heavily, low soft thunders of music rose and fell, a faint yellowish vapor stole out from under the cabinet and filled the darkness with a visible haze. Captain Swendon stumbled to his feet and went back to his daughter: "I can't bear it, child! I can't bear it!" dropping into a chair.

She took his hand in her own, which were quite cool, and stroked and kissed it. But she did not speak nor take her eyes from the door of the cabinet.

It opened. Within sat Miriam, immovable, her eyes closed. Beside her stood a shadowy luminous figure covered with a filmy veil. It moved forward into the room. So thick was the vapor that the figure itself appeared but a shade.

Laidley stooped forward, his hands on his knees, his lips apart, his eyes dilated with terror.

The veil slowly fell from the face of the spirit, and revealed, indistinctly as the negative of a photograph, a small thin woman with eager, restless eyes, and black hair rolled in puffs high on the head in the fashion of many years ago.

"Virginie!" gasped Laidley.

The captain shuddered, and hid his face. His daughter, with a quick step backward, threw aside the curtains and flung open the shutters. The broad daylight streamed in.

Combe sprang toward her with an oath.

The young girl held back the curtain steadily. "We need fresh air," she said smiling resolutely in his face.

The rush of air, the daylight, the cheerful voice wakened the room as out of a vision of death. The men started to their feet; there was a tumult of voices and laughter; the materialized soul staggered back to reach the cabinet. The whole of the cheap trickery was bared: her hair was an ill-fitting wig, the chalk lay in patches on her face, the vapor of Hades was only salt burning in a dish: the boards removed from the window showed her snug hiding-place inside.

Dr. Dehr's fury made itself heard above the confusion: "You have brought Spiritualism into disrepute by your infernal imposture!" clutching the poor wretch by the shoulder, while another intemperate disciple called loudly for the police. The woman began to sob, but did not utter a word.

"Let her go, doctor," said Mr. Waring, coming up. "We paid to see a farce, and it was really a very nice bit of acting. This poor girl was hired, no doubt: she is only earning her living."

"What has she done?" cried Dehr. "Spiritualism in Philadelphia never has attracted the class of investigators that are here to-day, and she—" shaking her viciously—"she's an impostor!"

"Damnation! she's a woman!" wrenching his hand from her. She gave Waring a keen furtive glance, and drew quickly aside. While some of the seekers after truth demanded their five dollars back with New England obstinacy, and Combe chattered and screeched at them, she stood in the middle of the room, immovable, her sombre sallow face set, her tawdry stage-properties about her—the crown of false black hair, the sweeping drapery, the smoking dish with fumes of ghastly vapor.

Mr. Waring went up to a short, broadly-built man in gray who had been seated in the background during the séance. "I did not know that you were in town or here, Mr. Neckart," he said with a certain marked respect. "That is not an unpicturesque figure, I think. She would serve as a study of Night, now—a stormy, muggy town-night, full of ooze and slime." Mr. Waring's manner and rhetoric were uneasy and deferential. Mr. Neckart was a power in a region quite outside of the little fastidious gossiping club of men and women whom he was wont to call the World.[Pg 48]

"Your Night, apparently, has little relish for the morning," he said.

The woman's threatening eyes, in fact, were fixed on the tall fair girl, the captain's daughter, who stood in the window, busied with buttoning her father's overcoat and pinning his empty sleeve to his breast. She was looking up at him, and talking: the wind stirred her loose pale-gold hair; behind her branches of white roses from a vine outside thrust themselves in at the window: the birds chirped in the rustling maples beyond.

"What a wonderful effect of light and color!" said Waring, who had lounged through studios and galleries enough to enable him to parcel out the world into so many bits of palette and brush-work. "Observe the atmosphere of sunshine and youth. Cabanel might paint the girl's face for the Dawn. Eyes of that profound blue appear to hold the light latent."

"There seems to be unusual candor in them," said Mr. Neckart, glancing carelessly at Jane again, and drawing on his gloves. "A lack of shrewdness remarkable in an American woman."

"The Swendons are Swedes by descent, you know. A little phlegm, a lack of passion, is to be expected, eh? Now, my own taste prefers the American type—features animated by a nimbler brain; as there, for example," looking toward Miss Fleming. "Ugly beyond apology. But there is a subtle attraction in it."

"No doubt you are right. I really know very little about women," indifferently. He nodded good-evening, glancing at his watch as he went out.

The captain was conscious of some malignant influence at his back, and turning, saw the woman, who had gradually approached, and now stood still. He hastily stepped between her and his daughter: "Good God! Stand back, Jane! This woman is following you."

"She looks as if she had the evil eye. But they are very fine eyes," said the young girl, inspecting her quietly, as if she had been a toad that stood suddenly upright in her way.

"I owe you an ill turn, and I shall pay it," said the woman with a tragic wave of the arms. "I had a way to support myself and my boy for a year, and you have taken it from me."

"It was such a very poor way! Such a shabby farce! And it was my mother that—" She stopped, a slight tremor on the fair, quiet face.

"Oh, I shall pay you!" The woman gathered her cheap finery about her and swept from the room.

In the confusion Judge Rhodes had sought out Laidley, full of righteous wrath on behalf of his friend the captain, against this limp fellow who was going to enter heaven with a paltering apology for dishonesty on his lips. Laidley, however, was reclining in the easy-chair with his eyes closed, and the closed eyes gave so startling an appearance of death to the face that the judge was thrown back in his headlong charge. "Why, why, William! I'm sorry to see you looking so under the weather," he said kindly.

Laidley's eyes began to blink: he smiled miserably: "It's too late to throw the blame on the weather, judge. Though I'm going back to Aiken next week. I came North too soon."

"This affair has turned out a more palpable humbug than I expected," trying to approach the point at issue by a gentle roundabout ascent. "I wish Van Ness had been here—Pliny Van Ness. There's a man whose advice I seek since I came to Philadelphia on all important matters. A man whose integrity, justice—God bless me, William! You must know Pliny Van Ness. Why don't you take his counsel, instead of meddling with these wretched mediums? Raising the dead to tell you what to do? Bah! If you had asked me, now—"

Laidley had drawn himself up in the chair, his watery eyes gathering a faint eagerness: "Sit down. Here. I wish to speak to you, judge. Nobody will hear us."

"Certainly. As you ask me now—I know the whole case. Don't try to talk: it only makes you cough. You want to say that the property—"

"I want to say nothing about the property. My will was made last week. I am determined to throw my means into[Pg 49] that channel where it will best contribute to God's service. He will not scorn a late repentance. But Van Ness—it was about Van Ness I wanted to talk to you."

"If your will was made last week, why did you try to bring back poor dead Virginie to advise you?"

"I don't know," said Laidley, coughing nervously—"I don't know. I thought she would confirm me—I—I want to be just to her daughter, God knows!"

"What is your idea of justice?"

"Why this—this," eagerly, catching the judge's red, fat hand in his cold fingers. "Jane will be a woman whom Van Ness would be apt to approve. I know he's fastidious. But she's very delicate and fair—as fine a bit of human flesh as I ever saw. As for mind, she has none. A mere child. He could mould her—mould her. Eh? I think I could throw out an inducement which would lead him to look favorably on her—when she's of a marriageable age, that is. If the girl were married to such a man as Van Ness, surely she would be well placed for life. Nobody could blame me for not making an heiress of her."

"Jane? Van Ness?" said the judge thoughtfully. "Well, Van Ness is a man whom any woman in the country should be proud to marry. But he is impregnable to that sort of thing. And Jane is but a child, as you say. The scheme seems to me utterly unfeasible, Laidley. Besides, what has it to do with her claims on you?"

"It has everything to do with them. I give her instead of money a home and husband such as no money can buy. They must be brought together, judge. You must do it. I have a word to say to Van Ness that will open his eyes to her merits. I will plant the seed, as I might say. It will grow fast enough."

The judge was silent as he helped Laidley, still talking eagerly, down the stairs and into his carriage. The whole fantastic scheme was, as he saw, the cowardly device of the dying man to appease his conscience. That this poor creature should have any power to influence Van Ness, the purest and strongest of men, was a mere bit of braggadocio, which surely did not deceive even Laidley himself.

But what could he do? To stab with reproach, even to argue with this nerveless, worn-out man, flaccid in mind and body, seemed to the kindly old fellow as cruel as to torture a dying fish or other cold-blooded creature of whose condition or capacity for suffering he could have no just idea.

Rebecca Harding Davis.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

THE SWEETENER.

[Pg 50]

AN ENGLISH EASTER.

It may be said of the English as is said of the council of war in Sheridan's farce of The Critic by one of the spectators of the rehearsal, that when they do agree their unanimity is wonderful. They differ among themselves greatly just now as regards the machinations of Russia, the derelictions of Turkey, the propriety of locking up the Reverend Arthur Tooth for his Romanizing excesses, the histrionic merits of Mr. Henry Irving, and a good many other matters; but neither just now nor at any other time do they fail to conform to those social observances on which Respectability has set her seal. England is a country of curious anomalies, and this has much to do with her being so interesting to foreign observers. The English individual character is very positive, very independent, very much made up according to its own sentiment of things, very prone to startling eccentricities; and yet at the same time it has beyond any other this peculiar gift of squaring itself with fashion and custom. In no other country, I imagine, are so many people to be found doing the same thing in the same way at the same time—using the same slang, wearing the same hats and cravats, collecting the same china-plates, playing the same game of lawn-tennis or of "polo," flocking into the same skating-rinks. The monotony of this spectacle would soon become oppressive if the foreign observer were not conscious of this latent capacity in the performers for the free play of character; he finds a good deal of entertainment in wondering how they reconcile the traditional insularity of the individual with this perpetual tribute to custom. Of course in all civilized societies the tribute to custom is being constantly paid; if it is less observable in America than elsewhere the reason is not, I think, because individual independence is greater, but because custom is more sparsely established. Where we have customs people certainly follow them; but for five American customs there are fifty English. I am very far from having discovered the secret; I have not in the least learned what becomes of that explosive personal force in the English character which is compressed and corked down by social conformity. I look with a certain awe at some of the manifestations of the conforming spirit, but the fermenting idiosyncrasies beneath it are hidden from my vision. The most striking example, to foreign eyes, of the power of custom in England is of course the universal church-going. In the sight of all England getting up from its tea and toast of a Sunday morning and brushing its hat and drawing on its gloves and taking its wife on its arm and making its offspring march before, and so, for decency's, respectability's, propriety's sake, making its way to a place of worship appointed by the State, in which it respects the formulas of a creed to which it attaches no positive sense and listens to a sermon over the length of which it explicitly haggles and grumbles,—in this great exhibition there is something very striking to a stranger, something which he hardly knows whether to pronounce very sublime or very puerile. He inclines on the whole to pronounce it sublime, because it gives him the feeling that whenever it may become necessary for a people trained in these manœuvres to move all together under a common direction, they will have it in them to do so with tremendous force and cohesiveness. We hear a good deal about the effect of the Prussian military system in consolidating the German people and making them available for a particular purpose; but I really think it not fanciful to say that the military punctuality which characterizes the English observance of Sunday ought to be appreciated in the same fashion. A nation which has passed through the mill will certainly have been stamped by it. And here, as in the German military[Pg 51] service, it is really the whole nation. When I spoke just now of paterfamilias and his entourage I did not mean to limit the statement to him. The young unmarried men go to church; the gay bachelors, the irresponsible members of society. (That last epithet must be taken with a grain of allowance. No one in England is irresponsible, that perhaps is the shortest way of describing the country. Every one is free and every one is responsible. To say what it is people are responsible to is of course a great extension of the question: briefly, to social expectation, to propriety, to morality, to "position," to the classic English conscience, which is, after all, such a considerable affair.)

The way in which the example of the more comfortable classes imposes itself upon the less comfortable may of course be noticed in smaller matters than church-going; in a great many matters which it may seem trivial to mention. If one is bent upon observation nothing, however, is trivial. So I may cite the practice of keeping the servants out of the room at breakfast. It is the fashion, and so, apparently, through the length and breadth of England, every one who has the slightest pretension to standing high enough to feel the way the social breeze is blowing conforms to it. It is awkward, unnatural, troublesome for those at table, it involves a vast amount of leaning and stretching, of waiting and perambulating, and it has just that vice against which, in English history, all great movements have been made—it is arbitrary. But it flourishes for all that, and all genteel people, looking into each other's eyes with the desperation of gentility, agree to endure it for gentility's sake. Another arbitrary trifle is the custom of depriving the unhappy visitor of a napkin at luncheon. When it is observed that the English luncheon differs from dinner only in being several degrees more elaborate and copious, and that in the London atmosphere it is but common charity, at any moment, to multiply your guest's opportunities if not for ablution at least for a "dry polish," it will be perceived that such eccentricities are the very wantonness and pedantry of fashion. But, as I say, they flourish, and they form part of an immense body of prescriptive usages, to which a society possessing in the largest manner, both by temperament and education, the sense of the "inalienable" rights and comforts of the individual, contrives to accommodate itself. I do not mean to say that usage in England is always uncomfortable and arbitrary. On the contrary, few strangers can be unfamiliar with that sensation (a most agreeable one) which consists in perceiving in the excesses of a custom which has struck us at first as a mere brutal invention, a reason existing in the historic "good sense" of the English race. The sensation is frequent, though in saying so I do not mean to imply that even superficially the presumption is against the usages of English society. It is not, for instance, necessarily against the custom of which I had it more especially in mind to speak in writing these lines. The stranger in London is forewarned that at Easter all the world goes out of town, and that if he has no mind to be left as lonely as Marius on the ruins of Carthage, he, too, had better make arrangements for a temporary absence. It must be admitted that there is a sort of unexpectedness in this vernal exodus of a body of people who, but a week before, were apparently devoting much energy to settling down for the season. Half of them have but lately come back from the country, where they have been spending the winter, and they have just had time, it may be supposed, to collect the scattered threads of town-life. Presently, however, the threads are dropped and society is dispersed, as if it had taken a false start. It departs as Holy Week draws to a close, and remains absent for the following ten days. Where it goes is its own affair; a good deal of it goes to Paris. Spending last winter in that city I remember how, when I woke up on Easter Monday and looked out of my window, I found the street covered, overnight, with a sort of snow-fall of disembarked Britons. They made, for other people, an uncomfortable week of it. One's customary table at the restaurant,[Pg 52] one's habitual stall at the Théâtre Français, one's usual fiacre on the cab-stand, were very apt to have suffered pre-emption. I believe that the pilgrimage to Paris was this year of the usual proportions: and you may be sure that people who did not cross the Channel were not without invitations to quiet old places in the country, where the pale, fresh primroses were beginning to light up the dark turf and the purple bloom of the bare tree-mosses to be freckled here and there with verdure. In England country-life is the obverse of the medal, town-life the reverse, and when an occasion comes for quitting London there are few members of what the French call the "easy class" who have not a collection of dull, moist, verdant resorts to choose from. Dull I call them, and I fancy not without reason, though at the moment I speak of their dullness must have been mitigated by the unintermittent presence of the keenest and liveliest of east winds. Even in mellow English country homes Easter-tide is a period of rawness and atmospheric acridity—the moment at which the frank hostility of winter, which has at last to give up the game, turns to peevishness and spite. This is what makes it arbitrary, as I said just now, for "easy" people to go forth to the wind-swept lawns and the shivering parks. But nothing is more striking to an American than the frequency of English holidays and the large way in which occasions for change and diversion are made use of. All this speaks to Americans of three things which they are accustomed to see allotted in scantier measure. The English have more time than we, they have more money, and they have a much higher relish for holiday taking. (I am speaking of course always of the "easy classes.") Leisure, fortune and the love of sport—these things are implied in English society at every turn. It was a very small number of weeks before Easter that Parliament met, and yet a ten days' recess was already, from the luxurious Parliamentary point of view, a necessity. A short time hence we shall be having the Whitsuntide Holidays, which I am told are even more of a festival than Easter, and from this point to midsummer, when everything stops, it is an easy journey. The business men and the professional men partake in equal measure of these agreeable diversions, and I was amused at hearing a lady whose husband was an active member of the bar say that, though he was leaving town with her for ten days and though Easter was a very nice bit of idleness, they really amused themselves with more gusto in the later recess, which would come on toward the end of May. I thought this highly probable, and admired so picturesque a chiaroscuro of work and play. If my phrase has a slightly ironical sound this is purely accidental. A large appetite for holidays, the ability not only to take them but to know what to do with them when taken, is the sign of a robust people, and judged by this measure we Americans are rather ill-conditioned. Such holidays as we take are taken very often in Europe, where it is sometimes noticeable that our privilege is rather heavy in our hands. Tribute rendered to English industry, however (our own stands in no need of compliments), it must be added that for those same easy classes I just spoke of things are very easy indeed. The number of persons available for purely social purposes at all times and seasons is infinitely greater than among ourselves; and the ingenuity of the arrangements permanently going forward to disembarrass them of their superfluous leisure is as yet in America an undeveloped branch of civilization. The young men who are preparing for the stern realities of life among the gray-green cloisters of Oxford are obliged to keep their terms but one half the year; and the rosy little cricketers of Eton and Harrow are let loose upon the parental home for an embarrassing number of months. Happily the parental home is apt to be an affair of gardens, lawns and parks.

Passion Week, in London, is distinctly an ascetic period; there is really an approach to sackcloth and ashes. Private dissipation is suspended; most of the theatres and music-halls are closed; the huge dusky city seems to take on a still sadder coloring and a sort of hush[Pg 53] steals over its mighty uproar. At such a time, for a stranger, London is not cheerful. Arriving there, during the past winter, about Christmas-time, I encountered three British Sundays in a row—a spectacle to strike terror into the stoutest heart. A Sunday and a "bank-holiday," if I remember aright, had joined hands with a Christmas Day and produced the portentous phenomenon to which I allude. I betrayed, I suppose, some apprehension of its oppressive character, for I remember being told in a consolatory way that I needn't fear; it would not come round again for another year. This information was given me apropos of that surprising interruption of one's relations with the laundress which is apparently characteristic of the period. I was told that all the washerwomen were drunk, and that, as it would take them some time to revive, I must not look for a speedy resumption of these relations. I shall not forget the impression made upon me by this statement; I had just come from Paris and it almost sent me spinning back. One of the incidental agréments of life in the latter city had been the knock at my door on Saturday evenings of a charming young woman with a large basket covered with a snowy napkin on her arm, and on her head a frilled and fluted muslin cap which was an irresistible advertisement of her art. To say that my admirable blanchisseuse was sober is altogether too gross a compliment; but I was always grateful to her for her russet cheek, her frank, expressive eye, her talkative smile, for the way her charming cap was poised upon her crisp, dense hair and her well-made dress was fitted to her well-made waist. I talked with her; I could talk with her; and as she talked she moved about and laid out her linen with a delightful modest ease. Then her light step carried her off again, talking, to the door and with a brighter smile and an "Adieu, monsieur!" she closed it behind her, leaving one to think how stupid is prejudice and how poetic a creature a washerwoman may be. London, in December, was livid with sleet and fog, and against this dismal background was offered me the vision of a horrible old woman in a smoky bonnet, lying prone in a puddle of whisky! She seemed to assume a kind of symbolic significance, and she almost frightened me away.

I mention this trifle, which is doubtless not creditable to my fortitude, because I found that the information given me was not strictly accurate and that at the end of three months I had another array of London Sundays to face. On this occasion however nothing occurred to suggest again the dreadful image I have just sketched, though I devoted a good deal of time to observing the manners of the lower orders. From Good Friday to Easter Monday, inclusive, they were very much en évidence, and it was an excellent occasion for getting an impression of the British populace. Gentility had retired to the background and in the West End all the blinds were lowered; the streets were void of carriages and well-dressed pedestrians were rare; but the "masses" were all abroad and making the most of their holiday, and I strolled about and watched them at their gambols. The heavens were most unfavorable, but in an English "outing" there is always a margin left for a drenching, and throughout the vast smoky city, beneath the shifting gloom of the sky the grimy crowds trooped about with a kind of weather-proof stolidity. The parks were full of them, the railway stations overflowed and the Thames embankment was covered. The "masses," I think, are usually an entertaining spectacle, even when observed through the glutinous medium of London bad weather. There are indeed few things in their way more impressive than a dusky London holiday; it suggests a variety of reflections. Even looked at superficially the British capital is one of the most interesting of cities, and it is perhaps on such occasions as this that I have most felt its interest. London is ugly, dusky, dreary, more destitute than any European city of graceful and decorative incident; and though on festal days, like those I speak of, the populace is massed in large numbers at certain points, many of the streets are empty enough of human life[Pg 54] to enable you to perceive their intrinsic hideousness. A Christmas Day or a Good Friday uncovers the ugliness of London. As you walk along the streets, having no fellow-pedestrians to look at, you look up at the brown brick house-walls, corroded with soot and fog, pierced with their straight stiff window-slits and finished, by way of a cornice, with a little black line resembling a slice of curb-stone. There is not an accessory, not a touch of architectural fancy, not the narrowest concession to beauty. If I were a foreigner it would make me rabid; being an Anglo-Saxon I find in it what Thackeray found in Baker street—a delightful proof of English domestic virtue, of the sanctity of the British home. There are miles and miles of these edifying monuments, and it would seem that a city made up of them should have no claim to that larger effectiveness of which I just now spoke. London, however, is not made up of them; there are architectural combinations of a statelier kind, and the impression moreover does not rest on details. London is picturesque in spite of details—from its dark-green, misty parks, the way the light comes down leaking and filtering from its cloudy skies, and the softness and richness of tone which objects put on in such an atmosphere as soon as they begin to recede. Nowhere is there such a play of light and shade, such a struggle of sun and smoke, such aërial gradations and confusions. To eyes addicted to the picturesque this is a constant entertainment, and yet this is only part of it. What completes the effect of the place is its appeal to the feelings, made in so many ways, but made above all by agglomerated immensity. At any given point London looks huge; even in narrow corners you have a sense of its hugeness, and petty places acquire a certain interest from their being parts of so mighty a whole. Nowhere, else is so much human life gathered together and nowhere does it press upon you with so many suggestions. These are not all of an exhilarating kind; far from it. But they are of every possible kind, and this is the interest of London. Those that were most forcible during the showery Easter season were certain of the more perplexing and depressing ones; but even with these was mingled a brighter strain.

I walked down to Westminster Abbey on Good Friday afternoon—walked from Piccadilly across the Green Park and through St. James's Park. The parks were densely filled with the populace—the elder people shuffling about the walks and the poor little smutty-faced children sprawling over the dark damp turf. When I reached the Abbey I found a dense group of people about the entrance, but I squeezed my way through them and succeeded in reaching the threshold. Beyond this it was impossible to advance, and I may add that it was not desirable. I put my nose into the church and promptly withdrew it. The crowd was terribly compact and, beneath the Gothic arches, the odor was not that of incense. I slowly eliminated myself, with that very modified sense of disappointment that one feels in London at being crowded out of a place. This is a frequent disappointment, for you very soon find out that there are, selfishly speaking, too many people. Human life is cheap; your fellow-mortals are too plentiful. Whereever you go you make the observation. Go to the theatre, to a concert, to an exhibition, to a reception; you always find that, before you arrive, there are people enough on the field. You are a tight fit in your place wherever you find it; you have too many companions and competitors. You feel yourself at times in danger of thinking meanly of the human personality; numerosity, as it were, swallows up quality, and such perpetual familiarity contains the germs of contempt. This is the reason why the perfection of luxury in England is to own a "park"—an artificial solitude. To get one's self into the middle of a few hundred acres of oak-studded turf and to keep off the crowd by the breadth, at least, of this grassy cincture, is to enjoy a comfort which circumstances make peculiarly precious. But I walked back through the parks in the midst of these "circumstances," and I found that entertainment which I never fail to derive from a great[Pg 55] English assemblage. The English are, to my eyes, so much the handsomest people in Europe that it takes some effort of the imagination to believe that the fact requires proof. I never see a large number of them without this impression being confirmed; though I hasten to add that I have sometimes felt it to be woefully shaken in the presence of a small number. I suspect that a great English crowd would yield a larger percentage of handsome faces and figures than any other. With regard to the upper class I imagine this is generally granted; but I should extend it to the whole people. Certainly, if the English populace strike the observer by their good looks they must be very good-looking indeed. They are as ill-dressed as their betters are well-dressed, and their garments have that sooty-looking surface which has nothing in common with some forms of ragged picturesqueness. It is the hard prose of misery—an ugly and hopeless imitation of respectable attire. This is especially noticeable in the battered and bedraggled bonnets of the women, which look as if their husbands had stamped on them in hobnailed boots, as a hint of what is in store for their wearers. Then it is not too much to say that two-thirds of the London faces, among the "masses," bear in some degree or other the traces of liquor, which is not a beautifying fluid. The proportion of flushed, empurpled, eruptive countenances is very striking; and the ugliness of the sight is not diminished by the fact that many of the faces thus disfigured were evidently once handsome. A very large allowance is to be made, too, for the people who bear the distinctive stamp of that physical and mental degradation which comes from the slums and purlieus of this dusky Babylon—the pallid, stunted, misbegotten and in every way miserable figures. These people swarm in every London crowd, and I know of none in any other place that suggest an equal degree of misery. But when these abatements are made, the observer is still liable to be struck by the frequency of well-modeled faces and bodies well put together; of strong, straight brows and handsome mouths and noses, of rounded, finished chins and well-poised heads, of admirable complexions and well-disposed limbs.

All this, I admit, is a description of the men rather than of the women; but to a certain extent it includes the women. There is much more beauty among English women of the lower class than strangers who are accustomed to dwell upon their "coarseness" recognize. Pretty heads, pretty mouths and cheeks and chins, pretty eyes too, if you are content with a moderate brilliancy, and at all events charming complexions—these seem to me to be presented in a very sufficient abundance. The capacity of an Englishwoman for being handsome strikes me as unlimited, and even if (I repeat) it is in the luxurious class that it is most freely exercised, yet among the daughters of the people one sees a great many fine points. Among the men fine points are strikingly numerous—especially among the younger ones. Now the same distinction is to be made—the gentlemen are certainly handsomer than the vulgarians. But taking one young Englishman with another, they are physically very well appointed. Their features are finished, composed, as it were, more harmoniously than those of many of their nearer and remoter neighbors, and their figures are apt to be both powerful and compact. They present to view very much fewer accidental noses and inexpressive mouths, fewer sloping shoulders and ill-planted heads of hair, than their American kinsmen. Speaking always from the sidewalk, it may be said that as the spring increases in London and the symptoms of the season multiply, the beautiful young men who adorn the West-End pavements, and who advance before you in couples, arm-in-arm, fair-haired, gray-eyed, athletic, slow-strolling, ambrosial, are among the most brilliant features of the brilliant period. I have it at heart to add that if the English are handsomer than ourselves, they are also very much uglier. Indeed I think that all the European peoples are uglier than the American; we are far from producing those magnificent types of facial eccentricity[Pg 56] which flourish among older civilizations. American ugliness is on the side of physical poverty and meanness; English on that of redundancy and monstrosity. In America there are few grotesques; in England there are many—and some of them are almost handsome!

The element of the grotesque was very noticeable to me in the most striking collection of the shabbier English types that I had seen since I came to London. The occasion of my seeing them was the funeral of Mr. George Odger, which befell some four or five weeks before the Easter period. Mr. George Odger, it will be remembered, was an English radical agitator, of humble origin, who had distinguished himself by a perverse desire to get into Parliament. He exercised, I believe, the useful profession of shoemaker, and he knocked in vain at the door that opens but to golden keys. But he was a useful and honorable man, and his own people gave him an honorable burial. I emerged accidentally into Piccadilly at the moment they were so engaged, and the spectacle was one I should have been sorry to miss. The crowd was enormous, but I managed to squeeze through it and to get into a hansom cab that was drawn up beside the pavement, and here I looked on as from a box at the play. Though it was a funeral that was going on I will not call it a tragedy; but it was a very serious comedy. The day happened to be magnificent—the finest of the year. The funeral had been taken in hand by the classes who are socially unrepresented in Parliament, and it had the character of a great popular "manifestation." The hearse was followed by very few carriages, but the cortége of pedestrians stretched away in the sunshine, up and down the classic gentility of Piccadilly, on a scale that was highly impressive. Here and there the line was broken by a small brass band—apparently one of those bands of itinerant Germans that play for coppers beneath lodging-house windows; but for the rest it was compactly made up of what the newspapers call the dregs of the population. It was the London rabble, the metropolitan mob, men and women, boys and girls, the decent poor and the indecent, who had scrambled into the ranks as they gathered them up on their passage, and were making a sort of solemn spree of it. Very solemn it all was—perfectly proper and undemonstrative. They shuffled along in an interminable line, and as I looked at them out of the front of my hansom I seemed to be having a sort of panoramic view of the under side, the wrong side, of the London world. The procession was filled with figures which seemed never to have "shown out," as the English say, before; of strange, pale, mouldy paupers who blinked and stumbled in the Piccadilly sunshine. I have no space to describe them more minutely, but I found in the whole affair something memorable. My impression rose not simply from the radical, or as I may say for the sake of color, the revolutionary, emanation of this dingy concourse, lighted up by the ironical sky; but from the same causes that I had observed a short time before, on the day the queen went to open Parliament, when in Trafalgar Square, looking straight down into Westminster and over the royal cortége, were gathered a group of banners and festoons, inscribed in big staring letters with mottoes and sentiments which a sensitive police-department might easily have found seditious. They were mostly in allusion to the Tichborne claimant, whose release from his dungeon they peremptorily demanded, and whose cruel fate was taken as a pretext for several sweeping reflections on the social arrangements of the time and country. These portentous standards were allowed to sun themselves as freely as if they had been the manifestoes of the Irish Giant or the Oriental Dwarf at a fair. I had lately come from Paris, where the police-department is sensitive, and where revolutionary placards are not observed to adorn the base of the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde. I was, therefore, the more struck on both of the occasions I speak of with the admirable English practice of letting people alone—with the good sense and the good humor and even the good promise of it. It was this that I[Pg 57] found impressive as I watched the "manifestation" of Mr. Odger's underfed partisans—the fact that the mighty mob could march along and do its errand, while the excellent quiet policemen stood by simply to see that the channel was kept clear and comfortable.

When Easter Monday came it was obvious that every one (save Mr. Odger's friends—three or four million or so) had gone out of town. There was hardly a pair of shutters in the West End that was not closed; there was not a bell that it was any use to pull. The weather was detestable, the rain incessant, and the fact that all one's friends were away gave one plenty of leisure to reflect that the country must be the reverse of enlivening. But all one's friends had gone thither (this is the unanimity I began by talking about), and to keep down as much as possible the proportions of that game of hide-and-seek of which, at the best, so much of London social life consists, it seemed wise to bring within the limits of the dull season any such excursion as one might have projected in commemoration of the first days of spring. After due cogitation I paid a little visit to Canterbury and Dover, taking Rochester by the way, and it was of this momentous journey that I proposed, in beginning these remarks, to give an account. But I have dallied so much by the way that I have come almost to my rope's end without reaching my first stage. I should have begun, artistically, by relating that I put myself in the humor for remote adventure by going down the Thames on a penny steamboat to—the Tower! This was on the Saturday before Easter and the City was as silent as the grave. The Tower was a memory of my childhood, and having a theory, that from such memories the dust of the ages had better not be shaken, I had not retraced my steps to its venerable walls. But the Tower is very good—much less cockneyfied than I supposed it would seem to my maturer vision; very vast and grand, historical and romantic. I could not get into it, as it had been closed for Passion Week, but I was thus relieved from the obligation to march about with a dozen fellow-starers in the train of a didactic beef-eater, and I strolled at will through the courts and the garden, sharing them only with the lounging soldiers of the garrison, who made the place more picturesque. At Rochester I stopped for the sake of its castle, which I spied from the railway-train, perched on a grassy bank beside the widening Medway. There were other reasons as well; the place has a small cathedral, and one has read about it in Dickens, who lived during the latter years of his life at Gadshill, a couple of miles from the town. All this Kentish country, between London and Dover, figures indeed repeatedly in Dickens; he is to a certain extent, for our own time, the genius loci. I found this to be quite the case at Rochester. I had occasion to go into a little shop kept by a talkative old woman who had a photograph of Gadshill lying on her counter. This led to my asking her whether the illustrious master of the house often made his appearance in the town. "Oh, bless you, sir," she said, "we every one of us knew him to speak to. He was in this very shop on the Tuesday with a party of foreigners—as he was dead in his bed on the Friday. He 'ad on his black velvet suit, and it always made him look so 'andsome. I said to my 'usband, 'I do think Charles Dickens looks so nice in that black velvet suit.' But he said he couldn't see as he looked any way particular. He was in this very shop on the Tuesday, with a party of foreigners." Rochester consists of little more than one long street, stretching away from the castle and the river toward neighboring Chatham, and edged with low brick houses, of intensely provincial aspect, most of which have some small, dull quaintness of gable or casement. Nearly opposite to the shop of the old lady with the dissentient husband is a little dwelling with an inscribed slab set into its face, which must often have provoked a smile in the great master of laughter. The slab relates that in the year 1579 Richard Watts here established a charity which should furnish "six poor travelers, not rogues or proctors," one night's lodging and entertainment[Pg 58] gratis and four pence in the morning to go on their way withal, and that in memory of his "munificence" the stone has lately been renewed. The inn at Rochester was poor, and I felt strongly tempted to knock at the door of Mr. Watts's asylum, under plea of being neither a rogue nor a proctor. The poor traveler who avails himself of the testamentary four pence may easily resume his journey as far as Chatham without breaking his treasure. Is not this the place where little Davy Copperfield slept under a cannon on his journey from London to Dover, to join his aunt, Miss Trotwood? The two towns are really but one, which forms an interminable crooked thoroughfare, crowded, in the dusk, as I measured it up and down, with specimens of the British soldier from the large garrison at Chatham; those trim and firmly-pacing red-coats who seem, to eyes accustomed to the promiscuous continental levies, so picked and disciplined, polished and pomatumed, such ornamental and yet after all, such capable warriors.

The cathedral at Rochester is small and plain, hidden away in rather an awkward corner, without a verdant close to set it off. It is dwarfed and effaced by the great square Norman keep of the adjacent castle. But within it is very charming, especially beyond the detestable wall, the vice of almost all the English cathedrals, which shuts in the choir and breaks that long vista so properly of the very essence of a great church. Here, as at Canterbury, you ascend a high range of steps to pass through the small door in this wall. When I speak slightingly, by the way, of the outside of Rochester cathedral, I intend my faint praise in a relative sense. If we were so happy as to possess this inferior edifice in America, we should go barefoot to see it; but here it stands in the great shadow of Canterbury, and that makes it humble. I remember, however, an old priory gateway which leads you to the church, out of the main street; I remember something in the way of a quiet, weird deanery or canonry, at the base of the eastern walls; I remember a fluted tower that took the afternoon light and let the rooks and the swallows come circling and clamoring around it. Better than these things, however, I remember the ivy-draped mass of the castle—a most noble and imposing ruin. The old walled precinct has been converted into a little public garden, with flowers and benches, and a pavilion for a band, and the place was not empty, as such places in England never are. The result is agreeable, but I believe the process was barbarous, involving the destruction and dispersion of many interesting portions of the ruin. I sat there for a long time, however, looking in the fading light at what was left. This rugged pile of Norman masonry will be left when a great many solid things have departed; it is a sort of satire on destruction or decay. Its walls are fantastically thick; their great time-bleached expanses and all their rounded roughnesses, their strange mixture of softness and grimness, have an indefinable fascination for the eye. English ruins always come out peculiarly when the day begins to fade. Weather-bleached, as I say they are, they turn even paler in the twilight and grow consciously solemn and spectral. I have seen many a mouldering castle, but I remember no single mass of ruin more impressive than this towering square of Rochester.

It is not the absence of a close that damages Canterbury; the cathedral stands amid grass and trees, with a great garden sweep all round it, and is placed in such a way that, as you pass out from under the gate-house, you appreciate immediately its grand feature—its extraordinary and magnificent length. None of the English cathedrals seems more beautifully isolated, more shut up to itself. It is a long walk beneath the walls from the gateway of the close to the far outer end of the last chapel. Of all that there is to observe in this upward-gazing stroll I can give no detailed account; I can speak only of the general impression. This is altogether delightful. None of the rivals of Canterbury have a more complicated and elaborate architecture, a more perplexing intermixture of periods, a more charming jumble of Norman arches and English[Pg 59] points and perpendiculars. What makes the side-view superb, moreover, is the double transepts, which produce a fine modification of gables and buttresses. It is as if two great churches had joined forces toward the middle—one giving its nave and the other its choir, and each keeping its own great cross-aisles. Astride of the roof, between them, sits a huge Gothic tower, which is one of the latest portions of the building, though it looks like one of the earliest, so crumbled and blunted and mellowed is it by time and weather. Like the rest of the structure it has a magnificent color—a sort of rich dull yellow, a something that is neither brown nor gray. This is particularly appreciable from the cloister on the farther side of the church—the side, I mean, away from the town and the open garden-sweep I spoke of; the side that looks toward a damp old deanery lurking behind a brown archway, through which you see young ladies in Gainsborough hats playing something on a patch of velvet turf; the side, in short, that is somehow intermingled with a green quadrangle which serves as a play-ground to a King's School, which is adorned externally with a most precious and picturesque old fragment of Norman staircase. This cloister is not "kept up;" it is very dusky and mouldy and dilapidated, and of course very picturesque. The old black arches and capitals are various and handsome, and in the centre are tumbled together a group of crooked gravestones, themselves almost buried in the deep soft grass. Out of the cloister opens the chapter-house, which is not kept up either, but which is none the less a magnificent structure; a noble lofty hall, with a beautiful wooden roof, simply arched like that of a tunnel, and very grand and impressive from its great sweep and its absence of columns, brackets or supports of any kind. The place is now given up to dust and echoes; but it looks more like a banqueting-hall than a council-room of priests, and as you sit on the old wooden bench, which, raised on two or three steps, runs round the base of the four walls, you may gaze up and make out the faint, ghostly traces of decorative paint and gold upon the noble ceiling. A little patch of this has been restored, "to give an idea." From one of the angles of the cloister you are recommended by the verger to take a view of the great tower, which indeed detaches itself with tremendous effect. You see it base itself upon the roof as broadly as if it were striking roots in earth, and then pile itself away to a height which seems to make the very swallows dizzy, as they fall twittering down its shafted sides. Within the cathedral you hear a great deal, of course, about poor Thomas A'Becket, and the great sensation of the place is to stand on the particular spot where he was murdered and look down at a small fragmentary slab which the verger points out to you as a bit of the pavement that caught the blood-drops of the struggle. It was late in the afternoon when I first entered the church; there had been a service in the choir, but it was well over and I had the place to myself. The verger, who had some pushing about of benches to attend to, turned me into the locked gates and left me to wander through the side-aisles of the choir and into the great chapel beyond it. I say I had the place to myself; but it would be more decent to affirm that I shared it, in particular, with another gentleman. This personage was stretched upon a couch of stone, beneath a quaint old canopy of wood; his hands were crossed upon his breast and his pointed toes rested upon a little griffin or leopard. He was a very handsome fellow and the image of a gallant knight. His name was Edward Plantagenet and his sobriquet was the Black Prince. "De la mort ne pensai-je mye," he says in the beautiful inscription embossed upon the bronze base of his image; and I too, as I stood there, thought not a whit of death. His bones were in the pavement beneath my feet, but within his rigid bronze his life burned fresh and strong. Simple, handsome and expressive, it is a singularly striking and even touching monument, and in the silent, empty chapel which had held together for so many ages this last remnant of his presence it was possible to feel a certain personal[Pg 60] nearness to him. One had been farther off, after all, from other examples of that British valor of which he is the most picturesque type. In this same chapel for many a year stood the shrine of St. Thomas of Canterbury, one of the richest and most potent in Christendom. The pavement which lay before it has kept its place, but Henry VIII. swept everything else away into the limbo of his ransacked abbeys and his murdered wives. Becket was originally buried in the crypt of the church; his ashes lay there for fifty years, and it was only little by little that his martyrdom was, as the French say, "exploited." Then he was transplanted into the Lady Chapel; every grain of his dust became a priceless relic and the pavement was hollowed by the knees of pilgrims. It was on this errand of course that Chaucer's story-telling cavalcade came to Canterbury. I made my way down into the crypt, which is a magnificent maze of low, dark arches and pillars, and groped about till I found the place where the frightened monks had first shuffled the inanimate victim of Moreville and Fitzurse out of the reach of further desecration. While I stood there a violent thunder-storm broke over the cathedral; great rumbling gusts and rain-drifts came sweeping through the open sides of the crypt, and, mingling with the darkness which seemed to deepen and flash in corners, and with the potent mouldy smell, made me feel as if I had descended into the very bowels of history. I emerged again, but the rain had settled down and spoiled the evening, and I splashed back to my inn and sat in a chair by the coffee-room fire, reading Dean Stanley's agreeable "Memorials" of Canterbury, and wondering over the musty appointments and meagre resources of English hostels. This establishment had entitled itself (in compliment to the Black Prince, I suppose), the "Fleur-de-Lis." The name was very pretty (I had been foolish enough to let it take me to the inn), but the lily was sadly deflowered. I found compensation at Dover, however, where the "Lord Warden" Hotel struck me as the best inn I had encountered in England. My principal errand at Dover was to look for Miss Betsey Trotwood's cottage, but I am sorry to say I failed to discover it. Was it not upon the downs, overlooking the town and the sea? I saw nothing on the downs but Dover Castle, which, in default of Miss Trotwood's stronghold, I zealously visited. It is an establishment of quite the same character, bristling with offensive and defensive machinery. More seriously speaking, it is a magnificent fortress—a bequest of the Middle Ages turned to excellent account by modern engineers. The day was clear and beautiful, and I walked about for a while among the towers and the grassy bastions; then I stood and gossiped with an amiable gunner who talked to me of Malta, leaning against the rampart and looking across the wrinkled sea to the glimmering cliffs of France.

Henry James, Jr.

THE ELIXIR.

[Pg 61]

LÉONIE REGNAULT: A STUDY FROM FRENCH LIFE.

In the pretty town of Macon, on the banks of the Saône, lived Léonie Regnault. She remembered no other home than the gray stone house with its balconied windows that overlooked the beautiful river and the long, somewhat formal promenades that stretch along its banks, with their green trees and many seats, but never a blade of grass—all dry, hard-beaten gravel, after the ugly French fashion, convenient enough, it must be confessed, for the evening loungers, gay or tired, whom the dewy green of Nature might incommode.

Léonie's father lived in Paris, and he had brought her when only three years old to the gray stone house and the care of his only sister, Madame Perrin, a childless widow, who gladly received the beautiful little girl to the large shelter of a loving heart. But Léonie never forgot her father. The little creature would sit on her low-cushioned chair and sing to herself, "Mon beau papa! mon beau papa! O comme je t'aime, mon beau papa!" I suppose every tender father appears beautiful to his little child, but Colonel Regnault was indeed a strikingly handsome man, with a perfect grace and dignity of manner which rendered him indispensable to the court of Louis Napoleon, where he had a prominent position on all days of ceremony. Once or twice a year he made his escape from court duties for a brief visit to Léonie, whose love for him grew more intense with years, concentrating in itself all the romance of her enthusiastic nature.

Madame Perrin saw few visitors, and scarcely ever went out except to mass. Every morning her good Louise took Léonie to the girls' school in the old stone mansion which had once been the home of Lamartine, and went every evening to conduct her home again. Of course, Léonie had her inseparable friend, as what school-girl has not, and few lovers are so devoted to each other as were Léonie Regnault and Hélène Duprès. They sat side by side every day in school, and out of school wrote each other long letters, of which they were generally themselves the bearers. Life seems so rich and inexhaustible when it is new—the merest nothing has its poem and history. They had made their first communion together, which was the most important incident hitherto in Léonie's uneventful life. Her father had come down on this occasion, and when she came from the altar he had put aside her white veil and kissed her with tears in his eyes.

Léonie had completed her fifteenth year when she was thrown into great excitement by an unexpected piece of news. Her father was about to marry. The future Madame Regnault was a young widow of good family and large fortune. He had taken this step, he said, for Léonie's sake even more than for his own. He wished to have his daughter with him and to cultivate her talents; and how could this be done without a home in Paris? The marriage would take place early in September, and the first week in October he would come for Léonie. He looked forward with delight to having a home for his beautiful beloved child.

It was the last week in September. The rain was falling in a dull dreary way, as it had been falling all day and almost a week of days.

"I wish it would clear up," said Léonie. "I hate to have everything look so dreary just the last week I have to stay."

"Do you ever think, chérie, how dull it will be for me when you are gone? What shall I do without ma chère petite?" asked Madame Perrin tenderly.

"And what shall I do without you, chère maman? I am afraid I shall not like the new mamma that papa has given me. Or perhaps I am only afraid that she will not like me. You are my real mother," taking her hand caressingly.[Pg 62] "I wish I could remember my own mother. Why have you never told me anything about her? I have asked you so many times."

"I never was acquainted with your mother. She lived in Paris, you know, and I lived here."

"But you have seen her. Was she beautiful? Am I like her?"

"Yes," said Madame Perrin with a little start—"so much like her that it frightens me." Then more deliberately, in reply to Léonie's astonished eyes, "I mean that it is sad to be reminded of one who is dead."

"Papa must have loved her very much. I remember when I was a little girl, and began to wonder why I had not a mother like Hélène, you said I must never ask papa about her, it would give him so much pain. But now I may, now that he has given her place to somebody else."

"By no means, Léonie—less than ever. If your poor father has at last succeeded in leaving his sorrow behind him, do you wish to drag him back to it, you thoughtless child?"

"Then you must tell me yourself, ma tante. It is very strange that you are so unwilling to tell me anything about my pretty mother who died when I was almost a baby."

"Why will you be so persistent? I do not like to give you so much pain."

"Why, dear aunt, I shall like to hear about her. It is very sad not to have any mother, but I can't feel as distressed about it as if I had known and loved her. She is only a beautiful dream to me. I cannot feel as I should if you were to die and leave me. You must tell me. I shall not let you have any peace till you do. You can't refuse me now, just when I am going away."

"Well, if I must, I must," said Madame Perrin with trembling voice. "What do I know? It may be for your salvation. The Blessed Virgin grant it! Your mother, Léonie, was a great beauty."

"I was sure of it. If I could only have seen her with my dear papa! He is so handsome always."

"She was a great singer too."

"I am glad of it. I shall be a singer when I have learned in Paris. I care more for the lessons in singing than for anything else in the great beautiful city, except being with my own papa."

"But, Léonie, your mother sang in the Grand Opera. She was the best singer in France, or in the world perhaps, and everybody was crazy about her."

"And so papa married an opera-singer? It is quite a romance."

"He did not marry her."

"Not marry her?" said Léonie with white face and great black, wide-open eyes.

"She was married already to one of the singers in the opera, and she left him to live with your father."

Léonie's white lips shaped rather than uttered the question, "What did he do, the husband?"

"He challenged your father, and, though he was so much his inferior, Léon was too generous to hurt his feelings by refusing to fight with him after doing him such an injury. He was so good a swordsman that he easily disarmed him with only a slight wound."

"This is terrible!" said Léonie. "My father such a wicked man!"

"That is not the way the world looked at it. All the men envied Léon, and the women flattered and spoiled him more than ever."

"I hate my father!" cried Léonie with quick, passionate sobs. "No wonder my poor mother died. I shall be her avenger: I feel it."

"You do not know what you are saying. Your mother avenged herself. She deserted him as she deserted her husband, and you too, my poor child, when you were just learning to say 'Mamma.' Poor Léon! he sinned, but he suffered too. Be merciful to him, Léonie, as you pray God to be merciful to you."

"Is my mother alive?" asked Léonie, shivering.

"No: she died three years ago. Your father never would see her again, but when he heard that she was sick and in want (she had entirely lost her wonderful voice), he gave her an annuity because she was your mother. Father Aubrey used to see her from time to[Pg 63] time, and he said she was truly penitent before she died."

"Oh, what shall I do? I shall never be happy again—never, never! What made you tell me? How could you?" said poor Léonie, wringing her little hands and burying her face in the cushions.

"My child, you would hear it sooner or later in that great, wicked city, and it is better that you should be prepared. You are beautiful like your mother, you will sing like her, and I am so afraid—" here the poor little woman broke down and began to cry like Léonie, but less violently—"I am so afraid that you will go on the stage and be tempted and fall like her. Promise me that you will never sing in the opera, Léonie, no matter who urges it, even if it is your father himself."

"I will die first," answered Léonie. "I wish I had never been born."

"Don't tell your father, Léonie," sobbed Madame Perrin; and here the conversation ended.

"What's the matter with Léonie?" asked Colonel Regnault the night after his arrival. "She looks so pale and languid, and hardly gives me a welcome. What ails the child?"

"She has not been quite well for a few days, and I dare say she feels sad at leaving Hélène and me," replied his sister.

"She'll brighten up when she gets to Paris," said the colonel.

The sorrow of early youth, however violent, is seldom proof against new impressions, and this was especially true of one so susceptible and mobile as Léonie Regnault. She entered enthusiastically upon her musical studies, taking lessons of Madame Viardot and also at the Conservatoire. Madame Regnault was a sweet and quiet woman, devotedly attached to her husband, and not a little afraid of him. Colonel Regnault, with all his urbanity, had a despotic will, extending to the most minute and seemingly indifferent things: he was just the kind of man to graduate a gentle, loving woman into a saint. The only time I ever dined with Madame Regnault I was forced to eat under the cold steel of his clear blue eye a plate of those small red shrimps which Parisians think so delicious (I could have swallowed spiders with as little effort), and afterward quaff a cup of black coffee with its cap of blue flame, which reminded me of "Deacon Giles's Distillery," in spite of protest and direful headache in terrorem; and the colonel thought he was polite to me. He chose all madame's gowns: the poor little woman did not venture to buy even a ribbon for herself; and from having been one of the most elegant women in Paris, she grew at length almost dowdyish; not but that her garments were as fresh and as costly as ever, but the brilliant colors and conspicuous styles which had suited the opera-singer, and which heightened the beauty of Léonie, extinguished the delicate color and soft blue eyes of Madame Regnault, and were so little in harmony with her person and character as to have almost the effect of a discord in music.

A year passed, and her heart was made glad by a dear little son, who was named Léon for his father. The little fellow was six weeks old, and his mother had scarcely left the nursery, which was a bit of heaven to her, when Colonel Regnault startled her from her dream of bliss: "I have found just the nurse for the baby, the wife of a small farmer who lives close to Rosny Station. She will wean her child and take him. She is such a fresh, healthy-looking woman, and everything is so clean and tidy in her cottage, that you will be delighted with her, I am sure."

"Oh, Léon, may I not nurse him myself? I cannot give him up to anybody. Who will take so good care of my little precious darling as his own mother?"

"It is not to be thought of, Clémence: it would wear you out. See, you are crying now: it shows how weak and nervous you are. Besides, Léonie needs you. She is losing already, for nobody plays her accompaniments so well as you, and I do not like to have her go to the Conservatoire with a bonne when it can be helped: a girl so striking is likely to be watched and followed. I never feel safe about her unless you are with her. Don't be silly: the baby will be better off in the country."[Pg 64]

Madame Regnault was very kind to Léonie: it was impossible for her to be otherwise to any one. She was devoted to her for her father's sake: she felt a thrill of delight in her beauty, in her wonderful talents; but she did not love her. She might have loved her perhaps—though there was not much in common between the ardent, high-spirited girl and the gentle, patient woman, except, indeed, the taste for music—but it is not in nature, and hardly in grace, for a woman thirsting for her husband's love to like being always postponed to some one else. Colonel Regnault seemed to have no perception of anything but his beautiful daughter: his ambition was centred in her even more than his affection. Léonie's talent developed rapidly, and his pride was fed by the praises of her masters and the more flattering compliments of friends and connoisseurs who were present at the musical soirées given from time to time at his own house.

But Léonie did not contribute to the peace of the household. Her aunt had not found it out, Madame Regnault never would have discovered it, but her father's despotic will roused one equally defiant in her, and when they came in contact it was the collision of flint and steel. Léonie often carried her point against her father, and he admired her only the more for it. The contests were quick and sharp—not very frequent, but very unpleasant to Madame Regnault. She grew thin and pale and spiritless. She was not yet thirty, and she had aged by half a score of years in the year and a half of her marriage.

Her mother, Madame Dumesnil, was indignant at what she considered the colonel's neglect of his wife, and mentally threatened to give him "a piece of her mind." She had not long to wait for an occasion.

"I am sorry to see Clémence looking so ill," said she to him as he entered his wife's dressing-room one day a little before breakfast—that is to say, about noon.

"I had not noticed that she was ailing," he rejoined with a quick glance at his wife.

"It is well that somebody has eyes," continued Madame Dumesnil. "I did not expect that my daughter was to become a governess when she married you. Her previous life had not prepared her for such arduous duties."

"My wife does not complain," said the colonel haughtily.

"Clémence complain! She would not complain if she suffered martyrdom." Madame Regnault looked imploringly at her mother, but she went on more sternly than before: "If Clémence had a spark of spirit she would never have had Léonie in the house. It is a shame for her to be made a slave to the opera-singer's girl, and I am not the only one who thinks so."

"Pardon me, madame," responded her son-in-law, "the conversation is too exciting for me. I have the honor to wish you a good-morning;" and he bowed himself out with the most exasperating courtesy.

"Oh, mother, what have you done?" cried Madame Regnault, trembling and tearful. "How could you make him so angry?"

"How could I, indeed! I wish I were his wife a little while: he wouldn't find it so easy to tyrannize over me. I don't know where you got your disposition from: you didn't take it from me, that's certain."

"Jacques," said Colonel Regnault to the porter as he left the house, "when Madame Dumesnil calls to see your mistress hereafter, let me know it, and remember that I am never at home."

Léonie, though she felt a certain hardness in the manner of Madame Dumesnil when she happened to meet her, was wholly unaware of what was passing in the heart of Madame Regnault, who had a genuine sympathetic interest in the development of her remarkable powers, playing her accompaniments unweariedly for hours daily and giving her the benefit of her own delicate and highly-cultivated taste. They were happy years for Léonie. Her young soul, full of the inspiration and power of genius, felt its wings growing. There is an atmosphere of art in Paris which is powerfully stimulating to any one of æsthetic tendencies;[Pg 65] and how exhilarating was this subtle atmosphere to Léonie! The Conservatoire, with its seventy professors and its thousand students, its competitions, concerts and public exercises, stimulated her zeal and inspired ever higher ideals that made close, hard study the play of her fresh and delighted faculties. Once a week her father took her to the opera. It happened that the first opera she heard was Faust, and she sat as if in a dream, white and scared, seeming to see in the scenes the spectre of her mother. But this impression wore away, and ere many weeks had passed her heart dilated, her eyes kindled with the triumphs of the singer, and she felt as Correggio when he looked on Raphael's St. Cecilia and exclaimed, "I, too, am a painter!"

Thus the days went on, not too slowly, till Léonie had entered her nineteenth year and approached the close of her studies. The finest concerts of Paris and the most exclusive are those of the Conservatoire, six in number, which occur once a fortnight from the middle of January to the middle of April. Léonie had often sung in the small concert-hall at examinations and private exercises, but now she was to sing in the Salle de Spectacle for the celebrated Société des Concerts. This wonderful company is composed mostly of the professors and teachers at the Conservatoire, and it is a rare honor for a pupil to sing or play at these concerts; but Léonie was a rare pupil, and whatever may be said of the jealousy of artists, I hold that true genius always exults in the recognition of genius. Léonie sang in each of the six concerts of her last year at the Conservatoire, and her singing gave exquisite delight to the appreciative listeners: the applause was heart-felt, enthusiastic, inspiring. But on the last night her father's rapture and pride reached their height. The beautiful concert-hall, so refined and classic with its Pompeii-like decorations, was filled with the most brilliant audience of a most brilliant city. The symphony had ended, and Léonie was to sing some selections from the opera of Fidelio. The applause which greeted her as she advanced on the stage was perhaps a tribute to her superb beauty and perfect grace. She was paler than usual, her large black eyes were full of that intense light which only emotion gives, but she showed no embarrassment, and felt none. She saw not the faces, heard not the plaudits. She was alone with her art. Her soul went forth into the song, and one listened in rapture, touched with pain that aught so sweet should be so evanescent. When the wonderful voice seemed to die like a vanishing soul there was silence for a moment—silence most eloquent of eulogies—and then came a burst of applause, the most enthusiastic that ever relieved a listener's heart or charmed a singer's ear.

The concert ended. Her father, proud and exultant, clasped her in his arms. Did he hear the whispers that Léonie's quick ear caught? "Colonel Regnault's daughter, the opera-singer's child. You remember that old story?"—"Ah, indeed! Wonderfully like her mother: more distinguished manner. Something of her father too. Will Regnault let her go on the stage, do you think?"—"I cannot tell. Il est fou d'elle. He brings her up in his own family."—"Vraiment? Good wife, Madame Regnault." Léonie shrank involuntarily from her father's embrace.

The competitive examinations came, and naturally Léonie received the highest prize in singing.

"I do not envy you, mademoiselle," said one of the unsuccessful candidates with a look and tone that accentuated the sneer: "there are other things that people inherit besides their musical talents."

"There will be plenty of spitefulness for your children to inherit, whether there is any talent or not," retorted Léonie, her eyes flashing with resentful pride. It was the first time that any one had deliberately alluded to the taint upon her birth, and it stung.

"I have something to tell you," said her father to Léonie a few days after. "The director of the opera has been talking to me about you. He is only waiting for my consent to bring you out at the Imperial Opera."

Léonie's face lighted up with a quick[Pg 66] gleam of surprise and pleasure, which was followed by a sudden terror.

"You may think it strange that I felt any reluctance: you are so young that you do not know enough of society to appreciate the objections. Not that there are any insuperable objections. In an art-loving community like ours the career of a great artist is prouder than a queen's."

The color had faded from Léonie's face, but her father did not notice it.

"The empress condescended to speak to me about it to-day. Her Majesty has the welfare of the opera very much at heart, and, as she says, one is responsible for a talent like yours. It is the rarest of gifts. Why not consecrate it to the elevation of art and the delight of the world? A vocation for art is as sacred as one for religion, and it would be almost a crime in me to hold you back from so manifest a destiny as yours. Well, what have you to say, child?" and he looked full into his daughter's pale, agitated face. "It is too much for you, my darling: you are quite overcome. Think it over and tell me to-morrow night." And he kissed her trembling lips with unusual emotion.

Léonie went to her room, but not to sleep. How short was that sleepless night, with its whirl of conflicting resolutions, its torrent of emotion, its ceaseless panorama of dissolving views! Opera after opera unrolled in magical splendor before her eyes, resounded in bursts of harmony in her ears and flowed in waves of delicious sweetness into her heart. And in all she was queen, and hearts rose and fell at her bidding as the ocean-waves beneath the strong and sweet compelling of the moon. It was intoxication, but underlying it was the deep satisfaction of a soul that has found the true outlet of its highest powers. "All the current of her being" surged and eddied into this one career that opened so invitingly before her. But she could not say "I will," though she wished to do so. The glories faded and another vision came. Her mother seemed to lie before her, dying, forsaken, remorseful, sinful. Was it her mother? was it herself? "Art thou stronger than I?" asked the voiceless lips.—"Yea, I am stronger," replied the soul of Léonie. And then a sudden revelation of incipient vanities and weaknesses and pride flashed across her consciousness as in the great light of God. Léonie shrank away self-abased. "Did my worship of art, which I thought so holy, hide all this?" she questioned.

The morning light came faintly through the curtained windows. Léonie rose, dressed herself quickly, and calling a bonne went to the Madeleine to early mass. After mass she entered the confessional of the white-haired father who had been her spiritual guide for the three years and a half of her life in Paris. On her return she locked herself into her room and passed the day alone.

"Well, my girl," inquired her father in the evening, "what am I to tell the director? Have you chosen the opera for your début already?"

"I shall never sing in the opera, father."

"Why, what is this, Léonie? If I have got over my scruples, I do not see that you need have any. I thought it would be just what you were longing for."

"I do long for it," said Léonie firmly, "and therefore I think it is not best."

"Don't speak in riddles," rejoined her father angrily. "Do you mean to tell me that you are going to throw away your glorious possibilities—certainties, I might say—for a whim?"

"Not for a whim, but because it is right."

"It is incomprehensible!" cried the colonel, walking the floor excitedly. "Here have you been for years in one rhapsody of music, nothing else in life—your mother and I and everything given up to help you on—and now, when such a prospect opens before you, a career that a princess might envy, when even the empress condescends to solicit it—'No, I am not going to sing. I'll throw it all away—my talent, my father's wishes.' Oh, it is insufferable! It is just like the perverse willfulness of women;" and he turned upon her in a white rage.

Léonie did not quail. "Father," said she, speaking very low, but with crystal clearness, "do you wish me to be like my mother?"[Pg 67]

Colonel Regnault staggered back. "My poor child," he whispered faintly, "who told you that story? Who could have the heart?"

The next day Léonie, with her father's permission, went to Macon to spend some weeks with her aunt. Soon after her departure Madame Regnault asked, "Now that Léonie is gone, cannot we have the children home?"

"We will bring Léon home," replied her husband. "He is a fine little fellow, and will make the house cheerful, but the baby will be better off in the country a year longer. We will have him in for a few days if you like, and the nurse can come with him."

"I will go out this very afternoon," said the mother. "Jeanne will go with me."

"No, my dear, it is too hard a jaunt for you: I will go to-morrow."

"Let me go, Léon: I feel so uneasy about the children. I cannot tell why, but it seems as if something was going to happen to them."

"What could happen to them? and what difference will a day make? I am glad I am not a woman, to be so anxious about nothing," said the colonel, smiling.

About eleven o'clock on the morrow the colonel reached Rosny, and was startled as he approached the house by an appearance of unusual stir, persons going in and out in a hurried and excited way. He entered. The nurse rushed toward him in vehement anguish: "Oh, Colonel Regnault, you are here! John has told you. Where is he? Did he not return with you?"

"I have not seen your husband, good woman. What is the matter? Are the children ill? I came out for them."

"Oh, I cannot tell him! I cannot tell him!" sobbed the unhappy woman. "The dear beautiful babies! It breaks my heart!"

"May God help you to bear it, sir: it is a heavy grief," said an aged woman. "The little boys are dead."

"Dead!" cried the heartstricken father—"my children dead! One of them, you mean—not both, not both!"

It was true. The baby, a dear little fellow six or seven months old, had had for several days a cold which the nurse did not think serious: during the night he had been attacked by croup, and about eight o'clock in the morning, almost before the doctor had arrived, the child was dead. Absorbed in the grief and terror of this sudden death, the nurse forgot to mind Léon, and the restless, active child slipped out of the house unheeded, and, playing on the railway-track, had been killed by a passing train not an hour before his father came for him.

Colonel Regnault's grief was violent and remorseful. "I have killed my children," he would say to his pitying friends. "If I had but listened to my wife and had them brought up at home! What is the croup with a watchful, intelligent mother, and a skillful physician at the very door? and how could any accident have happened to Léon here? So many idle servants in my house, and my own child to die for lack of care!"

Madame Regnault never knew how Léon died. The little body was not mangled: it had been caught and thrown aside by something attached to the engine—I do not know exactly how—and the mother was left to believe that he had died of sickness like the baby. She bore her sorrow with the still meekness consonant with her character, and with wifely tenderness exerted herself to soothe her husband's violent grief.

A little later in the summer the war broke out. Colonel Regnault went gladly, even rashly, into danger, and found neither death nor wounds, but in his anguish for the desolation of his country he made a truce with his own remorse.

The last time I was in Paris—which was in 1874—General and Madame Regnault called on me at my old friend's, Madame Le Fort's. A charming little girl about three years old was with them, a blue-eyed, fair-haired child—very beautiful, and as much like her father as a little girl can be like a man approaching fifty. I was not surprised to see that she was, as her mother said, "une petite fille gâtée." I inquired for Léonie.

"Can you believe that Léonie has not[Pg 68] been in Paris since you saw her here?" replied her father. "She is a thorough little provincial. She has been married more than a year now."

"Ah, I congratulate you! I hope her marriage was pleasing to you," I added, as he did not respond immediately.

"Assez. Her husband is a very worthy young man for a provincial—Théophile Duprès, the brother of a little school-friend of hers. I went down to the wedding, not to grieve Léonie, but I shall never be reconciled to it—never! To think what that girl threw away! Such talent! and to have it lost, utterly lost! It is inexplicable. Every motive that could influence a girl on the one hand, and—But I give it up. Let us not talk of it," he concluded with a little wave of his hand, as if dismissing Léonie and all that pertained to her.

But I could not turn my thoughts from her so quickly. Even now, when I am, so to speak, in another world, she causes me not a little perplexity. Was she right? was she wrong? Can one ever be happy in suppressing a great talent? How it strives and agonizes for some manifestation of itself! and when it slowly dies, stifled in its living grave, must not one feel a bitter regret for having slain the nobler part of one's self?

But is it not heresy to doubt that a woman can sacrifice genius for love, and be content—yea, glad—with an infinite joy? And why not have love and genius too? Alas! most lives are opaque planets, like the earth on which they are evolved, and can have only one bright side at a time.

Madame Regnault was little changed: she preserved the old sweet gentleness and quiet refinement of manner, but she seemed more at ease with her husband, and did not watch so timidly his least gesture. Colonel—or rather General—Regnault had changed more. He had grown quite gray: he was still a handsome, high-bred gentleman, with the same exquisite urbanity of manner, but the disappointment of his ambition for Léonie, the anguish which had smitten him for his children's death, and the great calamity which had almost crushed France, the idol of every Frenchman, had softened and humanized him. He was less like an Apollo exulting in his own divinity; and when I marked his tender thoughtfulness for his wife, his unwonted appreciation of her lovely character, and especially his indulgence of the caprices of little Aimée, who was almost always his companion, I was ready to believe in his entire conversion.

But can the Ethiopian change his skin? One morning Madame Le Fort's little dressmaker came rushing in in a very excited way: "Mon Dieu! I am so glad to get here! Quel homme terrible!"

"What is the matter?" asked madame.

"I have just been trying on Madame Regnault's new costume, the gray faille and velvet, you know, that she selected when she came with you. It is a charming costume, and she looked sweetly in it. The general came in before I got through. 'Do you call that a costume?' he asked in a passion. 'It makes her look like a fright. Take it away: never let me see it again.' Poor little madame hurried me to get it off. 'Take it away! out of the house with it!' cried he as if he were commanding a regiment of dragoons.—'I can't take it away,' said I. 'It was made to order—madame selected it herself—and you cannot expect me to take it back.' I was frightened to death, but I couldn't lose the money, you know. The window was open: he seized the unlucky costume, and giving it a little whirl, sent it flying out of the window over the balustrade. Madame was going to send her maid for it, but no; the wind caught it, and away it went out of the court, and where it lighted or who picked it up is more than I know, or madame either. It may be a fine thing to be a general's wife, but I'd rather be a dressmaker."

And the little dressmaker laughed till she cried to think of madame's handsome costume sailing out of the window over the Avenue Haussmann, and lighting like a balloon on the head of some lucky or luckless passer-by.

Mary E. Blair.

[Pg 69]

PRIMARY AND SECONDARY EDUCATION IN FRANCE.

For a long period, France, with her ancient university and her venerable scholastic institutions—which after the Renaissance drew to themselves the flower of the youth of Europe—may be said to have led the way as regards general education. It has only been in modern times that the progress made by the Anglo-Saxon and German nations has placed, at all events, primary instruction in France somewhat in the rear of other countries. As for her system of secondary and superior education, it has even within the last few years elicited many expressions of approval from foreigners competent to form a judgment on the subject. In the following pages we propose giving a succinct account of the actual system and position of primary and secondary education in France, speaking of what has been done since the close of the war in 1871, and of what yet remains to be done.

PRIMARY EDUCATION.

The great crying evil in France is the lack of education among the poorer classes, who nevertheless, by the democratic constitution of their country, are called upon, together with the rich and the middle classes, to take their share in the government. This evil is recognized in France, and each fresh Assembly meets at Versailles with the determination of having primary schools built and of having every child taught at least to read and write. But these good intentions are terribly hampered by the all-absorbing military appropriations, which, swallowing up some 500,000,000 francs annually, do not allow the ministers and deputies, well disposed as they are, to appropriate to the education of all France a sum much exceeding that expended by the single State of Pennsylvania in the same cause. Still, the acknowledgment of the existence of the evil is in itself a great step toward remedying it, and the France of to-day is making progress in this respect. Before the last war, instead of saying with Terence,

the French citizen might rather have cried, "I am a Frenchman, and that which is not French is foreign to me." A salutary reaction has set in since the war, and nothing is more common than to hear Frenchmen observe that their country was conquered not by Moltke or Krupp, but rather by the German Schullehrer.

We shall not enter into the merits of the long-standing dispute in France as to the superiority of secular or of clerical education. The parable of the mote and the beam might probably be applicable to both parties, but no impartial observer can fail to recognize that the triumph of Romanism in France, consequent upon the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, has formed one of the chief obstacles to the development of public education in that country. Huss, Luther, Calvin—in a word, all the leaders of the Reformation—inculcated the sacred duty devolving upon every man of reading the Bible for himself in his own tongue. Hence we now find education far more advanced in Protestant than in Catholic countries—a fact which has not a little contributed to the decadence of the Latin races. Richelieu, who held that a hungry people was the most submissive, was also of opinion that an ignorant people obeyed the most readily. Louis XIV. and Louis XV., without saying as much, acted up to the cardinal's maxim, doing absolutely nothing for popular education. The instruction of the upper classes was at that time in the hands of religious societies or congrégations. The Revolution, displaying its usual iconoclastic zeal, upset this system, without reflecting for a moment that it might be as well to substitute some other system for it, and that it takes time to organize a body of teachers fit to undertake[Pg 70] such a work. The Convention decreed that those parents should be punished who did not send their children to school, overlooking the fact that there were no schools to send them to. It proclaimed gratuitous instruction, but made no provision for the salaries of the teachers. These hastily instituted reforms were eminently characteristic of the feverish excitement amidst which matters affecting the most serious interests of the nation were disposed of. The First Empire and the Restoration saw but little done on behalf of primary education. Under Louis Philippe the question of gratuitous instruction and compulsory attendance got no farther, notwithstanding the fact of such men being in power as Victor Cousin, Villemain and Guizot.

The efforts of Jules Simon and of Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire to have the question settled by the Republican government in 1848 proved futile. Napoleon III., having found 44,000 schools in France at the commencement of his reign, left it with 54,000 at its close—a most insignificant rate of increase, as regards primary instruction, compared with the advances made in the same direction by foreign nations, and with the material progress of France itself during those eighteen eventful years. The Third Republic has, as was observed above, given to the question of education a prominent place among the reforms to be instituted. Scarcely had the most pressing financial and military questions been dealt with ere a searching examination into the educational system of the country was undertaken and its defects laid bare. In a report on primary and secondary education in different countries, read by M. Levasseur before the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences on the 29th of May, 1875, he establishes the fact that out of forty-five nations whose educational statistics he had examined, France only occupies the twentieth place—naturally a somewhat humiliating admission for a nation which has claimed to be the centre and radiating-point of modern civilization.

The map on which the departments figure tinged with black proportionately with the illiteracy of their inhabitants is in mourning to a most lamentable extent. It might be taken for the geological map of Pennsylvania, with the coal-regions indicated by black patches; and most assuredly the Lehigh Valley would appear no darker on such a map than does on the chart of ignorance the unfortunate department of the Ariége, with 66 per cent. of its inhabitants absolutely illiterate. Happily, since this map was issued matters have somewhat mended; nevertheless, the lack of appreciation of the benefits of education is still very noticeable in a large number of the departments.

The village schools are kept up by the communes, aided by contributions from the department and from the government. The total annual amount of the contributions from these three sources does not exceed 65,000,000 francs for the whole of France. Deduct from this paltry sum of $13,000,000 a certain quota for the construction and keeping in repair of school-houses, and it will at once be seen that what remains to be divided among the 54,000 teachers is scarcely sufficient to afford them even the barest subsistence. The recent reduction of school-teachers' salaries throughout the United States has given rise to much unfavorable comment, but happy indeed would teachers in France consider themselves were they to receive even anything approaching the reduced pay of their Transatlantic brethren. Of the school-teachers above spoken of, 26,000 receive 750 francs ($150) per annum, 14,000 receive 550 francs, and 10,000 but 450 francs, or less than the common farm-laborer, who has at least food and lodging provided for him by his master. True it is that many of the teachers receive a slight additional salary for acting as secretary at the mairie; but a much larger number of them have to eke out a scanty subsistence by manual labor during certain hours of the day, especially in harvest-time.

As for the school-houses, they are usually in such a dilapidated condition that the farmers would scarcely care to use them as cattle-sheds. We have visited[Pg 71] schools—and they exist by the score, not to say by the hundred—without either benches or desks, blackboard or maps, and through the roofs of which the rain poured on teachers and pupils. On entering one of these schools and seeing the little fellows in their torn blouses, their feet simply encased in great wooden sabots, their lunch-baskets with coarse bread and a few nuts by their side, the stranger can hardly realize that he is in that country where there is a more even distribution of property, and where the peasantry are more prosperous and conservative, than anywhere else. Among the efforts made to improve things may be mentioned the frequent inspections, not only by government inspectors, but also by gentlemen called délégués cantonaux, who are usually chosen from among the landed proprietary of the neighborhood by the prefects.

"Paris is not France," is a remark frequently uttered by French conservatives, and one which certainly holds good as regards education. The department of the Seine actually expends some $6,000,000 annually on education, which is something over 46 per cent. of the total expenditure for all France under this head. Considering that the population of the department of the Seine does not exceed 2,400,000, it will be seen that the expenditure there for educational purposes is not inferior to that of our own representative States. At the Vienna Exhibition of 1873 it may be recollected that Paris, conjointly with Saxony and Sweden, was awarded the diploma of honor for primary instruction. This branch of education is absolutely gratuitous, and, in view of the experience of other countries, is likely to remain so, in spite of the outcry that parents able to contribute toward the education of their offspring should be compelled to do so. Ink, paper, pens, books, models and maps are supplied free of charge to each pupil. During 1876 not less than 330,000 books, 1,490,000 copy-books and 1,440,000 steel pens were thus supplied in the primary schools of the capital. In Paris there are some 260,000 children of both sexes old enough to go to school. Of this number, 104,000 get some kind of education, either at home or at the boarding-schools, and 134,000 attend the public schools—either under secular or clerical management—and the salles d'asile, of which we shall presently speak. The great capital thus contains some 22,000 children who cannot read or write, and this will account for the fact of the educational status of the department of the Seine being inferior to that of many of the eastern departments, and occupying a far lower place on the list than might otherwise have been expected. Up to the age of two years the infants of parents too poor to watch over their offspring in the daytime are admitted into the crèches. In these admirable private institutions—founded some thirty years ago by M. Marbeau—the infants are washed, fed and tended with maternal solicitude. Between the ages of two and six years the children are admitted into the salles d'asile, or children's homes, of which there are over a hundred in Paris. There it is first sought to develop the child's intellectual faculties, prepare it for school, inculcate habits of cleanliness and morality, and instruct it in the rudiments of reading and writing. Between the ages of six and fourteen children are admitted into the schools, and, nominally at least, go through the plan of study drawn up by the board of primary education, and which is as follows: Reading, writing, geography, spelling, arithmetic, compendium of sacred and French history, linear drawing, singing, the rudiments of physics, geometry and natural history, and calligraphy. Were this programme carried out in its integrity, education in France would, it need hardly be said, be considerably further advanced than it is at present. Even in Paris, however, the material obstacles are not slight. Most of the schools are far too cramped for space, especially in those wealthy and crowded parts of the city between the Rue de Rivoli and the Boulevards, for instance, where every foot of ground and every breathing-space are worth large sums of money. In a city where the people are so closely packed, and where a family is content to live on[Pg 72] a flat, how is room to be found for spacious, airy school-buildings, with a detached seat and desk for each pupil, a large central hall and a play-ground adjoining? Such establishments must inevitably cost immense sums of money, but Paris, if we may judge by the annual increase in the educational appropriations, seems determined not to let this difficulty stand in the way of her children obtaining a good education.

A word as to the teachers. The female lay teachers are, it must be acknowledged, very greatly inferior to the lady teachers in the United States. It is said that in England when a man has failed at everything else he becomes a coal-merchant. We should not dream of applying this remark to French ladies as regards school-teaching. At the same time, it is an established fact that the French girls' schools which are managed by nuns, and especially those of the Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul, are far above the other female educational establishments. Most of the male lay teachers are appointed from the primary normal schools which exist in the chief town of every department; and it is a noteworthy fact that the majority of them are ardent Republicans, notwithstanding the fact that during the Empire every effort was made to win them over to the imperial side. In every normal and primary school was the bust of Napoleon, and a liberal distribution took place of the famous Journal des Instituteurs, every paragraph of which, political or educational, was dressed up in Napoleonic attire. Possibly, some of the lay primary school-teachers may have adopted republicanism out of a spirit of natural opposition to their old adversaries and competitors, the instituteurs congréganistes. Of these, too, a word must be said. While in the secondary clerical schools most of the instructors are Jesuits, in the primary schools most of the teachers belong to the confraternity of the École Chrétienne, the members of which, without taking the vows and assuming a lifelong engagement, agree nevertheless to remain single, to submit to the discipline of the society and to wear the ecclesiastical dress. Strict Ultramontanists, these brethren have been somewhat unjustly nicknamed the frères Ignorantins. Living as they do in common, with but few wants, and receiving, whenever they require it, pecuniary aid from the wealthy party to which they belong, they are satisfied with a rate of pay less than one-half that of the lay teachers, and are thus preferred in a large number of communes on the simple ground of economy. Their plan of instruction is the same as that adopted in the secular primary schools, except that religious instruction and exercises of course play a larger part with them than with their lay brethren. The ultra radicals, who in a large measure control the educational appropriations in the town-council, are bitterly opposed to any portion of the public instruction remaining in the hands of the clerical element, and their most strenuous efforts are used to have all these congregational schools of both sexes closed. They would concentrate the entire national educational system under the control of a body of lay teachers to be paid by the towns and by the state. In these views they are supported by the Republican party, while the clergy have on their side the majority of the Senate. Whether the absence of clerical competition would be likely to prove advantageous or not to the secular educational establishments, we shall not attempt to say, but certain it is that the long continuance of this bitter feud between the two parties has been anything but conducive to the educational progress of France.

At the age of fourteen the Parisian youth not intended for one of the learned professions leaves school to learn a trade. Should he desire to increase his stock of knowledge and have a taste for study, he can, after passing an examination, enter the excellent École Turgot, wherein the programme of the primary schools is somewhat extended, without, however, embracing the study of Latin and Greek. At the Turgot the course comprises mathematics, linear and ornamental drawing, physics and mechanics, chemistry, natural history, calligraphy,[Pg 73] bookkeeping, French language and literature, history, geography, English and German. All the pupils are day scholars. There could probably be no better devised programme for developing and exercising the intellectual faculties of those who have gone through the primary schools, and it may unhesitatingly be affirmed that for most of the pupils the training received at the École Turgot is of lifelong value.

If a youth aim yet higher, he can apply for admittance at the Collége Chaptal, where he may eventually obtain gratuitously a classical education, and at its close a university degree. From the Chaptal school—the new building devoted to which forms a conspicuous feature on the Boulevard des Batignolles—the pupil may, on passing an examination, enter either of the two higher colleges, the Central or the Polytechnic. Then, too, the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers may be looked on in the light of a magnificent annex to the schools of primary instruction. The idea of such an institution originated with the celebrated mechanician of the last century, Vaucanson, who bequeathed to the government his splendid collection of models, drawings, tools, machines and automatons. The Convention decreed the establishment of the Conservatoire, which now contains some 12,000 models in its industrial museum. Among them may be mentioned Pascal's arithmetical machine, Lavoisier's instruments, the first highway locomotive constructed by Cugniot in 1770, a lock forged by Louis XVI., clocks and watches of historic interest, and those patents which have run out by lapse of time. The machinery is set in motion at certain hours of the day, during which the public is admitted free. The library, rich in works of science, art and industry, is always open. In the evening there are gratuitous lectures delivered by men of science on such subjects as geometry, mechanics and chemistry applied to the arts, industrial and agricultural chemistry, agriculture, spinning-looms, dyeing, etc. The Conservatoire turns out the best foremen and heads of workshops to be found in Paris. It occupies the fine old building once used as the abbey of St. Martin des Champs, which has been tastefully restored in the original style, and takes up one of the sides of a handsome square laid out with flowers and fountains.

Nor must we pass over entirely unnoticed the admirable gratuitous lectures given by the Polytechnic Association—not the Polytechnic School—on such subjects as hygiene, linear drawing, French grammar, bookkeeping and geometry. These lectures are held in some twenty different buildings, so as to be within the reach of the working-classes, no matter what part of Paris they may reside in. Among the lecturers in recent years are to be found such names as those of Ferdinand de Lesseps, Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Barral and Batbie.

We have thus rapidly seen what Paris does for her poor youth. The city has often been called the focus of light and the centre of intelligence. Without going quite so far as this, it must nevertheless be acknowledged that with her public schools, her splendid libraries, her museums, her natural history and art collections, and her very numerous and valuable institutions open free to all, Paris affords unusual facilities for boys, taken even from the lowest strata of society, to rise by dint of hard study, a firm will and exemplary conduct to the very highest positions.

SECONDARY EDUCATION.

In France, children of parents in easy circumstances do not go to the primary schools at all. Every man occupying a higher social position than that of a mechanic does his utmost to procure for his children an education which shall place them above what the French call "the common people." Even a small farmer, with but a few thousand dollars at his command, strives to place his son in an institution where the higher cultivation of the intellectual faculties, the dress worn, and the very bearing, shall distinguish him from one of "the people." It need hardly be said that such a system as this, so diametrically opposed to that which prevails in the United States, tends to[Pg 74] foster somewhat of jealousy and bitterness among the lower classes. As for those who have received this higher education, they would, as a general rule, consider it derogatory to their dignity ever in after life to perform any manual labor: this they leave to the illiterate and to those who have only attended the primary schools. The result may be imagined in the case of those whose parents, having paid their eight or nine years' schooling, are unable to do anything more for their offspring when they leave college. They cannot all earn their living in a professional capacity, or in the literary field, or as government employés, or, to be brief, in one of those situations which a graduate can accept; and those who fail, insensibly and by degrees fall into the ranks of the déclassés. The common workman may occasionally and for a short period suffer privation and want, but that becomes the chronic condition of the poor graduate. He becomes a misanthrope, hates his fellow-beings and resorts to petty shifts in order to live. Gradually his sense of honor and his moral feelings get weaker and weaker, and finally disappear altogether. Then he becomes one of those men who, like the conspirators denounced by Corneille,

These men take a prominent part in every émeute, haranguing the populace, propagating socialistic theories, and gaining a baneful influence over the uneducated and the discontented among the workingmen, thus causing that bloodshed and destruction of which Paris has so often been the scene. Probably no more vivid picture of the life of these unfortunate persons has ever been drawn than that which Jules Vallès has given us in his Réfractaires. Most eloquently does he describe the vain hopes and reveries by which these men are elated, and the poignant misery they suffer. Vallès, it will be recollected, was a Communist, a member of that revolutionary government which contained so many of these déclassés.

Far be it from us to desire to limit the higher education to the children of the rich. By all means let every man in a position to do so give his sons the benefit of the secondary education. The fittest will always survive, the weakest inevitably go to the wall. At the same time, there are certain modifications which all will admit may be introduced with advantage into the present system, and these will become apparent as we proceed.

Secondary education is imparted in the national lyceums, which are established and governed by the state, and which now exist in eighty out of the eighty-six departments; in the municipal colleges, which are established and governed by the towns; and in the private colleges, the majority of which are kept by religious fraternities.

The most celebrated of the private colleges are Arcueil and Sorèze, both of which belong to the Dominicans. The principal professors at Arcueil were, it will be recollected, taken to La Roquette in 1871, and there shot with Archbishop Darboy and the other hostages. Sorèze will not be forgotten so long as the memory of Lacordaire lives. The Fathers of the Oratory own the college of Juilly, where Berryer and Montalembert were educated. It was to this order that belonged the illustrious Massillon a century and a half ago, and Father Gratry in our own time. As for the Jesuits, their colleges are distributed over the whole of France, and are distinguished for their comfort and elegance, their spacious halls, their fine grounds and the excellent gymnasia attached thereto. Their superiority over the national lyceums leads to the fact of their being as well attended as the latter, although pupils at the Jesuits' colleges pay three times as much as at the government schools. The large college of the Jesuits in the Rue des Postes at Paris furnishes a heavy contingent to St. Cyr and the polytechnic schools. The Stanislas College, although a private institution, has its corps of professors appointed by the Minister of Public Instruction, and its pupils are privileged to take part in the general examinations of the lyceum pupils. M. John Lemoinne, the eminent writer for the[Pg 75] Journal des Débats, was educated at the Stanislas College, all the pupils of which, it may be mentioned, are day scholars. At the Rollin College only boarders are admitted.

There are quite a number of foreign colleges at Paris, such as the Egyptian, the Japanese, the Armenian and the Polish colleges. The former Irish college, now called Collége des Fondations britanniques, is under the patronage of the French Minister of Education. It is here that young men speaking the English language are specially educated for the priesthood, the whole of the instruction being given in English and the management being in the hands of British and Irish ecclesiastics. About 15,200 scholars attend the private colleges in Paris.

Proceeding now to speak of the actual condition of the lycées, or lyceums, it may at once be stated that boarders at one of these establishments in Paris pay from $200 to $300 annually, and in the provinces from $150 to $200, according to age. Considering that this one charge covers board, instruction, books, washing, clothes, writing materials, medical attendance and medicine, it will readily be understood that the income from this source is totally inadequate to meet the outlays. The government, besides providing a large number of gratuitous scholarships, makes up the deficit, whatever it may be, and thus really maintains the lyceums. There are in Paris five national lycées, besides the lyceum at Vanves, situated at a little distance to the south of the capital, at what was once the villa of the prince de Condé, on the Vaugirard route. At Vanves the younger pupils have the opportunity afforded them of pursuing their studies in the country, and only entering one of the Paris lycées when they have worked themselves into the fifth class. The most famous as well as the largest of the lyceums of Paris is the Lycée Descartes, formerly called the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. It stands in the Rue St. Jacques, on the spot formerly occupied by the Jesuits' Collége de Clermont, which was founded in 1563, and confiscated when the Jesuits were expelled from France by the duc de Choiseul in 1764. As is well known, Molière and Voltaire, two of the bitterest enemies of the Jesuits, were educated at the Collége de Clermont. At Louis-le-Grand were also educated Crébillon, the author of the Sopha; Gresset, the writer of Vert-vert; Robespierre, Camille Desmoulins, Crémieux, Eugène Delacroix, Victor Hugo; the eminent surgeon Dupuytren; Jules Janin, Villemain, Littré and Laboulaye. At present 540 of its 1200 pupils are day scholars.

Sainte-Barbe, the most celebrated of the free colleges of Paris, sends its pupils to the course of instruction at the Lycée Descartes. Sainte-Barbe was founded in 1460 by the Abbé Lenormand, and reorganized after the Revolution by Delaneau: it stands in the Place du Panthéon, on a small plot of ground, and is so thickly surrounded by buildings that the play-ground is not even large enough for the pupils to move about in. The younger among them are therefore sent to the branch of the school at Fontenay-aux-Roses, a stately château with spacious grounds. Both Ignatius Loyola, who founded the order of Jesus, and Calvin, who did his best to destroy it, were educated at Sainte-Barbe, as were also in more modern times Eugène Scribe, the singer Nourrit, the celebrated painter in water-colors Eugène Lamy, and General Trochu. The present director of Sainte-Barbe is M. Dubief, formerly inspector of the Academy of Paris, and who succeeded in 1865 the lamented M. Labrouste, to whose untiring exertions Sainte-Barbe owes in great part the high reputation it has enjoyed in recent times.

On the Boulevard St. Michel, on the spot where once stood the old Collége d'Harcourt, is the Lycée St. Louis, now called, after the famous mathematician, the Lycée Monge. Although the Lycée Monge is specially devoted to scientific training, it has numbered among its pupils Charles Gounod the composer and Egger the Hellenist.

In the rear of the Panthéon, on the site of the abbey of Ste. Geneviève, founded by Clovis in 510, stands the Lycée Corneille, formerly called the Lycée Napoléon, and before that the[Pg 76] Collége Henri IV. To the archæologist the cellars, the kitchens, the chapel and the old tower of the twelfth century cannot fail to prove of the greatest interest, while the remainder of the structure, built during the reign of Louis XIV., makes this unquestionably the finest of the lyceums of Paris. At the Lycée Corneille were educated Casimir Delavigne (whose bust by David d'Angers adorns the interior), Sainte-Beuve, Haussmann, Alfred de Musset, St. Marc Girardin, Émile Augier, Remusat, the prince de Joinville and the dukes of Nemours, Aumale, Montpensier and Chartres. The three lyceums above mentioned are on the left bank, the remaining two on the right bank, of the Seine.

In the Rue Caumartin, near the Havre railway-station, on the site of the Capuchins' convent, stands the Lycée Condorcet, or, as it was called until recently, the Lycée Bonaparte. All the pupils are day scholars, and most of them come from the adjacent wealthy district of the Chaussée d'Antin, the Boulevards and the Madeleine. Among the pupils of this aristocratic educational establishment may be named J. J. Ampère, Alexandre Dumas fils, Adolphe Adam the composer, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt the novelists, Alphonse Karr, Henry Monnier, Nadar, Taine, Eugène Sue; the mulatto Schælcher, now Senator of France; the celebrated Jesuit Father Ravignan, and the poet Théodore de Banville.

The Lycée Charlemagne is in a building in the Rue St. Antoine, formerly used as the Jesuits' convent. Being situated in one of the poorest sections of Paris, the children from which as a rule do not get beyond the primary schools, it receives most of its scholars from the numerous boarding-schools of the Quartier du Marais. Among the many well-known names formerly on the roll of the Lycée Charlemagne are those of Gustave Doré, Théophile Gautier, Admiral Jurien de la Gravière, Michelet; the dramatic critic Francisque Sarcey; Got the comedian, and Buffet the statesman.

These five lyceums of Paris, with their 7500 day scholars and boarders, and the eighty lyceums in the provinces, have precisely the same programme and rules of government throughout. The boarders are divided into three sections, the first being for the petits—viz., boys averaging from seven to twelve, who are instructed in the elementary course, comprising the eighth and seventh classes; the second is for the moyens, who receive instruction in the grammar course, comprising the sixth, fifth and fourth classes; the third is for the grands, who, taking their place in the third and second classes, proceed with the higher course, embracing rhetoric, philosophy, and, if desired, special mathematics. Although at playtime the boys meet in a common play-ground, during school-hours they are distributed in different rooms or studies (études), one class generally corresponding to a study. There is thus the eighth, fourth or second study, just as there is the eighth, fourth or second class. The professors—of whom there are from fifteen to thirty, the number of boys ranging from three hundred to twelve hundred—superintend the classes, while the dozen poor, ill-paid ushers have to keep order in the études. The scholars signify their contempt for the ushers—officially known as maîtres répétiteurs—by nicknaming them pions or watch-dogs. Yet not an usher but is appointed, like all others engaged in the lycée, by the minister. Each one of them has obtained his degree as bachelor, and many only accept the situation as a means of economically pursuing their studies toward the higher degrees and fellowships. Where the class is a large one, the corresponding study is usually divided into two, so as to reduce the number in one étude to about thirty. The lads making up each étude sleep in one dormitory on little iron bedsteads, only separated from each other by the width of the bed. The usher in charge sleeps at the extremity of the dormitory, his bed being the only one provided with curtains.

A boy entering the lyceum at seven or eight years of age has already learned the rudiments, and is accordingly placed in the eighth class. In those exceptional cases where the boy comes to school unable[Pg 77] to read or write he passes the first year in the preparatory class. In the eighth class, and the next year in the seventh, he is taught French grammar, spelling, arithmetic, sacred history and elementary Latin exercises and translation. In the sixth and fifth and the fourth classes the Latin authors the boy has to study become gradually more and more difficult. The professor of history who accompanies the students throughout their lyceum course, instructs them as they advance each year to a higher class, in Greek and Roman history and modern and ancient geography. So also the professors of English and German, of physics, natural history and mathematics keep up with their pupils, and guide their studies, each in his special branch, until they graduate. Drawing and music are also taught without extra charge two hours a week, but those children whose parents really desire them to make progress in these special branches have to take—and pay extra for—private lessons called répétitions. In the third and second classes, as also when the pupils are going through the course of rhetoric, Greek as well as Latin is studied, together with the French classic authors, Corneille, Racine, Molière, Bossuet, Boileau, La Bruyère, La Fontaine, Fénelon, Massillon and some of Voltaire's works. The history of France is also studied, but scarcely with that thoroughness which characterizes the study of history in the German gymnasia.

The pupil's last year is passed in the philosophy class, formerly called the logic class, which is specially devoted to the study of the human understanding; thus, as Mr. Matthew Arnold well puts it, "making the pupil busy himself with the substance of ideas, as in rhetoric he busied himself with their form, and developing his reflection as rhetoric developed his imagination and taste." During this last year, however, classic studies are pursued with none the less vigor, for on his proficiency in these branches depends very largely the student's success at the second and final examination for his degree. It is only since 1874 that this examination has been divided into two parts—the first at the close of the year of rhetoric, the second at the close of the year of philosophy, the student being required to pass on both occasions. Each of the two examinations is divided into the épreuve écrite and the épreuve orale. In the latter the candidate is examined generally on all the subjects studied. The épreuve écrite consists, the first year, of a translation and Latin discourse—the second year, of a Latin dissertation and a French dissertation. Those educated in Paris have to pass their examination at the Sorbonne, while those educated in the provinces are examined by one of the sixteen faculties of France, at Poitiers, Caen, Toulouse, Bordeaux, etc. It is scarcely necessary to observe that the bachelor's degree confers no sort of privilege in France. The diploma which attests to its recipient having passed through a regular course of classical study opens up no career to him, but with this diploma he can study law or medicine or qualify for the special schools, such as the Polytechnic, St. Cyr and the normal schools, and on leaving these his position is assured.

The life led by the boarders at the lycées is as follows: At six o'clock in summer, and at half-past six in winter, the pupils get up at the sound of the drum. Ten minutes are allowed for dressing, and then they all march in procession to the preparation-room. One of the lads recites a short prayer in Latin, after which the boys study till half-past seven. They then proceed to the refectory, where all the pupils breakfast together, ten minutes being allowed for the meal. Thence the boys go into the play-ground, where the ranks are broken and a quarter of an hour is allowed for play and talk. (Out of the play-ground conversation among the pupils is prohibited by the rules, and not infrequently those caught talking are punished.) From eight to ten the boys are in school; from ten to half-past ten, at play; from half-past ten to twelve, in the study, writing exercises, getting ready for classes and solving problems. At twelve o'clock, dinner, then play till one; from one till two, in the study, learning by heart lessons[Pg 78] for recitation; from two till four, school; from four to five, play; from five to half-past seven in the study, where the exercises for the following morning are written. At half-past seven, supper, then another prayer in Latin, and then to bed. On Thursdays and Sundays there are no classes, but the boys have their hours of study as on other days, and fill up the time by a two-hours' walk in marching array, either in the city or (if weather permit) in the country. Once a week in Paris, once a fortnight in the provinces, a boy may go out for a holiday if his parents or persons authorized by his parents come and take him from school. He is allowed to see his parents or those representing them any day between four and five P.M. in the parloir. On Sundays attendance at mass and at vespers in the chapel of the lycée is compulsory for pupils of the Roman Catholic faith. Pupils belonging to other faiths have in Paris every opportunity for attending the services of their religion, but in the provinces this is naturally not so easy. The regular holidays are the 1st and 2d of January, a week at Easter and two months in summer, commencing about the 10th of August. All corporal punishment is strictly prohibited. The lads are punished by being kept in in play-hours and on holidays, and in grave cases by being confined en séquestre. It is very rarely that a pupil is expelled—a punishment which may in extreme cases entail expulsion from every lyceum in France.

As will have been seen, the life led by the boarders at the lyceums is pretty irksome and severe. If a boy's parents live in the city, he can simply attend the classes as a day scholar, which experience has proved to be the better of the two plans. From a sanitary point of view the lyceums do not stand high by any means. Few among them were built on any proper model, or, as will have been noticed, even constructed for their present use. About four-fifths of them were old colleges belonging to religious corporations confiscated at the Revolution, or they were formerly convents, and have now been fitted up as well as possible for purely educational purposes. The rooms are for the most part so small that the lads are crowded and huddled together. On some of the benches they have to sit on one side when they want to write. Every lyceum has an infirmary, to which are attached two or three Sisters of Charity, and the infirmary is often fuller than could be wished. The play-grounds are in general miserably small, rarely planted with trees, and ill adapted for boys to run about and play in. Some of the boys who are always kept in do not get even this poor exercise. The contributions of the government for the maintenance of the lyceums being on a somewhat parsimonious scale, every kind of economy is practiced. The food, without being unwholesome, is far from being agreeable. The lighting of the buildings by oil lamps, not by gas, is often insufficient, and may possibly explain the fact of so many Frenchmen being short-sighted. The rooms are warmed in winter by small stoves, which send out noxious vapors.

At the head of every lyceum is a provost (proviseur), who is assisted by a censeur or superintendent of instruction, by an inspector of studies, and by a bursar (économe), who controls the finances of the establishment. Toward the end of each scholastic year, about July, ten or a dozen of the brightest youths are selected from each of the classes in the lyceums of Paris, and are made to undergo an examination in composition at the Sorbonne. At its close prizes and accessits are awarded, and these are distributed about the 15th of August in the amphitheatre of the Sorbonne, and in presence of a distinguished assemblage under the presidency of the Minister of Public Instruction. The minister, having opened the proceedings with a speech in French, is followed by one of the professors, who, in accordance with a custom more than a century old, makes a speech in Latin. Since 1865 the provincial lyceums have competed among themselves, and as the subjects of composition are the same as those in the Paris lyceums, an opportunity is afforded for observing how very much farther advanced[Pg 79] are the Parisian establishments than those in the interior. Not only has Paris the best professors, but also the best boys, many having been sent thither by their parents from the provincial lyceums on their displaying marked ability and intelligence. Thus the standard of the Paris lyceums is raised. Upon the result of the general examination undergone by the pupils of a public or private school depends the estimation in which that institution is held by the public. The more prizes taken by a lyceum or by an institution sending its pupils to the lyceum examinations, the greater will be the number of parents sending their children thither. The successful participants who have carried off the prizes of honor in special mathematics, philosophy and Latin are exempt from military service, while the professors of the class to which they belonged are often rewarded with the cross of the Legion of Honor. It will therefore be apparent that the heads of the educational establishments are, to say the least, quite as much interested in the results of the contest as are the pupils themselves. The natural consequence is, that the professors devote themselves to cramming those pupils whose assiduity and superior intelligence mark them out as fit partakers in such a contest. There are sometimes as many as sixty pupils in a class in the Paris Lycée, and yet the professor's attention may be confined to barely a dozen among them. The rest of the class read novels, go to sleep or remain listless during the lesson. The well-known writer M. Maxime du Camp may possibly have slightly exaggerated the evil when he asserted that "Ceux-là seuls travaillent qui se destinent aux écoles spéciales;" but we have no difficulty in believing his statement that on one occasion M. Émile Saisset—since a member of the Institute, then professor at the Lycée Henri IV.—left the platform, and taking a seat facing the front row, where he had got together the six best (plus forts), began reading to them in a low tone. When one of the other pupils began talking too loud, the professor cried out, "Ne faites donc pas tant de bruit: vous nous empêchez de causer."

But, although these general examinations may operate somewhat disadvantageously toward the duller members of the class, it must be acknowledged that they have had the effect of inducing many a youth to put forth his best efforts in order to attain special distinction, and have thus laid the foundation of future success. Among those with whom such has been the case may be mentioned the names of Delille the poet, La Harpe the critic, Victor Cousin the philosopher, Adrien de Jussieu the naturalist, Drouyn de Lhuys, ex-Minister of Foreign Affairs, now president of the Agricultural Society of France; Taine, Edmond About, Prévost Paradol, etc.

Within the last thirty years the plan of study in the lycées has undergone many changes. Each successive Minister of Education has instituted some modifications, and the result has generally been an improvement. The most thoroughgoing revision took place under M. Jules Simon, who was Minister of Public Instruction in 1872. A well-known member of the Institute and professor of philosophy, M. Paul Janet, in defending the reforms instituted by M. Simon, makes some bold remarks on the subject. Secondary education in France is now composed of two branches of instruction mingled, which if separated might, according to M. Janet, each for itself furnish the materials for a very thorough and wide-reaching education. On the one hand is the classical course, consisting of Greek and Latin, and on the other what may be termed the modern course, composed of French, living foreign languages, history, geography, science and physical exercises,—these last embracing fencing, gymnastics, gun-practice, etc. Society at the time of the Renaissance had to be steeped once again in the study of classical literature in order to weld anew the links of that chain which had been broken by the invasion of the barbarians. So also, reasons M. Janet, it is necessary now for us to be prepared for the new conditions of modern and contemporary civilization. This civilization, he goes on to say, is marked by three distinguishing characteristics: the[Pg 80] prodigious development of science and industry; the establishment of political institutions more or less liberal; the extension of the means of communication between various nations. Therefore he holds that the study of science should occupy a more prominent place in the system of French instruction. History, useless in a country despotically governed, becomes more and more necessary in a free country. Foreign languages and the literature of the Teutonic and English-speaking nations must occupy a larger place in the new plan of studies.

But the question arises, How can place be found for new studies when some of the old ones have to be crowded out? Evidently this can only be done by circumscribing within narrower limits classical instruction. Now-a-days, says M. Jules Simon, "on apprend les langues vivantes pour les parler et les langues mortes pour les lire." The day is past when Santeul gained for himself a reputation by his Latin verse, and when Cardinal de Polignac refuted Lucretius in his own tongue. Latin compositions have become purely artificial exercises, and the art of writing Latin must be sacrificed, just as the art of speaking Latin was sacrificed a century ago. Therefore it was that M. Simon did away with Latin verse. He retained for the present Latin speeches and dissertations, but contemplated abolishing these too in the future; and he proposed that there should be two kinds of exposition of Latin texts in the classes—the one very profound, and where much time should be given to but a few lines; the other, on the contrary, very rapid and extended, having for its object to exercise the pupil in reading and readily understanding what he reads. Since the reforms of 1872 the pupils read Latin with not less facility than before; which seems to show that Latin verse was not indispensable. It should also be mentioned that under M. Simon's auspices a law was made in 1872 requiring every pupil to pass an examination before being promoted from a lower to a higher class in the lycée. Those who fail in this examination, and who do not care to return to the lower class, are transferred to the so-called classes de science, where the subjects of study are mathematics, geometry, physics, chemistry and natural history.

M. Jules Simon retired from his post as Minister of Public Instruction under M. Thiers on the 24th of May, 1873, and the reforms he had instituted were overthrown by the clerical ministry which followed. The Republican elections of the 20th of February, 1876, having been the means of once more placing the government in the hands of M. Simon's friends, he himself was on the 12th of December last made president of the Council of Ministers, while M. Waddington resumed the portfolio of Public Instruction. M. Waddington, who besides being a Rugby and Cambridge man, has, like M. Simon, taken the doctor's degree at the Sorbonne, at once took measures to carry out the liberal and progressive reforms we have spoken of. His efforts were, however, frustrated by the enforced retirement of the Jules Simon ministry on the 16th of May, 1877, and the accession of the conservatives to power. There can be little doubt that the new ministry will set aside all the reforms planned and executed, and will return to the old paths until the seesaw of public opinion in France shall once more re-establish the Simon-Waddington reforms.

As has been shown, the progress made in the system of secondary instruction in France is but slow: indeed, it may be compared to that of certain pilgrims, who in fulfillment of their vows take three steps forward and two backward. Nevertheless, these party struggles and tentative efforts cannot fail in the end to result in a marked definitive improvement in the educational system. Before all things, it was necessary that the fallibility of the old system and of the antiquated shibboleths of instruction, which had hitherto exercised undisputed sway, be recognized. The rest will follow in due time. Whether minister or not, M. Jules Simon may justly claim the credit of having brought about a salutary educational crisis, the effects of which will be felt by the next, if not by the present, generation.

C. H. Harding.

[Pg 81]

THE MARQUIS OF LOSSIE.

BY GEORGE MACDONALD, AUTHOR OF "MALCOLM."

CHAPTER LVII.

THE SHORE.

It was two days after the longest day of the year, when there is no night in those regions, only a long twilight in which many dream and do not know it. There had been a few days of variable weather, with sudden changes of wind to east and north, and round again by south to west, and then there had been a calm for several days. But now the little wind there was blew from the north-east, and the fervor of a hot June was rendered more delicious by the films of flavoring cold that floated through the mass of heat. All Portlossie more or less, the Seaton especially, was in a state of excitement, for its little neighbor Scaurnose was more excited still. There the man most threatened, and with greatest injustice, was the only one calm amongst the men, and amongst the women his wife was the only one that was calmer than he. Blue Peter was resolved to abide the stroke of wrong, and not resist the powers that were, believing them in some true sense—which he found it hard to understand when he thought of the factor as the individual instance—ordained of God. He had a dim perception too that it was better that one, and that one he, should suffer, than that order should be destroyed and law defied. Suffering, he might still in patience possess his soul, and all be well with him; but what would become of the country if every one wronged were to take the law into his own hands? Thousands more would be wronged by the lawless in a week than by unjust powers in a year. But the young men were determined to pursue their plan of resistance, and those of the older and soberer who saw the uselessness of it gave themselves little trouble to change the minds of the rest. Peter, although he knew they were not at rest, neither inquired what their purpose might be, nor allowed any conjecture or suspicion concerning it to influence him in his preparations for departure. Not that he had found a new home. Indeed, he had not heartily set about searching for one—in part because, unconsciously to himself, he was buoyed up by the hope he read so clear in the face of his more trusting wife that Malcolm would come to deliver them. His plan was to leave her and his children with certain friends at Port Gordon: he would not hear of going to the Partans to bring them into trouble. He would himself set out immediately after for the Lewis fishing. Few had gone from Scaurnose or Portlossie. The magnitude of the events that were about to take place, yet more the excitement and interest they occasioned, kept the most of the men at home, and they contented themselves with fishing the waters of the Moray Frith—not without notable success. But what was success with such a tyrant over them as the factor, threatening to harry their nests and turn the sea-birds and their young out of their heritage of rock and sand and shingle? They could not keep house on the waves any more than the gulls. Those who still held their religious assemblies in the cave called the Baillies' Barn met often, read and sang the comminatory psalms more than any others, and prayed much against the wiles and force of their enemies both temporal and spiritual; while Mr. Crathie went every Sunday to church, grew redder in the nose and hotter in the temper.

Miss Horn was growing more and more uncomfortable concerning events, and dissatisfied with Malcolm. She had not for some time heard from him, and here was his most important duty unattended to—she would not yet say neglected—the well-being of his tenantry left in the hands of an unsympathetic, self-important underling, who was fast losing all the good sense he had once[Pg 82] possessed! Were the life and history of all these brave fishermen and their wives and children to be postponed to the pampered feelings of one girl, and that because she was what she had no right to be—namely, his half-sister? said Miss Horn to herself, that bosom friend to whom some people, and those not the worst, say oftener what they do not mean than what they do. She had written to him within the last month a very hot letter indeed, which had afforded no end of amusement to Mrs. Catanach as she sat in his old lodging over the curiosity-shop, but, I need hardly say, had not reached Malcolm; and now there was but one night and the best of all the fisher families would have nowhere to lie down. Miss Horn, with Joseph Mair, thought she did well to be angry with Malcolm.

The blind piper had been very restless all day. Questioned again and again by his Mistress Partan as to what was amiss with him, he had given her odd and evasive answers. Every few minutes he got up—even from cleaning her lamp—to go to the shore. He had not far to go to reach it—had but to cross the threshold, and take a few steps through the close, and he was on the road that ran along the sea-front of the village. On the one side were the cottages, scattered and huddled—on the other, the shore and ocean, wide outstretched. He would walk straight across the road until he felt the sand under his feet; there stand for a few moments facing the sea, and, with nostrils distended, breathing deep breaths of the air from the north-east, then turn and walk back to Meg Partan's kitchen and resume his ministration of light. These his sallies were so frequent, and his absences so short, that a more serene temper than hers might have been fretted by them. But there was something about his look and behavior that, while it perplexed, restrained her, and instead of breaking out upon him she eyed him curiously. She had found that it would not do to stare at him. The moment she began to do so he began to fidget, and turned his back to her. It had made her lose her temper for a moment, and declare aloud as her conviction that he was after all an impostor, and saw as well as any of them.

"She has told you so, Mistress Partan, one hundred thousand times," replied Duncan with an odd smile; "and perhaps she will pe see a little petter as any of you, no matter."

Thereupon she murmured to herself, "The cratur' 'ill be seein' something!" and with mingled awe and curiosity sought to lay some restraint upon her unwelcome observation of him.

Thus it went on the whole day, and as the evening approached he grew still more excited. The sun went down and the twilight began, and as the twilight deepened still his excitement grew. Straightway it seemed as if the whole Seaton had come to share in it. Men and women were all out of doors; and, late as it was when the sun set, to judge by the number of bare legs and feet that trotted in and out with a little red flash, with a dull patter-pat on earthen floor and hard road, and a scratching and hustling among the pebbles, there could not have been one older than a baby in bed; while of the babies even not a few were awake in their mothers' arms, and out with them on the sea-front, where the men, with their hands in their trouser-pockets, were lazily smoking pigtail in short clay pipes with tin covers fastened to the stems by little chains, and some of the women, in short blue petticoats and worsted stockings, were doing the same. Some stood in their doors, talking with neighbors standing in their doors, but these were mostly the elder women: the younger ones—all but Lizzy Findlay—were out in the road. One man half leaned, half sat on the window-sill of Duncan's former abode, and round him were two or three more, and some women, talking about Scaurnose, and the factor, and what the lads there would do to-morrow; while the hush of the sea on the pebbles mingled with their talk like an unknown tongue of the Infinite—never articulating, only suggesting—uttering in song and not in speech—dealing not with thoughts, but with feelings and foretastes. No one listened:[Pg 83] what to them was the Infinite, with Scaurnose in the near distance? It was now almost as dark as it would be throughout the night if it kept clear.

Once more there was Duncan, standing as if looking out to sea, and shading his brows with his hand as if to protect his eyes from the glare of the sun and enable his sight.

"There's the auld piper again!" said one of the group, a young woman. "He's unco fule-like to be stan'in' that gait (way), makin' as gien he cudna weel see for the sun in 's een."

"Haud ye yer tongue, lass," rejoined an elderly woman beside her. "There's mair things nor ye ken, as the Beuk says. There's een 'at can see an' een 'at canna, an' een 'at can see twise ower, an' een 'at can see steikit what nane can see open."

"Ta poat! ta poat of my chief!" cried the seer. "She is coming like a tream of ta night, put one tat will not tepart with ta morning!" He spoke as one suppressing a wild joy.

"Wha'll that be, lucky-deddy?" inquired in a respectful voice the woman who had last spoken, while all within hearing hushed each other and stood in silence. And all the time the ghost of the day was creeping round from west to east, to put on its resurrection body and rise new born. It gleamed faint like a cold ashy fire in the north.

"And who will it pe than her own son, Mistress Reekie?" answered the piper, calling her by her husband's nickname, as was usual, but, as was his sole wont, prefixing the title of respect where custom would have employed but her Christian name. "Who'll should it pe put her own Malcolm?" he went on. "I see his poat come round ta Tead Head. She flits over the water like a pale ghost over Morven. But it's ta young and ta strong she is pringing home to Tuncan.—O m'anam, beannuich!"

Involuntarily, all eyes turned toward the point called the Death's Head, which bounded the bay on the east.

"It's ower dark to see onything," said the man on the window-sill. "There's a bit haar (fog) come up."

"Yes," said Duncan, "it'll pe too tark for you who haf cot no eyes only to speak of. Put you'll wait a few, and you'll pe seeing as well as herself.—Och, her poy! her poy! O m'anam! Ta Lort pe praised! and she'll tie in peace, for he'll pe only ta one-half of him a Cam'ell, and he'll pe safed at last, as sure as there's a heafen to co to and a hell to co from. For ta half tat's not a Cam'ell must be ta strong half, and it will trag ta other half into heafen—where it will not pe ta welcome howefer."

As if to get rid of the unpleasant thought that his Malcolm could not enter heaven without taking half a Campbell with him, he turned from the sea and hurried into the house, but only to catch up his pipes and hasten out again, filling the bag as he went. Arrived once more on the verge of the sand, he stood again facing the north-east, and began to blow a pibroch loud and clear.

Meantime, the Partan had joined the same group, and they were talking in a low tone about the piper's claim to the second-sight—for although all were more or less inclined to put faith in Duncan, there was here no such unquestioning belief in the marvel as would have been found on the west coast in every glen from the Mull of Cantyre to Loch Eribol—when suddenly Meg Partan, almost the only one hitherto remaining in the house, appeared rushing from the close. "Hech, sirs!" she cried, addressing the Seaton in general, "gien the auld man be in the richt—"

"She'll pe aal in ta right, Mistress Partan, and tat you'll pe seeing," said Duncan, who, hearing her first cry, had stopped his drone and played softly, listening.

But Meg went on without heeding him any more than was implied in the repetition of her exordium: "Gien the auld man be i' the richt, it 'll be the marchioness hersel', 'at's h'ard o' the ill-duin's o' her factor, an' 's comin' to see efter her fowk. An' it 'll be Ma'colm's duin'; an' that 'll be seen. But the bonny laad winna ken the state o' the herbor, an' he'll be makin' for the moo' o' 't, an' he'll jist rin 's bonny boatie agrun' 'atween[Pg 84] the twa piers; an' that 'll no be a richt hame-comin' for the leddy o' the lan'; an' what's mair, Ma'colm 'ill get the wyte (blame) o' 't; an' that 'll be seen. Sae ye maun, some o' ye, to the pier-heid, an' luik oot to gie them warnin'."

Her own husband was the first to start, proud of the foresight of his wife. "Haith, Meg!" he cried, "ye're maist as guid at the lang sicht as the piper himsel'!"

Several followed him, and as they ran Meg cried after them, giving her orders as if she had been vice-admiral of the red, in a voice shrill enough to pierce the worst gale that ever blew on northern shore, "Ye'll jist tell the bonnie laad to haud wast a bit an' rin her ashore, an' we'll a' be there, an' hae her as dry's Noah's ark in a jiffie. Tell her leddyship we'll cairry the boat an' her intil't to the tap o' the Boar's Tail gien she'll gie's her orders.—Winna we, laads?"

"We can but try," said one. "But the Fisky 'ill be waur to get a grip o' nor Nancy here," he added, turning suddenly upon the plumpest girl in the place, who stood next him. But she foiled him of the kiss he had thought to snatch, and turned the laugh from herself upon him, so cleverly avoiding his clutch that he staggered into the road and nearly fell upon his nose.

By the time the Partan and his companions reached the pier-head something was dawning in the vague of sea and sky that might be a sloop, and standing for the harbor. Thereupon the Partan and Jamie Ladle jumped into a small boat and pulled out. Dubs, who had come from Scaurnose on the business of the conjuration, had stepped into the stern, not to steer, but to show a white ensign—somebody's Sunday shirt he had gathered as they ran from a furze-bush, where it hung to dry, between the Seaton and the harbor.

"Hoots! ye'll affront the marchioness," objected the Partan.

"Man, i' the gloamin' she'll no ken't frae buntin'," said Dubs, and at once displayed it, holding it by the two sleeves. The wind had now fallen to the softest breath, and the little vessel came on slowly. The men rowed hard, shouting and waving their flag, and soon heard a hail which none of them could mistake for other than Malcolm's. In a few minutes they were on board, greeting their old friend with jubilation, but talking in a subdued tone, for they knew by Malcolm's that the cutter bore their lady. Briefly the Partan communicated the state of the harbor, and recommended porting his helm and running the Fisky ashore about opposite the brass swivel. "A' the men an' women i' the Seaton," he said, "'ill be there to haul her up."

Malcolm took the helm, gave his orders and steered farther westward.

By this time the people on shore had caught sight of the cutter. They saw her come stealing out of the thin dark like a thought half thought, and go gliding along the shore like a sea-ghost over the dusky water, faint, uncertain, noiseless, glimmering. It could be no other than the Fisky! Both their lady and their friend Malcolm must be on board, they were certain, for how could the one of them come without the other? and doubtless the marchioness—whom they all remembered as a good-humored, handsome girl, ready to speak to any and everybody—would immediately deliver them from the hateful red-nosed ogre, her factor. Out at once they all set along the shore to greet her arrival, each running regardless of the rest, so that from the Seaton to the middle of the Boar's Tail there was a long, straggling, broken string of hurrying fisher-folk, men and women, old and young, followed by all the current children, tapering to one or two toddlers, who felt themselves neglected and wept their way along. The piper, too asthmatic to run, but not too asthmatic to walk and play his bagpipes, delighting the heart of Malcolm, who could not mistake the style, believed he brought up the rear, but was mistaken; for the very last came Mrs. Findlay and Lizzy, carrying between them their little deal kitchen-table for her ladyship to step out of the boat upon, and Lizzy's child fast asleep on the top of it.

The foremost ran and ran until they saw that the Fisky had chosen her lair,[Pg 85] and was turning her bows to the shore, when they stopped and stood ready with greased planks and ropes to draw her up. In a few minutes the whole population was gathered, darkening, in the June midnight, the yellow sands between the tide and the dune. The Psyche was well manned now with a crew of six. On she came under full sail till within a few yards of the beach, when in one and the same moment every sheet was let go, and she swept softly up like a summer wave, and lay still on the shore. The butterfly was asleep. But ere she came to rest, the instant indeed that her canvas went fluttering away, thirty strong men had rushed into the water and laid hold of the now wingless Psyche. In a few minutes she was high and dry.

Malcolm leaped on the sand just as the Partaness came bustling up with her kitchen-table between her two hands like a tray. She set it down, and across it shook hands with him violently: then caught it up again, and deposited it firm on its four legs beneath the cutter's waist. "Noo, my leddy," said Meg, looking up at the marchioness, "set ye yer bit fut upo' my table, an' we'll think the mair o' 't efter whan we tak oor denner aff o' 't."

Florimel thanked her, stepped lightly upon it, and sprang to the sand, where she was received with words of welcome from many, and shouts which rendered them inaudible from the rest. The men, their bonnets in their hands, and the women curtseying, made a lane for her to pass through, while the young fellows would gladly have begged leave to carry her could they have extemporized any suitable sort of palanquin or triumphal litter.

Followed by Malcolm, she led the way over the Boar's Tail—nor would accept any help in climbing it—straight for the tunnel: Malcolm had never laid aside the key his father had given him to the private doors while he was yet a servant. They crossed by the embrasure of the brass swivel. That implement had now long been silent, but they had not gone many paces from the bottom of the dune when it went off with a roar. The shouts of the people drowned the startled cry with which Florimel turned to Malcolm, involuntarily mindful of old and for her better times. She had not looked for such a reception, and was both flattered and touched by it. For a brief space the spirit of her girlhood came back. Possibly, had she then understood that hope rather than faith or love was at the heart of their enthusiasm, that her tenants looked upon her as their savior from the factor, and sorely needed the exercise of her sovereignty, she might have better understood her position and her duty toward them.

Malcolm unlocked the door of the tunnel, and she entered, followed by Rose, who felt as if she were walking in a dream. But as he stepped in after them he was seized from behind and clasped close in an embrace he knew at once. "Daddy, daddy!" he said, and turning threw his arms round the piper.

"My poy! my poy! her nain son Malcolm!" said the old man in a whisper of intense satisfaction and suppression. "You'll must pe forgifing her for coming pack to you. She cannot help lofing you, and you must forget tat you are a Cam'ell."

Malcolm kissed his cheek, and said, also in a whisper, "My ain daddy! I hae a heap to tell ye, but I maun see my leddy hame first."

"Co, co, this moment co!" cried the old man, pushing him away. "To your tuties to my leddyship first, and then come to her old daddy."

"I'll be wi' ye in half an hoor or less."

"Coot poy! coot poy! Come to Mistress Partan's."

"Ay, ay, daddy!" said Malcolm, and hurried through the tunnel.

As Florimel approached the ancient dwelling of her race, now her own to do with as she would, her pleasure grew. Whether it was the twilight or the breach in dulling custom, everything looked strange, the grounds wider, the trees larger, the house grander and more anciently venerable. And all the way the burn sang in the hollow. The spirit of her father seemed to hover about the[Pg 86] place, and while the thought that her father's voice would not greet her when she entered the hall cast a solemn funereal state over her simple return, her heart yet swelled with satisfaction and far-derived pride. All this was hers to do with as she would, to confer as she pleased! No thought of her tenants, fishers or farmers, who did their strong part in supporting the ancient dignity of her house, had even an associated share in the bliss of the moment. She had forgotten her reception already, or regarded it only as the natural homage to such a position and power as hers. As to owing anything in return, the idea had indeed been presented to her when with Clementina and Malcolm she talked over St. Ronan's Well, but it had never entered her mind.

The drawing-room and the hall were lighted. Mrs. Courthope was at the door, as if she expected her, and Florimel was careful to take everything as a matter of course.

"When will your ladyship please to want me?" asked Malcolm.

"At the usual hour, Malcolm," she answered.

He turned and ran to the Seaton.

His first business was the accommodation of Travers and Davy, but he found them already housed at the Salmon, with Jamie Ladle teaching Travers to drink toddy. They had left the Psyche snug: she was high above high-water mark, and there were no tramps about: they had furled her sails, locked the companion-door and left her.

Mrs. Findlay rejoiced over Malcolm as if he had been her own son from a far country, but the poor piper, between politeness and gratitude on the one hand and the urging of his heart on the other, was sorely tried by her loquacity: he could hardly get in a word. Malcolm perceived his suffering, and as soon as seemed prudent proposed that he should walk with him to Miss Horn's, where he was going to sleep, he said, that night. Mrs. Partan snuffed, but held her peace. For the third or fourth time that day, wonderful to tell, she restrained herself!

As soon as they were out of the house Malcolm assured Duncan, to the old man's great satisfaction, that, had he not found him there, he would within another month have set out to roam Scotland in search of him.

Miss Horn had heard of their arrival, and was wandering about the house, unable even to sit down until she saw the marquis. To herself she always called him the marquis: to his face he was always Ma'colm. If he had not come she declared she could not have gone to bed; yet she received him with an edge to her welcome: he had to answer for his behavior. They sat down, and Duncan told a long sad story; which finished, with the toddy that had sustained him during the telling, the old man thought it better, for fear of annoying his Mistress Partan, to go home. As it was past one o'clock, they both agreed.

"And if she'll tie to-night, my poy," said Duncan, "she'll pe lie awake in her crave all ta long tarkness to pe waiting to hear ta voice of your worrts in ta morning. And nefer you mind, Malcolm, she'll has learned to forgive you for peing only ta one-half of yourself a cursed Cam'ell."

Miss Horn gave Malcolm a wink, as much as to say, "Let the old man talk: it will hurt no Campbell;" and showed him out with much attention.

And then at last Malcolm poured out his whole story, and his heart with it, to Miss Horn, who heard and received it with understanding, and a sympathy which grew ever as she listened. At length she declared herself perfectly satisfied, for not only had he done his best, but she did not see what else he could have done. She hoped, however, that now he would contrive to get this part over as quickly as possible, for which in the morning she would show him cogent reasons.

"I hae no feelin's mysel', as ye weel ken, Ma'colm," she remarked in conclusion, "an' I doobt, gien I had been i' your place, I wad na hae luikit ta a' sides o' the thing at ance, as ye hae dune. An' it was a man like you 'at sae near lost yer life for the hizzy!" she exclaimed. "I maunna think aboot it, or I winna[Pg 87] sleep a wink. But we maun get that deevil Catanach (an' cat eneuch!) hangt.—Weel, my man, ye may haud up yer heid afore the father o' ye, for ye're the first o' the race, I'm thinkin', 'at ever was near han' deein' for anither. But mak ye a speedy en' till 't noo, laad, an' fa' to the lave o' yer wark. There's a terrible heap to be dune. But I maun haud my tongue the nicht, for I wad fain ye had a guid sleep; an' I'm needin' ane sair mysel', for I'm no sae yoong as I ance was; an' I hae been that anxious aboot ye, Ma'colm, 'at though I never hed ony feelin's, yet, noo 'at it's a' gaein' richt, an' ye're a' richt, an' like to be richt for evermair, my heid's jist like to split. Gang yer wa's to yer bed, and soon' may ye sleep! It's the bed yer bonny mither got a soon' sleep in at last, an' muckle was she i' need o' 't! An' jist tak tent the morn what ye say whan Jean's i' the room, or maybe o' the ither side o' the door, for she's no mowse. I dinna ken what gars me keep the jaud. I believe 'at gien the verra deevil himsel' had been wi' me sae lang, I wadna hae the hert to turn him aboot his ill business. That's what comes o' haein' no feelin's. Ither fowk wad hae gotten rid o' her half a score o' years sin' syne."

CHAPTER LVIII.

THE TRENCH.

Malcolm had not yet, after all the health-giving of the voyage, entirely recovered the effects of the ill-compounded potion. Indeed, sometimes the fear crossed his mind that never would he be the same man again—that the slow furnace of the grave alone would destroy the vile deposit left in his house of life. Hence it came that he was weary, and overslept himself the next morning; but it was no great matter: he had yet time enough. He swallowed his breakfast as a working man alone can, and set out for Duff Harbor. At Leith, where they had put in for provisions, he had posted a letter to Mr. Soutar, directing him to have Kelpie brought on to his own town, whence he would fetch her himself. The distance was about ten miles, the hour eight, and he was a good enough walker, although boats and horses had combined to prevent him, he confessed, from getting over-fond of Shank's mare. To men who delight in the motions of a horse under them the legs of a man are a tame, dull means of progression, although they too have their superiorities; and one of the disciplines of this world is to get out of the saddle and walk afoot. He who can do so with perfect serenity must very nearly have learned with Saint Paul in whatsoever state he is, therein to be content. It was the loveliest of mornings, however, to be abroad in upon any terms, and Malcolm hardly needed the resources of one who knew both how to be abased and how to abound—enviable perfection!—for the enjoyment of even a long walk. Heaven and earth were just settling to the work of the day after their morning prayer, and the whole face of things yet wore something of that look of expectation which one who mingles the vision of the poet with the faith of the Christian may well imagine to be their upward look of hope after a night of groaning and travailing—the earnest gaze of the creature waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God; and for himself, though the hardest thing was yet to come, there was a satisfaction in finding himself almost up to his last fence, with the heavy ploughed land through which he had been floundering nearly all behind him; which figure means that he had almost made up his mind what to do.

When he reached the Duff Arms he walked straight into the yard, where the first thing he saw was a stable-boy in the air, hanging on to a twitch on the nose of the rearing Kelpie. In another instant he would have been killed or maimed for life, and Kelpie loose and scouring the streets of Duff Harbor. When she heard Malcolm's voice and the sound of his running feet she dropped as if to listen. He flung the boy aside and caught her halter. Once or twice more she reared in the vain hope of so ridding herself of the pain that clung to her lip and nose, nor did she, through the mist of her anger and suffering, quite recognize[Pg 88] her master in his yacht-uniform. But the torture decreasing, she grew able to scent his presence, welcomed him with her usual glad whinny, and allowed him to to do with her as he would.

Having fed her, found Mr. Soutar and arranged several matters with him, he set out for home.

That was a ride! Kelpie was mad with life. Every available field he jumped her into, and she tore its element of space at least to shreds with her spurning hoofs. But the distance was not great enough to quiet her before they got to hard turnpike and young plantations. He would have entered at the grand gate, but found no one at the lodge, for the factor, to save a little, had dismissed the old keeper. He had therefore to go on, and through the town, where, to the awe-stricken eyes of the population peeping from doors and windows, it seemed as if the terrible horse would carry him right over the roofs of the fisher-cottages below and out to sea. "Eh, but he's a terrible cratur, that Ma'colm MacPhail!" said the old wives to each other, and felt there must be something wicked in him to ride like that.

But he turned her aside from the steep hill, and passed along the street that led to the town-gate of the House. Whom should he see, as he turned into it, but Mrs. Catanach, standing on her own doorstep, opposite the descent to the Seaton, shading her eyes with her hand, and looking far out over the water through the green smoke of the village below! It had been her wont to gaze thus since ever he could remember her, though what she could at such times be looking for, except it were the devil in person, he found it hard to conjecture. At the sound of his approach she turned; and such an expression crossed her face in a momentary flash ere she disappeared in the house as added considerably to his knowledge of fallen humanity. Before he reached her door she was out again, tying on a clean white apron as she came, and smiling like a dark pool in sunshine. She dropped a low curtsey, and looked as if she had been occupying her house for months of his absence. But Malcolm would not meet even cunning with its own weapons, and therefore turned away his head and took no notice of her. She ground her teeth with the fury of hate, and swore that she would yet disappoint him of his purpose, whatever it were, in this masquerade of service. Her heart being scarcely of the calibre to comprehend one like Malcolm's, her theories for the interpretation of the mystery were somewhat wild and altogether of a character unfit to see the light.

The keeper of the town-gate greeted Malcolm, as he let him in, with a pleased old face and words of welcome, but added instantly, as if it was no time for the indulgence of friendship, that it was a terrible business going on at the Nose.

"What is it?" asked Malcolm in alarm.

"Ye hae been ower lang awa', I doobt," answered the man, "to ken hoo the factor—But, Lord save ye! haud yer tongue," he interjected, looking fearfully around him. "Gien he kenned 'at I said sic a thing, he wad turn me oot o' hoose an' ha'."

"You've said nothing yet," returned Malcolm.

"I said factor, an' that same's 'maist eneuch, for he's like a roarin' lion an' a ragin' bear amang the people; an' that sin' ever ye gaed. Bow o' Meal said i' the meetin' the ither nicht 'at he bude to be the verra man, the wickit ruler propheseed o' sae lang sin' syne i' the beuk o' the Proverbs. Eh! it's an awfu' thing to be foreordeent to oonrichteousness!"

"But you haven't told me what is the matter at Scaurnose," said Malcolm impatiently.

"Ow, it's jist this—'at this same's Midsimmer Day, an' Blue Peter—honest fallow!—he's been for the last three month un'er nottice frae the factor to quit. An' sae, ye see—"

"To quit!" exclaimed Malcolm. "Sic a thing was never h'ard tell o'."

"Haith! it's h'ard tell o' noo," returned the gate-keeper. "Quittin' 's as plenty as quicken (couch-grass). 'Deed, there's maist naething ither h'ard tell o' bit quittin', for the full half o' Scaurnose is un'er like nottice for Michaelmas, an' the Lord kens what it 'll a' en' in!"[Pg 89]

"But what's it for? Blue Peter's no the man to misbehave himsel'."

"Weel, ye ken mair yersel' nor ony ither as to the warst fau't there is to lay till 's chairge; for they say—that is, some say—it's a' yer ain wyte, Ma'colm."

"What mean ye, man? Speyk oot," said Malcolm.

"They say it's a' anent the abduckin' o' the markis's boat, 'at you an' him gaed aff wi' thegither."

"That'll hardly haud, seein' the marchioness hersel' cam' hame in her the last nicht."

"Ay, but ye see the decree's gane oot, and what the factor says is like the laws o' the Medes an' Persians, 'at they say's no to be altert: I kenna mysel'."

"Ow weel, gien that be a', I'll see efter that wi' the marchioness."

"Ay, but ye see there's a lot o' the laads there, as I'm tellt, 'at has vooed 'at factor nor factor's man sall never set fut in Scaurnose frae this day furth. Gang ye doon to the Seaton, an' see hoo mony o' yer auld freen's ye'll fin' there. Man, there a' oot to Scaurnose to see the plisky. The factor he's there, I ken—and some constables wi' 'im—to see 'at his order's cairried oot. An' the laads they hae been fortifeein' the place, as they ca' 't, for the last ook. They've howkit a trenk, they tell me, 'at nane but a hunter on 's horse cud win ower, an' they're postit alang the toon-side o' 't wi' sticks an' stanes an boat-heuks, an' guns an' pistils. An' gien there bena a man or twa killt a'ready—"

Before he finished his sentence Kelpie was leveling herself along the road for the sea-gate.

Johnny Bykes was locking it on the other side, in haste to secure his eye-share of what was going on, when he caught sight of Malcolm tearing up. Mindful of the old grudge, also that there was no marquis now to favor his foe, he finished the arrested act of turning the key, drew it from the lock, and to Malcolm's orders, threats and appeals returned for all answer that he had no time to attend to him, and so left him looking through the bars. Malcolm dashed across the burn, and round the base of the hill on which stood the little wind-god blowing his horn, dismounted, unlocked the door in the wall, got Kelpie through, and was in the saddle again before Johnny was halfway from the gate. When the churl saw him he trembled, turned and ran for its shelter again in terror, nor perceived until he reached it that the insulted groom had gone off like the wind in the opposite direction.

Malcolm soon left the high-road and cut across the fields, over which the wind bore cries and shouts, mingled with laughter and the animal sounds of coarse jeering. When he came nigh the cart-road which led into the village he saw at the entrance of the street a crowd, and rising from it the well-known shape of the factor on his horse. Nearer the sea, where was another entrance through the back yards of some cottages, was a smaller crowd. Both were now pretty silent, for the attention of all was fixed on Malcolm's approach. As he drew up Kelpie foaming and prancing, and the group made way for her, he saw a deep wide ditch across the road, on whose opposite side was ranged irregularly the flower of Scaurnose's younger manhood, calmly, even merrily, prepared to defend their entrenchment. They had been chaffing the factor, and loudly challenging the constables to come on, when they recognized Malcolm in the distance, and expectancy stayed the rush of their bruising wit. For they regarded him as beyond a doubt come from the marchioness with messages of good-will. When he rode up, therefore, they raised a great shout, every one welcoming him by name. But the factor—who, to judge by appearances, had had his forenoon dram ere he left home—burning with wrath, moved his horse in between Malcolm and the ditch. He had self-command enough left, however, to make one attempt at the loftily superior. "Pray what is your business?" he said, as if he had never seen Malcolm in his life before. "I presume you come with a message."

"I come to beg you, sir, not to go farther with this business. Surely the punishment is already enough," said Malcolm respectfully.[Pg 90]

"Who sends me the message?" asked the factor, his lips pressed together and his eyes flaming.

"One," answered Malcolm, "who has some influence for justice, and will use it upon whichever side the justice may lie."

"Go to hell!" cried the factor, losing utterly his slender self-command and raising his whip.

Malcolm took no heed of the gesture, for he was at the moment beyond his reach. "Mr. Crathie," he said calmly, "you are banishing the best man in the place."

"No doubt! no doubt! seeing he's a crony of yours," laughed the factor in mighty scorn.—"A canting, prayer-meeting rascal!" he added.

"Is that ony waur nor a drucken elyer o' the kirk?" cried Dubs from the other side of the ditch, raising a roar of laughter.

The very purple left the factor's face and turned to a corpse-like gray in the fire of his fury.

"Come, come, my men! that's going too far," said Malcolm.

"An' wha ir ye for a fudgie (truant) fisher, to gie coonsel ohn speired?" shouted Dubs, altogether disappointed in the part Malcolm seemed only able to take. "Haud to the factor there wi' yer coonsel!"

"Get out of my way!" said Mr. Crathie through his set teeth, and came straight upon Malcolm. "Home with you, or-r-r-r—" And again he raised his whip, this time plainly with intent.

"For God's sake, factor, min' the mere!" cried Malcolm. "Ribs an' legs an' a' 'ill be to crack gien ye anger her wi' yer whuppin'!" As he spoke he drew a little aside, that the factor might pass if he pleased. A noise arose in the smaller crowd, and Malcolm turned to see what it meant: off his guard, he received a stinging cut over the head from the factor's whip. Simultaneously, Kelpie stood up on end, and Malcolm tore the weapon from the treacherous hand. "If I gave you what you deserve, Mr. Crathie, I should knock you and your horse together into that ditch. A touch of the spur would do it. I am not quite sure that I ought not. A nature like yours takes forbearance for fear." While he spoke, his mare was ramping and kicking, making a clean sweep all about her. Mr. Crathie's horse turned restive from sympathy, and it was all his rider could do to keep his seat. As soon as he got Kelpie a little quieter, Malcolm drew near and returned him his whip. He snatched it from his outstretched hand and essayed a second cut at him, which Malcolm rendered powerless by pushing Kelpie close up to him. Then suddenly wheeling, he left him.

On the other side of the trench the fellows were shouting and roaring with laughter.

"Men!" cried Malcolm, "you have no right to stop up this road. I want to go and see Blue Peter."

"Come on, than!" cried one of the young men, emulous of Dubs's humor, and spread out his arms as if to receive Kelpie to his bosom.

"Stand out of the way: I'm coming," said Malcolm. As he spoke he took Kelpie a little round, keeping out of the way of the factor, who sat trembling with rage on his still excited animal, and sent her at the trench. The Deevil's Jock, as they called him, kept jumping, with his arms outspread, from one place to another, as if to receive Kelpie's charge; but when he saw her actually coming, in short, quick bounds, straight to the trench, he was seized with terror, and, half paralyzed, slipped as he turned to flee and rolled into the ditch, just in time to see Kelpie fly over his head. His comrades scampered right and left, and Malcolm, rather disgusted, took no notice of them.

A cart, loaded with their little all, the horse in the shafts, was standing at Peter's door, but nobody was near it. Hardly had Malcolm entered the close, however, when out rushed Annie, and heedless of Kelpie's demonstrative repellence, reached up her hands like a child, caught him by the arm while yet he was busied with his troublesome charge, drew him down toward her and held him till, in spite of Kelpie, she had[Pg 91] kissed him again and again. "Eh, Ma'colm! eh, my lord!" she said, "ye hae saved my faith. I kenned ye wad come."

"Haud yer tongue, Annie: I maunna be kenned," said Malcolm.

"There's nae danger. They'll tak it for sweirin'," said Annie, laughing and crying both at once.

But next came Blue Peter, his youngest child in his arms.

"Eh, Peter, man! I'm bleythe to see ye," cried Malcolm. "Gie 's a grup o' yer honest han'."

More than even the sight of his face, beaming with pleasure, more than that grasp of the hand that would have squeezed the life out of a polecat, was the sound of the mother-tongue from his lips. The cloud of Peter's long distrust broke and vanished, and the sky of his soul was straightway a celestial blue. He snatched his hand from Malcolm's, walked back into the empty house, ran into the little closet off the kitchen, bolted the door, fell on his knees in the void little sanctuary that had of late been the scene of so many foiled attempts to lift up his heart, and poured out speechless thanksgiving to the God of all grace and consolation, who had given him back his friend, and that in the time of his sore need. So true was his heart in its love that, giving thanks for his friend, he forgot he was the marquis of Lossie, before whom his enemy was but as a snail in the sun. When he rose from his knees and went out again, his face shining and his eyes misty, his wife was on the top of the cart, tying a rope across the cradle.

"Peter," said Malcolm, "ye was quite richt to gang, but I'm glaid they didna lat ye."

"I wad hae been halfw'y to Port Gordon or noo," said Peter.

"But noo ye'll no gang to Port Gordon," said Malcolm. "Ye'll jist gang to the Salmon for a feow days till we see hoo things'll gang."

"I'll du onything ye like, Ma'colm," said Peter, and went into the house to fetch his bonnet.

In the street arose the cry of a woman, and into the close rushed one of the fisher-wives, followed by the factor. He had found a place on the eastern side of the village, whither he had slipped unobserved, where, jumping a low earth-wall, he got into a little back yard. He was trampling over its few stocks of kail and its one dusty miller and double daisy when the woman to whose cottage it belonged caught sight of him through her window, and running out fell to abusing him, doubtless in no measured language. He rode at her in his rage, and she fled shrieking into Peter's close and behind the cart, never ceasing her vituperation, but calling him every choice name in her vocabulary. Beside himself with the rage of murdered dignity, he struck at her over the corner of the cart. Thereupon from the top of it Annie Mair ventured to expostulate: "Hoot, sir! It's no mainners to lat at a wuman like that."

He turned upon her, and gave her a cut on the arm and hand so stinging that she cried out, and nearly fell from the cart. Out rushed Peter and flew at the factor, who from his seat of vantage began to ply his whip about his head. But Malcolm, who, when the factor appeared, had moved aside to keep Kelpie out of mischief, and saw only the second of the two assaults, came forward with a scramble and a bound. "Haud awa', Peter!" he cried: "this belangs to me. I gae 'im back 's whup, an' sae I'm accoontable.—Mr. Crathie"—and as he spoke he edged his mare up to the panting factor—"the man who strikes a woman must be taught that he is a scoundrel, and that office I take. I would do the same if you were the lord of Lossie instead of his factor."

Mr. Crathie, knowing himself now in the wrong, was a little frightened at the set speech, and began to bluster and stammer, but the swift descent of Malcolm's heavy riding-whip on his shoulders and back made him voluble in curses. Then began a battle that could not last long with such odds on the side of justice. It was gazed at from the mouth of the close by many spectators, but none dared enter because of the capering and plunging and kicking of the horses. In less than a minute the factor[Pg 92] turned to flee, and spurring out of the court galloped up the street at full stretch.

"Haud oot o' the gait!" cried Malcolm, and rode after him. But more careful of the people, he did not get a good start, and the factor was over the trench and into the fields before he caught him up. Then again the stinging switch buckled about the shoulders of the oppressor with all the force of Malcolm's brawny arm. The factor yelled and cursed and swore, and still Malcolm plied the whip, and still the horses flew over fields and fences and ditches. At length in the last field, from which they must turn into the high-road, the factor groaned out, "For God's sake, Ma'colm, hae mercy!"

The youth's uplifted arm fell by his side. He turned his mare's head, and when the factor ventured to turn his, he saw the avenger already halfway back to Scaurnose, and the constables in full flight meeting him.

While Malcolm was thus occupied his sister was writing to Lady Bellair. She told her that, having gone out for a sail in her yacht, which she had sent for from Scotland, the desire to see her home had overpowered her to such a degree that of the intended sail she had made a voyage, and here she was, longing just as much now to see Lady Bellair; and if she thought proper to bring a gentleman with her to take care of her, he also should be welcome for her sake. It was a long way for her to come, she said, and Lady Bellair knew what sort of a place it was, but there was nobody in London now, and if she had nothing more enticing on her tablets, etc., etc. She ended with begging her, if she was inclined to make her happy with her presence, to bring to her Caley and her hound Demon. She had hardly finished when Malcolm presented himself. She received him very coldly, and declined to listen to anything about the fishers. She insisted that, being one of their party, he was prejudiced in their favor, and that of course a man of Mr. Crathie's experience must know better than he what ought to be done with such people in view of protecting her rights and keeping them in order. She declared that she was not going to disturb the old way of things to please him, and said that he had now done her all the mischief he could, except indeed he were to head the fishers and sack Lossie House. Malcolm found that instead of gaining any advantage by making himself known to her as her brother, he had but given her confidence in speaking her mind to him, and set her free from considerations of personal dignity when she desired to humiliate him. But he was a good deal surprised at the ability with which she set forth and defended her own view of her affairs, for she did not tell him that the Rev. Mr. Cairns had been with her all the morning, flattering her vanity, worshiping her power and generally instructing her in her own greatness—also putting in a word or two anent his friend Mr. Crathie, and his troubles with her ladyship's fisher-tenants. She was still, however, so far afraid of her brother—which state of feeling was perhaps the main cause of her insulting behavior to him—that she sat in some dread lest he might chance to see the address of the letter she had been writing.

I may mention here that Lady Bellair accepted the invitation with pleasure for herself and Liftore, promised to bring Caley, but utterly declined to take charge of Demon or allow him to be of the party. Thereupon, Florimel, who was fond of the animal, and feared much, as he was no favorite, that something would happen to him, wrote to Clementina, praying her to visit her in her lovely loneliness—good as The Gloom in its way, though not quite so dark—and to add a hair to the weight of her obligation if she complied by allowing her deerhound to accompany her. Clementina was the only one, she said, of her friends for whom the animal had ever shown a preference.

Malcolm retired from his sister's presence much depressed, saw Mrs. Courthope, who was kind as ever, and betook himself to his old room, next to that in which his strange history began. There he sat down and wrote urgently to Lenorme, stating that he had an important communication to make, and begging[Pg 93] him to start for the North the moment he received the letter. A messenger from Duff Harbor well mounted would ensure Malcolm's presence within a couple of hours.

He found the behavior of his old acquaintances and friends in the Seaton much what he had expected: the few were as cordial as ever, while the many still resented, with a mingling of the jealousy of affection, his forsaking of the old life for one they regarded as unworthy of a bred at least, if not born, fisherman. A few there were still who always had been, for reasons known only to themselves, less than friendly. The women were all cordial.

"Sic a mad-like thing," said old Futtocks, who was now the leader of the assembly at the Barn, "to gang scoorin' the cuintry on that mad brute o' a mere! What guid, think ye, can come o' sic-like?"

"H'ard ye 'im ever tell the story aboot Colonsay Castel yon'er?"

"Ay, hev I."

"Weel, isna his mere 'at they ca' Kelpie jest the pictur' o' the deil's ain horse 'at lay at the door an' watched whan he flaw oot, an' tuik the wa' wi' 'im?"

"I cudna say till I saw whether the deil himsel' cud gar her lie still."

CHAPTER LIX.

THE PEACEMAKER.

The heroes of Scaurnose expected a renewal of the attack, and in greater force, the next day, and made their preparations accordingly, strengthening every weak point around the village. They were put in great heart by Malcolm's espousal of their cause, as they considered his punishment of the factor; but most of them set it down in their wisdom as resulting from the popular condemnation of his previous supineness. It did not therefore add greatly to his influence with them. When he would have prevailed upon them to allow Blue Peter to depart, arguing that they had less right to prevent than the factor had to compel him, they once more turned upon him: what right had he to dictate to them? he did not belong to Scaurnose. He reasoned with them that the factor, although he had not justice, had law on his side, and could turn out whom he pleased. They said, "Let him try it!" He told them that they had given great provocation, for he knew that the men they had assaulted came surveying for a harbor, and that they ought at least to make some apology for having maltreated them. It was all useless: that was the women's doing, they said; besides, they did not believe him; and if what he said was true, what was the thing to them, seeing they were all under notice to leave? Malcolm said that perhaps an apology would be accepted. They told him if he did not take himself off they would serve him as he had served the factor. Finding expostulation a failure, therefore, he begged Joseph and Annie to settle themselves again as comfortably as they could, and left them.

Contrary to the expectation of all, however, and considerably to the disappointment of the party of Dubs, Fite Folp and the rest, the next day was as peaceful as if Scaurnose had been a halcyon nest floating on the summer waves; and it was soon reported that in consequence of the punishment he had received from Malcolm the factor was far too ill to be troublesome to any but his wife. This was true, but, severe as his chastisement was, it was not severe enough to have had any such consequences but for his late growing habit of drinking whisky. As it was, fever had followed upon the combination of bodily and mental suffering. But already it had wrought this good in him, that he was far more keenly aware of the brutality of the offence of which he had been guilty than he would otherwise have been all his life through. To his wife, who first learned the reason of Malcolm's treatment of him from his delirious talk in the night, it did not, circumstances considered, appear an enormity, and her indignation with the avenger of it, whom she had all but hated before, was furious. Malcolm, on his part, was greatly concerned to hear the result of his severity. He refrained,[Pg 94] however, from calling to inquire, knowing it would be interpreted as an insult, not accepted as a sign of sympathy. He went to the doctor instead, who, to his consternation, looked very serious at first. But when he learned all about the affair, he changed his view considerably, and condescended to give good hopes of his coming through, even adding that it would lengthen his life by twenty years if it broke him of his habits of whisky-drinking and rage.

And now Malcolm had a little time of leisure, which he put to the best possible use in strengthening his relations with the fishers. For he had nothing to do about the House except look after Kelpie; and Florimel, as if determined to make him feel that he was less to her than before, much as she used to enjoy seeing him sit his mare, never took him out with her—always Stoat. He resolved therefore, seeing he must yet delay action a while in the hope of the appearance of Lenorme, to go out as in the old days after the herring, both for the sake of splicing, if possible, what strands had been broken between him and the fishers, and of renewing for himself the delights of elemental conflict. With these views he hired himself to the Partan, whose boat's crew was short-handed. And now, night after night, he reveled in the old pleasure, enhanced by so many months of deprivation. Joy itself seemed embodied in the wind blowing on him out of the misty infinite while his boat rocked and swung on the waters, hanging between two worlds—that in which the wind blew, and that other dark-swaying mystery whereinto the nets to which it was tied went away down and down, gathering the harvest of the ocean. It was as if Nature called up all her motherhood to greet and embrace her long-absent son. When it came on to blow hard, as it did once and again during those summer nights, instead of making him feel small and weak in the midst of the storming forces, it gave him a glorious sense of power and unconquerable life. And when his watch was out, and the boat lay quiet, like a horse tethered and asleep in his clover-field, he too would fall asleep with a sense of simultaneously deepening and vanishing delight such as he had not at all in other conditions experienced. Ever since the poison had got into his system, and crept where it yet lay lurking in hidden corners and crannies, a noise at night would on shore startle him awake, and set his heart beating hard; but no loudest sea-noise ever woke him: the stronger the wind flapped its wings around him, the deeper he slept. When a comrade called him by name he was up at once and wide awake.

It answered also all his hopes in regard to his companions and the fisher-folk generally. Those who had really known him found the same old Malcolm, and those who had doubted him soon began to see that at least he had lost nothing in courage or skill or good-will: ere long he was even a greater favorite than before. On his part, he learned to understand far better the nature of his people, as well as the individual characters of them, for his long (but not too long) absence and return enabled him to regard them with unaccustomed, and therefore in some respects more discriminating, eyes.

Duncan's former dwelling happening to be then occupied by a lonely woman, Malcolm made arrangements with her to take them both in; so that in relation to his grandfather too something very much like the old life returned for a time—with this difference, that Duncan soon began to check himself as often as the name of his hate with its accompanying curse rose to his lips.

The factor continued very ill. He had sunk into a low state, in which his former indulgence was greatly against him. Every night the fever returned, and at length his wife was worn out with watching and waiting upon him.

And every morning Lizzy Findlay without fail called to inquire how Mr. Crathie had spent the night. To the last, while quarreling with every one of her neighbors with whom he had anything to do, he had continued kind to her, and she was more grateful than one in other trouble than hers could have understood. But[Pg 95] she did not know that an element in the origination of his kindness was the belief that it was by Malcolm she had been wronged and forsaken.

Again and again she had offered, in the humblest manner, to ease his wife's burden by sitting with him at night; and at last, finding she could hold up no longer, Mrs. Crathie consented. But even after a week she found herself still unable to resume the watching, and so, night after night, resting at home during a part of the day, Lizzy sat by the sleeping factor, and when he woke ministered to him like a daughter. Nor did even her mother object, for sickness is a wondrous reconciler. Little did the factor suspect, however, that it was partly for Malcolm's sake she nursed him, anxious to shield the youth from any possible consequences of his righteous vengeance.

While their persecutor lay thus, gradually everything at Scaurnose, and consequently at the Seaton, lapsed into its old way, and the summer of such content as before they had possessed returned to the fishers. I fear it would have proved hard for some of them, had they made effort in that direction, to join in the prayer—if prayer it may be called—put up in church for him every Sunday. What a fearful canopy the prayers that do not get beyond the atmosphere would make if they turned brown with age! Having so lately seen the factor going about like a maniac, raving at this piece of damage and that heap of dirt, the few fishers present could never help smiling when Mr. Cairns prayed for him as "the servant of God and his Church now lying grievously afflicted—persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed." Having found the fitting phrases, he seldom varied them.

Through her sorrow Lizzy had grown tender, as through her shame she had grown wise. That the factor had been much in the wrong only rendered her anxious sympathy the more eager to serve him. Knowing so well what it was to have done wrong, she was pitiful over him, and her ministrations were none the less devoted that she knew exactly how Malcolm thought and felt about him; for the affair, having taken place in open village and wide field and in the light of mid-day, and having been reported by eye-witnesses many, was everywhere perfectly known, and Malcolm therefore talked of it freely to his friends—among them both to Lizzy and her mother.

Sickness sometimes works marvelous changes, and the most marvelous on persons who to the ordinary observer seem the least liable to change. Much apparent steadfastness of nature, however, is but sluggishness, and comes from incapacity to generate change or contribute toward personal growth; and it follows that those whose nature is such can as little prevent or retard any change that has its initiative beyond them. The men who impress the world as the mightiest are those often who can the least—never those who can the most in their natural kingdom; generally those whose frontiers lie openest to the inroads of temptation, whose atmosphere is most subject to moody changes and passionate convulsions, who, while perhaps they can whisper laws to a hemisphere, can utter no decree of smallest potency as to how things shall be within themselves. Place Alexander ille Magnus beside Malcolm's friend Epictetus, ille servorum servus—take his crutch from the slave and set the hero upon his Bucephalus, but set them alone and in a desert—which will prove the great man? which the unchangeable? The question being what the man himself shall or shall not be, shall or shall not feel, shall or shall not recognize as of himself and troubling the motions of his being, Alexander will prove a mere earth-bubble, Epictetus a cavern in which pulses the tide of the eternal and infinite Sea.

But then first, when the false strength of the self-imagined great man is gone, when the want or the sickness has weakened the self-assertion which is so often mistaken for strength of individuality, when the occupations in which he formerly found a comfortable consciousness of being have lost their interest, his ambitions their glow and his consolations their color, when suffering has wasted away those upper strata of his[Pg 96] factitious consciousness, and laid bare the lower, simpler, truer deeps, of which he has never known or has forgotten the existence, then there is a hope of his commencing a new and real life. Powers then, even powers within himself, of which he knew nothing, begin to assert themselves, and the man commonly reported to possess a strong will is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed. This factor, this man of business, this despiser of humbug, to whom the scruples of a sensitive conscience were a contempt, would now lie awake in the night and weep. "Ah!" I hear it answered, "but that was the weakness caused by his illness." True; but what then had become of his strength? And was it all weakness? What if this weakness was itself a sign of returning life, not of advancing death—of the dawn of a new and genuine strength? For he wept because in the visions of his troubled brain he saw once more the cottage of his father the shepherd, with all its store of lovely nothings round which the nimbus of sanctity had gathered while he thought not of them; wept over the memory of that moment of delight when his mother kissed him for parting with his willow whistle to the sister who cried for it: he cried now in his turn, after five-and-fifty years, for not yet had the little fact done with him, not yet had the kiss of his mother lost its power on the man; wept over the sale of the pet lamb, though he had himself sold thousands of lambs since; wept over even that bush of dusty miller by the door, like the one he trampled under his horse's feet in the little yard at Scaurnose that horrible day. And oh that nest of wild bees with its combs of honey unspeakable! He used to laugh and sing then: he laughed still sometimes—he could hear how he laughed, and it sounded frightful—but he never sang. Were the tears that honored such childish memories all of weakness? Was it cause of regret that he had not been wicked enough to have become impregnable to such foolish trifles? Unable to mount a horse, unable to give an order, not caring even for his toddy, he was left at the mercy of his fundamentals: his childhood came up and claimed him, and he found the childish things he had put away better than the manly things he had adopted. It is one thing for Saint Paul and another for Mr. Worldly Wiseman to put away childish things. The ways they do it, and the things they substitute, are both so different! And now first to me, whose weakness it is to love life more than manners, and men more than their portraits, the man begins to grow interesting. Picture the dawn of innocence on a dull, whisky-drinking, commonplace soul, stained by self-indulgence and distorted by injustice! Unspeakably more interesting and lovely is to me such a dawn than the honeymoon of the most passionate of lovers, except indeed I know them such lovers that their love will out-last all the moons.

"I'm a poor creature, Lizzy," he said, turning his heavy face one midnight toward the girl as she sat half dozing, ready to start awake.

"God comfort ye, sir!" said the girl.

"He'll take good care of that," returned the factor. "What did I ever do to deserve it? There's that MacPhail, now—to think of him! Didn't I do what man could for him? Didn't I keep him about the place when all the rest were dismissed? Didn't I give him the key of the library, that he might read and improve his mind? And look what comes of it!"

"Ye mean, sir," said Lizzy, quite innocently, "'at that's the w'y ye ha'e dune wi' God, an' sae he winna heed ye?"

The factor had meant nothing in the least like it. He had merely been talking as the imps of suggestion tossed up. His logic was as sick and helpless as himself. So at that he held his peace, stung in his pride at least—perhaps in his conscience too, only he was not prepared to be rebuked by a girl like her, who had—Well, he must let it pass: how much better was he himself?

But Lizzy was loyal: she could not hear him speak so of Malcolm and hold her peace as if she agreed in his condemnation. "Ye'll ken Ma'colm better some day, sir," she said.

"Well, Lizzy," returned the sick man,[Pg 97] in a tone that but for feebleness would have been indignant, "I have heard a good deal of the way women will stand up for men that have treated them cruelly, but you to stand up for him passes!"

"He's been the best friend I ever had," said Lizzy.

"Girl! how can you sit there, and tell me so to my face?" cried the factor, his voice strengthened by the righteousness of the reproof it bore. "If it were not the dead of the night—"

"I tell ye naething but the trowth, sir," said Lizzy as the contingent threat died away. "But ye maun lie still or I maun gang for the mistress. Gien ye be the waur the morn, it'll be a' my wyte, 'cause I cudna bide to hear sic things said o' Ma'colm."

"Do ye mean to tell me," persisted her charge, heedless of her expostulation, "that the fellow who brought you to disgrace, and left you with a child you could ill provide for—and I well know never sent you a penny all the time he was away, whatever he may have done now—is the best friend you ever had?"

"Noo God forgie ye, Maister Crathie, for threipin' sic a thing!" cried Lizzy, rising as if she would leave him. "Ma'colm MacPhail's as clear o' ony sin like mine as my wee bairnie itsel'."

"Do ye daur tell me he's no the father o' that same, lass?"

"No; nor never will be the father o' ony bairn whase mither's no his wife!" said Lizzy, with burning cheeks but resolute voice.

The factor, who had risen on his elbow to look her in the face, fell back in silence, and neither of them spoke for what seemed to the watcher a long time. When she ventured to look at him, he was asleep.

He lay in one of those troubled slumbers into which weakness and exhaustion will sometimes pass very suddenly; and in that slumber he had a dream which he never forgot. He thought he had risen from his grave with an awful sound in his ears, and knew he was wanted at the judgment-seat. But he did not want to go, therefore crept into the porch of the church and hoped to be forgotten. But suddenly an angel appeared with a flaming sword, and drove him out of the churchyard away to Scaurnose, where the Judge was sitting. And as he fled in terror before the angel he fell, and the angel came and stood over him, and his sword flashed torture into his bones, but he could not and dared not rise. At last, summoning all his strength, he looked up at him and cried out, "Sir, hae mercy, for God's sake!" Instantly all the flames drew back into the sword, and the blade dropped, burning like a brand from the hilt, which the angel threw away. And lo! it was Malcolm MacPhail, and he was stooping to raise him. With that he awoke, and there was Lizzy looking down on him anxiously. "What are you looking like that for?" he asked crossly.

She did not like to tell him that she had been alarmed by his dropping asleep, and in her confusion she fell back on the last subject. "There maun be some mistak, Mr. Crathie," she said. "I wuss ye wad tell me what gars ye hate Ma'colm MacPhail as ye du."

The factor, although he seemed to himself to know well enough, was yet a little puzzled how to commence his reply; and therewith a process began that presently turned into something with which never in his life before had his inward parts been acquainted—a sort of self-examination, to wit. He said to himself, partly in the desire to justify his present dislike—he would not call it hate, as Lizzy did—that he used to get on with the lad well enough, and had never taken offence at his freedoms, making no doubt his manner came of his blood, and he could not help it, being a chip of the old block; but when he ran away with the marquis's boat, and went to the marchioness and told her lies against him, then what could he do but—dislike him?

Arrived at this point, he opened his mouth and gave the substance of what preceded it for answer to Lizzy's question. But she replied at once: "Nobody 'ill gar me believe, sir, 'at Ma'colm MacPhail ever tellt a lee again' you or onybody. I dinna believe he ever tellt a lee in 's life. Jist ye exem' him weel anent it, sir. An' for the boat, nae doobt it was makin' free to tak it; but ye ken, sir, 'at[Pg 98] hoo he was maister o' the same. It was in his chairge, an' ye ken little aboot boats yersel' or the sailin' o' them, sir."

"But it was me that engaged him again after all the servants at the House had been dismissed: he was my servant."

"That maks the thing luik waur, nae doobt," allowed Lizzy, with something of cunning. "Hoo was't at he cam to du 't ava' (of all at all), sir? Can ye min'?" she pursued.

"I discharged him."

"An' what for, gien I may mak bold to speir, sir?" she went on.

"For insolence."

"Wad ye tell me hoo he answert ye? Dinna think me meddlin', sir: I'm clear certain there's been some mistak. Ye cudna be sae guid to me an' be ill to him, ohn some mistak."

It was consoling to the conscience of the factor, in regard of his behavior to the two women, to hear his own praise for kindness from a woman's lips. He took no offence, therefore, at her persistent questioning, but told her as well and as truly as he could remember, with no more than the all-but unavoidable exaggeration with which feeling will color fact, the whole passage between Malcolm and himself concerning the sale of Kelpie, and closed with an appeal to the judgment of his listener, in which he confidently anticipated her verdict: "A most ridic'lous thing! ye can see yersel' as weel 's onybody, Lizzy. An' sic a thing to ca' an honest man like mysel' a hypocreet for! ha! ha! ha! There's no a bairn atween John o' Groat's an' the Lan's En' disna ken 'at the seller o' a horse is b'un' to reese (extol) him, an' the buyer to tak care o' himsel'. I'll no say it's jist allooable to tell a doonricht lee, but ye may come full nearer till't in horse-dealin', ohn sinned, nor in ony ither kin' o' merchandeze. It's like luve an' war, in baith which, it's weel kenned, a' thing's fair. The saw sud rin—Luve an' war an' horse-dealin'.—Divna ye see, Lizzy?"

But Lizzy did not answer, and the factor, hearing a stifled sob, started to his elbow.

"Lie still, sir!" said Lizzy. "It's naething. I was only jist thinkin' 'at that wad be the w'y 'at the father o' my bairn rizzoned wi' himsel' whan he lee'd to me."

"Hey!" said the astonished factor, and in his turn held his peace, trying to think.

Now, Lizzy for the last few months had been going to school—the same school with Malcolm, open to all comers—the only school where one is sure to be led in the direction of wisdom—and there she had been learning to some purpose, as plainly appeared before she had done with the factor.

"Whase Kirk are ye elder o', Maister Crathie?" she asked presently.

"Ow, the Kirk o' Scotlan', of coorse," answered the patient, in some surprise at her ignorance.

"Ay, ay," returned Lizzy; "but whase aucht (owning, property) is 't?"

"Ow, whase but the Redeemer's?"

"An' div ye think, Mr. Crathie, 'at gien Jesus Christ had had a horse to sell, he wad hae hidden frae him 'at wad buy ae hair o' a fau't 'at the beast hed? Wad he no hae dune till's neiper as he wad hae his neiper du to him?"

"Lassie! lassie! tak care hoo ye even Him to sic-like as hiz (us). What wad He hae to du wi' horseflesh?"

Lizzy held her peace. Here was no room for argument. He had flung the door of his conscience in the face of her who woke it. But it was too late, for the word was in already. Oh that false reverence which men substitute for adoring obedience, and wherewith they reprove the childlike spirit that does not know another kingdom than that of God and that of Mammon! God never gave man thing to do concerning which it were irreverent to ponder how the Son of God would have done it.

But, I say, the word was in, and, partly no doubt from its following so close upon the dream the factor had had, was potent in its operation. He fell a-thinking, and a-thinking more honestly than he had thought for many a day. And presently it was revealed to him that, if he were in the horse-market wanting to buy, and a man there who had to sell said to him, "He wadna du for you, sir: ye wad be tired o' 'im in a week," he would never remark, "What a fool the fellow[Pg 99] is!" but, "Weel, noo, I ca' that neiborly!" He did not get quite so far just then as to see that every man to whom he might want to sell a horse was as much his neighbor as his own brother; nor, indeed, if he had got as far, would it have indicated much progress in honesty, seeing he would at any time, when needful and possible, have cheated that brother in the matter of a horse as certainly as he would a Patagonian or Chinaman. But the warped glass of a bad maxim had at least been cracked in his window.

The peacemaker sat in silence the rest of the night, but the factor's sleep was broken, and at times he wandered. He was not so well the next day, and his wife, gathering that Lizzy had been talking, and herself feeling better, would not allow her to sit up with him any more.

Days and days passed, and still Malcolm had no word from Lenorme, and was getting hopeless in respect to that quarter of possible aid. But so long as Florimel could content herself with the quiet of Lossie House, there was time to wait, he said to himself. She was not idle, and that was promising. Every day she rode out with Stoat. Now and then she would make a call in the neighborhood, and, apparently to trouble Malcolm, took care to let him know that on one of these occasions her call had been upon Mrs. Stewart. One thing he did feel was, that she made no renewal of her friendship with his grandfather: she had, alas! outgrown the girlish fancy. Poor Duncan took it much to heart. She saw more of the minister and his wife—who both flattered her—than anybody else, and was expecting the arrival of Lady Bellair and Lord Liftore with the utmost impatience. They, for their part, were making the journey by the easiest possible stages, tacking and veering, and visiting every one of their friends that lay between London and Lossie: they thought to give Florimel the little lesson that, though they accepted her invitation, they had plenty of friends in the world besides her ladyship, and were not dying to see her.

One evening, Malcolm, as he left the grounds of Mr. Morrison, on whom he had been calling, saw a traveling-carriage pass toward Portlossie, and something liker fear laid hold of his heart than he had ever felt except when Florimel and he on the night of the storm took her father for Lord Gernon the wizard. As soon as he reached certain available fields, he sent Kelpie tearing across them, dodged through a fir wood, and came out on the road half a mile in front of the carriage: as again it passed him he saw that his fears were facts, for in it sat the bold-faced countess and the mean-hearted lord. Something must be done at last, and until it was done good watch must be kept.

I must here note that during this time of hoping and waiting Malcolm had attended to another matter of importance. Over every element influencing his life, his family, his dependants, his property, he desired to possess a lawful, honest command: where he had to render account he would be head. Therefore, through Mr. Soutar's London agent, to whom he sent up Davy, and whom he brought acquainted with Merton and his former landlady at the curiosity-shop, he had discovered a good deal about Mrs. Catanach from her London associates, among them the herb-doctor and his little boy who had watched Davy; and he had now almost completed an outline of evidence which, grounded on that of Rose, might be used against Mrs. Catanach at any moment. He had also set inquiries on foot in the track of Caley's antecedents, and had discovered more than the acquaintance between her and Mrs. Catanach. Also he had arranged that Hodges, the man who had lost his leg through his cruelty to Kelpie, should leave for Duff Harbor as soon as possible after his discharge from the hospital. He was determined to crush the evil powers which had been ravaging his little world.

CHAPTER LX.

AN OFFERING.

Clementina was always ready to accord any reasonable request Florimel could make of her; but her letter lifted[Pg 100] such a weight from her heart and life that she would now have done whatever she desired, reasonable or unreasonable, provided only it was honest. She had no difficulty in accepting Florimel's explanation that her sudden disappearance was but a breaking of the social jail, the flight of the weary bird from its foreign cage back to the country of its nest; and that same morning she called upon Demon. The hound, feared and neglected, was rejoiced to see her, came when she called him, and received her caresses: there was no ground for dreading his company. It was a long journey, but if it had been across a desert instead of through her own country, the hope that lay at the end of it would have made it more than pleasant. She, as well as Lady Bellair, had friends upon the way, but no desire either to lengthen the journey or shorten its tedium by visiting them.

The letter would have found her at Wastbeach instead of London had not the society and instructions of the schoolmaster detained her a willing prisoner to its heat and glare and dust. Him only in all London must she see to bid good-bye. To Camden Town therefore she went that same evening, when his work would be over for the day. As usual now, she was shown into his room—his only one. As usual also, she found him poring over his Greek Testament. The gracious, graceful woman looked lovelily strange in that mean chamber—like an opal in a brass ring. There was no such contrast between the room and its occupant. His bodily presence was too weak to "stick fiery off" from its surroundings, and to the eye that saw through the bodily presence to the inherent grandeur, that grandeur suggested no discrepancy, being of the kind that lifts everything to its own level, casts the mantle of its own radiance around its surroundings. Still, to the eye of love and reverence it was not pleasant to see him in such entourage, and now that Clementina was going to leave him, the ministering spirit that dwelt in the woman was troubled.

"Ah!" he said, and rose as she entered, "this is then the angel of my deliverance!" But with such a smile he did not look as if he had much to be delivered from. "You see," he went on, "old man as I am, and peaceful, the summer will lay hold upon me. She stretches out a long arm into this desert of houses and stones, and sets me longing after the green fields and the living air—it seems dead here—and the face of God, as much as one may behold of the Infinite through the revealing veil of earth and sky and sea. Shall I confess my weakness, my poverty of spirit, my covetousness after the visual? I was even getting a little tired of that glorious God-and-man lover, Saul of Tarsus: no, not of him, never of him, only of his shadow in his words. Yet perhaps—yes, I think so—it is God alone of whom a man can never get tired. Well, no matter: tired I was, when lo! here comes my pupil, with more of God in her face than all the worlds and their skies He ever made."

"I would my heart were as full of Him too, then, sir," answered Clementina. "But if I am anything of a comfort to you, I am more than glad; therefore the more sorry to tell you that I am going to leave you, though for a little while only, I trust."

"You do not take me by surprise, my lady. I have of course been looking forward for some time to my loss and your gain. The world is full of little deaths—deaths of all sorts and sizes, rather let me say. For this one I was prepared. The good summer-land calls you to its bosom, and you must go."

"Come with me," cried Clementina, her eyes eager with the light of the sudden thought, while her heart reproached her grievously that only now first had it come to her.

"A man must not leave the most irksome work for the most peaceful pleasure," answered the schoolmaster. "I am able to live—yes, and do my work—without you, my lady," he added with a smile, "though I shall miss you sorely."

"But you do not know where I want you to come," she said.

"What difference can that make, my lady, except indeed in the amount of[Pg 101] pleasure to be refused, seeing this is not a matter of choice? I must be with the children whom I have engaged to teach, and whose parents pay me for my labor—not with those who, besides, can do well without me."

"I cannot, sir—not for long at least."

"What! not with Malcolm to supply my place?"

Clementina blushed, but only like a white rose. She did not turn her head aside; she did not lower their lids to veil the light she felt mount into her eyes; she looked him gently in the face as before, and her aspect of entreaty did not change. "Ah! do not be unkind, master," she said.

"Unkind!" he repeated. "You know I am not. I have more kindness in my heart than any lips can tell. You do not know, you could not yet imagine, the half of what I hope of and for and from you."

"I am going to see Malcolm," she said with a little sigh. "That is, I am going to visit Lady Lossie at her place in Scotland—your own old home, where so many must love you. Can't you come? I shall be traveling alone, quite alone, except my servants."

A shadow came over the schoolmaster's face: "You do not think, my lady, or you would not press me. It pains me that you do not see at once it would be dishonest to go without timely notice to my pupils, and to the public too. But, beyond that quite, I never do anything of myself. I go not where I wish, but where I seem to be called or sent. I never even wish much, except when I pray to Him in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. After what He wants to give me I am wishing all day long. I used to build many castles, not without a beauty of their own—that was when I had less understanding—now I leave them to God to build for me: He does it better, and they last longer. See now, this very hour, when I needed help, could I have contrived a more lovely annihilation of the monotony that threatened to invade my weary spirit than this inroad of light in the person of my Lady Clementina? Nor will He allow me to get overwearied with vain efforts. I do not think He will keep me here long, for I find I cannot do much for these children. They are but some of His many pagans—not yet quite ready to receive Christianity, I think—not like children with some of the old seeds of the truth buried in them, that want to be turned up nearer to the light. This ministration I take to be more for my good than theirs—a little trial of faith and patience for me—a stony corner of the lovely valley of humiliation to cross. True, I might be happier where I could hear the larks, but I do not know that anywhere have I been more peaceful than in this little room, on which I see you so often cast round your eyes curiously, perhaps pitifully, my lady."

"It is not at all a fit place for you," said Clementina with a touch of indignation.

"Softly, my lady, lest, without knowing it, your love should make you sin. Who set thee, I pray, for a guardian angel over my welfare? I could scarce have a lovelier, true; but where is thy brevet? No, my lady: it is a greater than thou that sets me the bounds of my habitation. Perhaps He may give me a palace one day. If I might choose, it would be things that belong to a cottage—the whiteness and the greenness and the sweet odors of cleanliness. But the Father has decreed for His children that they shall know the thing that is neither their ideal nor His. Who can imagine how in this respect things looked to our Lord when He came and found so little faith on the earth? But perhaps, my lady, you would not pity my present condition so much if you had seen the cottage in which I was born, and where my father and mother loved each other, and died happier than on their wedding-day. There I was happy too until their loving ambition decreed that I should be a scholar and a clergyman. Not before then did I ever know anything worthy the name of trouble. A little cold and a little hunger at times, and not a little restlessness always, was all. But then—ah, then my troubles began. Yet God, who bringeth light out of darkness, hath[Pg 102] brought good even out of my weakness and presumption and half-unconscious falsehood. When do you go?"

"To-morrow morning, as I purpose."

"Then God be with thee! He is with thee, only my prayer is that thou mayst know it. He is with me, and I know it. He does not find this chamber too mean or dingy or unclean to let me know Him near me in it."

"Tell me one thing before I go," said Clementina: "are we not commanded to bear each other's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ? I read it to-day."

"Then why ask me?"

"For another question: does not that involve the command to those who have burdens that they should allow others to bear them?"

"Surely, my lady. But I have no burden to let you bear."

"Why should I have everything and you nothing? Answer me that."

"My lady, I have millions more than you, for I have been gathering the crumbs under my Master's table for thirty years."

"You are a king," answered Clementina. "But a king needs a handmaiden somewhere in his house: that let me be in yours. No, I will be proud, and assert my rights: I am your daughter. If I am not, why am I here? Do you not remember telling me that the adoption of God meant a closer relation than any other fatherhood, even His own first fatherhood, could signify? You cannot cast me off if you would. Why should you be poor when I am rich? You are poor: you cannot deny it," she concluded with a serious playfulness.

"I will not deny my privileges," said the schoolmaster, with a smile such as might have acknowledged the possession of some exquisite and envied rarity.

"I believe," insisted Clementina, "you are just as poor as the apostle Paul when he sat down to make a tent, or as our Lord himself after he gave up carpentering."

"You are wrong there, my lady. I am not so poor as they must often have been."

"But I don't know how long I may be away, and you may fall ill, or—or—see some—some book you want very much, or—"

"I never do," said the schoolmaster.

"What! never see a book you want to have?"

"No, not now. I have my Greek Testament, my Plato and my Shakespeare, and one or two little books besides whose wisdom I have not yet quite exhausted."

"I can't bear it!" cried Clementina, almost on the point of weeping. "You will not let me near you. You put out an arm as long as the summer's, and push me away from you. Let me be your servant." As she spoke she rose, and walking softly up to him where he sat, kneeled at his knees and held out suppliantly a little bag of white silk tied with crimson. "Take it—father," she said, hesitating, and bringing the word out with an effort: "take your daughter's offering—a poor thing to show her love, but something to ease her heart."

He took it, and weighed it up and down in his hand with an amused smile, but his eyes full of tears. It was heavy. He opened it. A chair was within his reach: he emptied it on the seat of it, and laughed with merry delight as its contents came tumbling out. "I never saw so much gold in my life if it were all taken together," he said. "What beautiful stuff it is! But I don't want it, my dear. It would but trouble me." And as he spoke he began to put it in the bag again. "You will want it for your journey," he said.

"I have plenty in my reticule," she answered. "That is a mere nothing to what I could have to-morrow morning for writing a cheque. I am afraid I am very rich. It is such a shame! But I can't well help it. You must teach me how to become poor. Tell me true: how much money have you?" She said this with such an earnest look of simple love that the schoolmaster made haste to rise that he might conceal his growing emotion.

"Rise, my dear lady," he said as he rose himself, "and I will show you." He gave her his hand, and she obeyed, but troubled and disappointed, and so[Pg 103] stood looking after him while he went to a drawer. Thence, searching in a corner of it, he brought a half-sovereign, a few shillings and some coppers, and held them out to her on his hand with the smile of one who has proved his point. "There!" he said, "do you think Paul would have stopped preaching to make a tent so long as he had as much as that in his pocket? I shall have more on Saturday, and I always carry a month's rent in my good old watch, for which I never had much use, and now have less than ever."

Clementina had been struggling with herself: now she burst into tears.

"Why, what a misspending of precious sorrow!" exclaimed the schoolmaster. "Do you think because a man has not a gold-mine he must die of hunger? I once heard of a sparrow that never had a worm left for the morrow, and died a happy death notwithstanding." As he spoke he took her handkerchief from her hand and dried her tears with it. But he had enough ado to keep his own back. "Because I won't take a bagful of gold from you when I don't want it," he went on, "do you think I should let myself starve without coming to you? I promise you I will let you know—come to you if I can—the moment I get too hungry to do my work well and have no money left. Should I think it a disgrace to take money from you? That would show a poverty of spirit such as I hope never to fall into. My sole reason for refusing now is that I do not need it."

But for all his loving words and assurances Clementina could not stay her tears. She was not ready to weep, but now her eyes were as a fountain.

"See, then, for your tears are hard to bear, my daughter," he said, "I will take one of these golden ministers, and if it has flown from me ere you come, seeing that, like the raven, it will not return if once I let it go, I will ask you for another. It may be God's will that you should feed me for a time."

"Like one of Elijah's ravens," said Clementina, with an attempted laugh that was really a sob.

"Like a dove whose wings are covered with silver and her feathers with yellow gold," said the schoolmaster.

A moment of silence followed, broken only by Clementina's failures in quieting herself.

"To me," he resumed, "the sweetest fountain of money is the hand of love, but a man has no right to take it from that fountain except he is in want of it. I am not. True, I go somewhat bare, my lady; but what is that when my Lord would have it so?"

He opened again the bag, and slowly, reverentially indeed, drew from it one of the new sovereigns with which it was filled. He put it in a waistcoat pocket and laid the bag on the table.

"But your clothes are shabby, sir," said Clementina, looking at him with a sad little shake of the head.

"Are they?" he returned, and looked down at his lower garments, reddening and anxious. "I did not think they were more than a little rubbed, but they shine somewhat," he said. "They are indeed polished by use," he went on with a troubled little laugh: "but they have no holes yet—at least none that are visible," he corrected. "If you tell me, my lady, if you honestly tell me, that my garments"—and he looked at the sleeve of his coat, drawing back his head from it to see it better—"are unsightly, I will take of your money and buy me a new suit." Over his coat-sleeve he regarded her, questioning.

"Everything about you is beautiful," she burst out. "You want nothing but a body that lets the light through." She took the hand still raised in his survey of his sleeve, pressed it to her lips, and walked, with even more than her wonted state, slowly from the room.

He took the bag of gold from the table and followed her down the stair. Her chariot was waiting her at the door. He handed her in, and laid the bag on the little seat in front.

"Will you tell him to drive home?" she said with a firm voice, and a smile which if any one care to understand let him read Spenser's fortieth sonnet. And so they parted. The coachman took the[Pg 104] queer, shabby, un-London-like man for a fortune-teller his lady was in the habit of consulting, and paid homage to his power with the handle of his whip as he drove away. The schoolmaster returned to his room—not to his Plato, not even to Saul of Tarsus, but to the Lord himself.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

SOME LAST WORDS FROM SAINTE-BEUVE.

It is seven years since the world of letters lost the prince of critics, the last of the critics. His unfinished and unpublished manuscripts were eagerly demanded and devoured; while obituaries, notices, reminiscences and those analyses which the French term appréciations rained in from various quarters. The latest of these that deserves attention was an outline of Saint-Beuve's life and literary career by the Vicomte d'Haussonville, in which, with an affectation of impartiality and fairness, every page was streaked with malice; imperfect justice was done to Sainte-Beuve's intellect; his influence and reputation were understated; and a picture was given of him as a man which could not but be disagreeable and disappointing to the vast number who admired him as a writer. In regard to the first two points, ill-nature and inaccuracy can do no harm: Sainte-Beuve's fame and ability are perfectly well known to the reading public of to-day, and the opinion of posterity will rest upon his own merits rather than on the statements of any biographer, as he is one of the authors whose writings are sure to be more read than what other people write about them. The unpleasant personal impression is not so easily dismissed: however exaggerated we may be disposed to think it, the reflection occurs, "How this man was feared!" The appearance of the notice several years after Sainte-Beuve's death strengthens this conviction: M. d'Haussonville waited until his subject should be quite cold before he ventured to touch him.

The causes of this dread and dislike are not to be found in Sainte-Beuve's voluminous works, nor have I met with any evidence of it in the writings of his literary contemporaries. He obviously held that it is a critic's duty to be just before he is generous, and there may be a lack of geniality in his praise, though it is not given grudgingly; but I cannot recall an instance of literary spite in the large proportion of his writings with which I am familiar. His judgments are often severe, never harsh: he frequently dealt in satire, rarely, as far as my memory serves, in sarcasm, and he condemns irony as one of the least intelligent dispositions of the mind. The only case in which I remember having suspected Sainte-Beuve of ill-nature was in a notice of J. J. Ampère printed in the Revue des Deux Mondes shortly after the latter's death; but a person who had known Ampère long and well, and on the friendliest terms, declared that it gave an entirely fair description of the man, who, full of talent and amiability as he was, had many weaknesses. Two pleas only can justify disinterring and gibbeting an author's private life—either his having done the same by others, or his having made the public the confidant of his individual experience. Few writers have intruded their own personality upon their readers less than Sainte-Beuve has done: the poems and novels of his youth, which won fervent admiration from the literary leaders of that day, De Vigny, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, are now forgotten: he is known to readers of the last half century by a series of critical and biographical essays extending from 1823 or 1824 to 1870, which combine every attribute[Pg 105] of perfect criticism except enthusiasm. The most prominent feature of his method is the conscientiousness with which he credits the person upon whom he passes judgment with every particle of worth which can be extracted from his writings, acts or sayings: he adopts as the basis of criticism the acknowledgment of whatever merit may exist in the subject of consideration; and his talent and patience for sifting the grain from the chaff are remarkable and admirable. An author who has left some forty volumes conceived in this spirit should have been safe against an effusion of spleen in his biographer. I am not assailing the fidelity of M. d'Haussonville's portrait—of which I have no means of judging—but the temper in which it is executed, which can be judged without difficulty. Besides the injustice already mentioned, it is disfigured by tittle-tattle, which tends to render the original ridiculous and repulsive, but does not add one whit to our knowledge of Sainte-Beuve as a man or an author.

A defence of Sainte-Beuve is not within the purpose of the present article; but it was impossible for one who has known him favorably for twenty years through his works and the testimony of his most distinguished literary compeers to speak of him at all without protesting against the detraction to which his memory has been subjected. Two small posthumous volumes have lately been issued in France,[C] revealing qualities which might expose the dead man to a mean revenge, though to most readers they will have a delightful freshness unspoiled by any bitter flavor. They consist of a series of notes on all sorts of subjects, literary, dramatic, religious and political, one of them being actually made up of the jottings in his later notebooks, while the other contains the memoranda of a sort of high-class gossip with which Sainte-Beuve supplied a friend, the editor of La Revue Suisse, during the years 1843-45. These were not to be published as they stood, but to be used by the editor, M. Juste Olivier, as he should think best: they are fragmentary, mere bits of raw material—if any product of that accomplished brain can be so termed—to be worked up by another hand. They were qualified by marginal observations, such as "This is for you alone," "This is rather strong," and they were to be absolutely anonymous, the author allowing himself the luxury of free speech, of writing exactly as he thought and felt; in short, of trusting his indiscretion to M. Olivier's discretion. The latter used his judgment independently; Sainte-Beuve's views and comments often became merely one ingredient in an article for which others supplied the rest; and the editor kneaded the whole into shape to his own liking. But the MSS. remained intact, and were confided by M. Olivier to M. Jules Troubat, Sainte-Beuve's private secretary and editor, who has published them in their integrity, he tells us, with the exception of "a few indispensable suppressions." The other volume, as we have said, is composed of his notebooks. These last were intended to take the place of memoirs by Sainte-Beuve himself, who wrote a short preface, under the name of M. Troubat, destined for a larger volume to appear after his death. He published, however, the greater part of those which he had already collected in vol. ii. of the Causeries de Lundi: the present series contains the notes which accumulated subsequently. M. Troubat has given them to the world as they stood. Both books abound in the characteristics of the author's style—good sense, moderation, perception, discrimination, delicacy, sparkle, unerring taste, as well as judgment in matters of intelligence. A parcel of disconnected passages cannot possess the flow and finish of a complete essay, but each bit has the clearness, incisiveness and smooth polish of his native wit. They give us Sainte-Beuve's first impression, thought, mental impulse, about daily events regarding which he sometimes afterward modified his opinion. Not often, however, for he had, if not precisely the prophetic vision which belongs to genius or minds illuminated by enthusiasm or sympathy, that keen far-sightedness which recognizes at a distance[Pg 106] rather than foresees the coming event or man. He tells a quantity of anecdotes, and he had exactly the sort of humor and absence of tenderness for human weakness which perceives the point that makes a story good in the greatest variety of speeches and situations. The key to the dislike and fear with which some people must have regarded him while living lies probably in just this appreciation. It is vain to assert that humor is necessarily kindly, or the adjectives "grim" and "savage" would not so often be tacked to it. Nobody could have hoped that friendship would blind Sainte-Beuve to an absurdity: on the other hand, even his enemies might count on his recognition if they had said a good thing, and his not spoiling it in the repetition, as too many friends do. This produced an impartiality in his verdicts which is the moral essence of criticism, but perhaps the most trying quality to the subject of it: he says himself that he had irritated and envenomed more people by his praise than by his blame. He had not a high opinion of human nature, which is curiously illustrated by his female portraits: when there has been only a doubt of a woman's virtue, he never gives her the benefit of the doubt; when there has not been even the suspicion of a slip, he presumes that she kept her secrets better than most people do. He was sensitive to the accusation of cynicism, and resented extremely an article in L'Union of June, 1855, in which he was set down as having not only a skeptical mind, but a skeptical heart; which was no doubt very nearly true. Yet he was on his guard against his natural cynicism in his literary judgments at least, as one need but glance over them to see. In the Cahiers he cites an expression of his fair friend Madame d'Arbonville: "How many good things there are besides the things which we like! We ought to make room within ourselves for a certain opposite;" and he adds that this should be the motto of a liberal and intelligent critic. These convictions helped to make his criticism as admirable, as invaluable, as it is; but the sharpness from which his literary work is free makes his private observations on men and things more entertaining. There are few people so well-natured as not to enjoy the peculiar pungency which gives many of the passages in the two volumes before us their relish: now and then it is as if we had got hold of the cruets which were to season a whole article. There is a batch of anecdotes about Lamartine, whose conspicuous gifts and position put his puerile vanity in relief; and that vanity Sainte-Beuve never spared. Lamartine set the fashion of his own idolatry by constituting himself the high priest; adulation was not enough—he demanded adoration; and he received it. He had a habit of contemplating himself from an objective but highly-idealizing point of view, best expressed by saying that he had a hero-worship for himself: his memoirs and other autobiographical writings are full of it, and in his intercourse it perpetually overflowed. "That is the brow they have tried to bend to the dust!" he exclaimed, standing before his own likeness in Ary Scheffer's studio. Lord Houghton, among his many good stories, had one of spending an evening at Lamartine's in Paris with a circle of celebrities. Alfred de Vigny, who had been out of town, presented himself. "Welcome back!" said Lamartine magnificently. "You come from the provinces: do they admire us down there?"—"They adore you," replied De Vigny with a bow. The conversation was a prolonged paean to the host, with choral strophe and antistrophe. One of the party began to rehearse the aspects in which Lamartine was the greatest man in France—"As a poet, as an orator, as an historian, as a statesman;" and as he paused, "And as a soldier," added Lamartine with a sublime gesture, "if ever France shall need him." This may have been the country neighbor who, we learn from Sainte-Beuve, pronounced Lamartine to be Fénelon without his didacticism, Rousseau without his sophistry, Mirabeau without his incendiary notions. Still, there were asides in the dialogue. One evening, the week before the overthrow of the provisional government[Pg 107] of which Lamartine was president, he had a crowded reception, and, notwithstanding the failure and imminent downfall of his administration, he was radiant with satisfaction. "What can M. de Lamartine have to be so pleased about?" said one of his friends to another. "He is pleased with himself," was the reply.—"One of those speeches," observes Sainte-Beuve, "which only friends find to make." But Lamartine was by no means solitary in this infatuation. Sainte-Beuve remarks that "Nothing is so common in our days: some think themselves God, some the Son of God, some archangels. Pierre Leroux thinks himself the first, De Vigny the last: Lamartine is a good prince—he is satisfied to be a seraph."

These books give us daily glimpses of Paris thirty years ago, of that incessant mental movement, inquiry, desire for novelty and vivacity of transient interest which dazzle the brain as the scintillation of the sun upon the unstable waves does the eye. In all great cities, quite as much as in villages, there is a topic which for the moment occupies everybody, and which cannot be escaped, whether you enter a drawing-room, pick up a newspaper or rush into the street: the chief difference is, that in the great cities it changes oftener—"every fortnight here," says Sainte-Beuve of Paris. The history of many a nine days' wonder may be gathered from the Chroniques: we can mark the first effect of occurrences startling at the time, some of which are now wholly forgotten, while others have become historical; we witness the appearance of new divinities who have since found their pedestals, niches or obscure corners. Among these was Ponsard, chiefly known in this country, to those who remember Mademoiselle Rachel's brief, gleaming transit, as the author of Horace et Lydie, a light, bright, graceful piece based upon Horace's "Donec gratus eram tibi."

M. Ponsard, who was from the south of France, arrived in Paris in 1843 with a tragedy called Lucrèce, which had been in his pocket for three years. It was read first at the house of the actor Bocage before a party of artists, actors and men of letters such as Paris alone can bring together. The littérateurs gave their opinion with caution and an oracular ambiguity which did not commit them too much: Gautier, on being asked how he liked it, replied, "It did not put me to sleep;" but the sculptor Préault, not having a literary reputation at stake, declared that if there were a "Roman prize" for tragedy (as there is for music and the fine arts, entitling the fortunate competitor to four years' travel and study in classic lands at the expense of the government) the author would set out on the morrow for the Eternal City. The play was read again a week or two afterward in the drawing-room of the Comtesse d'Agoult, the beautiful, gifted, reckless friend of Lizst's youth, and mother of the wife of Von Bulow and Wagner. The success was complete. Sainte-Beuve was again present; and Lamartine was among the audience full of admiration: the poor young poet could not nerve himself to come. The play was read by Bocage, who took the principal part, that of Brutus, when it was brought out at the Odéon. The chaste Lucretia was played by Madame Dorval, whose strength lay in parts of a different kind, and who announced her new character to a friend with the comment, "I only play women of virtue now-a-days." Reports of the new tragedy, which had been heard only in secret session, soon got about Paris, and excited intense curiosity and impatience; one of the daily papers published a scene from Lucrèce; the sale was immense; everybody praised it to the skies, even members of the Academy. The next day the hoax came out: a clever but third-rate writer, M. Méry, had made April fools of the wits of Paris. The piece itself was soon performed, and made what is called in this country an immense sensation: the theatre, long out of favor, was crowded every night; the papers were full of it every morning; it was the topic about which everybody talked. Authors who had lately written less popular plays were somewhat envious and spiteful; Victor Hugo pronounced Lucrèce to be Livy versified; Dumas repeated[Pg 108] (or invented) the speech of an enthusiastic notary, who exclaimed, "What a piece! Not one of my clerks could have written it." Madame de Girardin had just brought out her tragedy of Judith at the Théâtre Français, with the powerful support of Rachel in the principal character: the drama, when read by Rachel and Madame de Girardin (whose beauty, wit and social position gave her during her whole life a fictitious rank in a certain set, of which none were better aware than the members of it) in Madame Récamier's drawing-room, had produced a better effect than it did upon the stage, where it was considered a respectable failure. Madame de Girardin could not control or conceal her chagrin, and meeting M. Ponsard one evening at the Duchesse de Grammont's, declined to have him presented to her. He took his honors so quietly—so tamely in the opinion of some people—that Madame Dorval exhorted him: "Wake up! wake up! you look like a hen that has hatched an eagle's egg." Since the Augustan age of French literature, since Corneille and Racine, a really fine tragedy on a classic subject had been unknown, and the romantic reaction was then at its height. The moral view of Lucrèce was a new and important element of success. "The religious feeling of the Roman matron, the inviolability of the domestic hearth, are these not new? do not they count for much?" observed the virtuous philosopher Ballanche, the devoted, unselfish friend of Madame Récamier. Sainte-Beuve was greatly impressed by the nobility of the characters and treatment, and after pointing out its beauties and shortcomings, set the seal to his encomium by affirming that the secret of the power of Lucrèce was that it had soul.

The extraordinary favor with which this play was received marked an epoch in a small way, a return to antique ideas and themes, to more elevated subjects and modes of dealing with them. Six weeks after its appearance Sainte-Beuve writes: "We have always been rather apish in France: the Grecian, Roman and biblical tragedies which every day now brings forth are innumerable. Who will deliver me from these Greeks and Romans? Here we are overrun by them again after forty years' insurrection, and by the Hebrews to boot." The high-water mark of the author's popularity was the publication of a trifle called the Anti-Lucrèce, which was sold in the purlieus of the Odéon: next day there was a rumor that a second Anti-Lucrèce was in preparation. But the tide had turned: six months later, when the theatre reopened after the summer vacation with the same tragedy, Sainte-Beuve records: "Lucrèce has reappeared only to die, not by the poignard, but of languor, coldness, premature old age. It is frightful how little and how fast we live in these times—works as well as men. We survive ourselves and our children: the generations are turned upside down. Here is a piece which scarcely six months ago all Paris ran to hear without being asked:... now they are tired of it already, and can find nothing in it: it is like last year's snow." The death-blow of the tragedy was given, Sainte-Beuve says, not by the dagger, but by a luckless blunder of the actor who played Lucretia's father, and who, instead of saying, L'assassin pâlissant ("The assassin turning pale,") said, L'assassin polisson ("The scamp of an assassin"); which set everybody laughing; and that was the end of it.

M. Ponsard might console himself, if he liked, by the reflection that his play, if not immortal, had killed his fair rival's Judith and swallowed up Victor Hugo's Burgraves, which had been acted at the Théâtre Français a month before Lucrèce was first produced. Regarding the former, Sainte-Beuve shows unwonted tenderness or policy. "Never let me be too epigrammatic about Madame de Girardin," he wrote to M. Olivier: "I would not seem to play the traitor to her smiles;" though in reference to a sharp encounter between her and Jules Janin he hints that she has claws of her own. He does not deny himself the pleasure of mentioning Victor Hugo's little weaknesses. At the first three representations of Les Burgraves the theatre was packed with the author's friends: on the fourth[Pg 109] a less partial public hissed to that degree that the curtain was dropped, and thenceforward each night was stormier until the play was withdrawn. Hugo could not bring himself to allow that he had been hissed, and, being behind the scenes, said to the actors, with the fatal sibilation whistling through the house, "They are interrupting my play" (On trouble ma pièce); which became a byword with these wicked wits. Sainte-Beuve, with his infallible instinct of wherein dwelt the vital greatness or defect of a production, characterizes the piece as an exaggeration. He admits that it has talent, especially in the preface, but adds, "Hugo sees all things larger than life: they look black to him—in Ruy Blas they looked red. But there is grandeur in the Burgraves: he alone, or Chateaubriand, could have written the introduction.... The banks of the Rhine are not so lofty and thunder-riven as he makes out, nor is Thessaly so black, nor Notre Dame so enormous, but more elegant, as may be seen from the pavement. But this is the defect of his eye."

Amidst these theatrical diversions the chronicler alludes to the fashionable preaching which occupied the gay world at hours when playhouses and drawing-rooms were not open. There was a religious revival going on in Paris almost equal to that which Moody and Sankey have produced here. "During Passion Week" (1843) "the crowd in all the churches, but at Notre Dame particularly, was prodigious. M. de Ravignan preached three times a day—at one o'clock for the women of the gay world, in the evening for the men, at other hours for the workingmen. He adapted his sermons to the different classes: to the women of the world he spoke as a man who knows the world and has belonged to it. They rushed, they crowded, they wept. I do not know how many communicants there were at Easter, but I believe the figure has not been so high for fifty years." At Advent of the same year the same scenes were repeated, with the Abbé Lacordaire in the pulpit. This excitement, and the debates in the Chamber on the subject of the theological lectures at the Sorbonne and College of France, call forth some excellent pages regarding the condition of Catholicism in France and the Gallican Church, and a brief, rapid review of the causes of the decline of the latter, which Sainte-Beuve asserts (more than thirty years ago) to be defunct. "Gallicanism, the noblest child of Catholicism, is dead before his father, who in his dotage remains obstinately faithful to his principles.... Gallicanism in its dissolution left a vast patrimony: the Jesuits may grab a huge bit of it, but the bulk will be diminished and disseminated.... At the rate things are going, Catholicism is tending to become a sect." The insight of this is as remarkable as the expression. Some years afterward, marking the progress of liberal ideas in religion, he says: "Men's conceptions of God are constantly changing. What was the atheism of yesterday will be the deism of to-morrow."

There are few Frenchman of any calling who are indifferent to politics, and the men of letters almost without exception are interested spectators when not actors in public affairs. From 1843 to 1845, the period of the Chroniques, was a dead calm in the political horizon of France, undisturbed by the little distant cloud of warfare in Algiers: the Legitimists worked up farcical fermentations which had no more body or head than those of the present day, although the chances of the party were rather better. The duke of Bordeaux (as the Comte de Chambord was then called) made an excursion to England one Christmas, which was seized as an occasion, or more probably was a preconcerted signal, for a dreary little demonstration of loyalty on the part of his adherents, who crossed over to pay their respects to him in London: by great arithmetical efforts their number was added up and made to amount to four hundred, though whether so many really went was doubted. There were a few old noblemen of great family: Berryer the eminent lawyer and Chateaubriand were the only names of individual distinction in the list, and the chief results were that Queen Victoria was[Pg 110] annoyed (some of the Orleans family being on a visit to her at the time) and intimated her annoyance, and that the superb Chateaubriand was spoken of in the English newspapers as "the good old man;" which Sainte-Beuve enjoyed extremely.

The Cahiers extend from 1847 to 1869, including the vicissitudes which brought about the Second Empire, whose annihilation Sainte-Beuve died half a year too soon to witness. In January, 1848, he felt the storm brewing in the air, though he little guessed from what quarter it would come nor on whose head it would burst. On the revolution of the 24th of February he writes: "What events! what a dream! I was prepared for much, but not so soon, nor for this.... I am tempted to believe in the nullity of every judgment, my own in particular—I who make it a business to judge others, and am so short-sighted.... The future will disclose what no one can foresee. There is no use in talking of ordinary wisdom and prudence: they have been utterly at fault. Guizot, the historian-philosopher, has turned out more stupid than a Polignac: Utopia and the poet's dream, on the contrary, have become facts and reality. I forgive Lamartine everything: he has been great during these days, and done honor to the poetic nature." But afterward, in looking back to the poet's reign, he grew satirical: "It was in the time of the good provisional government, which did so many things and left so many undone. The fortunes of France crumbled to pieces in a fortnight, but it was under the invocation of equality and fraternity. As to liberty, it only existed for madmen, and the wise took good care to make no use of it. 'The great folk are terribly scared,' said my portress, but the small fry triumphed: it was their turn. So much had never been said about work before, and so little was never done. People walked about all day, planted liberty-trees at every street-corner, illuminated willy-nilly, and perorated in the clubs and squares until midnight. The Exchange rang with disasters in the morning: in the evening it sparkled with lanterns and fireworks. It was the gayest anarchy for the lower classes of Paris, who had no police and looked after themselves. The street-boys ran about with flags; workmen without work, but paid nevertheless, walked in perpetual procession; the demireps had kicked over the traces, and on the sidewalks the most virtuous fellow-citizenesses were hugged without ceremony: it must be added that they did not resent it too much. The grisettes, having nothing to eat, gave themselves away for nothing or next to nothing, as during the Fronde. The chorus of the Girondists was sung on every open lot, and there was a feast of addresses. Lamartine wrought marvels such as Ulysses might have done, and he was the siren of the hour. Yet they laughed and joked, and the true French wit revived. There was general good-humor and amiability in those first days of a most licentious spring sunshine. There was an admixture of bad taste, as there always is in the people of Paris when they grow sentimental. They made grotesque little gardens round the liberty-trees, which they watered assiduously.... The small fry adored their provisional government, as they formerly did their good king Louis XII., and more than one simple person said with emotion, 'It must be admitted that we are well governed, they talk so well!'" Before three months had elapsed the provisional government was at an end: "their feet slipped in blood—literally, in torrents of blood." "The politicians of late years have been playing a game of chess, intent wholly upon the board, but never giving a thought to the table under the board. But the table was alive, the back of a people which began to move, and in the twinkling of an eye chessboard and men went to the devil."

Among the entries of the next ten or twelve years are sketches of the leading statesmen and scraps of their conversation: those of Thiers are very animated. Sainte-Beuve says that he has a happiness of verbal expression which eludes his pen; "yet raise him upon a pinnacle of works of art" (of which M. Thiers has always been a patron publicly and privately), "of historical monuments and[Pg 111] flatterers, and he will never be aught but the cleverest of marmosets." If he had lived another twelvemonth, Sainte-Beuve might have had some other word for the Great Citizen. On Guizot he is still more severe, making him out a mere humbug, and of the poorest sort. When the poet Auguste Barbier became a candidate for the French Academy, M. Guizot had never heard of him, and had to be told all about him and his verses—there was surely no disgrace in this ignorance on the part of a man engrossed in studies and pursuits of a more serious nature—but before a week was over he was heard expressing amazement that another person knew nothing of Barbier, and talking of his poems as if he had always been familiar with them. The Duchesse de Broglie said: "What M. Guizot has known since morning he pretends to have known from all eternity."

This paper might be prolonged almost to the length of the volumes themselves by quoting all the keen, sagacious or brilliant sayings which they contain. Two more, merely to exemplify Sainte-Beuve's command of words in very different lines of thought: "The old fragments of cases in φι and θεν, the ancient remains of verbs in μι the second aorists, which alone survive the other submerged tenses, always produce the same effect upon me, in view of the regular declensions and conjugations, as the multitude of the isles and Cyclades in relation to the Peloponnesus and the rest of the mainland on the map of Greece: there was a time when they were all one. The rocks and peaks still stand to attest it."—"Never is a word which has always brought bad luck to him who used it from the tribune."

M. Troubat speaks of the correspondence of Sainte-Beuve as destined for publication: the Chroniques and Cahiers are like anchovies to whet the appetite for a longer and more continuous reading.

Sarah B. Wister.

A FEW LETTERS.

Brookside, April 12, 1872.

Dear Cousin Bessie: It does not seem possible that but two months from to-day I saw you standing on your porch in good old Applethorpe bidding me an April "farewell." I can see you now, as I saw you then, smiling—or rather laughing—and saying, "Write! write often; and if you can't find any real news, make something up." I little thought then I should so soon find material for correspondence. He was very sick at first, but really seems better now. But I forgot you don't know anything about him. Well! neither do I much, but "what I have I give unto thee." So, I'll begin at the beginning of my romance.

Day before yesterday, as I was engaged in the very romantic work of ploughing, I heard a clattering of hoofs and the snort and pant of a horse at full tear. In an instant the runaway was brought up, bang! against my fence. It was the work of but a moment to leap over and seize the animal. I then perceived his rider clinging, senseless, to the saddle by one stirrup. It is a great mercy to him that he was not killed, but he had been dragged but a short distance, and was therefore not severely injured. I secured the horse to the fence as quickly as possible, and then disengaged the gentleman. Upon removing him to the house, sending for a physician and applying various remedies, his consciousness was restored, and we soon discovered his injuries as well as a little of his history. His wounds prove to be bruises about the head and face (more[Pg 112] disfiguring than serious), and a broken leg which it will take several weeks to cure.

So here he is on my hands till he is well. I'm not sorry, either, for "it is not good for man to be alone," and I find him my nearest neighbor—like me an orphan, like me with a small fortune, consisting principally of his farm, and about my age. I've no doubt we shall get along capitally. I shall write every few days of his progress, knowing that you will be interested in whatever interests me. Don't forget to send me all the gossip of Applethorpe, for I am going to make my neighbor acquainted with all the inhabitants of Applethorpe by proxy—i. e., through your letters; so write your most entertaining ones, as I expect to read them all aloud to amuse and interest a captious invalid. "No more at present" from your affectionate cousin,

Philip Aubrey.

To Miss Bessie Linton, Applethorpe.

Applethorpe, April 20, 1872.

My dear Boy: Your letter duly rec'd. I am glad you have found companionship, though I am sorry for him that it should be an accident that literally "threw" him in your way. You did not tell me his name, or anything but the bare fact of his accident. Be sure that you will find in me an interested listener—or rather reader—of anything you may choose to tell me. But don't leave accounts of yourself out of your letters in order to make room for him. Remember, you are my only relation, the only person in the world in whom I have a right to be interested. It does not seem possible to me, when I think of it, that there is only five years' difference in our ages: why, I'm sure I feel ten years older, instead of five. I was very young at fifteen to take charge of a great boy of ten; and if it were not that you were the good boy you always were, I never could have fulfilled the charge your dying mother left me. Do not think, dear, I was not glad to do it for her. Could I ever, ever, if I worked five times as hard as I have since she left you, repay all that she did for me, the poor miserable, shy orphan left to her care?

But out upon these memories! Let us deal with the present and future.

Item. Mary Montrose's engagement to Joel Roberts is "out" to-day. I'm glad, for I'm tired of keeping the secret. Poor dear Mary! I do hope she will be happy. She inquires very cordially after you every time she sees me. She doesn't know she blasted one of my most precious hopes when she told me she was engaged to Joel.

Good-bye, dear! Be sure and write long letters to your affectionate cousin,

Bessie L——.

Brookside, April 30, 1872.

Dear Bess: Please excuse my not answering your last two letters, on the plea of business. Indeed, working and waiting on my friend, George Hammond, have occupied all my time.

Now, Bessie, I want you to do something for me. Yesterday, when I got your letter, I read it aloud as usual, George looking very sad the while. When I was done he said in a trembling tone, "I wish to heaven there was some one in the world nearly enough related to me to care to write to me! But I am alone, entirely alone;" and his eyes filled. (Forgive his weakness, Bess: he has been very sick.) I tried to cheer him, but all to no purpose till an idea struck him. His face brightening, he said, "Do you believe, Philip—I know it is a great deal to ask—but do you believe you could persuade your cousin to write to me? I should prize it so much. Do you think she would? Just fancy what it is never to receive a letter from any one except a business-man!"

Now, Bessie, won't you write him once in a while? There is not a particle of harm in it, and I assure you it will be a real boon to the poor fellow. Just imagine him lying here on his back day after day, and not a thing to amuse him but my company!

Of course you'll say that you can have nothing to write about to a stranger. But you'll soon find something, I know: I'll trust to your "woman's wit." Ask him about his past life: begin that way. But there! I'll not give you any advice on[Pg 113] the subject: you understand writing letters better than I do. So good-bye, "fair coz." Pray accede to my request.

Yours, etc.,
Philip A——.

Brookside, July 1, 1872.

My dearest Bessie: I'm getting jealous! Twice within a week have you written to George Hammond, and but once to me. Your letters to him are long, I know, for I see him read them. The correspondence is become something desperate—no wonder. He has just told me that through your letters he has become very deeply attached to you, and that when I return home at the end of another week he will come and plead his cause personally. He asks my benediction. I am sure he has my most hearty good wishes, and I do hope, Bessie dear, you may be inclined to say "Yes." Then, after you are married, you can come out here and settle down near your only remaining relative for the rest of your natural existence. You smile and shake your head, and say, "Oh yes, that will last till Philip marries!" But I say that if I see you and George Hammond united, it is all I ask.

But I shall say no more. He can plead better by word of mouth than I by paper, I hope. Ever your devoted

Philip.
To Miss Bessie Linton.

A week later, Bessie Linton, fair and young spite of her thirty years, waited at the Applethorpe station in her pony-carriage for her cousin and his friend. She was possessed by so many emotions that she hardly knew whether she most wished or most dreaded seeing the visitors. That she was herself deeply interested in George Hammond she did not pretend to deny even to herself; yet just at the last she dreaded seeing him. It seemed to bring everything so near.

The whistle sounded round the bend, and in another moment the dreaded, hoped-for train arrived. There alighted from it a number of passengers, but none that Bessie recognized at all. Presently there came toward her a gentleman with full beard and moustache, holding out his hand and exclaiming, "Cousin Bessie, don't you know me?"

"Why, Philip Aubrey! No, I didn't. Why, where—" and she hesitated a half second—"where is my Philip gone?"

"He's here alive and hearty, and the same old scapegrace, I'm afraid."

Then, seeing the look of inquiry and suspense on her face, he added with considerable embarrassment, "George didn't come just yet. I'll tell you all about it when we get home."

She was forced to be satisfied, but a nameless feeling of "something" made the drive a rather silent one, although each tried spasmodically to start a conversation. Tea over, Philip drew Bessie out into the garden, and sitting down in a rustic scat, said, "Bessie, come and sit down: I want to talk to you." Simply, straightforwardly as of old, she came.

"Bessie dear," said Philip, "I have something to say, and don't know how to say it. But I guess the only way is to tell the truth at once. There is no such person as George Hammond."

Bessie's heart-blood stopped for what seemed half an hour, and then she articulated slowly, "Then who wrote those letters, Philip?"

"I did," he answered sadly.

She started away from him as if he had been a serpent. She walked up and down like a caged animal. At last her scorn burst forth: "You, Philip Aubrey! you! You have dared to laugh me to scorn, have you? You have dared to presume that because I am what the world calls an 'old maid,' I am a fit mark for the arrows of the would-be wits? Philip Aubrey, all I have to wish is, that your actions may recoil upon yourself." She would have said more, but her feelings overcame her entirely, and sitting down she covered her face with her hand, the tears trickling through her fingers.

"Oh, Bessie! Bessie! they have. Bitterly have I repented of my ruse. But I know if you will hear me you will not judge me harshly."

She drew herself up, and throwing all possible scorn into her face, said, "Go! and if there remains in your body one[Pg 114] vestige of feeling belonging to a gentleman, never let me look upon your face again."

Like a stricken cur he went from her presence. He knew her too well: he knew that once roused as she now was, years could not efface her impression. He knew she would listen to no apology, no word of any kind; so the only thing left for him to do, as she had expressed it, was to "leave her presence."

As soon as he was fairly gone Bessie rose, went into the house, locked herself in her own room and struggled with herself. She did not even pretend to herself that her trouble was not hard to bear. What did life hold for her now? She had not even the cousin on whom her affections had so long been centred as her one living relation.

"Oh, if he had only died! if he had only died before he deceived me this way!" she moaned, "I think I should have borne it more easily. It cannot be called the thoughtless trick of a boy: he is too old, and has carried it on too long, and planned it all too systematically, for that."

Three hours after she came from her vigil pale and silent, but a conqueror. A little card stuck in the drawing-room mirror told her that Philip had started for New York on his way to his Western home again.

"I declare, Ophelie, Bessie Linton's awful queer about Philip Aubrey. Last night I says to her, says I, 'Bessie, I hear Philip Aubrey's home—is he?' First she turned mighty red, and then as white as a sheet, and she seemed kind a-chokin' like; but in a moment she says, 'So he was, Mrs. Dartle, but he found some pressing business that took him back a great deal sooner than he expected.' 'La!' says I, 'what a pity! You ain't seen him for so long, and you was so attached to him!' And she says, just as cold as an ice-pitcher, 'I shall miss him very much. Have you seen my new heliotrope, Mrs. Dartle?' So I couldn't say anything more, but I declare to man I'd give a penny to know what's the matter—such friends as they used to be, too! You may depend upon it the fault's on his side. Mebbe he's done something dreadful."

So things got whispered around, not very much to the credit of Mr. Aubrey, but after Mrs. Dartle's rebuff no one dared question Miss Linton, knowing her so well.

Day succeeded day, and no one knew the bitterness that filled Miss Linton's heart so full that it seemed as if it must burst. Then came a letter from Philip. "Shall I open it? No, I will send it back. That he should dare to write again!" One mail followed another, and still the letter was unsent, was unopened. At last, after a fortnight had passed, her good sense got the better of her ill-feeling, and she said to herself, "I will at least see what he can say for himself in excuse. I need not answer it." So she opened it, and read as follows:

Brookside, October 8, 1872.

My much-abused Cousin: I dare not even hope that you will not return this unopened. But if you do open it I hope you may read what I have to say without too bitter feelings. Where shall I commence to tell you my story?

You know what you said in regard to "making up" news, and one day as I was out riding my horse did land me at my own fence in the way I described. For weeks I lay on a bed of the most excruciating torture. Then I began to recover, and although I was confined to a sofa my faculties were on the alert, and I was pretty nearly distracted for something to do to amuse myself with. Finally, a brilliant idea struck me, and you were the victim of its execution. Believe me, believe me, Bessie dear, I only meant it for the harmless amusement of a week or two, but I became so interested in your letters to my imaginary friend that I could not bear to give them up. I had, Bessie, as I told you, learned to love you from your letters. They were so precious to me, it seemed like tearing from me a part of my very life to think of letting you know how I had deceived you, and so closing all the correspondence (which meant so much to me) between us. You will say I was cowardly. I was: I know[Pg 115] it, and I admit it. But, Bessie, Bessie, I loved you so! Let my love plead for me. I thought it would be easier for me to tell you face to face. But God knows the hardest task I ever set myself was telling you how I had deceived you.

Bessie, don't cast me off! Can't you find a little corner in your heart wherein I may rest? Let me be your cousin: of course I dare not hope ever to be anything dearer. But if you only will forgive me the trick into which I was led by sickness and want of amusement, and afterward continued from love of you, it is all I dare ask.

Ever your devoted
Philip.

Emotions of various kinds seized the soul of Bessie Linton as she read Philip's letter once, twice, thrice. First, her heart was hardened to anything he might say—then as he told of his sufferings a little pity crept in; and finally, as she concluded the last word for the third time, her heart was so overflowing with pity—which is akin to love—that she—forgave him.

At least, so I suppose, as they passed my window just now laughing, and as happy a married couple as ever you saw, if she is "five years older than he is, and had the bringin' of him up," to use Mrs. Dartle's expression.

E. C. Hewitt.

FROM THE FLATS.

[Pg 116]

A DAY'S MARCH THROUGH FINLAND.

"Why don't you go to Imatra?" asks my friend P—— as we lean over the side of the Peterhof steamer and watch the golden domes of St. Petersburg rising slowly from the dull gray level of the Gulf of Finland. "Now that you've seen a bit of Central Russia, that's the next thing for you to do. Go to Imatra, and I'll go too."

"And where on earth is Imatra?" ask I innocently.

"Oh come! you don't mean to say you've never heard of Imatra? Why, everybody knows it. Let's go there next week."

Nevertheless, it so happens that I have not heard of Imatra—an ignorance probably shared by most people out of Russia, and perhaps not a few in it. But I am destined to a speedier acquaintance than I had anticipated with the famous waterfall (or "foss," as the natives call it), which, lying forty miles due north of the Finnish port of Viborg, close to the renowned "Saima Lake," attracts the amateur fishermen of St. Petersburg by scores every summer.

The proposed trip comes at an auspicious moment, for St. Petersburg in July is as thoroughly a "city of the dead" as London in September or Chamouni in January; and the average tourist, having eaten cabbage-soup at Wolff's or Dominique's, promenaded the Nevski Prospect and bought photographs in the Gostinni-Dvor (the Russian Regent street and Burlington Arcade), witnessed a service in the Isaac Church, and perhaps gone on to Moscow to stare at the Kremlin and the Monster Bell, must either await the approach of winter or fall back upon the truly British consolation of being able to "say that he has been there." Then is the time for suburban or rural jaunts; for picnics at Peterhof and drives to Oranienbaum; for wandering through the gardens of Catherine II. at Tsarskoe-Selo ("Czar's Village") and eating curds and cream at Pavlovski; for surveying the monastery of Strelna or the batteries of Cronstadt; or, finally, for taking the advice of my roving friend and going to Imatra.

Accordingly, behold all our preparations made—knapsacks packed, tear-and-wear garments put in requisition, many-colored Russian notes exchanged (at a fearful discount) for dingy Finnish silver[D]—and at half-past ten on a not particularly bright July morning we stand on the deck of the anything but "good ship" Konstantin, bound for Viborg.

Despite her tortoise qualities as a steamer, however (which prolong our voyage to nearly nine hours), the vessel is really luxurious in her accommodations; and were her progress even slower, the motley groups around us (groups such as only Dickens could describe or Leech portray) would sufficiently beguile the time—jaunty boy-officers in brand-new uniforms, gallantly puffing their papirossi (paper cigarettes) in defiance of coming nausea, and discussing the merits of the new opera loud enough to assure every one within earshot that they know nothing whatever about it; squat Finnish peasants, whose round, puffy faces and thick yellow hair are irresistibly suggestive of overboiled apple-dumplings; gray-coated Russian soldiers, with the dogged endurance of their race written in every line of their patient, solid, unyielding faces; a lanky Swede, whose huge cork hat and broad collar give him the look of an exaggerated medicine-bottle; the inevitable tourist in the inevitable plaid suit, struggling with endless convolutions of fishing-tackle and hooking himself in a fresh place at every turn; three or four pale-faced clerks on leave, looking very much as if their "overwork" had been in some way connected with cigars and bad brandy; a German tradesman from Vasili-Ostroff (with the short turnip-colored moustache[Pg 117] characteristic of Wilhelm in his normal state), in dutiful attendance on his wife, who is just completing her preparations for being comfortably ill as soon as the vessel starts; and a fine specimen of the real British merchant, talking vehemently (in a miraculous dialect of his own invention) to a Russian official, whose air of studied politeness shows plainly that he does not understand a word of his neighbor's discourse.

Directly we go off the rain comes on, with that singular fatality characteristic of pleasure-trips in general, arising, doubtless, from the mysterious law which ordains that a man shall step into a puddle the instant he has had his boots blacked, and that a piece of bread-and-butter shall fall (how would Sir Isaac Newton have accounted for it?) with the buttered side downward. In a trice the deck is deserted by all save two or three self-devoted martyrs in macintosh, who "pace the plank" with that air of stern resolution worn by an Englishman when dancing a quadrille or discharging any other painful duty. The scenery throughout the entire voyage consists chiefly of fog, relieved by occasional patches of sand-bank; and small wonder if the superior attractions of the well-spread dinner-table detain most of our fellow-sufferers below. What is this first dish that they offer us? Raw salmon, by the shade of Soyer! sliced thin and loaded with pepper. Then follow soup, fried trout, roast beef, boiled ditto, slices of German sausage, neck of veal and bacon, fried potatoes and cabbage. Surely, now, "Hold, enough!" Not a bit of it: enter an enormous plum-pudding, which might do duty for a globe at any provincial school; next, a dish of rice and preserve, followed by some of the strongest conceivable cheese; finally, strawberries, and bilberries, with cream and sugar ad libitum. Involuntarily I recall the famous old American story of the "boss" at a railway refreshment-room who demanded fifty cents extra from a passenger who stuck to the table after all the rest had dined and gone away. "Your board says, 'Dinner, three dollars and fifty cents!'" remonstrated the victim.—"Ah! that's all very well for reasonable human bein's with one stomach apiece," retorted the Inexorable; "but when a feller eats as if there were no hereafter, we've got to pile it on!"

As we pass Cronstadt the fog "lifts" slightly, giving us a momentary glimpse of the huge forts that guard the passage—the locked door which bars out Western Europe. There is nothing showy or pretentious about these squat, round-shouldered, narrow-eyed sentinels of the channel; but they have a grim air of reserved strength, as though they could be terribly effective in time of need. Two huge forts now command the "southern channel," in addition to the four which guarded it at the time of the Baltic expedition during the Crimean war; and the land-batteries (into which no outsider is now admitted without special permission) are being strengthened by movable shields of iron and other appliances of the kind, for which nearly one million roubles (one hundred and fifty thousand pounds) have been set apart. The seaward approaches are commanded by numerous guns of formidable calibre, and far away on the long, level promontory of the North Spit we can just descry a dark excrescence—the battery recently constructed for the defence of the "northern passage." Thus, from the Finnish coast to Oranienbaum a bristling line of unbroken fortification proclaims Russia's aversion to war, and the gaping mouths of innumerable cannon announce to all who approach, with silent eloquence, that "L'empire c'est la paix." It is a fine political parable that the Western traveler's first glimpse of Russian civilization should assume the form of a line of batteries, reminding one of poor Mungo Park's splendid unconscious sarcasm, when, while wandering helplessly in the desert, he came suddenly upon a gibbet with a man hanging in chains upon it; "Whereupon," says he, "I kneeled down and gave hearty thanks to Almighty God, who had been pleased to conduct me once more into a Christian and civilized country."

As the afternoon creeps on the rain seems to fall heavier, the fog to brood[Pg 118] thicker, the steamer to go (if possible) slower than before. However, everything earthly has an end except a suit in chancery; and by nightfall (if there be any nightfall in this wonderful region, where it is lighter at midnight than in England at daybreak) we reach Viborg, a neat little town built along the edge of a narrow inlet, with the straight, wide, dusty streets which characterize every Russian town from Archangelsk to Sevastopol. Along the edge of the harbor runs a well laid-out promenade, a favorite resort after sunset, when the cool breeze from the gulf comes freshly in after the long, sultry hours of the afternoon. Behind it cluster, like a heap of colored pebbles, the painted wooden houses of the town; while over all stands, like a veteran sentinel, the gray massive tower of the old castle, frowning upon the bristling masts of the harbor like the Past scowling at the Present.

The rippling sea in front and the dark belt of forest behind give the whole place a very picturesque appearance; but the beauty of the latter is sorely marred by the destroying sweep of a recent hurricane, traces of which are still visible in the long swathes of fallen trees that lie strewn amid the greenwood, like the dead among the living.

In the solemn, subdued light of the northern evening we rattle in a crazy drosky over the uneven stones of the town into the vast desolate square in which stands the solitary hotel, a huge barrack-like building, up and down which we wander for some time, like the prince in the Sleeping Beauty's palace, without meeting any sign of life, till at length in a remote corner we come suddenly upon a chubby little waiter about the size of a well-grown baby, to whom we give our orders. This, however, is his first and last appearance, for every time we ring a different waiter, of the same diminutive size, answers the bell; which oppresses us with an undefined apprehension of having got into a charity-school by mistake.

When I first made the acquaintance of Viborg, a journey thither from St. Petersburg, though the distance by land is only about eighty miles, was no light undertaking. The daring traveler who elected to travel by road had no choice but to provide himself with abundant wrappings and a good stock of food, draw his strong boots up to his knee, fortify his inner man with scalding tea or fiery corn-whisky, and struggle through axle-deep mud or breast-high snow (according to the season), sometimes for two days together. "Mais nous avons changé tout cela." Two trains run daily from St. Petersburg, covering the whole distance in about four hours, and the stations along the line, though bearing marks of hasty construction, are still sufficiently comfortable and well supplied with provisions. Thanks to this direct communication with the capital, Viborg is now completely au fait of the news of the day, and all fashionable topics are canvassed as eagerly on the promenade of this little Finnish seaport as along the pavements of the Nevski Prospect.

"We must breakfast early to-morrow, mind," says P—— as we settle into our respective beds, "for a march in the sun here is no joke, you bet!"

"Worse than in Arabia or South America?" ask I with calm scorn.

"You'll find the north of Russia a pretty fair match for both at this season. Do you happen to know that one of the hottest places in the world is Archangelsk on the White Sea? In summer the pitch melts off the vessels like butter, and the mosquitoes are so thick that the men on board the grain-ships fairly burrow into the corn for shelter.[E] Good-night! Sharp six to-morrow, mind!"

Accordingly, the early daylight finds us tramping along the edge of the picturesque little creek (dappled here and there with wood-crowned islets) in order to get well into our work before the sun is high in the sky, for a forty-mile march, knapsack on shoulder, across a difficult country, in the heat of a real Russian summer, is not a thing to be trifled with, even by men who have seen Turkey and Syria. A sudden turn of the road soon blots out the sea, and we plunge at once[Pg 119] into the green silent depths of the northern forest.

It is characteristic of the country that, barely out of sight of one of the principal ports of Finland, we are in the midst of a loneliness as utter as if it had never been broken by man. The only tokens of his presence are the narrow swathe of road running between the dim, unending files of the shadowy pine trees, and the tall wooden posts, striped black and white like a zebra, which mark the distance in versts from Viborg, the verst being two-thirds of a mile.

To an unpractised eye the marvelous smoothness and hardness of this forest highway (unsurpassed by any macadamized road in England) might suggest a better opinion of the local civilization than it deserves; for in this case it is the soil, not the administration, that merits all the credit. In granite-paved Finland, as in limestone-paved Barbados, Nature has already laid down your road in a way that no human engineering can rival, and all you have to do is to smooth it to your own liking.

And now the great panorama of the far North—a noble change from the flat unending monotony of the Russian steppes—begins in all its splendor. At one moment we are buried in a dark depth of forest, shadowy and spectral as those which haunt us in the weird outlines of Retzsch; the next minute we burst upon an open valley, bright with fresh grass, and with a still, shining lake slumbering in the centre, the whole picture framed in a background of sombre woods. Here rise giant boulders of granite, crested with spreading pines—own brothers, perhaps, of the block dragged hence eighty years ago from which the greatest of Russian rulers still looks down upon the city that bears his name;[F] there, bluffs of wooded hill rear themselves above the surrounding sea of foliage, and at times the roadside is dotted with the little wooden huts of the natives, whence wooden-faced women, turbaned with colored handkerchiefs, and white-headed children, in nothing but a short night-gown with a warm lining of dirt, stare wonderingly at us as we go striding past. And over all hangs the clear, pearly-gray northern sky.

One hour is past, and still the air keeps moderately fresh, although the increasing glare warns us that it will be what I once heard a British tourist call "more hotterer" by and by. So far, however, we have not turned a hair, and the second hour's work matches the first to an inch. As we pass through the little hamlet which marks the first quarter of our allotted distance we instinctively pull out our watches: "Ten miles in two hours! Not so bad, but we must keep it up."

So we set ourselves to the third hour, and out comes the sun—bright and beautiful and destroying as Homer's Achilles:

Hitherto, despite the severity of our pace, we have contrived to keep up a kind of flying conversation, but now grim silence settles on our way. There is a point in every match against time when the innate ferocity of man, called forth by the exercises which civilization has borrowed from the brute creation, comes to the front in earnest—when your best friend becomes your deadly enemy, and the fact of his being one stride in advance of you is an injury only to be atoned by blood. Such is the precise point that we have reached now; and when we turn from exchanging malignant looks with each other, it is only to watch with ominous eagerness for the coming in sight of the painted verst-posts, which somehow appear to succeed one another far more slowly than they did an hour ago.

By the middle of the fourth hour we are marching with coats off and sleeves rolled up, like amateur butchers; and although our "pace" is as good as ever, the elastic swing of our first start is now replaced by that dogged, "hard-and-heavy" tramp which marks the point where the flesh and the spirit begin to pull in opposite directions. Were either of us alone, the pace would probably slacken at once, and each may safely say in his heart, as Condorcet said of the dying D'Alembert,[Pg 120] "Had I not been there he must have flinched!"

But just as the fourth hour comes to an end (during which we have looked at our watches as often as Wellington during the terrible mid-day hours that preceded the distant boom of the Prussian cannon) we come round a sharp bend in the road, and there before us lies the quaint little log-built post-house (the "halfway house" in very truth), with its projecting roof and painted front and striped doorposts; just at which auspicious moment I stumble and twist my foot.

"You were right to reserve that performance to the last," remarks P—— with a grin, helping me to the door; and we order a samovar (tea-urn) to be heated, while we ourselves indulge in a scrambling wash of the rudest kind, but very refreshing nevertheless.

Reader, did you ever walk five miles an hour for four hours together over a hilly country, with the thermometer at eighty-three degrees in the shade? If so, then will you appreciate our satisfaction as we throw aside our heavy boots, plunge our swollen feet into cold water, and, with coats off and collars thrown open, sit over our tea and black bread in that quaint little cross-beamed room, with an appetite never excited by the best plats of the Erz-Herzog Karl or the Trois Frères Provençaux. Two things, at least, one may always be sure of finding in perfection at a Russian post-station: tea is the one; the other I need not particularize, as its presence does not usually become apparent till you "retire to rest" (?).

Our meal being over and my foot still unfit for active service, we order a telyayga (cart) and start anew for Imatra Foss. Our vehicle is simply a wooden tray on wheels, with a bag of hay in it, on which we do our best to recline, while our driver perches himself on the edge of the cart, thereby doubtless realizing vividly the sensation of rowing hard in a pair of thin unmentionables. Thanks to the perpetual gaps in the road formed by the great thaw two months ago (the Finnish winter ending about the beginning of May), during the greater part of the ride we play an animated though involuntary game of cup-and-ball, being thrown up and caught again incessantly. At length a dull roar, growing ever louder and louder, breaks the dreamy stillness of the forest, and before long we come to a little chalet-like inn embosomed in trees, where we alight, for this is the "Imatra Hotel."

Let us cast one glance out of the back window before sitting down to supper (in a long, bare, chilly chamber like a third-class waiting-room), for such a view is not seen every day. We are on the very brink of a deep narrow gorge, the upper part of which is so thickly clad with pines as to resemble the crest of some gigantic helmet, but beneath the naked granite stands out in all its grim barrenness, lashed by the spray of the mighty torrent that roars between its projecting rocks. Just below us, the river, forced back by a huge boulder in the centre of its course, literally piles itself up into a kind of liquid mound, foaming, flashing and trembling incessantly, the ceaseless motion and tremendous din of the rapids having an indescribably bewildering effect.

On quitting our inn the next morning a very picturesque walk of half an hour brings us to a little hut beside the Saima Ferry, where we find a party of "three fishers" from St. Petersburg, comprising a Russian colonel, an ex-chasseur d'Afrique (now an actor at one of the Russian theatres) and an Englishman. The three give us a cordial welcome, and insist upon our joining them; and for the next few days our surroundings are savagely picturesque enough to satisfy Jean-Jacques himself—living in a cabin of rough-hewn logs plastered with mud, sleeping on a bundle of straw, with our knapsacks for a pillow; tramping for miles every day through the sombre pine forest or fishing by moonlight in the shadowy lake, with the silence of a newly-created world all around; and having an "early pull" every morning across the ferry with our host, a squat, yellow-haired, gnome-like creature in sheepskin frock and bark shoes, who[Pg 121] manifests unbounded amazement every time he sees us washing our hands.

But the lake itself is, if possible, even more picturesque than the river. It is one of those long, straggling bodies of water so common in the far North, resembling not so much one great lake as an endless series of small ones. Just at the sortie of the river a succession of rapids, scarcely less magnificent than those of the "Foss" itself, rush between the wooded shores, their unresting whirl and fury contrasting gloriously with the vast expanse of glassy water above, crested with leafy islets and mirroring the green boughs that droop over it along the shore. Here did we spend many a night fishing and "spinning yarns," in both of which accomplishments the ex-chasseur was pre-eminent; and strange enough it seemed, lying in the depths of that northern forest, to listen to descriptions of the treeless sands of Egypt and the burning wastes of the Sahara. Our midnight camp, on a little promontory just above the rapids, was a study for Rembrandt—the slender pine-stems reddened by the blaze of our camp-fire; the group of bearded faces coming and going as the light waxed and waned; beyond the circle of light a gloom all the blacker for the contrast; the ghostly white of the foam shimmering through the leaves, and the clear moonlit sky overhanging all.

When a wet day came upon us the inexhaustible ex-chasseur (who, like Frederick the Great, could "do everything but keep still") amused himself and us with various experiments in cookery, of which art he was a perfect master. His versatility in sauces might have aroused the envy of Soyer himself, and the party having brought with them a large stock of provisions, he was never at a loss for materials. Our ordinary dinner consisted of trout sauced with red wine, mutton, veal, duck, cheese, fresh strawberries and coffee; after which every man took his tumbler of tea, with a slice of lemon in it, from the stove, and the evening began.

The sight of the country, however, is undoubtedly the natives themselves. Their tawny skins, rough yellow hair and coarse flat faces would look uninviting enough to those who have never seen a Kalmuck or a Samoyede, but, despite their diet of dried fish and bread mixed with sawdust, both men and women are remarkably healthy and capable of surprising feats of strength and endurance. They make great use of bark for caps, shoes, plates, etc., in the making of which they are very skillful. As to their dress, it baffles description, and the horror of my friend the ex-chasseur at his first glimpse of it was as good as a play. On one occasion he was criticising severely the "rig" of some passing natives: "Voilà un qui porte un pantalon et point de bottes—un autre qui a des bottes et point de pantalon; peut-être que le troisième n'aura ni l'un ni l'autre!" At last came one with a pair of boots almost big enough to go to sea in, and turned up like an Indian canoe. Our critic eyed them in silence for a moment, and then said with a shudder, "Ce sont des bottes impossibles!"

But there needs only a short journey here to show the folly of further annexations on the part of Russia while those already made are so lamentably undeveloped. Finland, which, rightly handled, might be one of the czar's richest possessions, is now, after nearly seventy years' occupation, as unprofitable as ever. Throughout the whole province there are only three hundred and ninety-eight miles of railway.[G] Post-roads, scarce enough in the South, are absolutely wanting in the North. Steam navigation on the Gulf of Bothnia extends only to Uleaborg, and is, so far as I can learn, actually non-existent on the great lakes, except between Tanasthuus and Tammerfors. Such is the state of a land containing boundless water-power, countless acres of fine timber, countless shiploads of splendid granite. But what can be expected of an untaught population under two millions left to themselves in an unreclaimed country nearly as large as France?

Helsingfors can now be reached from[Pg 122] St. Petersburg, viâ Viborg, in fourteen and a half hours; but what is one such line to the boundless emptiness of Finland? The fearful lesson of 1869 will not be easily forgotten, when all the horrors of famine were let loose at once upon the unhappy province. Seed-corn was exhausted: bread became dear, dearer still, and then failed altogether. Men, women and children, struggling over snowy moors and frozen lakes toward the distant towns in which lay their only chance of life, dropped one by one on the long march of death, and were devoured ere they were cold by the pursuing wolves. Nor did the survivors fare much better: some reached the haven of refuge only to fall dead in its very streets. Others gorged themselves with unwholesome food, and died with it in their mouths. Fields lying waste; villages dispeopled; private houses turned into hospitals; fever-parched skeletons tottering from the doors of overcrowded asylums; children wandering about in gaunt and squalid nakedness; crowds of men, frenzied by prolonged misery and ripe for any outrage, roaming the streets night and day,—such were the scenes enacted throughout the length of Finland during two months and a half.

But better days are now dawning on the afflicted land. Roads and railways are being pushed forward into the interior, and the ill-judged attempts formerly made to Russianize the population have given place to a more conciliatory policy. A Russian from Helsingfors tells me that lectures are being delivered there, and extracts from native works read, in the aboriginal tongue; that it is being treated with special attention in the great schools of Southern Finland; that there has even been some talk of dramatic representations in Finnish at the Helsingfors theatre. Such a policy is at once prudent and generous, and far better calculated to bind together the heterogeneous races of the empire than that absurd "Panslavism" which is best translated as "making every one a slave."

David Ker.

OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.

THE DEAD OF PARIS.

It is an expensive operation to die in Paris, particularly for a foreigner. If an unhappy American chances to pay the debt of Nature in a furnished apartment or a hotel, the proprietor makes the heirs of the deceased pay roundly for the privilege which their relation has enjoyed. No matter by what manner of death the departed may have made his or her exit, be it chronic or epidemic—anything so impossible to communicate as heart disease or apoplexy, for instance—every article in the room must be paid for at its full value, or rather quadruple that amount. As much as one thousand dollars has sometimes been charged for the plenishing of a room, everything in which, if put up at auction, would not have realized a tenth part of that amount. Through the efforts of our representatives, however, this tax has been fixed at a somewhat less exorbitant amount.

Parisian funerals are conducted by a company—which, like most of such enterprises in France, is a gigantic monopoly—under the direct supervision of the government. The tariff of its charges includes nine grades of funerals, at prices ranging from fifteen hundred dollars down to four dollars. For the first amount the mourners enjoy all the splendors possible to the occasion—a hearse draped with velvet and drawn by four horses, each decked with ostrich-plumes and led by a groom clothed in a mourning livery; velvet draperies sprinkled with silver tears for the porte-cochère wherein the coffin lies in state; and grand funeral lamps lit with spirits to[Pg 123] flame around the bier at the church. For the last tariff a pine coffin painted black, a stretcher and two men to bear the body to the fosse commune, are accorded. But between these two extremes lies every variety of funeral that one can imagine, a very respectable affair with two mourning carriages being offered for about sixty dollars. Very few Americans are ever interred in a Paris cemetery, the prejudices of our nation exacting that the remains of the dead should be transferred to their native land. To the foreigner this process appears to be inexplicable, for, as a French gentleman once remarked to me with a shrug of his shoulders, "Only the Americans and English are fond of making corpses travel" (de faire voyager leurs morts). They generally prefer to call in the services of the embalmer, who for a charge of six hundred dollars will do his work wisely if not too well. Still, there are some graves of our fellow-citizens still visible even at Père la Chaise. And at that historic cemetery for years there existed a beautiful spot, a sort of hollow on the hillside, where flowers, trees and grass all flourished luxuriantly, thanks to years of neglect. It was a wild and lovely oasis of Nature in the midst of the stiff, artificial formality of the rest of the cemetery, and became one of the sights of the place. Unfortunately, French formality revolted against the untamed charm of this neglected spot: the proprietor, an American gentleman, was sought out, the lot was repurchased by the city, the trees were uprooted, the hollow filled in, and the beautiful ravine exists no longer.

The Compagnie des Pompes Funèbres is obliged to inter the poor gratuitously; nor is this service light, as the number of free funerals is considerably greater than that of paying ones. The city pays one dollar to the company for each pauper funeral. The mass of material possessed by the company is very great, comprising six hundred vehicles of all kinds, three hundred horses, six thousand biers or stretchers, and a vast number of draperies, cushions, torches, etc. Over five hundred and seventy-five men are employed by this organization. Thanks to these ample arrangements, the terrible spectacle afforded during the cholera outbreaks of 1832 and 1849, when the dead were conveyed to the cemeteries piled in upholsterers' wagons, is not likely to be renewed, as during the exceptional mortality from the same cause in 1854 and 1865 the arrangements were found to suffice for all demands.

In olden times Paris was full of cemeteries: they were attached to every hospital and every church. The wealthy were interred in the churches themselves: in the church of Les Innocents, which was specially affected by the nobility, the aisles were often crowded with coffins awaiting their turn to be placed in the overcrowded vaults. Nobody troubled himself about the sanitary side of the question in those days, as witness the cemetery of Saint Roch, which in 1763 was established beside one of the city wells. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries cemeteries were popular places of resort. Les Innocents was especially popular: it was surrounded by arcades, where booths and stores were established, and people came there to promenade and to amuse themselves. Nor were private cemeteries unknown, many prominent Jewish and Protestant families being privileged to inter their dead (to whom the Church denied burial in consecrated ground) in the gardens attached to their houses. Thus, when the work of reconstructing Paris under the Second Empire was begun, the enormous quantity of graves that were discovered filled the workers with amaze. The bones thus found were at first transferred to the Western Cemetery, which had been closed for over twenty years, but the accumulation speedily became unmanageable, and when a mass of over three thousand square feet of bones had been deposited there, a decree of the authorities caused the whole and all similar discoveries to be deposited in the catacombs.

The Revolution did away with the greater part of the intramural cemeteries by suppressing those attached to the churches and declaring the ground to[Pg 124] be national property: they were consequently parceled out into lots and sold. But the guillotine created a need for new burial-grounds, two of which were accordingly established. One, situated near the Place du Trône, still exists: it occupies the former site of the gardens of the Dames Chauvinesses de Picpus. After the Revolution it was purchased by an association of the surviving members of families who had relatives interred there. This cemetery ought to be a pilgrim shrine for every American visiting Paris, for it was chosen as a last resting-place for the remains of La Fayette. The other "garden of the guillotine," as these cemeteries were once significantly called, has long since disappeared, but the Chapelle Expiatoire erected to the memory of Marie Antoinette and of Louis XVI. on the Boulevard Haussmann now marks its former site. It was there that the bodies of these royal victims of revolutionary fury were hastily interred in a bed of quicklime, with a thick layer of quicklime cast over each of them. When, after the Restoration, the task of exhuming the royal remains was undertaken, crumbling bones alone remained to point out the resting-place of the once beautiful daughter of the Cæsars and of the descendant of Saint Louis. The smaller bones of the skeleton of Louis XVI., in particular, had almost wholly disappeared: that of the queen was in better preservation, owing to a smaller quantity of quicklime having been used. Strange to say, her garters, which were of elastic webbing, were found in a state of almost perfect preservation, while of the rest of her garments only a few rotting fragments remained. These garters, together with some pieces of the coffins, were presented as precious relics to Louis XVIII. But grave doubts have frequently been expressed, in view of the very slight means of identification afforded by the state of the remains, as to whether these crumbling relics of mortality were really those of the king and queen. With the exception of the plot on which stands the Chapelle Expiatoire, every vestige of the revolutionary cemetery has long since disappeared. The splendid Boulevard Haussmann now passes directly over its site, and the gayety and animation of one of the most brilliant quarters of modern Paris surround what was once the last resting-place of those who perished by the guillotine on the Place de la Révolution.

The present system of Parisian cemeteries was only adopted at the beginning of this century. Paris now possesses twenty, the most important of which are Père la Chaise and Montparnasse. The ground of all of these belongs to the city. You can purchase a lot to be held for ever, or you can buy a temporary concession, the price varying with the length of time for which the ground is to be held. Five years is the shortest period for which a lot can be accorded, as experts declare that the body is not wholly absorbed into the surrounding earth before that time.

What shall Paris do with her dead? is now becoming a very serious question. It is against the law to bury bodies within her limits, yet fourteen out of her twenty cemeteries are within her bounds, and the vast city, spreading out on either side, soon catches up with those established on her exterior territories.

It has been proposed to construct a new and immense cemetery at a distance of some twenty or thirty miles from the city, to which the funeral cortéges could be transferred by rail. But the strong sentiment of the French for the dead has as yet prevented the realization of this very sensible and really necessary project. As a rule, the French are very fond of visiting the graves of their departed relatives, and on the great anniversary for such visits, "Le Jour des Morts," it is calculated that over half a million persons are present in the different cemeteries during the day. On such occasions not only are wreaths of natural flowers, of beads and of immortelles deposited on the tombs, but often the visiting-cards of the persons who have come to pay due respect to the dead. The tomb of Rachel, for instance, has been specially honored in that way, some of the visitors even turning up the corner of the card to show that they had called in person. The[Pg 125] question suggests itself, What if the visit should be returned? Edgar A. Poe might have found in this idea material for one of his weird and wondrous tales. We all know what happened when Don Juan in merry fashion begged that the statue of his former victim would come to take supper with him.

The French authorities have indeed purchased a vast tract of ground at Méry-sur-Oise, distant from Paris about one hour by rail, with intent to found there a vast central necropolis, but the prejudices or indifference of the Parisian populace have as yet prevented the realization of this project. Something must be done, however, and that speedily. Were cremation an established fact, that would settle the whole matter, but the French, who always seem to get an attack of piety in the wrong place, are horrified at such an idea. It is probable, therefore, that a law will be adopted, such as is now in force in Switzerland, making all concessions of burial-lots merely temporary. Such a law is already talked of, and the duration of the longest concession is fixed at ten years. A regulation of this kind would of course do away with much of the elegance of decoration that now distinguishes the Parisian cemeteries, as few families would care to erect costly monuments over a grave that must be vacated at the end of ten years.

L. H. H.

THE RELIGIOUS STRUGGLE AT GENEVA.

Even for a chance resident in Geneva, for a disinterested stranger to the strife, the Ultramontane and Old Catholic question is no more to be avoided than the bise which blows in the month of November upon the just and the unjust. You take the longest way round through the sheltered streets, if you like, but the terrific north wind is certain to catch you at the first square you cross. And you may say you have no particular interest in the war of churches, and no adequate means of forming a judgment: you still hear a good deal that is said, and read much that is written, on the burning topic. If a supporter of the ruling party describes what occurred some months since at Bellerive on the lake shore, when a company of gendarmes marched into the village, took possession of the church, set the Swiss cross floating from the steeple and established the new curé by force of arms, in place of the Ultramontane incumbent, who had long defied the cantonal authorities and remained at his post in spite of reiterated orders to depart, the impression you receive is that of the might and majesty of the law triumphant. What else can be done, they ask, when the government of the land is flouted in open scorn? What, indeed? And the counter-display of banners by the vanquished party on that eventful day illustrated, it would appear, the well-known step from the sublime to the ridiculous. Every black rag on which they could lay hands dangled from the windows of the faithful in sign of distress: not even a petticoat rather the worse for wear but did duty on the occasion. And yet one thoroughly convinced of the puerility of such demonstrations may also think that the Swiss flag itself has been unfurled in causes more glorious.

"The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church," say the persecuted. "Where the government has put in an apostate priest, he celebrates mass to empty benches: we set up our altar in a barn, and it is full to overflowing." So far as this city is concerned, the statement is correct. The place of worship to which the Ultramontanes retired when driven from the cathedral of Notre Dame may, if they choose, be called a barn—a large one—and it is furnished with a goodly congregation, whereas the forty or fifty persons who assemble in their former church look no more than "a handful of corn upon the mountains." It must be admitted also that in sowing after the manner of the martyrs the Ultramontanes are ready and willing, and should the official rigors be insufficient they will perhaps do a little private bloodletting for the sake of contributing handsomely to the support of their cause. The Sisters of Charity, expelled from Geneva last year as exercising a pernicious influence, are said to have opened all their veins before they went. Excepting[Pg 126] that blood, however, it is not apparent that they lost a great deal: they merely crossed the boundary into France, can revisit the scene of their martyrdom whenever they please, and moreover, in their present quality of strangers, the government has lost the right of interference with their apparel, so that the stiff white bonnets may now walk with impunity under the very nose of a conseiller d'état. The inhabitants of the canton are severely restricted as to costume under the present régime. No native priest is permitted a distinctive dress, and where a couple of large hats and long skirts are seen strolling through the streets, you know they are from over the border. Jesuitism is not to parade in full uniform, nor is it to lurk privily under never so humble a roof. In their struggles with the hydra-headed monster the men in the high places of this canton found themselves lately face to face with an odd set of opponents. An association of servant-girls, animated by the spirit of party, had stepped into the vacant quarters of the Sisters—a locality already confiscated by the government. The object of the society is praiseworthy: it provides a home for servants out of place, and nurses and maintains such as are sick or destitute. Still, the powers that be thought such Christian charity might be exercised as well elsewhere, and sent a notice to quit, of which the domestics, with a traditional contempt for lawful authority, made no account whatever. They were threatened with the police, but still stood firm, and not until an armed force actually descended upon them did they retire in good order, bearing one of their company on a mattress. Those interested in their behalf call attention to the fact that the sick person had to be transported through the streets on the coldest day of the season, while the party of the gendarmerie cause it to be understood that said person only took to her bed when the judicial knock sounded at the door.

Scandalous wrangling, petty bickering, the zealous wrath of true conviction on either side,—there is room for them all in a contest like this, where every one must wear the badge of party in plain sight, and defend it as best he may, but defend it at all costs. To stand between two such hostile forces is to be regarded as an enemy by both, and is a situation that may seem equivocal even to lookers-on. Yet those who listen habitually to the one man who has chosen that unenviable post can hardly complain of want of clearness in his own defining of his position. Père Hyacinthe is sometimes held to be on the high road to Protestantism. Any one who went out in the middle of some discourse of his, and so heard only the warm-hearted, candid confession of sympathy with all that is excellent among heretics, might carry away such an impression: those who remain until the inevitable "mais" with which the second proposition begins are convinced that to grasp the hand he holds out for Church unity the Protestants would have many more steps to take than he contemplates on his side, and that the meeting could by no means be a halfway one. Another numerously-supported opinion is that of his waiting only for a good opportunity to return to the true fold. Certain it is that at all times and in all places he calls himself a faithful son of that Church of which, as he ceases not to reiterate, he has never sought the ruin, but the reform. Who, however, hearing the scathing apostrophe that follows to the address of the misguided old man who holds the keys of St. Peter can feel that this son of Rome, devoted though he be, is very ready to sue for pardon? On the contrary, let the shepherd repent, then the wandering sheep may come back to the flock. A weightier charge against him than any other is that of betraying party, of faithlessly turning his back on the cause he once espoused. But that cause is still his, as he declares: no one has more at heart the success of the Old Catholic movement than he, no one a warmer desire to see the purified Church in the place that is hers of right; but also no one has a deeper abhorrence of that Church lending herself as a servant to political intrigues, be the government that sets them on foot called despotic or republican. And then the Grand Conseil comes in for no little scorn and contempt.[Pg 127] Père Hyacinthe may be a Jesuit in disguise, or a Calvinist at heart, or a broken reed that pierces the hand of him who leans on it; but there is still another hypothesis: he may be a man endowed with the rare gift of seeing all sides of a question with equal impartiality, and one not to be deterred by any party considerations from speaking his free opinion: in that case it is certain that he would find no place in either of the factions at variance in this commonwealth.

How large the number of those who followed Père Hyacinthe when he took up his present isolated position it would be difficult to estimate, for the services at the Casino are attended by others besides his own flock; Sunday after Sunday the barren concert-hall is filled, but many faces wear an expectant look that distinguishes them as passing strangers from the frequenters of the place; and when the mass begins there is evident doubt in the minds of some how far loyalty to their own simpler forms permits them to unite in this worship. They solve the question by standing up whenever a change of position seems to be called for; and in fact to kneel in the narrow, crowded seats is almost impossible, so that the front row, with more space at its disposal, may be properly expected to act as proxy for all the rest. There comes a moment, however, that unites Catholic and Protestant under one spell: it is when the first word falls from the lips of the great speaker. Whatever the subject, whether Catholic reform or the state of the soul after death, a breathless stillness bears witness to enchained attention. Such a theme as the latter must lead far from the daily ways of thought that many tread who listen: when the silver tongue ceases, one may murmur to another, "Mystical!" and yet a very untranscendental mind, borne upward for the moment by that wondrous eloquence, might well catch some vision of a mysterious bond between the Church militant and the Church triumphant—might all but feel a tie linking that strangely-mingled assemblage with the Blessed Company of All Saints.

G. H. P.

THE COMING ELECTIONS IN FRANCE.

The crisis brought about in France by Marshal MacMahon's coup de palais of May 16, 1877, has thrown the country just four years back. Circumstances widely different in character from those which caused the overthrow of M. Thiers on May 24, 1873, have once more placed the government in the hands of men of whom the Republic might well have thought itself for ever rid. At that time the blow was struck by a parliamentary majority. This time it is the representative of the executive power who has thought fit to interfere, seeking to substitute an authoritative for a parliamentary government. When MacMahon assumed power he declared that his post was that of "a sentinel who has to watch over the integrity of your sovereign powers;" but it would appear as though the recollection of his own earlier career, his clerical associations and other secret influences at work, had made him ambitious to occupy a higher position. From the post of sentinel he leaps to that of generalissimo; and there can be little doubt as to the cause which the transition is intended to serve.

There is no longer anything to fear from the Legitimists: the death-knell of that party was rung by the Count de Chambord's famous letter of October 30, 1873, declaring his continued adherence to Bourbon principles. Nor is aught to be apprehended from the Orleanists. They—the Centre-Right in the two houses—long hesitated whether to cast in their lot with the Republic, which would annihilate them by absorption with the Centre-Left, or to join the ranks of the so-called Conservatives, who are undoubtedly destined to swamp them in the stream of imperialism. After much swaying to and fro they have, it would seem, at length determined to follow their usual party tactics and go over bodily to the side which appears to them to present the least immediate danger—viz., the Imperialist. There is no disguising the matter. The battle this time will be between the Republicans and the Bonapartists. M. Gambetta, in the course of his eloquent speech[Pg 128] of May 4, 1877, cried, "Le cléricalisme, voilà l'ennemi." Powerful, however, as is the clerical party to embarrass, it is not strong enough at the urns to over-turn the Republic. Imperialism alone can hope to do that when, arrayed in fight against the present form of government, it seeks to win over to its side the country population, those six million electors for the most part owners of the soil they till, and on whose decision hinges to a large extent the future of France. These paysans will vote for one of two things—the Republic or the Empire, the marshal-president before the 16th of May, or the marshal-president who "belongs to the Right."

In France this is, in some degree at least, understood, and even now each party is mustering all its forces so as to be prepared for the October elections. The Republicans are already well organized, with their committees and sub-committees awaiting the instructions of their leader. They will proceed to the polls encouraged by their success at the last elections, taking credit for the tranquil state of France up to the 16th of May, 1877, setting forth their moderation when in power, the guarantees they have given for the maintenance of order, and the almost unanimous approbation their conduct of affairs has met with at the hands of the foreign press.

The Bonapartists will put on their panoply of battle, strong in the support of the marshal, his prefects, his mayors and the cohorts of inferior appointees, such as the gendarmes, the rural constabulary, and all that powerful mechanism at the disposal of a government which sets up official candidates with the avowed intention of carrying the elections by the almost irresistible force of French centralization. All who have seen in motion that formidable political machine called a French prefecture know what this implies. It will be recollected that nearly all the prefects have been changed since the 16th of May. The prefect is appointed by the Minister of the Interior, and receives from him every day by telegraph the word of command, while the post brings him official circulars. These orders he in turn communicates to his subordinates, the mayors. The mayors are, it is true, not all appointed by the prefects, those in the rural districts being elected by the town councils. Nevertheless, they are all more or less under the thumb of the prefects. They need the prefect's signature almost every day to stamp some official act; they require government grants for the maintenance of schools, roads and other purposes in their communes; they dare not offend the prefects, under penalty of having men appointed as rural constables, mayors' secretaries and letter-carriers who shall be so many enemies of the mayors and shall thwart them at every step. The prefect thus exercises enormous influence in every commune, both over the mayor and the lower class of appointees. He likewise holds in subjection in the various districts the justices of the peace, whose appointments can be revoked at will should they vote against orders or fail to use their influence on behalf of the official candidate. The prefect also reigns supreme over the brigades of foot and mounted gendarmerie scattered throughout his department. Of course, the gendarmes do not follow a man to the poll to see that he votes to order, but both the gendarmes and the rural constables understand that they are to act as gently toward the liquor-sellers who vote as they are bidden as they are to proceed rigorously against those who contend for the right of private judgment. If the latter get into trouble, they must be made an example of, whereas should the supporters of the official candidates have broken the law, matters may easily be arranged. Besides these instruments, the prefect has his newspaper, containing articles carefully prepared beforehand at Paris, which he has distributed gratuitously among the electors during the whole of the campaign. This newspaper enjoys the patronage of the judicial and official advertisements, for the insertion of which, American readers need scarcely be told, it receives very handsome pay. Even the post-office is made to join in the conspiracy against the opposition candidate, and it is no rare occurrence for[Pg 129] the newspapers and the voting tickets issued by the anti-official party to be held back at the post-office until the day after the election.

All these means, and others besides, are used to intimidate the country population. The strength of the administration is paraded before them. A great show of energy—or, to use the expressive French word, de poigne—is made. This is done in order that the French peasant, instinctively attracted by a display of power and repelled by an exhibition of weakness, may cast his vote for the man who appears to be the stronger candidate, and who enjoys the friendship of Monsieur le Préfet.

In February, 1876, M. Buffet, then Minister of the Interior, only employed the means above described sparingly and stealthily. The favor with which he viewed the aspirations of the clerical party caused him to allow the Bonapartist machine to get somewhat rusty. In October, 1877, M. de Fourtou, the Bonapartist Minister of the Interior, selected by the marshal and his advisers as the fittest for the post, will, we may rest assured, make ample use of the levers of administrative centralization. His past career furnishes evidence that he will not hesitate an instant to declare as the official nominee, and energetically to support, any anti-Republican candidate having the least chance of success. Under such circumstances in almost every electoral district in the north, centre and west of France there will be a Bonapartist candidate. The situation insensibly recalls Dryden's well-known lines:

Even in 1876, when they were left to their own resources, the Imperialists were able to carry the election of about a hundred of their adherents. Now, with one of their own party as the leading wire-puller, and with the aid of the not over-scrupulous préfets à poigne—who have scarcely forgotten the instruction they received during Napoleon's reign—the Imperialists will not despair of getting another one hundred and fifty, perhaps even two hundred, members into the Chamber.

C. H. H.

VON MOLTKE IN TURKEY.

Artemus Ward, giving his reasons for approving of G. Washington, adduced the pleasing fact that "George never slopped over." Had that king of jokers ever uttered a "sparkling remark" about H. von Moltke (as we may be sure he would have done if he had lived until now), it would most probably have conveyed a very similar idea in equally scintillating language. It is currently reported of the last-named gentleman that he "keeps silence in seven languages." Like the great William of Orange, he is popularly nicknamed in his own country "the silent man" (der Schweiger). Perhaps this habitual reticence is one reason why his utterances are received—when he speaks at all—by his countrymen generally with such deep respect and interest; for even the all-powerful Bismarck cannot command, among Germans, a stricter attention to his speeches. And with regard to military subjects at least, it is natural that the rest of the world should not be altogether indifferent to what the famous strategist may have to say.

But this ability to refrain from utterance did not, at an earlier period of his life, prevent his doing what is traditionally asserted to gratify a man's enemies; and patriotic Frenchmen ought to be glad to know that he once wrote a book. Indeed, he has written more than one, but there is one of his productions which is now attracting a great deal of attention. This work is entitled "Letters on the State of, and Events in, Turkey, from 1835 to 1839. By Helmuth von Moltke, Captain on the General Staff, afterward General and Field-marshal." At least this is the title under which the book has lately been republished at Berlin. The original designation was a little less overpowering, but quite huge enough, apparently, to smother the young literary effort; for it died quickly, and though some forty years have passed since the first edition appeared (with a warm recommendation from the eminent geographer Karl Ritter), yet[Pg 130] the one just issued is only the second. It is now preceded by a short introduction written for the publishers at their urgent request; and no more widely-popular book has appeared in Germany for many years. The people take a vast amount of pleasure in reading the descriptions of their staid, soldierly old field-marshal attired in Oriental garb and figuring among scenes which might have been taken from the Arabian Nights.

But, aside from any personal considerations, the book is really a very interesting and valuable one, and unquestionably deserved a better fate than that which overtook it at first. And now that everything connected with Turkey possesses a special interest for the world at large, it will well repay a careful perusal.

"Captain" von Moltke went to Turkey in the thirty-fifth year of his age, and at a time when the public interest in that country was hardly less active than it has been lately. The war of 1828 and 1829, and Sultan Mahmud II.'s energetic action in fighting his foes and undertaking vast internal reforms, had caused the attention of the world to be concentrated upon his affairs. The young German staff-officer intended spending only a few weeks in the Ottoman empire. But the sultan was anxious to avail himself of the services of just such men, and the offer of an appointment as musteschar ("imperial councilor") was too tempting for Von Moltke to refuse. Installed in his office, he soon made his value apparent to both the sultan and Chosrew Pasha, the seraskier, who was in high favor at court, and in a short time a vast number and variety of duties were assigned to him. Was a difficult bridge-building project to be carried out, he was the man to make it a success; did the sultan's palace need to have another tower perched upon it, he must direct the work: in fact, it seemed to be the prevailing impression that the advice and assistance of "Moltke Pasha" were good things to have in any situation.

His good standing in high government circles made him much sought after by Turkish subordinate officials, who hoped to make use of his interest to their own advantage. According to the common custom in that part of the world, they sent him presents in great numbers. Horses enough were given to him to mount a whole company of cavalry, and not unfrequently also these propitiatory offerings took the form of hard cash. He asserts that any hesitation about accepting these donations would merely have convinced the givers that he thought them too small; and he was therefore obliged to resort to the expedient of dividing them among his servants and employés. These proceedings won for him the honorable distinction of being considered delih, which may be translated by the popular expression "cracked." Among other delicate attentions offered to him as a stranger was the infliction of the bastinado upon certain criminals in his presence and with a view to his gratification. Certain Greeks, who were thus made to take a very important part in getting the entertainment to the foreigner on foot, were considerately allowed a very liberal reduction in the number of blows they were to receive, which was only twenty-five hundred!

But, in addition to such diversions, Von Moltke's experiences in Turkey included many opportunities to become thoroughly acquainted with the face of the country and the characteristics of the various races inhabiting it. He accompanied the sultan during an extensive tour made by the latter among the Christian provinces, and gives an interesting account of the journey. At another time he was sent to Syria, where the royal forces were operating against Ibrahim Pasha, and here it was that the future great general went through his first campaign. That it ended in a most disastrous defeat for the side upon which he was enlisted does not seem to have been due to any want of energy on his part. Soon after this he gave up his post under the Turkish government and returned to his native land.

W. W. C.

PUNCHING THE DRINKS.

The latest move upon John Barleycorn's works is engineered by the legislative wisdom of the Old Dominion. It[Pg 131] consists in a bell-punch on the model, embalmed already in poetry, of the implement which forms the most conspicuous feature of the street-car conductor's outfit. The disappearance of each drink is to be announced to all within hearing by a sprightly peal on a kind of joy-bell Edgar A. Poe lived too soon to include in his tintinnabulatory verses. The chimes vary in intensity and glee according to the magnitude of the event they at once celebrate and record. Lager elicits but a modest jingle, whisky unadorned is honored with a louder greeting, and the arrival of an artistic cobbler at the seat of thirst is the signal for a triple bob-major of the most brilliant vivacity. On a court day, an election day or a circus day the air will vibrate to the incessant and inspiriting clangor; and as in one part or another of the Commonwealth one at least of those festivals so dear to freemen is in blast always, the din will be ended only by midnight, resounding over her whole surface from daylight to the witching hour.

J.B.'s assailants, and their modes of attack, are innumerable. Every foot of his enceinte is scarred with the dint of siege, and from every battlement "the flight of baffled foes" he has "watched along the plain." Sap and storm have alike failed to bring down his rosy colors. Father Mathew, Gough, the Sons of Temperance, the Straight-Outs,—where are they? He stands intact and defiant. Should he surrender, it will be a wondrous triumph, and all the more so for the simplicity of the means. The marvel will be, as with Columbus and the egg, why everybody did not think of it long ago.

The way once opened, all will flock in. Divines, statesmen, moralists and financiers will all strike for the new placer. The moral reformers will brandish aloft the tinkling weapon, enthusiastic in their determination to use it to the utmost and bring down tippling to a minimum. Lawmakers and tax-gatherers will rejoice over a new and fertile source of revenue, and pile upon it impost on impost, secure of the approval of the most grumbling of tax-payers. To the new fiscal and moral California all will flock.

The extent of the revolution is as little to be estimated in advance as was that caused by Columbus's voyage. Strong drink pervades all civilized lands. It is a universal element, the elimination of which must produce changes impossible to be calculated or foreseen. Should the grand moral results anticipated follow, the difference between civilized man and his sober savage fellow will be widened. Progress will no longer be handicapped, and will press forward with accelerated speed. Its path will cease to be strewn with broken fortunes, happiness and bottles. Policemen and criminal courts will lose, according to standard statistics, four-fifths of their occupation. In that proportion the cause of virtue will gain. Mankind will be four hundred per cent. more honest and peaceable than before the passage of the whisky-punch bill. With the public treasury full, and the detective, the juryman and the shyster existent only in a fossil state, the millennium will have been, as the phrase runs, discounted.

But we run foul of the inevitable and inexorable If. Is the machine invented that is to do such work? Is it within the reach of any combination of springs, ratchets and clappers? Is the leviathan of strong drink to be hooked after that fashion—a bit put in his mouth and the monster made to draw the car of state? We shall see. The end would justify much more ponderous and hazardous means, and the chance is worth taking. Independent of the general blessing to mankind involved in the punch idea, Virginia proposes in it a special benefit to herself; and that of course is her chief motive. States so very much in debt as she is are not prone to quixotic philanthropy. Should this novel form of taxation assist in paying the interest on her bonds, she will patiently wait for the secondary, if broader, good accruing to the world at large. Men, she argues, who are able to indulge in stimulants are able to pay their debts, and at least their share of the public debt. Each click of the bell proclaims her adoption of this theory, and at the same time her anxiety to find some means of satisfying her creditors.[Pg 132] If she can cancel at once her bonds and Barleycorn, so much the better.

E. B.

THE NAUTCH-DANCERS OF INDIA.

The Prince of Wales was severely censured by some of the English journals for dignifying by his presence the nautch-dancing of India. These performances are peculiar to the country and its religion, and constitute so important a part of the marvels of the East that few male travelers at least fail to witness them. Probably the prince saw no good reason why he should forego any of the benefits of sightseeing vouchsafed to the ordinary traveler. Dancing has always been an important feature of the ceremonial worship of most Oriental peoples. Every temple of note in India has attached to it a troop of nautch-dancers. According to Mr. Sellen, the author of Annotations of the Sacred Writing's of the Hindus (London, 1865), these young girls are "early initiated into all the mysteries of their profession. They are instructed in dancing and vocal and instrumental music, their chief employment being to chant the sacred hymns and perform nautches before their god on the recurrence of high festivals." One of the English papers declared that "witnessing the physical contortions of half-nude prostitutes" was hardly a commendable amusement in the future sovereign of Great Britain. But this is hardly just. Vile as the calling of the nautch-women may be—and one of their duties is to raise funds for the aggrandizement of the temple to which they are attached by selling themselves in its courts—it does not degrade like ordinary prostitution where all society shuns and abhors its votary. In India both priest and layman respect the calling of the nautch-girls as one advancing the cause of religion. It is possible, therefore, to see that their moral nature is, in a sense, sustained by self-respect. "Being always women of more or less personal attractions, which are enhanced," says the same author, "by all the seductions of dress, jewels, accomplishments and art, they frequently receive large sums for the favors they grant, and fifty, one hundred, and even two hundred, rupees have been known to be paid to these sirens at one time." Nor is this very much to be wondered at if it be true that they comprise among their number "some of the loveliest women in the world."

M. H.

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

It would hardly be inferred from such a title that the duodecimo in large print which assumes to discuss the New World is occupied with the diary of a tour in a gunboat from Rio de Janeiro through Magellan's Straits and up the west coast of South America to San Diego, and thence by stage and railway to San Francisco, Salt Lake and Chicago. An exploration of this character could not be exhaustive, and the successors of the gallant major will find an abundance of matter left in the twin continents for much larger books with much smaller titles.

It must be said, in justice to the writer, that the pretentiousness of his book is only skin-deep. It "thunders in the index," but disappears after the front page. He makes no claim to profundity, and is satisfied to be an authority among Nimrods rather than with statesmen and philosophers. The rod and gun suit his hand better than the pen, and he takes not the least trouble to disguise the fact. Style is the very least of his cares: we should almost judge, indeed, that he likes to parade his contempt for it. The pronoun who he[Pg 133] constantly applies to animals, from a sheep to a shellfish. Of the Uruguayan thistles he notes: "The abundance of this weed was quite surprising, and consisted chiefly of two kinds." The gentleman of color he invariably mentions as a nigger—a word as strange to ears polite in America, and perhaps as natural to them in England, as nasty. He plucks at Sir G. Wolseley's laurels won in "licking a few miserable niggers in Ashantee."

But literary vanities can be despised by a man who drops a prong-horned antelope at one thousand and ninety yards; overtakes by swimming, and captures, a turtle in mid-ocean; finishes with a single ball a grizzly who had put to flight the settlers of half a county in Idaho; stalks a guanaco in Patagonia nine feet high to the top of the head; and catches in one day's fishing, "the only day I really worked hard, twenty-seven California salmon, weighing three hundred and twenty-four pounds." The majesty of the facts utterly overshadows any little blemishes in the method of stating them. Truth so grand might well afford to present itself quite naked, as Truth poetically does—much more somewhat defective in the cut of its garments.

Sir Rose Price is a cosmopolitan sportsman, having hunted the jungles of India, the swamps of Eastern Africa and China, the fjelds of Norway, and most other fields of "mimic war." As usual with persons of that taste, he enjoys perfect health, and, like most persons who know that great blessing, he is full of bonhommie and looks on the rosy side of things. Mosquitoes he dislikes: he denounces also the modern Peruvians. But his chief bitterness is reserved for the unhappy gunboat, the Rocket, which took eight months to get him to San Diego, and spent half an hour in turning round. Whether or not that particular segment of England's wooden walls was built in the eclipse, no reader of Sir Rose's book will doubt that she is rigged with curses dark. When he leaves her a cloud seems to be lifted from his soul. Everything thereafter is delightful, if we except the climate of San Francisco, which he abominates as windy and extreme in its daily changes, and the social system which prevails under Brigham Young. The "big trees" transport him; the California stage-drivers are unapproachable in the world; the officers of the United States army treat him with the most assiduous and unvaried courtesy and hospitality; the ladies of both coasts of the United States are unrivaled for beauty; and "the more one sees of America, both of people and country, the better one likes both." He sums up in the following climax: "Should any visit America after reading these lines, let me advise them to pay particular attention to three subjects—i. e., canvas-back ducks, terrapin and madeira. This to the uninitiated is a hint worth remembering." The last word, we take it, refers to the wine of that name, which we had thought was still in process of very slow recovery from the eclipse of twenty-five years ago. The major, however, knows wine, and speaks impartially of it. The wines of California he damns unreservedly: the Californians themselves, he says, never drink them.

Sir Rose Price became intimate with the brave and unfortunate Custer. He was to have joined that officer on the expedition which terminated so fatally. His "traps were packed" and he was ready to start, when, as he states it, a singular train of untoward events interposed and saved his scalp. Secretary Belknap was impeached—General Custer was summoned to Washington and gave testimony unfavorable to the accused. General Grant's alleged disgust thereat caused Custer to be deprived of independent command and the power of appointing a staff. Hence The Two Americas and one scalp less at the belt of Sitting Bull.

Neither the biographer nor the critic finds it easy to get a good grip on a personal or literary career so little marked by salient features as that of Procter. The lives of few individuals have rolled on more evenly than his did for the round eighty years which made its term. Not of high or of low birth, rich or poor, feeble or vigorous in health, a man of the world or a recluse, ardent or cold in emotions, his figure is strangely wanting in light and shade. As a poet and a thinker his character is equally evasive. His verse can rarely be pronounced decidedly feeble or commonplace, and never lofty or thrilling. He will be remembered by two or three short poems tender in fancy and soft in finish. Inquirers who are tempted by these to explore[Pg 134] the rest of his productions will find them readable, but not memorable, and will wonder at learning that a tragedy of Procter's attained a success on the London stage denied to either of Tennyson's.

The poet will go down to posterity under an assumed name, that under which he was almost exclusively known to readers of his own day. Thus buried under an anonym, and gravitating at all points toward mediocrity, it is odd that so much interest should centre in his life and works as we actually find to exist. This interest may be mainly ascribed to his surroundings. Like Rogers, he shines by reflected light. He numbered among his friends or acquaintances, in varied shades of intimacy, almost every celebrity in British literature during two generations. To these were added leading representatives of the fine arts, music and the drama—Mendelssohn, Lawrence, Landseer, Turner, the Kembles, Edmund Kean. It was a notable visiting-list that embraced all the Lake school, Byron, Dickens, Thackeray, the two Lyttons, Scott, Sydney Smith and a number of others as incongruous in time and tenets. Good taste, amiability, the means and disposition to entertain, would have sufficed, with the aid of less of intellectual and imaginative power than Procter possessed, to keep him in good companionship with men like these, who felt the need of a common professional rallying-point in the metropolis. He avoided collision with any of their crotchets and idiosyncrasies. His antipathies were few, and what he had he was generally successful in repressing. De Quincey seems to have been lowest in his estimation. The genial Elia and the fiery Hazlitt divided his especial and lasting attachment.

Procter was always haunted by the very natural impression that he owed to the world some use of the opportunities afforded him for the study of mind and character by such a concourse of leading men. But he failed to make even a move toward the discharge of that task until a short time before the close of his life. The results, slight as they are, form perhaps the most interesting section of the book before us. It embraces short notices of Byron, Rogers, Crabbe, the three chief Lakers, Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt, Carlyle, Haydon, Campbell, Moore and a few others. Coleridge, we are told, had a "prodigious amount of miscellaneous reading" always at command, and forgot everything in the pleasure of hearing himself talk when he could secure an audience. Wordsworth's poverty at one period of his life is illustrated by his having been met emerging from a wood with a quantity of hazelnuts which he had gathered to eke out the scanty dinner of his family. Doubtless he had collected finer things than nuts, if less available for material sustenance. Wordsworth, breakfasting with Rogers, excused his being late by saying he had been detained by one of Coleridge's long monologues. He had called so early on Coleridge, he explained, because he was to dine with him that evening. "And," said Rogers, "you wanted to draw the sting out of him beforehand." Campbell was in society cautious, stiff and precise, like much of his verse, but was subject to occasional outbreaks, analogous to the "Battle of the Baltic" and "Ye Mariners of England." Crabbe resembled Moore in his passion for lords. Walter Scott was big, broad, easy and self-poised, like one of his own historical novels. He impressed Procter more than any of the rest as great, and consciously great. Leigh Hunt was "essentially a gentleman;" he "treated all people fairly, yet seldom or never looked up to any one with much respect;" and "his mind was feminine rather than manly, without intending to speak disrespectfully of his intellect."

Part IV. of the book is devoted to selections from letters written to Procter. Jeffrey, Byron, Carlyle and Beddoes are the chief correspondents quoted. Those from Byron are strongly Byronesque, but give us no new points, unless in the high moral tone he assumes in defending Don Juan. That poem does, he avers, no injustice to the English aristocracy, which he maintains to have been at that time the most profligate in Europe. The prominent details of the queen's trial and others like it would "in no other country have been publicly tolerated a moment." Was it Byron's theory, then, that all kinds of morality are merely relative, and the outgrowth of local conditions?

The materials at the command of the editor of this book were obviously very meagre. Yet it has undoubted value. If neither a corner-stone, a voussoir nor a capital, it has at least its place in the edifice which forms the literary history of the nineteenth century. Beyond that value it has merit as the simple record of a life enriched by the charms of poetry and elegant taste and the social and domestic charities.[Pg 135]

The announcement of this book as "a companion volume to Wallace's Russia" provokes a comparison greatly to its disadvantage. The qualities most conspicuous in Mr. Wallace's work, thoroughness of exposition, skillful arrangement, breadth of view and mastery of details, are wholly wanting in Colonel Baker's Turkey. The information which it gives from the author's personal observation is fragmentary and disappointing; the matter gleaned from other sources is chiefly surplusage; the expressions of opinion indicate positiveness rather than keen insight or impartial judgment; and, what renders the contrast still more striking, the book as evidently owes its dimensions, if not its existence, to the immediate interest of the subject as Mr. Wallace's work was the slowly-ripened fruit of long and patient study, and its opportune appearance a fortuitous advantage that added little to its attractiveness. It is, however, no ground for condemning a book that it has been written to supply information for which there is a present demand; and if Colonel Baker had confined himself to telling us what he knew, and his publishers had refrained from exciting undue expectations, the contribution might have been accepted thankfully for what it was worth, without special complaint in regard to its deficiencies. About half the book is readable, and this includes some portions which, besides being interesting, derive a special value from the author's qualifications for speaking authoritatively on the points discussed in them. He traveled somewhat extensively in Bulgaria; he purchased and cultivated an estate in the neighborhood of Salonica, and was thus brought into those relations of landlord, employer and taxpayer which entail a certain familiarity with the workings of the administrative machinery and with the habits and feelings of the rural population; and, finally, as a soldier, he writes with full comprehension and intelligence on the military resources of the country and the prospects of the war which was seen to be inevitable when his book went to press. In reference to the last point, he even sketches a plan of defence which it seems not improbable may be that which the government will adopt, if its own collapse or the intervention of other powers does not bring the struggle to a speedier termination or an unforeseen issue. He considers the Danube with its defences as offering no obstacle of importance to the overwhelming forces preparing to cross it. The Balkan affords numerous passes which may be traversed at all seasons except in the depth of winter, and no points of defence that may not easily be turned. But after crossing this range the Russians will be more than three hundred miles from their base, and all their supplies will have to be brought over the mountains. Their numbers will have been so diminished by sickness and by the large detachments necessary for masking the fortresses in their rear, that out of the four hundred thousand with which Colonel Baker supposes them to open the campaign, they cannot be expected to operate with more than one hundred thousand south of the Balkan. They will still have a difficult country before them, and from Burgas, on the Black Sea, where Colonel Baker proposes the establishment of an entrenched camp, to be constantly supplied and reinforced by water-transport from Constantinople, their flanks may be harassed and their communications threatened, making it impossible for them to march on Adrianople before ridding themselves of this danger. "It may be argued," says Colonel Baker, "that this plan of defence would be giving over a large portion of the empire to Russian occupation, but the answer is, that Turkey, being in command of the Black Sea, could strangle all Russian commerce in those waters until that power released her grip of the Ottoman throat." But whatever be the merit or the feasibility of this plan, it presupposes not only a design on the part of Russia to advance upon Constantinople, which is doubtful, but a degree of energy in the Turkish government and military commanders which it is almost certain does not exist. The Ottoman power is to all appearance perishing of inanition, and the mere hastening of its dissolution through external shocks is not to be deprecated. But it is puerile to imagine that this will be the only or chief result of the war now going on, if not arrested by intervention in one form or another. In the delicate and complicated relations of the European states the dismemberment of one empire and the aggrandizement of another are not such changes as can occur without affecting the whole system, and that harmony of action which it was found impossible to secure as a means of averting war is not likely to show itself when some decisive catastrophe[Pg 136] shall have developed the possibilities to be hoped or apprehended, brought conflicting interests into play and suggested new combinations. Whether a different course, with joint action, on the part of the powers that now affect neutrality would have led to a more satisfactory result, is itself a mere matter of speculation; but out of England few persons will be disposed to agree with Colonel Baker in putting on Russia the whole responsibility both of the war and of the events which are pleaded as the justification of it. While conceding the corruption, apathy and general incompetence of the Turkish government, he contends that oppression is the exception, not the rule, that the chief mischiefs have sprung directly from Russian intrigue, that the country has been making rapid progress in many ways, and that time alone might safely have been trusted to bring about all desirable reforms. So far as the general condition of the people is concerned, his statements are entitled to weight. But beyond the limits of his own experience his boldness in assertion will not incline the reader to accept him as a safe guide. His book would have left a far more favorable impression had he confined himself to the description of what he saw and the relation of his own adventures, leaving Turkish history and political speculations to writers of a different class.

Books Received.

The Music Reader; or, The Practice and Principles of the Art, especially adapted to Vocal Music. For the use of Schools, Classes and Private Instruction. By Leopold Meignen and Wm. W. Keys. Philadelphia: W. H. Boner & Co., Agts.

Standard Facts and Figures; or, What you Do Know! What you Don't Know!! What you Want to Know!!! (Revised and enlarged edition.) Edited by A. G. Sullivan. New York: Morton & Dumont.

The Divine Order of the Universe, as interpreted by Emanuel Swedenborg; with especial relation to Modern Astronomy. By Rev. Augustus Clissold, M. A. London: Longmans, Green & Co.

From Traditional to Rational Faith; or, The Way I came from Baptist to Liberal Christianity. By R. Andrew Griffin. (Town-and-Country Series.) Boston: Roberts Brothers.

The Life, Times and Character of Oliver Cromwell. (Half-Hour Series.) By the Right Honorable E. H. Knatchbull-Hugessen, M. P. New York: Harper & Bros.

How to Teach according to Temperament and Mental Development; or, Phrenology in the School-room and the Family. By Nelson Sizer. New York: S. R. Wells & Co.

Rise of the People and Growth of Parliament, 1215-1485: Epochs of English History. By James Rowley, M. A. (Harper's Half-Hour Series.) New York: Harper & Bros.

Imaginary Conversations. By Walter Savage Landor. (Fourth Series.) Dialogues of Literary Men, of Famous Women, etc. Boston: Roberts Brothers.

Peru: Incidents of Travel and Exploration in the Land of the Incas, By E. George Squier, M. A., F. S. A. New York: Harper & Brothers.

A Winter Story. By Miss Peard, author of "The Rose Garden." (Town-and-Country Series.) Boston: Roberts Brothers.

That Lass o' Lowrie's. By Frances Hodgson Burnett. Illustrated by Alfred Fredericks. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co.

Shakespeare's Tragedy of Macbeth. Edited, with Notes, by William J. Rolfe, A. M. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Aloys. By B. Auerbach. Translated by Charles T. Brooks. (Leisure-Hour Series.) New York: Henry Holt & Co.

Steam Injectors: Their Theory and Use. From the French of M. Léon Pochet. New York: D. Van Nostrand.

Academy Sketches, Exhibition of 1877. With Descriptive Notes by "Nemo." New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.

Miss Nancy's Pilgrimage: A Story of Travel. By Virginia W. Johnson. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Mark Twain's Adhesive Scrap Book. By Samuel L. Clemens. New York: Slote, Woodman & Co.

Transmission of Power by Wire Ropes. By Albert W. Stahl, M. E. New York: D. Van Nostrand.

Dot and Dime. Two Characters in Ebony. By One who Knows all about them. Boston: Loring.

Hours with Men and Books. By William Mathews, LL.D. Chicago: S. C. Griggs & Co.

Bessie Lang. By Alice Corkran. (Leisure-Hour Series.) New York: Henry Holt & Co.

Annual Report of the Chief Signal-Officer for 1876. Washington: Government Printing office.

Will it Be? By Mrs. Helen J. Ford. (Loring's Tales of the Day.) Boston: Loring.

My Lady-Help, and What she Taught me, By Mrs. Warren. Boston: Loring.

A Modern Mephistopheles. (No-Name Series.) Boston: Roberts Brothers.

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