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Title: The Complete PG Works of O. W. Holmes, Sr.

Author: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet)
(Not the Jurist O. W. Holmes, Jr.)

Release Date: June, 2002 [Etext #3252]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[The date this file was first posted = February 2, 2001]
[Most recently updated: December 8, 2001]

Edition: 11

Language: English

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This etext was produced by David Widger  <widger@cecomet.net>





[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the
file for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making an
entire meal of them.  D.W.]





        THE ENTIRE GUTENBERG FILES OF OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, SR.



CONTENTS:

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-table
The Professor at the Breakfast-table
The Poet at the Breakfast Table
Over the Teacups
Elsie Venner
The Guardian Angel
A Mortal Antipathy
Pages from an Old Volume of Life
     Bread and the Newspaper
     My Hunt after "The Captain"
     The Inevitable Trial
     Cinders from Ashes
     The Pulpit and the Pew
Medical Essays
     Homeopathy and its Kindred Delusions
     The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever
     Currents and Counter-currents in Medical Science
     Border Lines of Knowledge in Some Provinces of Medical Science
     Scholastic and Bedside Teaching
     The Medical Profession in Massachusetts
     The Young Practitioner
     Medical Libraries
     Some of My Early Teachers





                  THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE
                        by Oliver Wendell Holmes


[Scanned and proofed by David Price <ccx074@coventry.ac.uk>]


THE AUTOCRAT'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY.


THE interruption referred to in the first sentence of the first of
these papers was just a quarter of a century in duration.

Two articles entitled "The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table" will be
found in the "New England Magazine," formerly published in Boston
by J. T. and E. Buckingham.  The date of the first of these
articles is November 1831, and that of the second February 1832.
When "The Atlantic Monthly" was begun, twenty-five years
afterwards, and the author was asked to write for it, the
recollection of these crude products of his uncombed literary
boyhood suggested the thought that it would be a curious experiment
to shake the same bough again, and see if the ripe fruit were
better or worse than the early windfalls.

So began this series of papers, which naturally brings those
earlier attempts to my own notice and that of some few friends who
were idle enough to read them at the time of their publication.
The man is father to the boy that was, and I am my own son, as it
seems to me, in those papers of the New England Magazine.  If I
find it hard to pardon the boy's faults, others would find it
harder.  They will not, therefore, be reprinted here, nor as I
hope, anywhere.

But a sentence or two from them will perhaps bear reproducing, and
with these I trust the gentle reader, if that kind being still
breathes, will be contented.


- "It is a capital plan to carry a tablet with you, and, when you
find yourself felicitous, take notes of your own conversation." -

- "When I feel inclined to read poetry I take down my Dictionary.
The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences.
The author may arrange the gems effectively, but their fhape and
luftre have been given by the attrition of ages.  Bring me the
fineft fimile from the whole range of imaginative writing, and I
will fhow you a fingle word which conveys a more profound, a more
accurate, and a more eloquent analogy." -

- "Once on a time, a notion was ftarted, that if all the people in
the world would fhout at once, it might be heard in the moon.  So
the projectors agreed it fhould be done in juft ten years.  Some
thousand fhip-loads of chronometers were diftributed to the
selectmen and other great folks of all the different nations.  For
a year beforehand, nothing else was talked about but the awful
noise that was to be made on the great occafion.  When the time
came, everybody had their ears so wide open, to hear the universal
ejaculation of BOO, - the word agreed upon, - that nobody spoke
except a deaf man in one of the Fejee Islands, and a woman in
Pekin, so that the world was never so ftill fince the creation." -


There was nothing better than these things and there was not a
little that was much worse.  A young fellow of two or three and
twenty has as good a right to spoil a magazine-full of essays in
learning how to write, as an oculist like Wenzel had to spoil his
hat-full of eyes in learning how to operate for cataract, or an
ELEGANT like Brummel to point to an armful of failures in the
attempt to achieve a perfect tie.  This son of mine, whom I have
not seen for these twenty-five years, generously counted, was a
self-willed youth, always too ready to utter his unchastised
fancies.  He, like too many American young people, got the spur
when he should have had the rein.  He therefore helped to fill the
market with that unripe fruit which his father says in one of these
papers abounds in the marts of his native country.  All these by-
gone shortcomings he would hope are forgiven, did he not feel sure
that very few of his readers know anything about them.  In taking
the old name for the new papers, he felt bound to say that he had
uttered unwise things under that title, and if it shall appear that
his unwisdom has not diminished by at least half while his years
have doubled, he promises not to repeat the experiment if he should
live to double them again and become his own grandfather.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.
BOSTON.  NOV. 1ST 1858.



CHAPTER I



I WAS JUST going to say, when I was interrupted, that one of the
many ways of classifying minds is under the heads of arithmetical
and algebraical intellects.  All economical and practical wisdom is
an extension or variation of the following arithmetical formula:
2+2=4.  Every philosophical proposition has the more general
character of the expression A+B=C.  We are mere operatives,
empirics, and egotists, until we learn to think in letters instead
of figures.

They all stared.  There is a divinity student lately come among us
to whom I commonly address remarks like the above, allowing him to
take a certain share in the conversation, so far as assent or
pertinent questions are involved.  He abused his liberty on this
occasion by presuming to say that Leibnitz had the same
observation. - No, sir, I replied, he has not.  But he said a
mighty good thing about mathematics, that sounds something like it,
and you found it, NOT IN THE ORIGINAL, but quoted by Dr. Thomas
Reid.  I will tell the company what he did say, one of these days.

- If I belong to a Society of Mutual Admiration? - I blush to say
that I do not at this present moment.  I once did, however.  It was
the first association to which I ever heard the term applied; a
body of scientific young men in a great foreign city who admired
their teacher, and to some extent each other.  Many of them
deserved it; they have become famous since.  It amuses me to hear
the talk of one of those beings described by Thackeray -


"Letters four do form his name" -


about a social development which belongs to the very noblest stage
of civilization.  All generous companies of artists, authors,
philanthropists, men of science, are, or ought to be, Societies of
Mutual Admiration.  A man of genius, or any kind of superiority, is
not debarred from admiring the same quality in another, nor the
other from returning his admiration.  They may even associate
together and continue to think highly of each other.  And so of a
dozen such men, if any one place is fortunate enough to hold so
many.  The being referred to above assumes several false premises.
First, that men of talent necessarily hate each other.  Secondly,
that intimate knowledge or habitual association destroys our
admiration of persons whom we esteemed highly at a distance.
Thirdly, that a circle of clever fellows, who meet together to dine
and have a good time, have signed a constitutional compact to
glorify themselves and to put down him and the fraction of the
human race not belonging to their number.  Fourthly, that it is an
outrage that he is not asked to join them.

Here the company laughed a good deal, and the old gentleman who
sits opposite said, "That's it! that's it!"

I continued, for I was in the talking vein.  As to clever people's
hating each other, I think a LITTLE extra talent does sometimes
make people jealous.  They become irritated by perpetual attempts
and failures, and it hurts their tempers and dispositions.
Unpretending mediocrity is good, and genius is glorious; but a weak
flavor of genius in an essentially common person is detestable.  It
spoils the grand neutrality of a commonplace character, as the
rinsings of an unwashed wineglass spoil a draught of fair water.
No wonder the poor fellow we spoke of, who always belongs to this
class of slightly flavored mediocrities, is puzzled and vexed by
the strange sight of a dozen men of capacity working and playing
together in harmony.  He and his fellows are always fighting.  With
them familiarity naturally breeds contempt.  If they ever praise
each other's bad drawings, or broken-winded novels, or spavined
verses, nobody ever supposed it was from admiration; it was simply
a contract between themselves and a publisher or dealer.

If the Mutuals have really nothing among them worth admiring, that
alters the question.  But if they are men with noble powers and
qualities, let me tell you, that, next to youthful love and family
affections, there is no human sentiment better than that which
unites the Societies of Mutual Admiration.  And what would
literature or art be without such associations?  Who can tell what
we owe to the Mutual Admiration Society of which Shakspeare, and
Ben Jonson, and Beaumont and Fletcher were members?  Or to that of
which Addison and Steele formed the centre, and which gave us the
Spectator?  Or to that where Johnson, and Goldsmith, and Burke, and
Reynolds, and Beauclerk, and Boswell, most admiring among all
admirers, met together?  Was there any great harm in the fact that
the Irvings and Paulding wrote in company? or any unpardonable
cabal in the literary union of Verplanck and Bryant and Sands, and
as many more as they chose to associate with them?

The poor creature does not know what he is talking about, when he
abuses this noblest of institutions.  Let him inspect its mysteries
through the knot-hole he has secured, but not use that orifice as a
medium for his popgun.  Such a society is the crown of a literary
metropolis; if a town has not material for it, and spirit and good
feeling enough to organize it, it is a mere caravansary, fit for a
man of genius to lodge in, but not to live in.  Foolish people hate
and dread and envy such an association of men of varied powers and
influence, because it is lofty, serene, impregnable, and, by the
necessity of the case, exclusive.  Wise ones are prouder of the
title M. S. M. A. than of all their other honors put together.

- All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called
"facts."  They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain.
Who does not know fellows that always have an ill-conditioned fact
or two which they lead after them into decent company like so many
bull-dogs, ready to let them slip at every ingenious suggestion, or
convenient generalization, or pleasant fancy?  I allow no "facts"
at this table.  What!  Because bread is good and wholesome and
necessary and nourishing, shall you thrust a crumb into my windpipe
while I am talking?  Do not these muscles of mine represent a
hundred loaves of bread? and is not my thought the abstract of ten
thousand of these crumbs of truth with which you would choke off my
speech?

[The above remark must be conditioned and qualified for the vulgar
mind.  The reader will of course understand the precise amount of
seasoning which must be added to it before he adopts it as one of
the axioms of his life.  The speaker disclaims all responsibility
for its abuse in incompetent hands.]

This business of conversation is a very serious matter.  There are
men that it weakens one to talk with an hour more than a day's
fasting would do.  Mark this that I am going to say, for it is as
good as a working professional man's advice, and costs you nothing:
It is better to lose a pint of blood from your veins than to have a
nerve tapped.  Nobody measures your nervous force as it runs away,
nor bandages your brain and marrow after the operation.

There are men of ESPRIT who are excessively exhausting to some
people.  They are the talkers who have what may be called JERKY
minds.  Their thoughts do not run in the natural order of sequence.
They say bright things on all possible subjects, but their zigzags
rack you to death.  After a jolting half-hour with one of these
jerky companions, talking with a dull friend affords great relief.
It is like taking the cat in your lap after holding a squirrel.

What a comfort a dull but kindly person is, to be sure, at times!
A ground-glass shade over a gas-lamp does not bring more solace to
our dazzled eyes than such a one to our minds.

"Do not dull people bore you?" said one of the lady-boarders, - the
same that sent me her autograph-book last week with a request for a
few original stanzas, not remembering that "The Pactolian" pays me
five dollars a line for every thing I write in its columns.

"Madam," said I, (she and the century were in their teens
together,) "all men are bores, except when we want them.  There
never was but one man whom I would trust with my latch-key."

"Who might that favored person be?"

"Zimmermann."

- The men of genius that I fancy most have erectile heads like the
cobra-di-capello.  You remember what they tell of William Pinkney,
the great pleader; how in his eloquent paroxysms the veins of his
neck would swell and his face flush and his eyes glitter, until he
seemed on the verge of apoplexy.  The hydraulic arrangements for
supplying the brain with blood are only second in importance to its
own organization.  The bulbous-headed fellows that steam well when
they are at work are the men that draw big audiences and give us
marrowy books and pictures.  It is a good sign to have one's feet
grow cold when he is writing.  A great writer and speaker once told
me that he often wrote with his feet in hot water; but for this,
ALL his blood would have run into his head, as the mercury
sometimes withdraws into the ball of a thermometer.

- You don't suppose that my remarks made at this table are like so
many postage-stamps, do you, - each to be only once uttered?  If
you do, you are mistaken.  He must be a poor creature that does not
often repeat himself.  Imagine the author of the excellent piece of
advice, "Know thyself," never alluding to that sentiment again
during the course of a protracted existence!  Why, the truths a man
carries about with him are his tools; and do you think a carpenter
is bound to use the same plane but once to smooth a knotty board
with, or to hang up his hammer after it has driven its first nail?
I shall never repeat a conversation, but an idea often.  I shall
use the same types when I like, but not commonly the same
stereotypes.  A thought is often original, though you have uttered
it a hundred times.  It has come to you over a new route, by a new
and express train of associations.

Sometimes, but rarely, one may be caught making the same speech
twice over, and yet be held blameless.  Thus, a certain lecturer,
after performing in an inland city, where dwells a LITTERATRICE of
note, was invited to meet her and others over the social teacup.
She pleasantly referred to his many wanderings in his new
occupation.  "Yes," he replied, "I am like the Huma, the bird that
never lights, being always in the cars, as he is always on the
wing." - Years elapsed.  The lecturer visited the same place once
more for the same purpose.  Another social cup after the lecture,
and a second meeting with the distinguished lady.  "You are
constantly going from place to place," she said. - "Yes," he
answered, "I am like the Huma," - and finished the sentence as
before.

What horrors, when it flashed over him that he had made this fine
speech, word for word, twice over!  Yet it was not true, as the
lady might perhaps have fairly inferred, that he had embellished
his conversation with the Huma daily during that whole interval of
years.  On the contrary, he had never once thought of the odious
fowl until the recurrence of precisely the same circumstances
brought up precisely the same idea.  He ought to have been proud of
the accuracy of his mental adjustments.  Given certain factors, and
a sound brain should always evolve the same fixed product with the
certainty of Babbage's calculating machine.

- What a satire, by the way, is that machine on the mere
mathematician!  A Frankenstein-monster, a thing without brains and
without heart, too stupid to make a blunder; that turns out results
like a corn-sheller, and never grows any wiser or better, though it
grind a thousand bushels of them!

I have an immense respect for a man of talents PLUS "the
mathematics."  But the calculating power alone should seem to be
the least human of qualities, and to have the smallest amount of
reason in it; since a machine can be made to do the work of three
or four calculators, and better than any one of them.  Sometimes I
have been troubled that I had not a deeper intuitive apprehension
of the relations of numbers.  But the triumph of the ciphering
hand-organ has consoled me.  I always fancy I can hear the wheels
clicking in a calculator's brain.  The power of dealing with
numbers is a kind of "detached lever" arrangement, which may be put
into a mighty poor watch - I suppose it is about as common as the
power of moving the ears voluntarily, which is a moderately rare
endowment.

- Little localized powers, and little narrow streaks of specialized
knowledge, are things men are very apt to be conceited about.
Nature is very wise; but for this encouraging principle how many
small talents and little accomplishments would be neglected!  Talk
about conceit as much as you like, it is to human character what
salt is to the ocean; it keeps it sweet, and renders it endurable.
Say rather it is like the natural unguent of the sea-fowl's
plumage, which enables him to shed the rain that falls on him and
the wave in which he dips.  When one has had ALL his conceit taken
out of him, when he has lost ALL his illusions, his feathers will
soon soak through, and he will fly no more.

"So you admire conceited people, do you?" said the young lady who
has come to the city to be finished off for - the duties of life.

I am afraid you do not study logic at your school, my dear.  It
does not follow that I wish to be pickled in brine because I like a
salt-water plunge at Nahant.  I say that conceit is just as natural
a thing to human minds as a centre is to a circle.  But little-
minded people's thoughts move in such small circles that five
minutes' conversation gives you an arc long enough to determine
their whole curve.  An arc in the movement of a large intellect
does not sensibly differ from a straight line.  Even if it have the
third vowel as its centre, it does not soon betray it.  The highest
thought, that is, is the most seemingly impersonal; it does not
obviously imply any individual centre.

Audacious self-esteem, with good ground for it, is always imposing.
What resplendent beauty that must have been which could have
authorized Phryne to "peel" in the way she did!  What fine speeches
are those two:  "NON OMNIS MORTAR," and "I have taken all knowledge
to be my province"!  Even in common people, conceit has the virtue
of making them cheerful; the man who thinks his wife, his baby, his
house, his horse, his dog, and himself severally unequalled, is
almost sure to be a good-humored person, though liable to be
tedious at times.

- What are the great faults of conversation?  Want of ideas, want
of words, want of manners, are the principal ones, I suppose you
think.  I don't doubt it, but I will tell you what I have found
spoil more good talks than anything else; - long arguments on
special points between people who differ on the fundamental
principles upon which these points depend.  No men can have
satisfactory relations with each other until they have agreed on
certain ULTIMATA of belief not to be disturbed in ordinary
conversation, and unless they have sense enough to trace the
secondary questions depending upon these ultimate beliefs to their
source.  In short, just as a written constitution is essential to
the best social order, so a code of finalities is a necessary
condition of profitable talk between two persons.  Talking is like
playing on the harp; there is as much in laying the hand on the
strings to stop their vibrations as in twanging them to bring out
their music.

- Do you mean to say the pun-question is not clearly settled in
your minds?  Let me lay down the law upon the subject.  Life and
language are alike sacred.  Homicide and VERBICIDE - that is,
violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate
meaning, which is its life - are alike forbidden.  Manslaughter,
which is the meaning of the one, is the same as man's laughter,
which is the end of the other.  A pun is PRIMA FACIE an insult to
the person you are talking with.  It implies utter indifference to
or sublime contempt for his remarks, no matter how serious.  I
speak of total depravity, and one says all that is written on the
subject is deep raving.  I have committed my self-respect by
talking with such a person.  I should like to commit him, but
cannot, because he is a nuisance.  Or I speak of geological
convulsions, and he asks me what was the cosine of Noah's ark;
also, whether the Deluge was not a deal huger than any modern
inundation.

A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return.  But if a blow
were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be
judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter
were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable
homicide.  Thus, in a case lately decided before Miller, J., Doe
presented Roe a subscription paper, and urged the claims of
suffering humanity.  Roe replied by asking, When charity was like a
top?  It was in evidence that Doe preserved a dignified silence.
Roe then said, "When it begins to hum."  Doe then - and not till
then - struck Roe, and his head happening to hit a bound volume of
the Monthly Rag-bag and Stolen Miscellany, intense mortification
ensued, with a fatal result.  The chief laid down his notions of
the law to his brother justices, who unanimously replied, "Jest
so."  The chief rejoined, that no man should jest so without being
punished for it, and charged for the prisoner, who was acquitted,
and the pun ordered to be burned by the sheriff.  The bound volume
was forfeited as a deodand, but not claimed.

People that make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the
railroad tracks.  They amuse themselves and other children, but
their little trick may upset a freight train of conversation for
the sake of a battered witticism.

I will thank you, B. F., to bring down two books, of which I will
mark the places on this slip of paper.  (While he is gone, I may
say that this boy, our land-lady's youngest, is called BENJAMIN
FRANKLIN, after the celebrated philosopher of that name.  A highly
merited compliment.)

I wished to refer to two eminent authorities.  Now be so good as to
listen.  The great moralist says:  "To trifle with the vocabulary
which is the vehicle of social intercourse is to tamper with the
currency of human intelligence.  He who would violate the
sanctities of his mother tongue would invade the recesses of the
paternal till without remorse, and repeat the banquet of Saturn
without an indigestion."

And, once more, listen to the historian.  "The Puritans hated puns.
The Bishops were notoriously addicted to them.  The Lords Temporal
carried them to the verge of license.  Majesty itself must have its
Royal quibble.  'Ye be burly, my Lord of Burleigh,' said Queen
Elizabeth, 'but ye shall make less stir in our realm than my Lord
of Leicester.'  The gravest wisdom and the highest breeding lent
their sanction to the practice.  Lord Bacon playfully declared
himself a descendant of 'Og, the King of Bashan.  Sir Philip
Sidney, with his last breath, reproached the soldier who brought
him water, for wasting a casque full upon a dying man.  A courtier,
who saw Othello performed at the Globe Theatre, remarked, that the
blackamoor was a brute, and not a man.  'Thou hast reason,' replied
a great Lord, 'according to Plato his saying; for this be a two-
legged animal WITH feathers.'  The fatal habit became universal.
The language was corrupted.  The infection spread to the national
conscience.  Political double-dealings naturally grew out of verbal
double meanings.  The teeth of the new dragon were sown by the
Cadmus who introduced the alphabet of equivocation.  What was
levity in the time of the Tudors grew to regicide and revolution in
the age of the Stuarts."

Who was that boarder that just whispered something about the
Macaulay-flowers of literature? - There was a dead silence. - I
said calmly, I shall henceforth consider any interruption by a pun
as a hint to change my boarding-house.  Do not plead my example.
If I have used any such, it has been only as a Spartan father would
show up a drunken helot.  We have done with them.

- If a logical mind ever found out anything with its logic? - I
should say that its most frequent work was to build a PONS ASINORUM
over chasms which shrewd people can bestride without such a
structure.  You can hire logic, in the shape of a lawyer, to prove
anything that you want to prove.  You can buy treatises to show
that Napoleon never lived, and that no battle of Bunker-hill was
ever fought.  The great minds are those with a wide span, which
couple truths related to, but far removed from, each other.
Logicians carry the surveyor's chain over the track of which these
are the true explorers.  I value a man mainly for his primary
relations with truth, as I understand truth, - not for any
secondary artifice in handling his ideas.  Some of the sharpest men
in argument are notoriously unsound in judgment.  I should not
trust the counsel of a smart debater, any more than that of a good
chess-player.  Either may of course advise wisely, but not
necessarily because he wrangles or plays well.

The old gentleman who sits opposite got his hand up, as a pointer
lifts his forefoot, at the expression, "his relations with truth,
as I understand truth," and when I had done, sniffed audibly, and
said I talked like a transcendentalist.  For his part, common sense
was good enough for him.

Precisely so, my dear sir, I replied; common sense, AS YOU
UNDERSTAND IT.  We all have to assume a standard of judgment in our
own minds, either of things or persons.  A man who is willing to
take another's opinion has to exercise his judgment in the choice
of whom to follow, which is often as nice a matter as to judge of
things for one's self.  On the whole, I had rather judge men's
minds by comparing their thoughts with my own, than judge of
thoughts by knowing who utter them.  I must do one or the other.
It does not follow, of course, that I may not recognize another
man's thoughts as broader and deeper than my own; but that does not
necessarily change my opinion, otherwise this would be at the mercy
of every superior mind that held a different one.  How many of our
most cherished beliefs are like those drinking-glasses of the
ancient pattern, that serve us well so long as we keep them in our
hand, but spill all if we attempt to set them down!  I have
sometimes compared conversation to the Italian game of MORA, in
which one player lifts his hand with so many fingers extended, and
the other gives the number if he can.  I show my thought, another
his; if they agree, well; if they differ, we find the largest
common factor, if we can, but at any rate avoid disputing about
remainders and fractions, which is to real talk what tuning an
instrument is to playing on it.

- What if, instead of talking this morning, I should read you a
copy of verses, with critical remarks by the author?  Any of the
company can retire that like.


ALBUM VERSES.


When Eve had led her lord away,
And Cain had killed his brother,
The stars and flowers, the poets say,
Agreed with one another

To cheat the cunning tempter's art,
And teach the race its duty,
By keeping on its wicked heart
Their eyes of light and beauty.

A million sleepless lids, they say,
Will be at least a warning;
And so the flowers would watch by day,
The stars from eve to morning.

On hill and prairie, field and lawn,
Their dewy eyes upturning,
The flowers still watch from reddening dawn
Till western skies are burning.

Alas! each hour of daylight tells
A tale of shame so crushing,
That some turn white as sea-bleached shells,
And some are always blushing.

But when the patient stars look down
On all their light discovers,
The traitor's smile, the murderer's frown,
The lips of lying lovers,

They try to shut their saddening eyes,
And in the vain endeavour
We see them twinkling in the skies,
And so they wink forever.


What do YOU think of these verses my friends? - Is that piece an
impromptu? said my landlady's daughter.  (Aet. 19 +.  Tender-eyed
blonde.  Long ringlets.  Cameo pin.  Gold pencil-case on a chain.
Locket.  Bracelet.  Album.  Autograph book.  Accordeon.  Reads
Byron, Tupper, and Sylvanus Cobb, junior, while her mother makes
the puddings.  Says "Yes?" when you tell her anything.) - OUI ET
NON, MA PETITE, - Yes and no, my child.  Five of the seven verses
were written off-hand; the other two took a week, - that is, were
hanging round the desk in a ragged, forlorn, unrhymed condition as
long as that.  All poets will tell you just such stories.  C'EST LE
DERNIER PAS QUI COUTE.  Don't you know how hard it is for some
people to get out of a room after their visit is really over?  They
want to be off, and you want to have them off, but they don't know
how to manage it.  One would think they had been built in your
parlour or study, and were waiting to be launched.  I have
contrived a sort of ceremonial inclined plane for such visitors,
which being lubricated with certain smooth phrases, I back them
down, metaphorically speaking, stern-foremost, into their "native
element," the great ocean of out-doors.  Well, now, there are poems
as hard to get rid of as these rural visitors.  They come in
glibly, use up all the serviceable rhymes, DAY, RAY, BEAUTY, DUTY,
SKIES, EYES, OTHER, BROTHER, MOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN, and the like; and
so they go on until you think it is time for the wind-up, and the
wind-up won't come on any terms.  So they lie about until you get
sick of the sight of them, and end by thrusting some cold scrap of
a final couplet upon them, and turning them out of doors.  I
suspect a good many "impromptus" could tell just such a story as
the above. - Here turning to our landlady, I used an illustration
which pleased the company much at the time, and has since been
highly commanded.  "Madam," I said, "you can pour three gills and
three quarters of honey from that pint jug, if it is full, in less
than one minute; but, Madam, you could not empty that last quarter
of a gill, though you were turned into a marble Hebe, and held the
vessel upside down for a thousand years.

One gets tired to death of the old, old rhymes, such as you see in
that copy of verses, - which I don't mean to abuse, or to praise
either.  I always feel as if I were a cobbler, putting new top-
leathers to an old pair of boot-soles and bodies, when I am fitting
sentiments to these venerable jingles.

     .    .    .    .    youth
.    .    .    .    .    morning
.    .    .    .    .    truth
.    .    .    .    .    warning

Nine tenths of the "Juvenile Poems" written spring out of the above
musical and suggestive coincidences.

"Yes?" said our landlady's daughter.

I did not address the following remark to her, and I trust, from
her limited range of reading, she will never see it; I said it
softly to my next neighbour.

When a young female wears a flat circular side - curl, gummed on
each temple, - when she walks with a male, not arm in arm, but his
arm against the back of hers, - and when she says "Yes?" with the
note of interrogation, you are generally safe in asking her what
wages she gets, and who the "feller" was you saw her with.

"What were you whispering?" said the daughter of the house,
moistening her lips, as she spoke, in a very engaging manner.

"I was only laying down a principle of social diagnosis."

"Yes?"

- It is curious to see how the same wants and tastes find the same
implements and modes of expression in all times and places.  The
young ladies of Otaheite, as you may see in Cook's Voyages, had a
sort of crinoline arrangement fully equal in radius to the largest
spread of our own lady-baskets.  When I fling a Bay-State shawl
over my shoulders, I am only taking a lesson from the climate that
the Indian had learned before me.  A BLANKET-shawl we call it, and
not a plaid; and we wear it like the aborigines, and not like the
Highlanders.

- We are the Romans of the modern world, - the great assimilating
people.  Conflicts and conquests are of course necessary accidents
with us, as with our prototypes.  And so we come to their style of
weapon.  Our army sword is the short, stiff, pointed GLADIUS of the
Romans; and the American bowie-knife is the same tool, modified to
meet the daily wants of civil society.  I announce at this table an
axiom not to be found in Montesquieu or the journals of Congress:-


The race that shortens its weapons lengthens its boundaries.


COROLLARY.  It was the Polish LANCE that left Poland at last with
nothing of her own to bound.


"Dropped from her nerveless grasp the SHATTERED SPEAR!"


What business had Sarmatia to be fighting for liberty with a
fifteen-foot pole between her and the breasts of her enemies?  If
she had but clutched the old Roman and young American weapon, and
come to close quarters, there might have been a chance for her; but
it would have spoiled the best passage in "The Pleasures of Hope."

- Self-made men? - Well, yes.  Of course everybody likes and
respects self-made men.  It is a great deal better to be made in
that way than not to be made at all.  Are any of you younger people
old enough to remember that Irishman's house on the marsh at
Cambridgeport, which house he built from drain to chimney-top with
his own hands?  It took him a good many years to build it, and one
could see that it was a little out of plumb, and a little wavy in
outline, and a little queer and uncertain in general aspect.  A
regular hand could certainly have built a better house; but it was
a very good house for a "self-made" carpenter's house, and people
praised it, and said how remarkably well the Irishman had
succeeded.  They never thought of praising the fine blocks of
houses a little farther on.

Your self-made man, whittled into shape with his own jack-knife,
deserves more credit, if that is all, than the regular engine-
turned article, shaped by the most approved pattern, and French-
polished by society and travel.  But as to saying that one is every
way the equal of the other, that is another matter.  The right of
strict social discrimination of all things and persons, according
to their merits, native or acquired, is one of the most precious
republican privileges.  I take the liberty to exercise it, when I
say, that, OTHER THINGS BEING EQUAL, in most relations of life I
prefer a man of family.

What do I mean by a man of family? - O, I'll give you a general
idea of what I mean.  Let us give him a first-rate fit out; it
costs us nothing.

Four or five generations of gentlemen and gentlewomen; among them a
member of his Majesty's Council for the Province, a Governor or so,
one or two Doctors of Divinity, a member of Congress, not later
than the time of top-boots with tassels.

Family portraits.  The member of the Council, by Smibert.  The
great merchant-uncle, by Copley, full length, sitting in his arm-
chair, in a velvet cap and flowered robe, with a globe by him, to
show the range of his commercial transactions, and letters with
large red seals lying round, one directed conspicuously to The
Honourable etc. etc.  Great-grandmother, by the same artist; brown
satin, lace very fine, hands superlative; grand old lady, stiffish,
but imposing.  Her mother, artist unknown; flat, angular, hanging
sleeves; parrot on fist.  A pair of Stuarts, viz., 1.  A superb
full-blown, mediaeval gentleman, with a fiery dash of Tory blood in
his veins, tempered down with that of a fine old rebel grandmother,
and warmed up with the best of old India Madeira; his face is one
flame of ruddy sunshine; his ruffled shirt rushes out of his bosom
with an impetuous generosity, as if it would drag his heart after
it; and his smile is good for twenty thousand dollars to the
Hospital, besides ample bequests to all relatives and dependants.
2.  Lady of the same; remarkable cap; high waist, as in time of
Empire; bust A LA JOSEPHINE; wisps of curls, like celery-tips, at
sides of forehead; complexion clear and warm, like rose-cordial.
As for the miniatures by Malbone, we don't count them in the
gallery.

Books, too, with the names of old college-students in them, -
family names; - you will find them at the head of their respective
classes in the days when students took rank on the catalogue from
their parents' condition.  Elzevirs, with the Latinized
appellations of youthful progenitors, and HIC LIBER EST MEUS on the
title-page.  A set of Hogarth's original plates.  Pope, original
edition, 15 volumes, London, 1717.  Barrow on the lower shelves, in
folio.  Tillotson on the upper, in a little dark platoon of octo-
decimos.

Some family silver; a string of wedding and funeral rings; the arms
of the family curiously blazoned; the same in worsted, by a maiden
aunt.

If the man of family has an old place to keep these things in,
furnished with claw-footed chairs and black mahogany tables, and
tall bevel-edged mirrors, and stately upright cabinets, his outfit
is complete.

No, my friends, I go (always, other things being equal) for the man
who inherits family traditions and the cumulative humanities of at
least four or five generations.  Above all things, as a child, he
should have tumbled about in a library.  All men are afraid of
books, who have not handled them from infancy.  Do you suppose our
dear DIDASCALOS over there ever read POLI SYNOPSIS, or consulted
CASTELLI LEXICON, while he was growing up to their stature?  Not
he; but virtue passed through the hem of their parchment and
leather garments whenever he touched them, as the precious drugs
sweated through the bat's handle in the Arabian story.  I tell you
he is at home wherever he smells the invigorating fragrance of
Russia leather.  No self-made man feels so.  One may, it is true,
have all the antecedents I have spoken of, and yet be a boor or a
shabby fellow.  One may have none of them, and yet be fit for
councils and courts.  Then let them change places.  Our social
arrangement has this great beauty, that its strata shift up and
down as they change specific gravity, without being clogged by
layers of prescription.  But I still insist on my democratic
liberty of choice, and I go for the man with the gallery of family
portraits against the one with the twenty-five-cent daguerreotype,
unless I find out that the last is the better of the two.

- I should have felt more nervous about the late comet, if I had
thought the world was ripe.  But it is very green yet, if I am not
mistaken; and besides, there is a great deal of coal to use up,
which I cannot bring myself to think was made for nothing.  If
certain things, which seem to me essential to a millennium, had
come to pass, I should have been frightened; but they haven't.
Perhaps you would like to hear my


LATTER-DAY WARNINGS.


When legislators keep the law,
When banks dispense with bolts and locks,
When berries, whortle - rasp - and straw -
Grow bigger DOWNWARDS through the box, -

When he that selleth house or land
Shows leak in roof or flaw in right, -
When haberdashers choose the stand
Whose window hath the broadest light, -

When preachers tell us all they think,
And party leaders all they mean, -
When what we pay for, that we drink,
From real grape and coffee-bean, -

When lawyers take what they would give,
And doctors give what they would take, -
When city fathers eat to live,
Save when they fast for conscience' sake, -

When one that hath a horse on sale
Shall bring his merit to the proof,
Without a lie for every nail
That holds the iron on the hoof, -

When in the usual place for rips
Our gloves are stitched with special care,
And guarded well the whalebone tips
Where first umbrellas need repair, -

When Cuba's weeds have quite forgot
The power of suction to resist,
And claret-bottles harber not
Such dimples as would hold your fist, -

When publishers no longer steal,
And pay for what they stole before, -
When the first locomotive's wheel
Rolls through the Hoosac tunnel's bore; -

TILL then let Cumming a blaze away,
And Miller's saints blow up the globe;
But when you see that blessed day,
THEN order your ascension robe!


The company seemed to like the verses, and I promised them to read
others occasionally, if they had a mind to hear them.  Of course
they would not expect it every morning.  Neither must the reader
suppose that all these things I have reported were said at any one
breakfast-time.  I have not taken the trouble to date them, as
Raspail, PERE, used to date every proof he sent to the printer; but
they were scattered over several breakfasts; and I have said a good
many more things since, which I shall very possibly print some time
or other, if I am urged to do it by judicious friends.

I finished off with reading some verses of my friend the Professor,
of whom you may perhaps hear more by and by.  The Professor read
them, he told me, at a farewell meeting, where the youngest of our
great Historians met a few of his many friends at their invitation.


YES, we knew we must lose him, - though friendship may claim
To blend her green leaves with the laurels of fame;
Though fondly, at parting, we call him our own,
'Tis the whisper of love when the bugle has blown.

As the rider that rests with the spur on his heel, -
As the guardsman that sleeps in his corselet of steel, -
As the archer that stands with his shaft on the string,
He stoops from his toil to the garland we bring.

What pictures yet slumber unborn in his loom
Till their warriors shall breathe and their beauties shall bloom,
While the tapestry lengthens the life-glowing dyes
That caught from our sunsets the stain of their skies!

In the alcoves of death, in the charnels of time,
Where flit the gaunt spectres of passion and crime,
There are triumphs untold, there are martyrs unsung,
There are heroes yet silent to speak with his tongue!

Let us hear the proud story which time has bequeathed
From lips that are warm with the freedom they breathed!
Let him summon its tyrants, and tell us their doom,
Though he sweep the black past like Van Tromp with his broom!

* * * * *

The dream flashes by, for the west-winds awake
On pampas, on prairie, o'er mountain and lake,
To bathe the swift bark, like a sea-girdled shrine,
With incense they stole from the rose and the pine.

So fill a bright cup with the sunlight that gushed
When the dead summer's jewels were trampled and crushed:
THE TRUE KNIGHT OF LEARNING, - the world holds him dear, -
Love bless him, Joy crown him, God speed his career!



CHAPTER II.



I REALLY believe some people save their bright thoughts, as being
too precious for conversation.  What do you think an admiring
friend said the other day to one that was talking good things, -
good enough to print?   "Why," said he, "you are wasting
mechantable literature, a cash article, at the rate, as nearly as I
can tell, of fifty dollars an hour."  The talker took him to the
window and asked him to look out and tell what he saw.

"Nothing but a very dusty street," he said, "and a man driving a
sprinkling-machine through it."

"Why don't you tell the man he is wasting that water?  What would
be the state of the highways of life, if we did not drive our
THOUGHT-SPRINKLERS through them with the valves open, sometimes?

"Besides, there is another thing about this talking, which you
forget.  It shapes our thoughts for us; - the waves of conversation
roll them as the surf rolls the pebbles on the shore.  Let me
modify the image a little.  I rough out my thoughts in talk as an
artist models in clay.  Spoken language is so plastic, - you can
pat and coax, and spread and shave, and rub out, and fill up, and
stick on so easily when you work that soft material, that there is
nothing like it for modelling.  Out of it come the shapes which you
turn into marble or bronze in your immortal books, if you happen to
write such.  Or, to use another illustration, writing or printing
is like shooting with a rifle; you may hit your reader's mind, or
miss it; - but talking is like playing at a mark with the pipe of
an engine; if it is within reach, and you have time enough, you
can't help hitting it."

The company agreed that this last illustration was of superior
excellence, or, in the phrase used by them, "Fust-rate."  I
acknowledged the compliment, but gently rebuked the expression.
"Fust-rate," "prime," "a prime article," "a superior piece of
goods," "a handsome garment," "a gent in a flowered vest," - all
such expressions are final.  They blast the lineage of him or her
who utters them, for generations up and down.  There is one other
phrase which will soon come to be decisive of a man's social
STATUS, if it is not already:   "That tells the whole story."  It
is an expression which vulgar and conceited people particularly
affect, and which well-meaning ones, who know better, catch from
them.  It is intended to stop all debate, like the previous
question in the General Court.  Only it doesn't; simply because
"that" does not usually tell the whole, nor one half of the whole
story.

- It is an odd idea, that almost all our people have had a
professional education.  To become a doctor a man must study some
three years and hear a thousand lectures, more or less.  Just how
much study it takes to make a lawyer I cannot say, but probably not
more than this.  Now most decent people hear one hundred lectures
or sermons (discourses) on theology every year, - and this, twenty,
thirty, fifty years together.  They read a great many religious
books besides.  The clergy, however, rarely hear any sermons except
what they preach themselves.  A dull preacher might be conceived,
therefore, to lapse into a state of QUASI heathenism, simply for
want of religious instruction.  And on the other hand, an attentive
and intelligent hearer, listening to a succession of wise teachers,
might become actually better educated in theology than any one of
them.  We are all theological students, and more of us qualified as
doctors of divinity than have received degrees at any of the
universities.

It is not strange, therefore, that very good people should often
find it difficult, if not impossible, to keep their attention fixed
upon a sermon treating feebly a subject which they have thought
vigorously about for years, and heard able men discuss scores of
times.  I have often noticed, however, that a hopelessly dull
discourse acts INDUCTIVELY, as electricians would say, in
developing strong mental currents.  I am ashamed to think with what
accompaniments and variations and FIORITURE I have sometimes
followed the droning of a heavy speaker, - not willingly, - for my
habit is reverential, - but as a necessary result of a slight
continuous impression on the senses and the mind, which kept both
in action without furnishing the food they required to work upon.
If you ever saw a crow with a king-bird after him, you will get an
image of a dull speaker and a lively listener.  The bird in sable
plumage flaps heavily along his straight-forward course, while the
other sails round him, over him, under him, leaves him, comes back
again, tweaks out a black feather, shoots away once more, never
losing sight of him, and finally reaches the crow's perch at the
same time the crow does, having cut a perfect labyrinth of loops
and knots and spirals while the slow fowl was painfully working
from one end of his straight line to the other.

[I think these remarks were received rather coolly.  A temporary
boarder from the country, consisting of a somewhat more than
middle-aged female, with a parchment forehead and a dry little
"frisette" shingling it, a sallow neck with a necklace of gold
beads, a black dress too rusty for recent grief and contours in
basso-rilievo, left the table prematurely, and was reported to have
been very virulent about what I said.  So I went to my good old
minister, and repeated the remarks, as nearly as I could remember
them, to him.  He laughed good-naturedly, and said there was
considerable truth in them.  He thought he could tell when people's
minds were wandering, by their looks.  In the earlier years of his
ministry he had sometimes noticed this, when he was preaching; -
very little of late years.  Sometimes, when his colleague was
preaching, he observed this kind of inattention; but after all, it
was not so very unnatural.  I will say, by the way, that it is a
rule I have long followed, to tell my worst thoughts to my
minister, and my best thoughts to the young people I talk with.]

- I want to make a literary confession now, which I believe nobody
has made before me.  You know very well that I write verses
sometimes, because I have read some of them at this table.  (The
company assented, - two or three of them in a resigned sort of way,
as I thought, as if they supposed I had an epic in my pocket, and
was going to read half a dozen books or so for their benefit.) - I
continued.  Of course I write some lines or passages which are
better than others; some which, compared with the others, might be
called relatively excellent.  It is in the nature of things that I
should consider these relatively excellent lines or passages as
absolutely good.  So much must be pardoned to humanity.  Now I
never wrote a "good" line in my life, but the moment after it was
written it seemed a hundred years old.  Very commonly I had a
sudden conviction that I had seen it somewhere.  Possibly I may
have sometimes unconsciously stolen it, but I do not remember that
I ever once detected any historical truth in these sudden
convictions of the antiquity of my new thought or phrase.  I have
learned utterly to distrust them, and never allow them to bully me
out of a thought or line.

This is the philosophy of it.  (Here the number of the company was
diminished by a small secession.)  Any new formula which suddenly
emerges in our consciousness has its roots in long trains of
thought; it is virtually old when it first makes its appearance
among the recognized growths of our intellect.  Any crystalline
group of musical words has had a long and still period to form in.
Here is one theory.

But there is a larger law which perhaps comprehends these facts.
It is this.  The rapidity with which ideas grow old in our memories
is in a direct ratio to the squares of their importance.  Their
apparent age runs up miraculously, like the value of diamonds, as
they increase in magnitude.  A great calamity, for instance, is as
old as the trilobites an hour after it has happened.  It stains
backward through all the leaves we have turned over in the book of
life, before its blot of tears or of blood is dry on the page we
are turning.  For this we seem to have lived; it was foreshadowed
in dreams that we leaped out of in the cold sweat of terror; in the
"dissolving views" of dark day-visions; all omens pointed to it;
all paths led to it.  After the tossing half-forgetfulness of the
first sleep that follows such an event, it comes upon us afresh, as
a surprise, at waking; in a few moments it is old again, - old as
eternity.

[I wish I had not said all this then and there.  I might have known
better.  The pale schoolmistress, in her mourning dress, was
looking at me, as I noticed, with a wild sort of expression.  All
at once the blood dropped out of her cheeks as the mercury drops
from a broken barometer-tube, and she melted away from her seat
like an image of snow; a slung-shot could not have brought her down
better.  God forgive me!

After this little episode, I continued, to some few that remained
balancing teaspoons on the edges of cups, twirling knives, or
tilting upon the hind legs of their chairs until their heads
reached the wall, where they left gratuitous advertisements of
various popular cosmetics.]

When a person is suddenly thrust into any strange, new position of
trial, he finds the place fits him as if he had been measured for
it.  He has committed a great crime, for instance, and is sent to
the State Prison.  The traditions, prescriptions, limitations,
privileges, all the sharp conditions of his new life, stamp
themselves upon his consciousness as the signet on soft wax; - a
single pressure is enough.  Let me strengthen the image a little.
Did you ever happen to see that most soft-spoken and velvet-handed
steam-engine at the Mint?  The smooth piston slides backward and
forward as a lady might slip her delicate finger in and out of a
ring.  The engine lays one of ITS fingers calmly, but firmly, upon
a bit of metal; it is a coin now, and will remember that touch, and
tell a new race about it, when the date upon it is crusted over
with twenty centuries.  So it is that a great silent-moving misery
puts a new stamp on us in an hour or a moment, - as sharp an
impression as if it had taken half a lifetime to engrave it.

It is awful to be in the hands of the wholesale professional
dealers in misfortune; undertakers and jailers magnetize you in a
moment, and you pass out of the individual life you were living
into the rhythmical movements of their horrible machinery.  Do the
worst thing you can, or suffer the worst that can be thought of,
you find yourself in a category of humanity that stretches back as
far as Cain, and with an expert at your elbow who has studied your
case all out beforehand, and is waiting for you with his implements
of hemp or mahogany.  I believe, if a man were to be burned in any
of our cities tomorrow for heresy, there would be found a master of
ceremonies that knew just how many fagots were necessary, and the
best way of arranging the whole matter.

- So we have not won the Goodwood cup; AU CONTRAIRE, we were a "bad
fifth," if not worse than that; and trying it again, and the third
time, has not yet bettered the matter.  Now I am as patriotic as
any of my fellow-citizens, - too patriotic in fact, for I have got
into hot water by loving too much of my country; in short, if any
man, whose fighting weight is not more than eight stone four
pounds, disputes it, I am ready to discuss the point with him.  I
should have gloried to see the stars and stripes in front at the
finish.  I love my country, and I love horses.  Stubbs's old
mezzotint of Eclipse hangs over my desk, and Herring's portrait of
Plenipotentiary, - whom I saw run at Epsom, - over my fireplace.
Did I not elope from school to see Revenge, and Prospect, and
Little John, and Peacemaker run over the race-course where now yon
suburban village flourishes, in the year eighteen hundred and ever-
so-few?  Though I never owned a horse, have I not been the
proprietor of six equine females, of which one was the prettiest
little "Morgin" that ever stepped?  Listen, then, to an opinion I
have often expressed long before this venture of ours in England.
Horse-RACING is not a republican institution; horse-TROTTING is.
Only very rich persons can keep race-horses, and everybody knows
they are kept mainly as gambling implements.  All that matter about
blood and speed we won't discuss; we understand all that; useful,
very, - OF course, - great obligations to the Godolphin "Arabian,"
and the rest.  I say racing horses are essentially gambling
implements, as much as roulette tables.  Now I am not preaching at
this moment; I may read you one of my sermons some other morning;
but I maintain that gambling, on the great scale, is not
republican.  It belongs to two phases of society, - a cankered
over-civilization, such as exists in rich aristocracies, and the
reckless life of borderers and adventurers, or the semi-barbarism
of a civilization resolved into its primitive elements.  Real
Republicanism is stern and severe; its essence is not in forms of
government, but in the omnipotence of public opinion which grows
out of it.  This public opinion cannot prevent gambling with dice
or stocks, but it can and does compel it to keep comparatively
quiet.  But horse-racing is the most public way of gambling, and
with all its immense attractions to the sense and the feelings, -
to which I plead very susceptible, - the disguise is too thin that
covers it, and everybody knows what it means.  Its supporters are
the Southern gentry, - fine fellows, no doubt, but not republicans
exactly, as we understand the term, - a few Northern millionnaires
more or less thoroughly millioned, who do not represent the real
people, and the mob of sporting men, the best of whom are commonly
idlers, and the worst very bad neighbors to have near one in a
crowd, or to meet in a dark alley.  In England, on the other hand,
with its aristocratic institutions, racing is a natural growth
enough; the passion for it spreads downwards through all classes,
from the Queen to the costermonger.  London is like a shelled corn-
cob on the Derby day, and there is not a clerk who could raise the
money to hire a saddle with an old hack under it that can sit down
on his office-stool the next day without wincing.

Now just compare the racer with the trotter for a moment.  The
racer is incidentally useful, but essentially something to bet
upon, as much as the thimble-rigger's "little joker."  The trotter
is essentially and daily useful, and only incidentally a tool for
sporting men.

What better reason do you want for the fact that the racer is most
cultivated and reaches his greatest perfection in England, and that
the trotting horses of America beat the world?  And why should we
have expected that the pick - if it was the pick - of our few and
far-between racing stables should beat the pick of England and
France?  Throw over the fallacious time-test, and there was nothing
to show for it but a natural kind of patriotic feeling, which we
all have, with a thoroughly provincial conceit, which some of us
must plead guilty to.

We may beat yet.  As an American, I hope we shall.  As a moralist
and occasional sermonizer, I am not so anxious about it.  Wherever
the trotting horse goes, he carries in his train brisk omnibuses,
lively bakers' carts, and therefore hot rolls, the jolly butcher's
wagon, the cheerful gig, the wholesome afternoon drive with wife
and child, - all the forms of moral excellence, except truth, which
does not agree with any kind of horse-flesh.  The racer brings with
him gambling, cursing, swearing, drinking, the eating of oysters,
and a distaste for mob-caps and the middle-aged virtues.

And by the way, let me beg you not to call a TROTTING MATCH a RACE,
and not to speak of a "thoroughbred" as a "BLOODED" horse, unless
he has been recently phlebotomized.  I consent to your saying
"blood horse," if you like.  Also, if, next year, we send out
Posterior and Posterioress, the winners of the great national four-
mile race in 7 18.5, and they happen to get beaten, pay your bets,
and behave like men and gentlemen about it, if you know how.

[I felt a great deal better after blowing off the ill-temper
condensed in the above paragraph.  To brag little, - to show well,
- to crow gently, if in luck, - to pay up, to own up, and to shut
up, if beaten, are the virtues of a sporting man, and I can't say
that I think we have shown them in any great perfection of late.]

- Apropos of horses.  Do you know how important good jockeying is
to authors?  Judicious management; letting the public see your
animal just enough, and not too much; holding him up hard when the
market is too full of him; letting him out at just the right buying
intervals; always gently feeling his mouth; never slacking and
never jerking the rein; - this is what I mean by jockeying.

- When an author has a number of books out a cunning hand will keep
them all spinning, as Signor Blitz does his dinner-plates; fetching
each one up, as it begins to "wabble," by an advertisement, a puff,
or a quotation.

- Whenever the extracts from a living writer begin to multiply fast
in the papers, without obvious reason, there is a new book or a new
edition coming.  The extracts are GROUND-BAIT.

- Literary life is fun of curious phenomena.  I don't know that
there is anything more noticeable than what we may call
CONVENTIONAL REPUTATIONS.  There is a tacit understanding in every
community of men of letters that they will not disturb the popular
fallacy respecting this or that electro-gilded celebrity.  There
are various reasons for this forbearance:  one is old; one is rich;
one is good-natured; one is such a favorite with the pit that it
would not be safe to hiss him from the manager's box.  The
venerable augurs of the literary or scientific temple may smile
faintly when one of the tribe is mentioned; but the farce is in
general kept up as well as the Chinese comic scene of entreating
and imploring a man to stay with you with the implied compact
between you that he shall by no means think of doing it.  A poor
wretch he must be who would wantonly sit down on one of these
bandbox reputations.  A Prince-Rupert's-drop, which is a tear of
unannealed glass, lasts indefinitely, if you keep it from meddling
hands; but break its tail off, and it explodes and resolves itself
into powder.  These celebrities I speak of are the Prince-Rupert's-
drops of the learned and polite world.  See how the papers treat
them!  What an array of pleasant kaleidoscopic phrases, which can
be arranged in ever so many charming patterns, is at their service!
How kind the "Critical Notices" - where small authorship comes to
pick up chips of praise, fragrant, sugary, and sappy - always are
to them!  Well, life would be nothing without paper-credit and
other fictions; so let them pass current.  Don't steal their chips;
don't puncture their swimming-bladders; don't come down on their
pasteboard boxes; don't break the ends of their brittle and
unstable reputations, you fellows who all feel sure that your names
will be household words a thousand years from now.

"A thousand years is a good while," said the old gentleman who sits
opposite, thoughtfully.

- Where have I been for the last three or four days?  Down at the
Island, deer-shooting. - How many did I bag?  I brought home one
buck shot. - The Island is where?  No matter.  It is the most
splendid domain that any man looks upon in these latitudes.  Blue
sea around it, and running up into its heart, so that the little
boat slumbers like a baby in lap, while the tall ships are
stripping naked to fight the hurricane outside, and storm-stay-
sails banging and flying in ribbons.  Trees, in stretches of miles;
beeches, oaks, most numerous; - many of them hung with moss,
looking like bearded Druids; some coiled in the clasp of huge,
dark-stemmed grape-vines.  Open patches where the sun gets in and
goes to sleep, and the winds come so finely sifted that they are as
soft as swan's down.  Rocks scattered about, - Stonehenge-like
monoliths.  Fresh-water lakes; one of them, Mary's lake, crystal-
clear, full of flashing pickerel lying under the lily-pads like
tigers in the jungle.  Six pounds of ditto killed one morning for
breakfast.  EGO FECIT.

The divinity-student looked as if he would like to question my
Latin.  No, sir, I said, - you need not trouble yourself.  There is
a higher law in grammar, not to be put down by Andrews and
Stoddard.  Then I went on.

Such hospitality as that island has seen there has not been the
like of in these our New England sovereignties.  There is nothing
in the shape of kindness and courtesy that can make life beautiful,
which has not found its home in that ocean-principality.  It has
welcomed all who were worthy of welcome, from the pale clergyman
who came to breathe the sea-air with its medicinal salt and iodine,
to the great statesman who turned his back on the affairs of
empire, and smoothed his Olympian forehead, and flashed his white
teeth in merriment over the long table, where his wit was the
keenest and his story the best.

[I don't believe any man ever talked like that in this world.  I
don't believe I talked just so; but the fact is, in reporting one's
conversation, one cannot help BLAIR-ing it up more or less, ironing
out crumpled paragraphs, starching limp ones, and crimping and
plaiting a little sometimes; it is as natural as prinking at the
looking-glass.]

- How can a man help writing poetry in such a place?  Everybody
does write poetry that goes there.  In the state archives, kept in
the library of the Lord of the Isle, are whole volumes of
unpublished verse, - some by well-known hands, and others quite as
good, by the last people you would think of as versifiers, - men
who could pension off all the genuine poets in the country, and buy
ten acres of Boston common, if it was for sale, with what they had
left.  Of course I had to write my little copy of verses with the
rest; here it is, if you will hear me read it.  When the sun is in
the west, vessels sailing in an easterly direction look bright or
dark to one who observes them from the north or south, according to
the tack they are sailing upon.  Watching them from one of the
windows of the great mansion, I saw these perpetual changes, and
moralized thus:-


SUN AND SHADOW.


As I look from the isle, o'er its billows of green,
To the billows of foam-crested blue,
Yon bark, that afar in the distance is seen,
Half dreaming, my eyes will pursue:
Now dark in the shadow, she scatters the spray
As the chaff in the stroke of the flail;
Now white as the sea-gull, she flies on her way,
The sun gleaming bright on her sail.

Yet her pilot is thinking of dangers to shun, -
Of breakers that whiten and roar;
How little he cares, if in shadow or sun
They see him that gaze from the shore!
He looks to the beacon that looms from the reef,
To the rock that is under his lee,
As he drifts on the blast, like a wind-wafted leaf,
O'er the gulfs of the desolate sea.

Thus drifting afar to the dim-vaulted caves
Where life and its ventures are laid,
The dreamers who gaze while we battle the waves
May see us in sunshine or shade;
Yet true to our course, though our shadow grow dark,
We'll trim our broad sail as before,
And stand by the rudder that governs the bark,
Nor ask how we look from the shore!


- Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.  Good
mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if
anything is thrust among them suddenly which tends to stop them or
reverse their motion.  A weak mind does not accumulate force enough
to hurt itself; stupidity often saves a man from going mad.  We
frequently see persons in insane hospitals, sent there in
consequence of what are called RELIGIOUS mental disturbances.  I
confess that I think better of them than of many who hold the same
notions, and keep their wits and appear to enjoy life very well,
outside of the asylums.  Any decent person ought to go mad, if he
really holds such or such opinions.  It is very much to his
discredit in every point of view, if he does not.  What is the use
of my saying what some of these opinions are?  Perhaps more than
one of you hold such as I should think ought to send you straight
over to Somerville, if you have any logic in your heads or any
human feeling in your hearts.  Anything that is brutal, cruel,
heathenish, that makes life hopeless for the most of mankind and
perhaps for entire races, - anything that assumes the necessity of
the extermination of instincts which were given to be regulated, -
no matter by what name you call it, - no matter whether a fakir, or
a monk, or a deacon believes it, - if received, ought to produce
insanity in every well-regulated mind.  That condition becomes a
normal one, under the circumstances.  I am very much ashamed of
some people for retaining their reason, when they know perfectly
well that if they were not the most stupid or the most selfish of
human beings, they would become NON-COMPOTES at once.

[Nobody understood this but the theological student and the
schoolmistress.  They looked intelligently at each other; but
whether they were thinking about my paradox or not, I am not clear.
- It would be natural enough.  Stranger things have happened.  Love
and Death enter boarding-houses without asking the price of board,
or whether there is room for them.  Alas, these young people are
poor and pallid!  Love SHOULD be both rich and rosy, but MUST be
either rich or rosy.  Talk about military duty!  What is that to
the warfare of a married maid-of-all-work, with the title of
mistress, and an American female constitution, which collapses just
in the middle third of life, and comes out vulcanized India-rubber,
if it happen to live through the period when health and strength
are most wanted?]

- Have I ever acted in private theatricals?  Often.  I have played
the part of the "Poor Gentleman," before a great many audiences, -
more, I trust, than I shall ever face again.  I did not wear a
stage-costume, nor a wig, nor moustaches of burnt cork; but I was
placarded and announced as a public performer, and at the proper
hour I came forward with the ballet-dancer's smile upon my
countenance, and made my bow and acted my part.  I have seen my
name stuck up in letters so big that I was ashamed to show myself
in the place by daylight.  I have gone to a town with a sober
literary essay in my pocket, and seen myself everywhere announced
as the most desperate of BUFFOS, - one who was obliged to restrain
himself in the full exercise of his powers, from prudential
considerations.  I have been through as many hardships as Ulysses,
in the pursuit of my histrionic vocation.  I have travelled in cars
until the conductors all knew me like a brother.  I have run off
the rails, and stuck all night in snow-drifts, and sat behind
females that would have the window open when one could not wink
without his eyelids freezing together.  Perhaps I shall give you
some of my experiences one of these days; - I will not now, for I
have something else for you.

Private theatricals, as I have figured in them in country lyceum-
halls, are one thing, - and private theatricals, as they may be
seen in certain gilded and frescoed saloons of our metropolis, are
another.  Yes, it is pleasant to see real gentlemen and ladies, who
do not think it necessary to mouth, and rant, and stride, like most
of our stage heroes and heroines, in the characters which show off
their graces and talents; most of all to see a fresh, unrouged,
unspoiled, high bred young maiden, with a lithe figure, and a
pleasant voice, acting in those love-dramas which make us young
again to look upon, when real youth and beauty will play them for
us.

- Of course I wrote the prologue I was asked to write.  I did not
see the play, though.  I knew there was a young lady in it, and
that somebody was in love with her, and she was in love with him,
and somebody (an old tutor, I believe) wanted to interfere, and,
very naturally, the young lady was too sharp for him.  The play of
course ends charmingly; there is a general reconciliation, and all
concerned form a line and take each others' hands, as people always
do after they have made up their quarrels, - and then the curtain
falls, - if it does not stick, as it commonly does at private
theatrical exhibitions, in which case a boy is detailed to pull it
down, which he does, blushing violently.

Now, then, for my prologue.  I am not going to change my caesuras
and cadences for anybody; so if you do not like the heroic, or
iambic trimeter brachy-catalectic, you had better not wait to hear
it


THIS IS IT.

A Prologue?  Well, of course the ladies know; -
I have my doubts.  No matter, - here we go!
What is a Prologue?  Let our Tutor teach:
PRO means beforehand; LOGOS stands for speech.
'Tis like the harper's prelude on the strings,
The prima donna's courtesy ere she sings; -
Prologues in metre are to other PROS
As worsted stockings are to engine-hose.

"The world's a stage," as Shakspeare said, one day;
The stage a world - was what he meant to say.
The outside world's a blunder, that is clear;
The real world that Nature meant is here.
Here every foundling finds its lost mamma;
Each rogue, repentant, melts his stern papa;
Misers relent, the spendthrift's debts are paid,
The cheats are taken in the traps they laid;
One after one the troubles all are past
Till the fifth act comes right side up at last,
When the young couple, old folks, rogues, and all,
Join hands, SO happy at the curtain's fall.
- Here suffering virtue ever finds relief,
And black-browed ruffians always come to grief,
- When the lorn damsel, with a frantic screech,
And cheeks as hueless as a brandy-peach,
Cries, "Help, kyind Heaven!" and drops upon her knees
On the green - baize, - beneath the (canvas) trees,-
See to her side avenging Valor fly:-
"Ha! Villain!  Draw!  Now, Terraitorr, yield or die!"
- When the poor hero flounders in despair,
Some dear lost uncle turns up millionnaire, -
Clasps the young scapegrace with paternal joy,
Sobs on his neck, "MY BOY!  MY BOY!!  MY BOY!!!"

Ours, then, sweet friends, the real world to-night.
Of love that conquers in disaster's spite.
Ladies, attend!  While woful cares and doubt
Wrong the soft passion in the world without,
Though fortune scowl, though prudence interfere,
One thing is certain:  Love will triumph here!

Lords of creation, whom your ladies rule, -
The world's great masters, when you're out of school, -
Learn the brief moral of our evening's play:
Man has his will, - but woman has her way!
While man's dull spirit toils in smoke and fire,
Woman's swift instinct threads the electric wire, -
The magic bracelet stretched beneath the waves
Beats the black giant with his score of slaves.
All earthly powers confess your sovereign art
But that one rebel, - woman's wilful heart.
All foes you master; but a woman's wit
Lets daylight through you ere you know you're hit.
So, just to picture what her art can do,
Hear an old story made as good as new.

Rudolph, professor of the headsman's trade,
Alike was famous for his arm and blade.
One day a prisoner Justice had to kill
Knelt at the block to test the artist's skill.
Bare-armed, swart-visaged, gaunt, and shaggy-browed,
Rudolph the headsman rose above the crowd.
His falchion lightened with a sudden gleam,
As the pike's armor flashes in the stream.
He sheathed his blade; he turned as if to go;
The victim knelt, still waiting for the blow.
"Why strikest not?  Perform thy murderous act,"
The prisoner said.  (Hs voice was slightly cracked.)
"Friend I HAVE struck," the artist straight replied;
"Wait but one moment, and yourself decide."

He held his snuff-box, - "Now then, if you please!"
The prisoner sniffed, and, with a crashing sneeze,
Off his head tumbled, - bowled along the floor, -
Bounced down the steps; - the prisoner said no more!

Woman! thy falchion is a glittering eye;
If death lurks in it, oh, how sweet to die!
Thou takest hearts as Rudolph took the head;
We die with love, and never dream we're dead!


The prologue went off very well, as I hear.  No alterations were
suggested by the lady to whom it was sent, so far as I know.
Sometimes people criticize the poems one sends them, and suggest
all sorts of improvements.  Who was that silly body that wanted
Burns to alter "Scots wha hae," so as to lengthen the last line,
thus


"EDWARD!" Chains and slavery!


Here is a little poem I sent a short time since to a committee for
a certain celebration.  I understood that it was to be a festive
and convivial occasion, and ordered myself accordingly.  It seems
the president of the day was what is called a "teetotaller."  I
received a note from him in the following words, containing the
copy subjoined, with the emendations annexed to it.

"Dear Sir, - your poem gives good satisfaction to the committee.
The sentiments expressed with reference to liquor are not, however,
those generally entertained by this community.  I have therefore
consulted the clergyman of this place, who has made come slight
changes, which he thinks will remove all objections, and keep the
valuable portions of the poem.  Please to inform me of your charge
for said poem.  Our means are limited, etc., etc., etc.

Yours with respect,"


HERE IT IS - WITH THE SLIGHT ALTERATIONS!

Come! fill a fresh bumper, - for why should we go
While the [nectar] [logwood] still reddens our cups as they flow?
Pour out the [rich juices] [decoction] still bright with the sun,
Till o'er the brimmed crystal the [rubies] [dye-stuff] shall run.

The [purple glebed clusters] [half-ripened apples] their life-dews
have bled;
How sweet is the [breath] [taste] of the [fragrance they shed]
[sugar of lead]!
For summer's [last roses] [rank poisons] lie hid in the [wines]
[WINES!!!]
That were garnered by [maidens who laughed through the vines.]
[stable-boys smoking long-nines.]

Then a [smile] [scowl], and a [glass] [howl], and a [toast]
[scoff], and a [cheer] [sneer],
For all [the good wine, and we've some of it here] [strychnine and
whiskey, and ratsbane and beer]
In cellar, in pantry, in attic, in hall,
[Long live the gay servant that laughs for us all!] [Down, down,
with the tyrant that masters us all!]


The company said I had been shabbily treated, and advised me to
charge the committee double, - which I did.  But as I never got my
pay, I don't know that it made much difference.  I am a very
particular person about having all I write printed as I write it.
I require to see a proof, a revise, a re-revise, and a double re-
revise, or fourth-proof rectified impression of all my productions,
especially verse.  A misprint kills a sensitive author.  An
intentional change of his text murders him.  No wonder so many
poets die young!

I have nothing more to report at this time, except two pieces of
advice I gave to the young women at table.  One relates to a
vulgarism of language, which I grieve to say is sometimes heard
even from female lips.  The other is of more serious purport, and
applies to such as contemplate a change of condition, - matrimony,
in fact.

- The woman who "calculates" is lost.

- Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.



CHAPTER III



[THE "Atlantic" obeys the moon, and its LUNIVERSARY has come round
again.  I have gathered up some hasty notes of my remarks made
since the last high tides, which I respectfully submit.  Please to
remember this is TALK; just as easy and just as formal as I choose
to make it.]

- I never saw an author in my life - saving, perhaps, one - that
did not purr as audibly as a full-grown domestic cat, (FELIS CATUS,
LINN.,) on having his fur smoothed in the right way by a skilful
hand.

But let me give you a caution.  Be very careful how you tell an
author he is DROLL.  Ten to one he will hate you; and if he does,
be sure he can do you a mischief, and very probably will.  Say you
CRIED over his romance or his verses, and he will love you and send
you a copy.  You can laugh over that as much as you like - in
private.

- Wonder why authors and actors are ashamed of being funny? - Why,
there are obvious reasons, and deep philosophical ones.  The clown
knows very well that the women are not in love with him, but with
Hamlet, the fellow in the black cloak and plumed hat.  Passion
never laughs.  The wit knows that his place is at the tail of a
procession.

If you want the deep underlying reason, I must take more time to
tell it.  There is a perfect consciousness in every form of wit -
using that term in its general sense - that its essence consists in
a partial and incomplete view of whatever it touches.  It throws a
single ray, separated from the rest, - red, yellow, blue, or any
intermediate shade, - upon an object; never white light; that is
the province of wisdom.  We get beautiful effects from wit, - all
the prismatic colors, - but never the object as it is in fair
daylight.  A pun, which is a kind if wit, is a different and much
shallower trick in mental optics throwing the SHADOWS of two
objects so that one overlies the other.  Poetry uses the rainbow
tints for special effects, but always keeps its essential object in
the purest white light of truth. - Will you allow me to pursue this
subject a little further?

[They didn't allow me at that time, for somebody happened to scrape
the floor with his chair just then; which accidental sound, as all
must have noticed, has the instantaneous effect that the cutting of
the yellow hair by Iris had upon infelix Dido.  It broke the charm,
and that breakfast was over.]

- Don't flatter yourselves that friendship authorizes you to say
disagreeable things to your intimates.  On the contrary, the nearer
you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact
and courtesy become.  Except in cases of necessity, which are rare,
leave your friend to learn unpleasant truths from his enemies; they
are ready enough to tell them.  Good-breeding NEVER forgets that
AMOUR-PROPRE is universal.  When you read the story of the
Archbishop and Gil Blas, you may laugh, if you will, at the poor
old man's delusion; but don't forget that the youth was the greater
fool of the two, and that his master served such a booby rightly in
turning him out of doors.

- You need not get up a rebellion against what I say, if you find
everything in my sayings is not exactly new.  You can't possibly
mistake a man who means to be honest for a literary pickpocket.  I
once read an introductory lecture that looked to me too learned for
its latitude.  On examination, I found all its erudition was taken
ready-made from D'Israeli.  If I had been ill-natured, I should
have shown up the little great man, who had once belabored me in
his feeble way.  But one can generally tell these wholesale thieves
easily enough, and they are not worth the trouble of putting them
in the pillory.  I doubt the entire novelty of my remarks just made
on telling unpleasant truths, yet I am not conscious of any
larceny.

Neither make too much of flaws and occasional overstatements.  Some
persons seem to think that absolute truth, in the form of rigidly
stated propositions, is all that conversation admits.  This is
precisely as if a musician should insist on having nothing but
perfect chords and simple melodies, - no diminished fifths, no flat
sevenths, no flourishes, on any account.  Now it is fair to say,
that, just as music must have all these, so conversation must have
its partial truths, its embellished truths, its exaggerated truths.
It is in its higher forms an artistic product, and admits the ideal
element as much as pictures or statues.  One man who is a little
too literal can spoil the talk of a whole tableful of men of
ESPRIT. - "Yes," you say, "but who wants to hear fanciful people's
nonsense?  Put the facts to it, and then see where it is!" -
Certainly, if a man is too fond of paradox, - if he is flighty and
empty, - if, instead of striking those fifths and sevenths, those
harmonious discords, often so much better than the twinned octaves,
in the music of thought, - if, instead of striking these, he
jangles the chords, stick a fact into him like a stiletto.  But
remember that talking is one of the fine arts, - the noblest, the
most important, and the most difficult, - and that its fluent
harmonies may be spoiled by the intrusion of a single harsh note.
Therefore conversation which is suggestive rather than
argumentative, which lets out the most of each talker's results of
thought, is commonly the pleasantest and the most profitable.  It
is not easy, at the best, for two persons talking together to make
the most of each other's thoughts, there are so many of them.

[The company looked as if they wanted an explanation.]

When John and Thomas, for instance, are talking together, it is
natural enough that among the six there should be more or less
confusion and misapprehension.

[Our landlady turned pale; - no doubt she thought there was a screw
loose in my intellects, - and that involved the probable loss of a
boarder.  A severe-looking person, who wears a Spanish cloak and a
sad cheek, fluted by the passions of the melodrama, whom I
understand to be the professional ruffian of the neighboring
theatre, alluded, with a certain lifting of the brow, drawing down
of the corners of the mouth, and somewhat rasping VOCE DI PETTO, to
Falstaff's nine men in buckram.  Everybody looked up.  I believe
the old gentleman opposite was afraid I should seize the carving-
knife; at any rate, he slid it to one side, as it were carelessly.]

I think, I said, I can make it plain to Benjamin Franklin here,
that there are at least six personalities distinctly to be
recognized as taking part in that dialogue between John and Thomas.

Three Johns.

1.  The real John; known only to his Maker.
2.  John's ideal John; never the real one, and often very unlike
him.
3.  Thomas's ideal John; never the real John, nor John's John, but
often very unlike either.

Three Thomas.

1.  The real Thomas.
2.  Thomas's ideal Thomas.
3.  John's ideal Thomas.


Only one of the three Johns is taxed; only one can be weighed on a
platform-balance; but the other two are just as important in the
conversation.  Let us suppose the real John to be old, dull, and
ill-looking.  But as the Higher Powers have not conferred on men
the gift of seeing themselves in the true light, John very possibly
conceives himself to be youthful, witty, and fascinating, and talks
from the point of view of this ideal.  Thomas, again, believes him
to be an artful rogue, we will say; therefore he is, so far as
Thomas's attitude in the conversation is concerned, an artful
rogue, though really simple and stupid.  The same conditions apply
to the three Thomases.  It follows, that, until a man can be found
who knows himself as his Maker knows him, or who sees himself as
others see him, there must be at least six persons engaged in every
dialogue between two.  Of these, the least important,
philosophically speaking, is the one that we have called the real
person.  No wonder two disputants often get angry, when there are
six of them talking and listening all at the same time.

[A very unphilosophical application of the above remarks was made
by a young fellow, answering to the name of John, who sits near me
at table.  A certain basket of peaches, a rare vegetable, little
known to boarding-houses, was on its way to me VIA this unlettered
Johannes.  He appropriated the three that remained in the basket,
remarking that there was just one apiece for him.  I convinced him
that his practical inference was hasty and illogical, but in the
mean time he had eaten the peaches.]

- The opinions of relatives as to a man's powers are very commonly
of little value; not merely because they sometimes overrate their
own flesh and blood, as some may suppose; on the contrary, they are
quite as likely to underrate those whom they have grown into the
habit of considering like themselves.  The advent of genius is like
what florists style the BREAKING of a seedling tulip into what we
may call high-caste colors, - ten thousand dingy flowers, then one
with the divine streak; or, if you prefer it, like the coming up in
old Jacob's garden of that most gentlemanly little fruit, the
seckel pear, which I have sometimes seen in shop-windows.  It is a
surprise, - there is nothing to account for it.  All at once we
find that twice two make FIVE.  Nature is fond of what are called
"gift-enterprises."  This little book of life which she has given
into the hands of its joint possessors is commonly one of the old
story-books bound over again.  Only once in a great while there is
a stately poem in it, or its leaves are illuminated with the
glories of art, or they enfold a draft for untold values signed by
the million-fold millionnaire old mother herself.  But strangers
are commonly the first to find the "gift" that came with the little
book.

It may be questioned whether anything can be conscious of its own
flavor.  Whether the musk-deer, or the civet-cat, or even a still
more eloquently silent animal that might be mentioned, is aware of
any personal peculiarity, may well be doubted.  No man knows his
own voice; many men do not know their own profiles.  Every one
remembers Carlyle's famous "Characteristics" article; allow for
exaggerations, and there is a great deal in his doctrine of the
self-unconsciousness of genius.  It comes under the great law just
stated.  This incapacity of knowing its own traits is often found
in the family as well as in the individual.  So never mind what
your cousins, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, and the rest, say
about that fine poem you have written, but send it (postage-paid)
to the editors, if there are any, of the "Atlantic," - which, by
the way, is not so called because it is A NOTION, as some dull wits
wish they had said, but are too late.

- Scientific knowledge, even in the most modest persons, has
mingled with it a something which partakes of insolence.  Absolute,
peremptory facts are bullies, and those who keep company with them
are apt to get a bullying habit of mind; - not of manners, perhaps;
they may be soft and smooth, but the smile they carry has a quiet
assertion in it, such as the Champion of the Heavy Weights,
commonly the best-natured, but not the most diffident of men, wears
upon what he very inelegantly calls his "mug."  Take the man, for
instance, who deals in the mathematical sciences.  There is no
elasticity in a mathematical fact; if you bring up against it, it
never yields a hair's breadth; everything must go to pieces that
comes in collision with it.  What the mathematician knows being
absolute, unconditional, incapable of suffering question, it should
tend, in the nature of things, to breed a despotic way of thinking.
So of those who deal with the palpable and often unmistakable facts
of external nature; only in a less degree.  Every probability - and
most of our common, working beliefs are probabilities - is provided
with BUFFERS at both ends, which break the force of opposite
opinions clashing against it; but scientific certainty has no
spring in it, no courtesy, no possibility of yielding.  All this
must react on the minds which handle these forms of truth.

- Oh, you need net tell me that Messrs. A. and B. are the most
gracious, unassuming people in the world, and yet preeminent in the
ranges of science I am referring to.  I know that as well as you.
But mark this which I am going to say once for all:  If I had not
force enough to project a principle full in the face of the half
dozen most obvious facts which seem to contradict it, I would think
only in single file from this day forward.  A rash man, once
visiting a certain noted institution at South Boston, ventured to
express the sentiment, that man is a rational being.  An old woman
who was an attendant in the Idiot School contradicted the
statement, and appealed to the facts before the speaker to disprove
it.  The rash man stuck to his hasty generalization,
notwithstanding.

[ - It is my desire to be useful to those with whom I am associated
in my daily relations.  I not unfrequently practise the divine art
of music in company with our landlady's daughter, who, as I
mentioned before, is the owner of an accordion.  Having myself a
well-marked barytone voice of more than half an octave in compass,
I sometimes add my vocal powers to her execution of


"Thou, thou reign'st in this bosom."


not, however, unless her mother or some other discreet female is
present, to prevent misinterpretation or remark.  I have also taken
a good deal of interest in Benjamin Franklin, before referred to,
sometimes called B. F., or more frequently Frank, in imitation of
that felicitous abbreviation, combining dignity and convenience,
adopted by some of his betters.  My acquaintance with the French
language is very imperfect, I having never studied it anywhere but
in Paris, which is awkward, as B. F. devotes himself to it with the
peculiar advantage of an Alsacian teacher.  The boy, I think, is
doing well, between us, notwithstanding.  The following is an
UNCORRECTED French exercise, written by this young gentleman.  His
mother thinks it very creditable to his abilities; though, being
unacquainted with the French language, her judgment cannot be
considered final.


LE RAT DIES SALONS A LECTURE.


CE rat ci est un animal fort singulier.  Il a deux pattes de
derriere sur lesquelles il marche, et deux pattes de devant dont il
fait usage pour tenir les journaux.  Cet animal a la peau noire
pour le plupart, et porte un cerele blanchatre autour de son cou.
On le trouve tous les jours aux dits salons, on il demeure, digere,
s'il y a do quoi dans son interieur, respire, tousse, eternue,
dort, et renfle quelquefois, ayant toujours le semblant de lire.
On ne sait pas s'il a une autre gite que cela.  Il a l'air d'une
bete tres stupide, mais il est d'une sagacite et d'une vitesse
extraordinaire quand il s'agit de saisir un journal nouveau.  On ne
sait pas pourquoi il lit, parcequ'il ne parait pas avoir des idees.
Il vocalise rarement, mais en revanche, il fait des bruits nasaux
divers.  Il porte un crayon dans une de ses poches pectorales, avec
lequel il fait des marques sur les bords des journaux et des
livres, semblable aux suivans:  !!! - Bah!  Pooh!  Il ne faut pas
cependant les prendre pour des signes d'intelligence.  Il ne vole
pas, ordinairement; il fait rarement meme des echanges de
parapluie, et jamais de chapeau, parceque son chapeau a toujours un
caractere specifique.  On ne sait pas au juste ce dont il se
nourrit.  Feu Cuvier etait d'avis que c'etait de l'odeur du cuir
des reliures; ce qu'on dit d'etre une nourriture animale fort
saine, et peu chere.  Il vit bien longtems.  Enfin il meure, en
laissant a ses heritiers une carte du Salon a Lecture on il avait
existe pendant sa vie.  On pretend qu'il revient toutes les nuits,
apres la mort, visiter le Salon.  On peut le voir, dit on, a
minuit, dans sa place habituelle, tenant le journal du soir, et
ayant a sa main un crayon de charbon.  Le lendemain on trouve des
caracteres inconnus sur les bords du journal.  Ce qui prouve que le
spiritualisme est vrai, et que Messieurs les Professeurs de
Cambridge sont des imbeciles qui ne savent rien du tout, du tout.


I think this exercise, which I have not corrected, or allowed to be
touched in any way, is not discreditable to B. F.  You observe that
he is acquiring a knowledge of zoology at the same time that he is
learning French.  Fathers of families in moderate circumstances
will find it profitable to their children, and an economical mode
of instruction, to set them to revising and amending this boy's
exercise.  The passage was originally taken from the "Histoire
Naturelle des Betes Ruminans et Rongeurs, Bipedes et Autres,"
lately published in Paris.  This was translated into English and
published in London.  It was republished at Great Pedlington, with
notes and additions by the American editor.  The notes consist of
an interrogation-mark on page 53d, and a reference (p. 127th) to
another book "edited" by the same hand.  The additions consist of
the editor's name on the title-page and back, with a complete and
authentic list of said editor's honorary titles in the first of
these localities.  Our boy translated the translation back into
French.  This may be compared with the original, to be found on
Shelf 13, Division X, of the Public Library of this metropolis.]

- Some of you boarders ask me from time to time why I don't write a
story, or a novel, or something of that kind.  Instead of answering
each one of you separately, I will thank you to step up into the
wholesale department for a few moments, where I deal in answers by
the piece and by the bale.

That every articulately-speaking human being has in him stuff for
ONE novel in three volumes duodecimo has long been with me a
cherished belief.  It has been maintained, on the other hand, that
many persons cannot write more than one novel, - that all after
that are likely to be failures. - Life is so much more tremendous a
thing in its heights and depths than any transcript of it can be,
that all records of human experience are as so many bound HERBARIA
to the innumerable glowing, glistening, rustling, breathing,
fragrance-laden, poison-sucking, life-giving, death-distilling
leaves and flowers of the forest and the prairies.  All we can do
with books of human experience is to make them alive again with
something borrowed from our own lives.  We can make a book alive
for us just in proportion to its resemblance in essence or in form
to our own experience.  Now an author's first novel is naturally
drawn, to a great extent, from his personal experiences; that is,
is a literal copy of nature under various slight disguises.  But
the moment the author gets out of his personality, he must have the
creative power, as well as the narrative art and the sentiment, in
order to tell a living story; and this is rare.

Besides, there is great danger that a man's first life-story shall
clean him out, so to speak, of his best thoughts.  Most lives,
though their stream is loaded with sand and turbid with alluvial
waste, drop a few golden grains of wisdom as they flow along.
Oftentimes a single CRADLING gets them all, and after that the poor
man's labor is only rewarded by mud and worn pebbles.  All which
proves that I, as an individual of the human family, could write
one novel or story at any rate, if I would.

- Why don't I, then? - Well, there are several reasons against it.
In the first place, I should tell all my secrets, and I maintain
that verse is the proper medium for such revelations.  Rhythm and
rhyme and the harmonies of musical language, the play of fancy, the
fire of imagination, the flashes of passion, so hide the nakedness
of a heart laid open, that hardly any confession, transfigured in
the luminous halo of poetry, is reproached as self-exposure.  A
beauty shows herself under the chandeliers, protected by the
glitter of her diamonds, with such a broad snowdrift of white arms
and shoulders laid bare, that, were she unadorned and in plain
calico, she would be unendurable - in the opinion of the ladies.

Again, I am terribly afraid I should show up all my friends.  I
should like to know if all story-tellers do not do this?  Now I am
afraid all my friends would not bear showing up very well; for they
have an average share of the common weakness of humanity, which I
am pretty certain would come out.  Of all that have told stories
among us there is hardly one I can recall who has not drawn too
faithfully some living portrait that might better have been spared.

Once more, I have sometimes thought it possible I might be too dull
to write such a story as I should wish to write.

And finally, I think it very likely I SHALL write a story one of
these days.  Don't be surprised at any time, if you see me coming
out with "The Schoolmistress," or "The Old Gentleman Opposite."
[OUR schoolmistress and OUR old gentleman that sits opposite had
left the table before I said this.]  I want my glory for writing
the same discounted now, on the spot, if you please.  I will write
when I get ready.  How many people live on the reputation of the
reputation they might have made!

- I saw you smiled when I spoke about the possibility of my being
too dull to write a good story.  I don't pretend to know what you
meant by it, but I take occasion to make a remark which may
hereafter prove of value to some among you. - When one of us who
has been led by native vanity or senseless flattery to think
himself or herself possessed of talent arrives at the full and
final conclusion that he or she is really dull, it is one of the
most tranquillizing and blessed convictions that can enter a
mortal's mind.  All our failures, our shortcomings, our strange
disappointments in the effect of our efforts are lifted from our
bruised shoulders, and fall, like Christian's pack, at the feet of
that Omnipotence which has seen fit to deny us the pleasant gift of
high intelligence, - with which one look may overflow us in some
wider sphere of being.

- How sweetly and honestly one said to me the other day, "I hate
books!"  A gentleman, - singularly free from affectations, - not
learned, of course, but of perfect breeding, which is often so much
better than learning, - by no means dull, in the sense of knowledge
of the world and society, but certainly not clever either in the
arts or sciences, - his company is pleasing to all who know him.  I
did not recognize in him inferiority of literary taste half so
distinctly as I did simplicity of character and fearless
acknowledgment of his inaptitude for scholarship.  In fact, I think
there are a great many gentlemen and others, who read with a mark
to keep their place, that really "hate books," but never had the
wit to find it out, or the manliness to own it.  [ENTRE NOUS, I
always read with a mark.]

We get into a way of thinking as if what we call an "intellectual
man" was, as a matter of course, made up of nine-tenths, or
thereabouts, of book-learning, and one-tenth himself.  But even if
he is actually so compounded, he need not read much.  Society is a
strong solution of books.  It draws the virtue out of what is best
worth reading, as hot water draws the strength of tea-leaves.  If I
were a prince, I would hire or buy a private literary tea-pot, in
which I would steep all the leaves of new books that promised well.
The infusion would do for me without the vegetable fibre.  You
understand me; I would have a person whose sole business should be
to read day and night, and talk to me whenever I wanted him to.  I
know the man I would have:  a quick-witted, out-spoken, incisive
fellow; knows history, or at any rate has a shelf full of books
about it, which he can use handily, and the same of all useful arts
and sciences; knows all the common plots of plays and novels, and
the stock company of characters that are continually coming on in
new costume; can give you a criticism of an octavo in an epithet
and a wink, and you can depend on it; cares for nobody except for
the virtue there is in what he says; delights in taking off big
wigs and professional gowns, and in the disembalming and
unbandaging of all literary mummies.  Yet he is as tender and
reverential to all that bears the mark of genius, - that is, of a
new influx of truth or beauty, - as a nun over her missal.  In
short, he is one of those men that know everything except how to
make a living.  Him would I keep on the square next my own royal
compartment on life's chessboard.  To him I would push up another
pawn, in the shape of a comely and wise young woman, whom he would
of course take - to wife.  For all contingencies I would liberally
provide.  In a word, I would, in the plebeian, but expressive
phrase, "put him through" all the material part of life; see him
sheltered, warmed, fed, button-mended, and all that, just to be
able to lay on his talk when I liked, - with the privilege of
shutting it off at will.

A Club is the next best thing to this, strung like a harp, with
about a dozen ringing intelligences, each answering to some chord
of the macrocosm.  They do well to dine together once in a while.
A dinner-party made up of such elements is the last triumph of
civilization over barbarism.  Nature and art combine to charm the
senses; the equatorial zone of the system is soothed by well-
studied artifices; the faculties are off duty, and fall into their
natural attitudes; you see wisdom in slippers and science in a
short jacket.

The whole force of conversation depends on how much you can take
for granted.  Vulgar chess-players have to play their game out;
nothing short of the brutality of an actual checkmate satisfies
their dull apprehensions.  But look at two masters of that noble
game!  White stands well enough, so far as you can see; but Red
says, Mate in six moves; - White looks, - nods; - the game is over.
Just so in talking with first-rate men; especially when they are
good-natured and expansive, as they are apt to be at table.  That
blessed clairvoyance which sees into things without opening them, -
that glorious license, which, having shut the door and driven the
reporter from its key-hole, calls upon Truth, majestic virgin! to
get off from her pedestal and drop her academic poses, and take a
festive garland and the vacant place on the MEDIUS LECTUS, - that
carnival-shower of questions and replies and comments, large axioms
bowled over the mahogany like bomb-shells from professional
mortars, and explosive wit dropping its trains of many-colored
fire, and the mischief-making rain of BON-BONS pelting everybody
that shows himself, - the picture of a truly intellectual banquet
is one which the old Divinities might well have attempted to
reproduce in their -

- "Oh, oh, oh!" cried the young fellow whom they call John, - "that
is from one of your lectures!"

I know it, I replied, - I concede it, I confess it, I proclaim it.


"The trail of the serpent is over them all!"


All lecturers, all professors, all schoolmasters, have ruts and
grooves in their minds into which their conversation is perpetually
sliding.  Did you never, in riding through the woods of a still
June evening, suddenly feel that you had passed into a warm stratum
of air, and in a minute or two strike the chill layer of atmosphere
beyond?  Did you never, in cleaving the green waters of the Back
Bay, - where the Provincial blue-noses are in the habit of beating
the "Metropolitan" boat-clubs, - find yourself in a tepid streak, a
narrow, local gulf-stream, a gratuitous warm-bath a little
underdone, through which your glistening shoulders soon flashed, to
bring you back to the cold realities of full-sea temperature?  Just
so, in talking with any of the characters above referred to, one
not unfrequently finds a sudden change in the style of the
conversation.  The lack-lustre eye rayless as a Beacon-Street door-
plate in August, all at once fills with light; the face flings
itself wide open like the church-portals when the bride and
bridegroom enter; the little man grows in stature before your eyes,
like the small prisoner with hair on end, beloved yet dreaded of
early childhood; you were talking with a dwarf and an imbecile, -
you have a giant and a trumpet-tongued angel before you! - Nothing
but a streak out of a fifty-dollar lecture. - As when, at some
unlooked-for moment, the mighty fountain-column springs into the
air before the astonished passer-by, - silver-footed, diamond-
crowned, rainbow-scarfed, - from the bosom of that fair sheet,
sacred to the hymns of quiet batrachians at home, and the epigrams
of a less amiable and less elevated order of REPTILIA in other
latitudes.

- Who was that person that was so abused some time since for saying
that in the conflict of two races our sympathies naturally go with
the higher?  No matter who he was.  Now look at what is going on in
India, - a white, superior "Caucasian" race, against a dark-
skinned, inferior, but still "Caucasian" race, - and where are
English and American sympathies?  We can't stop to settle all the
doubtful questions; all we know is, that the brute nature is sure
to come out most strongly in the lower race, and it is the general
law that the human side of humanity should treat the brutal side as
it does the same nature in the inferior animals, - tame it or crush
it.  The India mail brings stories of women and children outraged
and murdered; the royal stronghold is in the hands of the babe-
killers.  England takes down the Map of the World, which she has
girdled with empire, and makes a correction thus:  [DELPHI] DELE.
The civilized world says, Amen.

- Do not think, because I talk to you of many subjects briefly,
that I should not find it much lazier work to take each one of them
and dilute it down to an essay.  Borrow some of my old college
themes and water my remarks to suit yourselves, as the Homeric
heroes did with their MELAS OINOS, - that black sweet, syrupy wine
(?) which they used to alloy with three parts or more of the
flowing stream.  [Could it have been MELASSES, as Webster and his
provincials spell it, - or MOLOSSA'S, as dear old smattering,
chattering, would-be-College-President, Cotton Mather, has it in
the "Magnalia"?  Ponder thereon, ye small antiquaries who make
barn-door-fowl flights of learning in "Notes and Queries!" - ye
Historical Societies, in one of whose venerable triremes I, too,
ascend the stream of time, while other hands tug at the oars! - ye
Amines of parasitical literature, who pick up your grains of
native-grown food with a bodkin, having gorged upon less honest
fare, until, like the great minds Goethe speaks of, you have "made
a Golgotha" of your pages! - ponder thereon!]

- Before you go, this morning, I want to read you a copy of verses.
You will understand by the title that they are written in an
imaginary character.  I don't doubt they will fit some family-man
well enough.  I send it forth as "Oak Hall" projects a coat, on A
PRIORI grounds of conviction that it will suit somebody.  There is
no loftier illustration of faith than this.  It believes that a
soul has been clad in flesh; that tender parents have fed and
nurtured it; that its mysterious COMPAGES or frame-work has
survived its myriad exposures and reached the stature of maturity;
that the Man, now self-determining, has given in his adhesion to
the traditions and habits of the race in favor of artificial
clothing; that he will, having all the world to choose from, select
the very locality where this audacious generalization has been
acted upon.  It builds a garment cut to the pattern of an Idea, and
trusts that Nature will model a material shape to fit it.  There is
a prophecy in every seam, and its pockets are full of inspiration.
- Now hear the verses.


THE OLD MAN DREAMS.


O for one hour of youthful joy!
Give back my twentieth spring!
I'd rather laugh a bright-haired boy
Than reign a gray-beard king!

Off with the wrinkled spoils of age!
Away with learning's crown!
Tear out life's wisdom-written page,
And dash its trophies down!

One moment let my life-blood stream
From boyhood's fount of flame!
Give me one giddy, reeling dream
Of life all love and fame!

- My listening angel heard the prayer,
And calmly smiling, said,
"If I but touch thy silvered hair,
Thy hasty wish hath sped.

"But is there nothing in thy track
To bid thee fondly stay,
While the swift seasons hurry back
To find the wished-for day?"

- Ah, truest soul of womankind!
Without thee, what were life?
One bliss I cannot leave behind:
I'll take - my - precious wife!

- The angel took a sapphire pen
And wrote in rainbow dew,
"The man would be a boy again,
And be a husband too!"

-  "And is there nothing yet unsaid
Before the change appears?
Remember, all their gifts have fled
With those dissolving years!"

Why, yes; for memory would recall
My fond paternal joys;
I could not bear to leave them all;
I'll take - my - girl - and - boys!

The smiling angel dropped his pen, -
"Why this will never do;
The man would be a boy again,
And be a father too!"

And so I laughed, - my laughter woke
The household with its noise, -
And wrote my dream, when morning broke,
To please the gray-haired boys.



CHAPTER IV.



[I AM so well pleased with my boarding-house that I intend to
remain there, perhaps for years.  Of course I shall have a great
many conversations to report, and they will necessarily be of
different tone and on different subjects.  The talks are like the
breakfasts, - sometimes dipped toast, and sometimes dry.  You must
take them as they come.  How can I do what all these letters ask me
to?  No. 1. want serious and earnest thought.  No. 2. (letter
smells of bad cigars) must have more jokes; wants me to tell a
"good storey" which he has copied out for me.  (I suppose two
letters before the word "good" refer to some Doctor of Divinity who
told the story.)  No. 3. (in female hand) - more poetry.  No. 4.
wants something that would be of use to a practical man.
(PRAHCTICAL MAHN he probably pronounces it.)  No. 5. (gilt-edged,
sweet-scented) - "more sentiment," - " heart's outpourings." -

My dear friends, one and all, I can do nothing but report such
remarks as I happen to have made at our breakfast-table.  Their
character will depend on many accidents, - a good deal on the
particular persons in the company to whom they were addressed.  It
so happens that those which follow were mainly intended for the
divinity-student and the school-mistress; though others, whom I
need not mention, saw to interfere, with more or less propriety, in
the conversation.  This is one of my privileges as a talker; and of
course, if I was not talking for our whole company, I don't expect
all the readers of this periodical to be interested in my notes of
what was said.  Still, I think there may be a few that will rather
like this vein, - possibly prefer it to a livelier one, - serious
young men, and young women generally, in life's roseate parenthesis
from - years of age to - inclusive.

Another privilege of talking is to misquote. - Of course it wasn't
Proserpina that actually cut the yellow hair, - but IRIS.  (As I
have since told you) it was the former lady's regular business, but
Dido had used herself ungenteelly, and Madame d'Enfer stood firm on
the point of etiquette.  So the bathycolpian Here - Juno, in Latin
- sent down Iris instead.  But I was mightily pleased to see that
one of the gentlemen that do the heavy articles for the celebrated
"Oceanic Miscellany" misquoted Campbell's line without any excuse.
"Waft us HOME the MESSAGE" of course it ought to be.  Will he be
duly grateful for the correction?]

- The more we study the body and the mind, the more we find both to
be governed, not by, but ACCORDING TO laws, such as we observe in
the larger universe. - You think you know all about WALKING, -
don't you, now?  Well, how do you suppose your lower limbs are held
to your body?  They are sucked up by two cupping vessels,
("cotyloid" - cup-like - cavities,) and held there as long as you
live, and longer.  At any rate, you think you move them backward
and forward at such a rate as your will determines, don't you? - On
the contrary, they swing just as any other pendulums swing, at a
fixed rate, determined by their length.  You can alter this by
muscular power, as you can take hold of the pendulum of a clock and
make it move faster or slower; but your ordinary gait is timed by
the same mechanism as the movements of the solar system.

[My friend, the Professor, told me all this, referring me to
certain German physiologists by the name of Weber for proof of the
facts, which, however, he said he had often verified.  I
appropriated it to my own use; what can one do better than this,
when one has a friend that tells him anything worth remembering?

The Professor seems to think that man and the general powers of the
universe are in partnership.  Some one was saying that it had cost
nearly half a million to move the Leviathan only so far as they had
got it already. - Why, - said the Professor, - they might have
hired an EARTHQUAKE for less money!]

Just as we find a mathematical rule at the bottom of many of the
bodily movements, just so thought may be supposed to have its
regular cycles.  Such or such a thought comes round periodically,
in its turn.  Accidental suggestions, however, so far interfere
with the regular cycles, that we may find them practically beyond
our power of recognition.  Take all this for what it is worth, but
at any rate you will agree that there are certain particular
thoughts that do not come up once a day, nor once a week, but that
a year would hardly go round without your having them pass through
your mind.  Here is one which comes up at intervals in this way.
Some one speaks of it, and there is an instant and eager smile of
assent in the listener or listeners.  Yes, indeed; they have often
been struck by it.

ALL AT ONCE A CONVICTION FLASHES THROUGH US THAT WE HAVE BEEN IN
THE SAME PRECISE CIRCUMSTANCES AS AT THE PRESENT INSTANT, ONCE OR
MANY TIMES BEFORE.

O, dear, yes! - said one of the company, - everybody has had that
feeling.

The landlady didn't know anything about such notions; it was an
idee in folks' heads, she expected.

The schoolmistress said, in a hesitating sort of way, that she knew
the feeling well, and didn't like to experience it; it made her
think she was a ghost, sometimes.

The young fellow whom they call John said he knew all about it; he
had just lighted a cheroot the other day, when a tremendous
conviction all at once came over him that he had done just that
same thing ever so many times before.  I looked severely at him,
and his countenance immediately fell - ON THE SIDE TOWARD ME; I
cannot answer for the other, for he can wink and laugh with either
half of his face without the other half's knowing it.

- I have noticed - I went on to say - the following circumstances
connected with these sudden impressions.  First, that the condition
which seems to be the duplicate of a former one is often very
trivial, - one that might have presented itself a hundred times.
Secondly, that the impression is very evanescent, and that it is
rarely, if ever, recalled by any voluntary effort, at least after
any time has elapsed.  Thirdly, that there is a disinclination to
record the circumstances, and a sense of incapacity to reproduce
the state of mind in words.  Fourthly, I have often felt that the
duplicate condition had not only occurred once before, but that it
was familiar and, as it seemed, habitual.  Lastly, I have had the
same convictions in my dreams.

How do I account for it? - Why, there are several ways that I can
mention, and you may take your choice.  The first is that which the
young lady hinted at; - that these flashes are sudden recollections
of a previous existence.  I don't believe that; for I remember a
poor student I used to know told me he had such a conviction one
day when he was blacking his boots, and I can't think he had ever
lived in another world where they use Day and Martin.

Some think that Dr. Wigan's doctrine of the brain's being a double
organ, its hemispheres working together like the two eyes, accounts
for it.  One of the hemispheres hangs fire, they suppose, and the
small interval between the perceptions of the nimble and the
sluggish half seems an indefinitely long period, and therefore the
second perception appears to be the copy of another, ever so old.
But even allowing the centre of perception to be double, I can see
no good reason for supposing this indefinite lengthening of the
time, nor any analogy that bears it out.  It seems to me most
likely that the coincidence of circumstances is very partial, but
that we take this partial resemblance for identity, as we
occasionally do resemblances of persons.  A momentary posture of
circumstances is so far like some preceding one that we accept it
as exactly the same, just as we accost a stranger occasionally,
mistaking him for a friend.  The apparent similarity may be owing
perhaps, quite as much to the mental state at the time, as to the
outward circumstances.

- Here is another of these curiously recurring remarks.  I have
said it, and heard it many times, and occasionally met with
something like it in books, - somewhere in Bulwer's novels, I
think, and in one of the works of Mr. Olmsted, I know.

MEMORY, IMAGINATION, OLD SENTIMENTS AND ASSOCIATIONS, ARE MORE
READILY REACHED THROUGH THE SENSE OF SMELL THAN BY ALMOST ANY OTHER
CHANNEL.

Of course the particular odors which act upon each person's
susceptibilities differ. - O, yes!  I will tell you some of mine.
The smell of PHOSPHORUS is one of them.  During a year or two of
adolescence I used to be dabbling in chemistry a good deal, and as
about that time I had my little aspirations and passions like
another, some of these things got mixed up with each other:
orange-colored fumes of nitrous acid, and visions as bright and
transient; reddening litmus-paper, and blushing cheeks; - EHEU!


"Soles occidere et redire possunt,"


but there is no reagent that will redden the faded roses of
eighteen hundred and - spare them!  But, as I was saying,
phosphorus fires this train of associations in an instant; its
luminous vapors with their penetrating odor throw me into a trance;
it comes to me in a double sense "trailing clouds of glory."  Only
the confounded Vienna matches, OHNE PHOSPHOR-GERUCH, have worn my
sensibilities a little.

Then there is the MARIGOLD.  When I was of smallest dimensions, and
wont to ride impacted between the knees of fond parental pair, we
would sometimes cross the bridge to the next village-town and stop
opposite a low, brown, "gambrel-roofed" cottage.  Out of it would
come one Sally, sister of its swarthy tenant, swarthy herself,
shady-lipped, sad-voiced, and, bending over her flower-bed, would
gather a "posy," as she called it, for the little boy.  Sally lies
in the churchyard with a slab of blue slate at her head, lichen-
crusted, and leaning a little within the last few years.  Cottage,
garden-beds, posies, grenadier-like rows of seedling onions, -
stateliest of vegetables, - all are gone, but the breath of a
marigold brings them all back to me.

Perhaps the herb EVERLASTING, the fragrant IMMORTELLE of our autumn
fields, has the most suggestive odor to me of all those that set me
dreaming.  I can hardly describe the strange thoughts and emotions
that come to me as I inhale the aroma of its pale, dry, rustling
flowers.  A something it has of sepulchral spicery, as if it had
been brought from the core of some great pyramid, where it had lain
on the breast of a mummied Pharaoh.  Something, too, of immortality
in the sad, faint sweetness lingering so long in its lifeless
petals.  Yet this does not tell why it fills my eyes with tears and
carries me in blissful thought to the banks of asphodel that border
the River of Life.

- I should not have talked so much about these personal
susceptibilities, if I had not a remark to make about them which I
believe is a new one.  It is this.  There may be a physical reason
for the strange connection between the sense of smell and the mind.
The olfactory nerve - so my friend, the Professor, tells me - is
the only one directly connected with the hemispheres of the brain,
the parts in which, as we have every reason to believe, the
intellectual processes are performed.  To speak more truly the
olfactory "nerve" is not a nerve at all, he says, but a part of the
brain, in intimate connection with its anterior lobes.  Whether
this anatomical arrangement is at the bottom of the facts I have
mentioned, I will not decide, but it is curious enough to be worth
remembering.  Contrast the sense of taste, as a source of
suggestive impressions, with that of smell.  Now the Professor
assures me that you will find the nerve of taste has no immediate
connection with the brain proper, but only with the prolongation of
the spinal cord.

[The old gentleman opposite did not pay much attention, I think, to
this hypothesis of mine.  But while I was speaking about the sense
of smell he nestled about in his seat, and presently succeeded in
getting out a large red bandanna handkerchief.  Then he lurched a
little to the other side, and after much tribulation at last
extricated an ample round snuff-box.  I looked as he opened it and
felt for the wonted pugil.  Moist rappee, and a Tonka-bean lying
therein.  I made the manual sign understood of all mankind that use
the precious dust, and presently my brain, too, responded to the
long unused stimulus - O boys, - that were, - actual papas and
possible grandpapas, - some of you with crowns like billiard-balls,
- some in locks of sable silvered, and some of silver sabled, - do
you remember, as you doze over this, those after-dinners at the
Trois Freres when the Scotch-plaided snuff-box went round, and the
dry Lundy-Foot tickled its way along into our happy sensoria?  Then
it was that the Chambertin or the Clos Vougeot came in, slumbering
in its straw cradle.  And one among you, - do you remember how he
would have a bit of ice always in his Burgundy, and sit tinkling it
against the sides of the bubble-like glass, saying that he was
hearing the cow-bells as he used to hear them, when the deep-
breathing kine came home at twilight from the huckleberry pasture,
in the old home a thousand leagues towards the sunset?]

Ah me! what strains and strophes of unwritten verse pulsate through
my soul when I open a certain closet in the ancient house where I
was born!  On its shelves used to lie bundles of sweet-marjoram and
pennyroyal and lavender and mint and catnip; there apples were
stored until their seeds should grow black, which happy period
there were sharp little milk-teeth always ready to anticipate;
there peaches lay in the dark, thinking of the sunshine they had
lost, until, like the hearts of saints that dream of heaven in
their sorrow, they grew fragrant as the breath of angels.  The
odorous echo of a score of dead summers lingers yet in those dim
recesses.

- Do I remember Byron's line about "striking the electric chain"? -
To be sure I do.  I sometimes think the less the hint that stirs
the automatic machinery of association, the more easily this moves
us.  What can be more trivial than that old story of opening the
folio Shakspeare that used to lie in some ancient English hall and
finding the flakes of Christmas pastry between its leaves, shut up
in them perhaps a hundred years ago?  And, lo! as one looks on
these poor relics of a bygone generation, the universe changes in
the twinkling of an eye; old George the Second is back again, and
the elder Pitt is coming into power, and General Wolfe is a fine,
promising young man, and over the Channel they are pulling the
Sieur Damiens to pieces with wild horses, and across the Atlantic
the Indians are tomahawking Hirams and Jonathans and Jonases at
Fort William Henry; all the dead people who have been in the dust
so long - even to the stout-armed cook that made the pastry - are
alive again; the planet unwinds a hundred of its luminous coils,
and the precession of the equinoxes is retraced on the dial of
heaven!  And all this for a bit of pie-crust!

- I will thank you for that pie, - said the provoking young fellow
whom I have named repeatedly.  He looked at it for a moment, and
put his hands to his eyes as if moved. - I was thinking, - he said
indistinctly -

- How?  What is't? - said our landlady.

- I was thinking - said he - who was king of England when this old
pie was baked, - and it made me feel bad to think how long he must
have been dead.

[Our landlady is a decent body, poor, and a widow, of course; CELA
VA SANS DIRE.  She told me her story once; it was as if a grain of
corn that had been ground and bolted had tried to individualize
itself by a special narrative.  There was the wooing and the
wedding, - the start in life, - the disappointments, - the children
she had buried, - the struggle against fate, - the dismantling of
life, first of its small luxuries, and then of its comforts, - the
broken spirits, - the altered character of the one on whom she
leaned, - and at last the death that came and drew the black
curtain between her and all her earthly hopes.

I never laughed at my landlady after she had told me her story, but
I often cried, - not those pattering tears that run off the eaves
upon our neighbors' grounds, the STILLICIDIUM of self-conscious
sentiment, but those which steal noiselessly through their conduits
until they reach the cisterns lying round about the heart; those
tears that we weep inwardly with unchanging features; - such I did
shed for her often when the imps of the boarding-house Inferno
tugged at her soul with their red-hot pincers.]

Young man, - I said, - the pasty you speak lightly of is not old,
but courtesy to those who labor to serve us, especially if they are
of the weaker sex, is very old, and yet well worth retaining.  May
I recommend to you the following caution, as a guide, whenever you
are dealing with a woman, or an artist, or a poet - if you are
handling an editor or politician, it is superfluous advice.  I take
it from the back of one of those little French toys which contain
pasteboard figures moved by a small running stream of fine sand;
Benjamin Franklin will translate it for you:  "QUOIQU'ELLE SOIT
TRES SOLIDEMENT MONTEE, IL FAUT NE PAS BRUTALISER LA MACHINE." - I
will thank you for the pie, if you please.

[I took more of it than was good for me - as much as 85 degrees, I
should think, - and had an indigestion in consequence.  While I was
suffering from it, I wrote some sadly desponding poems, and a
theological essay which took a very melancholy view of creation.
When I got better I labelled them all "Pie-crust," and laid them by
as scarecrows and solemn warnings.  I have a number of books on my
shelves that I should like to label with some such title; but, as
they have great names on their title-pages, - Doctors of Divinity,
some of them, - it wouldn't do.]

- My friend, the Professor, whom I have mentioned to you once or
twice, told me yesterday that somebody had been abusing him in some
of the journals of his calling.  I told him that I didn't doubt he
deserved it; that I hoped he did deserve a little abuse
occasionally, and would for a number of years to come; that nobody
could do anything to make his neighbors wiser or better without
being liable to abuse for it; especially that people hated to have
their little mistakes made fun of, and perhaps he had been doing
something of the kind. - The Professor smiled. - Now, said I, hear
what I am going to say.  It will not take many years to bring you
to the period of life when men, at least the majority of writing
and talking men, do nothing but praise.  Men, like peaches and
pears, grow sweet a little while before they begin to decay.  I
don't know what it is, - whether a spontaneous change, mental or
bodily, or whether it is thorough experience of the thanklessness
of critical honesty, - but it is a fact, that most writers, except
sour and unsuccessful ones, get tired of finding fault at about the
time when they are beginning to grow old.  As a general thing, I
would not give a great deal for the fair words of a critic, if he
is himself an author, over fifty years of age.  At thirty we are
all trying to cut our names in big letters upon the walls of this
tenement of life; twenty years later we have carved it, or shut up
our jack-knives.  Then we are ready to help others, and care less
to hinder any, because nobody's elbows are in our way.  So I am
glad you have a little life left; you will be saccharine enough in
a few years.

- Some of the softening effects of advancing age have struck me
very much in what I have heard or seen here and elsewhere.  I just
now spoke of the sweetening process that authors undergo.  Do you
know that in the gradual passage from maturity to helplessness the
harshest characters sometimes have a period in which they are
gentle and placid as young children?  I have heard it said, but I
cannot be sponsor for its truth, that the famous chieftain,
Lochiel, was rocked in a cradle like a baby, in his old age.  An
old man, whose studies had been of the severest scholastic kind,
used to love to hear little nursery-stories read over and over to
him.  One who saw the Duke of Wellington in his last years
describes him as very gentle in his aspect and demeanor.  I
remember a person of singularly stern and lofty bearing who became
remarkably gracious and easy in all his ways in the later period of
his life.

And that leads me to say that men often remind me of pears in their
way of coming to maturity.  Some are ripe at twenty, like human
Jargonelles, and must be made the most of, for their day is soon
over.  Some come into their perfect condition late, like the autumn
kinds, and they last better than the summer fruit.  And some, that,
like the Winter-Nelis, have been hard and uninviting until all the
rest have had their season, get their glow and perfume long after
the frost and snow have done their worst with the orchards.  Beware
of rash criticisms; the rough and stringent fruit you condemn may
be an autumn or a winter pear, and that which you picked up beneath
the same bough in August may have been only its worm-eaten
windfalls.  Milton was a Saint-Germain with a graft of the roseate
Early-Catherine.  Rich, juicy, lively, fragrant, russet skinned old
Chaucer was an Easter-Beurre; the buds of a new summer were
swelling when he ripened.

- There is no power I envy so much - said the divinity-student - as
that of seeing analogies and making comparisons.  I don't
understand how it is that some minds are continually coupling
thoughts or objects that seem not in the least related to each
other, until all at once they are put in a certain light, and you
wonder that you did not always see that they were as like as a pair
of twins.  It appears to me a sort of miraculous gift.

[He is rather a nice young man, and I think has an appreciation of
the higher mental qualities remarkable for one of his years and
training.  I try his head occasionally as housewives try eggs, -
give it an intellectual shake and hold it up to the light, so to
speak, to see if it has life in it, actual or potential, or only
contains lifeless albumen.]

You call it MIRACULOUS, - I replied, - tossing the expression with
my facial eminence, a little smartly, I fear. - Two men are walking
by the polyphloesboean ocean, one of them having a small tin cup
with which he can scoop up a gill of sea-water when he will, and
the other nothing but his hands, which will hardly hold water at
all, - and you call the tin cup a miraculous possession!  It is the
ocean that is the miracle, my infant apostle!  Nothing is clearer
than that all things are in all things, and that just according to
the intensity and extension of our mental being we shall see the
many in the one and the one in the many.  Did Sir Isaac think what
he was saying when he made HIS speech about the ocean, - the child
and the pebbles, you know?  Did he mean to speak slightingly of a
pebble?  Of a spherical solid which stood sentinel over its
compartment of space before the stone that became the pyramids had
grown solid, and has watched it until now!  A body which knows all
the currents of force that traverse the globe; which holds by
invisible threads to the ring of Saturn and the belt of Orion!  A
body from the contemplation of which an archangel could infer the
entire inorganic universe as the simplest of corollaries!  A throne
of the all-pervading Deity, who has guided its every atom since the
rosary of heaven was strung with beaded stars!

So, - to return to OUR walk by the ocean, - if all that poetry has
dreamed, all that insanity has raved, all that maddening narcotics
have driven through the brains of men, or smothered passion nursed
in the fancies of women, - if the dreams of colleges and convents
and boarding-schools, - if every human feeling that sighs, or
smiles, or curses, or shrieks, or groans, should bring all their
innumerable images, such as come with every hurried heart-beat, -
the epic which held them all, though its letters filled the zodiac,
would be but a cupful from the infinite ocean of similitudes and
analogies that rolls through the universe.

[The divinity-student honored himself by the way in which he
received this.  He did not swallow it at once, neither did he
reject it; but he took it as a pickerel takes the bait, and carried
it off with him to his hole (in the fourth story) to deal with at
his leisure.]

- Here is another remark made for his especial benefit. - There is
a natural tendency in many persons to run their adjectives together
in TRIADS, as I have heard them called, - thus:  He was honorable,
courteous, and brave; she was graceful, pleasing, and virtuous.
Dr. Johnson is famous for this; I think it was Bulwer who said you
could separate a paper in the "Rambler" into three distinct essays.
Many of our writers show the same tendency, - my friend, the
Professor, especially.  Some think it is in humble imitation of
Johnson, - some that it is for the sake of the stately sound only.
I don't think they get to the bottom of it.  It is, I suspect, an
instinctive and involuntary effort of the mind to present a thought
or image with the THREE DIMENSIONS that belong to every solid, - an
unconscious handling of an idea as if it had length, breadth, and
thickness.  It is a great deal easier to say this than to prove it,
and a great deal easier to dispute it than to disprove it.  But
mind this:  the more we observe and study, the wider we find the
range of the automatic and instinctive principles in body, mind,
and morals, and the narrower the limits of the self-determining
conscious movement.

- I have often seen piano-forte players and singers make such
strange motions over their instruments or song-books that I wanted
to laugh at them.  "Where did our friends pick up all these fine
ecstatic airs?" I would say to myself.  Then I would remember My
Lady in "Marriage a la Mode," and amuse myself with thinking how
affectation was the same thing in Hogarth's time and in our own.
But one day I bought me a Canary-bird and hung him up in a cage at
my window.  By-and-by he found himself at home, and began to pipe
his little tunes; and there he was, sure enough, swimming and
waving about, with all the droopings and liftings and languishing
side-turnings of the head that I had laughed at.  And now I should
like to ask, WHO taught him all this? - and me, through him, that
the foolish head was not the one swinging itself from side to side
and bowing and nodding over the music, but that other which was
passing its shallow and self-satisfied judgment on a creature made
of finer clay than the frame which carried that same head upon its
shoulders?

- Do you want an image of the human will, or the self-determining
principle, as compared with its prearranged and impassable
restrictions?  A drop of water, imprisoned in a crystal; you may
see such a one in any mineralogical collection.  One little fluid
particle in the crystalline prism of the solid universe!

- Weaken moral obligations? - No, not weaken, but define them.
When I preach that sermon I spoke of the other day, I shall have to
lay down some principles not fully recognized in some of your text-
books.

I should have to begin with one most formidable preliminary.  You
saw an article the other day in one of the journals, perhaps, in
which some old Doctor or other said quietly that patients were very
apt to be fools and cowards.  But a great many of the clergyman's
patients are not only fools and cowards, but also liars.

[Immense sensation at the table. - Sudden retirement of the angular
female in oxydated bombazine.  Movement of adhesion - as they say
in the Chamber of Deputies - on the part of the young fellow they
call John.  Falling of the old-gentleman-opposite's lower jaw -
(gravitation is beginning to get the better of him.)  Our landlady
to Benjamin Franklin, briskly, - Go to school right off, there's a
good boy!  Schoolmistress curious, - takes a quick glance at
divinity-student.  Divinity-student slightly flushed draws his
shoulders back a little, as if a big falsehood - or truth - had hit
him in the forehead.  Myself calm.]

- I should not make such a speech as that, you know, without having
pretty substantial indorsers to fall back upon, in case my credit
should be disputed.  Will you run up stairs, Benjamin Franklin,
(for B. F. had NOT gone right off, of course,) and bring down a
small volume from the left upper corner of the right-hand shelves?

[Look at the precious little black, ribbed backed, clean-typed,
vellum-papered 32mo.  "DESIDERII ERASMI COLLOQUIA.  Amstelodami.
Typis Ludovici Elzevirii.  1650."  Various names written on title-
page.  Most conspicuous this:  Gul. Cookeson E. Coll. Omn. Anim.
1725.  Oxon.

- O William Cookeson, of All-Souls College, Oxford, - then writing
as I now write, - now in the dust, where I shall lie, - is this
line all that remains to thee of earthly remembrance?  Thy name is
at least once more spoken by living men; - is it a pleasure to
thee?  Thou shalt share with me my little draught of immortality, -
its week, its month, its year, - whatever it may be, - and then we
will go together into the solemn archives of Oblivion's
Uncatalogued Library!]

- If you think I have used rather strong language, I shall have to
read something to you out of the book of this keen and witty
scholar, - the great Erasmus, - who "laid the egg of the
Reformation which Luther hatched."  Oh, you never read his
NAUFRAGIUM, or "Shipwreck," did you?  Of course not; for, if you
had, I don't think you would have given me credit - or discredit -
for entire originality in that speech of mine.  That men are
cowards in the contemplation of futurity he illustrates by the
extraordinary antics of many on board the sinking vessel; that they
are fools, by their praying to the sea, and making promises to bits
of wood from the true cross, and all manner of similar nonsense;
that they are fools, cowards, and liars all at once, by this story:
I will put it into rough English for you. - "I couldn't help
laughing to hear one fellow bawling out, so that he might be sure
to be heard, a promise to Saint Christopher of Paris - the
monstrous statue in the great church there - that he would give him
a wax taper as big as himself.  'Mind what you promise!' said an
acquaintance that stood near him, poking him with his elbow; 'you
couldn't pay for it, if you sold all your things at auction.'
'Hold your tongue, you donkey!' said the fellow, - but softly, so
that Saint Christopher should not hear him, - 'do you think I'm in
earnest?  If I once get my foot on dry ground, catch me giving him
so much as a tallow candle!'"

Now, therefore, remembering that those who have been loudest in
their talk about the great subject of which we were speaking have
not necessarily been wise, brave, and true men, but, on the
contrary, have very often been wanting in one or two or all of the
qualities these words imply, I should expect to find a good many
doctrines current in the schools which I should be obliged to call
foolish, cowardly, and false.

- So you would abuse other people's beliefs, Sir, and yet not tell
us your own creed! - said the divinity-student, coloring up with a
spirit for which I liked him all the better.

- I have a creed, - I replied; - none better, and none shorter.  It
is told in two words, - the two first of the Paternoster.  And when
I say these words I mean them.  And when I compared the human will
to a drop in a crystal, and said I meant to DEFINE moral
obligations, and not weaken them, this was what I intended to
express:  that the fluent, self-determining power of human beings
is a very strictly limited agency in the universe.  The chief
planes of its enclosing solid are, of course, organization,
education, condition.  Organization may reduce the power of the
will to nothing, as in some idiots; and from this zero the scale
mounts upwards by slight gradations.  Education is only second to
nature.  Imagine all the infants born this year in Boston and
Timbuctoo to change places!  Condition does less, but "Give me
neither poverty nor riches" was the prayer of Agur, and with good
reason.  If there is any improvement in modern theology, it is in
getting out of the region of pure abstractions and taking these
every-day working forces into account.  The great theological
question now heaving and throbbing in the minds of Christian men is
this:-

No, I wont talk about these things now.  My remarks might be
repeated, and it would give my friends pain to see with what
personal incivilities I should be visited.  Besides, what business
has a mere boarder to be talking about such things at a breakfast-
table?  Let him make puns.  To be sure, he was brought up among the
Christian fathers, and learned his alphabet out of a quarto
"Concilium Tridentinum."  He has also heard many thousand
theological lectures by men of various denominations; and it is not
at all to the credit of these teachers, if he is not fit by this
time to express an opinion on theological matters.

I know well enough that there are some of you who had a great deal
rather see me stand on my head than use it for any purpose of
thought.  Does not my friend, the Professor, receive at least two
letters a week, requesting him to. . . . , - on the strength of
some youthful antic of his, which, no doubt, authorizes the
intelligent constituency of autograph-hunters to address him as a
harlequin?

- Well, I can't be savage with you for wanting to laugh, and I like
to make you laugh, well enough, when I can.  But then observe this:
if the sense of the ridiculous is one side of an impressible
nature, it is very well; but if that is all there is in a man, he
had better have been an ape at once, and so have stood at the head
of his profession.  Laughter and tears are meant to turn the wheels
of the same machinery of sensibility; one is wind-power, and the
other water-power; that is all.  I have often heard the Professor
talk about hysterics as being Nature's cleverest illustration of
the reciprocal convertibility of the two states of which these acts
are the manifestations; But you may see it every day in children;
and if you want to choke with stifled tears at sight of the
transition, as it shows itself in older years, go and see Mr. Blake
play JESSE RURAL.

It is a very dangerous thing for a literary man to indulge his love
for the ridiculous.  People laugh WITH him just so long as he
amuses them; but if he attempts to be serious, they must still have
their laugh, and so they laugh AT him.  There is in addition,
however, a deeper reason for this than would at first appear.  Do
you know that you feel a little superior to every man who makes you
laugh, whether by making faces or verses?  Are you aware that you
have a pleasant sense of patronizing him, when you condescend so
far as to let him turn somersets, literal or literary, for your
royal delight?  Now if a man can only be allowed to stand on a
dais, or raised platform, and look down on his neighbor who is
exerting his talent for him, oh, it is all right! - first-rate
performance! - and all the rest of the fine phrases.  But if all at
once the performer asks the gentleman to come upon the floor, and,
stepping upon the platform, begins to talk down at him, - ah, that
wasn't in the programme!

I have never forgotten what happened when Sydney Smith - who, as
everybody knows, was an exceedingly sensible man, and a gentleman,
every inch of him - ventured to preach a sermon on the Duties of
Royalty.  The "Quarterly," "so savage and tartarly," came down upon
him in the most contemptuous style, as "a joker of jokes," a
"diner-out of the first water," in one of his own phrases; sneering
at him, insulting him, as nothing but a toady of a court, sneaking
behind the anonymous, would ever have been mean enough to do to a
man of his position and genius, or to any decent person even. - If
I were giving advice to a young fellow of talent, with two or three
facets to his mind, I would tell him by all means to keep his wit
in the background until after he had made a reputation by his more
solid qualities.  And so to an actor:  HAMLET first, and BOB LOGIC
afterwards, if you like; but don't think, as they say poor Liston
used to, that people will be ready to allow that you can do
anything great with MACBETH'S dagger after flourishing about with
PAUL PRY'S umbrella.  Do you know, too, that the majority of men
look upon all who challenge their attention, - for a while, at
least, - as beggars, and nuisances?  They always try to get off as
cheaply as they can; and the cheapest of all things they can give a
literary man - pardon the forlorn pleasantry! - is the FUNNY-bone.
That is all very well so far as it goes, but satisfies no man, and
makes a good many angry, as I told you on a former occasion.

- Oh, indeed, no! - I am not ashamed to make you laugh,
occasionally.  I think I could read you something I have in my desk
which would probably make you smile.  Perhaps I will read it one of
these days, if you are patient with me when I am sentimental and
reflective; not just now.  The ludicrous has its place in the
universe; it is not a human invention, but one of the Divine ideas,
illustrated in the practical jokes of kittens and monkeys long
before Aristophanes or Shakspeare.  How curious it is that we
always consider solemnity and the absence of all gay surprises and
encounter of wits as essential to the idea of the future life of
those whom we thus deprive of half their faculties and then call
BLESSED!  There are not a few who, even in this life, seem to be
preparing themselves for that smileless eternity to which they look
forward, by banishing all gayety from their hearts and all
joyousness from their countenances.  I meet one such in the street
not unfrequently, a person of intelligence and education, but who
gives me (and all that he passes) such a rayless and chilling look
of recognition, - something as if he were one of Heaven's
assessors, come down to "doom" every acquaintance he met, - that I
have sometimes begun to sneeze on the spot, and gone home with a
violent cold, dating from that instant.  I don't doubt he would cut
his kitten's tail off, if he caught her playing with it.  Please
tell me, who taught her to play with it?

No, no! - give me a chance to talk to you, my fellow-boarders, and
you need not be afraid that I shall have any scruples about
entertaining you, if I can do it, as well as giving you some of my
serious thoughts, and perhaps my sadder fancies.  I know nothing in
English or any other literature more admirable than that sentiment
of Sir Thomas Browne "EVERY MAN TRULY LIVES, SO LONG AS HE ACTS HIS
NATURE, OR SOME WAY MAKES GOOD THE FACULTIES OF HIMSELF."

I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand,
as in what direction we are moving:  To reach the port of heaven,
we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it, -
but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.  There is one
very sad thing in old friendships, to every mind that is really
moving onward.  It is this:  that one cannot help using his early
friends as the seaman uses the log, to mark his progress.  Every
now and then we throw an old schoolmate over the stern with a
string of thought tied to him, and look - I am afraid with a kind
of luxurious and sanctimonious compassion - to see the rate at
which the string reels off, while he lies there bobbing up and
down, poor fellow! and we are dashing along with the white foam and
bright sparkle at our bows; - the ruffled bosom of prosperity and
progress, with a sprig of diamonds stuck in it!  But this is only
the sentimental side of the matter; for grow we must, if we outgrow
all that we love.

Don't misunderstand that metaphor of heaving the log, I beg you.
It is merely a smart way of saying that we cannot avoid measuring
our rate of movement by those with whom we have long been in the
habit of comparing ourselves; and when they once become stationary,
we can get our reckoning from them with painful accuracy.  We see
just what we were when they were our peers, and can strike the
balance between that and whatever we may feel ourselves to be now.
No doubt we may sometimes be mistaken.  If we change our last
simile to that very old and familiar one of a fleet leaving the
harbor and sailing in company for some distant region, we can get
what we want out of it.  There is one of our companions; - her
streamers were torn into rags before she had got into the open sea,
then by and by her sails blew out of the ropes one after another,
the waves swept her deck, and as night came on we left her a
seeming wreck, as we flew under our pyramid of canvas.  But lo! at
dawn she is still in sight, - it may be in advance of us.  Some
deep ocean-current has been moving her on, strong, but silent, -
yes, stronger than these noisy winds that puff our sails until they
are swollen as the cheeks of jubilant cherubim.  And when at last
the black steam-tug with the skeleton arms, which comes out of the
mist sooner or later and takes us all in tow, grapples her and goes
off panting and groaning with her, it is to that harbor where all
wrecks are refitted, and where, alas! we, towering in our pride,
may never come.

So you will not think I mean to speak lightly of old friendships,
because we cannot help instituting comparisons between our present
and former selves by the aid of those who were what we were, but
are not what we are.  Nothing strikes one more, in the race of
life, than to see how many give out in the first half of the
course.  "Commencement day" always reminds me of the start for the
"Derby," when the beautiful high-bred three-year olds of the season
are brought up for trial.  That day is the start, and life is the
race.  Here we are at Cambridge, and a class is just "graduating."
Poor Harry! he was to have been there too, but he has paid forfeit;
step out here into the grass back of the church; ah! there it is:-


"HUNC LAPIDEM POSUERUNT
SOCII MOERENTES."


But this is the start, and here they are, - coats bright as silk,
and manes as smooth as EAU LUSTRALE can make them.  Some of the
best of the colts are pranced round, a few minutes each, to show
their paces.  What is that old gentleman crying about? and the old
lady by him, and the three girls, what are they all covering their
eyes for?  Oh, that is THEIR colt which has just been trotted up on
the stage.  Do they really think those little thin legs can do
anything in such a slashing sweepstakes as is coming off in these
next forty years?  Oh, this terrible gift of second-sight that
comes to some of us when we begin to look through the silvered
rings of the ARCUS SENILIS!

TEN YEARS GONE.  First turn in the race.  A few broken down; two or
three bolted.  Several show in advance of the ruck.  CASSOCK, a
black colt, seems to be ahead of the rest; those black colts
commonly get the start, I have noticed, of the others, in the first
quarter.  METEOR has pulled up.

TWENTY YEARS.  Second corner turned.  CASSOCK has dropped from the
front, and JUDEX, an iron-gray, has the lead.  But look! how they
have thinned out!  Down flat, - five, - six, - how many?  They lie
still enough! they will not get up again in this race, be very
sure!  And the rest of them, what a "tailing off"!  Anybody can see
who is going to win, - perhaps.

THIRTY YEARS.  Third corner turned.  DIVES, bright sorrel, ridden
by the fellow in a yellow jacket, begins to make play fast; is
getting to be the favourite with many.  But who is that other one
that has been lengthening his stride from the first, and now shows
close up to the front?  Don't you remember the quiet brown colt
ASTEROID, with the star in his forehead?  That is he; he is one of
the sort that lasts; look out for him!  The black "colt," as we
used to call him, is in the background, taking it easily in a
gentle trot.  There is one they used to call THE FILLY, on account
of a certain feminine air he had; well up, you see; the Filly is
not to be despised my boy!

FORTY YEARS.  More dropping off, - but places much as before.

FIFTY YEARS.  Race over.  All that are on the course are coming in
at a walk; no more running.  Who is ahead?  Ahead?  What! and the
winning-post a slab of white or gray stone standing out from that
turf where there is no more jockeying or straining for victory!
Well, the world marks their places in its betting-book; but be sure
that these matter very little, if they have run as well as they
knew how!

- Did I not say to you a little while ago that the universe swam in
an ocean of similitudes and analogies?  I will not quote Cowley, or
Burns, or Wordsworth, just now, to show you what thoughts were
suggested to them by the simplest natural objects, such as a flower
or a leaf; but I will read you a few lines, if you do not object,
suggested by looking at a section of one of those chambered shells
to which is given the name of Pearly Nautilus.  We need not trouble
ourselves about the distinction between this and the Paper
Nautilus, the ARGONAUTA of the ancients.  The name applied to both
shows that each has long been compared to a ship, as you may see
more fully in Webster's Dictionary, or the "Encyclopedia," to which
he refers.  If you will look into Roget's Bridgewater Treatise, you
will find a figure of one of these shells, and a section of it.
The last will show you the series of enlarging compartments
successively dwelt in by the animal that inhabits the shell, which
is built in a widening spiral.  Can you find no lesson in this?


THE CHAMBERED NAUTILUS.

This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign,
Sails the unshadowed main, -
The venturous bark that flings
On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings
In gulfs enchanted, where the siren sings,
And coral reefs lie bare,
Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair

Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl;
Wrecked is the ship of pearl!
And every clambered cell,
Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,
As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,
Before thee lies revealed, -
Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed!

Year after year beheld the silent toil
That spread his lustrous coil;
Still, as the spiral grew,
He left the past year's dwelling for the new,
Stole with soft step its shining archway through,
Built up its idle door,
Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more.

Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee,
Child of the wandering sea,
Cast from her lap forlorn!
From thy dead lips a clearer note is born
Than ever Triton blew from wreathed horn!
While on mine ear it rings,
Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings:-

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!



CHAPTER V.



A LYRIC conception - my friend, the Poet, said - hits me like a
bullet in the forehead.  I have often had the blood drop from my
cheeks when it struck, and felt that I turned as white as death.
Then comes a creeping as of centipedes running down the spine, -
then a gasp and a great jump of the heart, - then a sudden flush
and a beating in the vessels of the head, - then a long sigh, - and
the poem is written.

It is an impromptu, I suppose, then, if you write it so suddenly, -
I replied.

No, - said he, - far from it.  I said written, but I did not say
COPIED.  Every such poem has a soul and a body, and it is the body
of it, or the copy, that men read and publishers pay for.  The soul
of it is born in an instant in the poet's soul.  It comes to him a
thought, tangled in the meshes of a few sweet words, - words that
have loved each other from the cradle of the language, but have
never been wedded until now.  Whether it will ever fully embody
itself in a bridal train of a dozen stanzas or not is uncertain;
but it exists potentially from the instant that the poet turns pale
with it.  It is enough to stun and scare anybody, to have a hot
thought come crashing into his brain, and ploughing up those
parallel ruts where the wagon trains of common ideas were jogging
along in their regular sequences of association.  No wonder the
ancients made the poetical impulse wholly external.  [Greek text
which cannot be reproduced]  Goddess, - Muse, - divine afflatus, -
something outside always.  I never wrote any verses worth reading.
I can't.  I am too stupid.  If I ever copied any that were worth
reading, I was only a medium.

[I was talking all this time to our boarders, you understand, -
telling them what this poet told me.  The company listened rather
attentively, I thought, considering the literary character of the
remarks.]

The old gentleman opposite all at once asked me if I ever read
anything better than Pope's "Essay on Man"?  Had I ever perused
McFingal?  He was fond of poetry when he was a boy, - his mother
taught him to say many little pieces, - he remembered one beautiful
hymn; - and the old gentleman began, in a clear, loud voice, for
his years, -


"The spacious firmament on high,
With all the blue ethereal sky,
And spangled heavens," -


He stopped, as if startled by our silence, and a faint flush ran up
beneath the thin white hairs that fell upon his cheek.  As I looked
round, I was reminded of a show I once saw at the Museum, - the
Sleeping Beauty, I think they called it.  The old man's sudden
breaking out in this way turned every face towards him, and each
kept his posture as if changed to stone.  Our Celtic Bridget, or
Biddy, is not a foolish fat scullion to burst out crying for a
sentiment.  She is of the serviceable, red-handed, broad-and-high-
shouldered type; one of those imported female servants who are
known in public by their amorphous style of person, their stoop
forwards, and a headlong and as it were precipitous walk, - the
waist plunging downwards into the rocking pelvis at every heavy
footfall.  Bridget, constituted for action, not for emotion, was
about to deposit a plate heaped with something upon the table, when
I saw the coarse arm stretched by my shoulder arrested, -
motionless as the arm of a terra-cotta caryatid; she couldn't set
the plate down while the old gentleman was speaking!

He was quite silent after this, still wearing the slight flush on
his cheek.  Don't ever think the poetry is dead in an old man
because his forehead is wrinkled, or that his manhood has left him
when his hand trembles!  If they ever WERE there, they ARE there
still!

By and by we got talking again. - Does a poet love the verses
written through him, do you think, Sir? - said the divinity-
student.

So long as they are warm from his mind, carry any of his animal
heat about them, I KNOW he loves them, - I answered.  When they
have had time to cool, he is more indifferent.

A good deal as it is with buckwheat cakes, - said the young fellow
whom they call John.

The last words, only, reached the ear of the economically organized
female in black bombazine . - Buckwheat is skerce and high, - she
remarked.  [Must be a poor relation sponging on our landlady, -
pays nothing, - so she must stand by the guns and be ready to repel
boarders.]

I liked the turn the conversation had taken, for I had some things
I wanted to say, and so, after waiting a minute, I began again. - I
don't think the poems I read you sometimes can be fairly
appreciated, given to you as they are in the green state.

- You don't know what I mean by the GREEN STATE?  Well, then, I
will tell you.  Certain things are good for nothing until they have
been kept a long while; and some are good for nothing until they
have been long kept and USED.  Of the first, wine is the
illustrious and immortal example.  Of those which must be kept and
used I will name three, - meerschaum pipes, violins, and poems.
The meerschaum is but a poor affair until it has burned a thousand
offerings to the cloud-compelling deities.  It comes to us without
complexion or flavor, - born of the sea-foam, like Aphrodite, but
colorless as PALLIDA MORS herself.  The fire is lighted in its
central shrine, and gradually the juices which the broad leaves of
the Great Vegetable had sucked up from an acre and curdled into a
drachm are diffused through its thirsting pores.  First a
discoloration, then a stain, and at last a rich, glowing, umber
tint spreading over the whole surface.  Nature true to her old
brown autumnal hue, you see, - as true in the fire of the
meerschaum as in the sunshine of October!  And then the cumulative
wealth of its fragrant reminiscences! he who inhales its vapors
takes a thousand whiffs in a single breath; and one cannot touch it
without awakening the old joys that hang around it as the smell of
flowers clings to the dresses of the daughters of the house of
Farina!

[Don't think I use a meerschaum myself, for I DO NOT, though I have
owned a calumet since my childhood, which from a naked Pict (of the
Mohawk species) my grandsire won, together with a tomahawk and
beaded knife-sheath; paying for the lot with a bullet-mark on his
right check.  On the maternal side I inherit the loveliest silver-
mounted tobacco-stopper you ever saw.  It is a little box-wood
Triton, carved with charming liveliness and truth; I have often
compared it to a figure in Raphael's "Triumph of Galatea."  It came
to me in an ancient shagreen case, - how old it is I do not know, -
but it must have been made since Sir Walter Raleigh's time.  If you
are curious, you shall see it any day.  Neither will I pretend that
I am so unused to the more perishable smoking contrivance that a
few whiffs would make me feel as if I lay in a ground-swell on the
Bay of Biscay.  I am not unacquainted with that fusiform, spiral-
wound bundle of chopped stems and miscellaneous incombustibles, the
CIGAR, so called, of the shops, - which to "draw" asks the suction-
power of a nursling infant Hercules, and to relish, the leathery
palate of an old Silenus.  I do not advise you, young man, even if
my illustration strike your fancy, to consecrate the flower of your
life to painting the bowl of a pipe, for, let me assure you, the
stain of a reverie-breeding narcotic may strike deeper than you
think for.  I have seen the green leaf of early promise grow brown
before its time under such Nicotian regimen, and thought the
umbered meerschaum was dearly bought at the cost of a brain
enfeebled and a will enslaved.]

Violins, too, - the sweet old Amati! - the divine Stradivarius!
Played on by ancient MAESTROS until the bow-hand lost its power and
the flying fingers stiffened.  Bequeathed to the passionate, young
enthusiast, who made it whisper his hidden love, and cry his
inarticulate longings, and scream his untold agonies, and wail his
monotonous despair.  Passed from his dying hand to the cold
VIRTUOSO, who let it slumber in its case for a generation, till,
when his hoard was broken up, it came forth once more and rode the
stormy symphonies of royal orchestras, beneath the rushing bow of
their lord and leader.  Into lonely prisons with improvident
artists; into convents from which arose, day and night, the holy
hymns with which its tones were blended; and back again to orgies
in which it learned to howl and laugh as if a legion of devils were
shut up in it; then again to the gentle DILETTANTE who calmed it
down with easy melodies until it answered him softly as in the days
of the old MAESTROS.  And so given into our hands, its pores all
full of music; stained, like the meerschaum, through and through,
with the concentrated hue and sweetness of all the harmonies which
have kindled and faded on its strings.

Now I tell you a poem must be kept AND USED, like a meerschaum, or
a violin.  A poem is just as porous as the meerschaum; - the more
porous it is, the better.  I mean to say that a genuine poem is
capable of absorbing an indefinite amount of the essence of our own
humanity, - its tenderness, its heroism, its regrets, its
aspirations, so as to be gradually stained through with a divine
secondary color derived from ourselves.  So you see it must take
time to bring the sentiment of a poem into harmony with our nature,
by staining ourselves through every thought and image our being can
penetrate.

Then again as to the mere music of a new poem; why, who can expect
anything more from that than from the music of a violin fresh from
the maker's hands?  Now you know very well that there are no less
than fifty-eight different pieces in a violin.  These pieces are
strangers to each other, and it takes a century, more or less, to
make them thoroughly acquainted.  At last they learn to vibrate in
harmony, and the instrument becomes an organic whole, as if it were
a great seed-capsule which had grown from a garden-bed in Cremona,
or elsewhere.  Besides, the wood is juicy and full of sap for fifty
years or so, but at the end of fifty or a hundred more gets
tolerably dry and comparatively resonant.

Don't you see that all this is just as true of a poem?  Counting
each word as a piece, there are more pieces in an average copy of
verses than in a violin.  The poet has forced all these words
together, and fastened them, and they don't understand it at first.
But let the poem be repeated aloud and murmured over in the mind's
muffled whisper often enough, and at length the parts become knit
together in such absolute solidarity that you could not change a
syllable without the whole world's crying out against you for
meddling with the harmonious fabric.  Observe, too, how the drying
process takes place in the stuff of a poem just as in that of a
violin.  Here is a Tyrolese fiddle that is just coming to its
hundredth birthday, - (Pedro Klauss, Tyroli, fecit, 1760,) - the
sap is pretty well out of it.  And here is the song of an old poet
whom Neaera cheated. -


"Nox erat, et coelo fulgebat Luna sereno
Inter minora sidera,
Cum tu magnorum numen laesura deorum
In verba jurabas mea."


Don't you perceive the sonorousness of these old dead Latin
phrases?  Now I tell you that, every word fresh from the dictionary
brings with it a certain succulence; and though I cannot expect the
sheets of the "Pactolian," in which, as I told you, I sometimes
print my verses, to get so dry as the crisp papyrus that held those
words of Horatius Flaccus, yet you may be sure, that, while the
sheets are damp, and while the lines hold their sap, you can't
fairly judge of my performances, and that, if made of the true
stuff, they will ring better after a while.

[There was silence for a brief space, after my somewhat elaborate
exposition of these self-evident analogies.  Presently A PERSON
turned towards me - I do not choose to designate the individual -
and said that he rather expected my pieces had given pretty good
"sahtisfahction." - I had, up to this moment, considered this
complimentary phrase as sacred to the use of secretaries of
lyceums, and, as it has been usually accompanied by a small
pecuniary testimonial, have acquired a certain relish for this
moderately tepid and unstimulating expression of enthusiasm.  But
as a reward for gratuitous services, I confess I thought it a
little below that blood-heat standard which a man's breath ought to
have, whether silent, or vocal and articulate.  I waited for a
favorable opportunity, however, before making the remarks which
follow.]

- There are single expressions, as I have told you already, that
fix a man's position for you before you have done shaking hands
with him.  Allow me to expand a little.  There are several things,
very slight in themselves, yet implying other things not so
unimportant.  Thus, your French servant has DEVALISE your premises
and got caught.  EXCUSEZ, says the SERGENT-DE-VILLE, as he politely
relieves him of his upper garments and displays his bust in the
full daylight.  Good shoulders enough, - a little marked, - traces
of smallpox, perhaps, - but white. . . . . CRAC! from the SERGENT-
DE-VILLE'S broad palm on the white shoulder!  Now look!  VOGUE LA
GALERE!  Out comes the big red V - mark of the hot iron; - he had
blistered it out pretty nearly, - hadn't he? - the old rascal
VOLEUR, branded in the galleys at Marseilles!  [Don't!  What if he
has got something like this? - nobody supposes I INVENTED such a
story.]

My man John, who used to drive two of those six equine females
which I told you I had owned, - for, look you, my friends, simple
though I stand here, I am one that has been driven in his
"kerridge," - not using that term, as liberal shepherds do, for any
battered old shabby-genteel go-cart which has more than one wheel,
but meaning thereby a four-wheeled vehicle WITH A POLE, - my man
John, I say, was a retired soldier.  He retired unostentatiously,
as many of Her Majesty's modest servants have done before and
since.  John told me, that when an officer thinks he recognizes one
of these retiring heroes, and would know if he has really been in
the service, that he may restore him, if possible, to a grateful
country, he comes suddenly upon him, and says, sharply, "Strap!"
If he has ever worn the shoulder-strap, he has learned the
reprimand for its ill adjustment.  The old word of command flashes
through his muscles, and his hand goes up in an instant to the
place where the strap used to be.

[I was all the time preparing for my grand COUP, you understand;
but I saw they were not quite ready for it, and so continued, -
always in illustration of the general principle I had laid down.]

Yes, odd things come out in ways that nobody thinks of.  There was
a legend, that, when the Danish pirates made descents upon the
English coast, they caught a few Tartars occasionally, in the shape
of Saxons, who would not let them go, - on the contrary, insisted
on their staying, and, to make sure of it, treated them as Apollo
treated Marsyas, or an Bartholinus has treated a fellow-creature in
his title-page, and, having divested them of the one essential and
perfectly fitting garment, indispensable in the mildest climates,
nailed the same on the church-door as we do the banns of marriage,
IN TERROREM.

[There was a laugh at this among some of the young folks; but as I
looked at our landlady, I saw that "the water stood in her eyes,"
as it did in Christiana's when the interpreter asked her about the
spider, and I fancied, but wasn't quite sure that the
schoolmistress blushed, as Mercy did in the same conversation, as
you remember.]

That sounds like a cock-and-bull-story, - said the young fellow
whom they call John.  I abstained from making Hamlet's remark to
Horatio, and continued.

Not long since, the church-wardens were repairing and beautifying
an old Saxon church in a certain English village, and among other
things thought the doors should be attended to.  One of them
particularly, the front-door, looked very badly, crusted, as it
were, and as if it would be all the better for scraping.  There
happened to be a microscopist in the village who had heard the old
pirate story, and he took it into his head to examine the crust on
this door.  There was no mistake about it; it was a genuine
historical document, of the Ziska drum-head pattern, - a real CUTIS
HUMANA, stripped from some old Scandinavian filibuster, and the
legend was true.

My friend, the Professor, settled an important historical and
financial question once by the aid of an exceedingly minute
fragment of a similar document.  Behind the pane of plate-glass
which bore his name and title burned a modest lamp, signifying to
the passers-by that at all hours of the night the slightest favors
(or fevers) were welcome.  A youth who had freely partaken of the
cup which cheers and likewise inebriates, following a moth-like
impulse very natural under the circumstances, dashed his fist at
the light and quenched the meek luminary, - breaking through the
plate-glass, of course, to reach it.  Now I don't want to go into
MINUTIAE at table, you know, but a naked hand can no more go
through a pane of thick glass without leaving some of its cuticle,
to say the least, behind it, than a butterfly can go through a
sausage-machine without looking the worse for it.  The Professor
gathered up the fragments of glass, and with them certain very
minute but entirely satisfactory documents which would have
identified and hanged any rogue in Christendom who had parted with
them. - The historical question, WHO DID IT? and the financial
question, WHO PAID FOR IT? were both settled before the new lamp
was lighted the next evening.

You see, my friends, what immense conclusions, touching our lives,
our fortunes, and our sacred honor, may be reached by means of very
insignificant premises.  This is eminently true of manners and
forms of speech; a movement or a phrase often tells you all you
want to know about a person.  Thus, "How's your health?" (commonly
pronounced HAALTH) - instead of, How do you do? or, How are you?
Or calling your little dark entry a "hall," and your old rickety
one-horse wagon a "kerridge."  Or telling a person who has been
trying to please you that he has given you pretty good
"sahtisfahction."  Or saying that you "remember of" such a thing,
or that you have been "stoppin"' at Deacon Somebody's, - and other
such expressions.  One of my friends had a little marble statuette
of Cupid in the parlor of his country-house, - bow, arrows, wings,
and all complete.  A visitor, indigenous to the region, looking
pensively at the figure, asked the lady of the house "if that was a
statoo of her deceased infant?"  What a delicious, though somewhat
voluminous biography, social, educational, and aesthetic in that
brief question!

[Please observe with what Machiavellian astuteness I smuggled in
the particular offence which it was my object to hold up to my
fellow-boarders, without too personal an attack on the individual
at whose door it lay.]

That was an exceedingly dull person who made the remark, EX PEDE
HERCULEM.  He might as well have said, "From a peck of apples you
may judge of the barrel."  EX PEDE, to be sure!  Read, instead, EX
UNGUE MINIMI DIGITI PEDIS, HERCULEM, EJUSQUE PATREM, MATREM, AVOS
ET PROAVOS, FILIOS, NEPOTES ET PRONEPOTES!  Talk to me about your
[Greek text which cannot be reproduced]!  Tell me about Cuvier's
getting up a megatherium from a tooth, or Agassiz's drawing a
portrait of an undiscovered fish from a single scale!  As the "O"
revealed Giotto, - as the one word "moi" betrayed the Stratford
atte-Bowe-taught Anglais, - so all a man's antecedents and
possibilities are summed up in a single utterance which gives at
once the gauge of his education and his mental organization.

Possibilities, Sir? - said the divinity-student; can't a man who
says HAOW? arrive at distinction?

Sir, - I replied, - in a republic all things are possible.  But the
man WITH A FUTURE has almost of necessity sense enough to see that
any odious trick of speech or manners must be got rid of.  Doesn't
Sydney Smith say that a public man in England never gets over a
false quantity uttered in early life?  OUR public men are in little
danger of this fatal misstep, as few of them are in the habit of
introducing Latin into their speeches, - for good and sufficient
reasons.  But they are bound to speak decent English, - unless,
indeed, they are rough old campaigners, like General Jackson or
General Taylor; in which case, a few scars on Priscian's head are
pardoned to old fellows who have quite as many on their own, and a
constituency of thirty empires is not at all particular, provided
they do not swear in their Presidential Messages.

However, it is not for me to talk.  I have made mistakes enough in
conversation and print.  I never find them out until they are
stereotyped, and then I think they rarely escape me.  I have no
doubt I shall make half a dozen slips before this breakfast is
over, and remember them all before another.  How one does tremble
with rage at his own intense momentary stupidity about things he
knows perfectly well, and to think how he lays himself open to the
impertinences of the CAPTATORES VERBORUM, those useful but humble
scavengers of the language, whose business it is to pick up what
might offend or injure, and remove it, hugging and feeding on it as
they go!  I don't want to speak too slightingly of these verbal
critics; - how can I, who am so fond of talking about errors and
vulgarisms of speech?  Only there is a difference between those
clerical blunders which almost every man commits, knowing better,
and that habitual grossness or meanness of speech which is
unendurable to educated persons, from anybody that wears silk or
broadcloth.

[I write down the above remarks this morning, January 26th, making
this record of the date that nobody may think it was written in
wrath, on account of any particular grievance suffered from the
invasion of any individual SCARABAEUS GRAMMATICUS.]

- I wonder if anybody ever finds fault with anything I say at this
table when it is repeated?  I hope they do, I am sure.  I should be
very certain that I had said nothing of much significance, if they
did not.

Did you never, in walking in the fields, come across a large flat
stone, which had lain, nobody knows how long, just where you found
it, with the grass forming a little hedge, as it were, all round
it, close to its edges, - and have you not, in obedience to a kind
of feeling that told you it had been lying there long enough,
insinuated your stick or your foot or your fingers under its edge
and turned it over as a housewife turns a cake, when she says to
herself, "It's done brown enough by this time"?  What an odd
revelation, and what an unforeseen and unpleasant surprise to a
small community, the very existence of which you had not suspected,
until the sudden dismay and scattering among its members produced
by your turning the old stone over!  Blades of grass flattened
down, colorless, matted together, as if they had been bleached and
ironed; hideous crawling creatures, some of them coleopterous or
horny-shelled, - turtle-bugs one wants to call them; some of them
softer, but cunningly spread out and compressed like Lepine
watches; (Nature never loses a crack or a crevice, mind you, or a
joint in a tavern bedstead, but she always has one of her flat-
pattern five timekeepers to slide into it;) black, glossy crickets,
with their long filaments sticking out like the whips of four-horse
stage-coaches; motionless, slug-like creatures, young larvae,
perhaps more horrible in their pulpy stillness than even in the
infernal wriggle of maturity!  But no sooner is the stone turned
and the wholesome light of day let upon this compressed and blinded
community of creeping things, than all of them which enjoy the
luxury of legs - and some of them have a good many - rush round
wildly, butting each other and everything in their way, and end in
a general stampede for underground retreats from the region
poisoned by sunshine.  NEXT YEAR you will find the grass growing
tall and green where the stone lay; the ground-bird builds her nest
where the beetle had his hole; the dandelion and the buttercup are
growing there, and the broad fans of insect-angels open and shut
over their golden disks, as the rhythmic waves of blissful
consciousness pulsate through their glorified being.

- The young fellow whom they call John saw fit to say, in his very
familiar way, - at which I do not choose to take offence, but which
I sometimes think it necessary to repress, - that I was coming it
rather strong on the butterflies.

No, I replied; there is meaning in each of those images, - the
butterfly as well as the others.  The stone is ancient error.  The
grass is human nature borne down and bleached of all its colour by
it.  The shapes which are found beneath are the crafty beings that
thrive in darkness, and the weaker organisms kept helpless by it.
He who turns the stone over is whosoever puts the staff of truth to
the old lying incubus, no matter whether he do it with a serious
face or a laughing one.  The next year stands for the coming time.
Then shall the nature which had lain blanched and broken rise in
its full stature and native hues in the sunshine.  Then shall God's
minstrels build their nests in the hearts of a new-born humanity.
Then shall beauty - Divinity taking outlines and color - light upon
the souls of men as the butterfly, image of the beatified spirit
rising from the dust, soars from the shell that held a poor grub,
which would never have found wings, had not the stone been lifted.

You never need think you can turn over any old falsehood without a
terrible squirming and scattering of the horrid little population
that dwells under it.

- Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of
somebody or other.  As soon as his breath comes back, he very
probably begins to expend it in hard words.  These are the best
evidence a man can have that he has said something it was time to
say.  Dr. Johnson was disappointed in the effect of one of his
pamphlets.  "I think I have not been attacked enough for it," he
said; - "attack is the reaction; I never think I have hit hard
unless it rebounds."

- If a fellow attacked my opinions in print would I reply?  Not I.
Do you think I don't understand what my friend, the Professor, long
ago called THE HYDROSTATIC PARADOX OF CONTROVERSY?

Don't know what that means? - Well, I will tell you.  You know,
that, if you had a bent tube, one arm of which was of the size of a
pipe-stem, and the other big enough to hold the ocean, water would
stand at the same height in one as in the other.  Controversy
equalizes fools and wise men in the same way, - AND THE FOOLS KNOW
IT.

- No, but I often read what they say about other people.  There are
about a dozen phrases which all come tumbling along together, like
the tongs, and the shovel, and the poker, and the brush, and the
bellows, in one of those domestic avalanches that everybody knows.
If you get one, you get the whole lot.

What are they? - Oh, that depends a good deal on latitude and
longitude.  Epithets follow the isothermal lines pretty accurately.
Grouping them in two families, one finds himself a clever, genial,
witty, wise, brilliant, sparkling, thoughtful, distinguished,
celebrated, illustrious scholar and perfect gentleman, and first
writer of the age; or a dull, foolish, wicked, pert, shallow,
ignorant, insolent, traitorous, black-hearted outcast, and disgrace
to civilization.

What do I think determines the set of phrases a man gets? - Well, I
should say a set of influences something like these:  - 1st.
Relationships, political, religious, social, domestic.  2d.
Oyster, in the form of suppers given to gentlemen connected with
criticism.  I believe in the school, the college, and the clergy;
but my sovereign logic, for regulating public opinion - which means
commonly the opinion of half a dozen of the critical gentry - is
the following MAJOR PROPOSITION.  Oysters AU NATUREL.  MINOR
PROPOSITION.  The same "scalloped."  CONCLUSION.  That - (here
insert entertainer's name) is clever, witty, wise, brilliant, - and
the rest.

- No, it isn't exactly bribery.  One man has oysters, and another
epithets.  It is an exchange of hospitalities; one gives a "spread"
on linen, and the other on paper, - that is all.  Don't you think
you and I should be apt to do just so, if we were in the critical
line?  I am sure I couldn't resist the softening influences of
hospitality.  I don't like to dine out, you know, - I dine so well
at our own table, [our landlady looked radiant,] and the company is
so pleasant [a rustling movement of satisfaction among the
boarders]; but if I did partake of a man's salt, with such
additions as that article of food requires to make it palatable, I
could never abuse him, and if I had to speak of him, I suppose I
should hang my set of jingling epithets round him like a string of
sleigh-bells.  Good feeling helps society to make liars of most of
us, - not absolute liars, but such careless handlers of truth that
its sharp corners get terribly rounded.  I love truth as chiefest
among the virtues; I trust it runs in my blood; but I would never
be a critic, because I know I could not always tell it.  I might
write a criticism of a book that happened to please me; that is
another matter.

- Listen, Benjamin Franklin!  This is for you, and such others of
tender age as you may tell it to.

When we are as yet small children, long before the time when those
two grown ladies offer us the choice of Hercules, there comes up to
us a youthful angel, holding in his right hand cubes like dice, and
in his left spheres like marbles.  The cubes are of stainless
ivory, and on each is written in letters of gold - TRUTH.  The
spheres are veined and streaked and spotted beneath, with a dark
crimson flush above, where the light falls on them, and in a
certain aspect you can make out upon every one of them the three
letters L, I, E.  The child to whom they are offered very probably
clutches at both.  The spheres are the most convenient things in
the world; they roll with the least possible impulse just where the
child would have them.  The cubes will not roll at all; they have a
great talent for standing still, and always keep right side up.
But very soon the young philosopher finds that things which roll so
easily are very apt to roll into the wrong corner, and to get out
of his way when he most wants them, while he always knows where to
find the others, which stay where they are left.  Thus he learns -
thus we learn - to drop the streaked and speckled globes of
falsehood and to hold fast the white angular blocks of truth.  But
then comes Timidity, and after her Good-nature, and last of all
Polite-behavior, all insisting that truth must ROLL, or nobody can
do anything with it; and so the first with her coarse rasp, and the
second with her broad file, and the third with her silken sleeve,
do so round off and smooth and polish the snow-white cubes of
truth, that, when they have got a little dingy by use, it becomes
hard to tell them from the rolling spheres of falsehood.

The schoolmistress was polite enough to say that she was pleased
with this, and that she would read it to her little flock the next
day.  But she should tell the children, she said, that there were
better reasons for truth than could be found in mere experience of
its convenience and the inconvenience of lying.

Yes, - I said, - but education always begins through the senses,
and works up to the idea of absolute right and wrong.  The first
thing the child has to learn about this matter is, that lying is
unprofitable, - afterwards, that it is against the peace and
dignity of the universe.

- Do I think that the particular form of lying often seen in
newspapers, under the title, "From our Foreign Correspondent," does
any harm? - Why, no, - I don't know that it does.  I suppose it
doesn't really deceive people any more than the "Arabian Nights" or
"Gulliver's Travels" do.  Sometimes the writers compile TOO
carelessly, though, and mix up facts out of geographies, and
stories out of the penny papers, so as to mislead those who are
desirous of information.  I cut a piece out of one of the papers,
the other day, which contains a number of improbabilities, and, I
suspect, misstatements.  I will send up and get it for you, if you
would like to hear it. - Ah, this is it; it is headed


"OUR SUMATRA CORRESPONDENCE.

"This island is now the property of the Stamford family, - having
been won, it is said, in a raffle, by Sir - Stamford, during the
stock-gambling mania of the South-Sea Scheme.  The history of this
gentleman may be found in an interesting series of questions
(unfortunately not yet answered) contained in the 'Notes and
Queries.'  This island is entirely surrounded by the ocean, which
here contains a large amount of saline substance, crystallizing in
cubes remarkable for their symmetry, and frequently displays on its
surface, during calm weather, the rainbow tints of the celebrated
South-Sea bubbles.  The summers are oppressively hot, and the
winters very probably cold; but this fact cannot be ascertained
precisely, as, for some peculiar reason, the mercury in these
latitudes never shrinks, as in more northern regions, and thus the
thermometer is rendered useless in winter.

The principal vegetable productions of the island are the pepper
tree and the bread-fruit tree.  Pepper being very abundantly
produced, a benevolent society was organized in London during the
last century for supplying the natives with vinegar and oysters, as
an addition to that delightful condiment.  [Note received from Dr.
D. P.]  It is said, however, that, as the oysters were of the kind
called NATIVES in England, the natives of Sumatra, in obedience to
a natural instinct, refused to touch them, and confined themselves
entirely to the crew of the vessel in which they were brought over.
This information was received from one of the oldest inhabitants, a
native himself, and exceedingly fond of missionaries.  He is said
also to be very skilful in the CUISINE peculiar to the island.

"During the season of gathering the pepper, the persons employed
are subject to various incommodities, the chief of which is violent
and long-continued sternutation, or sneezing.  Such is the
vehemence of these attacks, that the unfortunate subjects of them
are often driven backwards for great distances at immense speed, on
the well-known principle of the aeolipile.  Not being able to see
where they are going, these poor creatures dash themselves to
pieces against the rocks or are precipitated over the cliffs and
thus many valuable lives are lost annually.  As, during the whole
pepper-harvest, they feed exclusively on this stimulant, they
become exceedingly irritable.  The smallest injury is resented with
ungovernable rage.  A young man suffering from the PEPPER-FEVER as
it is called, cudgelled another most severely for appropriating a
superannuated relative of trifling value, and was only pacified by
having a present made him of a pig of that peculiar species of
swine called the PECCAVI by the Catholic Jews, who, it is well
known, abstain from swine's flesh in imitation of the Mahometan
Buddhists.

"The bread-tree grows abundantly.  Its branches are well known to
Europe and America under the familiar name of MACCARONI.  The
smaller twigs are called VERMICELLI.  They have a decided animal
flavor, as may be observed in the soups containing them.
Maccaroni, being tubular, is the favorite habitat of a very
dangerous insect, which is rendered peculiarly ferocious by being
boiled.  The government of the island, therefore, never allows a
stick of it to be exported without being accompanied by a piston
with which its cavity may at any time be thoroughly swept out.
These are commonly lost or stolen before the maccaroni arrives
among us.  It therefore always contains many of these insects,
which, however, generally die of old age in the shops, so that
accidents from this source are comparatively rare.

"The fruit of the bread-tree consists principally of hot rolls.
The buttered-muffin variety is supposed to be a hybrid with the
cocoa-nut palm, the cream found on the milk of the cocoa-nut
exuding from the hybrid in the shape of butter, just as the ripe
fruit is splitting, so as to fit it for the tea-table, where it is
commonly served up with cold" -

- There, - I don't want to read any more of it.  You see that many
of these statements are highly improbable. - No, I shall not
mention the paper. - No, neither of them wrote it, though it
reminds me of the style of these popular writers.  I think the
fellow who wrote it must have been reading some of their stories,
and got them mixed up with his history and geography.  I don't
suppose HE lies; - he sells it to the editor, who knows how many
squares off "Sumatra" is.  The editor, who sells it to the public -
By the way, the papers have been very civil haven't they? - to the
- the what d'ye call it? - "Northern Magazine," - isn't it? - got
up by some of those Come-outers, down East, as an organ for their
local peculiarities.

- The Professor has been to see me.  Came in, glorious, at about
twelve o'clock, last night.  Said he had been with "the boys."  On
inquiry, found that "the boys," were certain baldish and grayish
old gentlemen that one sees or hears of in various important
stations of society.  The Professor is one of the same set, but he
always talks as if he had been out of college about ten years,
whereas. . .  [Each of these dots was a little nod, which the
company understood, as the reader will, no doubt.]  He calls them
sometimes "the boys," and sometimes "the old fellows."  Call him by
the latter title, and see how he likes it. - Well, he came in last
night glorious, as I was saying.  Of course I don't mean vinously
exalted; he drinks little wine on such occasions, and is well known
to all the Peters and Patricks as the gentleman who always has
indefinite quantities of black tea to kill any extra glass of red
claret he may have swallowed.  But the Professor says he always
gets tipsy on old memories at these gatherings.  He was, I forget
how many years old when he went to the meeting; just turned of
twenty now, - he said.  He made various youthful proposals to me,
including a duet under the landlady's daughter's window.  He had
just learned a trick, he said, of one of "the boys," of getting a
splendid bass out of a door-panel by rubbing it with the palm of
his hand.  Offered to sing "The sky is bright," accompanying
himself on the front-door, if I would go down and help in the
chorus.  Said there never was such a set of fellows as the old boys
of the set he has been with.  Judges, mayors, Congress-men, Mr.
Speakers, leaders in science, clergymen better than famous, and
famous too, poets by the half-dozen, singers with voices like
angels, financiers, wits, three of the best laughers in the
Commonwealth, engineers, agriculturists, - all forms of talent and
knowledge he pretended were represented in that meeting.  Then he
began to quote Byron about Santa Croce, and maintained that he
could "furnish out creation" in all its details from that set of
his.  He would like to have the whole boodle of them, (I
remonstrated against this word, but the Professor said it was a
diabolish good word, and he would have no other,) with their wives
and children, shipwrecked on a remote island, just to see how
splendidly they would reorganize society.  They could build a city,
- they have done it; make constitutions and laws; establish
churches and lyceums; teach and practise the healing art; instruct
in every department; found observatories; create commerce and
manufactures; write songs and hymns, and sing 'em, and make
instruments to accompany the songs with; lastly, publish a journal
almost as good as the "Northern Magazine," edited by the Come-
outers.  There was nothing they were not up to, from a christening
to a hanging; the last, to be sure, could never be called for,
unless some stranger got in among them.

- I let the Professor talk as long as he liked; it didn't make much
difference to me whether it was all truth, or partly made up of
pale Sherry and similar elements.  All at once he jumped up and
said, -

Don't you want to hear what I just read to the boys?

I have had questions of a similar character asked me before,
occasionally.  A man of iron mould might perhaps say, No!  I am not
a man of iron mould, and said that I should be delighted.

The Professor then read - with that slightly sing-song cadence
which is observed to be common in poets reading their own verses -
the following stanzas; holding them at a focal distance of about
two feet and a half, with an occasional movement back or forward
for better adjustment, the appearance of which has been likened by
some impertinent young folks to that of the act of playing on the
trombone.  His eyesight was never better; I have his word for it.


MARE RUBRUM.


FLASH out a stream of blood-red wine! -
For I would drink to other days;
And brighter shall their memory shine,
Seen flaming through its crimson blaze.
The roses die, the summers fade;
But every ghost of boyhood's dream
By Nature's magic power is laid
To sleep beneath this blood-red stream.

It filled the purple grapes that lay
And drank the splendors of the sun
Where the long summer's cloudless day
Is mirrored in the broad Garonne;
It pictures still the bacchant shapes
That saw their hoarded sunlight shed, -
The maidens dancing on the grapes, -
Their milk-white ankles splashed with red.

Beneath these waves of crimson lie,
In rosy fetters prisoned fast,
Those flitting shapes that never die,
The swift-winged visions of the past.
Kiss but the crystal's mystic rim,
Each shadow rends its flowery chain,
Springs in a bubble from its brim
And walks the chambers of the brain.

Poor Beauty! time and fortune's wrong
No form nor feature may withstand, -
Thy wrecks are scattered all along,
Like emptied sea-shells on the sand; -
Yet, sprinkled with this blushing rain,
The dust restores each blooming girl,
As if the sea-shells moved again
Their glistening lips of pink and pearl.

Here lies the home of school-boy life,
With creaking stair and wind-swept hall,
And, scarred by many a truant knife,
Our old initials on the wall;
Here rest - their keen vibrations mute -
The shout of voices known so well,
The ringing laugh, the wailing flute,
The chiding of the sharp-tongued bell.

Here, clad in burning robes, are laid
Life's blossomed joys, untimely shed;
And here those cherished forms have strayed
We miss awhile, and call them dead.
What wizard fills the maddening glass
What soil the enchanted clusters grew?
That buried passions wake and pass
In beaded drops of fiery dew?

Nay, take the cup of blood-red wine, -
Our hearts can boast a warmer grow,
Filled from a vantage more divine, -
Calmed, but not chilled by winter's snow!
To-night the palest wave we sip
Rich as the priceless draught shall be
That wet the bride of Cana's lip, -
The wedding wine of Galilee!



CHAPTER VI.



SIN has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.

- I think, Sir, - said the divinity-student, - you must intend that
for one of the sayings of the Seven Wise Men of Boston you were
speaking of the other day.

I thank you, my young friend, - was my reply, - but I must say
something better than that, before I could pretend to fill out the
number.

- The schoolmistress wanted to know how many of these sayings there
were on record, and what, and by whom said.

- Why, let us see, - there is that one of Benjamin Franklin, "the
great Bostonian," after whom this lad was named.  To be sure, he
said a great many wise things, - and I don't feel sure he didn't
borrow this, - he speaks as if it were old.  But then he applied it
so neatly! -

"He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you
another than he whom you yourself have obliged."

Then there is that glorious Epicurean paradox, uttered by my
friend, the Historian, in one of his flashing moments:-

"Give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with its
necessaries."

To these must certainly be added that other saying of one of the
wittiest of men:-

"Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris." -

The divinity-student looked grave at this, but said nothing.

The schoolmistress spoke out, and said she didn't think the wit
meant any irreverence.  It was only another way of saying, Paris is
a heavenly place after New York or Boston.

A jaunty-looking person, who had come in with the young fellow they
call John, - evidently a stranger, - said there was one more wise
man's saying that he had heard; it was about our place, but he
didn't know who said it. - A civil curiosity was manifested by the
company to hear the fourth wise saying.  I heard him distinctly
whispering to the young fellow who brought him to dinner, SHALL I
TELL IT?  To which the answer was, GO AHEAD! - Well, - he said, -
this was what I heard:-

"Boston State-House is the hub of the solar system.  You couldn't
pry that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation
straightened out for a crowbar."

Sir, - said I, - I am gratified with your remark.  It expresses
with pleasing vivacity that which I have sometimes heard uttered
with malignant dulness.  The satire of the remark is essentially
true of Boston, - and of all other considerable - and
inconsiderable - places with which I have had the privilege of
being acquainted.  Cockneys think London is the only place in the
world.  Frenchmen - you remember the line about Paris, the Court,
the World, etc. -  I recollect well, by the way, a sign in that
city which ran thus:  "Hotel l'Univers et des Etats Unis"; and as
Paris IS the universe to a Frenchman, of course the United States
are outside of it. - "See Naples and then die." - It is quite as
bad with smaller places.  I have been about, lecturing, you know,
and have found the following propositions to hold true of all of
them.

1.  The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the centre of
each and every town or city.

2.  If more than fifty years have passed since its foundation, it
is affectionately styled by the inhabitants the "GOOD OLD town of"
- (whatever its name may happen to be.)

3.  Every collection of its inhabitants that comes together to
listen to a stranger is invariably declared to be a "remarkably
intelligent audience."

4.  The climate of the place is particularly favorable to
longevity.

5.  It contains several persons of vast talent little known to the
world.  (One or two of them, you may perhaps chance to remember,
sent short pieces to the "Pactolian" some time since, which were
"respectfully declined.")

Boston is just like other places of its size; - only perhaps,
considering its excellent fish-market, paid fire-department,
superior monthly publications, and correct habit of spelling the
English language, it has some right to look down on the mob of
cities.  I'll tell you, though, if you want to know it, what is the
real offence of Boston.  It drains a large water-shed of its
intellect, and will not itself be drained.  If it would only send
away its first-rate men, instead of its second-rate ones, (no
offence to the well-known exceptions, of which we are always
proud,) we should be spared such epigrammatic remarks as that which
the gentleman has quoted.  There can never be a real metropolis in
this country, until the biggest centre can drain the lesser ones of
their talent and wealth. - I have observed, by the way, that the
people who really live in two great cities are by no means so
jealous of each other, as are those of smaller cities situated
within the intellectual basin, or SUCTION-RANGE, of one large one,
of the pretensions of any other.  Don't you see why?  Because their
promising young author and rising lawyer and large capitalist have
been drained off to the neighboring big city, - their prettiest
girl has been exported to the same market; all their ambition
points there, and all their thin gilding of glory comes from there.
I hate little toad-eating cities.

- Would I be so good as to specify any particular example? - Oh, -
an example?  Did you ever see a bear-trap?  Never?  Well, shouldn't
you like to see me put my foot into one?  With sentiments of the
highest consideration I must beg leave to be excused.

Besides, some of the smaller cities are charming.  If they have an
old church or two, a few stately mansions of former grandees, here
and there an old dwelling with the second story projecting, (for
the convenience of shooting the Indians knocking at the front-door
with their tomahawks,) - if they have, scattered about, those
mighty square houses built something more than half a century ago,
and standing like architectural boulders dropped by the former
diluvium of wealth, whose refluent wave has left them as its
monument, - if they have gardens with elbowed apple-trees that push
their branches over the high board-fence and drop their fruit on
the side-walk, - if they have a little grass in the side-streets,
enough to betoken quiet without proclaiming decay, - I think I
could go to pieces, after my life's work were done, in one of those
tranquil places, as sweetly as in any cradle that an old man may be
rocked to sleep in.  I visit such spots always with infinite
delight.  My friend, the Poet, says, that rapidly growing towns are
most unfavorable to the imaginative and reflective faculties.  Let
a man live in one of these old quiet places, he says, and the wine
of his soul, which is kept thick and turbid by the rattle of busy
streets, settles, and, as you hold it up, you may see the sun
through it by day and the stars by night.

- Do I think that the little villages have the conceit of the great
towns? - I don't believe there is much difference.  You know how
they read Pope's line in the smallest town in our State of
Massachusetts? - Well, they read it


"All are but parts of one stupendous HULL!"


- Every person's feelings have a front-door and a side-door by
which they may be entered.  The front-door is on the street.  Some
keep it always open; some keep it latched; some, locked; some,
bolted, - with a chain that will let you peep in, but not get in;
and some nail it up, so that nothing can pass its threshold.  This
front-door leads into a passage which opens into an ante-room, and
this into the inferior apartments.  The side-door opens at once
into the sacred chambers.

There is almost always at least one key to this side-door.  This is
carried for years hidden in a mother's bosom.  Fathers, brothers,
sisters, and friends, often, but by no means so universally, have
duplicates of it.  The wedding-ring conveys a right to one; alas,
if none is given with it!

If nature or accident has put one of these keys into the hands of a
person who has the torturing instinct, I can only solemnly
pronounce the words that Justice utters over its doomed victim, -
THE LORD HAVE MERCY ON YOUR SOUL!  You will probably go mad within
a reasonable time, - or, if you are a man, run off and die with
your head on a curb-stone, in Melbourne or San Francisco, - or, if
you are a woman, quarrel and break your heart, or turn into a pale,
jointed petrifaction that moves about as if it were alive, or play
some real life-tragedy or other.

Be very careful to whom you trust one of these keys of the side-
door.  The fact of possessing one renders those even who are dear
to you very terrible at times.  You can keep the world out from
your front-door, or receive visitors only when you are ready for
them; but those of your own flesh and blood, or of certain grades
of intimacy, can come in at the side-door, if they will, at any
hour and in any mood.  Some of them have a scale of your whole
nervous system, and can play all the gamut of your sensibilities in
semitones, - touching the naked nerve-pulps as a pianist strikes
the keys of his instrument.  I am satisfied that there are as great
masters of this nerve-playing as Vieuxtemps or Thalberg in their
lines of performance.  Married life is the school in which the most
accomplished artists in this department are found.  A delicate
woman is the best instrument; she has such a magnificent compass of
sensibilities!  From the deep inward moan which follows pressure on
the great nerves of right, to the sharp cry as the filaments of
taste are struck with a crashing sweep, is a range which no other
instrument possesses.  A few exercises on it daily at home fit a
man wonderfully for his habitual labors, and refresh him immensely
as he returns from them.  No stranger can get a great many notes of
torture out of a human soul; it takes one that knows it well, -
parent, child, brother, sister, intimate.  Be very careful to whom
you give a side-door key; too many have them already.

- You remember the old story of the tender-hearted man, who placed
a frozen viper in his bosom, and was stung by it when it became
thawed?  If we take a cold-blooded creature into our bosom, better
that it should sting us and we should die than that its chill
should slowly steal into our hearts; warm it we never can!  I have
seen faces of women that were fair to look upon, yet one could see
that the icicles were forming round these women's hearts.  I knew
what freezing image lay on the white breasts beneath the laces!

A very simple INTELLECTUAL mechanism answers the necessities of
friendship, and even of the most intimate relations of life.  If a
watch tells us the hour and the minute, we can be content to carry
it about with us for a life-time, though it has no second-hand and
is not a repeater, nor a musical watch, - though it is not
enamelled nor jewelled, - in short, though it has little beyond the
wheels required for a trustworthy instrument, added to a good face
and a pair of useful hands.  The more wheels there are in a watch
or a brain, the more trouble they are to take care of.  The
movements of exaltation which belong to genius are egotistic by
their very nature.  A calm, clear mind, not subject to the spasms
and crises which are so often met with in creative or intensely
perceptive natures, is the best basis for love or friendship. -
Observe, I am talking about MINDS.  I won't say, the more
intellect, the less capacity for loving; for that would do wrong to
the understanding and reason; - but, on the other hand, that the
brain often runs away with the heart's best blood, which gives the
world a few pages of wisdom or sentiment or poetry, instead of
making one other heart happy, I have no question.

If one's intimate in love or friendship cannot or does not share
all one's intellectual tastes or pursuits, that is a small matter.
Intellectual companions can be found easily in men and books.
After all, if we think of it, most of the world's loves and
friendships have been between people that could not read nor spell.

But to radiate the heat of the affections into a clod which absorbs
all that is poured into it, but never warms beneath the sunshine of
smiles or the pressure of hand or lip, - this is the great
martyrdom of sensitive beings, - most of all in that perpetual AUTO
DA FE where young womanhood is the sacrifice.

- You noticed, perhaps, what I just said about the loves and
friendships of illiterate persons, - that is, of the human race,
with a few exceptions here and there.  I like books, - I was born
and bred among them, and have the easy feeling, when I get into
their presence, that a stable-boy has among horses.  I don't think
I undervalue them either as companions or as instructors.  But I
can't help remembering that the world's great men have not commonly
been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.  The Hebrew
patriarchs had small libraries, I think, if any; yet they represent
to our imaginations a very complete idea of manhood, and, I think,
if we could ask in Abraham to dine with us men of letters next
Saturday, we should feel honored by his company.

What I wanted to say about books is this:  that there are times in
which every active mind feels itself above any and all human books.

- I think a man must have a good opinion of himself, Sir, - said
the divinity-student, - who should feel himself above Shakspeare at
any time.

My young friend, - I replied, - the man who is never conscious of a
state of feeling or of intellectual effort entirely beyond
expression by any form of words whatsoever is a mere creature of
language.  I can hardly believe there are any such men.  Why, think
for a moment of the power of music.  The nerves that make us alive
to it spread out (so the Professor tells me) in the most sensitive
region of the marrow just where it is widening to run upwards into
the hemispheres.  It has its seat in the region of sense rather
than of thought.  Yet it produces a continuous and, as it were,
logical sequence of emotional and intellectual changes; but how
different from trains of thought proper! how entirely beyond the
reach of symbols! - Think of human passions as compared with all
phrases!  Did you ever hear of a man's growing lean by the reading
of "Romeo and Juliet," or blowing his brains out because Desdemona
was maligned?  There are a good many symbols, even, that are more
expressive than words.  I remember a young wife who had to part
with her husband for a time.  She did not write a mournful poem;
indeed, she was a silent person, and perhaps hardly said a word
about it; but she quietly turned of a deep orange color with
jaundice.  A great many people in this world have but one form of
rhetoric for their profoundest experiences, - namely, to waste away
and die.  When a man can READ, his paroxysm of feeling is passing.
When he can READ, his thought has slackened its hold. - You talk
about reading Shakspeare, using him as an expression for the
highest intellect, and you wonder that any common person should be
so presumptuous as to suppose his thought can rise above the text
which lies before him.  But think a moment.  A child's reading of
Shakspeare is one thing, and Coleridge's or Schlegel's reading of
him is another.  The saturation-point of each mind differs from
that of every other.  But I think it is as true for the small mind
which can only take up a little as for the great one which takes up
much, that the suggested trains of thought and feeling ought always
to rise above - not the author, but the reader's mental version of
the author, whoever he may be.

I think most readers of Shakspeare sometimes find themselves thrown
into exalted mental conditions like those produced by music.  Then
they may drop the book, to pass at once into the region of thought
without words.  We may happen to be very dull folks, you and I, and
probably are, unless there is some particular reason to suppose the
contrary.  But we get glimpses now and then of a sphere of
spiritual possibilities, where we, dull as we are now, may sail in
vast circles round the largest compass of earthly intelligences.

- I confess there are times when I feel like the friend I mentioned
to you some time ago, - I hate the very sight of a book.  Sometimes
it becomes almost a physical necessity to talk out what is in the
mind, before putting anything else into it.  It is very bad to have
thoughts and feelings, which were meant to come out in talk, STRIKE
IN, as they say of some complaints that ought to show outwardly.

I always believed in life rather than in books.  I suppose every
day of earth, with its hundred thousand deaths and something more
of births, - with its loves and hates, its triumphs and defeats,
its pangs and blisses, has more of humanity in it than all the
books that were ever written, put together.  I believe the flowers
growing at this moment send up more fragrance to heaven than was
ever exhaled from all the essences ever distilled.

- Don't I read up various matters to talk about at this table or
elsewhere? - No, that is the last thing I would do.  I will tell
you my rule.  Talk about those subjects you have had long in your
mind, and listen to what others say about subjects you have studied
but recently.  Knowledge and timber shouldn't be much used, till
they are seasoned.

-  Physiologists and metaphysicians have had their attention turned
a good deal of late to the automatic and involuntary actions of the
mind.  Put an idea into your intelligence and leave it there an
hour, a day, a year, without ever having occasion to refer to it.
When, at last, you return to it, you do not find it as it was when
acquired.  It has domiciliated itself, so to speak, - become at
home, - entered into relations with your other thoughts, and
integrated itself with the whole fabric of the mind. - Or take a
simple and familiar example; Dr. Carpenter has adduced it.  You
forget a name, in conversation, - go on talking, without making any
effort to recall it, - and presently the mind evolves it by its own
involuntary and unconscious action, while you were pursuing another
train of thought, and the name rises of itself to your lips.

There are some curious observations I should like to make about the
mental machinery, but I think we are getting rather didactic.

- I should be gratified, if Benjamin Franklin would let me know
something of his progress in the French language.  I rather liked
that exercise he read us the other day, though I must confess I
should hardly dare to translate it, for fear some people in a
remote city where I once lived might think I was drawing their
portraits.

- Yes, Paris is a famous place for societies.  I don't know whether
the piece I mentioned from the French author was intended simply as
Natural History, or whether there was not a little malice in his
description.  At any rate, when I gave my translation to B. F. to
turn back again into French, one reason was that I thought it would
sound a little bald in English, and some people might think it was
meant to have some local bearing or other, - which the author, of
course, didn't mean, inasmuch as he could not be acquainted with
anything on this side of the water.

 [The above remarks were addressed to the school-mistress, to whom
I handed the paper after looking it over.  The divinity-student
came and read over her shoulder, - very curious, apparently, but
his eyes wandered, I thought.  Fancying that her breathing was
somewhat hurried and high, or THORACIC, as my friend, the
Professor, calls it, I watched her a little more closely. - It is
none of my business. - After all, it is the imponderables that move
the world, - heat, electricity, love.  HABET?]

This is the piece that Benjamin Franklin made into boarding-school
French, such as you see here; don't expect too much; - the mistakes
give a relish to it, I think.


LES SOCIETES POLYPHYSIOPHILOSOPHIQUES.

CES Societes la sont une Institution pour suppleer aux besoins
d'esprit et de coeur de ces individus qui ont survecu a leurs
emotions a l'egard du beau sexe, et qui n'ont pas la distraction de
l'habitude de boire.

Pour devenir membre d'une de ces Societes, on doit avoir le moins
de cheveux possible.  S'il y en reste plusieurs qui resistent aux
depilatoires naturelles et autres, on doit avoir quelques
connaissances, n'importe dans quel genre.  Des le moment qu'on
ouvre la porte de la Societe, on a un grand interet dans toutes les
choses dont on ne sait rien.  Ainsi, un microscopiste demontre un
nouveau FLEXOR du TARSE d'un MELOLONTHA VULGARIS.  Douze savans
improvises, portans des besicles, et qui ne connaissent rien des
insectes, si ce n'est les morsures du CULEX, se precipitent sur
l'instrument, et voient - une grande bulle d'air, dont ils
s'emerveillent avec effusion.  Ce qui est un spectacle plein
d'instruction - pour ceux qui ne sont pas de ladite Societe.  Tous
les membres regardent les chimistes en particulier avec un air
d'intelligence parfaite pendant qu'ils prouvent dans un discours
d'une demiheure que O6 N3 H5 C6 etc. font quelque chose qui n'est
bonne a rien, mais qui probablement a une odeur tres desagreable,
selon l'habitude des produits chimiques.  Apres cela vient un
mathematicien qui vous bourre avec des a+b et vous rapporte enfin
un x+y, dont vous n'avex pas besoin et qui ne change nullement vos
relations avec la vie.  Un naturaliste vous parle des formations
speciales des animaux excessivement inconnus, dont vous n'avez
jamais soupconne l'existence.  Ainsi il vous decrit les FOLLICULES
de L'APPENDIX VERMIFORMIS d'un DZIGGUETAI.  Vous ne savez pas ce
que c'est qu'un FOLLICULE.  Vous ne savez pas ce que c'est qu'un
APPENDIX UERMIFORMIS.  Vous n'avez jamais entendu parler du
DZIGGUETAI.  Ainsi vous gagnez toutes ces connaisances a la fois,
qui s'attachent a votre esprit comme l'eau adhere aux plumes d'un
canard.  On connait toutes les langues EX OFFICIO en devenant
membre d'une de ces Societes.  Ainsi quand on entend lire un Essai
sur les dialectes Tchutchiens, on comprend tout cela de suite, et
s'instruit enormement.

Il y a deux especes d'individus qu'on trouve toujours a ces
Societes:  1 (degree) Le membre a questions; 2 (degree) Le membre a
"Bylaws."

La QUESTION est une specialite.  Celui qui en fait metier ne fait
jamais des reponses.  La question est une maniere tres commode de
dire les choses suivantes:  "Me voila!  Je ne suis pas fossil, moi,
- je respire encore!  J'ai des idees, - voyez mon intelligence!
Vous ne croyiez pas, vous autres, que je savais quelque chose de
cela!  Ah, nous avons un peu de sagacite, voyez vous!  Nous ne
sommes nullement la bete qu'on pense!" - LE FAISEUR DE QUESTIONS
DONNE PEU D'ATTENTION AUX REPONSES QU'ON FAIT; CE N'EST PAS LA DANS
SA SPECIALITE.

Le membre a "Bylaws" est le bouchon de toutes les emotions
mousseuses et genereuses qui se montrent dans la Societe.  C'est un
empereur manque, - un tyran a la troiseme trituration.  C'est un
esprit dur, borne, exact, grand dans les petitesses, petit dans les
grandeurs, selon le mot du grand Jefferson.  On ne l'aime pas dans
la Societe, mais on le respecte et on le craint.  Il n'y a qu'un
mot pour ce membre audessus de "Bylaws."  Ce mot est pour lui ce
que l'Om est aux Hundous.  C'est sa religion; il n'y a rien audela.
Ce mot la c'est la CONSTITUTION!

Lesdites Societes publient des feuilletons de tems en tems.  On les
trouve abandonnes a sa porte, nus comme des enfans nouveaunes,
faute de membrane cutanee, ou meme papyracee.  Si on aime la
botanique, on y trouve une memoire sur les coquilles; si on fait
des etudes zoologiques, on square trouve un grand tas de q' [square
root of minus one], ce qui doit etre infiniment plus commode que
les encyclopedies.  Ainsi il est clair comme la metaphysique qu'on
doit devenir membre d'une Societe telle que nous decrivons.

RECETTE POUR LE DEPILATOIRE PHYSIOPHILOSOPHIQUE
Chaux vive lb. ss.  Eau bouillante Oj.
Depilez avec.  Polissez ensuite.


I told the boy that his translation into French was creditable to
him; and some of the company wishing to hear what there was in the
piece that made me smile, I turned it into English for them, as
well as I could, on the spot.

The landlady's daughter seemed to be much amused by the idea that a
depilatory could take the place of literary and scientific
accomplishments; she wanted me to print the piece, so that she
might send a copy of it to her cousin in Mizzourah; she didn't
think he'd have to do anything to the outside of his head to get
into any of the societies; he had to wear a wig once, when he
played a part in a tabullo.

No, - said I, - I shouldn't think of printing that in English.
I'll tell you why.  As soon as you get a few thousand people
together in a town, there is somebody that every sharp thing you
say is sure to hit.  What if a thing was written in Paris or in
Pekin? - that makes no difference.  Everybody in those cities, or
almost everybody, has his counterpart here, and in all large
places. - You never studied AVERAGES as I have had occasion to.

I'll tell you how I came to know so much about averages.  There was
one season when I was lecturing, commonly, five evenings in the
week, through most of the lecturing period.  I soon found, as most
speakers do, that it was pleasanter to work one lecture than to
keep several in hand.

- Don't you get sick to death of one lecture? - said the landlady's
daughter, - who had a new dress on that day, and was in spirits for
conversation.

I was going to talk about averages, - I said, - but I have no
objection to telling you about lectures, to begin with.

A new lecture always has a certain excitement connected with its
delivery.  One thinks well of it, as of most things fresh from his
mind.  After a few deliveries of it, one gets tired and then
disgusted with its repetition.  Go on delivering it, and the
disgust passes off, until, after one has repeated it a hundred or a
hundred and fifty times, he rather enjoys the hundred and first or
hundred and fifty-first time, before a new audience.  But this is
on one condition, - that he never lays the lecture down and lets it
cool.  If he does, there comes on a loathing for it which is
intense, so that the sight of the old battered manuscript is as bad
as sea-sickness.

A new lecture is just like any other new tool.  We use it for a
while with pleasure.  Then it blisters our hands, and we hate to
touch it.  By-and-by our hands get callous, and then we have no
longer any sensitiveness about it.  But if we give it up, the
calluses disappear; and if we meddle with it again, we miss the
novelty and get the blisters. - The story is often quoted of
Whitefield, that he said a sermon was good for nothing until it had
been preached forty times.  A lecture doesn't begin to be old until
it has passed its hundredth delivery; and some, I think, have
doubled, if not quadrupled, that number.  These old lectures are a
man's best, commonly; they improve by age, also, - like the pipes,
fiddles, and poems I told you of the other day.  One learns to make
the most of their strong points and to carry off their weak ones, -
to take out the really good things which don't tell on the
audience, and put in cheaper things that do.  All this degrades
him, of course, but it improves the lecture for general delivery.
A thoroughly popular lecture ought to have nothing in it which five
hundred people cannot all take in a flash, just as it is uttered.

- No, indeed, - I should be very sorry to say anything
disrespectful of audiences.  I have been kindly treated by a great
many, and may occasionally face one hereafter.  But I tell you the
AVERAGE intellect of five hundred persons, taken as they come, is
not very high.  It may be sound and safe, so far as it goes, but it
is not very rapid or profound.  A lecture ought to be something
which all can understand, about something which interests
everybody.  I think, that, if any experienced lecturer gives you a
different account from this, it will probably be one of those
eloquent or forcible speakers who hold an audience by the charm of
their manner, whatever they talk about, - even when they don't talk
very well.

But an AVERAGE, which was what I meant to speak about, is one of
the most extraordinary subjects of observation and study.  It is
awful in its uniformity, in its automatic necessity of action.  Two
communities of ants or bees are exactly alike in all their actions,
so far as we can see.  Two lyceum assemblies, of five hundred each,
are so nearly alike, that they are absolutely undistinguishable in
many cases by any definite mark, and there is nothing but the place
and time by which one can tell the "remarkably intelligent
audience" of a town in New York or Ohio from one in any New England
town of similar size.  Of course, if any principle of selection has
come in, as in those special associations of young men which are
common in cities, it deranges the uniformity of the assemblage.
But let there be no such interfering circumstances, and one knows
pretty well even the look the audience will have, before he goes
in.  Front seats:  a few old folk, - shiny-headed, - slant up best
ear towards the speaker, - drop off asleep after a while, when the
air begins to get a little narcotic with carbonic acid.  Bright
women's faces, young and middle-aged, a little behind these, but
toward the front - (pick out the best, and lecture mainly to that.)
Here and there a countenance, sharp and scholarlike, and a dozen
pretty female ones sprinkled about.  An indefinite number of pairs
of young people, - happy, but not always very attentive.  Boys, in
the background, more or less quiet.  Dull faces here, there, - in
how many places!  I don't say dull PEOPLE, but faces without a ray
of sympathy or a movement of expression.  They are what kill the
lecturer.  These negative faces with their vacuous eyes and stony
lineaments pump and suck the warm soul out of him; - that is the
chief reason why lecturers grow so pale before the season is over.
They render LATENT any amount of vital caloric; they act on our
minds as those cold-blooded creatures I was talking about act on
our hearts.

Out of all these inevitable elements the audience is generated, - a
great compound vertebrate, as much like fifty others you have seen
as any two mammals of the same species are like each other.  Each
audience laughs, and each cries, in just the same places of your
lecture; that is, if you make one laugh or cry, you make all.  Even
those little indescribable movements which a lecturer takes
cognizance of, just as a driver notices his horse's cocking his
ears, are sure to come in exactly the same place of your lecture
always.  I declare to you, that as the monk said about the picture
in the convent, - that he sometimes thought the living tenants were
the shadows, and the painted figures the realities, - I have
sometimes felt as if I were a wandering spirit, and this great
unchanging multivertebrate which I faced night after night was one
ever-listening animal, which writhed along after me wherever I
fled, and coiled at my feet every evening, turning up to me the
same sleepless eyes which I thought I had closed with my last
drowsy incantation!

- Oh, yes!  A thousand kindly and courteous acts, - a thousand
faces that melted individually out of my recollection as the April
snow melts, but only to steal away and find the beds of flowers
whose roots are memory, but which blossom in poetry and dreams.  I
am not ungrateful, nor unconscious of all the good feeling and
intelligence everywhere to be met with through the vast parish to
which the lecturer ministers.  But when I set forth, leading a
string of my mind's daughters to market, as the country-folk fetch
in their strings of horses - Pardon me, that was a coarse fellow
who sneered at the sympathy wasted on an unhappy lecturer, as if,
because he was decently paid for his services, he had therefore
sold his sensibilities. - Family men get dreadfully homesick.  In
the remote and bleak village the heart returns to the red blaze of
the logs in one's fireplace at home.


"There are his young barbarians all at play," -


if he owns any youthful savages. - No, the world has a million
roosts for a man, but only one nest.

- It is a fine thing to be an oracle to which an appeal is always
made in all discussions.  The men of facts wait their turn in grim
silence, with that slight tension about the nostrils which the
consciousness of carrying a "settler" in the form of a fact or a
revolver gives the individual thus armed.  When a person is really
full of information, and does not abuse it to crush conversation,
his part is to that of the real talkers what the instrumental
accompaniment is in a trio or quartette of vocalists.

- What do I mean by the real talkers? - Why, the people with fresh
ideas, of course, and plenty of good warm words to dress them in.
Facts always yield the place of honor, in conversation, to thoughts
about facts; but if a false note is uttered, down comes the finger
on the key and the man of facts asserts his true dignity.  I have
known three of these men of facts, at least, who were always
formidable, - and one of them was tyrannical.

- Yes, a man sometimes makes a grand appearance on a particular
occasion; but these men knew something about almost everything, and
never made mistakes. - He?  VENEERS in first-rate style.  The
mahogany scales off now and then in spots, and then you see the
cheap light stuff - I found - very fine in conversational
information, the other day when we were in company.  The talk ran
upon mountains.  He was wonderfully well acquainted with the
leading facts about the Andes, the Apennines, and the Appalachians;
he had nothing in particular to say about Ararat, Ben Nevis, and
various other mountains that were mentioned.  By and by some
Revolutionary anecdote came up, and he showed singular familiarity
with the lives of the Adamses, and gave many details relating to
Major Andre.  A point of Natural History being suggested, he gave
an excellent account of the air-bladder of fishes.  He was very
full upon the subject of agriculture, but retired from the
conversation when horticulture was introduced in the discussion.
So he seemed well acquainted with the geology of anthracite, but
did not pretend to know anything of other kinds of coal.  There was
something so odd about the extent and limitations of his knowledge,
that I suspected all at once what might be the meaning of it, and
waited till I got an opportunity. - Have you seen the "New American
Cyclopaedia?" said I. - I have, he replied; I received an early
copy. - How far does it go? - He turned red, and answered, - To
Araguay. - Oh, said I to myself, - not quite so far as Ararat; -
that is the reason he knew nothing about it; but he must have read
all the rest straight through, and, if he can remember what is in
this volume until he has read all those that are to come, he will
know more than I ever thought he would.

Since I had this experience, I hear that somebody else has related
a similar story.  I didn't borrow it, for all that. - I made a
comparison at table some time since, which has often been quoted
and received many compliments.  It was that of the mind of a bigot
to the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour on it, the more it
contracts.  The simile is a very obvious, and, I suppose I may now
say, a happy one; for it has just been shown me that it occurs in a
Preface to certain Political Poems of Thomas Moore's published long
before my remark was repeated.  When a person of fair character for
literary honesty uses an image, such as another has employed before
him, the presumption is, that he has struck upon it independently,
or unconsciously recalled it, supposing it his own.

It is impossible to tell, in a great many cases, whether a
comparison which suddenly suggests itself is a new conception or a
recollection.  I told you the other day that I never wrote a line
of verse that seemed to me comparatively good, but it appeared old
at once, and often as if it had been borrowed.  But I confess I
never suspected the above comparison of being old, except from the
fact of its obviousness.  It is proper, however, that I proceed by
a formal instrument to relinquish all claim to any property in an
idea given to the world at about the time when I had just joined
the class in which Master Thomas Moore was then a somewhat advanced
scholar.

I, therefore, in full possession of my native honesty, but knowing
the liability of all men to be elected to public office, and for
that reason feeling uncertain how soon I may be in danger of losing
it, do hereby renounce all claim to being considered the FIRST
person who gave utterance to a certain simile or comparison
referred to in the accompanying documents, and relating to the
pupil of the eye on the one part and the mind of the bigot on the
other.  I hereby relinquish all glory and profit, and especially
all claims to letters from autograph collectors, founded upon my
supposed property in the above comparison, - knowing well, that,
according to the laws of literature, they who speak first hold the
fee of the thing said.  I do also agree that all Editors of
Cyclopedias and Biographical Dictionaries, all Publishers of
Reviews and Papers, and all Critics writing therein, shall be at
liberty to retract or qualify any opinion predicated on the
supposition that I was the sole and undisputed author of the above
comparison.  But, inasmuch as I do affirm that the comparison
aforesaid was uttered by me in the firm belief that it was new and
wholly my own, and as I have good reason to think that I had never
seen or heard it when first expressed by me, and as it is well
known that different persons may independently utter the same idea,
- as is evinced by that familiar line from Donatus, -


"Pereant illi qui ante nos nostra dixerunt," -


now, therefore, I do request by this instrument that all well-
disposed persons will abstain from asserting or implying that I am
open to any accusation whatsoever touching the said comparison,
and, if they have so asserted or implied, that they will have the
manliness forthwith to retract the same assertion or insinuation.


I think few persons have a greater disgust for plagiarism than
myself.  If I had even suspected that the idea in question was
borrowed, I should have disclaimed originality, or mentioned the
coincidence, as I once did in a case where I had happened to hit on
an idea of Swift's. - But what shall I do about these verses I was
going to read you?  I am afraid that half mankind would accuse me
of stealing their thoughts, if I printed them.  I am convinced that
several of you, especially if you are getting a little on in life,
will recognize some of these sentiments as having passed through
your consciousness at some time.  I can't help it, - it is too late
now.  The verses are written, and you must have them.  Listen,
then, and you shall hear


WHAT WE ALL THINK.

THAT age was older once than now,
In spite of locks untimely shed,
Or silvered on the youthful brow;
That babes make love and children wed.

That sunshine had a heavenly glow,
Which faded with those "good old days,"
When winters came with deeper snow,
And autumns with a softer haze.

That - mother, sister, wife, or child -
The "best of women" each has known.
Were schoolboys ever half so wild?
How young the grandpapas have grown,

That BUT FOR THIS our souls were free,
And BUT FOR THAT our lives were blest;
That in some season yet to be
Our cares will leave us time to rest.

Whene'er we groan with ache or pain,
Some common ailment of the race, -
Though doctors think the matter plain, -
That ours is "a peculiar case."

That when like babes with fingers burned
We count one bitter maxim more,
Our lesson all the world has learned,
And men are wiser than before.

That when we sob o'er fancied woes,
The angels hovering overhead
Count every pitying drop that flows
And love us for the tears we shed.

That when we stand with tearless eye
And turn the beggar from our door,
They still approve us when we sigh,
"Ah, had I but ONE THOUSAND MORE!"

That weakness smoothed the path of sin,
In half the slips our youth has known;
And whatsoe'er its blame has been,
That Mercy flowers on faults outgrown.

Though temples crowd the crumbled brink
O'erhanging truth's eternal flow,
Their tablets bold with WHAT WE THINK,
Their echoes dumb to WHAT WE KNOW;

That one unquestioned text we read,
All doubt beyond, all fear above,
Nor crackling pile nor cursing creed
Can burn or blot it:  GOD IS LOVE!



CHAPTER VII.



[THIS particular record is noteworthy principally for containing a
paper by my friend, the Professor, with a poem or two annexed or
intercalated.  I would suggest to young persons that they should
pass over it for the present, and read, instead of it, that story
about the young man who was in love with the young lady, and in
great trouble for something like nine pages, but happily married on
the tenth page or thereabouts, which, I take it for granted, will
be contained in the periodical where this is found, unless it
differ from all other publications of the kind.  Perhaps, if such
young people will lay the number aside, and take it up ten years,
or a little more, from the present time, they may find something in
it for their advantage.  They can't possibly understand it all
now.]

My friend, the Professor, began talking with me one day in a dreary
sort of way.  I couldn't get at the difficulty for a good while,
but at last it turned out that somebody had been calling him an old
man. - He didn't mind his students calling him THE old man, he
said.  That was a technical expression, and he thought that he
remembered hearing it applied to himself when he was about twenty-
five.  It may be considered as a familiar and sometimes endearing
appellation.  An Irishwoman calls her husband "the old man," and he
returns the caressing expression by speaking of her as "the old
woman."  But now, said he, just suppose a case like one of these.
A young stranger is overheard talking of you as a very nice old
gentleman.  A friendly and genial critic speaks of your green old
age as illustrating the truth of some axiom you had uttered with
reference to that period of life.  What I call an old man is a
person with a smooth, shining crown and a fringe of scattered white
hairs, seen in the streets on sunshiny days, stooping as he walks,
bearing a cane, moving cautiously and slowly; telling old stories,
smiling at present follies, living in a narrow world of dry habits;
one that remains waking when others have dropped asleep, and keeps
a little night-lamp-flame of life burning year after year, if the
lamp is not upset, and there is only a careful hand held round it
to prevent the puffs of wind from blowing the flame out.  That's
what I call an old man.

Now, said the Professor, you don't mean to tell me that I have got
to that yet?  Why, bless you, I am several years short of the time
when - [I knew what was coming, and could hardly keep from
laughing; twenty years ago he used to quote it as one of those
absurd speeches men of genius will make, and now he is going to
argue from it] - several years short of the time when Balzac says
that men are - most - you know - dangerous to - the hearts of - in
short, most to be dreaded by duennas that have charge of
susceptible females. - What age is that? said I, statistically. -
Fifty-two years, answered the Professor. - Balzac ought to know,
said I, if it is true that Goethe said of him that each of his
stories must have been dug out of a woman's heart.  But fifty-two
is a high figure.

Stand in the light of the window, Professor, said I.  - The
Professor took up the desired position. - You have white hairs, I
said. - Had 'em any time these twenty years, said the Professor. -
And the crow's-foot, - PES ANSERINUS, rather. - The Professor
smiled, as I wanted him to, and the folds radiated like the ridges
of a half-opened fan, from the outer corner of the eyes to the
temples. - And the calipers said I. - What are the CALIPERS? he
asked, curiously. - Why, the parenthesis, said I. - PARENTHESIS?
said the Professor; what's that? - Why, look in the glass when you
are disposed to laugh, and see if your mouth isn't framed in a
couple of crescent lines, - so, my boy ( ). - It's all nonsense,
said the Professor; just look at my BICEPS; - and he began pulling
off his coat to show me his arm.  Be careful, said I; you can't
bear exposure to the air, at your time of life, as you could once.
- I will box with you, said the Professor, row with you, walk with
you, ride with you, swim with you, or sit at table with you, for
fifty dollars a side. - Pluck survives stamina, I answered.

The Professor went off a little out of humor.  A few weeks
afterwards he came in, looking very good-natured, and brought me a
paper, which I have here, and from which I shall read you some
portions, if you don't object.  He had been thinking the matter
over, he said, - had read Cicero "De Senectute," and made up his
mind to meet old age half way.  These were some of his reflections
that he had written down; so here you have.


THE PROFESSOR'S PAPER.


THERE is no doubt when old age begins.  The human body is a furnace
which keeps in blast three-score years and ten, more or less.  It
burns about three hundred pounds of carbon a year, (besides other
fuel,) when in fair working order, according to a great chemist's
estimate.  When the fire slackens, life declines; when it goes out,
we are dead.

It has been shown by some noted French experimenters, that the
amount of combustion increases up to about the thirtieth year,
remains stationary to about forty-five, and then diminishes.  This
last is the point where old age starts from.  The great fact of
physical life is the perpetual commerce with the elements, and the
fire is the measure of it.

About this time of life, if food is plenty where you live, - for
that, you know, regulates matrimony, - you may be expecting to find
yourself a grandfather some fine morning; a kind of domestic
felicity that gives one a cool shiver of delight to think of, as
among the not remotely possible events.

I don't mind much those slipshod lines Dr. Johnson wrote to Thrale,
telling her about life's declining from THIRTY-FIVE; the furnace is
in full blast for ten years longer, as I have said.  The Romans
came very near the mark; their age of enlistment reached from
seventeen to forty-six years.

What is the use of fighting against the seasons, or the tides, or
the movements of the planetary bodies, or this ebb in the wave of
life that flows through us?  We are old fellows from the moment the
fire begins to go out.  Let us always behave like gentlemen when we
are introduced to new acquaintance.


INCIPIT ALLEGORIA SENECTUTIS.


Old Age, this is Mr. Professor; Mr. Professor, this is Old Age.

OLD AGE. - Mr. Professor, I hope to see you well.  I have known you
for some time, though I think you did not know me.  Shall we walk
down the street together?

PROFESSOR (drawing back a little). - We can talk more quietly,
perhaps, in my study.  Will you tell me how it is you seem to be
acquainted with everybody you are introduced to, though he
evidently considers you an entire stranger?

OLD AGE. - I make it a rule never to force myself upon a person's
recognition until I have known him at least FIVE YEARS.

PROFESSOR. - Do you mean to say that you have known me so long as
that?

OLD AGE.  I do.  I left my card on you longer ago than that, but I
am afraid you never read it; yet I see you have it with you.

PROFESSOR. - Where?

OLD AGE. - There, between your eyebrows, - three straight lines
running up and down; all the probate courts know that token, - "Old
Age, his mark."  Put your forefinger on the inner end of one
eyebrow, and your middle finger on the inner end of the other
eyebrow; now separate the fingers, and you will smooth out my sign-
manual; that's the way you used to look before I left my card on
you.

PROFESSOR. - What message do people generally send back when you
first call on them?

OLD AGE. - Not at home.  Then I leave a card and go.  Next year I
call; get the same answer; leave another card.  So for five or six,
- sometimes ten years or more.  At last, if they don't let me in, I
break in through the front door or the windows.

We talked together in this way some time.  Then Old Age said again,
- Come, let us walk down the street together, - and offered me a
cane, an eyeglass, a tippet, and a pair of over-shoes. - No, much
obliged to you, said I.  I don't want those things, and I had a
little rather talk with you here, privately, in my study.  So I
dressed myself up in a jaunty way and walked out alone; - got a
fall, caught a cold, was laid up with a lumbago, and had time to
think over this whole matter.


EXPLICIT ALLEGORIA SENECTUTIS.


We have settled when old age begins.  Like all Nature's processes,
it is gentle and gradual in its approaches, strewed with illusions,
and all its little griefs soothed by natural sedatives.  But the
iron hand is not less irresistible because it wears the velvet
glove.  The button-wood throws off its bark in large flakes, which
one may find lying at its foot, pushed out, and at last pushed off,
by that tranquil movement from beneath, which is too slow to be
seen, but too powerful to be arrested.  One finds them always, but
one rarely sees them fall.  So it is our youth drops from us, -
scales off, sapless and lifeless, and lays bare the tender and
immature fresh growth of old age.  Looked at collectively, the
changes of old age appear as a series of personal insults and
indignities, terminating at last in death, which Sir Thomas Browne
has called "the very disgrace and ignominy of our nature."


My lady's cheek can boast no more
The cranberry white and pink it wore;
And where her shining locks divide,
The parting line is all too wide -


No, no, - this will never do.  Talk about men, if you will, but
spare the poor women.

We have a brief description of seven stages of life by a remarkably
good observer.  It is very presumptuous to attempt to add to it,
yet I have been struck with the fact that life admits of a natural
analysis into no less than fifteen distinct periods.  Taking the
five primary divisions, infancy, childhood, youth, manhood, old
age, each of these has its own three periods of immaturity,
complete development, and decline.  I recognize on OLD baby at
once, - with its "pipe and mug," (a stick of candy and a
porringer,) - so does everybody; and an old child shedding its
milk-teeth is only a little prototype of the old man shedding his
permanent ones.  Fifty or thereabouts is only the childhood, as it
were, of old age; the graybeard youngster must be weaned from his
late suppers now.  So you will see that you have to make fifteen
stages at any rate, and that it would not be hard to make twenty-
five; five primary, each with five secondary divisions.

The infancy and childhood of commencing old age have the same
ingenuous simplicity and delightful unconsciousness about them as
the first stage of the earlier periods of life shows.  The great
delusion of mankind is in supposing that to be individual and
exceptional which is universal and according to law.  A person is
always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man
for the first time.

Nature gets us out of youth into manhood, as sailors are hurried on
board of vessels, - in a state of intoxication.  We are hustled
into maturity reeling with our passions and imaginations, and we
have drifted far away from port before we awake out of our
illusions.  But to carry us out of maturity into old age, without
our knowing where we are going, she drugs us with strong opiates,
and so we stagger along with wide open eyes that see nothing until
snow enough has fallen on our heads to rouse our comatose brains
out of their stupid trances.

There is one mark of age that strikes me more than any of the
physical ones; - I mean the formation of HABITS.  An old man who
shrinks into himself falls into ways that become as positive and as
much beyond the reach of outside influences as if they were
governed by clock-work.  The ANIMAL functions, as the physiologists
call them, in distinction from the ORGANIC, tend, in the process of
deterioration to which age and neglect united gradually lead them,
to assume the periodical or rhythmical type of movement.  Every
man's HEART (this organ belongs, you know, to the organic system)
has a regular mode of action; but I know a great many men whose
BRAINS, and all their voluntary existence flowing from their
brains, have a SYSTOLE and DIASTOLE as regular as that of the heart
itself.  Habit is the approximation of the animal system to the
organic.  It is a confession of failure in the highest function of
being, which involves a perpetual self-determination, in full view
of all existing circumstances.  But habit, you see, is an action in
present circumstances from past motives.  It is substituting a VIS
A TERGO for the evolution of living force.

When a man, instead of burning up three hundred pounds of carbon a
year, has got down to two hundred and fifty, it is plain enough he
must economize force somewhere.  Now habit is a labor-saving
invention which enables a man to get along with less fuel, - that
is all; for fuel is force, you know, just as much in the page I am
writing for you as in the locomotive or the legs that carry it to
you.  Carbon is the same thing, whether you call it wood, or coal,
or bread and cheese.  A reverend gentleman demurred to this
statement, - as if, because combustion is asserted to be the SINE
QUA NON of thought, therefore thought is alleged to be a purely
chemical process.  Facts of chemistry are one thing, I told him,
and facts of consciousness another.  It can be proved to him, by a
very simple analysis of some of his spare elements, that every
Sunday, when he does his duty faithfully, he uses up more
phosphorus out of his brain and nerves than on ordinary days.  But
then he had his choice whether to do his duty, or to neglect it,
and save his phosphorus and other combustibles.

It follows from all this that THE FORMATION OF HABITS ought
naturally to be, as it is, the special characteristic of age.  As
for the muscular powers, they pass their maximum long before the
time when the true decline of life begins, if we may judge by the
experience of the ring.  A man is "stale," I think, in their
language, soon after thirty, - often, no doubt, much earlier, as
gentlemen of the pugilistic profession are exceedingly apt to keep
their vital fire burning WITH THE BLOWER UP.

- So far without Tully.  But in the mean time I have been reading
the treatise, "De Senectute."  It is not long, but a leisurely
performance.  The old gentleman was sixty-three years of age when
he addressed it to his friend T. Pomponius Atticus, Eq., a person
of distinction, some two or three years older.  We read it when we
are schoolboys, forget all about it for thirty years, and then take
it up again by a natural instinct, - provided always that we read
Latin as we drink water, without stopping to taste it, as all of us
who ever learned it at school or college ought to do.

Cato is the chief speaker in the dialogue.  A good deal of it is
what would be called in vulgar phrase "slow."  It unpacks and
unfolds incidental illustrations which a modern writer would look
at the back of, and toss each to its pigeon-hole.  I think ancient
classics and ancient people are alike in the tendency to this kind
of expansion.

An old doctor came to me once (this is literal fact) with some
contrivance or other for people with broken kneepans.  As the
patient would be confined for a good while, he might find it dull
work to sit with his hands in his lap.  Reading, the ingenious
inventor suggested, would be an agreeable mode of passing the time.
He mentioned, in his written account of his contrivance, various
works that might amuse the weary hour.  I remember only three, -
Don Quixote, Tom Jones, and WATTS ON THE MIND.

It is not generally understood that Cicero's essay was delivered as
a lyceum lecture, (CONCIO POPULARIS,) at the Temple of Mercury.
The journals (PAPYRI) of the day ("Tempora Quotidiana," -
"Tribuinus Quirinalis," - "Praeco Romanus," and the rest) gave
abstracts of it, one of which I have translated and modernized, as
being a substitute for the analysis I intended to make.

IV.  Kal.  Mart. . . . .

The lecture at the Temple of Mercury, last evening, was well
attended by the ELITE of our great city.  Two hundred thousand
sestertia were thought to have been represented in the house.  The
doors were besieged by a mob of shabby fellows, (ILLOTUM VULGUS,)
who were at length quieted after two or three had been somewhat
roughly handled (GLADIO JUGULATI).  The speaker was the well-known
Mark Tully, Eq., - the subject Old Age.  Mr. T. has a lean and
scraggy person, with a very unpleasant excrescence upon his nasal
feature, from which his nickname of CHICK-PEA (Cicero) is said by
some to be derived.  As a lecturer is public property, we may
remark, that his outer garment (TOGA) was of cheap stuff and
somewhat worn, and that his general style and appearance of dress
and manner (HABITUS, VESTITUSQUE) were somewhat provincial.

The lecture consisted of an imaginary dialogue between Cato and
Laelius.  We found the first portion rather heavy, and retired a
few moments for refreshment (POCULA QUAEDAM VINI). - All want to
reach old age, says Cato, and grumble when they get it; therefore
they are donkeys. - The lecturer will allow us to say that he is
the donkey; we know we shall grumble at old age, but we want to
live through youth and manhood, IN SPITE of the troubles we shall
groan over. - There was considerable prosing as to what old age can
do and can't. - True, but not new.  Certainly, old folks can't
jump, - break the necks of their thigh-bones, (FEMORUM CERVICES,)
if they do; can't crack nuts with their teeth; can't climb a
greased pole (MALUM INUNCTUM SCANDERE NON POSSUNT); but they can
tell old stories and give you good advice; if they know what you
have made up your mind to do when you ask them. - All this is well
enough, but won't set the Tiber on fire (TIBERIM ACCENDERE
NEQUAQUAM POTEST.)

There were some clever things enough, (DICTA HAND INEPTA,) a few of
which are worth reporting. - Old people are accused of being
forgetful; but they never forget where they have put their money. -
Nobody is so old he doesn't think he can live a year. - The
lecturer quoted an ancient maxim, - Grow old early, if you would be
old long, - but disputed it. - Authority, he thought, was the chief
privilege of age. - It is not great to have money, but fine to
govern those that have it. - Old age begins at FORTY-SIX years,
according to the common opinion. - It is not every kind of old age
or of wine that grows sour with time. - Some excellent remarks were
made on immortality, but mainly borrowed from and credited to
Plato. - Several pleasing anecdotes were told. - Old Milo, champion
of the heavy weights in his day, looked at his arms and whimpered,
"They are dead."  Not so dead as you, you old fool, - says Cato; -
you never were good for anything but for your shoulders and flanks.
- Pisistratus asked Solon what made him dare to be so obstinate.
Old age, said Solon.

The lecture was on the whole acceptable, and a credit to our
culture and civilization. - The reporter goes on to state that
there will be no lecture next week, on account of the expected
combat between the bear and the barbarian.  Betting (SPONSIO) two
to one (DUO AD UNUM) on the bear.


- After all, the most encouraging things I find in the treatise,
"De Senectute," are the stories of men who have found new
occupations when growing old, or kept up their common pursuits in
the extreme period of life.  Cato learned Greek when he was old,
and speaks of wishing to learn the fiddle, or some such instrument,
(FIDIBUS,) after the example of Socrates.  Solon learned something
new, every day, in his old age, as he gloried to proclaim.  Cyrus
pointed out with pride and pleasure the trees he had planted with
his own hand.  [I remember a pillar on the Duke of Northumberland's
estate at Alnwick, with an inscription in similar words, if not the
same.  That, like other country pleasures, never wears out.  None
is too rich, none too poor, none too young, none too old to enjoy
it.]  There is a New England story I have heard more to the point,
however, than any of Cicero's.  A young farmer was urged to set out
some apple-trees. - No, said he, they are too long growing, and I
don't want to plant for other people.  The young farmer's father
was spoken to about it, but he, with better reason, alleged that
apple-trees were slow and life was fleeting.  At last some one
mentioned it to the old grandfather of the young farmer.  He had
nothing else to do, - so he stuck in some trees.  He lived long
enough to drink barrels of cider made from the apples that grew on
those trees.

As for myself, after visiting a friend lately, - [Do remember all
the time that this is the Professor's paper.] - I satisfied myself
that I had better concede the fact that - my contemporaries are not
so young as they have been, - and that, - awkward as it is, -
science and history agree in telling me that I can claim the
immunities and must own the humiliations of the early stage of
senility.  Ah! but we have all gone down the hill together.  The
dandies of my time have split their waistbands and taken to high-
low shoes.  The beauties of my recollections - where are they?
They have run the gantlet of the years as well as I.  First the
years pelted them with red roses till their cheeks were all on
fire.  By and by they began throwing white roses, and that morning
flush passed away.  At last one of the years threw a snow-ball, and
after that no year let the poor girls pass without throwing snow-
balls.  And then came rougher missiles, - ice and stones; and from
time to time an arrow whistled, and down went one of the poor
girls.  So there are but few left; and we don't call those few
GIRLS, but -

Ah, me!  Here am I groaning just as the old Greek sighed AI, AI!
and the old Roman, EHEU!  I have no doubt we should die of shame
and grief at the indignities offered us by age, if it were not that
we see so many others as badly or worse off than ourselves.  We
always compare ourselves with our contemporaries.

[I was interrupted in my reading just here.  Before I began at the
next breakfast, I read them these verses; - I hope you will like
them, and get a useful lesson from them.]


THE LAST BLOSSOM.


Though young no more, we still would dream
Of beauty's dear deluding wiles;
The leagues of life to graybeards seem
Shorter than boyhood's lingering miles.

Who knows a woman's wild caprice?
It played with Goethe's silvered hair,
And many a Holy Father's "niece"
Has softly smoothed the papal chair.

When sixty bids us sigh in vain
To melt the heart of sweet sixteen,
We think upon those ladies twain
Who loved so well the tough old Dean.

We see the Patriarch's wintry face,
The maid of Egypt's dusky glow,
And dream that Youth and Age embrace,
As April violets fill with snow.

Tranced in her Lord's Olympian smile
His lotus-loving Memphian lies, -
The musky daughter of the Nile
With plaited hair and almond eyes.

Might we but share one wild caress
Ere life's autumnal blossoms fall,
And Earth's brown, clinging lips impress
The long cold kiss that waits us all!

My bosom heaves, remembering yet
The morning of that blissful day
When Rose, the flower of spring, I met,
And gave my raptured soul away.

Flung from her eyes of purest blue,
A lasso, with its leaping chain
Light as a loop of larkspurs, flew
O'er sense and spirit, heart and brain.

Thou com'st to cheer my waning age,
Sweet vision, waited for so long!
Dove that would seek the poet's cage
Lured by the magic breath of song!

She blushes!  Ah, reluctant maid,
Love's DRAPEAU ROUGE the truth has told!
O'er girlhood's yielding barricade
Floats the great Leveller's crimson fold!

Come to my arms! - love heeds not years
No frost the bud of passion knows. -
Ha! what is this my frenzy hears?
A voice behind me uttered, - Rose!

Sweet was her smile, - but not for me;
Alas, when woman looks TOO kind,
Just turn your foolish head and see, -
Some youth is walking close behind!


As to GIVING UP because the almanac or the Family-Bible says that
it is about time to do it, I have no intention of doing any such
thing.  I grant you that I burn less carbon than some years ago.  I
see people of my standing really good for nothing, decrepit,
effete, LA LEVRE INFERIEURE DEJA PENDANTE, with what little life
they have left mainly concentrated in their epigastrium.  But as
the disease of old age is epidemic, endemic, and sporadic, and
everybody that lives long enough is sure to catch it, I am going to
say, for the encouragement of such as need it, how I treat the
malady in my own case.

First.  As I feel, that, when I have anything to do, there is less
time for it than when I was younger, I find that I give my
attention more thoroughly, and use my time more economically than
ever before; so that I can learn anything twice as easily as in my
earlier days.  I am not, therefore, afraid to attack a new study.
I took up a difficult language a very few years ago with good
success, and think of mathematics and metaphysics by-and-by.

Secondly.  I have opened my eyes to a good many neglected
privileges and pleasures within my reach, and requiring only a
little courage to enjoy them.  You may well suppose it pleased me
to find that old Cato was thinking of learning to play the fiddle,
when I had deliberately taken it up in my old age, and satisfied
myself that I could get much comfort, if not much music, out of it.

Thirdly.  I have found that some of those active exercises, which
are commonly thought to belong to young folks only, may be enjoyed
at a much later period.

A young friend has lately written an admirable article in one of
the journals, entitled, "Saints and their Bodies."  Approving of
his general doctrines, and grateful for his records of personal
experience, I cannot refuse to add my own experimental confirmation
of his eulogy of one particular form of active exercise and
amusement, namely, BOATING.  For the past nine years, I have rowed
about, during a good part of the summer, on fresh or salt water.
My present fleet on the river Charles consists of three row-boats.
1. A small flat-bottomed skiff of the shape of a flat-iron, kept
mainly to lend to boys.  2. A fancy "dory" for two pairs of sculls,
in which I sometimes go out with my young folks.  3. My own
particular water-sulky, a "skeleton" or "shell" race-boat, twenty-
two feet long, with huge outriggers, which boat I pull with ten-
foot sculls, - alone, of course, as it holds but one, and tips him
out, if he doesn't mind what he is about.  In this I glide around
the Back Bay, down the stream, up the Charles to Cambridge and
Watertown, up the Mystic, round the wharves, in the wake of
steamboats which leave a swell after them delightful to rock upon;
I linger under the bridges, - those "caterpillar bridges," as my
brother professor so happily called them; rub against the black
sides of old wood-schooners; cool down under the overhanging stern
of some tall Indiaman; stretch across to the Navy-Yard, where the
sentinel warns me off from the Ohio, - just as if I should hurt her
by lying in her shadow; then strike out into the harbor, where the
water gets clear and the air smells of the ocean, - till all at
once I remember, that, if a west wind blows up of a sudden, I shall
drift along past the islands, out of sight of the dear old State-
house, - plate, tumbler, knife and fork all waiting at home, but no
chair drawn up at the table, - all the dear people waiting,
waiting, waiting, while the boat is sliding, sliding, sliding into
the great desert, where there is no tree and no fountain.  As I
don't want my wreck to be washed up on one of the beaches in
company with devil's-aprons, bladder-weeds, dead horse-shoes, and
bleached crab-shells, I turn about and flap my long narrow wings
for home.  When the tide is running out swiftly, I have a splendid
fight to get through the bridges, but always make it a rule to
beat, - though I have been jammed up into pretty tight places at
times, and was caught once between a vessel swinging round and the
pier, until our bones (the boat's, that is) cracked as if we had
been in the jaws of Behemoth.  Then back to my moorings at the foot
of the Common, off with the rowing-dress, dash under the green
translucent wave, return to the garb of civilization, walk through
my Garden, take a look at my elms on the Common, and, reaching my
habitat, in consideration of my advanced period of life, indulge in
the Elysian abandonment of a huge recumbent chair.

When I have established a pair of well-pronounced feathering-
calluses on my thumbs, when I am in training so that I can do my
fifteen miles at a stretch without coming to grief in any way, when
I can perform my mile in eight minutes or a little less, then I
feel as if I had old Time's head in chancery, and could give it to
him at my leisure.

I do not deny the attraction of walking.  I have bored this ancient
city through and through in my daily travels, until I know it as an
old inhabitant of a Cheshire knows his cheese.  Why, it was I who,
in the course of these rambles, discovered that remarkable avenue
called MYRTLE STREET, stretching in one long line from east of the
Reservoir to a precipitous and rudely paved cliff which looks down
on the grim abode of Science, and beyond it to the far hills; a
promenade so delicious in its repose, so cheerfully varied with
glimpses down the northern slope into busy Cambridge Street with
its iron river of the horse-railroad, and wheeled barges gliding
back and forward over it, - so delightfully closing at its western
extremity in sunny courts and passages where I know peace, and
beauty, and virtue, and serene old age must be perpetual tenants, -
so alluring to all who desire to take their daily stroll, in the
words of Dr. Watts, -

"Alike unknowing and unknown," -

that nothing but a sense of duty would have prompted me to reveal
the secret of its existence.  I concede, therefore, that walking is
an immeasurably fine invention, of which old age ought constantly
to avail itself.

Saddle-leather is in some respects even preferable to sole-leather.
The principal objection to it is of a financial character.  But you
may be sure that Bacon and Sydenham did not recommend it for
nothing.  One's HEPAR, or, in vulgar language, liver, - a ponderous
organ, weighing some three or four pounds, - goes up and down like
the dasher of a churn in the midst of the other vital arrangements,
at every step of a trotting horse.  The brains also are shaken up
like coppers in a money-box.  Riding is good, for those that are
born with a silver-mounted bridle in their hand, and can ride as
much and as often as they like, without thinking all the time they
hear that steady grinding sound as the horse's jaws triturate with
calm lateral movement the bank-bills and promises to pay upon which
it is notorious that the profligate animal in question feeds day
and night.

Instead, however, of considering these kinds of exercise in this
empirical way, I will devote a brief space to an examination of
them in a more scientific form.

The pleasure of exercise is due first to a purely physical
impression, and secondly to a sense of power in action.  The first
source of pleasure varies of course with our condition and the
state of the surrounding circumstances; the second with the amount
and kind of power, and the extent and kind of action.  In all forms
of active exercise there are three powers simultaneously in action,
- the will, the muscles, and the intellect.  Each of these
predominates in different kinds of exercise.  In walking, the will
and muscles are so accustomed to work together and perform their
task with so little expenditure of force, that the intellect is
left comparatively free.  The mental pleasure in walking, as such,
is in the sense of power over all our moving machinery.  But in
riding, I have the additional pleasure of governing another will,
and my muscles extend to the tips of the animal's ears and to his
four hoofs, instead of stopping at my hands and feet.  Now in this
extension of my volition and my physical frame into another animal,
my tyrannical instincts and my desire for heroic strength are at
once gratified.  When the horse ceases to have a will of his own
and his muscles require no special attention on your part, then you
may live on horseback as Wesley did, and write sermons or take
naps, as you like.  But you will observe, that, in riding on
horseback, you always have a feeling, that, after all, it is not
you that do the work, but the animal, and this prevents the
satisfaction from being complete.

Now let us look at the conditions of rowing.  I won't suppose you
to be disgracing yourself in one of those miserable tubs, tugging
in which is to rowing the true boat what riding a cow is to
bestriding an Arab.  You know the Esquimaux KAYAK, (if that is the
name of it,) don't you?  Look at that model of one over my door.
Sharp, rather? - On the contrary, it is a lubber to the one you and
I must have; a Dutch fish-wife to Psyche, contrasted with what I
will tell you about. - Our boat, then, is something of the shape of
a pickerel, as you look down upon his back, he lying in the
sunshine just where the sharp edge of the water cuts in among the
lily-pads.  It is a kind of a giant POD, as one may say, - tight
everywhere, except in a little place in the middle, where you sit.
Its length is from seven to ten yards, and as it is only from
sixteen to thirty inches wide in its widest part, you understand
why you want those "outriggers," or projecting iron frames with the
rowlocks in which the oars play.  My rowlocks are five feet apart;
double the greatest width of the boat.

Here you are, then, afloat with a body a rod and a half long, with
arms, or wings, as you may choose to call them, stretching more
than twenty feet from tip to tip; every volition of yours extending
as perfectly into them as if your spinal cord ran down the centre
strip of your boat, and the nerves of your arms tingled as far as
the broad blades of your oars, - oars of spruce, balanced,
leathered, and ringed under your own special direction.  This, in
sober earnest, is the nearest approach to flying that man has ever
made or perhaps ever will make.  As the hawk sails without flapping
his pinions, so you drift with the tide when you will, in the most
luxurious form of locomotion indulged to an embodied spirit.  But
if your blood wants rousing, turn round that stake in the river,
which you see a mile from here; and when you come in in sixteen
minutes, (if you do, for we are old boys, and not champion
scullers, you remember,) then say if you begin to feel a little
warmed up or not!  You can row easily and gently all day, and you
can row yourself blind and black in the face in ten minutes, just
as you like.  It has been long agreed that there is no way in which
a man can accomplish so much labor with his muscles as in rowing.
It is in the boat, then, that man finds the largest extension of
his volitional and muscular existence; and yet he may tax both of
them so slightly, in that most delicious of exercises, that he
shall mentally write his sermon, or his poem, or recall the remarks
he has made in company and put them in form for the public, as well
as in his easy-chair.

I dare not publicly name the rare joys, the infinite delights, that
intoxicate me on some sweet June morning, when the river and bay
are smooth as a sheet of beryl-green silk, and I run along ripping
it up with my knife-edged shell of a boat, the rent closing after
me like those wounds of angels which Milton tells of, but the seam
still shining for many a long rood behind me.  To lie still over
the Flats, where the waters are shallow, and see the crabs crawling
and the sculpins gliding busily and silently beneath the boat, - to
rustle in through the long harsh grass that leads up some tranquil
creek, - to take shelter from the sunbeams under one of the
thousand-footed bridges, and look down its interminable colonnades,
crusted with green and oozy growths, studded with minute barnacles,
and belted with rings of dark muscles, while overhead streams and
thunders that other river whose every wave is a human soul flowing
to eternity as the river below flows to the ocean, - lying there
moored unseen, in loneliness so profound that the columns of Tadmor
in the Desert could not seem more remote from life, - the cool
breeze on one's forehead, the stream whispering against the half-
sunken pillars, - why should I tell of these things, that I should
live to see my beloved haunts invaded and the waves blackened with
boats as with a swarm of water-beetles?  What a city of idiots we
must be not to have covered this glorious bay with gondolas and
wherries, as we have just learned to cover the ice in winter with
skaters!

I am satisfied that such a set of black-coated, stiff-jointed,
soft-muscled, paste-complexioned youth as we can boast in our
Atlantic cities never before sprang from loins of Anglo-Saxon
lineage.  Of the females that are the mates of these males I do not
here speak.  I preached my sermon from the lay-pulpit on this
matter a good while ago.  Of course, if you heard it, you know my
belief is that the total climatic influences here are getting up a
number of new patterns of humanity, some of which are not an
improvement on the old model.  Clipper-built, sharp in the bows,
long in the spars, slender to look at, and fast to go, the ship,
which is the great organ of our national life of relation, is but a
reproduction of the typical form which the elements impress upon
its builder.  All this we cannot help; but we can make the best of
these influences, such as they are.  We have a few good boatmen, -
no good horsemen that I hear of, - I cannot speak for cricketing, -
but as for any great athletic feat performed by a gentleman in
these latitudes, society would drop a man who should run round the
Common in five minutes.  Some of our amateur fencers, single-stick
players, and boxers, we have no reason to be ashamed of.  Boxing is
rough play, but not too rough for a hearty young fellow.  Anything
is better than this white-blooded degeneration to which we all
tend.

I dropped into a gentlemen's sparring exhibition only last evening.
It did my heart good to see that there were a few young and
youngish youths left who could take care of their own heads in case
of emergency.  It is a fine sight, that of a gentleman resolving
himself into the primitive constituents of his humanity.  Here is a
delicate young man now, with an intellectual countenance, a slight
figure, a sub-pallid complexion, a most unassuming deportment, a
mild adolescent in fact, that any Hiram or Jonathan from between
the ploughtails would of course expect to handle with perfect ease.
Oh, he is taking off his gold-bowed spectacles!  Ah, he is
divesting himself of his cravat!  Why, he is stripping off his
coat!  Well, here he is, sure enough, in a tight silk shirt, and
with two things that look like batter puddings in the place of his
fists.  Now see that other fellow with another pair of batter
puddings, - the big one with the broad shoulders; he will certainly
knock the little man's head off, if he strikes him.  Feinting,
dodging, stopping, hitting, countering, - little man's head not off
yet.  You might as well try to jump upon your own shadow as to hit
the little man's intellectual features.  He needn't have taken off
the gold-bowed spectacles at all.  Quick, cautious, shifty, nimble,
cool, he catches all the fierce lunges or gets out of their reach,
till his turn comes, and then, whack goes one of the batter
puddings against the big one's ribs, and bang goes the other into
the big one's face, and, staggering, shuffling, slipping, tripping,
collapsing, sprawling, down goes the big one in a miscellaneous
bundle. - If my young friend, whose excellent article I have
referred to, could only introduce the manly art of self-defence
among the clergy, I am satisfied that we should have better sermons
and an infinitely less quarrelsome church-militant.  A bout with
the gloves would let off the ill-nature, and cure the indigestion,
which, united, have embroiled their subject in a bitter
controversy.  We should then often hear that a point of difference
between an infallible and a heretic, instead of being vehemently
discussed in a series of newspaper articles, had been settled by a
friendly contest in several rounds, at the close of which the
parties shook hands and appeared cordially reconciled,

But boxing you and I are too old for, I am afraid.  I was for a
moment tempted, by the contagion of muscular electricity last
evening, to try the gloves with the Benicia Boy, who looked in as a
friend to the noble art; but remembering that he had twice my
weight and half my age, besides the advantage of his training, I
sat still and said nothing.

There is one other delicate point I wish to speak of with reference
to old age.  I refer to the use of dioptric media which correct the
diminished refracting power of the humors of the eye, - in other
words, spectacles.  I don't use them.  All I ask is a large, fair
type, a strong daylight or gas-light, and one yard of focal
distance, and my eyes are as good as ever.  But if YOUR eyes fail,
I can tell you something encouraging.  There is now living in New
York State an old gentleman who, perceiving his sight to fail,
immediately took to exercising it on the finest print, and in this
way fairly bullied Nature out of her foolish habit of taking
liberties at five-and-forty, or thereabout.  And now this old
gentleman performs the most extraordinary feats with his pen,
showing that his eyes must be a pair of microscopes.  I should be
afraid to say to you how much he writes in the compass of a half-
dime, - whether the Psalms or the Gospels, or the Psalms AND the
Gospels, I won't be positive.

But now let rue tell you this.  If the time comes when you must lay
down the fiddle and the bow, because your fingers are too stiff,
and drop the ten-foot sculls, because your arms are too weak, and,
after dallying awhile with eye-glasses, come at last to the
undisguised reality of spectacles, - if the time comes when that
fire of life we spoke of has burned so low that where its flames
reverberated there is only the sombre stain of regret, and where
its coals glowed, only the white ashes that cover the embers of
memory, - don't let your heart grow cold, and you may carry
cheerfulness and love with you into the teens of your second
century, if you can last so long.  As our friend, the Poet, once
said, in some of those old-fashioned heroics of his which he keeps
for his private reading, -

Call him not old, whose visionary brain
Holds o'er the past its undivided reign.
For him in vain the envious seasons roll
Who bears eternal summer in his soul.
If yet the minstrel's song, the poet's lay,
Spring with her birds, or children with their play,
Or maiden's smile, or heavenly dream of art
Stir the few life-drops creeping round his heart, -
Turn to the record where his years are told, -
Count his gray hairs, - they cannot make him old!

END OF THE PROFESSOR'S PAPER.


[The above essay was not read at one time, but in several
instalments, and accompanied by various comments from different
persons at the table.  The company were in the main attentive, with
the exception of a little somnolence on the part of the old
gentleman opposite at times, and a few sly, malicious questions
about the "old boys" on the part of that forward young fellow who
has figured occasionally, not always to his advantage, in these
reports.

On Sunday mornings, in obedience to a feeling I am not ashamed of,
I have always tried to give a more appropriate character to our
conversation.  I have never read them my sermon yet, and I don't
know that I shall, as some of them might take my convictions as a
personal indignity to themselves.  But having read our company so
much of the Professor's talk about age and other subjects connected
with physical life, I took the next Sunday morning to repeat to
them the following poem of his, which I have had by me some time.
He calls it - I suppose, for his professional friends - THE
ANATOMIST'S HYMN, but I shall name it - ]


THE LIVING TEMPLE.

Not in the world of light alone,
Where God has built his blazing throne,
Nor yet alone in earth below,
With belted seas that come and go,
And endless isles of sunlit green,
Is all thy Maker's glory seen:
Look in upon thy wondrous frame, -
Eternal wisdom still the same!

The smooth, soft air with pulse-like waves
Flows murmuring through its hidden caves
Whose streams of brightening purple rush
Fired with a new and livelier blush,
While all their burden of decay
The ebbing current steals away,
And red with Nature's flame they start
From the warm fountains of the heart.

No rest that throbbing slave may ask,
Forever quivering o'er his task,
While far and wide a crimson jet
Leaps forth to fill the woven net
Which in unnumbered crossing tides
The flood of burning life divides,
Then kindling each decaying part
Creeps back to find the throbbing heart.

But warmed with that uchanging flame
Behold the outward moving frame,
Its living marbles jointed strong
With glistening band and silvery thong,
And linked to reason's guiding reins
By myriad rings in trembling chains,
Each graven with the threaded zone
Which claims it as the master's own.

See how yon beam of seeming white
Is braided out of seven-hued light,
Yet in those lucid globes no ray
By any chance shall break astray.
Hark how the rolling surge of sound,
Arches and spirals circling round,
Wakes the hushed spirit through thine ear
With music it is heaven to hear.

Then mark the cloven sphere that holds
All thought in its mysterious folds,
That feels sensation's faintest thrill
And flashes forth the sovereign will;
Think on the stormy world that dwells
Locked in its dim and clustering cells!
The lightning gleams of power it sheds
Along its hollow glassy threads!

O Father! grant thy love divine
To make these mystic temples thine!
When wasting age and wearying strife
Have sapped the leaning walls of life,
When darkness gathers over all,
And the last tottering pillars fall,
Take the poor dust thy mercy warms
And mould it into heavenly forms!



CHAPTER VIII.



[SPRING has come.  You will find some verses to that effect at the
end of these notes.  If you are an impatient reader, skip to them
at once.  In reading aloud, omit, if you please, the sixth and
seventh verses.  These are parenthetical and digressive, and,
unless your audience is of superior intelligence, will confuse
them.  Many people can ride on horseback who find it hard to get on
and to get off without assistance.  One has to dismount from an
idea, and get into the saddle again, at every parenthesis.]

- The old gentleman who sits opposite, finding that spring had
fairly come, mounted a white hat one day, and walked into the
street.  It seems to have been a premature or otherwise
exceptionable exhibition, not unlike that commemorated by the late
Mr. Bayly.  When the old gentleman came home, he looked very red in
the face, and complained that he had been "made sport of."  By
sympathizing questions, I learned from him that a boy had called
him "old daddy," and asked him when he had his hat whitewashed.

This incident led me to make some observations at table the next
morning, which I here repeat for the benefit of the readers of this
record.

- The hat is the vulnerable point of the artificial integument.  I
learned this in early boyhood.  I was once equipped in a hat of
Leghorn straw, having a brim of much wider dimensions than were
usual at that time, and sent to school in that portion of my native
town which lies nearest to this metropolis.  On my way I was met by
a "Port-chuck," as we used to call the young gentlemen of that
locality, and the following dialogue ensued.

THE PORT-CHUCK.  Hullo, You-sir, joo know th' wuz gon-to be a race
to-morrah?

MYSELF.  No.  Who's gon-to run, 'n' wher's't gon-to be?

THE PORT-CHUCK.  Squire Mico 'n' Doctor Wiliams, round the brim o'
your hat.

These two much-respected gentlemen being the oldest inhabitants at
that time, and the alleged race-course being out of the question,
the Port-chuck also winking and thrusting his tongue into his
cheek, I perceived that I had been trifled with, and the effect has
been to make me sensitive and observant respecting this article of
dress ever since.  Here is an axiom or two relating to it.

A hat which has been POPPED, or exploded by being sat down upon, is
never itself again afterwards.

It is a favorite illusion of sanguine natures to believe the
contrary.

Shabby gentility has nothing so characteristic as its hat.  There
is always an unnatural calmness about its nap, and an unwholesome
gloss, suggestive of a wet brush.

The last effort of decayed fortune is expended in smoothing its
dilapidated castor.  The hat is the ULTIMUM MORIENS of
"respectability."

- The old gentleman took all these remarks and maxims very
pleasantly, saying, however, that he had forgotten most of his
French except the word for potatoes, - PUMMIES DE TARE. -  ULTIMUM
MORIENS, I told him, is old Italian, and signifies LAST THING TO
DIE.  With this explanation he was well contented, and looked quite
calm when I saw him afterwards in the entry with a black hat on his
head and the white one in his hand.


- I think myself fortunate in having the Poet and the Professor for
my intimates.  We are so much together, that we no doubt think and
talk a good deal alike; yet our points of view are in many respects
individual and peculiar.  You know me well enough by this time.  I
have not talked with you so long for nothing and therefore I don't
think it necessary to draw my own portrait.  But let me say a word
or two about my friends.

The Professor considers himself, and I consider him, a very useful
and worthy kind of drudge.  I think he has a pride in his small
technicalities.  I know that he has a great idea of fidelity; and
though I suspect he laughs a little inwardly at times at the grand
airs "Science" puts on, as she stands marking time, but not getting
on, while the trumpets are blowing and the big drums beating, - yet
I am sure he has a liking for his specially, and a respect for its
cultivators.

But I'll tell you what the Professor said to the Poet the other
day. - My boy, said he, I can work a great deal cheaper than you,
because I keep all my goods in the lower story.  You have to hoist
yours into the upper chambers of the brain, and let them down again
to your customers.  I take mine in at the level of the ground, and
send them off from my doorstep almost without lifting.  I tell you,
the higher a man has to carry the raw material of thought before he
works it up, the more it costs him in blood, nerve, and muscle.
Coleridge knew all this very well when he advised every literary
man to have a profession.

- Sometimes I like to talk with one of them, and sometimes with the
other.  After a while I get tired of both.  When a fit of
intellectual disgust comes over me, I will tell you what I have
found admirable as a diversion, in addition to boating and other
amusements which I have spoken of, - that is, working at my
carpenter's-bench.  Some mechanical employment is the greatest
possible relief, after the purely intellectual faculties begin to
tire.  When I was quarantined once at Marseilles, I got to work
immediately at carving a wooden wonder of loose rings on a stick,
and got so interested in it, that when we were set loose, I
"regained my freedom with a sigh," because my toy was unfinished.

There are long seasons when I talk only with the Professor, and
others when I give myself wholly up to the Poet.  Now that my
winter's work is over and spring is with us, I feel naturally drawn
to the Poet's company.  I don't know anybody more alive to life
than he is.  The passion of poetry seizes on him every spring, he
says, - yet oftentimes he complains, that, when he feels most, he
can sing least.

Then a fit of despondency comes over him. - I feel ashamed,
sometimes, - said he, the other day, - to think how far my worst
songs fall below my best.  It sometimes seems to me, as I know it
does to others who have told me so, that they ought to be ALL BEST,
- if not in actual execution, at least in plan and motive.  I am
grateful - he continued - for all such criticisms.  A man is always
pleased to have his most serious efforts praised, and the highest
aspect of his nature get the most sunshine.

Yet I am sure, that, in the nature of things, many minds must
change their key now and then, on penalty of getting out of tune or
losing their voices.  You know, I suppose, - he said, - what is
meant by complementary colors?  You know the effect, too, which the
prolonged impression of any one color has on the retina.  If you
close your eyes after looking steadily at a RED object, you see a
GREEN image.

It is so with many minds, - I will not say with all.  After looking
at one aspect of external nature, or of any form of beauty or
truth, when they turn away, the COMPLEMENTARY aspect of the same
object stamps itself irresistibly and automatically upon the mind.
Shall they give expression to this secondary mental state, or not?

When I contemplate - said my friend, the Poet - the infinite
largeness of comprehension belonging to the Central Intelligence,
how remote the creative conception is from all scholastic and
ethical formulae, I am led to think that a healthy mind ought to
change its mood from time to time, and come down from its noblest
condition, - never, of course, to degrade itself by dwelling upon
what is itself debasing, but to let its lower faculties have a
chance to air and exercise themselves.  After the first and second
floor have been out in the bright street dressed in all their
splendors, shall not our humble friends in the basement have their
holiday, and the cotton velvet and the thin-skinned jewelry -
simple adornments, but befitting the station of those who wear them
- show themselves to the crowd, who think them beautiful, as they
ought to, though the people up stairs know that they are cheap and
perishable?

- I don't know that I may not bring the Poet here, some day or
other, and let him speak for himself.  Still I think I can tell you
what he says quite as well as he could do it. - Oh, - he said to
me, one day, - I am but a hand-organ man, - say rather, a hand-
organ.  Life turns the winch, and fancy or accident pulls out the
stops.  I come under your windows, some fine spring morning, and
play you one of my ADAGIO movements, and some of you say, - This is
good, - play us so always.  But, dear friends, if I did not change
the stop sometimes, the machine would wear out in one part and rust
in another.  How easily this or that tune flows! - you say, - there
must be no end of just such melodies in him. - I will open the poor
machine for you one moment, and you shall look. - Ah!  Every note
marks where a spur of steel has been driven in.  It is easy to
grind out the song, but to plant these bristling points which make
it was the painful task of time.

I don't like to say it, - he continued, - but poets commonly have
no larger stock of tunes than hand-organs; and when you hear them
piping up under your window, you know pretty well what to expect.
The more stops, the better.  Do let them all be pulled out in their
turn!

So spoke my friend, the Poet, and read me one of his stateliest
songs, and after it a gay CHANSON, and then a string of epigrams.
All true, - he said, - all flowers of his soul; only one with the
corolla spread, and another with its disk half opened, and the
third with the heart-leaves covered up and only a petal or two
showing its tip through the calyx.  The water-lily is the type of
the poet's soul, - he told me.

- What do you think, Sir, - said the divinity-student, - opens the
souls of poets most fully?

Why, there must be the internal force and the external stimulus.
Neither is enough by itself.  A rose will not flower in the dark,
and a fern will not flower anywhere.

What do I think is the true sunshine that opens the poet's corolla?
- I don't like to say.  They spoil a good many, I am afraid; or at
least they shine on a good many that never come to anything.

Who are THEY? - said the schoolmistress.

Women.  Their love first inspires the poet, and their praise is his
best reward.

The schoolmistress reddened a little, but looked pleased. - Did I
really think so? - I do think so; I never feel safe until I have
pleased them; I don't think they are the first to see one's
defects, but they are the first to catch the color and fragrance of
a true poem.  Fit the same intellect to a man and it is a bow-
string, - to a woman and it is a harp-string.  She is vibratile and
resonant all over, so she stirs with slighter musical tremblings of
the air about her. - Ah, me! - said my friend, the Poet, to me, the
other day, - what color would it not have given to my thoughts, and
what thrice-washed whiteness to my words, had I been fed on women's
praises!  I should have grown like Marvell's fawn, -

"Lilies without; roses within!"

But then, - he added, - we all think, IF so and so, we should have
been this or that, as you were saying the other day, in those
rhymes of yours.

- I don't think there are many poets in the sense of creators; but
of those sensitive natures which reflect themselves naturally in
soft and melodious words, pleading for sympathy with their joys and
sorrows, every literature is full.  Nature carves with her own
hands the brain which holds the creative imagination, but she casts
the over-sensitive creatures in scores from the same mould.

There are two kinds of poets, just as there are two kinds of
blondes.  [Movement of curiosity among our ladies at table. -
Please to tell us about those blondes, said the schoolmistress.]
Why, there are blondes who are such simply by deficiency of
coloring matter, - NEGATIVE or WASHED blondes, arrested by Nature
on the way to become albinesses.  There are others that are shot
through with golden light, with tawny or fulvous tinges in various
degree, - POSITIVE or STAINED blondes, dipped in yellow sunbeams,
and as unlike in their mode of being to the others as an orange is
unlike a snowball.  The albino-style carries with it a wide pupil
and a sensitive retina.  The other, or the leonine blonde, has an
opaline fire in her clear eye, which the brunette can hardly match
with her quick glittering glances.

Just so we have the great sun-kindled, constructive imaginations,
and a far more numerous class of poets who have a certain kind of
moonlight-genius given them to compensate for their imperfection of
nature.  Their want of mental coloring-matter makes them sensitive
to those impressions which stronger minds neglect or never feel at
all.  Many of them die young, and all of them are tinged with
melancholy.  There is no more beautiful illustration of the
principle of compensation which marks the Divine benevolence than
the fact that some of the holiest lives and some of the sweetest
songs are the growth of the infirmity which unfits its subject for
the rougher duties of life.  When one reads the life of Cowper, or
of Keats, or of Lucretia and Margaret Davidson, - of so many
gentle, sweet natures, born to weakness, and mostly dying before
their time, - one cannot help thinking that the human race dies out
singing, like the swan in the old story.  The French poet, Gilbert,
who died at the Hotel Dieu, at the age of twenty-nine, - (killed by
a key in his throat, which he had swallowed when delirious in
consequence of a fall,) - this poor fellow was a very good example
of the poet by excess of sensibility.  I found, the other day, that
some of my literary friends had never heard of him, though I
suppose few educated Frenchmen do not know the lines which he
wrote, a week before his death, upon a mean bed in the great
hospital of Paris.


"Au banquet de la vie, infortune convive,
J'apparus un jour, et je meurs;
Je meurs, et sur ma tombe, ou lentement j'arrive,
Nul ne viendra verser des pleurs."

At life's gay banquet placed, a poor unhappy guest,
One day I pass, then disappear;
I die, and on the tomb where I at length shall rest
No friend shall come to shed a tear.


You remember the same thing in other words some where in Kirke
White's poems.  It is the burden of the plaintive songs of all
these sweet albino-poets.  "I shall die and be forgotten, and the
world will go on just as if I had never been; - and yet how I have
loved! how I have longed! how I have aspired!"  And so singing,
their eyes grow brighter and brighter, and their features thinner
and thinner, until at last the veil of flesh is threadbare, and,
still singing, they drop it and pass onward.


- Our brains are seventy-year clocks.  The Angel of Life winds them
up once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the
hand of the Angel of the Resurrection.

Tic-tac! tic-tac! go the wheels of thought; our will cannot stop
them; they cannot stop themselves, sleep cannot still them; madness
only makes them go faster; death alone can break into the case,
and, seizing the ever-swinging pendulum, which we call the heart,
silence at last the clicking of the terrible escapement we have
carried so long beneath our wrinkled foreheads.

If we could only get at them, as we lie on our pillows and count
the dead beats of thought after thought and image after image
jarring through the overtired organ!  Will nobody block those
wheels, uncouple that pinion, cut the string that holds those
weights, blow up the infernal machine with gunpowder?  What a
passion comes over us sometimes for silence and rest! - that this
dreadful mechanism, unwinding the endless tapestry of time,
embroidered with spectral figures of life and death, could have but
one brief holiday!  Who can wonder that men swing themselves off
from beams in hempen lassos? - that they jump off from parapets
into the swift and gurgling waters beneath? - that they take
counsel of the grim friend who has but to utter his one peremptory
monosyllable and the restless machine is shivered as a vase that is
dashed upon a marble floor?  Under that building which we pass
every day there are strong dungeons, where neither hook, nor bar,
nor bed-cord, nor drinking-vessel from which a sharp fragment may
be shattered, shall by any chance be seen.  There is nothing for
it, when the brain is on fire with the whirling of its wheels, but
to spring against the stone wall and silence them with one crash.
Ah, they remembered that, - the kind city fathers, - and the walls
are nicely padded, so that one can take such exercise as he likes
without damaging himself on the very plain and serviceable
upholstery.  If anybody would only contrive some kind of a lever
that one could thrust in among the works of this horrid automaton
and check them, or alter their rate of going, what would the world
give for the discovery?

- From half a dime to a dime, according to the style of the place
and the quality of the liquor, - said the young fellow whom they
call John.

You speak trivially, but not unwisely, - I said.  Unless the will
maintain a certain control over these movements, which it cannot
stop, but can to some extent regulate, men are very apt to try to
get at the machine by some indirect system of leverage or other.
They clap on the brakes by means of opium; they change the
maddening monotony of the rhythm by means of fermented liquors.  It
is because the brain is locked up and we cannot touch its movement
directly, that we thrust these coarse tools in through any crevice,
by which they may reach the interior, and so alter its rate of
going for a while, and at last spoil the machine.

Men who exercise chiefly those faculties of the mind which work
independently of the will, - poets and artists, for instance, who
follow their imagination in their creative moments, instead of
keeping it in hand as your logicians and practical men do with
their reasoning faculty, - such men are too apt to call in the
mechanical appliances to help them govern their intellects.

- He means they get drunk, - said the young fellow already alluded
to by name.

Do you think men of true genius are apt to indulge in the use of
inebriating fluids? said the divinity-student.

If you think you are strong enough to bear what I am going to say,
- I replied, - I will talk to you about this.  But mind, now, these
are the things that some foolish people call DANGEROUS subjects, -
as if these vices which burrow into people's souls, as the Guinea-
worm burrows into the naked feet of West-Indian slaves, would be
more mischievous when seen than out of sight.  Now the true way to
deal with those obstinate animals, which are a dozen feet long,
some of them, and no bigger than a horse hair, is to get a piece of
silk round their HEADS, and pull them out very cautiously.  If you
only break them off, they grow worse than ever, and sometimes kill
the person who has the misfortune to harbor one of them.  Whence it
is plain that the first thing to do is to find out where the head
lies.

Just so of all the vices, and particularly of this vice of
intemperance.  What is the head of it, and where does it lie?  For
you may depend upon it, there is not one of these vices that has
not a head of its own, - an intelligence, - a meaning, - a certain
virtue, I was going to say, - but that might, perhaps, sound
paradoxical.  I have heard an immense number of moral physicians
lay down the treatment of moral Guinea-worms, and the vast majority
of them would always insist that the creature had no head at all,
but was all body and tail.  So I have found a very common result of
their method to be that the string slipped, or that a piece only of
the creature was broken off, and the worm soon grew again, as bad
as ever.  The truth is, if the Devil could only appear in church by
attorney, and make the best statement that the facts would bear him
out in doing on behalf of his special virtues, (what we commonly
call vices,) the influence of good teachers would be much greater
than it is.  For the arguments by which the Devil prevails are
precisely the ones that the Devil-queller most rarely answers.  The
way to argue down a vice is not to tell lies about it, - to say
that it has no attractions, when everybody knows that it has, - but
rather to let it make out its case just as it certainly will in the
moment of temptation, and then meet it with the weapons furnished
by the Divine armory.  Ithuriel did not spit the toad on his spear,
you remember, but touched him with it, and the blasted angel took
the sad glories of his true shape.  If he had shown fight then, the
fair spirits would have known how to deal with him.

That all spasmodic cerebral action is an evil is not perfectly
clear.  Men get fairly intoxicated with music, with poetry, with
religious excitement, oftenest with love.  Ninon de l'Enclos said
she was so easily excited that her soup intoxicated her, and
convalescents have been made tipsy by a beef-steak.

There are forms and stages of alcoholic exaltation which, in
themselves, and without regard to their consequences, might be
considered as positive improvements of the persons affected.  When
the sluggish intellect is roused, the slow speech quickened, the
cold nature warmed, the latent sympathy developed, the flagging
spirit kindled, - before the trains of thought become confused or
the will perverted, or the muscles relaxed, - just at the moment
when the whole human zoophyte flowers out like a full-blown rose,
and is ripe for the subscription-paper or the contribution-box, -
it would be hard to say that a man was, at that very time, worse,
or less to be loved, than when driving a hard bargain with all his
meaner wits about him.  The difficulty is, that the alcoholic
virtues don't wash; but until the water takes their colors out, the
tints are very much like those of the true celestial stuff.

[Here I was interrupted by a question which I am very unwilling to
report, but have confidence enough in those friends who examine
these records to commit to their candor.

A PERSON at table asked me whether I "went in for rum as a steady
drink?" - His manner made the question highly offensive, but I
restrained myself, and answered thus:-]

Rum I take to be the name which unwashed moralists apply alike to
the product distilled from molasses and the noblest juices of the
vineyard.  Burgundy "in all its sunset glow" is rum.  Champagne,
"the foaming wine of Eastern France," in rum.  Hock, which our
friend, the Poet, speaks of as


"The Rhine's breastmilk, gushing cold and bright,
Pale as the moon, and maddening as her light,"


is rum.  Sir, I repudiate the loathsome vulgarism as an insult to
the first miracle wrought by the Founder of our religion!  I
address myself to the company. - I believe in temperance, nay,
almost in abstinence, as a rule for healthy people.  I trust that I
practice both.  But let me tell you, there are companies of men of
genius into which I sometimes go, where the atmosphere of intellect
and sentiment is so much more stimulating than alcohol, that, if I
thought fit to take wine, it would be to keep me sober.

Among the gentlemen that I have known, few, if any, were ruined by
drinking.  My few drunken acquaintances were generally ruined
before they became drunkards.  The habit of drinking is often a
vice, no doubt, - sometimes a misfortune, - as when an almost
irresistible hereditary propensity exists to indulge in it, - but
oftenest of all a PUNISHMENT.

Empty heads, - heads without ideas in wholesome variety and
sufficient number to furnish food for the mental clockwork, - ill-
regulated heads, where the faculties are not under the control of
the will, - these are the ones that hold the brains which their
owners are so apt to tamper with, by introducing the appliances we
have been talking about.  Now, when a gentleman's brain is empty or
ill-regulated, it is, to a great extent, his own fault; and so it
is simple retribution, that, while he lies slothfully sleeping or
aimlessly dreaming, the fatal habit settles on him like a vampyre,
and sucks his blood, fanning him all the while with its hot wings
into deeper slumber or idler dreams!  I am not such a hard-souled
being as to apply this to the neglected poor, who have had no
chance to fill their heads with wholesome ideas, and to be taught
the lesson of self-government.  I trust the tariff of Heaven has an
AD VALOREM scale for them - and all of us.

But to come back to poets and artists; - if they really are more
prone to the abuse of stimulants, - and I fear that this is true, -
the reason of it is only too clear.  A man abandons himself to a
fine frenzy, and the power which flows through him, as I once
explained to you, makes him the medium of a great poem or a great
picture.  The creative action is not voluntary at all, but
automatic; we can only put the mind into the proper attitude, and
wait for the wind, that blows where it listeth, to breathe over it.
Thus the true state of creative genius is allied to REVERIE, or
dreaming.  If mind and body were both healthy and had food enough
and fair play, I doubt whether any men would be more temperate than
the imaginative classes.  But body and mind often flag, - perhaps
they are ill-made to begin with, underfed with bread or ideas,
overworked, or abused in some way.  The automatic action, by which
genius wrought its wonders, fails.  There is only one thing which
can rouse the machine; not will, - that cannot reach it; nothing
but a ruinous agent, which hurries the wheels awhile and soon eats
out the heart of the mechanism.  The dreaming faculties are always
the dangerous ones, because their mode of action can be imitated by
artificial excitement; the reasoning ones are safe, because they
imply continued voluntary effort.

I think you will find it true, that, before any vice can fasten on
a man, body, mind, or moral nature must be debilitated.  The mosses
and fungi gather on sickly trees, not thriving ones; and the odious
parasites which fasten on the human frame choose that which is
already enfeebled.  Mr. Walker, the hygeian humorist, declared that
he had such a healthy skin it was impossible for any impurity to
stick to it, and maintained that it was an absurdity to wash a face
which was of necessity always clean.  I don't know how much fancy
there was in this; but there is no fancy in saying that the
lassitude of tired-out operatives, and the languor of imaginative
natures in their periods of collapse, and the vacuity of minds
untrained to labor and discipline, fit the soul and body for the
germination of the seeds of intemperance.

Whenever the wandering demon of Drunkenness finds a ship adrift, -
no steady wind in its sails, no thoughtful pilot directing its
course, - he steps on board, takes the helm, and steers straight
for the maelstrom.


- I wonder if you know the TERRIBLE SMILE?  [The young fellow whom
they call John winked very hard, and made a jocular remark, the
sense of which seemed to depend on some double meaning of the word
SMILE.  The company was curious to know what I meant.]

There are persons - I said - who no sooner come within sight of you
than they begin to smile, with an uncertain movement of the mouth,
which conveys the idea that they are thinking about themselves, and
thinking, too, that you are thinking they are thinking about
themselves, - and so look at you with a wretched mixture of self-
consciousness, awkwardness, and attempts to carry off both, which
are betrayed by the cowardly behaviour of the eye and the tell-tale
weakness of the lips that characterize these unfortunate beings.

- Why do you call them unfortunate, Sir? - asked the divinity-
student.

Because it is evident that the consciousness of some imbecility or
other is at the bottom of this extraordinary expression.  I don't
think, however, that these persons are commonly fools.  I have
known a number, and all of them were intelligent.  I think nothing
conveys the idea of UNDERBREEDING more than this self-betraying
smile.  Yet I think this peculiar habit as well as that of
MEANINGLESS BLUSHING may be fallen into by very good people who met
often, or sit opposite each other at table.  A true gentleman's
face is infinitely removed from all such paltriness, - calm-eyed,
firm-mouthed.  I think Titian understood the look of a gentleman as
well as anybody that ever lived.  The portrait of a young man
holding a glove in his hand, in the Gallery of the Louvre, if any
of you have seen that collection, will remind you of what I mean.

- Do I think these people know the peculiar look they have? - I
cannot say; I hope not; I am afraid they would never forgive me, if
they did.  The worst of it is, the trick is catching; when one
meets one of these fellows, he feels a tendency to the same
manifestation.  The Professor tells me there is a muscular slip, a
dependence of the PLATYSMA MYOIDES, which is called the RISORIUS
SANTORINI.

- Say that once more, - exclaimed the young fellow mentioned above.

The Professor says there is a little fleshy slip called Santorini's
laughing muscle.  I would have it cut out of my face, if I were
born with one of those constitutional grins upon it.  Perhaps I am
uncharitable in my judgment of those sour-looking people I told you
of the other day, and of these smiling folks.  It may be that they
are born with these looks, as other people are with more generally
recognized deformities.  Both are bad enough, but I had rather meet
three of the scowlers than one of the smilers.

- There is another unfortunate way of looking, which is peculiar to
that amiable sex we do not like to find fault with.  There are some
very pretty, but, unhappily, very ill-bred women, who don't
understand the law of the road with regard to handsome faces.
Nature and custom would, no doubt, agree in conceding to all males
the right of at least two distinct looks at every comely female
countenance, without any infraction of the rules of courtesy or the
sentiment of respect.  The first look is necessary to define the
person of the individual one meets so as to avoid it in passing.
Any unusual attraction detected in a first glance is a sufficient
apology for a second, - not a prolonged and impertinent stare, but
an appreciating homage of the eyes, such as a stranger may
inoffensively yield to a passing image.  It is astonishing how
morbidly sensitive some vulgar beauties are to the slightest
demonstration of this kind.  When a lady walks the streets, she
leaves her virtuous-indignation countenance at home; she knows well
enough that the street is a picture-gallery, where pretty faces
framed in pretty bonnets are meant to be seen, and everybody has a
right to see them.

- When we observe how the same features and style of person and
character descend from generation to generation, we can believe
that some inherited weakness may account for these peculiarities.
Little snapping-turtles snap - so the great naturalist tells us -
before they are out of the egg-shell.  I am satisfied, that, much
higher up in the scale of life, character is distinctly shown at
the age of -2 or -3 months.

- My friend, the Professor, has been full of eggs lately.  [This
remark excited a burst of hilarity which I did not allow to
interrupt the course of my observations.]  He has been reading the
great book where he found the fact about the little snapping-
turtles mentioned above.  Some of the things he has told me have
suggested several odd analogies enough.

There are half a dozen men, or so, who carry in their brains the
OVARIAN EGGS of the next generation's or century's civilization.
These eggs are not ready to be laid in the form of books as yet;
some of them are hardly ready to be put into the form of talk.  But
as rudimentary ideas or inchoate tendencies, there they are; and
these are what must form the future.  A man's general notions are
not good for much, unless he has a crop of these intellectual
ovarian eggs in his own brain, or knows them as they exist in the
minds of others.  One must be in the HABIT of talking with such
persons to get at these rudimentary germs of thought; for their
development is necessarily imperfect, and they are moulded on new
patterns, which must be long and closely studied.  But these are
the men to talk with.  No fresh truth ever gets into a book.

- A good many fresh lies get in, anyhow, - said one of the company.

I proceeded in spite of the interruption. - All uttered thought, my
friend, the Professor, says, is of the nature of an excretion.  Its
materials have been taken in, and have acted upon the system, and
been reacted on by it; it has circulated and done its office in one
mind before it is given out for the benefit of others.  It may be
milk or venom to other minds; but, in either case, it is something
which the producer has had the use of and can part with.  A man
instinctively tries to get rid of his thought in conversation or in
print so soon as it is matured; but it is hard to get at it as it
lies imbedded, a mere potentiality, the germ of a germ, in his
intellect.

- Where are the brains that are fullest of these ovarian eggs of
thought? - I decline mentioning individuals.  The producers of
thought, who are few, the "jobbers" of thought, who are many, and
the retailers of thought, who are numberless, are so mixed up in
the popular apprehension, that it would be hopeless to try to
separate them before opinion has had time to settle.  Follow the
course of opinion on the great subjects of human interest for a few
generations or centuries, get its parallax, map out a small arc of
its movement, see where it tends, and then see who is in advance of
it or even with it; the world calls him hard names, probably; but
if you would find the OVA of the future, you must look into the
folds of his cerebral convolutions.

[The divinity-student looked a little puzzled at this suggestion,
as if he did not see exactly where he was to come out, if he
computed his arc too nicely.  I think it possible it might cut off
a few corners of his present belief, as it has cut off martyr-
burning and witch-hanging; - but time will show, - time will show,
as the old gentleman opposite says.]

- Oh, - here is that copy of verses I told you about.


SPRING HAS COME.

INTRA MUROS.

The sunbeams, lost for half a year,
Slant through my pane their morning rays
For dry Northwesters cold and clear,
The East blows in its thin blue haze.

And first the snowdrop's bells are seen,
Then close against the sheltering wall
The tulip's horn of dusky green,
The peony's dark unfolding ball.

The golden-chaliced crocus burns;
The long narcissus-blades appear;
The cone-beaked hyacinth returns,
And lights her blue-flamed chandelier.

The willow's whistling lashes, wrung
By the wild winds of gusty March,
With sallow leaflets lightly strung,
Are swaying by the tufted larch.

The elms have robed their slender spray
With full-blown flower and embryo leaf;
Wide o'er the clasping arch of day
Soars like a cloud their hoary chief.

- [See the proud tulip's flaunting cup,
That flames in glory for an hour, -
Behold it withering, - then look up, -
How meek the forest-monarch's flower! -

When wake the violets, Winter dies;
When sprout the elm-buds, Spring is near;
When lilacs blossom, Summer cries,
"Bud, little roses!  Spring is here!"]

The windows blush with fresh bouquets,
Cut with the May-dew on their lips;
The radish all its bloom displays,
Pink as Aurora's finger-tips.

Nor less the flood of light that showers
On beauty's changed corolla-shades, -
The walks are gay as bridal bowers
With rows of many-petalled maids.

The scarlet shell-fish click and clash
In the blue barrow where they slide;
The horseman, proud of streak and splash,
Creeps homeward from his morning ride.

Here comes the dealer's awkward string,
With neck in rope and tail in knot, -
Rough colts, with careless country-swing,
In lazy walk or slouching trot.

- Wild filly from the mountain-side,
Doomed to the close and chafing thills,
Lend me thy long, untiring stride
To seek with thee thy western hills!

I hear the whispering voice of Spring,
The thrush's trill, the cat-bird's cry,
Like some poor bird with prisoned wing
That sits and sings, but longs to fly.

Oh for one spot of living green, -
One little spot where leaves can grow, -
To love unblamed, to walk unseen,
To dream above, to sleep below!



CHAPTER IX.



[AQUI ESTA ENCERRADA EL ALMA DEL LICENCIADO PEDRO GARCIAS.

If I should ever make a little book out of these papers, which I
hope you are not getting tired of, I suppose I ought to save the
above sentence for a motto on the title-page.  But I want it now,
and must use it.  I need not say to you that the words are Spanish,
nor that they are to be found in the short Introduction to "Gil
Blas," nor that they mean, "Here lies buried the soul of the
licentiate Pedro Garcias."

I warned all young people off the premises when I began my notes
referring to old age.  I must be equally fair with old people now.
They are earnestly requested to leave this paper to young persons
from the age of twelve to that of fourscore years and ten, at which
latter period of life I am sure that I shall have at least one
youthful reader.  You know well enough what I mean by youth and
age; - something in the soul, which has no more to do with the
color of the hair than the vein of gold in a rock has to do with
the grass a thousand feet above it.

I am growing bolder as I write.  I think it requires not only
youth, but genius, to read this paper.  I don't mean to imply that
it required any whatsoever to talk what I have here written down.
It did demand a certain amount of memory, and such command of the
English tongue as is given by a common school education.  So much I
do claim.  But here I have related, at length, a string of
trivialities.  You must have the imagination of a poet to
transfigure them.  These little colored patches are stains upon the
windows of a human soul; stand on the outside, they are but dull
and meaningless spots of color; seen from within, they are
glorified shapes with empurpled wings and sunbright aureoles.

My hand trembles when I offer you this.  Many times I have come
bearing flowers such as my garden grew; but now I offer you this
poor, brown, homely growth, you may cast it away as worthless.  And
yet - and yet - it is something better than flowers; it is a SEED-
CAPSULE.  Many a gardener will cut you a bouquet of his choicest
blossoms for small fee, but he does not love to let the seeds of
his rarest varieties go out of his own hands.

It is by little things that we know ourselves; a soul would very
probably mistake itself for another, when once disembodied, were it
not for individual experiences which differ from those of others
only in details seemingly trifling.  All of us have been thirsty
thousands of times, and felt, with Pindar, that water was the best
of things.  I alone, as I think, of all mankind, remember one
particular pailful of water, flavored with the white-pine of which
the pail was made, and the brown mug out of which one Edmund, a
red-faced and curly-haired boy, was averred to have bitten a
fragment in his haste to drink; it being then high summer, and
little full-blooded boys feeling very warm and porous in the low-
"studded" school-room where Dame Prentiss, dead and gone, ruled
over young children, many of whom are old ghosts now, and have
known Abraham for twenty or thirty years of our mortal time.

Thirst belongs to humanity, everywhere, in all ages; but that
white-pine pail, and that brown mug belong to me in particular; and
just so of my special relationships with other things and with my
rice.  One could never remember himself in eternity by the mere
fact of having loved or hated any more than by that of having
thirsted; love and hate have no more individuality in them than
single waves in the ocean; - but the accidents or trivial marks
which distinguished those whom we loved or hated make their memory
our own forever, and with it that of our own personality also.

Therefore, my aged friend of five-and-twenty, or thereabouts, pause
at the threshold of this particular record, and ask yourself
seriously whether you are fit to read such revelations as are to
follow.  For observe, you have here no splendid array of petals
such as poets offer you, - nothing but a dry shell, containing, if
you will get out what is in it, a few small seeds of poems.  You
may laugh at them, if you like.  I shall never tell you what I
think of you for so doing.  But if you can read into the heart of
these things, in the light of other memories as slight, yet as dear
to your soul, then you are neither more nor less than a POET, and
can afford to write no more verses during the rest of your natural
life, - which abstinence I take to be one of the surest marks of
your meriting the divine name I have just bestowed upon you.

May I beg of you who have begun this paper nobly trusting to your
own imagination and sensibilities to give it the significance which
it does not lay claim to without your kind assistance, - may I beg
of you, I say, to pay particular attention to the BRACKETS which
enclose certain paragraphs?  I want my "asides," you see, to
whisper loud to you who read my notes, and sometimes I talk a page
or two to you without pretending that I said a word of it to our
boarders.  You will find a very long "aside" to you almost as soon
as you begin to read.  And so, dear young friend, fall to at once,
taking such things as I have provided for you; and if you turn
them, by the aid of your powerful imagination, into a fair banquet,
why, then, peace be with you, and a summer by the still waters of
some quiet river, or by some yellow beach, where, as my friend the
Professor, says, you can sit with Nature's wrist in your hand and
count her ocean-pulses.]

I should like to make a few intimate revelations relating
especially to my early life, if I thought you would like to hear
them.

[The schoolmistress turned a little in her chair, and sat with her
face directed partly towards me. - Half-mourning now; - purple
ribbon.  That breastpin she wears has GRAY hair in it; her
mother's, no doubt; - I remember our landlady's daughter telling
me, soon after the schoolmistress came to board with us, that she
had lately "buried a payrent."  That's what made her look so pale,
- kept the poor dying thing alive with her own blood.  Ah! long
illness is the real vampyrism; think of living a year or two after
one is dead, by sucking the life-blood out of a frail young
creature at one's bedside!  Well, souls grow white, as well as
cheeks, in these holy duties one that goes in a nurse may come out
an angel. - God bless all good women! - to their soft hands and
pitying hearts we must all come at last! - The schoolmistress has a
better color than when she came. - Too late!  "It might have been."
- Amen! - How many thoughts go to a dozen heart-beats, sometimes!
There was no long pause after my remark addressed to the company,
but in that time I had the train of ideas and feelings I have just
given flash through my consciousness sudden and sharp as the
crooked red streak that springs out of its black sheath like the
creese of a Malay in his death-race, and stabs the earth right and
left in its blind rage.

I don't deny that there was a pang in it, - yes, a stab; but there
was a prayer, too, - the "Amen" belonged to that. - Also, a vision
of a four-story brick house, nicely furnished, - I actually saw
many specific articles, - curtains, sofas, tables, and others, and
could draw the patterns of them at this moment, - a brick house, I
say, looking out on the water, with a fair parlor, and books and
busts and pots of flowers and bird-cages, all complete; and at the
window, looking on the water, two of us. - "Male and female created
He them." - These two were standing at the window, when a smaller
shape that was playing near them looked up at me with such a look
that I - - poured out a glass of water, drank it all down, and then
continued.]

I said I should like to tell you some things, such as people
commonly never tell, about my early recollections.  Should you like
to hear them?

Should we LIKE to hear them? - said the schoolmistress; - no, but
we should love to.

[The voice was a sweet one, naturally, and had something very
pleasant in its tone, just then. - The four-story brick house,
which had gone out like a transparency when the light behind it is
quenched, glimmered again for a moment; parlor, books, busts,
flower-pots, bird-cages, all complete, - and the figures as
before.]

We are waiting with eagerness, Sir, - said the divinity-student.

[The transparency went out as if a flash of black lightning had
struck it.]

If you want to hear my confessions, the next thing - I said - is to
know whether I can trust you with them.  It is only fair to say
that there are a great many people in the world that laugh at such
things.  I think they are fools, but perhaps you don't all agree
with me.

Here are children of tender age talked to as if they were capable
of understanding Calvin's "Institutes," and nobody has honesty or
sense enough to tell the plain truth about the little wretches:
that they are as superstitious as naked savages, and such miserable
spiritual cowards - that is, if they have any imagination - that
they will believe anything which is taught them, and a great deal
more which they teach themselves.

I was born and bred, as I have told you twenty times, among books
and those who knew what was in books.  I was carefully instructed
in things temporal and spiritual.  But up to a considerable
maturity of childhood I believed Raphael and Michael Angelo to have
been superhuman beings.  The central doctrine of the prevalent
religious faith of Christendom was utterly confused and neutralized
in my mind for years by one of those too common stories of actual
life, which I overheard repeated in a whisper. - Why did I not ask?
you will say. - You don't remember the rosy pudency of sensitive
children.  The first instinctive movement of the little creatures
is to make a cache, and bury in it beliefs, doubts, dreams, hopes,
and terrors.  I am uncovering one of these CACHES.  Do you think I
was necessarily a greater fool and coward than another?

I was afraid of ships.  Why, I could never tell.  The masts looked
frightfully tall, - but they were not so tall as the steeple of our
old yellow meeting-house.  At any rate I used to hide my eyes from
the sloops and schooners that were wont to lie at the end of the
bridge, and I confess that traces of this undefined terror lasted
very long. - One other source of alarm had a still more fearful
significance.  There was a great wooden HAND, - a glove-maker's
sign, which used to swing and creak in the blast, as it hung from a
pillar before a certain shop a mile or two outside of the city.
Oh, the dreadful hand!  Always hanging there ready to catch up a
little boy, who would come home to supper no more, nor yet to bed,
- whose porringer would be laid away empty thenceforth, and his
half-worn shoes wait until his small brother grew to fit them.

As for all manner of superstitious observances, I used once to
think I must have been peculiar in having such a list of them, but
I now believe that half the children of the same age go through the
same experiences.  No Roman soothsayer ever had such a catalogue of
OMENS as I found in the Sibylline leaves of my childhood.  That
trick of throwing a stone at a tree and attaching some mighty issue
to hitting or missing, which you will find mentioned in one or more
biographies, I well remember.  Stepping on or over certain
particular things or spots - Dr. Johnson's especial weakness I got
the habit of at a very early age. - I won't swear that I have not
some tendency to these not wise practices even at this present
date.  [How many of you that read these notes can say the same
thing!]

With these follies mingled sweet delusions, which I loved so well I
would not outgrow them, even when it required a voluntary effort to
put a momentary trust in them.  Here is one which I cannot help
telling you.

The firing of the great guns at the Navy-yard is easily heard at
the place where I was born and lived.  "There is a ship of war come
in," they used to say, when they heard them.  Of course, I supposed
that such vessels came in unexpectedly, after indefinite years of
absence, - suddenly as falling stones; and that the great guns
roared in their astonishment and delight at the sight of the old
war-ship splitting the bay with her cutwater.  Now, the sloop-of-
war the Wasp, Captain Blakely, after gloriously capturing the
Reindeer and the Avon, had disappeared from the face of the ocean,
and was supposed to be lost.  But there was no proof of it, and, of
course, for a time, hopes were entertained that she might be heard
from.  Long after the last real chance had utterly vanished, I
pleased myself with the fond illusion that somewhere on the waste
of waters she was still floating, and there were YEARS during which
I never heard the sound of the great guns booming inland from the
Navy-yard without saying to myself, "The Wasp has come!" and almost
thinking I could see her, as she rolled in, crumpling the water
before her, weather-beaten, barnacled, with shattered spars and
threadbare canvas, welcomed by the shouts and tears of thousands.
This was one of those dreams that I nursed and never told.  Let me
make a clean breast of it now, and say, that, so late as to have
outgrown childhood, perhaps to have got far on towards manhood,
when the roar of the cannon has struck suddenly on my ear, I have
started with a thrill of vague expectation and tremulous delight,
and the long-unspoken words have articulated themselves in the
mind's dumb whisper, THE WASP HAS COME!

- Yes, children believe plenty of queer things.  I suppose all of
you have had the pocket-book fever when you were little? - What do
I mean?  Why, ripping up old pocket-books in the firm belief that
bank-bills to an immense amount were hidden in them. - So, too, you
must all remember some splendid unfulfilled promise of somebody or
other, which fed you with hopes perhaps for years, and which left a
blank in your life which nothing has ever filled up. - O. T.
quitted our household carrying with him the passionate regrets of
the more youthful members.  He was an ingenious youngster; wrote
wonderful copies, and carved the two initials given above with
great skill on all available surfaces.  I thought, by the way, they
were all gone; but the other day I found them on a certain door
which I will show you some time.  How it surprised me to find them
so near the ground!  I had thought the boy of no trivial
dimensions.  Well, O. T., when he went, made a solemn promise to
two of us.  I was to have a ship, and the other a marTIN-house
(last syllable pronounced as in the word TIN).  Neither ever came;
but, oh, how many and many a time I have stolen to the corner, -
the cars pass close by it at this time, - and looked up that long
avenue, thinking that he must be coming now, almost sure, as I
turned to look northward, that there he would be, trudging toward
me, the ship in one hand and the marTIN-house in the other!

[You must not suppose that all I am going to say, as well as all I
have said, was told to the whole company.  The young fellow whom
they call John was in the yard, sitting on a barrel and smoking a
cheroot, the fumes of which came in, not ungrateful, through the
open window.  The divinity-student disappeared in the midst of our
talk.  The poor relation in black bombazine, who looked and moved
as if all her articulations were elbow-joints, had gone off to her
chamber, after waiting with a look of soul-subduing decorum at the
foot of the stairs until one of the male sort had passed her and
ascended into the upper regions.  This is a famous point of
etiquette in our boarding-house; in fact, between ourselves, they
make such an awful fuss about it, that I, for one, had a great deal
rather have them simple enough not to think of such matters at all.
Our landlady's daughter said, the other evening, that she was going
to "retire"; whereupon the young fellow called John took up a lamp
and insisted on lighting her to the foot of the staircase.  Nothing
would induce her to pass by him, until the schoolmistress, saying
in good plain English that it was her bed-time, walked straight by
them both, not seeming to trouble herself about either of them.

I have been led away from what I meant the portion included in
these brackets to inform my readers about.  I say, then, most of
the boarders had left the table about the time when I began telling
some of these secrets of mine, - all of them, in fact, but the old
gentleman opposite and the schoolmistress.  I understand why a
young woman should like to hear these simple but genuine
experiences of early life, which are, as I have said, the little
brown seeds of what may yet grow to be poems with leaves of azure
and gold; but when the old gentleman pushed up his chair nearer to
me, and slanted round his best ear, and once, when I was speaking
of some trifling, tender reminiscence, drew a long breath, with
such a tremor in it that a little more and it would have been a
sob, why, then I felt there must be something of nature in them
which redeemed their seeming insignificance.  Tell me, man or woman
with whom I am whispering, have you not a small store of
recollections, such as these I am uncovering, buried beneath the
dead leaves of many summers, perhaps under the unmelting snows of
fast-returning winters, - a few such recollections, which, if you
should write them all out, would be swept into some careless
editor's drawer, and might cost a scanty half-hour's lazy reading
to his subscribers, - and yet, if Death should cheat you of them,
you would not know yourself in eternity?]

- I made three acquaintances at a very early period of life, my
introduction to whom was never forgotten.  The first unequivocal
act of wrong that has left its trace in my memory was this:
refusing a small favor asked of me, - nothing more than telling
what had happened at school one morning.  No matter who asked it;
but there were circumstances which saddened and awed me.  I had no
heart to speak; - I faltered some miserable, perhaps petulant
excuse, stole away, and the first battle of life was lost.  What
remorse followed I need not tell.  Then and there, to the best of
my knowledge, I first consciously took Sin by the hand and turned
my back on Duty.  Time has led me to look upon my offence more
leniently; I do not believe it or any other childish wrong is
infinite, as some have pretended, but infinitely finite.  Yet, oh
if I had but won that battle!

The great Destroyer, whose awful shadow it was that had silenced
me, came near me, - but never, so as to be distinctly seen and
remembered, during my tender years.  There flits dimly before me
the image of a little girl, whose name even I have forgotten, a
schoolmate, whom we missed one day, and were told that she had
died.  But what death was I never had any very distinct idea, until
one day I climbed the low stone wall of the old burial-ground and
mingled with a group that were looking into a very deep, long,
narrow hole, dug down through the green sod, down through the brown
loam, down through the yellow gravel, and there at the bottom was
an oblong red box, and a still, sharp, white face of a young man
seen through an opening at one end of it.  When the lid was closed,
and the gravel and stones rattled down pell-mell, and the woman in
black, who was crying and wringing her hands, went off with the
other mourners, and left him, then I felt that I had seen Death,
and should never forget him.

One other acquaintance I made at an earlier period of life than the
habit of romancers authorizes. - Love, of course. - She was a
famous beauty afterwards. - I am satisfied that many children
rehearse their parts in the drama of life before they have shed all
their milk-teeth. - I think I won't tell the story of the golden
blonde. - I suppose everybody has had his childish fancies; but
sometimes they are passionate impulses, which anticipate all the
tremulous emotions belonging to a later period.  Most children
remember seeing and adoring an angel before they were a dozen years
old.

[The old gentleman had left his chair opposite and taken a seat by
the schoolmistress and myself, a little way from the table. - It's
true, it's true, - said the old gentleman. - He took hold of a
steel watch-chain, which carried a large, square gold key at one
end and was supposed to have some kind of time-keeper at the other.
With some trouble he dragged up an ancient-looking, thick, silver,
bull's-eye watch.  He looked at it for a moment, - hesitated, -
touched the inner corner of his right eye with the pulp of his
middle finger, - looked at the face of the watch, - said it was
getting into the forenoon, - then opened the watch and handed me
the loose outside case without a word. - The watch-paper had been
pink once, and had a faint tinge still, as if all its tender life
had not yet quite faded out.  Two little birds, a flower, and, in
small school-girl letters, a date, - 17 . . - no matter. - Before I
was thirteen years old, - said the old gentleman. - I don't know
what was in that young schoolmistress's head, nor why she should
have done it; but she took out the watch-paper and put it softly to
her lips, as if she were kissing the poor thing that made it so
long ago.  The old gentleman took the watch-paper carefully from
her, replaced it, turned away and walked out, holding the watch in
his hand.  I saw him pass the window a moment after with that
foolish white hat on his head; he couldn't have been thinking what
he was about when he put it on.  So the schoolmistress and I were
left alone.  I drew my chair a shade nearer to her, and continued.]

And since I am talking of early recollections, I don't know why I
shouldn't mention some others that still cling to me, - not that
you will attach any very particular meaning to these same images so
full of significance to me, but that you will find something
parallel to them in your own memory.  You remember, perhaps, what I
said one day about smells.  There were certain SOUNDS also which
had a mysterious suggestiveness to me, - not so intense, perhaps,
as that connected with the other sense, but yet peculiar, and never
to be forgotten.

The first was the creaking of the wood-sleds, bringing their loads
of oak and walnut from the country, as the slow-swinging oxen
trailed them along over the complaining snow, in the cold, brown
light of early morning.  Lying in bed and listening to their dreary
music had a pleasure in it akin to the Lucretian luxury, or that
which Byron speaks of as to be enjoyed in looking on at a battle by
one "who hath no friend, no brother there."

There was another sound, in itself so sweet, and so connected with
one of those simple and curious superstitions of childhood of which
I have spoken, that I can never cease to cherish a sad sort of love
for it. - Let me tell the superstitious fancy first.  The Puritan
"Sabbath," as everybody knows, began at "sundown" on Saturday
evening.  To such observance of it I was born and bred.  As the
large, round disk of day declined, a stillness, a solemnity, a
somewhat melancholy hush came over us all.  It was time for work to
cease, and for playthings to be put away.  The world of active life
passed into the shadow of an eclipse, not to emerge until the sun
should sink again beneath the horizon.

It was in this stillness of the world without and of the soul
within that the pulsating lullaby of the evening crickets used to
make itself most distinctly heard, - so that I well remember I used
to think that the purring of these little creatures, which mingled
with the batrachian hymns from the neighboring swamp, WAS PECULIAR
TO SATURDAY EVENINGS.  I don't know that anything could give a
clearer idea of the quieting and subduing effect of the old habit
of observance of what was considered holy time, than this strange,
childish fancy.

Yes, and there was still another sound which mingled its solemn
cadences with the waking and sleeping dreams of my boyhood.  It was
heard only at times, - a deep, muffled roar, which rose and fell,
not loud, but vast, - a whistling boy would have drowned it for his
next neighbor, but it must have been heard over the space of a
hundred square miles.  I used to wonder what this might be.  Could
it be the roar of the thousand wheels and the ten thousand
footsteps jarring and trampling along the stones of the neighboring
city?  That would be continuous; but this, as I have said, rose and
fell in regular rhythm.  I remember being told, and I suppose this
to have been the true solution, that it was the sound of the waves,
after a high wind, breaking on the long beaches many miles distant.
I should really like to know whether any observing people living
ten miles, more or less, inland from long beaches, - in such a
town, for instance, as Cantabridge, in the eastern part of the
Territory of the Massachusetts, - have ever observed any such
sound, and whether it was rightly accounted for as above.

Mingling with these inarticulate sounds in the low murmur of
memory, are the echoes of certain voices I have heard at rare
intervals.  I grieve to say it, but our people, I think, have not
generally agreeable voices.  The marrowy organisms, with skins that
shed water like the backs of ducks, with smooth surfaces neatly
padded beneath, and velvet linings to their singing-pipes, are not
so common among us as that other pattern of humanity with angular
outlines and plane surfaces, and integuments, hair like the fibrous
covering of a cocoa-nut in gloss and suppleness as well as color,
and voices at once thin and strenuous, - acidulous enough to
produce effervescence with alkalis, and stridulous enough to sing
duets with the katydids.  I think our conversational soprano, as
sometimes overheard in the cars, arising from a group of young
persons, who may have taken the train at one of our great
industrial centres, for instance, - young persons of the female
sex, we will say, who have bustled in full-dressed, engaged in loud
strident speech, and who, after free discussion, have fixed on two
or more double seats, which having secured, they proceed to eat
apples and hand round daguerreotypes, - I say, I think the
conversational soprano, heard under these circumstances, would not
be among the allurements the old Enemy would put in requisition,
were he getting up a new temptation of St. Anthony.

There are sweet voices among us, we all know, and voices not
musical, it may be, to those who hear them for the first time, yet
sweeter to us than any we shall hear until we listen to some
warbling angel in the overture to that eternity of blissful
harmonies we hope to enjoy. - But why should I tell lies?  If my
friends love me, it is because I try to tell the truth.  I never
heard but two voices in my life that frightened me by their
sweetness.

- Frightened you? - said the schoolmistress. - Yes, frightened me.
They made me feel as if there might be constituted a creature with
such a chord in her voice to some string in another's soul, that,
if she but spoke, he would leave all and follow her, though it were
into the jaws of Erebus.  Our only chance to keep our wits is, that
there are so few natural chords between others' voices and this
string in our souls, and that those which at first may have jarred
a little by and by come into harmony with it. - But I tell you this
is no fiction.  You may call the story of Ulysses and the Sirens a
fable, but what will you say to Mario and the poor lady who
followed him?

- Whose were those two voices that bewitches me so? - They both
belonged to German women.  One was a chambermaid, not otherwise
fascinating.  The key of my room at a certain great hotel was
missing, and this Teutonic maiden was summoned to give information
respecting it.  The simple soul was evidently not long from her
mother-land, and spoke with sweet uncertainty of dialect.  But to
hear her wonder and lament and suggest, with soft, liquid
inflexions, and low, sad murmurs, in tones as full of serious
tenderness for the fate of the lost key as if it had been a child
that had strayed from its mother, was so winning, that, had her
features and figure been as delicious as her accents, - if she had
looked like the marble Clytie, for instance, - why, all can say is
-

[The schoolmistress opened her eyes so wide, that I stopped short.]

I was only going to say that I should have drowned myself.  For
Lake Erie was close by, and it is so much better to accept
asphyxia, which takes only three minutes by the watch, than a
MESALLIANCE, that lasts fifty years to begin with, and then passes
along down the line of descent, (breaking out in all manner of
boorish manifestations of feature and manner, which, if men were
only as short-lived as horses, could be readily traced back through
the square-roots and the cube-roots of the family stem on which you
have hung the armorial bearings of the De Champignons or the De la
Morues, until one came to beings that ate with knives and said
"Haow?") that no person of right feeling could have hesitated for a
single moment.

The second of the ravishing voices I have heard was, as I have
said, that of another German woman. - I suppose I shall ruin myself
by saying that such a voice could not have come from any
Americanized human being.

- What was there in it? - said the schoolmistress, - and, upon my
word, her tones were so very musical, that I almost wished I had
said three voices instead of two, and not made the unpatriotic
remark above reported. - Oh, I said, it had so much WOMAN in it, -
MULIEBRITY, as well as FEMINEITY; - no self-assertion, such as free
suffrage introduces into every word and movement; large, vigorous
nature, running back to those huge-limbed Germans of Tacitus, but
subdued by the reverential training and tuned by the kindly culture
of fifty generations.  Sharp business habits, a lean soil,
independence, enterprise, and east winds, are not the best things
for the larynx.  Still, you hear noble voices among us, - I have
known families famous for them, - but ask the first person you meet
a question, and ten to one there is a hard, sharp, metallic,
matter-of-business clink in the accents of the answer, that
produces the effect of one of those bells which small trades-people
connect with their shop-doors, and which spring upon your ear with
such vivacity, as you enter, that your first impulse is to retire
at once from the precincts.

- Ah, but I must not forget that dear little child I saw and heard
in a French hospital.  Between two and three years old.  Fell out
of her chair and snapped both thigh-bones.  Lying in bed, patient,
gentle.  Rough students round her, some in white aprons, looking
fearfully business-like; but the child placid, perfectly still.  I
spoke to her, and the blessed little creature answered me in a
voice of such heavenly sweetness, with that reedy thrill in it
which you have heard in the thrush's even-song, that I hear it at
this moment, while I am writing, so many, many years afterwards. -
C'EST TOUT COMME UN SERIN, said the French student at my side.

These are the voices which struck the key-note of my conceptions as
to what the sounds we are to hear in heaven will be, if we shall
enter through one of the twelve gates of pearl.  There must be
other things besides aerolites that wander from their own spheres
to ours; and when we speak of celestial sweetness or beauty, we may
be nearer the literal truth than we dream.  If mankind generally
are the shipwrecked survivors of some pre-Adamitic cataclysm, set
adrift in these little open boats of humanity to make one more
trial to reach the shore, - as some grave theologians have
maintained, - if, in plain English, men are the ghosts of dead
devils who have "died into life," (to borrow an expression from
Keats,) and walk the earth in a suit of living rags which lasts
three or four score summers, - why, there must have been a few good
spirits sent to keep them company, and these sweet voices I speak
of must belong to them.

- I wish you could once hear my sister's voice, - said the
schoolmistress.

If it is like yours, it must be a pleasant one, - said I.

I never thought mine was anything, - said the schoolmistress.

How should you know? - said I. - People never hear their own
voices, - any more than they see their own faces.  There is not
even a looking-glass for the voice.  Of course, there is something
audible to us when we speak; but that something is not our own
voice as it is known to all our acquaintances.  I think, if an
image spoke to us in our own tones, we should not know them in the
least. - How pleasant it would be, if in another state of being we
could have shapes like our former selves for playthings, - we
standing outside or inside of them, as we liked, and they being to
us just what we used to be to others!

- I wonder if there will be nothing like what we call "play," after
our earthly toys are broken, - said the schoolmistress.

Hush, - said I, - what will the divinity-student say?

[I thought she was hit, that time; - but the shot must have gone
over her, or on one side of her; she did not flinch.]

Oh, - said the schoolmistress, - he must look out for my sister's
heresies; I am afraid he will be too busy with them to take care of
mine.

Do you mean to say, - said I, - that it is YOUR SISTER whom that
student -

[The young fellow commonly known as John, who had been sitting on
the barrel, smoking, jumped off just then, kicked over the barrel,
gave it a push with his foot that set it rolling, and stuck his
saucy-looking face in at the window so as to cut my question off in
the middle; and the schoolmistress leaving the room a few minutes
afterwards, I did not have a chance to finish it.

The young fellow came in and sat down in a chair, putting his heels
on the top of another.

Pooty girl, - said he.

A fine young lady, - I replied.

Keeps a first-rate school, according to accounts, - said he, -
teaches all sorts of things, - Latin and Italian and music.  Folks
rich once, - smashed up.  She went right ahead as smart as if she'd
been born to work.  That's the kind o' girl I go for.  I'd marry
her, only two or three other girls would drown themselves, if I
did.

I think the above is the longest speech of this young fellow's
which I have put on record.  I do not like to change his peculiar
expressions, for this is one of those cases in which the style is
the man, as M. de Buffon says.  The fact is, the young fellow is a
good-hearted creature enough, only too fond of his jokes, - and if
it were not for those heat-lightning winks on one side of his face,
I should not mind his fun much.]


[Some days after this, when the company were together again, I
talked a little.]

- I don't think I have a genuine hatred for anybody.  I am well
aware that I differ herein from the sturdy English moralist and the
stout American tragedian.  I don't deny that I hate THE SIGHT of
certain people; but the qualities which make me tend to hate the
man himself are such as I am so much disposed to pity, that, except
under immediate aggravation, I feel kindly enough to the worst of
them.  It is such a sad thing to be born a sneaking fellow, so much
worse than to inherit a hump-back or a couple of club-feet, that I
sometimes feel as if we ought to love the crippled souls, if I may
use this expression, with a certain tenderness which we need not
waste on noble natures.  One who is born with such congenital
incapacity that nothing can make a gentleman of him is entitled,
not to our wrath, but to our profoundest sympathy.  But as we
cannot help hating the sight of these people, just as we do that of
physical deformities, we gradually eliminate them from our society,
- we love them, but open the window and let them go.  By the time
decent people reach middle age they have weeded their circle pretty
well of these unfortunates, unless they have a taste for such
animals; in which case, no matter what their position may be, there
is something, you may be sure, in their natures akin to that of
their wretched parasites.

- The divinity-student wished to know what I thought of affinities,
as well as of antipathies; did I believe in love at first sight?

Sir, - said I, - all men love all women.  That is the PRIMA-FACIE
aspect of the case.  The Court of Nature assumes the law to be,
that all men do so; and the individual man is bound to show cause
why he does not love any particular woman.  A man, says one of my
old black-letter law-books, may show divers good reasons, as thus:
He hath not seen the person named in the indictment; she is of
tender age, or the reverse of that; she hath certain personal
disqualifications, - as, for instance, she is a blackamoor, or hath
an ill-favored countenance; or, his capacity of loving being
limited, his affections are engrossed by a previous comer; and so
of other conditions.  Not the less is it true that he is bound by
duty and inclined by nature to love each and every woman.
Therefore it is that each woman virtually summons every man to show
cause why he doth not love her.  This is not by written document,
or direct speech, for the most part, but by certain signs of silk,
gold, and other materials, which say to all men, - Look on me and
love, as in duty bound.  Then the man pleadeth his special
incapacity, whatsoever that may be, - as, for instance,
impecuniosity, or that he hath one or many wives in his household,
or that he is of mean figure, or small capacity; of which reasons
it may be noted, that the first is, according to late decisions, of
chiefest authority. - So far the old law-book.  But there is a note
from an older authority, saying that every woman doth also love
each and every man, except there be some good reason to the
contrary; and a very observing friend of mine, a young unmarried
clergyman, tells me, that, so far as his experience goes, he has
reason to think the ancient author had fact to justify his
statement.

I'll tell you how it is with the pictures of women we fall in love
with at first sight.

- We a'n't talking about pictures, - said the landlady's daughter,
- we're talking about women.

I understood that we were speaking of love at sight, - I remarked,
mildly. - Now, as all a man knows about a woman whom he looks at is
just what a picture as big as a copper, or a "nickel," rather, at
the bottom of his eye can teach him, I think I am right in saying
we are talking about the pictures of women. - Well, now, the reason
why a man is not desperately in love with ten thousand women at
once is just that which prevents all our portraits being distinctly
seen upon that wall.  They all ARE painted there by reflection from
our faces, but because ALL of them are painted on each spot, and
each on the same surface, and many other objects at the same time,
no one is seen as a picture.  But darken a chamber and let a single
pencil of rays in through a key-hole, then you have a picture on
the wall.  We never fall in love with a woman in distinction from
women, until we can get an image of her through a pin-hole; and
then we can see nothing else, and nobody but ourselves can see the
image in our mental camera-obscura.

- My friend, the Poet, tells me he has to leave town whenever the
anniversaries come round.

What's the difficulty? - Why, they all want him to get up and make
speeches, or songs, or toasts; which is just the very thing he
doesn't want to do.  He is an old story, he says, and hates to show
on these occasions.  But they tease him, and coax him, and can't do
without him, and feel all over his poor weak head until they get
their fingers on the FONTANELLE, (the Professor will tell you what
this means, - he says the one at the top of the head always remains
open in poets,) until, by gentle pressure on that soft pulsating
spot, they stupefy him to the point of acquiescence.

There are times, though, he says, when it is a pleasure, before
going to some agreeable meeting, to rush out into one's garden and
clutch up a handful of what grows there, - weeds and violets
together, - not cutting them off, but pulling them up by the roots
with the brown earth they grow in sticking to them.  That's his
idea of a post-prandial performance.  Look here, now.  These verses
I am going to read you, he tells me, were pulled up by the roots
just in that way, the other day. - Beautiful entertainment, - names
there on the plates that flow from all English-speaking tongues as
familiarly as AND or THE; entertainers known wherever good poetry
and fair title-pages are held in esteem; guest a kind-hearted,
modest, genial, hopeful poet, who sings to the hearts of his
countrymen, the British people, the songs of good cheer which the
better days to come, as all honest souls trust and believe, will
turn into the prose of common life.  My friend, the Poet, says you
must not read such a string of verses too literally.  If he trimmed
it nicely below, you wouldn't see the roots, he says, and he likes
to keep them, and a little of the soil clinging to them.

This is the farewell my friend, the Poet, read to his and our
friend, the Poet:-


A GOOD TIME GOING!

BRAVE singer of the coming time,
Sweet minstrel of the joyous present,
Crowned with the noblest wreath of rhyme,
The holly-leaf of Ayrshire's peasant,
Good-bye!  Good-bye! - Our hearts and hands,
Our lips in honest Saxon phrases,
Cry, God be with him, till he stands
His feet among the English daisies!

'Tis here we part; - for other eyes
The busy deck, the flattering streamer,
The dripping arms that plunge and rise,
The waves in foam, the ship in tremor,
The kerchiefs waving from the pier,
The cloudy pillar gliding o'er him,
The deep blue desert, lone and drear,
With heaven above and home before him!

His home! - the Western giant smiles,
And twirls the spotty globe to find it; -
This little speck the British Isles?
'Tis but a freckle, - never mind it! -
He laughs, and all his prairies roll,
Each gurgling cataract roars and chuckles,
And ridges stretched from pole to pole
Heave till they crack their iron knuckles!

But memory blushes at the sneer,
And Honor turns with frown defiant,
And Freedom, leaning on her spear,
Laughs louder than the laughing giant:-
"An islet is a world," she said,
"When glory with its dust has blended,
And Britain kept her noble dead
Till earth and seas and skies are rended!"

Beneath each swinging forest-bough
Some arm as stout in death reposes, -
From wave-washed foot to heaven-kissed brow
Her valor's life-blood runs in roses;
Nay, let our brothers of the West
Write smiling in their florid pages,
One-half her soil has walked the rest
In poets, heroes, martyrs, sages!

Hugged in the clinging billow's clasp,
From sea-weed fringe to mountain heather,
The British oak with rooted grasp
Her slender handful holds together; -
With cliffs of white and bowers of green,
And Ocean narrowing to caress her,
And hills and threaded streams between, -
Our little mother isle, God bless her!

In earth's broad temple where we stand,
Fanned by the eastern gales that brought us,
We hold the missal in our hand,
Bright with the lines our Mother taught us;
Where'er its blazoned page betrays
The glistening links of gilded fetters,
Behold, the half-turned leaf displays
Her rubric stained in crimson letters!

Enough!  To speed a parting friend
'Tis vain alike to speak and listen; -
Yet stay, - these feeble accents blend
With rays of light from eyes that glisten.
Good-bye! once more, - and kindly tell
In words of peace the young world's story, -
And say, besides, - we love too well
Our mother's soil, our father's glory!

When my friend, the Professor, found that my friend, the Poet, had
been coming out in this full-blown style, he got a little excited,
as you may have seen a canary, sometimes, when another strikes up.
The Professor says he knows he can lecture, and thinks he can write
verses.  At any rate, he has often tried, and now he was determined
to try again.  So when some professional friends of his called him
up, one day, after a feast of reason and a regular "freshet" of
soul which had lasted two or three hours, he read them these
verses.  He introduced them with a few remarks, he told me, of
which the only one he remembered was this:  that he had rather
write a single line which one among them should think worth
remembering than set them all laughing with a string of epigrams.
It was all right, I don't doubt; at any rate, that was his fancy
then, and perhaps another time he may be obstinately hilarious;
however, it may be that he is growing graver, for time is a fact so
long as clocks and watches continue to go, and a cat can't be a
kitten always, as the old gentleman opposite said the other day.

You must listen to this seriously, for I think the Professor was
very much in earnest when he wrote it.


THE TWO ARMIES.

As Life's unending column pours,
Two marshalled hosts are seen,-
Two armies on the trampled shores
That Death flows black between.

One marches to the drum-beat's roll,
The wide-mouthed clarion's bray,
And bears upon a crimson scroll,
"Our glory is to slay."

One moves in silence by the stream,
With sad, yet watchful eyes,
Calm as the patient planet's gleam
That walks the clouded skies.

Along its front no sabres shine,
No blood-red pennons wave;
Its banner bears the single line,
"Our duty is to save."

For those no death-bed's lingering shade;
At Honor's trumpet-call,
With knitted brow and lifted blade
In Glory's arms they fall.

For these no clashing falchions bright,
No stirring battle-cry;
The bloodless stabber calls by night, -
Each answers, "Here am I!"

For those the sculptor's laurelled bust,
The builder's marble piles,
The anthems pealing o'er their dust
Through long cathedral aisles.

For these the blossom-sprinkled turf
That floods the lonely graves,
When Spring rolls in her sea-green surf
In flowery-foaming waves.

Two paths lead upward from below,
And angels wait above,
Who count each burning life-drop's flow,
Each falling tear of Love.

Though from the Hero's bleeding breast
Her pulses Freedom drew,
Though the white lilies in her crest
Sprang from that scarlet dew, -

While Valor's haughty champions wait
Till all their scars are shown,
Love walks unchallenged through the gate,
To sit beside the Throne!



CHAPTER X.



[THE schoolmistress came down with a rose in her hair, - a fresh
June rose.  She has been walking early; she has brought back two
others, - one on each cheek.

I told her so, in some such pretty phrase as I could muster for the
occasion.  Those two blush-roses I just spoke of turned into a
couple of damasks.  I suppose all this went through my mind, for
this was what I went on to say:-]

I love the damask rose best of all.  The flowers our mothers and
sisters used to love and cherish, those which grow beneath our
eaves and by our doorstep, are the ones we always love best.  If
the Houyhnhnms should ever catch me, and, finding me particularly
vicious and unmanageable, send a man-tamer to Rareyfy me, I'll tell
you what drugs he would have to take and how he would have to use
them.  Imagine yourself reading a number of the Houyhnhnm Gazette,
giving an account of such an experiment.

"MAN-TAMING EXTRAORDINARY.

"THE soft-hoofed semi-quadruped recently captured was subjected to
the art of our distinguished man-tamer in presence of a numerous
assembly.  The animal was led in by two stout ponies, closely
confined by straps to prevent his sudden and dangerous tricks of
shoulder-hitting and foot-striking.  His countenance expressed the
utmost degree of ferocity and cunning.

"The operator took a handful of BUDDING LILAC-LEAVES, and crushing
them slightly between his hoofs, so as to bring out their peculiar
fragrance, fastened them to the end of a long pole and held them
towards the creature.  Its expression changed in an instant, - it
drew in their fragrance eagerly, and attempted to seize them with
its soft split hoofs.  Having thus quieted his suspicious subject,
the operator proceeded to tie a BLUE HYACINTH to the end of the
pole and held it out towards the wild animal.  The effect was
magical.  Its eyes filled as if with raindrops, and its lips
trembled as it pressed them to the flower.  After this it was
perfectly quiet, and brought a measure of corn to the man-tamer,
without showing the least disposition to strike with the feet or
hit from the shoulder."


That will do for the Houyhnhnm Gazette. - Do you ever wonder why
poets talk so much about flowers?  Did you ever hear of a poet who
did not talk about them?  Don't you think a poem, which, for the
sake of being original, should leave them out, would be like those
verses where the letter A or E or some other is omitted?  No, -
they will bloom over and over again in poems as in the summer
fields, to the end of time, always old and always new.  Why should
we be more shy of repeating ourselves than the spring be tired of
blossoms or the night of stars?  Look at Nature.  She never wearies
of saying over her floral pater-noster.  In the crevices of
Cyclopean walls, - in the dust where men lie, dust also, - on the
mounds that bury huge cities, the wreck of Nineveh and the Babel-
heap, - still that same sweet prayer and benediction.  The Amen! of
Nature is always a flower.

Are you tired of my trivial personalities, - those splashes and
streaks of sentiment, sometimes perhaps of sentimentality, which
you may see when I show you my heart's corolla as if it were a
tulip?  Pray, do not give yourself the trouble to fancy me an idiot
whose conceit it is to treat himself as an exceptional being.  It
is because you are just like me that I talk and know that you will
listen.  We are all splashed and streaked with sentiments, - not
with precisely the same tints, or in exactly the same patterns, but
by the same hand and from the same palette.

I don't believe any of you happen to have just the same passion for
the blue hyacinth which I have, - very certainly not for the
crushed lilac-leaf-buds; many of you do not know how sweet they
are.  You love the smell of the sweet-fern and the bayberry-leaves,
I don't doubt; but I hardly think that the last bewitches you with
young memories as it does me.  For the same reason I come back to
damask roses, after having raised a good many of the rarer
varieties.  I like to go to operas and concerts, but there are
queer little old homely sounds that are better than music to me.
However, I suppose it's foolish to tell such things.

- It is pleasant to be foolish at the right time, - said the
divinity-student; - saying it, however, in one of the dead
languages, which I think are unpopular for summer-reading, and
therefore do not bear quotation as such.

Well, now, - said I, - suppose a good, clean, wholesome-looking
countryman's cart stops opposite my door. - Do I want any
huckleberries? - If I do not, there are those that do.  Thereupon
my soft-voiced handmaid bears out a large tin pan, and then the
wholesome countryman, heaping the peck-measure, spreads his broad
hands around its lower arc to confine the wild and frisky berries,
and so they run nimbly along the narrowing channel until they
tumble rustling down in a black cascade and tinkle on the
resounding metal beneath. - I won't say that this rushing
huckleberry hail-storm has not more music for me than the "Anvil
Chorus."

- I wonder how my great trees are coming on this summer.

- Where are your great trees, Sir? - said the divinity-student.

Oh, all round about New England.  I call all trees mine that I have
put my wedding-ring on, and I have as many tree-wives as Brigham
Young has human ones.

- One set's as green as the other, - exclaimed a boarder, who has
never been identified.

They're all Bloomers, - said the young fellow called John.

[I should have rebuked this trifling with language, if our
landlady's daughter had not asked me just then what I meant by
putting my wedding-ring on a tree.]

Why, measuring it with my thirty-foot tape, my dear, - said I, - I
have worn a tape almost out on the rough barks of our old New
England elms and other big trees. - Don't you want to hear me talk
trees a little now?  That is one of my specialities.

[So they all agreed that they should like to hear me talk about
trees.]

I want you to understand, in the first place, that I have a most
intense, passionate fondness for trees in general, and have had
several romantic attachments to certain trees in particular.  Now,
if you expect me to hold forth in a "scientific" way about my tree-
loves, - to talk, for instance, of the Ulmus Americana, and
describe the ciliated edges of its samara, and all that, - you are
an anserine individual, and I must refer you to a dull friend who
will discourse to you of such matters.  What should you think of a
lover who should describe the idol of his heart in the language of
science, thus:  Class, Mammalia; Order, Primates; Genus, Homo;
Species, Europeus; Variety, Brown; Individual, Ann Eliza; Dental
Formula

 2-2 1-1 2-2 3-3
i---c---p---m---
 2-2 1-1 2-2 3-3'

and so on?

No, my friends, I shall speak of trees as we see them, love them,
adore them in the fields, where they are alive, holding their green
sun-shades over our heads, talking to us with their hundred
thousand whispering tongues, looking down on us with that sweet
meekness which belongs to huge, but limited organisms, - which one
sees in the brown eyes of oxen, but most in the patient posture,
the outstretched arms, and the heavy-drooping robes of these vast
beings endowed with life, but not with soul, - which outgrow us and
outlive us, but stand helpless, - poor things! - while Nature
dresses and undresses them, like so many full-sized, but under-
witted children.

Did you ever read old Daddy Gilpin?  Slowest of men, even of
English men; yet delicious in his slowness, as is the light of a
sleepy eye in woman.  I always supposed "Dr. Syntax" was written to
make fun of him.  I have a whole set of his works, and am very
proud of it, with its gray paper, and open type, and long ff, and
orange-juice landscapes.  The PERE Gilpin had the kind of science I
like in the study of Nature, - a little less observation than White
of Selborne, but a little more poetry. - Just think of applying the
Linnaean system to an elm!  Who cares how many stamens or pistils
that little brown flower, which comes out before the leaf, may have
to classify it by?  What we want is the meaning, the character, the
expression of a tree, as a kind and as an individual.

There is a mother-idea in each particular kind of tree, which, if
well marked, is probably embodied in the poetry of every language.
Take the oak, for instance, and we find it always standing as a
type of strength and endurance.  I wonder if you ever thought of
the single mark of supremacy which distinguishes this tree from all
our other forest-trees?  All the rest of them shirk the work of
resisting gravity; the oak alone defies it.  It chooses the
horizontal direction for its limbs, so that their whole weight may
tell, - and then stretches them out fifty or sixty feet, so that
the strain may be mighty enough to be worth resisting.  You will
find, that, in passing from the extreme downward droop of the
branches of the weeping-willow to the extreme upward inclination of
those of the poplar, they sweep nearly half a circle.  At 90
degrees the oak stops short; to slant upward another degree would
mark infirmity of purpose; to bend downwards, weakness of
organization.  The American elm betrays something of both; yet
sometimes, as we shall see, puts on a certain resemblance to its
sturdier neighbor.

It won't do to be exclusive in our taste about trees.  There is
hardly one of them which has not peculiar beauties in some fitting
place for it.  I remember a tall poplar of monumental proportions
and aspect, a vast pillar of glossy green, placed on the summit of
a lofty hill, and a beacon to all the country round.  A native of
that region saw fit to build his house very near it, and, having a
fancy that it might blow down some time or other, and exterminate
himself and any incidental relatives who might be "stopping" or
"tarrying" with him, - also laboring under the delusion that human
life is under all circumstances to be preferred to vegetable
existence, - had the great poplar cut down.  It is so easy to say,
"It is only a poplar!" and so much harder to replace its living
cone than to build a granite obelisk!

I must tell you about some of my tree-wives.  I was at one period
of my life much devoted to the young lady-population of Rhode
Island, a small, but delightful State in the neighborhood of
Pawtucket.  The number of inhabitants being not very large, I had
leisure, during my visits to the Providence Plantations, to inspect
the face of the country in the intervals of more fascinating
studies of physiognomy.  I heard some talk of a great elm a short
distance from the locality just mentioned.  "Let us see the great
elm," - I said, and proceeded to find it, - knowing that it was on
a certain farm in a place called Johnston, if I remember rightly.
I shall never forget my ride and my introduction to the great
Johnston elm.

I always tremble for a celebrated tree when I approach it for the
first time.  Provincialism has no SCALE of excellence in man or
vegetable; it never knows a first-rate article of either kind when
it has it, and is constantly taking second and third rate ones for
Nature's best.  I have often fancied the tree was afraid of me, and
that a sort of shiver came over it as over a betrothed maiden when
she first stands before the unknown to whom she has been plighted.
Before the measuring-tape the proudest tree of them all quails and
shrinks into itself.  All those stories of four or five men
stretching their arms around it and not touching each other's
fingers, if one's pacing the shadow at noon and making it so many
hundred feet, die upon its leafy lips in the presence of the awful
ribbon which has strangled so many false pretensions.

As I rode along the pleasant way, watching eagerly for the object
of my journey, the rounded tops of the elms rose from time to time
at the road-side.  Wherever one looked taller and fuller than the
rest, I asked myself, - "Is this it?"  But as I drew nearer, they
grew smaller, - or it proved, perhaps, that two standing in a line
had looked like one, and so deceived me.  At last, all at once,
when I was not thinking of it, - I declare to you it makes my flesh
creep when I think of it now, - all at once I saw a great, green
cloud swelling in the horizon, so vast, so symmetrical, of such
Olympian majesty and imperial supremacy among the lesser forest-
growths, that my heart stopped short, then jumped at my ribs as a
hunter springs at a five-barred gate, and I felt all through me,
without need of uttering the words, - "This is it!"

You will find this tree described, with many others, in the
excellent Report upon the Trees and Shrubs of Massachusetts.  The
author has given my friend the Professor credit for some of his
measurements, but measured this tree himself, carefully.  It is a
grand elm for size of trunk, spread of limbs, and muscular
development, - one of the first, perhaps the first, of the first
class of New England elms.

The largest actual girth I have ever found at five feet from the
ground is in the great elm lying a stone's throw or two north of
the main road (if my points of compass are right) in Springfield.
But this has much the appearance of having been formed by the union
of two trunks growing side by side.

The West-Springfield elm and one upon Northampton meadows, belong
also to the first class of trees.

There is a noble old wreck of an elm at Hatfield, which used to
spread its claws out over a circumference of thirty-five feet or
more before they covered the foot of its bole up with earth.  This
is the American elm most like an oak of any I have ever seen.

The Sheffield elm is equally remarkable for size and perfection of
form.  I have seen nothing that comes near it in Berkshire County,
and few to compare with it anywhere.  I am not sure that I remember
any other first-class elms in New England, but there may be many.

- What makes a first-class elm? - Why, size, in the first place,
and chiefly.  Anything over twenty feet of clear girth, five feet
above the ground, and with a spread of branches a hundred feet
across, may claim that title, according to my scale.  All of them,
with the questionable exception of the Springfield tree above
referred to, stop, so far as my experience goes, at about twenty-
two or twenty-three feet of girth and a hundred and twenty of
spread.

Elms of the second class, generally ranging from fourteen to
eighteen feet, are comparatively common.  The queen of them all is
that glorious tree near one of the churches in Springfield.
Beautiful and stately she is beyond all praise.  The "great tree"
on Boston Common comes in the second rank, as does the one at
Cohasset, which used to have, and probably has still, a head as
round as an apple-tree, and that at Newburyport, with scores of
others which might be mentioned.  These last two have perhaps been
over-celebrated.  Both, however, are pleasing vegetables.  The poor
old Pittsfield elm lives on its past reputation.  A wig of false
leaves is indispensable to make it presentable.

[I don't doubt there may be some monster-elm or other, vegetating
green, but inglorious, in some remote New England village, which
only wants a sacred singer to make it celebrated.  Send us your
measurements, - (certified by the postmaster, to avoid possible
imposition,) - circumference five feet from soil, length of line
from bough-end to bough-end, and we will see what can be done for
you.]

- I wish somebody would get us up the following work:-


SYLVA NOVANGLICA.

Photographs of New England Elms and other Trees, taken upon the
Same Scale of Magnitude.  With Letter-Press Descriptions, by a
Distinguished Literary Gentleman.  Boston & Co. 185..


The same camera should be used, - so far as possible, - at a fixed
distance.  Our friend, who has given us so many interesting figures
in his "Trees of America," must not think this Prospectus invades
his province; a dozen portraits, with lively descriptions, would be
a pretty complement to his large work, which, so far as published,
I find excellent.  If my plan were carried out, and another series
of a dozen English trees photographed on the same scale the
comparison would be charming.

It has always been a favorite idea of mine to bring the life of the
Old and the New World face to face, by an accurate comparison of
their various types of organization.  We should begin with man, of
course; institute a large and exact comparison between the
development of LA PIANTA UMANA, as Alfieri called it, in different
sections of each country, in the different callings, at different
ages, estimating height, weigh, force by the dynamometer and the
spirometer, and finishing off with a series of typical photographs,
giving the principal national physiognomies.  Mr. Hutchinson has
given us some excellent English data to begin with.

Then I would follow this up by contrasting the various parallel
forms of life in the two continents.  Our naturalists have often
referred to this incidentally or expressly; but the ANIMUS of
Nature in the two half globes of the planet is so momentous a point
of interest to our race, that it should be made a subject of
express and elaborate study.  Go out with me into that walk which
we call THE MALL, and look at the English and American elms.  The
American elm is tall, graceful, slender-sprayed, and drooping as if
from languor.  The English elm is compact, robust, holds its
branches up, and carries its leaves for weeks longer than our own
native tree.

Is this typical of the creative force on the two sides of the
ocean, or not?  Nothing but a careful comparison through the whole
realm of life can answer this question.

There is a parallelism without identity in the animal and vegetable
life of the two continents, which favors the task of comparison in
an extraordinary manner.  Just as we have two trees alike in many
ways, yet not the same, both elms, yet easily distinguishable, just
so we have a complete flora and a fauna, which, parting from the
same ideal, embody it with various modifications.  Inventive power
is the only quality of which the Creative Intelligence seems to be
economical; just as with our largest human minds, that is the
divinest of faculties, and the one that most exhausts the mind
which exercises it.  As the same patterns have very commonly been
followed, we can see which is worked out in the largest spirit, and
determine the exact limitations under which the Creator places the
movement of life in all its manifestations in either locality.  We
should find ourselves in a very false position, if it should prove
that Anglo-Saxons can't live here, but die out, if not kept up by
fresh supplies, as Dr. Knox and other more or less wise persons
have maintained.  It may turn out the other way, as I have heard
one of our literary celebrities argue, - and though I took the
other side, I liked his best, - that the American is the Englishman
reinforced.

- Will you walk out and look at those elms with me after breakfast?
- I said to the schoolmistress.

[I am not going to tell lies about it, and say that she blushed, -
as I suppose she ought to have done, at such a tremendous piece of
gallantry as that was for our boarding-house.  On the contrary, she
turned a little pale, - but smiled brightly and said, - Yes, with
pleasure, but she must walk towards her school. - She went for her
bonnet. - The old gentleman opposite followed her with his eyes,
and said he wished he was a young fellow.  Presently she came down,
looking very pretty in her half-mourning bonnet, and carrying a
school-book in her hand.]


MY FIRST WALK WITH THE SCHOOLMISTRESS.


This is the shortest way, - she said, as we came to a corner. -
Then we won't take it, - said I. - The schoolmistress laughed a
little, and said she was ten minutes early, so she could go round.

We walked under Mr. Paddock's row of English elms.  The gray
squirrels were out looking for their breakfasts, and one of them
came toward us in light, soft, intermittent leaps, until he was
close to the rail of the burial-ground.  He was on a grave with a
broad blue-slate-stone at its head, and a shrub growing on it.  The
stone said this was the grave of a young man who was the son of an
Honorable gentleman, and who died a hundred years ago and more. -
Oh, yes, DIED, - with a small triangular mark in one breast, and
another smaller opposite, in his back, where another young man's
rapier had slid through his body; and so he lay down out there on
the Common, and was found cold the next morning, with the night-
dews and the death-dews mingled on his forehead.

Let us have one look at poor Benjamin's grave, - said I. - His
bones lie where his body was laid so long ago, and where the stone
says they lie, - which is more than can be said of most of the
tenants of this and several other burial-grounds.

[The most accursed act of Vandalism ever committed within my
knowledge was the uprooting of the ancient gravestones in three at
least of our city burialgrounds, and one at least just outside the
city, and planting them in rows to suit the taste for symmetry of
the perpetrators.  Many years ago, when this disgraceful process
was going on under my eyes, I addressed an indignant remonstrance
to a leading journal.  I suppose it was deficient in literary
elegance, or too warm in its language; for no notice was taken of
it, and the hyena-horror was allowed to complete itself in the face
of daylight.  I have never got over it.  The bones of my own
ancestors, being entombed, lie beneath their own tablet; but the
upright stones have been shuffled about like chessmen, and nothing
short of the Day of Judgment will tell whose dust lies beneath any
of those records, meant by affection to mark one small spot as
sacred to some cherished memory.  Shame! shame! shame! - that is
all I can say.  It was on public thoroughfares, under the eye of
authority, that this infamy was enacted.  The red Indians would
have known better; the selectmen of an African kraal-village would
have had more respect for their ancestors.  I should like to see
the gravestones which have been disturbed all removed, and the
ground levelled, leaving the flat tombstones; epitaphs were never
famous for truth, but the old reproach of "Here LIES" never had
such a wholesale illustration as in these outraged burial-places,
where the stone does lie above, and the bones do not lie beneath.]

Stop before we turn away, and breathe a woman's sigh over poor
Benjamin's dust.  Love killed him, I think.  Twenty years old, and
out there fighting another young fellow on the Common, in the cool
of that old July evening; - yes, there must have been love at the
bottom of it.

The schoolmistress dropped a rosebud she had in her hand, through
the rails, upon the grave of Benjamin Woodbridge.  That was all her
comment upon what I told her. - How women love Love! said I; - but
she did not speak.

We came opposite the head of a place or court running eastward from
the main street. - Look down there, - I said, - My friend the
Professor lived in that house at the left hand, next the further
corner, for years and years.  He died out of it, the other day. -
Died? - said the schoolmistress. - Certainly, - said I. - We die
out of houses, just as we die out of our bodies.  A commercial
smash kills a hundred men's houses for them, as a railroad crash
kills their mortal frames and drives out the immortal tenants.  Men
sicken of houses until at last they quit them, as the soul leaves
its body when it is tired of its infirmities.  The body has been
called "the house we live in"; the house is quite as much the body
we live in.  Shall I tell you some things the Professor said the
other day? - Do! - said the schoolmistress.

A man's body, - said the Professor, - is whatever is occupied by
his will and his sensibility.  The small room down there, where I
wrote those papers you remember reading, was much more a portion of
my body than a paralytic's senseless and motionless arm or leg is
of his.

The soul of a man has a series of concentric envelopes round it,
like the core of an onion, or the innermost of a nest of boxes.
First, he has his natural garment of flesh and blood.  Then, his
artificial integuments, with their true skin of solid stuffs, their
cuticle of lighter tissues, and their variously-tinted pigments.
Thirdly, his domicile, be it a single chamber or a stately mansion.
And then, the whole visible world, in which Time buttons him up as
in a loose outside wrapper.

You shall observe, - the Professor said, - for, like Mr. John
Hunter and other great men, he brings in that SHALL with great
effect sometimes, - you shall observe that a man's clothing or
series of envelopes does after a certain time mould itself upon his
individual nature.  We know this of our hats, and are always
reminded of it when we happen to put them on wrong side foremost.
We soon find that the beaver is a hollow cast of the skull, with
all its irregular bumps and depressions.  Just so all that clothes
a man, even to the blue sky which caps his head, - a little
loosely, - shapes itself to fit each particular being beneath it.
Farmers, sailors, astronomers, poets, lovers, condemned criminals,
all find it different, according to the eyes with which they
severally look.

But our houses shape themselves palpably on our inner and outer
natures.  See a householder breaking up and you will be sure of it.
There is a shell-fish which builds all manner of smaller shells
into the walls of its own.  A house is never a home until we have
crusted it with the spoils of a hundred lives besides those of our
own past.  See what these are and you can tell what the occupant
is.

I had no idea, - said the Professor, - until I pulled up my
domestic establishment the other day, what an enormous quantity of
roots I had been making during the years I was planted there.  Why,
there wasn't a nook or a corner that some fibre had not worked its
way into; and when I gave the last wrench, each of them seemed to
shriek like a mandrake, as it broke its hold and came away.

There is nothing that happens, you know, which must not inevitably,
and which does not actually, photograph itself in every conceivable
aspect and in all dimensions.  The infinite galleries of the Past
await but one brief process and all their pictures will be called
out and fixed forever.  We had a curious illustration of the great
fact on a very humble scale.  When a certain bookcase, long
standing in one place, for which it was built, was removed, there
was the exact image on the wall of the whole, and of many of its
portions.  But in the midst of this picture was another, - the
precise outline of a map which had hung on the wall before the
bookcase was built.  We had all forgotten everything about the map
until we saw its photograph on the wall.  Then we remembered it, as
some day or other we may remember a sin which has been built over
and covered up, when this lower universe is pulled away from before
the wall of Infinity, where the wrong-doing stands self-recorded.

The Professor lived in that house a long time, - not twenty years,
but pretty near it.  When he entered that door, two shadows glided
over the threshold; five lingered in the doorway when he passed
through it for the last time, - and one of the shadows was claimed
by its owner to be longer than his own.  What changes he saw in
that quiet place!  Death rained through every roof but his;
children came into life, grew to maturity, wedded, faded away,
threw themselves away; the whole drama of life was played in that
stock-company's theatre of a dozen houses, one of which was his,
and no deep sorrow or severe calamity ever entered his dwelling.
Peace be to those walls, forever, - the Professor said, - for the
many pleasant years he has passed within them!

The Professor has a friend, now living at a distance, who has been
with him in many of his changes of place, and who follows him in
imagination with tender interest wherever he goes. - In that little
court, where he lived in gay loneliness so long, -

- in his autumnal sojourn by the Connecticut, where it comes
loitering down from its mountain fastnesses like a great lord,
swallowing up the small proprietary rivulets very quietly as it
goes, until it gets proud and swollen and wantons in huge luxurious
oxbows about the fair Northampton meadows, and at last overflows
the oldest inhabitant's memory in profligate freshets at Hartford
and all along its lower shores, - up in that caravansary on the
banks of the stream where Ledyard launched his log canoe, and the
jovial old Colonel used to lead the Commencement processions, -
where blue Ascutney looked down from the far distance, and the
hills of Beulah, as the Professor always called them, rolled up the
opposite horizon in soft climbing masses, so suggestive of the
Pilgrim's Heavenward Path that he used to look through his old
"Dollond" to see if the Shining Ones were not within range of
sight, - sweet visions, sweetest in those Sunday walks which
carried them by the peaceful common, through the solemn village
lying in cataleptic stillness under the shadow of the rod of Moses,
to the terminus of their harmless stroll, - the patulous fage, in
the Professor's classic dialect, - the spreading beech, in more
familiar phrase, - [stop and breathe here a moment, for the
sentence is not done yet, and we have another long journey before
us,] -

- and again once more up among those other hills that shut in the
amber-flowing Housatonic, - dark stream, but clear, like the lucid
orbs that shine beneath the lids of auburn-haired, sherry-wine-eyed
demi-blondes, - in the home overlooking the winding stream and the
smooth, flat meadow; looked down upon by wild hills, where the
tracks of bears and catamounts may yet sometimes be seen upon the
winter snow; facing the twin summits which rise in the far North,
the highest waves of the great land-storm in all this billowy
region, - suggestive to mad fancies of the breasts of a half-buried
Titaness, stretched out by a stray thunderbolt, and hastily hidden
away beneath the leaves of the forest, - in that home where seven
blessed summers were passed, which stand in memory like the seven
golden candlesticks in the beatific vision of the holy dreamer, -

- in that modest dwelling we were just looking at, not glorious,
yet not unlovely in the youth of its drab and mahogany, - full of
great and little boys' playthings from top to bottom, - in all
these summer or winter nests he was always at home and always
welcome.

This long articulated sigh of reminiscences, - this calenture which
shows me the maple-shadowed plains of Berkshire and the mountain-
circled green of Grafton beneath the salt waves which come feeling
their way along the wall at my feet, restless and soft-touching as
blind men's busy fingers, - is for that friend of mine who looks
into the waters of the Patapsco and sees beneath them the same
visions which paint themselves for me in the green depths of the
Charles.

- Did I talk all this off to the schoolmistress? - Why, no, - of
course not.  I have been talking with you, the reader, for the last
ten minutes.  You don't think I should expect any woman to listen
to such a sentence as that long one, without giving her a chance to
put in a word?

- What did I say to the schoolmistress? - Permit me one moment.  I
don't doubt your delicacy and good-breeding; but in this particular
case, as I was allowed the privilege of walking alone with a very
interesting young woman, you must allow me to remark, in the
classic version of a familiar phrase, used by our Master Benjamin
Franklin, it is NULLUM TUI NEGOTII.

When the schoolmistress and I reached the school-room door, the
damask roses I spoke of were so much heightened in color by
exercise that I felt sure it would be useful to her to take a
stroll like this every morning, and made up my mind I would ask her
to let me join her again.


EXTRACT FROM MY PRIVATE JOURNAL.
(TO BE BURNED UNREAD.)


I am afraid I have been a fool; for I have told as much of myself
to this young person as if she were of that ripe and discreet age
which invites confidence and expansive utterance.  I have been low-
spirited and listless, lately, - it is coffee, I think, - (I
observe that which is bought READY-GROUND never affects the head,)
- and I notice that I tell my secrets too easily when I am
downhearted.

There are inscriptions on our hearts, which, like that on Dighton
Rock, are never to be seen except at dead-low tide.

There is a woman's footstep on the sand at the side of my deepest
ocean-buried inscription!

- Oh, no, no, no! a thousand times, no! - Yet what is this which
has been shaping itself in my soul? - Is it a thought? - is it a
dream? - is it a PASSION? - Then I know what comes next.

- The Asylum stands on a bright and breezy hill; those glazed
corridors are pleasant to walk in, in bad weather.  But there are
iron bars to all the windows.  When it is fair, some of us can
stroll outside that very high fence.  But I never see much life in
those groups I sometimes meet; - and then the careful man watches
them so closely!  How I remember that sad company I used to pass on
fine mornings, when I was a schoolboy! - B., with his arms full of
yellow weeds, - ore from the gold mines which he discovered long
before we heard of California, - Y., born to millions, crazed by
too much plum-cake, (the boys said,) dogged, explosive, - made a
Polyphemus of my weak-eyed schoolmaster, by a vicious flirt with a
stick, - (the multi-millonnaires sent him a trifle, it was said, to
buy another eye with; but boys are jealous of rich folks, and I
don't doubt the good people made him easy for life,) - how I
remember them all!

I recollect, as all do, the story of the Hall of Eblis, in
"Vathek," and how each shape, as it lifted its hand from its
breast, showed its heart, - a burning coal.  The real Hall of Eblis
stands on yonder summit.  Go there on the next visiting-day, and
ask that figure crouched in the corner, huddled up like those
Indian mummies and skeletons found buried in the sitting posture,
to lift its hand, - look upon its heart, and behold, not fire, but
ashes. - No, I must not think of such an ending!  Dying would be a
much more gentlemanly way of meeting the difficulty.  Make a will
and leave her a house or two and some stocks, and other little
financial conveniences, to take away her necessity for keeping
school. - I wonder what nice young man's feet would be in my French
slippers before six months were over!  Well, what then?  If a man
really loves a woman, of course he wouldn't marry her for the
world, if he were not quite sure that he was the best person she
could by any possibility marry.

- It is odd enough to read over what I have just been writing. - It
is the merest fancy that ever was in the world.  I shall never be
married.  She will; and if she is as pleasant as she has been so
far, I will give her a silver tea-set, and go and take tea with her
and her husband, sometimes.  No coffee, I hope, though, - it
depresses me sadly.  I feel very miserably; - they must have been
grinding it at home. - Another morning walk will be good for me,
and I don't doubt the schoolmistress will be glad of a little fresh
air before school.


- The throbbing flushes of the poetical intermittent have been
coming over me from time to time of late.  Did you ever see that
electrical experiment which consists in passing a flash through
letters of gold-leaf in a darkened room, whereupon some name or
legend springs out of the darkness in characters of fire?

There are songs all written out in my soul, which I could read, if
the flash might pass through them, - but the fire must come down
from heaven.  Ah! but what if the stormy NIMBUS of youthful passion
has blown by, and one asks for lightning from the ragged CIRRUS of
dissolving aspirations, or the silvered CUMULUS of sluggish
satiety?  I will call on her whom the dead poets believed in, whom
living ones no longer worship, - the immortal maid, who, name her
what you will, - Goddess, Muse, Spirit of Beauty, - sits by the
pillow of every youthful poet, and bends over his pale forehead
until her tresses lie upon his cheek and rain their gold into his
dreams.


MUSA.

O MY lost Beauty! - hast thou folded quite
Thy wings of morning light
Beyond those iron gates
Where Life crowds hurrying to the haggard Fates,
And Age upon his mound of ashes waits
To chill our fiery dreams,
Hot from the heart of youth plunged in his icy streams?

Leave me not fading in these weeds of care,
Whose flowers are silvered hair! -
Have I not loved thee long,
Though my young lips have often done thee wrong
And vexed thy heaven-tuned ear with careless song?
Ah, wilt thou yet return,
Bearing thy rose-hued torch, and bid thine altar burn?

Come to me! - I will flood thy silent shine
With my soul's sacred wine,
And heap thy marble floors
As the wild spice-trees waste their fragrant stores
In leafy islands walled with madrepores
And lapped in Orient seas,
When all their feathery palm toss, plume-like, in the breeze.

Come to me! - thou shalt feed on honied words,
Sweeter than song of birds; -
No wailing bulbul's throat,
No melting dulcimer's melodious note,
When o'er the midnight wave its murmurs float,
Thy ravished sense might soothe
With flow so liquid-soft, with strain so velvet-smooth.

Thou shalt be decked with jewels, like a queen,
Sought in those bowers of green
Where loop the clustered vines
And the close-clinging dulcamara twines, -
Pure pearls of Maydew where the moonlight shines,
And Summer's fruited gems,
And coral pendants shorn from Autumn's berried stems.

Sit by me drifting on the sleepy waves, -
Or stretched by grass-grown graves,
Whose gray, high-shouldered stones,
Carved with old names Life's time-worn roll disowns,
Lean, lichen-spotted, o'er the crumbled bones
Still slumbering where they lay
While the sad Pilgrim watched to scare the wolf away.

Spread o'er my couch thy visionary wing!
Still let me dream and sing, -
Dream of that winding shore
Where scarlet cardinals bloom, - for me no more, -
The stream with heaven beneath its liquid floor,
And clustering nenuphars
Sprinkling its mirrored blue like golden-chaliced stars!

Come while their balms the linden-blossoms shed! -
Come while the rose is red, -
While blue-eyed Summer smiles
On the green ripples round you sunken piles
Washed by the moon-wave warm from Indian isles,
And on the sultry air
The chestnuts spread their palms like holy men in prayer!

Oh, for thy burning lips to fire my brain
With thrills of wild sweet pain! -
On life's autumnal blast,
Like shrivelled leaves, youth's, passion-flowers are cast, -
Once loving thee, we love thee to the last! -
Behold thy new-decked shrine,
And hear once more the voice that breathed "Forever thine!"



CHAPTER XI.



[THE company looked a little flustered one morning when I came in,
- so much so, that I inquired of my neighbor, the divinity-
student,) what had been going on.  It appears that the young fellow
whom they call John had taken advantage of my being a little late
(I having been rather longer than usual dressing that morning) to
circulate several questions involving a quibble or play upon words,
- in short, containing that indignity to the human understanding,
condemned in the passages from the distinguished moralist of the
last century and the illustrious historian of the present, which I
cited on a former occasion, and known as a PUN.  After breakfast,
one of the boarders handed me a small roll of paper containing some
of the questions and their answers.  I subjoin two or three of
them, to show what a tendency there is to frivolity and meaningless
talk in young persons of a certain sort, when not restrained by the
presence of more reflective natures. - It was asked, "Why tertian
and quartan fevers were like certain short-lived insects."  Some
interesting physiological relation would be naturally suggested.
The inquirer blushes to find that the answer is in the paltry
equivocation, that they SKIP a day or two. - "Why an Englishman
must go to the Continent to weaken his grog or punch."  The answer
proves to have no relation whatever to the temperance-movement, as
no better reason is given than that island- (or, as it is absurdly
written, ILE AND) water won't mix. - But when I came to the next
question and its answer, I felt that patience ceased to be a
virtue.  "Why an onion is like a piano" is a query that a person of
sensibility would be slow to propose; but that in an educated
community an individual could be found to answer it in these words,
- "Because it smell odious," QUASI, it's melodious, - is not
credible, but too true.  I can show you the paper.

Dear reader, I beg your pardon for repeating such things.  I know
most conversations reported in books are altogether above such
trivial details, but folly will come up at every table as surely as
purslain and chickweed and sorrel will come up in gardens.  This
young fellow ought to have talked philosophy, I know perfectly
well; but he didn't, - he made jokes.]

I am willing, - I said, - to exercise your ingenuity in a rational
and contemplative manner. - No, I do not proscribe certain forms of
philosophical speculation which involve an approach to the absurd
or the ludicrous, such as you may find, for example, in the folio
of the Reverend Father Thomas Sanchez, in his famous Disputations,
"De Sancto Matrimonio."  I will therefore turn this levity of yours
to profit by reading you a rhymed problem, wrought out by my friend
the Professor.


THE DEACON'S MASTERPIECE:
OR THE WONDERFUL "ONE-HOSS-SHAY."
A LOGICAL STORY.

HAVE you heard of the wonderful one-shay,
That was built in such a logical way
It ran a hundred years to a day,
And then, of a sudden, it - ah, but stay,
I'll tell you what happened without delay,
Scaring the parson into fits,
Frightening people out of their wits, -
Have you ever heard of that, I say?

Seventeen hundred and fifty-five.
GEORGIUS SECUNDUS was then alive, -
Snuffy old drone from the German hive.
That was the year when Lisbon-town
Saw the earth open and gulp her down,
And Braddock's army was done so brown,
Left without a scalp to its crown.
It was on the terrible Earthquake-day
That the Deacon finished the one-hoss-shay.

Now in building of chaises, I tell you what,
There is always SOMEWHERE a weakest spot, -
In hub, tire, felloe, in spring or thill,
In panel, or crossbar, or floor, or sill,
In screw, bolt, thoroughbrace, - lurking still
Find it somewhere you must and will, -
Above or below, or within or without, -
And that's the reason, beyond a doubt,
A chaise BREASTS DOWN, but doesn't WEAR OUT.

But the Deacon swore (as Deacons do,
With an "I dew vum," or an "I tell YEOU,")
He would build one shay to beat the taown
'n' the keounty 'n' all the kentry raoun';
It should be so built that it COULDN' break daown -
- "Fur," said the Deacon, "'t's mighty plain
Thut the weakes' place mus' stan the strain;
'n' the way t' fix it, uz I maintain,
Is only jest
T' make that place uz strong uz the rest."

So the Deacon inquired of the village folk
Where he could find the strongest oak,
That couldn't be split nor bent nor broke, -
That was for spokes and floor and sills;
He sent for lancewood to make the thills;
The crossbars were ash, from the straightest trees;
The panels of white-wood, that cuts like cheese,
But lasts like iron for things like these;
The hubs of logs from the "Settler's ellum," -
Last of its timber, - they couldn't sell 'em,
Never an axe had seen their chips,
And the wedges flew from between their lips,
Their blunt ends frizzled like celery-tips;
Step and prop-iron, bolt and screw,
Spring, tire, axle, and linchpin too,
Steel of the finest, bright and blue;
Thoroughbrace bison-skin, thick and wide;
Boot, top, dasher, from tough old hide
Found in the pit when the tanner died.
That was the way he "put her through." -
"There!" said the Deacon, "naow she'll dew."

Do!  I tell you, I father guess
She was a wonder, and nothing less!
Colts grew horses, beards turned gray,
Deacon and deaconess dropped away,
Children and grand-children - where were they?
But there stood the stout old one-hoss-shay
As fresh as on Lisbon-earthquake-day!

EIGHTEEN HUNDRED; - it came and found
The Deacon's Masterpiece strong and sound.
Eighteen hundred increased by ten; -
"Hahnsum kerridge" they called it then.
Eighteen hundred and twenty came; -
Running as usual; much the same.
Thirty and forty at last arrive,
And then come fifty, and FIFTY-FIVE.

Little of all we value here
Wakes on the morn of its hundredth year
Without both feeling and looking queer.
In fact, there's nothing that keeps its youth,
So far as I know, but a tree and truth.
(This is a moral that runs at large;
Take it. - You're welcome. - No extra charge.)

FIRST OF NOVEMBER, - the Earthquake-day. -
There are traces of age in the one-hoss-shay.
A general flavor of mild decay,
But nothing local, as one may say.
There couldn't be, - for the Deacon's art
Had made it so like in every part
That there wasn't a chance for one to start.
For the wheels were just as strong as the thills,
And the floor was just as strong as the sills,
And the panels just as strong as the floor,
And the whippletree neither less nor more,
And the back-crossbar as strong as the fore,
And spring and axle and hub ENCORE.
And yet, AS A WHOLE, it is past a doubt
In another hour it will be WORN OUT!

First of November, 'Fifty-five!
This morning the parson takes a drive.
Now, small boys, get out of the way!
Here comes the wonderful one-horse-shay,
Drawn by a rat-tailed, ewe-necked bay.
"Huddup!" said the parson. - Off went they.

The parson was working his Sunday's text, -
Had got to FIFTHLY, and stopped perplexed
At what the - Moses - was coming next.
All at once the horse stood still,
Close by the meet'n-house on the hill.
- First a shiver, and then a thrill,
Then something decidedly like a spill, -
And the parson was sitting upon a rock,
At half-past nine by the meet'n-house clock, -
Just the hour of the Earthquake shock!
- What do you think the parson found,
When he got up and stared around?
The poor old chaise in a heap or mound,
As if it had been to the mill and ground!
You see, of course, if you're not a dunce,
How it went to pieces all at once, -
All at once, and nothing first, -
Just as bubbles do when they burst.

End of the wonderful one-hoss-shay.
Logic is logic.  That's all I say.


- I think there is one habit, - I said to our company a day or two
afterwards - worse than that of punning.  It is the gradual
substitution of cant or flash terms for words which truly
characterize their objects.  I have known several very genteel
idiots whose whole vocabulary had deliquesced into some half dozen
expressions.  All things fell into one of two great categories, -
FAST or SLOW.  Man's chief end was to be a BRICK.  When the great
calamities of life overtook their friends, these last were spoken
of as being a GOOD DEAL CUT UP.  Nine-tenths of human existence
were summed up in the single word, BORE.  These expressions come to
be the algebraic symbols of minds which have grown too weak or
indolent to discriminate.  They are the blank checks of
intellectual bankruptcy; - you may fill them up with what idea you
like; it makes no difference, for there are no funds in the
treasury upon which they are drawn.  Colleges and good-for-nothing
smoking-clubs are the places where these conversational fungi
spring up most luxuriantly.  Don't think I undervalue the proper
use and application of a cant word or phrase.  It adds piquancy to
conversation, as a mushroom does to a sauce.  But it is no better
than a toadstool, odious to the sense and poisonous to the
intellect, when it spawns itself all over the talk of men and
youths capable of talking, as it sometimes does.  As we hear flash
phraseology, it is commonly the dishwater from the washings of
English dandyism, school-boy or full-grown, wrung out of a three-
volume novel which had sopped it up, or decanted from the pictured
urn of Mr. Verdant Green, and diluted to suit the provincial
climate.

- The young fellow called John spoke up sharply and said, it was
"rum" to hear me "pitchin' into fellers" for "goin' it in the slang
line," when I used all the flash words myself just when I pleased.

- I replied with my usual forbearance. - Certainly, to give up the
algebraic symbol, because A or B is often a cover for ideal
nihility, would be unwise.  I have heard a child laboring to
express a certain condition, involving a hitherto undescribed
sensation (as it supposed,) all of which could have been
sufficiently explained by the participle - BORED.  I have seen a
country-clergyman, with a one-story intellect and a one-horse
vocabulary, who has consumed his valuable time (and mine) freely,
in developing an opinion of a brother-minister's discourse which
would have been abundantly characterized by a peach-down-lipped
sophomore in the one word - SLOW.  Let us discriminate, and be shy
of absolute proscription.  I am omniverbivorous by nature and
training.  Passing by such words as are poisonous, I can swallow
most others, and chew such as I cannot swallow.

Dandies are not good for much, but they are good for something.
They invent or keep in circulation those conversational blank
checks or counters just spoken of, which intellectual capitalists
may sometimes find it worth their while to borrow of them.  They
are useful, too, in keeping up the standard of dress, which, but
for them, would deteriorate, and become, what some old fools would
have it, a matter of convenience, and not of taste and art.  Yes, I
like dandies well enough, - on one condition.

- What is that, Sir? - said the divinity-student.

- That they have pluck.  I find that lies at the bottom of all true
dandyism.  A little boy dressed up very fine, who puts his finger
in his mouth and takes to crying, if other boys make fun of him,
looks very silly.  But if he turns red in the face and knotty in
the fists, and makes an example of the biggest of his assailants,
throwing off his fine Leghorn and his thickly-buttoned jacket, if
necessary, to consummate the act of justice, his small toggery
takes on the splendors of the crested helmet that frightened
Astyanax.  You remember that the Duke said his dandy officers were
his best officers.  The "Sunday blood," the super-superb sartorial
equestrian of our annual Fast-day, is not imposing or dangerous.
But such fellows as Brummel and D'Orsay and Byron are not to be
snubbed quite so easily.  Look out for "la main de fer sous le gant
de velours," (which I printed in English the other day without
quotation-marks, thinking whether any SCARABAEUS CRITICUS would add
this to his globe and roll in glory with it into the newspapers, -
which he didn't do it, in the charming pleonasm of the London
language, and therefore I claim the sole merit of exposing the
same.)  A good many powerful and dangerous people have had a
decided dash of dandyism about them.  There was Alcibiades, the
"curled son of Clinias," an accomplished young man, but what would
be called a "swell" in these days.  There was Aristoteles, a very
distinguished writer, of whom you have heard, - a philosopher, in
short, whom it took centuries to learn, centuries to unlearn, and
is now going to take a generation or more to learn over again.
Regular dandy, he was.  So was Marcus Antonius; and though he lost
his game, he played for big stakes, and it wasn't his dandyism that
spoiled his chance.  Petrarca was not to be despised as a scholar
or a poet, but he was one of the same sort.  So was Sir Humphrey
Davy; so was Lord Palmerston, formerly, if I am not forgetful.
Yes, - a dandy is good for something as such; and dandies such as I
was just speaking of have rocked this planet like a cradle, - aye,
and left it swinging to this day. - Still, if I were you, I
wouldn't go to the tailor's, on the strength of these remarks, and
run up a long bill which will render pockets a superfluity in your
next suit.  ELEGANS "NASCITUR, NON FIT."  A man is born a dandy, as
he is born a poet.  There are heads that can't wear hats; there are
necks that can't fit cravats; there are jaws that can't fill out
collars - (Willis touched this last point in one of his earlier
ambrotypes, if I remember rightly); there are TOURNURES nothing can
humanize, and movements nothing can subdue to the gracious suavity
or elegant languor or stately serenity which belong to different
styles of dandyism.

We are forming an aristocracy, as you may observe, in this country,
- not a GRATIA-DEI, nor a JUREDIVINO one, - but a DE-FACTO upper
stratum of being, which floats over the turbid waves of common life
like the iridescent film you may have seen spreading over the water
about our wharves, - very splendid, though its origin may have been
tar, tallow, train-oil, or other such unctuous commodities.  I say,
then, we are forming an aristocracy; and, transitory as its
individual life often is, it maintains itself tolerably, as a
whole.  Of course, money is its corner-stone.  But now observe
this.  Money kept for two or three generations transforms a race, -
I don't mean merely in manners and hereditary culture, but in blood
and bone.  Money buys air and sunshine, in which children grow up
more kindly, of course, than in close, back streets; it buys
country-places to give them happy and healthy summers, good
nursing, good doctoring, and the best cuts of beef and mutton.
When the spring-chickens come to market - I beg your pardon, - that
is not what I was going to speak of.  As the young females of each
successive season come on, the finest specimens among them, other
things being equal, are apt to attract those who can afford the
expensive luxury of beauty.  The physical character of the next
generation rises in consequence.  It is plain that certain families
have in this way acquired an elevated type of face and figure, and
that in a small circle of city-connections one may sometimes find
models of both sexes which one of the rural counties would find it
hard to match from all its townships put together.  Because there
is a good deal of running down, of degeneration and waste of life,
among the richer classes, you must not overlook the equally obvious
fact I have just spoken of, - which in one or two generations more
will be, I think, much more patent than just now.

The weak point in our chryso-aristocracy is the same I have alluded
to in connection with cheap dandyism.  Its thorough manhood, its
high-caste gallantry, are not so manifest as the plate-glass of its
windows and the more or less legitimate heraldry of its coach-
panels.  It is very curious to observe of how small account
military folks are held among our Northern people.  Our young men
must gild their spurs, but they need not win them.  The equal
division of property keeps the younger sons of rich people above
the necessity of military service.  Thus the army loses an element
of refinement, and the moneyed upper class forgets what it is to
count heroism among its virtues.  Still I don't believe in any
aristocracy without pluck as its backbone.  Ours may show it when
the time comes, if it ever does come.

-  These United States furnish the greatest market for intellectual
GREEN FRUIT of all the places in the world.  I think so, at any
rate.  The demand for intellectual labor is so enormous and the
market so far from nice, that young talent is apt to fare like
unripe gooseberries, - get plucked to make a fool of.  Think of a
country which buys eighty thousand copies of the "Proverbial
Philosophy," while the author's admiring countrymen have been
buying twelve thousand!  How can one let his fruit hang in the sun
until it gets fully ripe, while there are eighty thousand such
hungry mouths ready to swallow it and proclaim its praises?
Consequently, there never was such a collection of crude pippins
and half-grown windfalls as our native literature displays among
its fruits.  There are literary green-groceries at every corner,
which will buy anything, from a button-pear to a pine-apple.  It
takes a long apprenticeship to train a whole people to reading and
writing.  The temptation of money and fame is too great for young
people.  Do I not remember that glorious moment when the late Mr. -
we won't say who, - editor of the - we won't say what, offered me
the sum of fifty cents PER double-columned quarto page for shaking
my young boughs over his foolscap apron?  Was it not an
intoxicating vision of gold and glory?  I should doubtless have
revelled in its wealth and splendor, but for learning that the
FIFTY CENTS was to be considered a rhetorical embellishment, and by
no means a literal expression of past fact or present intention.

-  Beware of making your moral staple consist of the negative
virtues.  It is good to abstain, and teach others to abstain, from
all that is sinful or hurtful.  But making a business of it leads
to emaciation of character, unless one feeds largely also on the
more nutritious diet of active sympathetic benevolence.

-  I don't believe one word of what you are saying, - spoke up the
angular female in black bombazine.

I am sorry you disbelieve it, Madam, - I said, and added softly to
my next neighbor, - but you prove it.

The young fellow sitting near me winked; and the divinity-student
said, in an undertone, - OPTIME DICTUM.

Your talking Latin, - said I, - reminds me of an odd trick of one
of my old tutors.  He read so much of that language, that his
English half turned into it.  He got caught in town, one hot
summer, in pretty close quarters, and wrote, or began to write, a
series of city pastorals.  Eclogues he called them, and meant to
have published them by subscription.  I remember some of his
verses, if you want to hear them. - You, Sir, (addressing myself to
the divinity-student,) and all such as have been through college,
or, what is the same thing, received an honorary degree, will
understand them without a dictionary.  The old man had a great deal
to say about "aestivation," as he called it, in opposition, as one
might say, to HIBERNATION.  Intramural aestivation, or town-life in
summer, he would say, is a peculiar form of suspended existence, or
semi-asphyxia.  One wakes up from it about the beginning of the
last week in September.  This is what I remember of his poem:-


AESTIVATION.

AN UNPUBLISHED POEM, BY MY LATE LATIN TUTOR

IN candent ire the solar splendor flames;
The foles, languescent, pend from arid rames;
His humid front the cive, anheling, wipes,
And dreams of erring on ventiferous ripes.

How dulce to vive occult to mortal eyes,
Dorm on the herb with none to supervise,
Carp the suave berries from the crescent vine,
And bibe the flow from longicaudate kine!

To me, alas! no verdurous visions come,
Save yon exiguous pool's conferva-scum, -
No concave vast repeats the tender hue
That laves my milk-jug with celestial blue!

Me wretched!  Let me curr to quercine shades
Effund your albid hausts, lactiferous maids!
Oh, might I vole to some umbrageous clump, -
Depart, - be off, - excede, - evade, - erump!


- I have lived by the sea-shore and by the mountains. - No, I am
not going to say which is best.  The one where your place is is the
best for you.  But this difference there is:  you can domesticate
mountains, but the sea is FERAE NATURAE.  You may have a hut, or
know the owner of one, on the mountain-side; you see a light half-
way up its ascent in the evening, and you know there is a home, and
you might share it.  You have noted certain trees, perhaps; you
know the particular zone where the hemlocks look so black in
October, when the maples and beeches have faded.  All its reliefs
and intaglios have electrotyped themselves in the medallions that
hang round the walls of your memory's chamber. - The sea remembers
nothing.  It is feline.  It licks your feet, - its huge flanks purr
very pleasantly for you; but it will crack your bones and eat you,
for all that, and wipe the crimsoned foam from its jaws as if
nothing had happened.  The mountains give their lost children
berries and water; the sea mocks their thirst and lets them die.
The mountains have a grand, stupid, lovable tranquillity; the sea
has a fascinating, treacherous intelligence.  The mountains lie
about like huge ruminants, their broad backs awful to look upon,
but safe to handle.  The sea smooths its silver scales until you
cannot see their joints, - but their shining is that of a snake's
belly, after all. - In deeper suggestiveness I find as great a
difference.  The mountains dwarf mankind and foreshorten the
procession of its long generations.  The sea drowns out humanity
and time; it has no sympathy with either; for it belongs to
eternity, and of that it sings its monotonous song forever and
ever.

Yet I should love to have a little box by the seashore.  I should
love to gaze out on the wild feline element from a front window of
my own, just as I should love to look on a caged panther, and see
it, stretch its shining length, and then curl over and lap its
smooth sides, and by-and-by begin to lash itself into rage and show
its white teeth and spring at its bars, and howl the cry of its
mad, but, to me, harmless fury. - And then, - to look at it with
that inward eye, - who does not love to shuffle off time and its
concerns, at intervals, - to forget who is President and who is
Governor, what race he belongs to, what language he speaks, which
golden-headed nail of the firmament his particular planetary system
is hung upon, and listen to the great liquid metronome as it beats
its solemn measure, steadily swinging when the solo or duet of
human life began, and to swing just as steadily after the human
chorus has died out and man is a fossil on its shores?

-  What should decide one, in choosing a summer residence? -
Constitution, first of all.  How much snow could you melt in an
hour, if you were planted in a hogshead of it?  Comfort is
essential to enjoyment.  All sensitive people should remember that
persons in easy circumstances suffer much more cold in summer -
that is, the warm half of the year - than in winter, or the other
half.  You must cut your climate to your constitution, as much as
your clothing to your shape.  After this, consult your taste and
convenient.  But if you would be happy in Berkshire, you must carry
mountains in your brain; and if you would enjoy Nahant, you must
have an ocean in your soul.  Nature plays at dominos with you; you
must match her piece, or she will never give it up to you.

- The schoolmistress said, in a rather mischievous way, that she
was afraid some minds or souls would be a little crowded, if they
took in the Rocky Mountains or the Atlantic.

Have you ever read the little book called "The Stars and the
Earth?" - said I. - Have you seen the Declaration of Independence
photographed in a surface that a fly's foot would cover?  The forms
or conditions of Time and Space, as Kant will tell you, are nothing
in themselves, - only our way of looking at things.  You are right,
I think, however, in recognizing the category of Space as being
quite as applicable to minds as to the outer world.  Every man of
reflection is vaguely conscious of an imperfectly-defined circle
which is drawn about his intellect.  He has a perfectly clear sense
that the fragments of his intellectual circle include the curves of
many other minds of which he is cognizant.  He often recognizes
these as manifestly concentric with his own, but of less radius.
On the other hand, when we find a portion of an are on the outside
of our own, we say it INTERSECTS ours, but are very slow to confess
or to see that it CIRCUMSCRIBES it.  Every now and then a man's
mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks
back to its former dimensions.  After looking at the Alps, I felt
that my mind had been stretched beyond the limits of its
elasticity, and fitted so loosely on my old ideas of space that I
had to spread these to fit it.

-  If I thought I should ever see the Alps! - said the
schoolmistress.

Perhaps you will, some time or other, - I said.

It is not very likely, - she answered. - I have had one or two
opportunities, but I had rather be anything than governess in a
rich family.

[Proud, too, you little soft-voiced woman!  Well, I can't say I
like you any the worse for it.  How long will school-keeping take
to kill you?  Is it possible the poor thing works with her needle,
too?  I don't like those marks on the side of her forefinger.

TABLEAU.  Chamouni.  Mont Blanc in full view.  Figures in the
foreground; two of them standing apart; one of them a gentleman of
- oh, - ah, - yes! the other a lady in a white cashmere, leaning on
his shoulder. - The ingenuous reader will understand that this was
an internal, private, personal, subjective diorama, seen for one
instant on the background of my own consciousness, and abolished
into black nonentity by the first question which recalled me to
actual life, as suddenly as if one of those iron shop-blinds (which
I always pass at dusk with a shiver, expecting to stumble over some
poor but honest shop-boy's head, just taken off by its sudden and
unexpected descent, and left outside upon the sidewalk) had come
down in front of it "by the run."]

- Should you like to hear what moderate wishes life brings one to
at last?  I used to be very ambitious, - wasteful, extravagant, and
luxurious in all my fancies.  Read too much in the "Arabian
Nights."  Must have the lamp, - couldn't do without the ring.
Exercise every morning on the brazen horse.  Plump down into
castles as full of little milk-white princesses as a nest is of
young sparrows.  All love me dearly at once. - Charming idea of
life, but too high-colored for the reality.  I have outgrown all
this; my tastes have become exceedingly primitive, - almost,
perhaps, ascetic.  We carry happiness into our condition, but must
not hope to find it there.  I think you will be willing to hear
some lines which embody the subdued and limited desires of my
maturity.


CONTENTMENT.

"Man wants but little here below."

LITTLE I ask, my wants are few;
I only wish a hut of stone,
(A VERY PLAIN brown stone will do,)
That I may call my own; -
And close at hand is such a one,
In yonder street that fronts the sun.

Plain food is quite enough for me;
Three courses are as good as ten; -
If Nature can subsist on three,
Thank heaven for three.  Amen!
I always thought cold victual nice; -
My CHOICE would be vanilla-ice.

I care not much for gold or land; -
Give me a mortgage here and there, -
Some good bank-stock, - some note of hand,
Or trifling railroad share; -
I only ask that Fortune send
A LITTLE more than I shall spend.

Honors are silly toys, I know,
And titles are but empty names; -
I would, PERHAPS, be Plenipo, -
But only near St. James; -
I'm very sure I should not care
To fill our Gubernator's chair.

Jewels are baubles; 'tis a sin
To care for such unfruitful things; -
One good-sized diamond in a pin, -
Some, NOT SO LARGE, in rings, -
A ruby and a pearl, or so,
Will do for me; - I laugh at show.

My dame should dress in cheap attire;
(Good, heavy silks are never dear;) -
I own perhaps I MIGHT desire
Some shawls of true cashmere, -
Some marrowy crapes of China silk,
Like wrinkled skins on scalded milk.

I would not have the horse I drive
So fast that folks must stop and stare
An easy gait - two, forty-five -
Suits me; I do not care; -
Perhaps, for just a SINGLE SPURT,
Some seconds less would do no hurt.

Of pictures, I should like to own
Titians and Raphaels three or four, -
I love so much their style and tone, -
One Turner, and no more, -
(A landscape, - foreground golden dirt
The sunshine painted with a squirt.)

Of books but few, - some fifty score
For daily use, and bound for wear;
The rest upon an upper floor; -
Some LITTLE luxury THERE
Of red morocco's gilded gleam,
And vellum rich as country cream.

Busts, cameos, gems, - such things as these,
Which others often show for pride,
I value for their power to please,
And selfish churls deride; -
ONE Stradivarius, I confess,
TWO Meerschaums, I would fain possess.

Wealth's wasteful tricks I will not learn,
Nor ape the glittering upstart fool; -
Shall not carved tables serve my turn,
But ALL must be of buhl?
Give grasping pomp its double share, -
I ask but ONE recumbent chair.

Thus humble let me live and die,
Nor long for Midas' golden touch,
If Heaven more generous gifts deny,
I shall not miss them MUCH, -
Too grateful for the blessing lent
Of simple tastes and mind content!


MY LAST WALK WITH THE SCHOOLMISTRESS.
(A PARENTHESIS.)

I can't say just how many walks she and I had taken together before
this one.  I found the effect of going out every morning was
decidedly favorable on her health.  Two pleasing dimples, the
places for which were just marked when she came, played, shadowy,
in her freshening cheeks when she smiled and nodded good-morning to
me from the school-house-steps.

I am afraid I did the greater part of the talking.  At any rate, if
I should try to report all that I said during the first half-dozen
walks we took together, I fear that I might receive a gentle hint
from my friends the publishers, that a separate volume, at my own
risk and expense, would be the proper method of bringing them
before the public.

- I would have a woman as true as Death.  At the first real lie
which works from the heart outward, she should be tenderly
chloroformed into a better world, where she can have an angel for a
governess, and feed on strange fruits which will make her all over
again, even to her bones and marrow. - Whether gifted with the
accident of beauty or not, she should have been moulded in the
rose-red clay of Love, before the breath of life made a moving
mortal of her.  Love-capacity is a congenital endowment; and I
think, after a while, one gets to know the warm-hued natures it
belongs to from the pretty pipe-clay counterfeits of them. - Proud
she may be, in the sense of respecting herself; but pride in the
sense of contemning others less gifted than herself, deserves the
two lowest circles of a vulgar woman's Inferno, where the
punishments are Smallpox and Bankruptcy. - She who nips off the end
of a brittle courtesy, as one breaks the tip of an icicle, to
bestow upon those whom she ought cordially and kindly to recognize,
proclaims the fact that she comes not merely of low blood, but of
bad blood.  Consciousness of unquestioned position makes people
gracious in proper measure to all; but if a woman puts on airs with
her real equals, she has something about herself or her family she
is ashamed of, or ought to be.  Middle, and more than middle-aged
people, who know family histories, generally see through it.  An
official of standing was rude to me once.  Oh, that is the maternal
grandfather, - said a wise old friend to me, - he was a boor. -
Better too few words, from the woman we love, than too many:  while
she is silent, Nature is working for her; while she talks, she is
working for herself. - Love is sparingly soluble in the words of
men; therefore they speak much of it; but one syllable of woman's
speech can dissolve more of it than a man's heart can hold.

-  Whether I said any or all of these things to the schoolmistress,
or not, - whether I stole them out of Lord Bacon, - whether I
cribbed them from Balzac, - whether I dipped them from the ocean of
Tupperian wisdom, - or whether I have just found them in my head,
laid there by that solemn fowl, Experience, (who, according to my
observation, cackles oftener than she drops real live eggs,) I
cannot say.  Wise men have said more foolish things, - and foolish
men, I don't doubt, have said as wise things.  Anyhow, the
schoolmistress and I had pleasant walks and long talks, all of
which I do not feel bound to report.

- You are a stranger to me, Ma'am. - I don't doubt you would like
to know all I said to the schoolmistress. - I sha'n't do it; - I
had rather get the publishers to return the money you have invested
in this.  Besides, I have forgotten a good deal of it.  I shall
tell only what I like of what I remember.

-  My idea was, in the first place, to search out the picturesque
spots which the city affords a sight of, to those who have eyes.  I
know a good many, and it was a pleasure to look at them in company
with my young friend.  There were the shrubs and flowers in the
Franklin-Place front-yards or borders; Commerce is just putting his
granite foot upon them.  Then there are certain small seraglio-
gardens, into which one can get a peep through the crevices of high
fences, - one in Myrtle Street, or backing on it, - here and there
one at the North and South Ends.  Then the great elms in Essex
Street.  Then the stately horse-chestnuts in that vacant lot in
Chambers Street, which hold their outspread hands over your head,
(as I said in my poem the other day,) and look as if they were
whispering, "May grace, mercy, and peace be with you!" - and the
rest of that benediction.  Nay, there are certain patches of
ground, which, having lain neglected for a time, Nature, who always
has her pockets full of seeds, and holes in all her pockets, has
covered with hungry plebeian growths, which fight for life with
each other, until some of them get broad-leaved and succulent, and
you have a coarse vegetable tapestry which Raphael would not have
disdained to spread over the foreground of his masterpiece.  The
Professor pretends that he found such a one in Charles Street,
which, in its dare-devil impudence of rough-and-tumble vegetation,
beat the pretty-behaved flower-beds of the Public Garden as
ignominiously as a group of young tatterdemalions playing pitch-
and-toss beats a row of Sunday-school-boys with their teacher at
their head.

But then the Professor has one of his burrows in that region, and
puts everything in high colors relating to it.  That is his way
about everything.  I hold any man cheap, - he said, - of whom
nothing stronger can be uttered than that all his geese are swans.
- How is that, Professor? - said I; - I should have set you down
for one of that sort. - Sir, - said he, - I am proud to say, that
Nature has so far enriched me, that I cannot own so much as a duck
without seeing in it as pretty a swan as ever swam the basin in the
garden of the Luxembourg.  And the Professor showed the whites of
his eyes devoutly, like one returning thanks after a dinner of many
courses.

I don't know anything sweeter than this leaking in of Nature
through all the cracks in the walls and floors of cities.  You heap
up a million tons of hewn rocks on a square mile or two of earth
which was green once.  The trees look down from the hill-sides and
ask each other, as they stand on tiptoe, - "What are these people
about?"  And the small herbs at their feet look up and whisper
back, - "We will go and see."  So the small herbs pack themselves
up in the least possible bundles, and wait until the wind steals to
them at night and whispers, "Come with me."  Then they go softly
with it into the great city, - one to a cleft in the pavement, one
to a spout on the roof, one to a seam in the marbles over a rich
gentleman's bones, and one to the grave without a stone where
nothing but a man is buried, - and there they grow, looking down on
the generations of men from mouldy roofs, looking up from between
the less-trodden pavements, looking out through iron cemetery-
railings.  Listen to them, when there is only a light breath
stirring, and you will hear them saying to each other, - "Wait
awhile!"  The words run along the telegraph of those narrow green
lines that border the roads leading from the city, until they reach
the slope of the hills, and the trees repeat in low murmurs to each
other, - "Wait awhile!"  By-and-by the flow of life in the streets
ebbs, and the old leafy inhabitants - the smaller tribes always in
front - saunter in, one by one, very careless seemingly, but very
tenacious, until they swarm so that the great stones gape from each
other with the crowding of their roots, and the feldspar begins to
be picked out of the granite to find them food.  At last the trees
take up their solemn line of march, and never rest until they have
encamped in the market-place.  Wait long enough and you will find
an old doting oak hugging a huge worn block in its yellow
underground arms; that was the cornerstone of the State-House.  Oh,
so patient she is, this imperturbable Nature!

- Let us cry! -

But all this has nothing to do with my walks and talks with the
schoolmistress.  I did not say that I would not tell you something
about them.  Let me alone, and I shall talk to you more than I
ought to, probably.  We never tell our secrets to people that pump
for them.

Books we talked about, and education.  It was her duty to know
something of these, and of course she did.  Perhaps I was somewhat
more learned than she, but I found that the difference between her
reading and mine was like that of a man's and a woman's dusting a
library.  The man flaps about with a bunch of feathers; the woman
goes to work softly with a cloth.  She does not raise half the
dust, nor fill her own eyes and mouth with it, - but she goes into
all the corners, and attends to the leaves as much as the covers. -
Books are the NEGATIVE pictures of thought, and the more sensitive
the mind that receives their images, the more nicely the finest
lines are reproduced.  A woman, (of the right kind,) reading after
a man, follows him as Ruth followed the reapers of Boaz, and her
gleanings are often the finest of the wheat.

But it was in talking of Life that we came most clearly together.
I thought I knew something about that, - that I could speak or
write about it somewhat to the purpose.

To take up this fluid earthly being of ours as a sponge sucks up
water, - to be steeped and soaked in its realities as a hide fills
its pores lying seven years in a tan-pit, - to have winnowed every
wave of it as a mill-wheel works up the stream that runs through
the flume upon its float-boards, - to have curled up in the keenest
spasms and flattened out in the laxest languors of this breathing-
sickness, which keeps certain parcels of matter uneasy for three or
four score years, - to have fought all the devils and clasped all
the angels of its delirium, - and then, just at the point when the
white-hot passions have cooled down to cherry-red, plunge our
experience into the ice-cold stream of some human language or
other, one might think would end in a rhapsody with something of
spring and temper in it.  All this I thought my power and province.

The schoolmistress had tried life, too.  Once in a while one meets
with a single soul greater than all the living pageant which passes
before it.  As the pale astronomer sits in his study with sunken
eyes and thin fingers, and weighs Uranus or Neptune as in a
balance, so there are meek, slight women who have weighed all which
this planetary life can offer, and hold it like a bauble in the
palm of their slender hands.  This was one of them.  Fortune had
left her, sorrow had baptized her; the routine of labor and the
loneliness of almost friendless city-life were before her.  Yet, as
I looked upon her tranquil face, gradually regaining a cheerfulness
which was often sprightly, as she became interested in the various
matters we talked about and places we visited, I saw that eye and
lip and every shifting lineament were made for love, - unconscious
of their sweet office as yet, and meeting the cold aspect of Duty
with the natural graces which were meant for the reward of nothing
less than the Great Passion.

- I never addressed one word of love to the schoolmistress in the
course of these pleasant walks.  It seemed to me that we talked of
everything but love on that particular morning.  There was,
perhaps, a little more timidity and hesitancy on my part than I
have commonly shown among our people at the boarding-house.  In
fact, I considered myself the master at the breakfast-table; but,
somehow, I could not command myself just then so well as usual.
The truth is, I had secured a passage to Liverpool in the steamer
which was to leave at noon, - with the condition, however, of being
released in case circumstances occurred to detain me.  The
schoolmistress knew nothing about all this, of course, as yet.

It was on the Common that we were walking.  The MALL, or boulevard
of our Common, you know, has various branches leading from it in
different directions.  One of these runs down from opposite Joy
Street southward across the whole length of the Common to Boylston
Street.  We called it the long path, and were fond of it.

I felt very weak indeed (though of a tolerably robust habit) as we
came opposite the head of this path on that morning.  I think I
tried to speak twice without making myself distinctly audible.  At
last I got out the question, - Will you take the long path with me?
- Certainly, - said the schoolmistress, - with much pleasure. -
Think, - I said, - before you answer; if you take the long path
with me now, I shall interpret it that we are to part no more! -
The schoolmistress stepped back with a sudden movement, as if an
arrow had struck her.

One of the long granite blocks used as seats was hard by, - the one
you may still see close by the Gingko-tree. - Pray, sit down, - I
said. - No, no, she answered, softly, - I will walk the LONG PATH
with you!

- The old gentleman who sits opposite met us walking, arm in arm,
about the middle of the long path, and said, very charmingly, -
"Good morning, my dears!"



CHAPTER XII.



[I DID not think it probable that I should have a great many more
talks with our company, and therefore I was anxious to get as much
as I could into every conversation.  That is the reason why you
will find some odd, miscellaneous facts here, which I wished to
tell at least once, as I should not have a chance to tell them
habitually at our breakfast-table. - We're very free and easy, you
know; we don't read what we don't like.  Our parish is so large,
one can't pretend to preach to all the pews at once.  One can't be
all the time trying to do the best of one's best if a company works
a steam fire-engine, the firemen needn't be straining themselves
all day to squirt over the top of the flagstaff.  Let them wash
some of those lower-story windows a little.  Besides, there is no
use in our quarrelling now, as you will find out when you get
through this paper.]

- Travel, according to my experience, does not exactly correspond
to the idea one gets of it out of most books of travels.  I am
thinking of travel as it was when I made the Grand Tour, especially
in Italy.  Memory is a net; one finds it full of fish when he takes
it from the brook; but a dozen miles of water have run through it
without sticking.  I can prove some facts about travelling by a
story or two.  There are certain principles to be assumed, - such
as these:- He who is carried by horses must deal with rogues. - To-
day's dinner subtends a larger visual angle than yesterday's
revolution.  A mote in my eye is bigger to me than the biggest of
Dr. Gould's private planets. - Every traveller is a self-taught
entomologist. - Old jokes are dynamometers of mental tension; an
old joke tells better among friends travelling than at home, -
which shows that their minds are in a state of diminished, rather
than increased vitality.  There was a story about "strahps to your
pahnts," which was vastly funny to us fellows - on the road from
Milan to Venice. - CAELUM, NON ANIMUM, - travellers change their
guineas, but not their characters.  The bore is the same, eating
dates under the cedars of Lebanon, as over a plate of baked beans
in Beacon Street. - Parties of travellers have a morbid instinct
for "establishing raws" upon each other. - A man shall sit down
with his friend at the foot of the Great Pyramid and they will take
up the question they had been talking about under "the great elm,"
and forget all about Egypt.  When I was crossing the Po, we were
all fighting about the propriety of one fellow's telling another
that his argument was ABSURD; one maintaining it to be a perfectly
admissible logical term, as proved by the phrase "reductio ad
absurdum;" the rest badgering him as a conversational bully.
Mighty little we troubled ourselves for PADUS, the Po, "a river
broader and more rapid than the Rhone," and the times when Hannibal
led his grim Africans to its banks, and his elephants thrust their
trunks into the yellow waters over which that pendulum ferry-boat
was swinging back and forward every ten minutes!

- Here are some of those reminiscences, with morals prefixed, or
annexed, or implied.

Lively emotions very commonly do not strike us full in front, but
obliquely from the side; a scene or incident in UNDRESS often
affects us more than one in full costume.


"Is this the mighty ocean? - is this all?"


says the Princess in Gebir.  The rush that should have flooded my
soul in the Coliseum did not come.  But walking one day in the
fields about the city, I stumbled over a fragment of broken
masonry, and lo! the World's Mistress in her stone girdle - ALTA
MAENIA ROMAE - rose before me and whitened my cheek with her pale
shadow as never before or since.

I used very often, when coming home from my morning's work at one
of the public institutions of Paris, to stop in at the dear old
church of St. Etienne du Mont.  The tomb of St. Genevieve,
surrounded by burning candles and votive tablets, was there; the
mural tablet of Jacobus Benignus Winslow was there; there was a
noble organ with carved figures; the pulpit was borne on the oaken
shoulders of a stooping Samson; and there was a marvellous
staircase like a coil of lace.  These things I mention from memory,
but not all of them together impressed me so much as an inscription
on a small slab of marble fixed in one of the walls.  It told how
this church of St. Stephen was repaired and beautified in the year
16**, and how, during the celebration of its reopening, two girls
of the parish (FILLES DE LA PAROISSE) fell from the gallery,
carrying a part of the balustrade with them, to the pavement, but
by a miracle escaped uninjured.  Two young girls, nameless, but
real presences to my imagination, as much as when they came
fluttering down on the tiles with a cry that outscreamed the
sharpest treble in the Te Deum.  (Look at Carlyle's article on
Boswell, and see how he speaks of the poor young woman Johnson
talked with in the streets one evening.)  All the crowd gone but
these two "filles de la paroisse," - gone as utterly as the dresses
they wore, as the shoes that were on their feet, as the bread and
meat that were in the market on that day.

Not the great historical events, but the personal incidents that
call up single sharp pictures of some human being in its pang or
struggle, reach us most nearly.  I remember the platform at Berne,
over the parapet of which Theobald Weinzapfli's restive horse
sprung with him and landed him more than a hundred feet beneath in
the lower town, not dead, but sorely broken, and no longer a wild
youth, but God's servant from that day forward.  I have forgotten
the famous bears, and all else. - I remember the Percy lion on the
bridge over the little river at Alnwick, - the leaden lion with his
tail stretched out straight like a pump-handle, - and why?  Because
of the story of the village boy who must fain bestride the leaden
tail, standing out over the water, - which breaking, he dropped
into the stream far below, and was taken out an idiot for the rest
of his life.

Arrow-heads must be brought to a sharp point, and the guillotine-
axe must have a slanting edge.  Something intensely human, narrow,
and definate pierces to the seat of our sensibilities more readily
than huge occurrences and catastrophes.  A nail will pick a lock
that defies hatchet and hammer.  "The Royal George" went down with
all her crew, and Cowper wrote an exquisitely simple poem about it;
but the leaf which holds it is smooth, while that which bears the
lines on his mother's portrait is blistered with tears.

My telling these recollections sets me thinking of others of the
same kind which strike the imagination, especially when one is
still young.  You remember the monument in Devizes market to the
woman struck dead with a lie in her mouth.  I never saw that, but
it is in the books.  Here is one I never heard mentioned; - if any
of the "Note and Query" tribe can tell the story, I hope they will.
Where is this monument?  I was riding on an English stage-coach
when we passed a handsome marble column (as I remember it) of
considerable size and pretensions. - What is that? - I said. -
That, - answered the coachman, - is THE HANGMAN'S PILLAR.  Then he
told me how a man went out one night, many years ago, to steal
sheep.  He caught one, tied its legs together, passed the rope over
his head, and started for home.  In climbing a fence, the rope
slipped, caught him by the neck, and strangled him.  Next morning
he was found hanging dead on one side of the fence and the sheep on
the other; in memory whereof the lord of the manor caused this
monument to be erected as a warning to all who love mutton better
than virtue.  I will send a copy of this record to him or her who
shall first set me right about this column and its locality.

And telling over these old stories reminds me that I have something
which may interest architects and perhaps some other persons.  I
once ascended the spire of Strasburg Cathedral, which is the
highest, I think, in Europe.  It is a shaft of stone filigree-work,
frightfully open, so that the guide puts his arms behind you to
keep you from falling.  To climb it is a noonday nightmare, and to
think of having climbed it crisps all the fifty-six joints of one's
twenty digits.  While I was on it, "pinnacled dim in the intense
inane," a strong wind was blowing, and I felt sure that the spire
was rocking.  It swayed back and forward like a stalk of rye or a
cat-o'nine-tails (bulrush) with a bobolink on it.  I mentioned it
to the guide, and he said that the spire did really swing back and
forward, - I think he said some feet.

Keep any line of knowledge ten years and some other line will
intersect it.  Long afterwards I was hunting out a paper of
Dumeril's in an old journal, - the "Magazin Encyclopedique" for
L'AN TROISIEME, (1795,) when I stumbled upon a brief article on the
vibrations of the spire of Strasburg Cathedral.  A man can shake it
so that the movement shall be shown in a vessel of water nearly
seventy feet below the summit, and higher up the vibration is like
that of an earthquake.  I have seen one of those wretched wooden
spires with which we very shabbily finish some of our stone
churches (thinking that the lidless blue eye of heaven cannot tell
the counterfeit we try to pass on it,) swinging like a reed, in a
wind, but one would hardly think of such a thing's happening in a
stone spire.  Does the Bunker-Hill Monument bend in the blast like
a blade of grass?  I suppose so.

You see, of course, that I am talking in a cheap way; - perhaps we
will have some philosophy by and by; - let me work out this thin
mechanical vein. - I have something more to say about trees.  I
have brought down this slice of hemlock to show you.  Tree blew
down in my woods (that were) in 1852.  Twelve feet and a half
round, fair girth; - nine feet, where I got my section, higher up.
This is a wedge, going to the centre, of the general shape of a
slice of apple-pie in a large and not opulent family.  Length,
about eighteen inches.  I have studied the growth of this tree by
its rings, and it is curious.  Three hundred and forty-two rings.
Started, therefore, about 1510.  The thickness of the rings tells
the rate at which it grew.  For five or six years the rate was
slow, - then rapid for twenty years.  A little before the year 1550
it began to grow very slowly, and so continued for about seventy
years.  In 1620 it took a new start and grew fast until 1714 then
for the most part slowly until 1786, when it started again and grew
pretty well and uniformly until within the last dozen years, when
it seems to have got on sluggishly.

Look here.  Here are some human lives laid down against the periods
of its growth, to which they corresponded.  This is Shakspeare's.
The tree was seven inches in diameter when he was born; ten inches
when he died.  A little less than ten inches when Milton was born;
seventeen when he died.  Then comes a long interval, and this
thread marks out Johnson's life, during which the tree increased
from twenty-two to twenty-nine inches in diameter.  Here is the
span of Napoleon's career; - the tree doesn't seem to have minded
it.

I never saw the man yet who was not startled at looking on this
section.  I have seen many wooden preachers, - never one like this.
How much more striking would be the calendar counted on the rings
of one of those awful trees which were standing when Christ was on
earth, and where that brief mortal life is chronicled with the
stolid apathy of vegetable being, which remembers all human history
as a thing of yesterday in its own dateless existence!

I have something more to say about elms.  A relative tells me there
is one of great glory in Andover, near Bradford.  I have some
recollections of the former place, pleasant and other.  [I wonder
if the old Seminary clock strikes as slowly as it used to.  My
room-mate thought, when he first came, it was the bell tolling
deaths, and people's ages, as they do in the country.  He swore -
(ministers' sons get so familiar with good words that they are apt
to handle them carelessly) - that the children were dying by the
dozen, of all ages, from one to twelve, and ran off next day in
recess, when it began to strike eleven, but was caught before the
clock got through striking.]  At the foot of "the hill," down in
town, is, or was, a tidy old elm, which was said to have been
hooped with iron to protect it from Indian tomahawks, (CREDAT
HAHNEMANNUS,) and to have grown round its hoops and buried them in
its wood.  Of course, this is not the tree my relative means.

Also, I have a very pretty letter from Norwich, in Connecticut,
telling me of two noble elms which are to be seen in that town.
One hundred and twenty-seven feet from bough-end to bough-end!
What do you say to that?  And gentle ladies beneath it, that love
it and celebrate its praises!  And that in a town of such supreme,
audacious, Alpine loveliness as Norwich! - Only the dear people
there must learn to call it Norridge, and not be misled by the mere
accident of spelling.

NorWICH.
PorCHmouth.
CincinnatAH.

What a sad picture of our civilization!

I did not speak to you of the great tree on what used to be the
Colman farm, in Deerfield, simply because I had not seen it for
many years, and did not like to trust my recollection.  But I had
it in memory, and even noted down, as one of the finest trees in
symmetry and beauty I had ever seen.  I have received a document,
signed by two citizens of a neighboring town, certified by the
postmaster and a selectman, and these again corroborated,
reinforced, and sworn to by a member of that extraordinary college-
class to which it is the good fortune of my friend the Professor to
belong, who, though he has FORMERLY been a member of Congress, is,
I believe, fully worthy of confidence.  The tree "girts" eighteen
and a half feet, and spreads over a hundred, and is a real beauty.
I hope to meet my friend under its branches yet; if we don't have
"youth at the prow," we will have "pleasure at the 'elm."

And just now, again, I have got a letter about some grand willows
in Maine, and another about an elm in Wayland, but too late for
anything but thanks.

[And this leads me to say, that I have received a great many
communications, in prose and verse since I began printing these
notes.  The last came this very morning, in the shape of a neat and
brief poem, from New Orleans.  I could not make any of them public,
though sometimes requested to do so.  Some of them have given me
great pleasure, and encouraged me to believe I had friends whose
faces I had never seen.  If you are pleased with anything a writer
says, and doubt whether to tell him of it, do not hesitate; a
pleasant word is a cordial to one, who perhaps thinks he is tiring
you, and so becomes tired himself.  I purr very loud over a good,
honest letter that says pretty things to me.]

- Sometimes very young persons send communications which they want
forwarded to editors; and these young persons do not always seem to
have right conceptions of these same editors, and of the public,
and of themselves.  Here is a letter I wrote to one of these young
folks, but, on the whole, thought it best not to send.  It is not
fair to single out one for such sharp advice, where there are
hundreds that are in need of it.


DEAR SIR, - You seem to be somewhat, but not a great deal, wiser
than I was at your age.  I don't wish to be understood as saying
too much, for I think, without committing myself to any opinion on
my present state, that I was not a Solomon at that stage of
development.

You long to "leap at a single bound into celebrity."  Nothing is so
common-place as to wish to be remarkable.  Fame usually comes to
those who are thinking about something else, - very rarely to those
who say to themselves, "Go to, now, let us be a celebrated
individual!"  The struggle for fame, as such, commonly ends in
notoriety; - that ladder is easy to climb, but it leads to the
pillory which is crowded with fools who could not hold their
tongues and rogues who could not hide their tricks.

If you have the consciousness of genius, do something to show it.
The world is pretty quick, nowadays, to catch the flavor of true
originality; if you write anything remarkable, the magazines and
newspapers will find you out, as the school-boys find out where the
ripe apples and pears are.  Produce anything really good, and an
intelligent editor will jump at it.  Don't flatter yourself that
any article of yours is rejected because you are unknown to fame.
Nothing pleases an editor more than to get anything worth having
from a new hand.  There is always a dearth of really fine articles
for a first-rate journal; for, of a hundred pieces received, ninety
are at or below the sea-level; some have water enough, but no head;
some head enough, but no water; only two or three are from full
reservoirs, high up that hill which is so hard to climb.

You may have genius.  The contrary is of course probable, but it is
not demonstrated.  If you have, the world wants you more than you
want it.  It has not only a desire, but a passion, for every spark
of genius that shows itself among us; there is not a bull-calf in
our national pasture that can bleat a rhyme but it is ten to one,
among his friends, and no takers, that he is the real, genuine, no-
mistake Osiris.

QU'EST CE QU'IL A FAIT?  What has he done?  That was Napoleon's
test.  What have you done?  Turn up the faces of your picture-
cards, my boy!  You need not make mouths at the public because it
has not accepted you at your own fancy-valuation.  Do the prettiest
thing you can and wait your time.

For the verses you send me, I will not say they are hopeless, and I
dare not affirm that they show promise.  I am not an editor, but I
know the standard of some editors.  You must not expect to "leap
with a single bound" into the society of those whom it is not
flattery to call your betters.  When "The Pactolian" has paid you
for a copy of verses, - (I can furnish you a list of alliterative
signatures, beginning with Annie Aureole and ending with Zoe
Zenith,) - when "The Rag-bag" has stolen your piece, after
carefully scratching your name out, - when "The Nut-cracker" has
thought you worth shelling, and strung the kernel of your cleverest
poem, - then, and not till then, you may consider the presumption
against you, from the fact of your rhyming tendency, as called in
question, and let our friends hear from you, if you think it worth
while.  You may possibly think me too candid, and even accuse me of
incivility; but let me assure you that I am not half so plain-
spoken as Nature, nor half so rude as Time.  If you prefer the long
jolting of public opinion to the gentle touch of friendship, try it
like a man.  Only remember this, - that, if a bushel of potatoes is
shaken in a market-cart without springs to it, the small potatoes
always get to the bottom.  Believe me, etc., etc.


I always think of verse-writers, when I am in this vein; for these
are by far the most exacting, eager, self-weighing, restless,
querulous, unreasonable literary persons one is like to meet with.
Is a young man in the habit of writing verses?  Then the
presumption is that he is an inferior person.  For, look you, there
are at least nine chances in ten that he writes POOR verses.  Now
the habit of chewing on rhymes without sense and soul to match them
is, like that of using any other narcotic, at once a proof of
feebleness and a debilitating agent.  A young man can get rid of
the presumption against him afforded by his writing verses only by
convincing us that they are verses worth writing.

All this sounds hard and rough, but, observe, it is not addressed
to any individual, and of course does not refer to any reader of
these pages.  I would always treat any given young person passing
through the meteoric showers which rain down on the brief period of
adolescence with great tenderness.  God forgive us if we ever speak
harshly to young creatures on the strength of these ugly truths,
and so sooner or later, smite some tender-souled poet or poetess on
the lips who might have sung the world into sweet trances, had we
not silenced the matin-song in its first low breathings!  Just as
my heart yearns over the unloved, just so it sorrows for the
ungifted who are doomed to the pangs of an undeceived self-
estimate.  I have always tried to be gentle with the most hopeless
cases.  My experience, however, has not been encouraging.

- X. Y., aet. 18, a cheaply-got-up youth, with narrow jaws, and
broad, bony, cold, red hands, having been laughed at by the girls
in his village, and "got the mitten" (pronounced mittIn) two or
three times, falls to souling and controlling, and youthing and
truthing, in the newspapers.  Sends me some strings of verses,
candidates for the Orthopedic Infirmary, all of them, in which I
learn for the millionth time one of the following facts:  either
that something about a chime is sublime, or that something about
time is sublime, or that something about a chime is concerned with
time, or that something about a rhyme is sublime or concerned with
time or with a chime.  Wishes my opinion of the same, with advice
as to his future course.

What shall I do about it?  Tell him the whole truth, and send him a
ticket of admission to the Institution for Idiots and Feeble-minded
Youth?  One doesn't like to be cruel, - and yet one hates to lie.
Therefore one softens down the ugly central fact of donkeyism, -
recommends study of good models, - that writing verse should be an
incidental occupation only, not interfering with the hoe, the
needle, the lapstone, or the ledger, - and, above all that there
should be no hurry in printing what is written.  Not the least use
in all this.  The poetaster who has tasted type is done for.  He is
like the man who has once been a candidate for the Presidency.  He
feeds on the madder of his delusion all his days, and his very
bones grow red with the glow of his foolish fancy.  One of these
young brains is like a bunch of India crackers; once touch fire to
it and it is best to keep hands off until it has done popping, - if
it ever stops.  I have two letters on file; one is a pattern of
adulation, the other of impertinence.  My reply to the first,
containing the best advice I could give, conveyed in courteous
language, had brought out the second.  There was some sport in
this, but Dulness is not commonly a game fish, and only sulks after
he is struck.  You may set it down as a truth which admits of few
exceptions, that those who ask your OPINION really want your
PRAISE, and will be contented with nothing less.

There is another kind of application to which editors, or those
supposed to have access to them, are liable, and which often proves
trying and painful.  One is appealed to in behalf of some person in
needy circumstances who wishes to make a living by the pen.  A
manuscript accompanying the letter is offered for publication.  It
is not commonly brilliant, too often lamentably deficient.  If
Rachel's saying is true, that "fortune is the measure of
intelligence," then poverty is evidence of limited capacity which
it too frequently proves to be, notwithstanding a noble exception
here and there.  Now an editor is a person under a contract with
the public to furnish them with the best things he can afford for
his money.  Charity shown by the publication of an inferior article
would be like the generosity of Claude Duval and the other
gentlemen highwaymen, who pitied the poor so much they robbed the
rich to have the means of relieving them.

Though I am not and never was an editor, I know something of the
trials to which they are submitted.  They have nothing to do but to
develope enormous calluses at every point of contact with
authorship.  Their business is not a matter of sympathy, but of
intellect.  They must reject the unfit productions of those whom
they long to befriend, because it would be a profligate charity to
accept them.  One cannot burn his house down to warm the hands even
of the fatherless and the widow.


THE PROFESSOR UNDER CHLOROFORM.

- You haven't heard about my friend the Professor's first
experiment in the use of anaesthetics, have you?

He was mightily pleased with the reception of that poem of his
about the chaise.  He spoke to me once or twice about another poem
of similar character he wanted to read me, which I told him I would
listen to and criticize.

One day, after dinner, he came in with his face tied up, looking
very red in the cheeks and heavy about the eyes. - Hy'r'ye? - he
said, and made for an arm-chair, in which he placed first his hat
and then his person, going smack through the crown of the former as
neatly as they do the trick at the circus.  The Professor jumped at
the explosion as if he had sat down on one of those small CALTHROPS
our grandfathers used to sow round in the grass when there were
Indians about, - iron stars, each ray a rusty thorn an inch and a
half long, - stick through moccasins into feet, - cripple 'em on
the spot, and give 'em lockjaw in a day or two.

At the same time he let off one of those big words which lie at the
bottom of the best man's vocabulary, but perhaps never turn up in
his life, - just as every man's hair MAY stand on end, but in most
men it never does.

After he had got calm, he pulled out a sheet or two of manuscript,
together with a smaller scrap, on which, as he said, he had just
been writing an introduction or prelude to the main performance.  A
certain suspicion had come into my mind that the Professor was not
quite right, which was confirmed by the way he talked; but I let
him begin.  This is the way he read it:-

PRELUDE.

I'M the fellah that tole one day
The tale of the won'erful one-hoss-shay.
Wan' to hear another?  Say.
- Funny, wasn'it?  Made ME laugh, -
I'm too modest, I am, by half, -
Made me laugh'S THOUGH I SH'D SPLIT, -
Cahn' a fellah like fellah's own wit? -
- Fellahs keep sayin', - "Well, now that's nice;
Did it once, but cahn' do it twice." -
Don' you b'lieve the'z no more fat;
Lots in the kitch'n 'z good 'z that.
Fus'-rate throw, 'n' no mistake, -
Han' us the props for another shake; -
Know I'll try, 'n' guess I'll win;
Here sh' goes for hit 'm ag'in!

Here I thought it necessary to interpose. - Professor, - I said, -
you are inebriated.  The style of what you call your "Prelude"
shows that it was written under cerebral excitement.  Your
articulation is confused.  You have told me three times in
succession, in exactly the same words, that I was the only true
friend you had in the world that you would unbutton your heart to.
You smell distinctly and decidedly of spirits. - I spoke, and
paused; tender, but firm.

Two large tears orbed themselves beneath the Professor's lids, - in
obedience to the principle of gravitation celebrated in that
delicious bit of bladdery bathos, "The very law that moulds a
tear," with which the "Edinburgh Review" attempted to put down
Master George Gordon when that young man was foolishly trying to
make himself conspicuous.

One of these tears peeped over the edge of the lid until it lost
its balance, - slid an inch and waited for reinforcements, -
swelled again, - rolled down a little further, - stopped, - moved
on, - and at last fell on the back of the Professor's hand.  He
held it up for me to look at, and lifted his eyes, brimful, till
they met mine.

I couldn't stand it, - I always break down when folks cry in my
face, - so I hugged him, and said he was a dear old boy, and asked
him kindly what was the matter with him, and what made him smell so
dreadfully strong of spirits.

Upset his alcohol lamp, - he said, - and spilt the alcohol on his
legs.  That was it. - But what had he been doing to get his head
into such a state? - had he really committed an excess?  What was
the matter? - Then it came out that he had been taking chloroform
to have a tooth out, which had left him in a very queer state, in
which he had written the "Prelude" given above, and under the
influence of which he evidently was still.

I took the manuscript from his hands and read the following
continuation of the lines he had begun to read me, while he made up
for two or three nights' lost sleep as he best might.


PARSON TURELL'S LEGACY:
OR THE PRESIDENT'S OLD ARM-CHAIR.
A MATHEMATICAL STORY.

FACTS respecting an old arm-chair.
At Cambridge.  Is kept in the College there.
Seems but little the worse for wear.
That's remarkable when I say
It was old in President Holyoke's day.
(One of his boys, perhaps you know,
Died, AT ONE HUNDRED, years ago.)
HE took lodging for rain or shine
Under green bed-clothes in '69.

Know old Cambridge?  Hope you do. -
Born there?  Don't say so!  I was, too.
(Born in a house with a gambrel-roof, -
Standing still, if you must have proof. -
"Gambrel? - Gambrel?" - Let me beg
You'll look at a horse's hinder leg, -
First great angle above the hoof, -
That's the gambrel; hence gambrel-roof.)
- Nicest place that ever was seen, -
Colleges red and Common green,
Sidewalks brownish with trees between.
Sweetest spot beneath the skies
When the canker-worms don't rise, -
When the dust, that sometimes flies
Into your mouth and ears and eyes.
In a quiet slumber lies,
NOT in the shape of unbaked pies
Such as barefoot children prize.

A kind of harber it seems to be,
Facing the flow of a boundless sea.
Rows of gray old Tutors stand
Ranged like rocks above the sand;
Rolling beneath them, soft and green,
Breaks the tide of bright sixteen, -
One wave, two waves, three waves, four,
Sliding up the sparkling floor;
Then it ebbs to flow no more,
Wandering off from shore to shore
With its freight of golden ore!
- Pleasant place for boys to play; -
Better keep your girls away;
Hearts get rolled as pebbles do
Which countless fingering waves pursue,
And every classic beach is strown
With heart-shaped pebbles of blood-red stone.

But this is neither here nor there; -
I'm talking about an old arm-chair.
You've heard, no doubt, of PARSON TURELL?
Over at Medford he used to dwell;
Married one of the Mathers' folk;
Got with his wife a chair of oak, -
Funny old chair, with seat like wedge,
Sharp behind and broad front edge, -
One of the oddest of human things,
Turned all over with knobs and rings, -
But heavy, and wide, and deep, and grand, -
Fit for the worthies of the land, -
Chief-Justice Sewall a cause to try in,
Or Cotton Mather to sit - and lie - in.
- Parson Turell bequeathed the same
To a certain student, - SMITH by name;
These were the terms, as we are told:
"Saide Smith saide Chaire to have and holde;
When he doth graduate, then to passe
To ye oldest Youth in ye Senior Classe.
On Payment of" -(naming a certain sum) -
"By him to whom ye Chaire shall come;
He to ye oldest Senior next,
And soe forever," - (thus runs the text,) -
"But one Crown lesse then he gave to claime,
That being his Debte for use of same."

SMITH transferred it to one of the BROWNS,
And took his money, - five silver crowns.
BROWN delivered it up to MOORE,
Who paid, it is plain, not five, but four.
MOORE made over the chair to LEE,
Who gave him crowns of silver three.
LEE conveyed it unto DREW,
And now the payment, of course, was two.
DREW gave up the chair to DUNN, -
All he got, as you see, was one.
DUNN released the chair to HALL,
And got by the bargain no crown at all.
- And now it passed to a second BROWN,
Who took it, and likewise CLAIMED A CROWN.
When BROWN conveyed it unto WARE,
Having had one crown, to make it fair,
He paid him two crowns to take the chair;
And WARE, being honest, (as all Wares be,)
He paid one POTTER, who took it, three.
Four got ROBINSON; five got DIX;
JOHNSON PRIMUS demanded six;
And so the sum kept gathering still
Till after the battle of Bunker's Hill
- When paper money became so cheap,
Folks wouldn't count it, but said "a heap,"

A certain RICHARDS, the books declare,
(A. M. in '90?  I've looked with care
Through the Triennial, - NAME NOT THERE.)
This person, Richards, was offered then
Eight score pounds, but would have ten;
Nine, I think, was the sum he took, -
Not quite certain, - but see the book.
- By and by the wars were still,
But nothing had altered the Parson's will.
The old arm-chair was solid yet,
But saddled with such a monstrous debt!
Things grew quite too bad to bear,
Paying such sums to get rid of the chair!
But dead men's fingers hold awful tight,
And there was the will in black and white,
Plain enough for a child to spell.
What should be done no man could tell,
For the chair was a kind of nightmare curse,
And every season but made it worse.

As a last resort, to clear the doubt,
They got old GOVERNOR HANCOCK out.
The Governor came, with his Light-horse Troop
And his mounted truckmen, all cock-a-hoop;
Halberds glittered and colors flew,
French horns whinnied and trumpets blew,
The yellow fifes whistled between their teeth
And the bumble-bee bass-drums boomed beneath;
So he rode with all his band,
Till the President met him, cap in hand.
- The Governor "hefted" the crowns, and said, -
"A will is a will, and the Parson's dead."
The Governor hefted the crowns.  Said he, -
"There is your p'int.  And here's my fee.
These are the terms you must fulfil, -
On such conditions I BREAK THE WILL!"
The Governor mentioned what these should be.
(Just wait a minute and then you'll see.)
The President prayed.  Then all was still,
And the Governor rose and BROKE THE WILL!
- "About those conditions?"  Well, now you go
And do as I tell you, and then you'll know.
Once a year, on Commencement-day,
If you'll only take the pains to stay,
You'll see the President in the CHAIR,
Likewise the Governor sitting there.
The President rises; both old and young
May hear his speech in a foreign tongue,
The meaning whereof, as lawyers swear,
Is this:  Can I keep this old arm-chair?
And then his Excellency bows,
As much as to say that he allows.
The Vice-Gub. next is called by name;
He bows like t'other, which means the same.
And all the officers round 'em bow,
As much as to say that THEY allow.
And a lot of parchments about the chair
Are handed to witnesses then and there,
And then the lawyers hold it clear
That the chair is safe for another year.

God bless you, Gentlemen!  Learn to give
Money to colleges while you live.
Don't be silly and think you'll try
To bother the colleges, when you die,
With codicil this, and codicil that,
That Knowledge may starve while Law grows fat;
For there never was pitcher that wouldn't spill,
And there's always a flaw in a donkey's will!


- Hospitality is a good deal a matter of latitude, I suspect.  The
shade of a palm-tree serves an African for a hut; his dwelling is
all door and no walls; everybody can come in.  To make a morning
call on an Esquimaux acquaintance, one must creep through a long
tunnel; his house is all walls and no door, except such a one as an
apple with a worm-hole has.  One might, very probably, trace a
regular gradation between these two extremes.  In cities where the
evenings are generally hot, the people have porches at their doors,
where they sit, and this is, of course, a provocative to the
interchange of civilities.  A good deal, which in colder regions is
ascribed to mean dispositions, belongs really to mean temperature.

Once in a while, even in our Northern cities, at noon, in a very
hot summer's day, one may realize, by a sudden extension in his
sphere of consciousness, how closely he is shut up for the most
part. - Do you not remember something like this?  July, between 1
and 2, P. M., Fahrenheit 96 degrees, or thereabout.  Windows all
gaping, like the mouths of panting dogs.  Long, stinging cry of a
locust comes in from a tree, half a mile off; had forgotten there
was such a tree.  Baby's screams from a house several blocks
distant; - never knew there were any babies in the neighborhood
before.  Tinman pounding something that clatters dreadfully, - very
distinct, but don't remember any tinman's shop near by.  Horses
stamping on pavement to get off flies.  When you hear these four
sounds, you may set it down as a warm day.  Then it is that one
would like to imitate the mode of life of the native at Sierra
Leone, as somebody has described it:  stroll into the market in
natural costume, - buy a water-melon for a halfpenny, - split it,
and scoop out the middle, - sit down in one half of the empty rind,
clap the other on one's head, and feast upon the pulp.

- I see some of the London journals have been attacking some of
their literary people for lecturing, on the ground of its being a
public exhibition of themselves for money.  A popular author can
print his lecture; if he deliver it, it is a case of QUAESTUM
CORPORE, or making profit of his person.  None but "snobs" do that.
ERGO, etc.  To this I reply, - NEGATUR MINOR.  Her Most Gracious
Majesty, the Queen, exhibits herself to the public as a part of the
service for which she is paid.  We do not consider it low-bred in
her to pronounce her own speech, and should prefer it so to hearing
it from any other person, or reading it.  His Grace and his
Lordship exhibit themselves very often for popularity, and their
houses every day for money. - No, if a man shows himself other than
he is, if he belittles himself before an audience for hire, then he
acts unworthily.  But a true word, fresh from the lips of a true
man, is worth paying for, at the rate of eight dollars a day, or
even of fifty dollars a lecture.  The taunt must be an outbreak of
jealousy against the renowned authors who have the audacity to be
also orators.  The sub-lieutenants (of the press) stick a too
popular writer and speaker with an epithet in England, instead of
with a rapier, as in France. - Poh!  All England is one great
menagerie, and, all at once, the jackal, who admires the gilded
cage of the royal beast, must protest against the vulgarity of the
talking-bird's and the nightingale's being willing to become a part
of the exhibition!


THE LONG PATH.
(LAST OF THE PARENTHESES.)


Yes, that was my last walk with the SCHOOLMISTRESS.  It happened to
be the end of a term; and before the next began, a very nice young
woman, who had been her assistant, was announced as her successor,
and she was provided for elsewhere.  So it was no longer the
schoolmistress that I walked with, but - Let us not be in unseemly
haste.  I shall call her the schoolmistress still; some of you love
her under that name.

When it became known among the boarders that two of their number
had joined hands to walk down the long path of life side by side,
there was, as you may suppose, no small sensation.  I confess I
pitied our landlady.  It took her all of a suddin, - she said.  Had
not known that we was keepin company, and never mistrusted anything
particular.  Ma'am was right to better herself.  Didn't look very
rugged to take care of a femily, but could get hired haalp, she
calc'lated. - The great maternal instinct came crowding up in her
soul just then, and her eyes wandered until they settled on her
daughter.

- No, poor, dear woman, - that could not have been.  But I am
dropping one of my internal tears for you, with this pleasant smile
on my face all the time.

The great mystery of God's providence is the permitted crushing out
of flowering instincts.  Life is maintained by the respiration of
oxygen and of sentiments.  In the long catalogue of scientific
cruelties there is hardly anything quite so painful to think of as
that experiment of putting an animal under the bell of an air-pump
and exhausting the air from it.  [I never saw the accursed trick
performed.  LAUS DEO!]  There comes a time when the souls of human
beings, women, perhaps, more even than men, begin to faint for the
atmosphere of the affections they were made to breathe.  Then it is
that Society places its transparent bell-glass over the young woman
who is to be the subject of one of its fatal experiments.  The
element by which only the heart lives is sucked out of her
crystalline prison.  Watch her through its transparent walls; - her
bosom is heaving; but it is in a vacuum.  Death is no riddle,
compared to this.  I remember a poor girl's story in the "Book of
Martyrs."  The "dry-pan and the gradual fire" were the images that
frightened her most.  How many have withered and wasted under as
slow a torment in the walls of that larger Inquisition which we
call Civilization!

Yes, my surface-thought laughs at you, you foolish, plain,
overdressed, mincing, cheaply-organized, self-saturated young
person, whoever you may be, now reading this, - little thinking you
are what I describe, and in blissful unconsciousness that you are
destined to the lingering asphyxia of soul which is the lot of such
multitudes worthier than yourself.  But it is only my surface-
thought which laughs.  For that great procession of the UNLOVED,
who not only wear the crown of thorns, but must hide it under the
locks of brown or gray, - under the snowy cap, under the chilling
turban, - hide it even from themselves, - perhaps never know they
wear it, though it kills them, - there is no depth of tenderness in
my nature that Pity has not sounded.  Somewhere, - somewhere, -
love is in store for them, - the universe must not be allowed to
fool them so cruelly.  What infinite pathos in the small, half-
unconscious artifices by which unattractive young persons seek to
recommend themselves to the favor of those towards whom our dear
sisters, the unloved, like the rest, are impelled by their God-
given instincts!

Read what the singing-women - one to ten thousand of the suffering
women - tell us, and think of the griefs that die unspoken!  Nature
is in earnest when she makes a woman; and there are women enough
lying in the next churchyard with very commonplace blue slate-
stones at their head and feet, for whom it was just as true that
"all sounds of life assumed one tone of love," as for Letitia
Landon, of whom Elizabeth Browning said it; but she could give
words to her grief, and they could not. - Will you hear a few
stanzas of mine?


THE VOICELESS.

WE count the broken lyres that rest
Where the sweet wailing singers slumber, -
But o'er their silent sister's breast
The wild flowers who will stoop to number?
A few can touch the magic string,
And noisy Fame is proud to win them; -
Alas for those that never sing,
But die with all their music in them!

Nay, grieve not for the dead alone
Whose song has told their hearts' sad story, -
Weep for the voiceless, who have known
The cross without the crown of glory!
Not where Leucadian breezes sweep
O'er Sappho's memory-haunted billow,
But where the glistening night-dews weep
On nameless sorrow's churchyard pillow.

O hearts that break and give no sign
Save whitening lip and fading tresses,
Till Death pours out his cordial wine
Slow-dropped from Misery's crushing presses, -
If singing breath or echoing chord
To every hidden pang were given,
What endless melodies were poured,
As sad as earth, as sweet as heaven!


I hope that our landlady's daughter is not so badly off, after all.
That young man from another city who made the remark which you
remember about Boston State-house and Boston folks, has appeared at
our table repeatedly of late, and has seemed to me rather attentive
to this young lady.  Only last evening I saw him leaning over her
while she was playing the accordion, - indeed, I undertook to join
them in a song, and got as far as "Come rest in this boo-oo," when,
my voice getting tremulous, I turned off, as one steps out of a
procession, and left the basso and soprano to finish it.  I see no
reason why this young woman should not be a very proper match for a
man that laughs about Boston State-house.  He can't be very
particular.

The young fellow whom I have so often mentioned was a little free
in his remarks, but very good-natured. - Sorry to have you go, - he
said. - School-ma'am made a mistake not to wait for me.  Haven't
taken anything but mournin' fruit at breakfast since I heard of it.
- MOURNING fruit, - said I, - what's that? - Huckleberries and
blackberries, - said he; - couldn't eat in colors, raspberries,
currants, and such, after a solemn thing like this happening. - The
conceit seemed to please the young fellow.  If you will believe it,
when we came down to breakfast the next morning, he had carried it
out as follows.  You know those odious little "saas-plates" that
figure so largely at boarding-houses, and especially at taverns,
into which a strenuous attendant female trowels little dabs, sombre
of tint and heterogeneous of composition, which it makes you feel
homesick to look at, and into which you poke the elastic coppery
tea-spoon with the air of a cat dipping her foot into a wash-tub, -
(not that I mean to say anything against them, for, when they are
of tinted porcelain or starry many-faceted crystal, and hold clean
bright berries, or pale virgin honey, or "lucent syrups tinct with
cinnamon," and the teaspoon is of white silver, with the Tower-
stamp, solid, but not brutally heavy, - as people in the green
stage of millionism will have them, - I can dally with their amber
semi-fluids or glossy spherules without a shiver,) - you know these
small, deep dishes, I say.  When we came down the next morning,
each of these (two only excepted) was covered with a broad leaf.
On lifting this, each boarder found a small heap of solemn black
huckleberries.  But one of those plates held red currants, and was
covered with a red rose; the other held white currants, and was
covered with a white rose.  There was a laugh at this at first, and
then a short silence, and I noticed that her lip trembled, and the
old gentleman opposite was in trouble to get at his bandanna
handkerchief

- "What was the use in waiting?  We should be too late for
Switzerland, that season, if we waited much longer." - The hand I
held trembled in mine, and the eyes fell meekly, as Esther bowed
herself before the feet of Ahasuerus. - She had been reading that
chapter, for she looked up, - if there was a film of moisture over
her eyes there was also the faintest shadow of a distant smile
skirting her lips, but not enough to accent the dimples, - and
said, in her pretty, still way, - "If it please the king, and if I
have found favor in his sight, and the thing seem right before the
king, and I be pleasing in his eyes" -

I don't remember what King Ahasuerus did or said when Esther got
just to that point of her soft, humble words, - but I know what I
did.  That quotation from Scripture was cut short, anyhow.  We came
to a compromise on the great question, and the time was settled for
the last day of summer.

In the mean time, I talked on with our boarders, much as usual, as
you may see by what I have reported.  I must say, I was pleased
with a certain tenderness they all showed toward us, after the
first excitement of the news was over.  It came out in trivial
matters, - but each one, in his or her way, manifested kindness.
Our landlady, for instance, when we had chickens, sent the LIVER
instead of the GIZZARD, with the wing, for the schoolmistress.
This was not an accident; the two are never mistaken, though some
landladies APPEAR as if they did not know the difference.  The
whole of the company were even more respectfully attentive to my
remarks than usual.  There was no idle punning, and very little
winking on the part of that lively young gentleman who, as the
reader may remember, occasionally interposed some playful question
or remark, which could hardly be considered relevant, - except when
the least allusion was made to matrimony, when he would look at the
landlady's daughter, and wink with both sides of his face, until
she would ask what he was pokin' his fun at her for, and if he
wasn't ashamed of himself.  In fact, they all behaved very
handsomely, so that I really felt sorry at the thought of leaving
my boarding-house.

I suppose you think, that, because I lived at a plain widow-woman's
plain table, I was of course more or less infirm in point of
worldly fortune.  You may not be sorry to learn, that, though not
what GREAT MERCHANTS call very rich, I was comfortable, -
comfortable, - so that most of those moderate luxuries I described
in my verses on CONTENTMENT - MOST of them, I say - were within our
reach, if we chose to have them.  But I found out that the
schoolmistress had a vein of charity about her, which had hitherto
been worked on a small silver and copper basis, which made her
think less, perhaps, of luxuries than even I did, - modestly as I
have expressed my wishes.

It is a rather pleasant thing to tell a poor young woman, whom one
has contrived to win without showing his rent-roll, that she has
found what the world values so highly, in following the lead of her
affections.  That was an enjoyment I was now ready for.

I began abruptly:- Do you know that you are a rich young person?

I know that I am very rich, - she said. - Heaven has given me more
than I ever asked; for I had not thought love was ever meant for
me.

It was a woman's confession, and her voice fell to a whisper as it
threaded the last words.

I don't mean that, - I said, - you blessed little saint and seraph!
- if there's an angel missing in the New Jerusalem, inquire for her
at this boarding house! - I don't mean that!  I mean that I - that
is, you - am - are - confound it! - I mean that you'll be what most
people call a lady of fortune.  And I looked full in her eyes for
the effect of the announcement.

There wasn't any.  She said she was thankful that I had what would
save me from drudgery, and that some other time I should tell her
about it. - I never made a greater failure in an attempt to produce
a sensation.

So the last day of summer came.  It was our choice to go to the
church, but we had a kind of reception at the boarding-house.  The
presents were all arranged, and among them none gave more pleasure
than the modest tributes of our fellow-boarders, - for there was
not one, I believe, who did not send something.  The landlady would
insist on making an elegant bride-cake, with her own hands; to
which Master Benjamin Franklin wished to add certain embellishments
out of his private funds, - namely, a Cupid in a mouse-trap, done
in white sugar, and two miniature flags with the stars and stripes,
which had a very pleasing effect, I assure you.  The landlady's
daughter sent a richly bound copy of Tupper's Poems.  On a blank
leaf was the following, written in a very delicate and careful
hand:-


Presented to . . . by . . .
On the eve ere her union in holy matrimony.
May sunshine ever beam o'er her!


Even the poor relative thought she must do something, and sent a
copy of "The Whole Duty of Man," bound in very attractive
variegated sheepskin, the edges nicely marbled.  From the divinity-
student came the loveliest English edition of "Keble's Christian
Year."  I opened it, when it came, to the FOURTH SUNDAY IN LENT,
and read that angelic poem, sweeter than anything I can remember
since Xavier's "My God, I love thee." - I am not a Churchman, - I
don't believe in planting oaks in flower-pots, - but such a poem as
"The Rosebud" makes one's heart a proselyte to the culture it grows
from.  Talk about it as much as you like, - one's breeding shows
itself nowhere more than in his religion.  A man should be a
gentleman in his hymns and prayers; the fondness for "scenes,"
among vulgar saints, contrasts so meanly with that -


"God only and good angels look
Behind the blissful scene,"-


and that other, -


"He could not trust his melting soul
But in his Maker's sight," -


that I hope some of them will see this, and read the poem, and
profit by it.

My laughing and winking young friend undertook to procure and
arrange the flowers for the table, and did it with immense zeal.  I
never saw him look happier than when he came in, his hat saucily on
one side, and a cheroot in his mouth, with a huge bunch of tea-
roses, which he said were for "Madam."

One of the last things that came was an old square box, smelling of
camphor, tied and sealed.  It bore, in faded ink, the marks,
"Calcutta, 1805."  On opening it, we found a white Cashmere shawl
with a very brief note from the dear old gentleman opposite, saying
that he had kept this some years, thinking he might want it, and
many more, not knowing what to do with it, - that he had never seen
it unfolded since he was a young supercargo, - and now, if she
would spread it on her shoulders, it would make him feel young to
look at it.

Poor Bridget, or Biddy, our red-armed maid of all work!  What must
she do but buy a small copper breast-pin and put it under
"Schoolma'am's" plate that morning, at breakfast?  And Schoolma'am
would wear it, - though I made her cover it, as well as I could,
with a tea-rose.

It was my last breakfast as a boarder, and I could not leave them
in utter silence.

Good-by, - I said, - my dear friends, one and all of you!  I have
been long with you, and I find it hard parting.  I have to thank
you for a thousand courtesies, and above all for the patience and
indulgence with which you have listened to me when I have tried to
instruct or amuse you.  My friend the Professor (who, as well as my
friend the Poet, is unavoidably absent on this interesting
occasion) has given me reason to suppose that he would occupy my
empty chair about the first of January next.  If he comes among
you, be kind to him, as you have been to me.  May the Lord bless
you all! - And we shook hands all round the table.

Half an hour afterwards the breakfast things and the cloth were
gone.  I looked up and down the length of the bare boards over
which I had so often uttered my sentiments and experiences - and -
Yes, I am a man, like another.

All sadness vanished, as, in the midst of these old friends of
mine, whom you know, and others a little more up in the world,
perhaps, to whom I have not introduced you, I took the
schoolmistress before the altar from the hands of the old gentleman
who used to sit opposite, and who would insist on giving her away.

And now we two are walking the long path in peace together.  The
"schoolmistress" finds her skill in teaching called for again,
without going abroad to seek little scholars.  Those visions of
mine have all come true.

I hope you all love me none the less for anything I have told you.
Farewell!




End of the  Project Gutenberg Etext of The Autocrat of the
Breakfast-Table






THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE

by Oliver Wendell Holmes




PREFACE TO REVISED EDITION.

The reader of to-day will not forget, I trust, that it is nearly a
quarter of a century since these papers were written.  Statements
which were true then are not necessarily true now.  Thus, the speed
of the trotting horse has been so much developed that the record of
the year when the fastest time to that date was given must be very
considerably altered, as may be seen by referring to a note on page
49 of the "Autocrat."  No doubt many other statements and opinions
might be more or less modified if I were writing today instead of
having written before the war, when the world and I were both more
than a score of years younger.

These papers followed close upon the track of the "Autocrat."  They
had to endure the trial to which all second comers are subjected,
which is a formidable ordeal for the least as well as the greatest.
Paradise Regained and the Second Part of Faust are examples which are
enough to warn every one who has made a jingle fair hit with his
arrow of the danger of missing when he looses "his fellow of the
selfsame flight."

There is good reason why it should be so.  The first juice that runs
of itself from the grapes comes from the heart of the fruit, and
tastes of the pulp only; when the grapes are squeezed in the press
the flow betrays the flavor of the skin.  If there is any freshness
in the original idea of the work, if there is any individuality in
the method or style of a new author, or of an old author on a new
track, it will have lost much of its first effect when repeated.
Still, there have not been wanting readers who have preferred this
second series of papers to the first.  The new papers were more
aggressive than the earlier ones, and for that reason found a
heartier welcome in some quarters, and met with a sharper antagonism
in others.  It amuses me to look back on some of the attacks they
called forth.  Opinions which do not excite the faintest show of
temper at this time from those who do not accept them were treated as
if they were the utterances of a nihilist incendiary.  It required
the exercise of some forbearance not to recriminate.

How a stray sentence, a popular saying, the maxim of some wise man, a
line accidentally fallen upon and remembered, will sometimes help one
when he is all ready to be vexed or indignant!  One day, in the time
when I was young or youngish, I happened to open a small copy of "Tom
Jones," and glance at the title-page.  There was one of those little
engravings opposite, which bore the familiar name of "T. Uwins," as I
remember it, and under it the words "Mr. Partridge bore all this
patiently."  How many times, when, after rough usage from
ill-mannered critics, my own vocabulary of vituperation was simmering
in such a lively way that it threatened to boil and lift its lid and
so boil over, those words have calmed the small internal
effervescence!  There is very little in them and very little of them;
and so there is not much in a linchpin considered by itself, but it
often keeps a wheel from coming off and prevents what might be a
catastrophe.  The chief trouble in offering such papers as these to
the readers of to-day is that their heresies have become so familiar
among intelligent people that they have too commonplace an aspect.
All the lighthouses and land-marks of belief bear so differently from
the way in which they presented themselves when these papers were
written that it is hard to recognize that we and our fellow-
passengers are still in the same old vessel sailing the same
unfathomable sea and bound to the same as yet unseen harbor.

But after all, there is not enough theology, good or bad, in these
papers to cause them to be inscribed on the Protestant Index
Expurgatorius; and if they are medicated with a few questionable
dogmas or antidogmas, the public has become used to so much rougher
treatments, that what was once an irritant may now act as an anodyne,
and the reader may nod over pages which, when they were first
written, would have waked him into a paroxysm of protest and
denunciation.

November, 1882.






PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION

This book is one of those which, if it lives for a number of decades,
and if it requires any Preface at all, wants a new one every ten
years.  The first Preface to a book is apt to be explanatory, perhaps
apologetic, in the expectation of attacks from various quarters.  If
the book is in some points in advance of public opinion, it is
natural that the writer should try to smooth the way to the reception
of his more or less aggressive ideas.  He wishes to convince, not to
offend,--to obtain a hearing for his thought, not to stir up angry
opposition in those who do not accept it.  There is commonly an
anxious look about a first Preface.  The author thinks he shall be
misapprehended about this or that matter, that his well-meant
expressions will probably be invidiously interpreted by those whom he
looks upon as prejudiced critics, and if he deals with living
questions that he will be attacked as a destructive by the
conservatives and reproached for his timidity by the noisier
radicals.  The first Preface, therefore, is likely to be the weakest
part of a work containing the thoughts of an honest writer.

After a time the writer has cooled down from his excitement,--has got
over his apprehensions, is pleased to find that his book is still
read, and that he must write a new Preface.  He comes smiling to his
task.  How many things have explained themselves in the ten or twenty
or thirty years since he came before his untried public in those
almost plaintive paragraphs in which he introduced himself to his
readers,--for the Preface writer, no matter how fierce a combatant he
may prove, comes on to the stage with his shield on his right arm and
his sword in his left hand.

The Professor at the Breakfast-Table came out in the "Atlantic
Monthly" and introduced itself without any formal Preface.  A quarter
of a century later the Preface of 1882, which the reader has just had
laid before him, was written.  There is no mark of worry, I think, in
that.  Old opponents had come up and shaken hands with the author
they had attacked or denounced.  Newspapers which had warned their
subscribers against him were glad to get him as a contributor to
their columns.  A great change had come over the community with
reference to their beliefs.  Christian believers were united as never
before in the feeling that, after all, their common object was to
elevate the moral and religious standard of humanity.  But within the
special compartments of the great Christian fold the marks of
division have pronounced themselves in the most unmistakable manner.
As an example we may take the lines of cleavage which have shown
themselves in the two great churches, the Congregational and the
Presbyterian, and the very distinct fissure which is manifest in the
transplanted Anglican church of this country.  Recent circumstances
have brought out the fact of the great change in the dogmatic
communities which has been going on silently but surely.  The
licensing of a missionary, the transfer of a Professor from one
department to another, the election of a Bishop,--each of these
movements furnishes evidence that there is no such thing as an air-
tight reservoir of doctrinal finalities.

The folding-doors are wide open to every Protestant to enter all the
privileged precincts and private apartments of the various exclusive
religious organizations.  We may demand the credentials of every
creed and catechise all the catechisms.  So we may discuss the
gravest questions unblamed over our morning coffee-cups or our
evening tea-cups.  There is no rest for the Protestant until he gives
up his legendary anthropology and all its dogmatic dependencies.

It is only incidentally, however, that the Professor at the
Breakfast-Table handles matters which are the subjects of religious
controversy.  The reader who is sensitive about having his fixed
beliefs dealt with as if they were open to question had better skip
the pages which look as if they would disturb his complacency.
"Faith" is the most precious of possessions, and it dislikes being
meddled with.  It means, of course, self-trust,--that is, a belief in
the value of our, own opinion of a doctrine, of a church, of a
religion, of a Being, a belief quite independent of any evidence that
we can bring to convince a jury of our fellow beings.  Its roots are
thus inextricably entangled with those of self-love and bleed as
mandrakes were said to, when pulled up as weeds.  Some persons may
even at this late day take offence at a few opinions expressed in the
following pages, but most of these passages will be read without loss
of temper by those who disagree with them, and by-and-by they may be
found too timid and conservative for intelligent readers, if they are
still read by any.

BEVERLY FARM, MASS., June 18, 1891.

O.  W.  H.






                        THE PROFESSOR

                           AT THE
                       BREAKFAST-TABLE.


          What he said, what he heard, and what he saw.




I

I intended to have signalized my first appearance by a certain large
statement, which I flatter myself is the nearest approach to a
universal formula, of life yet promulgated at this breakfast-table.
It would have had a grand effect.  For this purpose I fixed my eyes
on a certain divinity-student, with the intention of exchanging a few
phrases, and then forcing my court-card, namely, The great end of
being.--I will thank you for the sugar,--I said.--Man is a
dependent creature.

It is a small favor to ask,--said the divinity-student,--and passed
the sugar to me.

--Life is a great bundle of little things,--I said.

The divinity-student smiled, as if that were the concluding epigram
of the sugar question.

You smile,--I said.--Perhaps life seems to you a little bundle of
great things?

The divinity-student started a laugh, but suddenly reined it back
with a pull, as one throws a horse on his haunches.--Life is a great
bundle of great things,--he said.

(NOW, THEN!)  The great end of being, after all, is....

Hold on!--said my neighbor, a young fellow whose name seems to be
John, and nothing else,--for that is what they all call him,--hold
on! the Sculpin is go'n' to say somethin'.

Now the Sculpin (Cottus Virginianus) is a little water-beast which
pretends to consider itself a fish, and, under that pretext, hangs
about the piles upon which West-Boston Bridge is built, swallowing
the bait and hook intended for flounders.  On being drawn from the
water, it exposes an immense head, a diminutive bony carcass, and a
surface so full of spines, ridges, ruffles, and frills, that the
naturalists have not been able to count them without quarrelling
about the number, and that the colored youth, whose sport they spoil,
do not like to touch them, and especially to tread on them, unless
they happen to have shoes on, to cover the thick white soles of their
broad black feet.

When, therefore, I heard the young fellow's exclamation, I looked
round the table with curiosity to see what it meant.  At the further
end of it I saw a head, and a--a small portion of a little deformed
body, mounted on a high chair, which brought the occupant up to a
fair level enough for him to get at his food.  His whole appearance
was so grotesque, I felt for a minute as if there was a showman
behind him who would pull him down presently and put up Judy, or the
hangman, or the Devil, or some other wooden personage of the famous
spectacle.  I contrived to lose the first of his sentence, but what I
heard began so:

--by the Frog-Pond, when there were frogs in and the folks used to
come down from the tents on section and Independence days with their
pails to get water to make egg-pop with.  Born in Boston; went to
school in Boston as long as the boys would let me.--The little man
groaned, turned, as if to look around, and went on.--Ran away from
school one day to see Phillips hung for killing Denegri with a
logger-head.  That was in flip days, when there were always two three
loggerheads in the fire.  I'm a Boston boy, I tell you,--born at
North End, and mean to be buried on Copp's Hill, with the good old
underground people,--the Worthylakes, and the rest of 'em.  Yes,--up
on the old hill, where they buried Captain Daniel Malcolm in a stone
grave, ten feet deep, to keep him safe from the red-coats, in those
old times when the world was frozen up tight and there was n't but
one spot open, and that was right over Faneuil all,--and black enough
it looked, I tell you!  There 's where my bones shall lie, Sir, and
rattle away when the big guns go off at the Navy Yard opposite!  You
can't make me ashamed of the old place!  Full crooked little
streets;--I was born and used to run round in one of 'em--

--I should think so,--said that young man whom I hear them call
"John,"--softly, not meaning to be heard, nor to be cruel, but
thinking in a half-whisper, evidently.--I should think so; and got
kinked up, turnin' so many corners.--The little man did not hear
what was said, but went on,--

--full of crooked little streets; but I tell you Boston has opened,
and kept open, more turnpikes that lead straight to free thought and
free speech and free deeds than any other city of live men or dead
men,--I don't care how broad their streets are, nor how high their
steeples!

--How high is Bosting meet'n'-house?--said a person with black
whiskers and imperial, a velvet waistcoat, a guard-chain rather too
massive, and a diamond pin so very large that the most trusting
nature might confess an inward suggestion,--of course, nothing
amounting to a suspicion.  For this is a gentleman from a great city,
and sits next to the landlady's daughter, who evidently believes in
him, and is the object of his especial attention.

How high?--said the little man.--As high as the first step of the
stairs that lead to the New Jerusalem.  Is n't that high enough?

It is,--I said.--The great end of being is to harmonize man with the
order of things, and the church has been a good pitch-pipe, and may
be so still.  But who shall tune the pitch-pipe?  Quis cus-(On the
whole, as this quotation was not entirely new, and, being in a
foreign language, might not be familiar to all the boarders, I
thought I would not finish it.)

--Go to the Bible!--said a sharp voice from a sharp-faced, sharp-
eyed, sharp-elbowed, strenuous-looking woman in a black dress,
appearing as if it began as a piece of mourning and perpetuated
itself as a bit of economy.

You speak well, Madam,--I said;--yet there is room for a gloss or
commentary on what you say.  "He who would bring back the wealth of
the Indies must carry out the wealth of the Indies."  What you bring
away from the Bible depends to some extent on what you carry to it.-
Benjamin Franklin!  Be so good as to step up to my chamber and bring
me down the small uncovered pamphlet of twenty pages which you will
find lying under the "Cruden's Concordance." [The boy took a large
bite, which left a very perfect crescent in the slice of bread-and-
butter he held, and departed on his errand, with the portable
fraction of his breakfast to sustain him on the way.]

--Here it is.  "Go to the Bible.  A Dissertation, etc., etc.  By J.
J. Flournoy.  Athens, Georgia, 1858."

Mr. Flournoy, Madam, has obeyed the precept which you have
judiciously delivered.  You may be interested, Madam, to know what
are the conclusions at which Mr. J. J. Flournoy of Athens, Georgia,
has arrived.  You shall hear, Madam.  He has gone to the Bible, and
he has come back from the Bible, bringing a remedy for existing
social evils, which, if it is the real specific, as it professes to
be, is of great interest to humanity, and to the female part of
humanity in particular.  It is what he calls TRIGAMY, Madam, or the
marrying of three wives, so that "good old men" may be solaced at
once by the companionship of the wisdom of maturity, and of those
less perfected but hardly less engaging qualities which are found at
an earlier period of life.  He has followed your precept, Madam; I
hope you accept his conclusions.

The female boarder in black attire looked so puzzled, and, in fact,
"all abroad," after the delivery of this "counter" of mine, that I
left her to recover her wits, and went on with the conversation,
which I was beginning to get pretty well in hand.

But in the mean time I kept my eye on the female boarder to see what
effect I had produced.  First, she was a little stunned at having her
argument knocked over.  Secondly, she was a little shocked at the
tremendous character of the triple matrimonial suggestion.  Thirdly.
--I don't like to say what I thought.  Something seemed to have
pleased her fancy.  Whether it was, that, if trigamy should come into
fashion, there would be three times as many chances to enjoy the
luxury of saying, "No!" is more than I, can tell you.  I may as well
mention that B. F. came to me after breakfast to borrow the pamphlet
for "a lady,"--one of the boarders, he said,--looking as if he had a
secret he wished to be relieved of.

--I continued.--If a human soul is necessarily to be trained up in
the faith of those from whom it inherits its body, why, there is the
end of all reason.  If, sooner or later, every soul is to look for
truth with its own eyes, the first thing is to recognize that no
presumption in favor of any particular belief arises from the fact of
our inheriting it.  Otherwise you would not give the Mahometan a fair
chance to become a convert to a better religion.

The second thing would be to depolarize every fixed religious idea in
the mind by changing the word which stands for it.

--I don't know what you mean by "depolarizing" an idea,--said the
divinity-student.

I will tell you,--I said.---When a given symbol which represents a
thought has lain for a certain length of time in the mind, it
undergoes a change like that which rest in a certain position gives
to iron.  It becomes magnetic in its relations,--it is traversed by
strange forces which did not belong to it.  The word, and
consequently the idea it represents, is polarized.

The religious currency of mankind, in thought, in speech, and in
print, consists entirely of polarized words.  Borrow one of these
from another language and religion, and you will find it leaves all
its magnetism behind it.  Take that famous word, O'm, of the Hindoo
mythology.  Even a priest cannot pronounce it without sin; and a holy
Pundit would shut his ears and run away from you in horror, if you
should say it aloud.  What do you care for O'm?  If you wanted to get
the Pundit to look at his religion fairly, you must first depolarize
this and all similar words for him.  The argument for and against new
translations of the Bible really turns on this.  Skepticism is afraid
to trust its truths in depolarized words, and so cries out against a
new translation.  I think, myself, if every idea our Book contains
could be shelled out of its old symbol and put into a new, clean,
unmagnetic word, we should have some chance of reading it as
philosophers, or wisdom-lovers, ought to read it,--which we do not
and cannot now any more than a Hindoo can read the "Gayatri" as a
fair man and lover of truth should do.  When society has once fairly
dissolved the New Testament, which it never has done yet, it will
perhaps crystallize it over again in new forms of language.

I did n't know you was a settled minister over this parish,--said the
young fellow near me.

A sermon by a lay-preacher may be worth listening--I replied, calmly.
--It gives the parallax of thought and feeling as they appear to the
observers from two very different points of view.  If you wish to get
the distance of a heavenly body, you know that you must take two
observations from remote points of the earth's orbit,--in midsummer
and midwinter, for instance.  To get the parallax of heavenly truths,
you must take an observation from the position of the laity as well
as of the clergy.  Teachers and students of theology get a certain
look, certain conventional tones of voice, a clerical gait, a
professional neckcloth, and habits of mind as professional as their
externals.  They are scholarly men and read Bacon, and know well
enough what the "idols of the tribe" are.  Of course they have their
false gods, as all men that follow one exclusive calling are prone to
do.--The clergy have played the part of the flywheel in our modern
civilization.  They have never suffered it to stop.  They have often
carried on its movement, when other moving powers failed, by the
momentum stored in their vast body.  Sometimes, too, they have kept
it back by their vis inertia, when its wheels were like to grind the
bones of some old canonized error into fertilizers for the soil that
yields the bread of life.  But the mainspring of the world's onward
religious movement is not in them, nor in any one body of men, let me
tell you.  It is the people that makes the clergy, and not the clergy
that makes the people.  Of course, the profession reacts on its
source with variable energy.--But there never was a guild of dealers
or a company of craftsmen that did not need sharp looking after.

Our old friend, Dr. Holyoke, whom we gave the dinner to some time
since, must have known many people that saw the great bonfire in
Harvard College yard.

--Bonfire?--shrieked the little man.--The bonfire when Robert
Calef's book was burned?

The same,--I said,--when Robert Calef the Boston merchant's book was
burned in the yard of Harvard College, by order of Increase Mather,
President of the College and Minister of the Gospel.  You remember
the old witchcraft revival of '92, and how stout Master Robert Calef,
trader of Boston, had the pluck to tell the ministers and judges what
a set of fools and worse than fools they were-

Remember it?--said the little man.--I don't think I shall forget it,
as long as I can stretch this forefinger to point with, and see what
it wears.  There was a ring on it.

May I look at it?--I said.

Where it is,--said the little man;--it will never come off, till it
falls off from the bone in the darkness and in the dust.

He pushed the high chair on which he sat slightly back from the
table, and dropped himself, standing, to the floor,--his head being
only a little above the level of the table, as he stood.  With pain
and labor, lifting one foot over the other, as a drummer handles his
sticks, he took a few steps from his place,--his motions and the
deadbeat of the misshapen boots announcing to my practised eye and
ear the malformation which is called in learned language talipes
varus, or inverted club-foot.

Stop!  stop!--I said,--let me come to you.

The little man hobbled back, and lifted himself by the left arm, with
an ease approaching to grace which surprised me, into his high chair.
I walked to his side, and he stretched out the forefinger of his
right hand, with the ring upon it.  The ring had been put on long
ago, and could not pass the misshapen joint.  It was one of those
funeral rings which used to be given to relatives and friends after
the decease of persons of any note or importance.  Beneath a round
fit of glass was a death's head.  Engraved on one side of this, "L.
B.  AEt.  22,"--on the other, "Ob. 1692"

My grandmother's grandmother,--said the little man.--Hanged for a
witch.  It does n't seem a great while ago.  I knew my grandmother,
and loved her.  Her mother was daughter to the witch that Chief
Justice Sewall hanged and Cotton Mather delivered over to the Devil.-
-That was Salem, though, and not Boston.  No, not Boston.  Robert
Calef, the Boston merchant, it was that blew them all to-

Never mind where he blew them to,--I said; for the little man was
getting red in the face, and I did n't know what might come next.

This episode broke me up, as the jockeys say, out of my square
conversational trot; but I settled down to it again.

--A man that knows men, in the street, at their work, human nature in
its shirt-sleeves, who makes bargains with deacons, instead of
talking over texts with them, a man who has found out that there are
plenty of praying rogues and swearing saints in the world,--above
all, who has found out, by living into the pith and core of life,
that all of the Deity which can be folded up between the sheets of
any human book is to the Deity of the firmament, of the strata, of
the hot aortic flood of throbbing human life, of this infinite,
instantaneous consciousness in which the soul's being consists,--an
incandescent point in the filament connecting the negative pole of a
past eternity with the positive pole of an eternity that is to come,-
-that all of the Deity which any human book can hold is to this
larger Deity of the working battery of the universe only as the films
in a book of gold-leaf are to the broad seams and curdled lumps of
ore that lie in unsunned mines and virgin placers,--Oh!--I was saying
that a man who lives out-of-doors, among live people, gets some
things into his head he might not find in the index of his "Body of
Divinity."

I tell you what,--the idea of the professions' digging a moat round
their close corporations, like that Japanese one at Jeddo, on the
bottom of which, if travellers do not lie, you could put Park Street
Church and look over the vane from its side, and try to stretch
another such spire across it without spanning the chasm,--that idea,
I say, is pretty nearly worn out.  Now when a civilization or a
civilized custom falls into senile dementia, there is commonly a
judgment ripe for it, and it comes as plagues come, from a breath,--
as fires come, from a spark.

Here, look at medicine.  Big wigs, gold-headed canes, Latin
prescriptions, shops full of abominations, recipes a yard long,
"curing" patients by drugging as sailors bring a wind by whistling,
selling lies at a guinea apiece,--a routine, in short, of giving
unfortunate sick people a mess of things either too odious to swallow
or too acrid to hold, or, if that were possible, both at once.

--You don't know what I mean, indignant and not unintelligent
country-practitioner?  Then you don't know the history of medicine,--
and that is not my fault.  But don't expose yourself in any outbreak
of eloquence; for, by the mortar in which Anaxarchus was pounded!  I
did not bring home Schenckius and Forestus and Hildanus, and all the
old folios in calf and vellum I will show you, to be bullied by the
proprietor, of a "Wood and Bache," and a shelf of peppered sheepskin
reprints by Philadelphia Editors.  Besides, many of the profession
and I know a little something of each other, and you don't think I am
such a simpleton as to lose their good opinion by saying what the
better heads among them would condemn as unfair and untrue?  Now mark
how the great plague came on the generation of drugging doctors, and
in what form it fell.

A scheming drug-vender, (inventive genius,) an utterly untrustworthy
and incompetent observer, (profound searcher of Nature,) a shallow
dabbler in erudition, (sagacious scholar,) started the monstrous
fiction (founded the immortal system) of Homoeopathy.  I am very
fair, you see,---you can help yourself to either of these sets of
phrases.

All the reason in the world would not have had so rapid and general
an effect on the public mind to disabuse it of the idea that a drug
is a good thing in itself, instead of being, as it is, a bad thing,
as was produced by the trick (system) of this German charlatan
(theorist).  Not that the wiser part of the profession needed him to
teach them; but the routinists and their employers, the "general
practitioners," who lived by selling pills and mixtures, and their
drug-consuming customers, had to recognize that people could get
well, unpoisoned.  These dumb cattle would not learn it of
themselves, and so the murrain of Homoeopathy fell on them.

--You don't know what plague has fallen on the practitioners of
theology?  I will tell you, then.  It is Spiritualism.  While some
are crying out against it as a delusion of the Devil, and some are
laughing at it as an hysteric folly, and some are getting angry with
it as a mere trick of interested or mischievous persons, Spiritualism
is quietly undermining the traditional ideas of the future state
which have been and are still accepted,--not merely in those who
believe in it, but in the general sentiment of the community, to a
larger extent than most good people seem to be aware of.  It need n't
be true, to do this, any more than Homoeopathy need, to do its work.
The Spiritualists have some pretty strong instincts to pry over,
which no doubt have been roughly handled by theologians at different
times.  And the Nemesis of the pulpit comes, in a shape it little
thought of, beginning with the snap of a toe-joint, and ending with
such a crack of old beliefs that the roar of it is heard in all the
ministers' studies of Christendom?  Sir, you cannot have people of
cultivation, of pure character, sensible enough in common things,
large-hearted women, grave judges, shrewd business-men, men of
science, professing to be in communication with the spiritual world
and keeping up constant intercourse with it, without its gradually
reacting on the whole conception of that other life.  It is the folly
of the world, constantly, which confounds its wisdom.  Not only out
of the mouths of babes and sucklings, but out of the mouths of fools
and cheats, we may often get our truest lessons.  For the fool's
judgment is a dog-vane that turns with a breath, and the cheat
watches the clouds and sets his weathercock by them,--so that one
shall often see by their pointing which way the winds of heaven are
blowing, when the slow-wheeling arrows and feathers of what we call
the Temples of Wisdom are turning to all points of the compass.

--Amen!--said the young fellow called John--Ten minutes by the
watch.  Those that are unanimous will please to signify by holding up
their left foot!

I looked this young man steadily in the face for about thirty
seconds.  His countenance was as calm as that of a reposing infant.
I think it was simplicity, rather than mischief, with perhaps a
youthful playfulness, that led him to this outbreak.  I have often
noticed that even quiet horses, on a sharp November morning, when
their coats are beginning to get the winter roughness, will give
little sportive demi-kicks, with slight sudden elevation of the
subsequent region of the body, and a sharp short whinny,--by no means
intending to put their heels through the dasher, or to address the
driver rudely, but feeling, to use a familiar word, frisky.  This, I
think, is the physiological condition of the young person, John.  I
noticed, however, what I should call a palpebral spasm, affecting the
eyelid and muscles of one side, which, if it were intended for the
facial gesture called a wink, might lead me to suspect a disposition
to be satirical on his part.

--Resuming the conversation, I remarked,--I am, ex officio, as a
Professor, a conservative.  For I don't know any fruit that clings to
its tree so faithfully, not even a "froze-'n'-thaw" winter-apple, as
a Professor to the bough of which his chair is made.  You can't shake
him off, and it is as much as you can do to pull him off.  Hence, by
a chain of induction I need not unwind, he tends to conservatism
generally.

But then, you know, if you are sailing the Atlantic, and all at once
find yourself in a current, and the sea covered with weeds, and drop
your Fahrenheit over the side and find it eight or ten degrees higher
than in the ocean generally, there is no use in flying in the face of
facts and swearing there is no such thing as a Gulf-Stream, when you
are in it.

You can't keep gas in a bladder, and you can't keep knowledge tight
in a profession.  Hydrogen will leak out, and air will leak in,
through India-rubber; and special knowledge will leak out, and
general knowledge will leak in, though a profession were covered with
twenty thicknesses of sheepskin diplomas.

By Jove, Sir, till common sense is well mixed up with medicine, and
common manhood with theology, and common honesty with law, We the
people, Sir, some of us with nut-crackers, and some of us with trip-
hammers, and some of us with pile-drivers, and some of us coming with
a whish! like air-stones out of a lunar volcano, will crash down on
the lumps of nonsense in all of them till we have made powder of
them--like Aaron's calf

[See Holmes poem: "When doctor's take what they would give and
lawyers give what they would take and strawberries grow larger down
through the box."   D.W.]

If to be a conservative is to let all the drains of thought choke up
and keep all the soul's windows down,--to shut out the sun from the
east and the wind from the west,--to let the rats run free in the
cellar, and the moths feed their fill in the chambers, and the
spiders weave their lace before the mirrors, till the soul's typhus
is bred out of our neglect, and we begin to snore in its coma or rave
in its delirium,--I, Sir, am a bonnet-rouge, a red cap of the
barricades, my friends, rather than a conservative.

--Were you born in Boston, Sir?--said the little man,--looking eager
and excited.

I was not,--I replied.

It's a pity,--it's a pity,--said the little man;--it 's the place to
be born in.  But if you can't fix it so as to be born here, you can
come and live here.  Old Ben Franklin, the father of American science
and the American Union, was n't ashamed to be born here.  Jim Otis,
the father of American Independence, bothered about in the Cape Cod
marshes awhile, but he came to Boston as soon as he got big enough.
Joe Warren, the first bloody ruffed-shirt of the Revolution, was as
good as born here.  Parson Charming strolled along this way from
Newport, and stayed here.  Pity old Sam Hopkins hadn't come, too;--
we'd have made a man of him,--poor, dear, good old Christian heathen!
There he lies, as peaceful as a young baby, in the old burying-
ground!  I've stood on the slab many a time.  Meant well,--meant
well.  Juggernaut.  Parson Charming put a little oil on one linchpin,
and slipped it out so softly, the first thing they knew about it was
the wheel of that side was down.  T' other fellow's at work now, but
he makes more noise about it.  When the linchpin comes out on his
side, there'll be a jerk, I tell you! Some think it will spoil the
old cart, and they pretend to say that there are valuable things in
it which may get hurt.  Hope not,--hope not.  But this is the great
Macadamizing place,--always cracking up something.

Cracking up Boston folks,--said the gentleman with the diamond-pin,
whom, for convenience' sake, I shall hereafter call the Koh-i-noor.

The little man turned round mechanically towards him, as Maelzel's
Turk used to turn, carrying his head slowly and horizontally, as if
it went by cogwheels.--Cracking up all sorts of things,--native and
foreign vermin included,--said the little man.

This remark was thought by some of us to have a hidden personal
application, and to afford a fair opening for a lively rejoinder, if
the Koh-i-noor had been so disposed.  The little man uttered it with
the distinct wooden calmness with which the ingenious Turk used to
exclaim, E-chec! so that it must have been heard.  The party supposed
to be interested in the remark was, however, carrying a large knife-
bladeful of something to his mouth just then, which, no doubt,
interfered with the reply he would have made.

--My friend who used to board here was accustomed sometimes, in a
pleasant way, to call himself the Autocrat of the table,--meaning, I
suppose, that he had it all his own way among the boarders.  I think
our small boarder here is like to prove a refractory subject, if I
undertake to use the sceptre my friend meant to bequeath me, too
magisterially.  I won't deny that sometimes, on rare occasions, when
I have been in company with gentlemen who preferred listening, I have
been guilty of the same kind of usurpation which my friend openly
justified.  But I maintain, that I, the Professor, am a good
listener.  If a man can tell me a fact which subtends an appreciable
angle in the horizon of thought, I am as receptive as the
contribution-box in a congregation of colored brethren.  If, when I
am exposing my intellectual dry-goods, a man will begin a good story,
I will have them all in, and my shutters up, before he has got to the
fifth "says he," and listen like a three-years' child, as the author
of the "Old Sailor" says.  I had rather hear one of those grand
elemental laughs from either of our two Georges, (fictitious names,
Sir or Madam,) glisten to one of those old playbills of our College
days, in which "Tom and Jerry" ("Thomas and Jeremiah," as the old
Greek Professor was said to call it) was announced to be brought on
the stage with whole force of the Faculty, read by our Frederick, (no
such person, of course,) than say the best things I might by any
chance find myself capable of saying.  Of course, if I come across a
real thinker, a suggestive, acute, illuminating, informing talker, I
enjoy the luxury of sitting still for a while as much as another.

Nobody talks much that does n't say unwise things,--things he did not
mean to say; as no person plays much without striking a false note
sometimes.  Talk, to me, is only spading up the ground for crops of
thought.  I can't answer for what will turn up.  If I could, it would
n't be talking, but "speaking my piece."  Better, I think, the hearty
abandonment of one's self to the suggestions of the moment at the
risk of an occasional slip of the tongue, perceived the instant it
escapes, but just one syllable too late, than the royal reputation of
never saying a foolish thing.

--What shall I do with this little man?--There is only one thing to
do,--and that is to let him talk when he will.  The day of the
"Autocrat's" monologues is over.

--My friend,--said I to the young fellow whom, as I have said, the
boarders call "John,"--My friend,--I said, one morning, after
breakfast,--can you give me any information respecting the deformed
person who sits at the other end of the table?

What! the Sculpin?--said the young fellow.

The diminutive person, with angular curvature of the spine,--I said,-
-and double talipes varus,--I beg your pardon,--with two club-feet.

Is that long word what you call it when a fellah walks so?--said the
young man, making his fists revolve round an imaginary axis, as you
may have seen youth of tender age and limited pugilistic knowledge,
when they show how they would punish an adversary, themselves
protected by this rotating guard,--the middle knuckle, meantime,
thumb-supported, fiercely prominent, death-threatening.

It is,--said I.--But would you have the kindness to tell me if you
know anything about this deformed person?

About the Sculpin?--said the young fellow.

My good friend,--said I,--I am sure, by your countenance, you would
not hurt the feelings of one who has been hardly enough treated by
Nature to be spared by his fellows.  Even in speaking of him to
others, I could wish that you might not employ a term which implies
contempt for what should inspire only pity.

A fellah 's no business to be so crooked,--said the young man called
John.

Yes, yes,--I said, thoughtfully,--the strong hate the weak.  It's all
right.  The arrangement has reference to the race, and not to the
individual.  Infirmity must be kicked out, or the stock run down.
Wholesale moral arrangements are so different from retail!--I
understand the instinct, my friend,--it is cosmic,--it is planetary,-
-it is a conservative principle in creation.

The young fellow's face gradually lost its expression as I was
speaking, until it became as blank of vivid significance as the
countenance of a gingerbread rabbit with two currants in the place of
eyes.  He had not taken my meaning.

Presently the intelligence came back with a snap that made him wink,
as he answered,--Jest so.  All right.  A 1.  Put her through.  That's
the way to talk.  Did you speak to me, Sir?--Here the young man
struck up that well-known song which I think they used to sing at
Masonic festivals, beginning, "Aldiborontiphoscophornio, Where left
you Chrononhotonthologos?"

I beg your pardon,--I said;--all I meant was, that men, as temporary
occupants of a permanent abode called human life, which is improved
or injured by occupancy, according to the style of tenant, have a
natural dislike to those who, if they live the life of the race as
well as of the individual, will leave lasting injurious effects upon
the abode spoken of, which is to be occupied by countless future
generations.  This is the final cause of the underlying brute
instinct which we have in common with the herds.

--The gingerbread-rabbit expression was coming on so fast, that I
thought I must try again.--It's a pity that families are kept up,
where there are such hereditary infirmities.  Still, let us treat
this poor man fairly, and not call him names.  Do you know what his
name is?

I know what the rest of 'em call him,--said the young fellow.--They
call him Little Boston.  There's no harm in that, is there?

It is an honorable term,--I replied.--But why Little Boston, in a
place where most are Bostonians?

Because nobody else is quite so Boston all over as he is,--said the
young fellow.

"L. B.  Ob. 1692."--Little Boston let him be, when we talk about him.
The ring he wears labels him well enough.  There is stuff in the
little man, or he would n't stick so manfully by this crooked,
crotchety old town.  Give him a chance.--You will drop the Sculpin,
won't you?--I said to the young fellow.

Drop him?--he answered,--I ha'n't took him up yet.

No, no,--the term,--I said,--the term.  Don't call him so any more,
if you please.  Call him Little Boston, if you like.

All right,--said the young fellow.--I would n't be hard on the poor
little-

The word he used was objectionable in point of significance and of
grammar.  It was a frequent termination of certain adjectives among
the Romans,--as of those designating a person following the sea, or
given to rural pursuits.  It is classed by custom among the profane
words; why, it is hard to say,--but it is largely used in the street
by those who speak of their fellows in pity or in wrath.

I never heard the young fellow apply the name of the odious pretended
fish to the little man from that day forward.

--Here we are, then, at our boarding--house.  First, myself, the
Professor, a little way from the head of the table, on the right,
looking down, where the "Autocrat" used to sit.  At the further end
sits the Landlady.  At the head of the table, just now, the Koh-i-
noor, or the gentleman with the diamond.  Opposite me is a Venerable
Gentleman with a bland countenance, who as yet has spoken little.
The Divinity Student is my neighbor on the right,--and further down,
that Young Fellow of whom I have repeatedly spoken.  The Landlady's
Daughter sits near the Koh-i-noor, as I said.  The Poor Relation near
the Landlady.  At the right upper corner is a fresh-looking youth of
whose name and history I have as yet learned nothing.  Next the
further left-hand corner, near the lower end of the table, sits the
deformed person.  The chair at his side, occupying that corner, is
empty.  I need not specially mention the other boarders, with the
exception of Benjamin Franklin, the landlady's son, who sits near his
mother.  We are a tolerably assorted set,--difference enough and
likeness enough; but still it seems to me there is something wanting.
The Landlady's Daughter is the prima donna in the way of feminine
attractions.  I am not quite satisfied with this young lady.  She
wears more "jewelry," as certain young ladies call their trinkets,
than I care to see on a person in her position.  Her voice is
strident, her laugh too much like a giggle, and she has that foolish
way of dancing and bobbing like a quill-float with a "minnum" biting
the hook below it, which one sees and weeps over sometimes in persons
of more pretensions.  I can't help hoping we shall put something into
that empty chair yet which will add the missing string to our social
harp.  I hear talk of a rare Miss who is expected.  Something in the
schoolgirl way, I believe.  We shall see.

--My friend who calls himself The Autocrat has given me a caution
which I am going to repeat, with my comment upon it, for the benefit
of all concerned.

Professor,--said he, one day,--don't you think your brain will run
dry before a year's out, if you don't get the pump to help the cow?
Let me tell you what happened to me once.  I put a little money into
a bank, and bought a check-book, so that I might draw it as I wanted,
in sums to suit.  Things went on nicely for a time; scratching with a
pen was as easy as rubbing Aladdin's Lamp; and my blank check-book
seemed to be a dictionary of possibilities, in which I could find all
the synonymes of happiness, and realize any one of them on the spot.
A check came back to me at last with these two words on it,--NO
FUNDS.  My check-book was a volume of waste-paper.

Now, Professor,--said he,--I have drawn something out of your bank,
you know; and just so sure as you keep drawing out your soul's
currency without making new deposits, the next thing will be, NO
FUNDS,--and then where will you be, my boy?  These little bits of
paper mean your gold and your silver and your copper, Professor; and
you will certainly break up and go to pieces, if you don't hold on to
your metallic basis.

There is something in that,--said I.--Only I rather think life can
coin thought somewhat faster than I can count it off in words.  What
if one shall go round and dry up with soft napkins all the dew that
falls of a June evening on the leaves of his garden?  Shall there be
no more dew on those leaves thereafter?  Marry, yea,--many drops,
large and round and full of moonlight as those thou shalt have
absterged!

Here am I, the Professor,--a man who has lived long enough to have
plucked the flowers of life and come to the berries,--which are not
always sad-colored, but sometimes golden-hued as the crocus of April,
or rosy-cheeked as the damask of June; a man who staggered against
books as a baby, and will totter against them, if he lives to
decrepitude; with a brain full of tingling thoughts, such as they
are, as a limb which we call "asleep," because it is so particuly
awake, is of pricking points; presenting a key-board of nerve-pulps,
not as yet tanned or ossified, to finger-touch of all outward
agencies; knowing nothing of the filmy threads of this web of life in
which we insects buzz awhile, waiting for the gray old spider to come
along; contented enough with daily realities, but twirling on his
finger the key of a private Bedlam of ideals; in knowledge feeding
with the fox oftener than with the stork,--loving better the breadth
of a fertilizing inundation than the depth of narrow artesian well;
finding nothing too small for his contemplation in the markings of
the grammatophora subtilissima, and nothing too large in the movement
of the solar system towards the star Lambda of the constellation
Hercules;--and the question is, whether there is anything left for
me, the Professor, to suck out of creation, after my lively friend
has had his straw in the bung-hole of the Universe!

A man's mental reactions with the atmosphere of life must go on,
whether he will or no, as between his blood and the air he breathes.
As to catching the residuum of the process, or what we call thought,-
-the gaseous ashes of burned-out thinking,--the excretion of mental
respiration,--that will depend on many things, as, on having a
favorable intellectual temperature about one, and a fitting
receptacle.--I sow more thought-seeds in twenty-four hours' travel
over the desert-sand along which my lonely consciousness paces day
and night, than I shall throw into soil where it will germinate, in a
year.  All sorts of bodily and mental perturbations come between us
and the due projection of our thought.  The pulse-like "fits of easy
and difficult transmission" seem to reach even the transparent medium
through which our souls are seen.  We know our humanity by its often
intercepted rays, as we tell a revolving light from a star or meteor
by its constantly recurring obscuration.

An illustrious scholar once told me, that, in the first lecture he
ever delivered, he spoke but half his allotted time, and felt as if
he had told all he knew.  Braham came forward once to sing one of his
most famous and familiar songs, and for his life could not recall the
first line of it;--he told his mishap to the audience, and they
screamed it at him in a chorus of a thousand voices.  Milton could
not write to suit himself, except from the autumnal to the vernal
equinox.  One in the clothing-business, who, there is reason to
suspect, may have inherited, by descent, the great poet's impressible
temperament, let a customer slip through his fingers one day without
fitting him with a new garment.  "Ah!" said he to a friend of mine,
who was standing by, "if it hadn't been for that confounded headache
of mine this morning, I'd have had a coat on that man, in spite of
himself, before he left-the store."  A passing throb, only,--but it
deranged the nice mechanism required to persuade the accidental human
being, X, into a given piece of broadcloth, A.

We must take care not to confound this frequent difficulty of
transmission of our ideas with want of ideas.  I suppose that a man's
mind does in time form a neutral salt with the elements in the
universe for which it has special elective affinities.  In fact, I
look upon a library as a kind of mental chemist's shop filled with
the crystals of all forms and hues which have come from the union of
individual thought with local circumstances or universal principles.

When a man has worked out his special affinities in this way, there
is an end of his genius as a real solvent.  No more effervescence and
hissing tumult--as he pours his sharp thought on the world's biting
alkaline unbeliefs!  No more corrosion of the old monumental tablets
covered with lies!  No more taking up of dull earths, and turning
them, first into clear solutions, and then into lustrous prisms!

I, the Professor, am very much like other men: I shall not find out
when I have used up my affinities.  What a blessed thing it is, that
Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors,
contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left!  Painful
as the task is, they never fail to warn the author, in the most
impressive manner, of the probabilities of failure in what he has
undertaken.  Sad as the necessity is to their delicate sensibilities,
they never hesitate to advertise him of the decline of his powers,
and to press upon him the propriety of retiring before he sinks into
imbecility.  Trusting to their kind offices, I shall endeavor to
fulfil-

--Bridget enters and begins clearing the table.

--The following poem is my (The Professor's) only contribution to the
great department of Ocean-Cable literature.  As all the poets of this
country will be engaged for the next six weeks in writing for the
premium offered by the Crystal-Palace Company for the Burns
Centenary, (so called, according to our Benjamin Franklin, because
there will be nary a cent for any of us,) poetry will be very scarce
and dear.  Consumers may, consequently, be glad to take the present
article, which, by the aid of a Latin tutor--and a Professor of
Chemistry, will be found intelligible to the educated classes.




                  DE SAUTY

         AN ELECTRO-CHEMICAL ECLOGUE.

         Professor.       Blue-Nose.


PROFESSOR.

Tell me, O Provincial!  speak, Ceruleo-Nasal!
Lives there one De Sauty extant now among yon,
Whispering Boanerges, son of silent thunder,
Holding talk with nations?

Is there a De Sauty, ambulant on Tellus,
Bifid-cleft like mortals, dormient in night-cap,
Having sight, smell, hearing, food-receiving feature
Three times daily patent?

Breathes there such a being, O Ceruleo-Nasal?
Or is he a mythus,--ancient word for "humbug,"--
Such as Livy told about the wolf that wet-nursed
Romulus and Remus?

Was he born of woman, this alleged De Sauty?
Or a living product of galvanic action,
Like the status bred in Crosses flint-solution?
Speak, thou Cyano-Rhinal!



BLUE-NOSE.

Many things thou askest, jackknife-bearing stranger,
Much-conjecturing mortal, pork-and-treacle-waster!
Pretermit thy whittling, wheel thine ear-flap toward me,
Thou shalt hear them answered.

When the charge galvanic tingled through the cable,
At the polar focus of the wire electric
Suddenly appeared a white-faced man among us
Called himself "DE SAUTY."

As the small opossum held in pouch maternal
Grasps the nutrient organ whence the term mammalia,
So the unknown stranger held the wire electric,
Sucking in the current.

When the current strengthened, bloomed the pale-faced stranger,
Took no drink nor victual, yet grew fat and rosy,
And from time to time, in sharp articulation,
Said, "All right!  DE SAUTY."

From the lonely station passed the utterance, spreading
Through the pines and hemlocks to the groves of steeples
Till the land was filled with loud reverberations
Of "All right! DE SAUTY."

When the current slackened, drooped the mystic stranger,
Faded, faded, faded, as the stream grew weaker,
Wasted to a shadow, with a hartshorn odor
Of disintegration.

Drops of deliquescence glistened on his forehead,
Whitened round his feet the dust of efflorescence,
Till one Monday morning, when the flow suspended,
There was no De Sauty.

Nothing but a cloud of elements organic,
C. O. H. N. Ferrum, Chor.  Flu.  Sil.  Potassa,
Calc.  Sod.  Phosph.  Mag.  Sulphur, Mang.(?) Alumin.(?) Cuprum,(?)
Such as man is made of.

Born of stream galvanic, with it be had perished!
There is no De Sauty now there is no current!
Give us a new cable, then again we'll hear him
Cry, "All right!  DE SAUTY."




II

Back again!--A turtle--which means a tortoise--is fond of his shell;
but if you put a live coal on his back, he crawls out of it.  So the
boys say.

It is a libel on the turtle.  He grows to his shell, and his shell is
in his body as much as his body is in his shell.--I don't think
there is one of our boarders quite so testudineous as I am.  Nothing
but a combination of motives, more peremptory than the coal on the
turtle's back, could have got me to leave the shelter of my carapace;
and after memorable interviews, and kindest hospitalities, and grand
sights, and huge influx of patriotic pride,--for every American owns
all America,--

          "Creation's heir,--the world, the world is"

his, if anybody's,--I come back with the feeling which a boned turkey
might experience, if, retaining his consciousness, he were allowed to
resume his skeleton.

Welcome, O Fighting Gladiator, and Recumbent Cleopatra, and Dying
Warrior, whose classic outlines (reproduced in the calcined mineral
of Lutetia) crown my loaded shelves!  Welcome, ye triumphs of
pictorial art (repeated by the magic graver) that look down upon me
from the walls of my sacred cell!  Vesalius, as Titian drew him,
high-fronted, still-eyed, thick-bearded, with signet-ring, as beseems
a gentleman, with book and carelessly-held eyeglass, marking him a
scholar; thou, too, Jan Kuyper, commonly called Jan Praktiseer, old
man of a century and seven years besides, father of twenty sons and
two daughters, cut in copper by Houbraken, bought from a portfolio on
one of the Paris quais; and ye Three Trees of Rembrandt, black in
shadow against the blaze of light; and thou Rosy Cottager of Sir
Joshua, roses hinted by the peppery burin of Bartolozzi; ye, too, of
lower grades in nature, yet not unlovely for unrenowned, Young Bull
of Paulus Potter, and sleeping Cat of Cornelius Visscher; welcome
once more to my eyes!  The old books look out from the shelves, and I
seem to read on their backs something asides their titles,--a kind of
solemn greeting.  The crimson carpet flushes warm under my feet.  The
arm-chair hugs me; the swivel-chair spins round with me, as if it
were giddy with pleasure; the vast recumbent fauteuil stretches
itself out under my weight, as one joyous with food and wine
stretches in after-dinner laughter.

The boarders were pleased to say that they were glad to get me back.
One of them ventured a compliment, namely,--that I talked as if I
believed what I said.--This was apparently considered something
unusual, by its being mentioned.

One who means to talk with entire sincerity,--I said,--always feels
himself in danger of two things, namely,--an affectation of
bluntness, like that of which Cornwall accuses Kent in "Lear," and
actual rudeness.  What a man wants to do, in talking with a stranger,
is to get and to give as much of the best and most real life that
belongs to the two talkers as the time will let him.  Life is short,
and conversation apt to run to mere words.  Mr. Hue I think it is,
who tells us some very good stories about the way in which two
Chinese gentlemen contrive to keep up a long talk without saying a
word which has any meaning in it.  Something like this is
occasionally heard on this side of the Great Wall.  The best Chinese
talkers I know are some pretty women whom I meet from time to time.
Pleasant, airy, complimentary, the little flakes of flattery
glimmering in their talk like the bits of gold-leaf in eau-de-vie de
Dantzic; their accents flowing on in a soft ripple,--never a wave,
and never a calm; words nicely fitted, but never a colored phrase or
a highly-flavored epithet; they turn air into syllables so
gracefully, that we find meaning for the music they make as we find
faces in the coals and fairy palaces in the clouds.  There is
something very odd, though, about this mechanical talk.

You have sometimes been in a train on the railroad when the engine
was detached a long way from the station you were approaching?  Well,
you have noticed how quietly and rapidly the cars kept on, just as if
the locomotive were drawing them?  Indeed, you would not have
suspected that you were travelling on the strength of a dead fact, if
you had not seen the engine running away from you on a side-track.
Upon my conscience, I believe some of these pretty women detach their
minds entirely, sometimes, from their talk,--and, what is more, that
we never know the difference.  Their lips let off the fluty syllables
just as their fingers would sprinkle the music-drops from their
pianos; unconscious habit turns the phrase of thought into words just
as it does that of music into notes.--Well, they govern the world
for all that, these sweet-lipped women,--because beauty is the index
of a larger fact than wisdom.

--The Bombazine wanted an explanation.

Madam,--said I,--wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is
the promise of the future.

--All this, however, is not what I was going to say.  Here am I,
suppose, seated--we will say at a dinner-table--alongside of an
intelligent Englishman.  We look in each other's faces,--we exchange
a dozen words.  One thing is settled: we mean not to offend each
other,--to be perfectly courteous,--more than courteous; for we are
the entertainer and the entertained, and cherish particularly amiable
feelings, to each other.  The claret is good; and if our blood
reddens a little with its warm crimson, we are none the less kind for
it.

I don't think people that talk over their victuals are like to say
anything very great, especially if they get their heads muddled with
strong drink before they begin jabberin'.

The Bombazine uttered this with a sugary sourness, as if the words
had been steeped in a solution of acetate of lead.--The boys of my
time used to call a hit like this a "side-winder."

--I must finish this woman.--

Madam,--I said,--the Great Teacher seems to have been fond of talking
as he sat at meat.  Because this was a good while ago, in a far-off
place, you forget what the true fact of it was,--that those were real
dinners, where people were hungry and thirsty, and where you met a
very miscellaneous company.  Probably there was a great deal of loose
talk among the guests; at any rate, there was always wine, we may
believe.

Whatever may be the hygienic advantages or disadvantages of wine,--
and I for one, except for certain particular ends, believe in water,
and, I blush to say it, in black tea,--there is no doubt about its
being the grand specific against dull dinners.  A score of people
come together in all moods of mind and body.  The problem is, in the
space of one hour, more or less, to bring them all into the same
condition of slightly exalted life.  Food alone is enough for one
person, perhaps,--talk, alone, for another; but the grand equalizer
and fraternizer, which works up the radiators to their maximum
radiation, and the absorbents to their maximum receptivity, is now
just where it was when

          The conscious water saw its Lord and blushed,

--when six great vessels containing water, the whole amounting to
more than a hogshead-full, were changed into the best of wine.  I
once wrote a song about wine, in which I spoke so warmly of it, that
I was afraid some would think it was written inter pocula; whereas it
was composed in the bosom of my family, under the most tranquillizing
domestic influences.

--The divinity-student turned towards me, looking mischievous.--Can
you tell me,--he said,--who wrote a song for a temperance celebration
once, of which the following is a verse?

     Alas for the loved one, too gentle and fair
     The joys of the banquet to chasten and share!
     Her eye lost its light that his goblet might shine,
     And the rose of her cheek was dissolved in his wine!

I did,--I answered.--What are you going to do about it?--I will tell
you another line I wrote long ago:--

     Don't be "consistent,"--but be simply true.

The longer I live, the more I am satisfied of two things: first, that
the truest lives are those that are cut rose-diamond-fashion, with
many facets answering to the many-planed aspects of the world about
them; secondly, that society is always trying in some way or other to
grind us down to a single flat surface.  It is hard work to resist
this grinding-down action.--Now give me a chance.  Better eternal
and universal abstinence than the brutalities of those days that made
wives and mothers and daughters and sisters blush for those whom they
should have honored, as they came reeling home from their debauches!
Yet better even excess than lying and hypocrisy; and if wine is upon
all our tables, let us praise it for its color and fragrance and
social tendency, so far as it deserves, and not hug a bottle in the
closet and pretend not to know the use of a wine-glass at a public
dinner!  I think you will find that people who honestly mean to be
true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try
to be "consistent."  But a great many things we say can be made to
appear contradictory, simply because they are partial views of a
truth, and may often look unlike at first, as a front view of a face
and its profile often do.

Here is a distinguished divine, for whom I have great respect, for I
owe him a charming hour at one of our literary anniversaries, and he
has often spoken noble words; but he holds up a remark of my friend
the "Autocrat,"--which I grieve to say he twice misquotes, by
omitting the very word which gives it its significance,--the word
fluid, intended to typify the mobility of the restricted will,--holds
it up, I say, as if it attacked the reality of the self-determining
principle, instead of illustrating its limitations by an image.  Now
I will not explain any farther, still less defend, and least of all
attack, but simply quote a few lines from one of my friend's poems,
printed more than ten years ago, and ask the distinguished gentleman
where he has ever asserted more strongly or absolutely the
independent will of the "subcreative centre," as my heretical friend
has elsewhere called man.

    --Thought, conscience, will, to make them all thy own
     He rent a pillar from the eternal throne!
    --Made in His image, thou must nobly dare
     The thorny crown of sovereignty to share.
    --Think not too meanly of thy low estate;
     Thou hast a choice; to choose is to create!

If he will look a little closely, he will see that the profile and
the full-face views of the will are both true and perfectly
consistent!

Now let us come back, after this long digression, to the conversation
with the intelligent Englishman.  We begin skirmishing with a few
light ideas,--testing for thoughts,--as our electro-chemical friend,
De Sauty, if there were such a person, would test for his current;
trying a little litmus-paper for acids, and then a slip of turmeric-
paper for alkalies, as chemists do with unknown compounds; flinging
the lead, and looking at the shells and sands it brings up to find
out whether we are like to keep in shallow water, or shall have to
drop the deep-sea line;--in short, seeing what we have to deal with.
If the Englishman gets his H's pretty well placed, he comes from one
of the higher grades of the British social order, and we shall find
him a good companion.

But, after all, here is a great fact between us.  We belong to two
different civilizations, and, until we recognize what separates us,
we are talking like Pyramus and Thisbe, without any hole in the wall
to talk through.  Therefore, on the whole, if he were a superior
fellow, incapable of mistaking it for personal conceit, I think I
would let out the fact of the real American feeling about Old-World
folks.  They are children to us in certain points of view.  They are
playing with toys we have done with for whole-generations.

--------
FOOTNOTE:

The more I have observed and reflected, the more limited seems to me
the field of action of the human will. Every act of choice involves a
special relation between the ego and the conditions before it.  But
no man knows what forces are at work in the determination of his ego.
The bias which decides his choice between two or more motives may
come from some unsuspected ancestral source, of which he knows
nothing at all.  He is automatic in virtue of that hidden spring of
reflex action, all the time having the feeling that he is self-
determining.  The Story of Elsie Yenner, written-soon after this book
was published, illustrates the direction in which my thought was
moving.  'The imaginary subject of the story obeyed her will, but her
will Obeyed the mysterious antenatal poisoning influence.
--------

That silly little drum they are always beating on, and the trumpet
and the feather they make so much noise and cut such a figure with,
we have not quite outgrown, but play with much less seriously and
constantly than they do.  Then there is a whole museum of wigs, and
masks, and lace-coats, and gold-sticks, and grimaces, and phrases,
which we laugh at honestly, without affectation, that are still used
in the Old-World puppet-shows.  I don't think we on our part ever
understand the Englishman's concentrated loyalty and specialized
reverence.  But then we do think more of a man, as such, (barring
some little difficulties about race and complexion which the
Englishman will touch us on presently,) than any people that ever
lived did think of him.  Our reverence is a great deal wider, if it
is less intense.  We have caste among us, to some extent; it is true;
but there is never a collar on the American wolf-dog such as you
often see on the English mastiff, notwithstanding his robust, hearty
individuality.

This confronting of two civilizations is always a grand sensation to
me; it is like cutting through the isthmus and letting the two oceans
swim into each other's laps.  The trouble is, it is so difficult to
let out the whole American nature without its self-assertion seeming
to take a personal character.  But I never enjoy the Englishman so
much as when he talks of church and king like Manco Capac among the
Peruvians.  Then you get the real British flavor, which the
cosmopolite Englishman loses.

How much better this thorough interpenetration of ideas than a barren
interchange of courtesies, or a bush-fighting argument, in which each
man tries to cover as much of himself and expose as much of his
opponent as the tangled thicket of the disputed ground will let him!

---My thoughts flow in layers or strata, at least three deep.  I
follow a slow person's talk, and keep a perfectly clear under-current
of my own beneath it.  Under both runs obscurely a consciousness
belonging to a third train of reflections, independent of the two
others.  I will try to write out a Mental movement in three parts.

A.---First voice, or Mental Soprano,--thought follows a woman
talking.

B.--Second voice, or Mental Barytone,--my running accompaniment.

C.--Third voice, or Mental Basso,--low grumble of importunate self-
repeating idea.

A.--White lace, three skirts, looped with flowers, wreath of apple-
blossoms, gold bracelets, diamond pin and ear-rings, the most
delicious berthe you ever saw, white satin slippers-

B.--Deuse take her!  What a fool she is!  Hear her chatter!  (Look
out of window just here.--Two pages and a half of description, if it
were all written out, in one tenth of a second.)--Go ahead, old lady!
(Eye catches picture over fireplace.) There's that infernal family
nose!  Came over in the "Mayflower" on the first old fool's face.
Why don't they wear a ring in it?

C.--You 'll be late at lecture,--late at lecture,--late,--late-

I observe that a deep layer of thought sometimes makes itself felt
through the superincumbent strata, thus:--The usual single or double
currents shall flow on, but there shall be an influence blending with
them, disturbing them in an obscure way, until all at once I say,--
Oh, there!  I knew there was something troubling me,--and the thought
which had been working through comes up to the surface clear,
definite, and articulates itself,--a disagreeable duty, perhaps, or
an unpleasant recollection.

The inner world of thought and the outer world of events are alike in
this, that they are both brimful.  There is no space between
consecutive thoughts, or between the never-ending series of actions.
All pack tight, and mould their surfaces against each other, so that
in the long run there is a wonderful average uniformity in the forms
of both thoughts and actions, just as you find that cylinders crowded
all become hexagonal prisms, and spheres pressed together are formed
into regular polyhedra.

Every event that a man would master must be mounted on the run, and
no man ever caught the reins of a thought except as it galloped by
him.  So, to carry out, with another comparison, my remark about the
layers of thought, we may consider the mind as it moves among
thoughts or events, like a circus-rider whirling round with a great
troop of horses.  He can mount a fact or an idea, and guide it more
or less completely, but he cannot stop it.  So, as I said in another
way at the beginning, he can stride two or three thoughts at once,
but not break their steady walk, trot, or gallop.  He can only take
his foot from the saddle of one thought and put it on that of
another.

--What is the saddle of a thought?  Why, a word, of course.--Twenty
years after you have dismissed a thought, it suddenly wedges up to
you through the press, as if it had been steadily galloping round and
round all that time without a rider.

The will does not act in the interspaces of thought, for there are no
such interspaces, but simply steps from the back of one moving
thought upon that of another.

--I should like to ask,--said the divinity-student,--since we are
getting into metaphysics, how you can admit space, if all things are
in contact, and how you can admit time, if it is always now to
something?

--I thought it best not to hear this question.

--I wonder if you know this class of philosophers in books or
elsewhere.  One of them makes his bow to the public, and exhibits an
unfortunate truth bandaged up so that it cannot stir hand or foot,--
as helpless, apparently, and unable to take care of itself, as an
Egyptian mummy.  He then proceeds, with the air and method of a
master, to take off the bandages.  Nothing can be neater than the way
in which he does it.  But as he takes off layer after layer, the
truth seems to grow smaller and smaller, and some of its outlines
begin to look like something we have seen before.  At last, when he
has got them all off, and the truth struts out naked, we recognize it
as a diminutive and familiar acquaintance whom we have known in the
streets all our lives.  The fact is, the philosopher has coaxed the
truth into his study and put all those bandages on; or course it is
not very hard for him to take them off.  Still, a great many people
like to watch the process,--he does it so neatly!

Dear!  dear!  I am ashamed to write and talk, sometimes, when I see
how those functions of the large-brained, thumb-opposing plantigrade
are abused by my fellow-vertebrates,--perhaps by myself.  How they
spar for wind, instead of hitting from the shoulder!

--The young fellow called John arose and placed himself in a neat
fighting attitude.--Fetch on the fellah that makes them long words!
--he said,--and planted a straight hit with the right fist in the
concave palm of the left hand with a click like a cup and ball.--You
small boy there, hurry up that "Webster's Unabridged!"

The little gentleman with the malformation, before described, shocked
the propriety of the breakfast-table by a loud utterance of three
words, of which the two last were "Webster's Unabridged," and the
first was an emphatic monosyllable.--Beg pardon,--he added,--forgot
myself.  But let us have an English dictionary, if we are to have
any.  I don't believe in clipping the coin of the realm, Sir!  If I
put a weathercock on my house, Sir, I want it to tell which way the
wind blows up aloft,--off from the prairies to the ocean, or off from
the ocean to the prairies, or any way it wants to blow!  I don't want
a weathercock with a winch in an old gentleman's study that he can
take hold of and turn, so that the vane shall point west when the
great wind overhead is blowing east with all its might, Sir!  Wait
till we give you a dictionary; Sir!  It takes Boston to do that
thing, Sir!

--Some folks think water can't run down-hill anywhere out of Boston,
--remarked the Koh-i-noor.

I don't know what some folks think so well as I know what some fools
say,--rejoined the Little Gentleman.--If importing most dry goods
made the best scholars, I dare say you would know where to look for
'em.--Mr. Webster could n't spell, Sir, or would n't spell, Sir,--at
any rate, he did n't spell; and the end of it was a fight between the
owners of some copyrights and the dignity of this noble language
which we have inherited from our English fathers.  Language!--the
blood of the soul, Sir! into which our thoughts run and out of which
they grow!  We know what a word is worth here in Boston.  Young Sam
Adams got up on the stage at Commencement, out at Cambridge there,
with his gown on, the Governor and Council looking on in the name of
his Majesty, King George the Second, and the girls looking down out
of the galleries, and taught people how to spell a word that was n't
in the Colonial dictionaries !  R-e, re, s-i-s, sis, t-a-n-c-e,
tance, Resistance!  That was in '43, and it was a good many years
before the Boston boys began spelling it with their muskets;--but
when they did begin, they spelt it so loud that the old bedridden
women in the English almshouses heard every syllable!  Yes, yes,
yes,--it was a good while before those other two Boston boys got the
class so far along that it could spell those two hard words,
Independence and Union!  I tell you what, Sir, there are a thousand
lives, aye, sometimes a million, go to get a new word into a language
that is worth speaking.  We know what language means too well here in
Boston to play tricks with it.  We never make a new word til we have
made a new thing or a new thought, Sir! then we shaped the new mould
of this continent, we had to make a few.  When, by God's permission,
we abrogated the primal curse of maternity, we had to make a word or
two.  The cutwater of this great Leviathan clipper, the OCCIDENTAL,--
this thirty-wasted wind-and-steam wave-crusher,--must throw a little
spray over the human vocabulary as it splits the waters of a new
world's destiny!

He rose as he spoke, until his stature seemed to swell into the fair
human proportions.  His feet must have been on the upper round of his
high chair; that was the only way I could account for it.

Puts her through fast-rate,--said the young fellow whom the boarders
call John.

The venerable and kind-looking old gentleman who sits opposite said
he remembered Sam Adams as Governor.  An old man in a brown coat.
Saw him take the Chair on Boston Common.  Was a boy then, and
remembers sitting on the fence in front of the old Hancock house.
Recollects he had a glazed 'lectionbun, and sat eating it and looking
down on to the Common.  Lalocks flowered late that year, and he got a
great bunch off from the bushes in the Hancock front-yard.

Them 'lection-buns are no go,--said the young man John, so called.
--I know the trick.  Give a fellah a fo'penny bun in the mornin', an'
he downs the whole of it.  In about an hour it swells up in his
stomach as big as a football, and his feedin' 's spilt for that day.
That's the way to stop off a young one from eatin' up all the
'lection dinner.

Salem!  Salem! not Boston,--shouted the little man.

But the Koh-i-noor laughed a great rasping laugh, and the boy
Benjamin Franklin looked sharp at his mother, as if he remembered the
bun-experiment as a part of his past personal history.

The Little Gentleman was holding a fork in his left hand.  He stabbed
a boulder of home-made bread with it, mechanically, and looked at it
as if it ought to shriek.  It did not,--but he sat as if watching it.

--Language is a solemn thing,--I said.--It grows out of life,--out
of its agonies and ecstasies, its wants and its weariness.  Every
language is a temple, in which the soul of those who speak it is
enshrined.  Because time softens its outlines and rounds the sharp
angles of its cornices, shall a fellow take a pickaxe to help time?
Let me tell you what comes of meddling with things that can take care
of themselves.--A friend of mine had a watch given him, when he was
a boy,--a "bull's eye," with a loose silver case that came off like
an oyster-shell from its contents; you know them,--the cases that you
hang on your thumb, while the core, or the real watch, lies in your
hand as naked as a peeled apple.  Well, he began with taking off the
case, and so on from one liberty to another, until he got it fairly
open, and there were the works, as good as if they were alive,--
crown-wheel, balance-wheel, and all the rest.  All right except one
thing,--there was a confounded little hair had got tangled round the
balance-wheel.  So my young Solomon got a pair of tweezers, and
caught hold of the hair very nicely, and pulled it right out, without
touching any of the wheels,--when,--buzzzZZZ!  and the watch had done
up twenty-four hours in double magnetic-telegraph time!--The English
language was wound up to run some thousands of years, I trust; but if
everybody is to be pulling at everything he thinks is a hair, our
grandchildren will have to make the discovery that it is a hair-
spring, and the old Anglo-Norman soul's-timekeeper will run down, as
so many other dialects have done before it.  I can't stand this
meddling any better than you, Sir.  But we have a great deal to be
proud of in the lifelong labors of that old lexicographer, and we
must n't be ungrateful.  Besides, don't let us deceive ourselves,--
the war of the dictionaries is only a disguised rivalry of cities,
colleges, and especially of publishers.  After all, it is likely that
the language will shape itself by larger forces than phonography and
dictionary-making.  You may spade up the ocean as much as you like,
and harrow it afterwards, if you can,--but the moon will still lead
the tides, and the winds will form their surface.

--Do you know Richardson's Dictionary?--I said to my neighbor the
divinity-student.

Haow?--said the divinity-student.--He colored, as he noticed on my
face a twitch in one of the muscles which tuck up the corner of the
mouth, (zygomaticus major,) and which I could not hold back from
making a little movement on its own account.

It was too late.--A country-boy, lassoed when he was a half-grown
colt.  Just as good as a city-boy, and in some ways, perhaps,
better,--but caught a little too old not to carry some marks of his
earlier ways of life.  Foreigners, who have talked a strange tongue
half their lives, return to the language of their childhood in their
dying hours.  Gentlemen in fine linen, and scholars in large
libraries, taken by surprise, or in a careless moment, will sometimes
let slip a word they knew as boys in homespun and have not spoken
since that time,--but it lay there under all their culture.  That is
one way you may know the country-boys after they have grown rich or
celebrated; another is by the odd old family names, particularly
those of the Hebrew prophets, which the good old people have saddled
them with.

--Boston has enough of England about it to make a good English
dictionary,--said that fresh-looking youth whom I have mentioned as
sitting at the right upper corner of the table.

I turned and looked him full in the face,--for the pure, manly
intonations arrested me.  The voice was youthful, but full of
character.--I suppose some persons have a peculiar susceptibility in
the matter of voice.--Hear this.

Not long after the American Revolution, a young lady was sitting in
her father's chaise in a street of this town of Boston.  She
overheard a little girl talking or singing, and was mightily taken
with the tones of her voice.  Nothing would satisfy her but she must
have that little girl come and live in her father's house.  So the
child came, being then nine years old.  Until her marriage she
remained under the same roof with the young lady.  Her children
became successively inmates of the lady's dwelling; and now, seventy
years, or thereabouts, since the young lady heard the child singing,
one of that child's children and one of her grandchildren are with
her in that home, where she, no longer young, except in heart, passes
her peaceful days.--Three generations linked together by so light a
breath of accident!

I liked--the sound of this youth's voice, I said, and his look when I
came to observe him a little more closely.  His complexion had
something better than the bloom and freshness which had first
attracted me;--it had that diffused tone which is a sure index of
wholesome, lusty life.  A fine liberal style of nature seemed to be:
hair crisped, moustache springing thick and dark, head firmly
planted, lips finished, as is commonly sees them in gentlemen's
families, a pupil well contracted, and a mouth that opened frankly
with a white flash of teeth that looked as if they could serve him as
they say Ethan Allen's used to serve their owner,--to draw nails
with.  This is the kind of fellow to walk a frigate's deck and bowl
his broadsides into the "Gadlant Thudnder-bomb," or any forty-port-
holed adventurer who would like to exchange a few tons of iron
compliments.--I don't know what put this into my head, for it was
not till some time afterward I learned the young fellow had been in
the naval school at Annapolis.  Something had happened to change his
plan of life, and he was now studying engineering and architecture in
Boston.

When the youth made the short remark which drew my attention to him,
the little deformed gentleman turned round and took a long look at
him.

Good for the Boston boy!--he said.

I am not a Boston boy,--said the youth, smiling,--I am a Marylander.

I don't care where you come from,--we'll make a Boston man of you,--
said the little gentleman.  Pray, what part of Maryland did you come
from, and how shall I call you?

The poor youth had to speak pretty loud, as he was at the right upper
corner of the table, and the little gentleman next the lower left-
hand corner.  His face flushed a little, but he answered pleasantly,
telling who he was, as if the little man's infirmity gave him a right
to ask any questions he wanted to.

Here is the place for you to sit,--said the little gentleman,
pointing to the vacant chair next his own, at the corner.

You're go'n' to have a young lady next you, if you wait till to-
morrow,--said the landlady to him.

He did not reply, but I had a fancy that he changed color.  It can't
be that he has susceptibilities with reference to a contingent young
lady!  It can't be that he has had experiences which make him
sensitive!  Nature could not be quite so cruel as to set a heart
throbbing in that poor little cage of ribs!  There is no use in
wasting notes of admiration.  I must ask the landlady about him.

These are some of the facts she furnished.--Has not been long with
her.  Brought a sight of furniture,--could n't hardly get some of it
upstairs.  Has n't seemed particularly attentive to the ladies.  The
Bombazine (whom she calls Cousin something or other) has tried to
enter into conversation with him, but retired with the impression
that he was indifferent to ladies' society.  Paid his bill the other
day without saying a word about it.  Paid it in gold,--had a great
heap of twenty-dollar pieces.  Hires her best room.  Thinks he is a
very nice little man, but lives dreadful lonely up in his chamber.
Wants the care of some capable nuss.  Never pitied anybody more in
her life--never see a more interestin' person.

--My intention was, when I began making these notes, to let them
consist principally of conversations between myself and the other
boarders.  So they will, very probably; but my curiosity is excited
about this little boarder of ours, and my reader must not be
disappointed, if I sometimes interrupt a discussion to give an
account of whatever fact or traits I may discover about him.  It so
happens that his room is next to mine, and I have the opportunity of
observing many of his ways without any active movements of curiosity.
That his room contains heavy furniture, that he is a restless little
body and is apt to be up late, that he talks to himself, and keeps
mainly to himself, is nearly all I have yet found out.

One curious circumstance happened lately which I mention without
drawing an absolute inference.  Being at the studio of a sculptor
with whom I am acquainted, the other day, I saw a remarkable cast of
a left arm.  On my asking where the model came from, he said it was
taken direct from the arm of a deformed person, who had employed one
of the Italian moulders to make the cast.  It was a curious case, it
should seem, of one beautiful limb upon a frame otherwise singularly
imperfect--I have repeatedly noticed this little gentleman's use of
his left arm.  Can he have furnished the model I saw at the
sculptor's?

--So we are to have a new boarder to-morrow.  I hope there will be
something pretty and pleasing about her.  A woman with a creamy
voice, and finished in alto rilievo, would be a variety in the
boarding-house,--a little more marrow and a little less sinew than
our landlady and her daughter and the bombazine-clad female, all of
whom are of the turkey-drumstick style of organization.  I don't mean
that these are our only female companions; but the rest being
conversational non-combatants, mostly still, sad feeders, who take in
their food as locomotives take in wood and water, and then wither
away from the table like blossoms that never came to fruit, I have
not yet referred to them as individuals.

I wonder what kind of young person we shall see in that empty chair
to-morrow!

--I read this song to the boarders after breakfast the other morning.
It was written for our fellows;--you know who they are, of course.



                    THE BOYS.

Has there any old fellow got mixed with the boys?
If there has, take him out, without making a noise!
Hang the Almanac's cheat and the Catalogue's spite!
Old Time is a liar!  We're twenty to-night!

We're twenty!  We're twenty!  Who says we are more?
He's tipsy,--young jackanapes!--show him the door!--
"Gray temples at twenty?"--Yes!  white, if we please;
Where the snow-flakes fall thickest there's nothing can freeze!

Was it snowing I spoke of?  Excuse the mistake!
Look close,--you will see not a sign of a flake;
We want some new garlands for those we have shed,
And these are white roses in place of the red!

We've a trick, we young fellows, you may have been told.
Of talking (in public) as if we were old;
That boy we call Doctor, (1) and this we call Judge (2)--
It's a neat little fiction,--of course it's all fudge.

That fellow's the Speaker, (3)--the one on the right;
Mr. Mayor, (4) my young one, how are you to-night?
That's our "Member of Congress,"(5) we say when we chaff;
There's the "Reverend" (6) What's his name?--don't make me laugh!

That boy with the grave mathematical look(7)
Made believe he had written a wonderful book,
And the ROYAL SOCIETY thought it was true!
So they chose him right in; a good joke it was, too.

There's a boy,--we pretend,--with a three-decker-brain
That could harness a team with a logical chain:
When he spoke for our manhood in syllabled fire,
We called him "The Justice,"--but now he's "The Squire."(1)

And there's a nice youngster of excellent pith,(2)
Fate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith,
But he shouted a song for the brave and the free,
--Just read on his medal,--"My country,--of thee!"

You hear that boy laughing?--you think he's all fun,
But the angels laugh, too, at the good he has done;
The children laugh loud as they troop to his call,
And the poor man that knows him laughs loudest of all!(3)

Yes, we're boys,--always playing with tongue or with pen,--
And I sometimes have asked,--Shall we ever be men?
Shall we always be youthful and laughing and gay,
Till the last dear companion drops smiling away?

Then here's to our boyhood, its gold and its gray!
The stars of its Winter, the dews of its May!
And when we have done with our life-lasting toys,
Dear Father, take care of thy children, the Boys!


1 Francis Thomas.
2 George Tyler Bigelow.
3 Francis Boardman Crowninshield.
4 G. W. Richardson.
5 George Thomas Davis.
6 James Freeman Clarke.
7 Benjamin Peirce.




III

[The Professor talks with the Reader.  He tells a
Young Girl's Story.]

When the elements that went to the making of the first man, father of
mankind, had been withdrawn from the world of unconscious matter, the
balance of creation was disturbed.  The materials that go to the
making of one woman were set free by the abstraction from inanimate
nature of one man's-worth of masculine constituents.  These combined
to make our first mother, by a logical necessity involved in the
previous creation of our common father.  All this, mythically,
illustratively, and by no means doctrinally or polemically.

The man implies the woman, you will understand.  The excellent
gentleman whom I had the pleasure of setting right in a trifling
matter a few weeks ago believes in the frequent occurrence of
miracles at the present day.  So do I.  I believe, if you could find
an uninhabited coral-reef island, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean,
with plenty of cocoa-palms and bread-fruit on it, and put a handsome
young fellow, like our Marylander, ashore upon it, if you touched
there a year afterwards, you would find him walking under the palm-
trees arm in arm with a pretty woman.

Where would she come from?

Oh, that 's the miracle!

--I was just as certain, when I saw that fine, high-colored youth at
the upper right-hand corner of our table, that there would appear
some fitting feminine counterpart to him, as if I had been a
clairvoyant, seeing it all beforehand.

--I have a fancy that those Marylanders are just about near enough to
the sun to ripen well.--How some of us fellows remember Joe and
Harry, Baltimoreans, both!  Joe, with his cheeks like lady-apples,
and his eyes like black-heart cherries, and his teeth like the
whiteness of the flesh of cocoanuts, and his laugh that set the
chandelier-drops rattling overhead, as we sat at our sparkling
banquets in those gay times!  Harry, champion, by acclamation, of
the college heavy-weights, broad-shouldered, bull-necked, square-
jawed, six feet and trimmings, a little science, lots of pluck, good-
natured as a steer in peace, formidable as a red-eyed bison in the
crack of hand-to-hand battle!  Who forgets the great muster-day, and
the collision of the classic with the democratic forces?  The huge
butcher, fifteen stone,--two hundred and ten pounds,--good weight,--
steps out like Telamonian Ajax, defiant.  No words from Harry, the
Baltimorean,--one of the quiet sort, who strike first; and do the
talking, if there is any, afterwards.  No words, but, in the place
thereof, a clean, straight, hard hit, which took effect with a spank
like the explosion of a percussion-cap, knocking the slayer of beeves
down a sand-bank,--followed, alas! by the too impetuous youth, so
that both rolled down together, and the conflict terminated in one of
those inglorious and inevitable Yankee clinches, followed by a
general melee, which make our native fistic encounters so different
from such admirably-ordered contests as that which I once saw at an
English fair, where everything was done decently and in order; and
the fight began and ended with such grave propriety, that a sporting
parson need hardly have hesitated to open it with a devout petition,
and, after it was over, dismiss the ring with a benediction.

I can't help telling one more story about this great field-day,
though it is the most wanton and irrelevant digression.  But all of
us have a little speck of fight underneath our peace and good-will to
men, just a speck, for revolutions and great emergencies, you know,--
so that we should not submit to be trodden quite flat by the first
heavy-heeled aggressor that came along.  You can tell a portrait from
an ideal head, I suppose, and a true story from one spun out of the
writer's invention.  See whether this sounds true or not.

Admiral Sir Isaac Coffin sent out two fine blood-horses, Barefoot and
Serab by name, to Massachusetts, something before the time I am
talking of.  With them came a Yorkshire groom, a stocky little
fellow, in velvet breeches, who made that mysterious hissing noise,
traditionary in English stables, when he rubbed down the silken-
skinned racers, in great perfection.  After the soldiers had come
from the muster-field, and some of the companies were on the village-
common, there was still some skirmishing between a few individuals
who had not had the fight taken out of them.  The little Yorkshire
groom thought he must serve out somebody.  So he threw himself into
an approved scientific attitude, and, in brief, emphatic language,
expressed his urgent anxiety to accommodate any classical young
gentleman who chose to consider himself a candidate for his
attentions.  I don't suppose there were many of the college boys that
would have been a match for him in the art which Englishmen know so
much more of than Americans, for the most part.  However, one of the
Sophomores, a very quiet, peaceable fellow, just stepped out of the
crowd, and, running straight at the groom, as he stood there,
sparring away, struck him with the sole of his foot, a straight blow,
as if it had been with his fist, and knocked him heels over head and
senseless, so that he had to be carried off from the field.  This
ugly way of hitting is the great trick of the French gavate, which is
not commonly thought able to stand its ground against English
pugilistic science.  These are old recollections, with not much to
recommend them, except, perhaps, a dash of life, which may be worth a
little something.

The young Marylander brought them all up, you may remember.  He
recalled to my mind those two splendid pieces of vitality I told you
of.  Both have been long dead. How often we see these great red-
flaring flambeaux of life blown out, as it were, by a puff of wind,
--and the little, single-wicked night-lamp of being, which some
white-faced and attenuated invalid shades with trembling fingers,
flickering on while they go out one after another, until its glimmer
is all that is left to us of the generation to which it belonged!

I told you that I was perfectly sure, beforehand, we should find some
pleasing girlish or womanly shape to fill the blank at our table and
match the dark-haired youth at the upper corner.

There she sits, at the very opposite corner, just as far off as
accident could put her from this handsome fellow, by whose side she
ought, of course, to be sitting.  One of the "positive" blondes, as
my friend, you may remember, used to call them.  Tawny-haired,
amber-eyed, full-throated, skin as white as a blanched almond.  Looks
dreamy to me, not self-conscious, though a black ribbon round her
neck sets it off as a Marie-Antoinette's diamond-necklace could not
do.  So in her dress, there is a harmony of tints that looks as if an
artist had run his eye over her and given a hint or two like the
finishing touch to a picture.  I can't help being struck with her,
for she is at once rounded and fine in feature, looks calm, as
blondes are apt to, and as if she might run wild, if she were trifled
with.  It is just as I knew it would be,--and anybody can see that
our young Marylander will be dead in love with her in a week.

Then if that little man would only turn out immensely rich and have
the good-nature to die and leave them all his money, it would be as
nice as a three-volume novel.

The Little Gentleman is in a flurry, I suspect, with the excitement
of having such a charming neighbor next him.  I judge so mainly by
his silence and by a certain rapt and serious look on his face, as if
he were thinking of something that had happened, or that might
happen, or that ought to happen,--or how beautiful her young life
looked, or how hardly Nature had dealt with him, or something which
struck him silent, at any rate.  I made several conversational
openings for him, but he did not fire up as he often does.  I even
went so far as to indulge in, a fling at the State House, which, as
we all know, is in truth a very imposing structure, covering less
ground than St. Peter's, but of similar general effect.  The little
man looked up, but did not reply to my taunt.  He said to the young
lady, however, that the State House was the Parthenon of our
Acropolis, which seemed to please her, for she smiled, and he
reddened a little,--so I thought.  I don't think it right to watch
persons who are the subjects of special infirmity,--but we all do it.

I see that they have crowded the chairs a little at that end of the
table, to make room for another newcomer of the lady sort.  A well-
mounted, middle-aged preparation, wearing her hair without a cap,--
pretty wide in the parting, though,--contours vaguely hinted,--
features very quiet,--says little as yet, but seems to keep her eye
on the young lady, as if having some responsibility for her
My record is a blank for some days after this.  In the mean time I
have contrived to make out the person and the story of our young
lady, who, according to appearances, ought to furnish us a heroine
for a boarding-house romance before a year is out.  It is very
curious that she should prove connected with a person many of us have
heard of.  Yet, curious as it is, I have been a hundred times struck
with the circumstance that the most remote facts are constantly
striking each other; just as vessels starting from ports thousands of
miles apart pass close to each other in the naked breadth of the
ocean, nay, sometimes even touch, in the dark, with a crack of
timbers, a gurgling of water, a cry of startled sleepers,--a cry
mysteriously echoed in warning dreams, as the wife of some Gloucester
fisherman, some coasting skipper, wakes with a shriek, calls the name
of her husband, and sinks back to uneasy slumbers upon her lonely
pillow,--a widow.

Oh, these mysterious meetings!  Leaving all the vague, waste, endless
spaces of the washing desert, the ocean-steamer and the fishing-smack
sail straight towards each other as if they ran in grooves ploughed
for them in the waters from the beginning of creation!  Not only
things and events, but our own thoughts, are so full of these
surprises, that, if there were a reader in my parish who did not
recognize the familiar occurrence of what I am now going to mention,
I should think it a case for the missionaries of the Society for the
Propagation of Intelligence among the Comfortable Classes.
There are about as many twins in the births of thought as of
children.  For the first time in your lives you learn some fact or
come across some idea.  Within an hour, a day, a week, that same fact
or idea strikes you from another quarter.  It seems as if it had
passed into space and bounded back upon you as an echo from the blank
wall that shuts in the world of thought.  Yet no possible connection
exists between the two channels by which the thought or the fact
arrived.  Let me give an infinitesimal illustration.

One of the Boys mentioned, the other evening, in the course of a very
pleasant poem he read us, a little trick of the Commons-table
boarders, which I, nourished at the parental board, had never heard
of.  Young fellows being always hungry--Allow me to stop dead-short,
in order to utter an aphorism which has been forming itself in one of
the blank interior spaces of my intelligence, like a crystal in the
cavity of a geode.

               Aphorism by the Professor.

In order to know whether a human being is young or old, offer it food
of different kinds at short intervals.  If young, it will eat
anything at any hour of the day or night.  If old, it observes stated
periods, and you might as well attempt to regulate the time of
highwater to suit a fishing-party as to change these periods.
The crucial experiment is this.  Offer a bulky and boggy bun to the
suspected individual just ten minutes before dinner.  If this is
eagerly accepted and devoured, the fact of youth is established.  If
the subject of the question starts back and expresses surprise and
incredulity, as if you could not possibly be in earnest, the fact of
maturity is no less clear.


--Excuse me,--I return to my story of the Commons-table.--Young
fellows being always hungry, and tea and dry toast being the meagre
fare of the evening meal, it was a trick of some of the Boys to
impale a slice of meat upon a fork, at dinner-time, and stick the
fork holding it beneath the table, so that they could get it at tea-
time.  The dragons that guarded this table of the Hesperides found
out the trick at last, and kept a sharp look-out for missing forks;--
they knew where to find one, if it was not in its place.--Now the
odd thing was, that, after waiting so many years to hear of this
college trick, I should hear it mentioned a second time within the
same twenty-four hours by a college youth of the present generation.
Strange, but true.  And so it has happened to me and to every person,
often and often, to be hit in rapid succession by these twinned facts
or thoughts, as if they were linked like chain-shot.

I was going to leave the simple reader to wonder over this, taking it
as an unexplained marvel.  I think, however, I will turn over a
furrow of subsoil in it.--The explanation is, of course, that in a
great many thoughts there must be a few coincidences, and these
instantly arrest our attention.  Now we shall probably never have the
least idea of the enormous number of impressions which pass through
our consciousness, until in some future life we see the photographic
record of our thoughts and the stereoscopic picture of our actions.
There go more pieces to make up a conscious life or a living body
than you think for.  Why, some of you were surprised when a friend of
mine told you there were fifty-eight separate pieces in a fiddle.
How many "swimming glands"--solid, organized, regularly formed,
rounded disks taking an active part in all your vital processes, part
and parcel, each one of them, of your corporeal being--do you suppose
are whirled along, like pebbles in a stream, with the blood which
warms your frame and colors your cheeks?--A noted German physiologist
spread out a minute drop of blood, under the microscope, in narrow
streaks, and counted the globules, and then made a calculation.  The
counting by the micrometer took him a week.--You have, my full-grown
friend, of these little couriers in crimson or scarlet livery,
running on your vital errands day and night as long as you live,
sixty-five billions, five hundred and seventy thousand millions.
Errors excepted.--Did I hear some gentleman say, "Doubted? "--I am
the Professor.  I sit in my chair with a petard under it that will
blow me through the skylight of my lecture-room, if I do not know
what I am talking about and whom I am quoting.

Now, my dear friends, who are putting your hands to your foreheads,
and saying to yourselves that you feel a little confused, as if you
had been waltzing until things began to whirl slightly round you, is
it possible that you do not clearly apprehend the exact connection of
all that I have been saying, and its bearing on what is now to come?
Listen, then.  The number of these living elements in our bodies
illustrates the incalculable multitude of our thoughts; the number of
our thoughts accounts for those frequent coincidences spoken of;
these coincidences in the world of thought illustrate those which we
constantly observe in the world of outward events, of which the
presence of the young girl now at our table, and proving to be the
daughter of an old acquaintance some of us may remember, is the
special example which led me through this labyrinth of reflections,
and finally lands me at the commencement of this young girl's story,
which, as I said, I have found the time and felt the interest to
learn something of, and which I think I can tell without wronging the
unconscious subject of my brief delineation.



IRIS.

You remember, perhaps, in some papers published awhile ago, an odd
poem written by an old Latin tutor?  He brought up at the verb amo, I
love, as all of us do, and by and by Nature opened her great living
dictionary for him at the word filia, a daughter.  The poor man was
greatly perplexed in choosing a name for her.  Lucretia and Virginia
were the first that he thought of; but then came up those pictured
stories of Titus Livius, which he could never read without crying,
though he had read them a hundred times.

--Lucretia sending for her husband and her father, each to bring one
friend with him, and awaiting them in her chamber.  To them her
wrongs briefly.  Let them see to the wretch,--she will take care of
herself.  Then the hidden knife flashes out and sinks into her heart.
She slides from her seat, and falls dying.  "Her husband and her
father cry aloud."--No, not Lucretia.

-Virginius,--a brown old soldier, father of a nice girl.  She engaged
to a very promising young man.  Decemvir Appius takes a violent fancy
to her,--must have her at any rate.  Hires a lawyer to present the
arguments in favor of the view that she was another man's daughter.
There used to be lawyers in Rome that would do such things.--All
right.   There are two sides to everything.  Audi alteram partem.
The legal gentleman has no opinion,--he only states the evidence.
--A doubtful case.  Let the young lady be under the protection of the
Honorable Decemvir until it can be looked up thoroughly.--Father
thinks it best, on the whole, to give in.  Will explain the matter,
if the young lady and her maid will step this way.  That is the
explanation,--a stab with a butcher's knife, snatched from a stall,
meant for other lambs than this poor bleeding Virginia

The old man thought over the story.  Then he must have one look at
the original.  So he took down the first volume and read it over.
When he came to that part where it tells how the young gentleman she
was engaged to and a friend of his took up the poor girl's bloodless
shape and carried it through the street, and how all the women
followed, wailing, and asking if that was what their daughters were
coming to,--if that was what they were to get for being good girls,--
he melted down into his accustomed tears of pity and grief, and,
through them all, of delight at the charming Latin of the narrative.
But it was impossible to call his child Virginia.  He could never
look at her without thinking she had a knife sticking in her bosom.

Dido would be a good name, and a fresh one.  She was a queen, and the
founder of a great city.  Her story had been immortalized by the
greatest of poets,--for the old Latin tutor clove to "Virgilius
Maro," as he called him, as closely as ever Dante did in his
memorable journey.  So he took down his Virgil, it was the smooth-
leafed, open-lettered quarto of Baskerville,--and began reading the
loves and mishaps of Dido.  It would n't do.  A lady who had not
learned discretion by experience, and came to an evil end.  He shook
his head, as he sadly repeated,

    "---misera ante diem, subitoque accensa furore;"

but when he came to the lines,

    "Ergo Iris croceis per coelum roscida pennis
     Mille trahens varios adverso Sole colores,"

he jumped up with a great exclamation, which the particular recording
angel who heard it pretended not to understand, or it might have gone
hard with the Latin tutor some time or other.

"Iris shall be her name!"--he said.  So her name was Iris.

--The natural end of a tutor is to perish by starvation.  It is only
a question of time, just as with the burning of college libraries.
These all burn up sooner or later, provided they are not housed in
brick or stone and iron.  I don't mean that you will see in the
registry of deaths that this or that particular tutor died of well-
marked, uncomplicated starvation.  They may, even, in extreme cases,
be carried off by a thin, watery kind of apoplexy, which sounds very
well in the returns, but means little to those who know that it is
only debility settling on the head.  Generally, however, they fade
and waste away under various pretexts,--calling it dyspepsia,
consumption, and so on, to put a decent appearance upon the case and
keep up the credit of the family and the institution where they have
passed through the successive stages of inanition.

In some cases it takes a great many years to kill a tutor by the
process in question.  You see they do get food and clothes and fuel,
in appreciable quantities, such as they are.  You will even notice
rows of books in their rooms, and a picture or two,--things that look
as if they had surplus money; but these superfluities are the water
of crystallization to scholars, and you can never get them away till
the poor fellows effloresce into dust.  Do not be deceived.  The
tutor breakfasts on coffee made of beans, edulcorated with milk
watered to the verge of transparency; his mutton is tough and
elastic, up to the moment when it becomes tired out and tasteless;
his coal is a sullen, sulphurous anthracite, which rusts into ashes,
rather than burns, in the shallow grate; his flimsy broadcloth is too
thin for winter and too thick for summer.  The greedy lungs of fifty
hot-blooded boys suck the oxygen from the air he breathes in his
recitation-room.  In short, he undergoes a process of gentle and
gradual starvation.

--The mother of little Iris was not called Electra, like hers of the
old story, neither was her grandfather Oceanus.  Her blood-name,
which she gave away with her heart to the Latin tutor, was a plain
old English one, and her water-name was Hannah, beautiful as
recalling the mother of Samuel, and admirable as reading equally well
from the initial letter forwards and from the terminal letter
backwards.  The poor lady, seated with her companion at the
chessboard of matrimony, had but just pushed forward her one little
white pawn upon an empty square, when the Black Knight, that cares
nothing for castles or kings or queens, swooped down upon her and
swept her from the larger board of life.

The old Latin tutor put a modest blue stone at the head of his late
companion, with her name and age and Eheu!  upon it,--a smaller one
at her feet, with initials; and left her by herself, to be rained and
snowed on,--which is a hard thing to do for those whom we have
cherished tenderly.

About the time that the lichens, falling on the stone, like drops of
water, had spread into fair, round rosettes, the tutor had starved
into a slight cough.  Then he began to draw the buckle of his black
trousers a little tighter, and took in another reef in his never-
ample waistcoat.  His temples got a little hollow, and the contrasts
of color in his cheeks more vivid than of old.  After a while his
walks fatigued him, and he was tired, and breathed hard after going
up a flight or two of stairs.  Then came on other marks of inward
trouble and general waste, which he spoke of to his physician as
peculiar, and doubtless owing to accidental causes; to all which the
doctor listened with deference, as if it had not been the old story
that one in five or six of mankind in temperate climates tells, or
has told for him, as if it were something new.  As the doctor went
out, he said to himself,--"On the rail at last.  Accommodation train.
A good many stops, but will get to the station by and by."  So the
doctor wrote a recipe with the astrological sign of Jupiter before
it, (just as your own physician does, inestimable reader, as you will
see, if you look at his next prescription,) and departed, saying he
would look in occasionally.  After this, the Latin tutor began the
usual course of "getting better," until he got so much better that
his face was very sharp, and when he smiled, three crescent lines
showed at each side of his lips, and when he spoke; it was in a
muffled whisper, and the white of his eye glistened as pearly as the
purest porcelain,--so much better, that he hoped--by spring--he----
might be able--to--attend------to his class again.--But he was
recommended not to expose himself, and so kept his chamber, and
occasionally, not having anything to do, his bed.  The unmarried
sister with whom he lived took care of him; and the child, now old
enough to be manageable and even useful in trifling offices, sat in
the chamber, or played, about.

Things could not go on so forever, of course.  One morning his face
was sunken and his hands were very, very cold.  He was "better," he
whispered, but sadly and faintly.  After a while he grew restless and
seemed a little wandering.  His mind ran on his classics, and fell
back on the Latin grammar.

"Iris!" he said,--"filiola mea!"--The child knew this meant my
dear little daughter as well as if it had been English.--"Rainbow!
"for he would translate her name at times,--"come to me,--veni"--and
his lips went on automatically, and murmured," vel venito!"--The
child came and sat by his bedside and took his hand, which she could
not warm, but which shot its rays of cold all through her slender
frame.  But there she sat, looking steadily at him.  Presently he
opened his lips feebly, and whispered, "Moribundus."  She did not
know what that meant, but she saw that there was something new and
sad.  So she began to cry; but presently remembering an old book that
seemed to comfort him at times, got up and brought a Bible in the
Latin version, called the Vulgate.  "Open it," he said,--"I will
read, segnius irritant,--don't put the light out,--ah!  hoeret
lateri,--I am going,--vale, vale, vale, goodbye, good-bye,--the Lord
take care of my child!  Domine, audi--vel audito!" His face whitened
suddenly, and he lay still, with open eyes and mouth.  He had taken
his last degree.

--Little Miss Iris could not be said to begin life with a very
brilliant rainbow over her, in a worldly point of view.  A limited
wardrobe of man's attire, such as poor tutors wear,--a few good
books, principally classics,--a print or two, and a plaster model of
the Pantheon, with some pieces of furniture which had seen service,--
these, and a child's heart full of tearful recollections and strange
doubts and questions, alternating with the cheap pleasures which are
the anodynes of childish grief; such were the treasures she
inherited.--No,--I forgot.  With that kindly sentiment which all of
us feel for old men's first children,--frost-flowers of the early
winter season, the old tutor's students had remembered him at a time
when he was laughing and crying with his new parental emotions, and
running to the side of the plain crib in which his alter egg, as he
used to say, was swinging, to hang over the little heap of stirring
clothes, from which looked the minute, red, downy, still, round face,
with unfixed eyes and working lips,--in that unearthly gravity which
has never yet been broken by a smile, and which gives to the earliest
moon-year or two of an infant's life the character of a first old
age, to counterpoise that second childhood which there is one chance
in a dozen it may reach by and by.  The boys had remembered the old
man and young father at that tender period of his hard, dry life.
There came to him a fair, silver goblet, embossed with classical
figures, and bearing on a shield the graver words, Ex dono
pupillorum.  The handle on its side showed what use the boys had
meant it for; and a kind letter in it, written with the best of
feeling, in the worst of Latin, pointed delicately to its
destination.  Out of this silver vessel, after a long, desperate,
strangling cry, which marked her first great lesson in the realities
of life, the child took the blue milk, such as poor tutors and their
children get, tempered with water, and sweetened a little, so as to
bring it nearer the standard established by the touching indulgence
and partiality of Nature,--who had mingled an extra allowance of
sugar in the blameless food of the child at its mother's breast, as
compared with that of its infant brothers and sisters of the bovine
race.

But a willow will grow in baked sand wet with rainwater.  An air-
plant will grow by feeding on the winds.  Nay, those huge forests
that overspread great continents have built themselves up mainly from
the air-currents with which they are always battling.  The oak is but
a foliated atmospheric crystal deposited from the aerial ocean that
holds the future vegetable world in solution.  The storm that tears
its leaves has paid tribute to its strength, and it breasts the
tornado clad in the spoils of a hundred hurricanes.

Poor little Iris!  What had she in common with the great oak in the
shadow of which we are losing sight of her?--She lived and grew like
that,--this was all.  The blue milk ran into her veins and filled
them with thin, pure blood.  Her skin was fair, with a faint tinge,
such as the white rosebud shows before it opens.  The doctor who had
attended her father was afraid her aunt would hardly be able to
"raise " her,--"delicate child,"--hoped she was not consumptive,--
thought there was a fair chance she would take after her father.

A very forlorn-looking person, dressed in black, with a white
neckcloth, sent her a memoir of a child who died at the age of two
years and eleven months, after having fully indorsed all the
doctrines of the particular persuasion to which he not only belonged
himself, but thought it very shameful that everybody else did not
belong.  What with foreboding looks and dreary death-bed stories, it
was a wonder the child made out to live through it.  It saddened her
early years, of course,--it distressed her tender soul with thoughts
which, as they cannot be fully taken in, should be sparingly used as
instruments of torture to break down the natural cheerfulness of a
healthy child, or, what is infinitely worse, to cheat a dying one out
of the kind illusions with which the Father of All has strewed its
downward path.

The child would have died, no doubt, and, if properly managed, might
have added another to the long catalogue of wasting children who have
been as cruelly played upon by spiritual physiologists, often with
the best intentions, as ever the subject of a rare disease by the
curious students of science.

Fortunately for her, however, a wise instinct had guided the late
Latin tutor in the selection of the partner of his life, and the
future mother of his child.  The deceased tutoress was a tranquil,
smooth woman, easily nourished, as such people are,--a quality which
is inestimable in a tutor's wife,--and so it happened that the
daughter inherited enough vitality from the mother to live through
childhood and infancy and fight her way towards womanhood, in spite
of the tendencies she derived from her other parent.

--Two and two do not always make four, in this matter of hereditary
descent of qualities.  Sometimes they make three, and sometimes five.
It seems as if the parental traits at one time showed separate, at
another blended,--that occasionally, the force of two natures is
represented in the derivative one by a diagonal of greater value than
either original line of living movement,--that sometimes there is a
loss of vitality hardly to be accounted for, and again a forward
impulse of variable intensity in some new and unforeseen direction.

So it was with this child.  She had glanced off from her parental
probabilities at an unexpected angle.  Instead of taking to classical
learning like her father, or sliding quietly into household duties
like her mother, she broke out early in efforts that pointed in the
direction of Art.  As soon as she could hold a pencil she began to
sketch outlines of objects round her with a certain air and spirit.
Very extraordinary horses, but their legs looked as if they could
move.  Birds unknown to Audubon, yet flying, as it were, with a rush.
Men with impossible legs, which did yet seem to have a vital
connection with their most improbable bodies.  By-and-by the doctor,
on his beast,--an old man with a face looking as if Time had kneaded
it like dough with his knuckles, with a rhubarb tint and flavor
pervading himself and his sorrel horse and all their appurtenances.
A dreadful old man!  Be sure she did not forget those saddle-bags
that held the detestable bottles out of which he used to shake those
loathsome powders which, to virgin childish palates that find heaven
in strawberries and peaches, are--Well, I suppose I had better stop.
Only she wished she was dead sometimes when she heard him coming.
On the next leaf would figure the gentleman with the black coat and
white cravat, as he looked when he came and entertained her with
stories concerning the death of various little children about her
age, to encourage her, as that wicked Mr. Arouet said about shooting
Admiral Byng.   Then she would take her pencil, and with a few
scratches there would be the outline of a child, in which you might
notice how one sudden sweep gave the chubby cheek, and two dots
darted at the paper looked like real eyes.

By-and-by she went to school, and caricatured the schoolmaster on the
leaves of her grammars and geographies, and drew the faces of her
companions, and, from time to time, heads and figures from her fancy,
with large eyes, far apart, like those of Raffaelle's mothers and
children, sometimes with wild floating hair, and then with wings and
heads thrown back in ecstasy.  This was at about twelve years old, as
the dates of these drawings show, and, therefore, three or four years
before she came among us.  Soon after this time, the ideal figures
began to take the place of portraits and caricatures, and a new
feature appeared in her drawing-books in the form of fragments of
verse and short poems.

It was dull work, of course, for such a young girl to live with an
old spinster and go to a village school.  Her books bore testimony to
this; for there was a look of sadness in the faces she drew, and a
sense of weariness and longing for some imaginary conditions of
blessedness or other, which began to be painful.  She might have gone
through this flowering of the soul, and, casting her petals, subsided
into a sober, human berry, but for the intervention of friendly
assistance and counsel.

In the town where she lived was a lady of honorable condition,
somewhat past middle age, who was possessed of pretty ample means, of
cultivated tastes, of excellent principles, of exemplary character,
and of more than common accomplishments.  The gentleman in black
broadcloth and white neckerchief only echoed the common voice about
her, when he called her, after enjoying, beneath her hospitable roof,
an excellent cup of tea, with certain elegancies and luxuries he was.
unaccustomed to, "The Model of all the Virtues."

She deserved this title as well as almost any woman.  She did really
bristle with moral excellences.  Mention any good thing she had not
done; I should like to see you try!  There was no handle of weakness
to take hold of her by; she was as unseizable, except in her
totality, as a billiard-ball; and on the broad, green, terrestrial
table, where she had been knocked about, like all of us, by the cue
of Fortune, she glanced from every human contact, and "caromed" from
one relation to another, and rebounded from the stuffed cushion of
temptation, with such exact and perfect angular movements, that the
Enemy's corps of Reporters had long given up taking notes of her
conduct, as there was no chance for their master.

What an admirable person for the patroness and directress of a
slightly self-willed child, with the lightning zigzag line of genius
running like a glittering vein through the marble whiteness of her
virgin nature!  One of the lady-patroness's peculiar virtues was
calmness.  She was resolute and strenuous, but still.  You could
depend on her for every duty; she was as true as steel.  She was
kind-hearted and serviceable in all the relations of life.  She had
more sense, more knowledge, more conversation, as well as more
goodness, than all the partners you have waltzed with this winter put
together.

Yet no man was known to have loved her, or even to have offered
himself to her in marriage.  It was a great wonder.  I am very
anxious to vindicate my character as a philosopher and an observer of
Nature by accounting for this apparently extraordinary fact.

You may remember certain persons who have the misfortune of
presenting to the friends whom they meet a cold, damp hand.  There
are states of mind in which a contact of this kind has a depressing
effect on the vital powers that makes us insensible to all the
virtues and graces of the proprietor of one of these life-absorbing
organs.  When they touch us, virtue passes out of us, and we feel as
if our electricity had been drained by a powerful negative battery,
carried about by an overgrown human torpedo.

"The Model of all the Virtues" had a pair of searching eyes as clear
as Wenham ice; but they were slower to melt than that fickle jewelry.
Her features disordered themselves slightly at times in a surface-
smile, but never broke loose from their corners and indulged in the
riotous tumult of a laugh,--which, I take it, is the mob-law of the
features;--and propriety the magistrate who reads the riot-act.  She
carried the brimming cup of her inestimable virtues with a cautious,
steady hand, and an eye always on them, to see that they did not
spill.  Then she was an admirable judge of character.  Her mind was a
perfect laboratory of tests and reagents; every syllable you put into
breath went into her intellectual eudiometer, and all your thoughts
were recorded on litmus-paper.  I think there has rarely been a more
admirable woman.  Of course, Miss Iris was immensely and passionately
attached to her.--Well,--these are two highly oxygenated adverbs,--
grateful,--suppose we say,--yes,--grateful, dutiful, obedient to her
wishes for the most part,--perhaps not quite up to the concert pitch
of such a perfect orchestra of the virtues.

We must have a weak spot or two in a character before we can love it
much.  People that do not laugh or cry, or take more of anything than
is good for them, or use anything but dictionary-words, are admirable
subjects for biographies.  But we don't always care most for those
flat-pattern flowers that press best in the herbarium.

This immaculate woman,--why could n't she have a fault or two?
Is n't there any old whisper which will tarnish that wearisome
aureole of saintly perfection?  Does n't she carry a lump of opium in
her pocket?  Is n't her cologne-bottle replenished oftener than its
legitimate use would require?  It would be such a comfort!

Not for the world would a young creature like Iris have let such
words escape her, or such thoughts pass through her mind.  Whether at
the bottom of her soul lies any uneasy consciousness of an oppressive
presence, it is hard to say, until we know more about her.  Iris sits
between the Little Gentleman and the "Model of all the Virtues," as
the black-coated personage called her.--I will watch them all.

--Here I stop for the present.  What the Professor said has had to
make way this time for what he saw and heard.

-And now you may read these lines, which were written for gentle
souls who love music, and read in even tones, and, perhaps, with
something like a smile upon the reader's lips, at a meeting where
these musical friends had gathered.  Whether they were written with
smiles or not, you can guess better after you have read them.


               THE OPENING OF THE PIANO.

In the little southern parlor of the house you may have seen
With the gambrel-roof, and the gable looking westward to the green,
At the side toward the sunset, with the window on its right,
Stood the London-made piano I am dreaming of to-night.

Ah me! how I remember the evening when it came!
What a cry of eager voices, what a group of cheeks in flame,
When the wondrous boa was opened that had come from over seas,
With its smell of mastic-varnish and its flash of ivory keys!

Then the children all grew fretful in the restlessness of joy,
For the boy would push his sister, and the sister crowd the boy,
Till the father asked for quiet in his grave paternal way,
But the mother hushed the tumult with the words, "Now, Mary, play."

For the dear soul knew that music was a very sovereign balm;
She had sprinkled it over Sorrow and seen its brow grow calm,
In the days of slender harpsichords with tapping tinkling quills,
Or caroling to her spinet with its thin metallic thrills.

So Mary, the household minstrel, who always loved to please,
Sat down to the new "Clementi," and struck the glittering keys.
Hushed were the children's voices, and every eye grew dim,
As, floating from lip and finger, arose the "Vesper Hymn."

--Catharine, child of a neighbor, curly and rosy-red,
(Wedded since, and a widow,--something like ten years dead,)
Hearing a gush of music such as none before,
Steals from her mother's chamber and peeps at the open door.

Just as the "Jubilate " in threaded whisper dies,
--"Open it! open it, lady!" the little maiden cries,
(For she thought't was a singing creature caged in a box she heard,)
"Open it! open it, lady! and let me see the bird!"




IV

I don't know whether our literary or professional people are more
amiable than they are in other places, but certainly quarrelling is
out of fashion among them.  This could never be, if they were in the
habit of secret anonymous puffing of each other.  That is the kind of
underground machinery which manufactures false reputations and
genuine hatreds.  On the other hand, I should like to know if we are
not at liberty to have a good time together, and say the pleasantest
things we can think of to each other, when any of us reaches his
thirtieth or fortieth or fiftieth or eightieth birthday.

We don't have "scenes," I warrant you, on these occasions.  No
"surprise" parties!  You understand these, of course.  In the rural
districts, where scenic tragedy and melodrama cannot be had, as in
the city, at the expense of a quarter and a white pocket-
handkerchief, emotional excitement has to be sought in the dramas of
real life.  Christenings, weddings, and funerals, especially the
latter, are the main dependence; but babies, brides, and deceased
citizens cannot be had at a day's notice.  Now, then, for a surprise-
party!

A bag of flour, a barrel of potatoes, some strings of onions, a
basket of apples, a big cake and many little cakes, a jug of
lemonade, a purse stuffed with bills of the more modest
denominations, may, perhaps, do well enough for the properties in one
of these private theatrical exhibitions.  The minister of the parish,
a tender-hearted, quiet, hard-working man, living on a small salary,
with many children, sometimes pinched to feed and clothe them,
praying fervently every day to be blest in his "basket and store,"
but sometimes fearing he asks amiss, to judge by the small returns,
has the first role,--not, however, by his own choice, but forced upon
him.  The minister's wife, a sharp-eyed, unsentimental body, is first
lady; the remaining parts by the rest of the family.  If they only
had a playbill, it would run thus:


                     ON TUESDAY NEXT
                    WILL BE PRESENTED
                   THE AFFECTING SCENE
                         CALLED

                   THE SURPRISE-PARTY

                           OR

                  THE OVERCOME FAMILY;


WITH THE FOLLOWING STRONG CAST OF CHARACTERS.

The Rev.  Mr. Overcome, by the Clergyman of this Parish.
Mrs.  Overcome, by his estimable lady.
Masters Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John Overcome,
Misses Dorcas, Tabitha, Rachel, and Hannah, Overcome, by their
interesting children.
Peggy, by the female help.

The poor man is really grateful;--it is a most welcome and unexpected
relief.  He tries to express his thanks,--his voice falters,--he
chokes,--and bursts into tears.  That is the great effect of the
evening.  The sharp-sighted lady cries a little with one eye, and
counts the strings of onions, and the rest of the things, with the
other.  The children stand ready for a spring at the apples.  The
female help weeps after the noisy fashion of untutored handmaids.

Now this is all very well as charity, but do let the kind visitors
remember they get their money's worth.  If you pay a quarter for dry
crying, done by a second-rate actor, how much ought you to pay for
real hot, wet tears, out of the honest eyes of a gentleman who is not
acting, but sobbing in earnest?

All I meant to say, when I began, was, that this was not a surprise-
party where I read these few lines that follow:

We will not speak of years to-night;
For what have years to bring,
But larger floods of love and light
And sweeter songs to sing?

We will not drown in wordy praise
The kindly thoughts that rise;
If friendship owns one tender phrase,
He reads it in our eyes.

We need not waste our schoolboy art
To gild this notch of time;
Forgive me, if my wayward heart
Has throbbed in artless rhyme.

Enough for him the silent grasp
That knits us hand in hand,
And he the bracelet's radiant clasp
That locks our circling band.

Strength to his hours of manly toil!
Peace to his starlit dreams!
Who loves alike the furrowed soil,
The music-haunted streams!

Sweet smiles to keep forever bright
The sunshine on his lips,
And faith, that sees the ring of light
Round Nature's last eclipse!


--One of our boarders has been talking in such strong language that I
am almost afraid to report it.  However, as he seems to be really
honest and is so very sincere in his local prejudices, I don't
believe anybody will be very angry with him.

It is here, Sir!  right here!--said the little deformed gentleman,--
in this old new city of Boston,--this remote provincial corner of a
provincial nation, that the Battle of the Standard is fighting, and
was fighting before we were born, and will be fighting when we are
dead and gone,--please God!  The battle goes on everywhere throughout
civilization; but here, here, here is the broad white flag flying
which proclaims, first of all, peace and good-will to men, and, next
to that, the absolute, unconditional spiritual liberty of each
individual immortal soul!  The three-hilled city against the seven-
hilled city!  That is it, Sir,--nothing less than that; and if you
know what that means, I don't think you'll ask for anything more.  I
swear to you, Sir, I believe that these two centres of civilization
are just exactly the two points that close the circuit in the battery
of our planetary intelligence!  And I believe there are spiritual
eyes looking out from Uranus and unseen Neptune,--ay, Sir, from the
systems of Sirius and Arcturus and Aldebaran, and as far as that
faint stain of sprinkled worlds confluent in the distance that we
call the nebula of Orion,--looking on, Sir, with what organs I know
not, to see which are going to melt in that fiery fusion, the
accidents and hindrances of humanity or man himself, Sir,--the
stupendous abortion, the illustrious failure that he is, if the
three-hilled city does not ride down and trample out the seven-hilled
city!

--Steam 's up!--said the young man John, so called, in a low tone.
--Three hundred and sixty-five tons to the square inch.  Let him blow
her off, or he'll bu'st his b'iler.

The divinity-student took it calmly, only whispering that he thought
there was a little confusion of images between a galvanic battery and
a charge of cavalry.

But the Koh-i-noor--the gentleman, you remember, with a very large
diamond in his shirt-front laughed his scornful laugh, and made as if
to speak.

Sail in, Metropolis!--said that same young man John, by name.  And
then, in a lower lane, not meaning to be heard,--Now, then, Ma'am
Allen!

But he was heard,--and the Koh-i-noor's face turned so white with
rage, that his blue-black moustache and beard looked fearful, seen
against it.  He grinned with wrath, and caught at a tumbler, as if he
would have thrown it or its contents at the speaker.  The young
Marylander fixed his clear, steady eye upon him, and laid his hand on
his arm, carelessly almost, but the Jewel found it was held so that
he could not move it.  It was of no use.  The youth was his master in
muscle, and in that deadly Indian hug in which men wrestle with their
eyes;--over in five seconds, but breaks one of their two backs, and
is good for threescore years and ten;--one trial enough,--settles the
whole matter,--just as when two feathered songsters of the barnyard,
game and dunghill, come together,-after a jump or two at each other,
and a few sharp kicks, there is the end of it; and it is, Apres vous,
Monsieur, with the beaten party in all the social relations for all
the rest of his days.

I cannot philosophically account for the Koh-i-noor's wrath.  For
though a cosmetic is sold, bearing the name of the lady to whom
reference was made by the young person John, yet, as it is publicly
asserted in respectable prints that this cosmetic is not a dye, I see
no reason why he should have felt offended by any suggestion that he
was indebted to it or its authoress.

I have no doubt that there are certain exceptional complexions to
which the purple tinge, above alluded to, is natural.  Nature is
fertile in variety.  I saw an albiness in London once, for sixpence,
(including the inspection of a stuffed boa-constrictor,) who looked
as if she had been boiled in milk.  A young Hottentot of my
acquaintance had his hair all in little pellets of the size of
marrow-fat peas.  One of my own classmates has undergone a singular
change of late years,--his hair losing its original tint, and getting
a remarkable discolored look; and another has ceased to cultivate any
hair at all over the vertex or crown of the head.  So I am perfectly
willing to believe that the purple-black of the Koh-i-noor's
moustache and whiskers is constitutional and not pigmentary.  But I
can't think why he got so angry.

The intelligent reader will understand that all this pantomime of the
threatened onslaught and its suppression passed so quickly that it
was all over by the time the other end of the table found out there
was a disturbance; just as a man chopping wood half a mile off may be
seen resting on his axe at the instant you hear the last blow he
struck.  So you will please to observe that the Little Gentleman was
not, interrupted during the time implied by these ex-post-facto
remarks of mine, but for some ten or fifteen seconds only.

He did not seem to mind the interruption at all, for he started
again.  The "Sir" of his harangue was no doubt addressed to myself
more than anybody else, but he often uses it in discourse as if he
were talking with some imaginary opponent.

--America, Sir,--he exclaimed,--is the only place where man is full-
grown!

He straightened himself up, as he spoke, standing on the top round of
his high chair, I suppose, and so presented the larger part of his
little figure to the view of the boarders.

It was next to impossible to keep from laughing.  The commentary was
so strange an illustration of the text!  I thought it was time to put
in a word; for I have lived in foreign parts, and am more or less
cosmopolitan.

I doubt if we have more practical freedom in America than they have
in England,---I said.--An Englishman thinks as he likes in religion
and politics.  Mr. Martineau speculates as freely as ever Dr.
Channing did, and Mr. Bright is as independent as Mr. Seward.

Sir,--said he,--it is n't what a man thinks or says; but when and
where and to whom he thinks and says it.  A man with a flint and
steel striking sparks over a wet blanket is one thing, and striking
them over a tinder-box is another.  The free Englishman is born under
protest; he lives and dies under protest,--a tolerated, but not a
welcome fact.  Is not freethinker a term of reproach in England?  The
same idea in the soul of an Englishman who struggled up to it and
still holds it antagonistically, and in the soul of an American to
whom it is congenital and spontaneous, and often unrecognized, except
as an element blended with all his thoughts, a natural movement, like
the drawing of his breath or the beating of his heart, is a very
different thing.  You may teach a quadruped to walk on his hind legs,
but he is always wanting to be on all fours.  Nothing that can be
taught a growing youth is like the atmospheric knowledge he breathes
from his infancy upwards.  The American baby sucks in freedom with
the milk of the breast at which he hangs.

--That's a good joke,--said the young fellow John,--considerin' it
commonly belongs to a female Paddy.

I thought--I will not be certain--that the Little Gentleman winked,
as if he had been hit somewhere--as I have no doubt Dr. Darwin did
when the wooden-spoon suggestion upset his theory about why, etc.  If
he winked, however, he did not dodge.

A lively comment!--he said.--But Rome, in her great founder, sucked
the blood of empire out of the dugs of a brute, Sir!  The Milesian
wet-nurse is only a convenient vessel through which the American
infant gets the life-blood of this virgin soil, Sir, that is making
man over again, on the sunset pattern!  You don't think what we are
doing and going to do here.  Why, Sir, while commentators are
bothering themselves with interpretation of prophecies, we have got
the new heavens and the new earth over us and under us!  Was there
ever anything in Italy, I should like to know, like a Boston sunset?

--This time there was a laugh, and the little man himself almost
smiled.

Yes,--Boston sunsets;--perhaps they're as good in some other places,
but I know 'em best here.  Anyhow, the American skies are different
from anything they see in the Old World.  Yes, and the rocks are
different, and the soil is different, and everything that comes out
of the soil, from grass up to Indians, is different.  And now that
the provisional races are dying out-

--What do you mean by the provisional races, Sir?--said the divinity-
student, interrupting him.

Why, the aboriginal bipeds, to be sure,--he answered,--the red-crayon
sketch of humanity laid on the canvas before the colors for the real
manhood were ready.

I hope they will come to something yet,--said the divinity-student.

Irreclaimable, Sir,--irreclaimable!--said the Little Gentleman.
--Cheaper to breed white men than domesticate a nation of red ones.
When you can get the bitter out of the partridge's thigh, you can
make an enlightened commonwealth of Indians.  A provisional race,
Sir,--nothing more.  Exhaled carbonic acid for the use of vegetation,
kept down the bears and catamounts, enjoyed themselves in scalping
and being scalped, and then passed away or are passing away,
according to the programme.

Well, Sir, these races dying out, the white man has to acclimate
himself.  It takes him a good while; but he will come all right by-
and-by, Sir,--as sound as a woodchuck,--as sound as a musquash!

A new nursery, Sir, with Lake Superior and Huron and all the rest of
'em for wash-basins!  A new race, and a whole new world for the new-
born human soul to work in!  And Boston is the brain of it, and has
been any time these hundred years!  That's all I claim for Boston,--
that it is the thinking centre of the continent, and therefore of the
planet.

--And the grand emporium of modesty,--said the divinity-student, a
little mischievously.

Oh, don't talk to me of modesty!--answered the Little Gentleman,--I
'm past that!  There is n't a thing that was ever said or done in
Boston, from pitching the tea overboard to the last ecclesiastical
lie it tore into tatters and flung into the dock, that was n't
thought very indelicate by some fool or tyrant or bigot, and all the
entrails of commercial and spiritual conservatism are twisted into
colics as often as this revolutionary brain of ours has a fit of
thinking come over it.--No, Sir,--show me any other place that is,
or was since the megalosaurus has died out, where wealth and social
influence are so fairly divided between the stationary and the
progressive classes!  Show me any other place where every other
drawing-room is not a chamber of the Inquisition, with papas and
mammas for inquisitors,--and the cold shoulder, instead of the "dry
pan and the gradual fire," the punishment of "heresy"!

--We think Baltimore is a pretty civilized kind of a village,--said
the young Marylander, good-naturedly.--But I suppose you can't
forgive it for always keeping a little ahead of Boston in point of
numbers,--tell the truth now.  Are we not the centre of something?

Ah, indeed, to be sure you are.  You are the gastronomic metropolis
of the Union.  Why don't you put a canvas-back-duck on the top of the
Washington column?  Why don't you get that lady off from Battle
Monument and plant a terrapin in her place?  Why will you ask for
other glories when you have soft crabs?  No, Sir,--you live too well
to think as hard as we do in Boston.  Logic comes to us with the
salt-fish of Cape Ann; rhetoric is born of the beans of Beverly; but
you--if you open your mouths to speak, Nature stops them with a fat
oyster, or offers a slice of the breast of your divine bird, and
silences all your aspirations.

And what of Philadelphia?--said the Marylander.

Oh, Philadelphia?--Waterworks,--killed by the Croton and Cochituate;-
-Ben Franklin,--borrowed from Boston;--David Rittenhouse,--made an
orrery;--Benjamin Rush,--made a medical system;--both interesting to
antiquarians;--great Red-river raft of medical students,--spontaneous
generation of professors to match;--more widely known through the
Moyamensing hose-company, and the Wistar parties;-for geological
section of social strata, go to The Club.--Good place to live in,
--first-rate market,--tip-top peaches.--What do we know about
Philadelphia, except that the engine-companies are always shooting
each other?

And what do you say to New York?--asked the Koh-i-noor.

A great city, Sir,--replied the Little Gentleman,--a very opulent,
splendid city.  A point of transit of much that is remarkable, and of
permanence for much that is respectable.  A great money-centre.  San
Francisco with the mines above-ground,--and some of 'em under the
sidewalks.  I have seen next to nothing grandiose, out of New York,
in all our cities.  It makes 'em all look paltry and petty.  Has many
elements of civilization.  May stop where Venice did, though, for
aught we know.--The order of its development is just this:--Wealth;
architecture; upholstery; painting; sculpture.  Printing, as a
mechanical art,--just as Nicholas Jepson and the Aldi, who were
scholars too, made Venice renowned for it.  Journalism, which is the
accident of business and crowded populations, in great perfection.
Venice got as far as Titian and Paul Veronese and Tintoretto,--great
colorists, mark you, magnificent on the flesh-and-blood side of Art,-
-but look over to Florence and see who lie in Santa Crocea, and ask
out of whose loins Dante sprung!

Oh, yes, to be sure, Venice built her Ducal Palace, and her Church of
St. Mark, and her Casa d' Or, and the rest of her golden houses; and
Venice had great pictures and good music; and Venice had a Golden
Book, in which all the large tax-payers had their names written;--but
all that did not make Venice the brain of Italy.

I tell you what, Sir,--with all these magnificent appliances of
civilization, it is time we began to hear something from the djinnis
donee whose names are on the Golden Book of our sumptuous, splendid,
marble-placed Venice,--something in the higher walks of literature,--
something in the councils of the nation.  Plenty of Art, I grant you,
Sir; now, then, for vast libraries, and for mighty scholars and
thinkers and statesmen,--five for every Boston one, as the population
is to ours,--ten to one more properly, in virtue of centralizing
attraction as the alleged metropolis, and not call our people
provincials, and have to come begging to us to write the lives of
Hendrik Hudson and Gouverneur Morris!

--The Little Gentleman was on his hobby, exalting his own city at the
expense of every other place.  I have my doubts if he had been in
either of the cities he had been talking about.  I was just going to
say something to sober him down, if I could, when the young
Marylander spoke up.

Come, now,--he said,--what's the use of these comparisons?  Did n't I
hear this gentleman saying, the other day, that every American owns
all America?  If you have really got more brains in Boston than other
folks, as you seem to think, who hates you for it, except a pack of
scribbling fools?  If I like Broadway better than Washington Street,
what then?  I own them both, as much as anybody owns either. I am an
American,--and wherever I look up and see the stars and stripes
overhead, that is home to me!

He spoke, and looked up as if he heard the emblazoned folds crackling
over him in the breeze.  We all looked up involuntarily, as if we
should see the national flag by so doing.  The sight of the dingy
ceiling and the gas-fixture depending therefrom dispelled the
illusion.

Bravo!  bravo!--said the venerable gentleman on the other side of the
table.--Those are the sentiments of Washington's Farewell Address.
Nothing better than that since the last chapter in Revelations.
Five-and-forty years ago there used to be Washington societies, and
little boys used to walk in processions, each little boy having a
copy of the Address, bound in red, hung round his neck by a ribbon.
Why don't they now?  Why don't they now?  I saw enough of hating each
other in the old Federal times; now let's love each other, I say,--
let's love each other, and not try to make it out that there is n't
any place fit to live in except the one we happen to be born in.

It dwarfs the mind, I think,--said I,--to feed it on any localism.
The full stature of manhood is shrivelled--

The color burst up into my cheeks.  What was I saying,--I, who would
not for the world have pained our unfortunate little boarder by an
allusion?

I will go,--he said,--and made a movement with his left arm to let
himself down from his high chair.

No,--no,--he does n't mean it,--you must not go,--said a kind voice
next him; and a soft, white hand was laid upon his arm.

Iris, my dear!--exclaimed another voice, as of a female, in accents
that might be considered a strong atmospheric solution of duty with
very little flavor of grace.

She did not move for this address, and there was a tableau that
lasted some seconds.  For the young girl, in the glory of half-blown
womanhood, and the dwarf, the cripple, the misshapen little creature
covered with Nature's insults, looked straight into each other's
eyes.

Perhaps no handsome young woman had ever looked at him so in his
life.  Certainly the young girl never had looked into eyes that
reached into her soul as these did.  It was not that they were in
themselves supernaturally bright,--but there was the sad fire in them
that flames up from the soul of one who looks on the beauty of woman
without hope, but, alas! not without emotion.  To him it seemed as if
those amber gates had been translucent as the brown water of a
mountain brook, and through them he had seen dimly into a virgin
wilderness, only waiting for the sunrise of a great passion for all
its buds to blow and all its bowers to ring with melody.

That is my image, of course,--not his.  It was not a simile that was
in his mind, or is in anybody's at such a moment,--it was a pang of
wordless passion, and then a silent, inward moan.

A lady's wish,--he said, with a certain gallantry of manner,--makes
slaves of us all.--And Nature, who is kind to all her children, and
never leaves the smallest and saddest of all her human failures
without one little comfit of self-love at the bottom of his poor
ragged pocket,--Nature suggested to him that he had turned his
sentence well; and he fell into a reverie, in which the old thoughts
that were always hovering dust outside the doors guarded by Common
Sense, and watching for a chance to squeeze in, knowing perfectly
well they would be ignominiously kicked out again as soon as Common
Sense saw them, flocked in pell-mell,--misty, fragmentary, vague,
half-ashamed of themselves, but still shouldering up against his
inner consciousness till it warmed with their contact:--John
Wilkes's--the ugliest man's in England--saying, that with half-an-
hour's start he would cut out the handsomest man in all the land in
any woman's good graces; Cadenus--old and savage--leading captive
Stella and Vanessa; and then the stray line of a ballad, "And a
winning tongue had he,"--as much as to say, it is n't looks, after
all, but cunning words, that win our Eves over,--just as of old when
it was the worst-looking brute of the lot that got our grandmother to
listen to his stuff and so did the mischief.

Ah, dear me!  We rehearse the part of Hercules with his club,
subjugating man and woman in our fancy, the first by the weight of
it, and the second by our handling of it,--we rehearse it, I say, by
our own hearth-stones, with the cold poker as our club, and the
exercise is easy.  But when we come to real life, the poker is in the
fore, and, ten to one, if we would grasp it, we find it too hot to
hold;--lucky for us, if it is not white-hot, and we do not have to
leave the skin of our hands sticking to it when we fling it down or
drop it with a loud or silent cry!

--I am frightened when I find into what a labyrinth of human
character and feeling I am winding.  I meant to tell my thoughts, and
to throw in a few studies of manner and costume as they pictured
themselves for me from day to day.  Chance has thrown together at the
table with me a number of persons who are worth studying, and I mean
not only to look on them, but, if I can, through them.  You can get
any man's or woman's secret, whose sphere is circumscribed by your
own, if you will only look patiently on them long enough.  Nature is
always applying her reagents to character, if you will take the pains
to watch her.  Our studies of character, to change the image, are
very much like the surveyor's triangulation of a geographical
province.  We get a base-line in organization, always; then we get an
angle by sighting some distant object to which the passions or
aspirations of the subject of our observation are tending; then
another;--and so we construct our first triangle.  Once fix a man's
ideals, and for the most part the rest is easy.  A wants to die worth
half a million.  Good.  B (female) wants to catch him,--and outlive
him.  All right.  Minor details at our leisure.

What is it, of all your experiences, of all your thoughts, of all
your misdoings, that lies at the very bottom of the great heap of
acts of consciousness which make up your past life?  What should you
most dislike to tell your nearest friend?--Be so good as to pause for
a brief space, and shut the volume you hold with your finger between
the pages.--Oh, that is it!

What a confessional I have been sitting at, with the inward ear of my
soul open, as the multitudinous whisper of my involuntary confidants
came back to me like the reduplicated echo of a cry among the craggy
bills!

At the house of a friend where I once passed the night was one of
those stately upright cabinet desks and cases of drawers which were
not rare in prosperous families during the last century.  It had held
the clothes and the books and the papers of generation after
generation.  The hands that opened its drawers had grown withered,
shrivelled, and at last been folded in death.  The children that
played with the lower handles had got tall enough to open the desk,
to reach the upper shelves behind the folding-doors,--grown bent
after a while,--and then followed those who had gone before, and left
the old cabinet to be ransacked by a new generation.

A boy of ten or twelve was looking at it a few years ago, and, being
a quick-witted fellow, saw that all the space was not accounted for
by the smaller drawers in the part beneath the lid of the desk.
Prying about with busy eyes and fingers, he at length came upon a
spring, on pressing which, a secret drawer flew from its hiding-
place.  It had never been opened but by the maker.  The mahogany
shavings and dust were lying in it as when the artisan closed it,--
and when I saw it, it was as fresh as if that day finished.

Is there not one little drawer in your soul, my sweet reader, which
no hand but yours has ever opened, and which none that have known you
seem to have suspected?  What does it hold?--A sin?--I hope not.
What a strange thing an old dead sin laid away in a secret drawer of
the soul is!  Must it some time or other be moistened with tears,
until it comes to life again and begins to stir in our
consciousness,--as the dry wheel-animalcule, looking like a grain of
dust, becomes alive, if it is wet with a drop of water?

Or is it a passion?  There are plenty of withered men and women
walking about the streets who have the secret drawer in their hearts,
which, if it were opened, would show as fresh as it was when they
were in the flush of youth and its first trembling emotions.

What it held will, perhaps, never be known, until they are dead and
gone, and same curious eye lights on an old yellow letter with the
fossil footprints of the extinct passion trodden thick all over it.

There is not a boarder at our table, I firmly believe, excepting the
young girl, who has not a story of the heart to tell, if one could
only get the secret drawer open.  Even this arid female, whose armor
of black bombazine looks stronger against the shafts of love than any
cuirass of triple brass, has had her sentimental history, if I am not
mistaken.  I will tell you my reason for suspecting it.

Like many other old women, she shows a great nervousness and
restlessness whenever I venture to express any opinion upon a class
of subjects which can hardly be said to belong to any man or set of
men as their strictly private property,--not even to the clergy, or
the newspapers commonly called "religious."  Now, although it would
be a great luxury to me to obtain my opinions by contract, ready-
made, from a professional man, and although I have a constitutional
kindly feeling to all sorts of good people which would make me happy
to agree with all their beliefs, if that were possible, still I must
have an idea, now and then, as to the meaning of life; and though the
only condition of peace in this world is to have no ideas, or, at
least, not to express them, with reference to such subjects, I can't
afford to pay quite so much as that even for peace.

I find that there is a very prevalent opinion among the dwellers on
the shores of Sir Isaac Newton's Ocean of Truth, that salt, fish,
which have been taken from it a good while ago, split open, cured and
dried, are the only proper and allowable food for reasonable people.
I maintain, on the other hand, that there are a number of live fish
still swimming in it, and that every one of us has a right to see if
he cannot catch some of them.  Sometimes I please myself with the
idea that I have landed an actual living fish, small, perhaps, but
with rosy gills and silvery scales.  Then I find the consumers of
nothing but the salted and dried article insist that it is poisonous,
simply because it is alive, and cry out to people not to touch it.  I
have not found, however, that people mind them much.

The poor boarder in bombazine is my dynamometer.  I try every
questionable proposition on her.  If she winces, I must be prepared
for an outcry from the other old women.  I frightened her, the other
day, by saying that faith, as an intellectual state, was self-
reliance, which, if you have a metaphysical turn, you will find is
not so much of a paradox as it sounds at first.  So she sent me a
book to read which was to cure me of that error.  It was an old book,
and looked as if it had not been opened for a long time.  What should
drop out of it, one day, but a small heart-shaped paper, containing a
lock of that straight, coarse, brown hair which sets off the sharp
faces of so many thin-flanked, large-handed bumpkins!  I read upon
the paper the name "Hiram."--Love! love! love!--everywhere!
everywhere!--under diamonds and housemaids' "jewelry,"--lifting the
marrowy camel's-hair, and rustling even the black bombazine!--No,
no,--I think she never was pretty, but she was young once, and wore
bright ginghams, and, perhaps, gay merinos.  We shall find that the
poor little crooked man has been in love, or is in love, or will be
in love before we have done with him, for aught that I know!

Romance!  Was there ever a boarding-house in the world where the
seemingly prosaic table had not a living fresco for its background,
where you could see, if you had eyes, the smoke and fire of some
upheaving sentiment, or the dreary craters of smouldering or burnt-
out passions?  You look on the black bombazine and high-necked
decorum of your neighbor, and no more think of the real life that
underlies this despoiled and dismantled womanhood than you think of a
stone trilobite as having once been full of the juices and the
nervous thrills of throbbing and self-conscious being.  There is a
wild creature under that long yellow pin which serves as brooch for
the bombazine cuirass,--a wild creature, which I venture to say would
leap in his cage, if I should stir him, quiet as you think him.  A
heart which has been domesticated by matrimony and maternity is as
tranquil as a tame bullfinch; but a wild heart which has never been
fairly broken in flutters fiercely long after you think time has
tamed it down,--like that purple finch I had the other day, which
could not be approached without such palpitations and frantic flings
against the bars of his cage, that I had to send him back and get a
little orthodox canary which had learned to be quiet and never mind
the wires or his keeper's handling.  I will tell you my wicked, but
half involuntary experiment on the wild heart under the faded
bombazine.

Was there ever a person in the room with you, marked by any special
weakness or peculiarity, with whom you could be two hours and not
touch the infirm spot?  I confess the most frightful tendency to do
just this thing.  If a man has a brogue, I am sure to catch myself
imitating it.  If another is lame, I follow him, or, worse than that,
go before him, limping.

I could never meet an Irish gentleman--if it had been the Duke of
Wellington himself--without stumbling upon the word "Paddy,"--which I
use rarely in my common talk.

I have been worried to know whether this was owing to some innate
depravity of disposition on my part, some malignant torturing
instinct, which, under different circumstances, might have made a
Fijian anthropophagus of me, or to some law of thought for which I
was not answerable.  It is, I am convinced, a kind of physical fact
like endosmosis, with which some of you are acquainted.  A thin film
of politeness separates the unspoken and unspeakable current of
thought from the stream of conversation.  After a time one begins to
soak through and mingle with the other.

We were talking about names, one day.--Was there ever anything,--I
said,--like the Yankee for inventing the most uncouth, pretentious,
detestable appellations,--inventing or finding them,--since the time
of Praise-God Barebones?  I heard a country-boy once talking of
another whom he called Elpit, as I understood him.  Elbridge is
common enough, but this sounded oddly.  It seems the boy was
christened Lord Pitt,--and called for convenience, as above.  I have
heard a charming little girl, belonging to an intelligent family in
the country, called Anges invariably; doubtless intended for Agnes.
Names are cheap.  How can a man name an innocent new-born child, that
never did him any harm, Hiram?--The poor relation, or whatever she
is, in bombazine, turned toward me, but I was stupid, and went on.--
To think of a man going through life saddled with such an abominable
name as that!--The poor relation grew very uneasy.--I continued;
for I never thought of all this till afterwards.--I knew one young
fellow, a good many years ago, by the name of Hiram--What's got
into you, Cousin,--said our landlady,--to look so?--There! you 've
upset your teacup!

It suddenly occurred to me what I had been doing, and I saw the poor
woman had her hand at her throat; she was half-choking with the
"hysteric ball,"--a very odd symptom, as you know, which nervous
women often complain of.  What business had I to be trying
experiments on this forlorn old soul?  I had a great deal better be
watching that young girl.

Ah, the young girl!  I am sure that she can hide nothing from me.
Her skin is so transparent that one can almost count her heart-beats
by the flushes they send into her cheeks.  She does not seem to be
shy, either.  I think she does not know enough of danger to be timid.
She seems to me like one of those birds that travellers tell of,
found in remote, uninhabited islands, who, having never received any
wrong at the hand of man, show no alarm at and hardly any particular
consciousness of his presence.

The first thing will be to see how she and our little deformed
gentleman get along together; for, as I have told you, they sit side
by side.  The next thing will be to keep an eye on the duenna,--the
"Model" and so forth, as the white-neck-cloth called her.  The
intention of that estimable lady is, I understand, to launch her and
leave her.  I suppose there is no help for it, and I don't doubt this
young lady knows how to take care of herself, but I do not like to
see young girls turned loose in boarding-houses.  Look here now!
There is that jewel of his race, whom I have called for convenience
the Koh-i-noor, (you understand it is quite out of the question for
me to use the family names of our boarders, unless I want to get into
trouble,)--I say, the gentleman with the diamond is looking very
often and very intently, it seems to me, down toward the farther
corner of the table, where sits our amber-eyed blonde.  The
landlady's daughter does not look pleased, it seems to me, at this,
nor at those other attentions which the gentleman referred to has, as
I have learned, pressed upon the newly-arrived young person.  The
landlady made a communication to me, within a few days after the
arrival of Miss Iris, which I will repeat to the best of my
remembrance.

He, (the person I have been speaking of,)--she said,--seemed to be
kinder hankerin' round after that young woman.  It had hurt her
daughter's feelin's a good deal, that the gentleman she was a-keepin'
company with should be offerin' tickets and tryin' to send presents
to them that he'd never know'd till jest a little spell ago,--and he
as good as merried, so fur as solemn promises went, to as respectable
a young lady, if she did say so, as any there was round, whosomever
they might be.

Tickets!  presents!--said I.--What tickets, what presents has he had
the impertinence to be offering to that young lady?

Tickets to the Museum,--said the landlady.  There is them that's glad
enough to go to the Museum, when tickets is given 'em; but some of
'em ha'n't had a ticket sence Cenderilla was played,--and now he must
be offerin' 'em to this ridiculous young paintress, or whatever she
is, that's come to make more mischief than her board's worth.  But it
a'n't her fault,--said the landlady, relenting;--and that aunt of
hers, or whatever she is, served him right enough.

Why, what did she do?

Do?  Why, she took it up in the tongs and dropped it out o' winder.

Dropped?  dropped what?--I said.

Why, the soap,--said the landlady.

It appeared that the Koh-i-noor, to ingratiate himself, had sent an
elegant package of perfumed soap, directed to Miss Iris, as a
delicate expression of a lively sentiment of admiration, and that,
after having met with the unfortunate treatment referred to, it was
picked up by Master Benjamin Franklin, who appropriated it,
rejoicing, and indulged in most unheard-of and inordinate ablutions
in consequence, so that his hands were a frequent subject of maternal
congratulation, and he smelt like a civet-cat for weeks after his
great acquisition.

After watching daily for a time, I think I can see clearly into the
relation which is growing up between the little gentleman and the
young lady.  She shows a tenderness to him that I can't help being
interested in.  If he was her crippled child, instead of being more
than old enough to be her father, she could not treat him more
kindly.  The landlady's daughter said, the other day, she believed
that girl was settin' her cap for the Little Gentleman.

Some of them young folks is very artful,--said her mother,--and there
is them that would merry Lazarus, if he'd only picked up crumbs
enough.  I don't think, though, this is one of that sort; she's
kinder childlike,--said the landlady,--and maybe never had any dolls
to play with; for they say her folks was poor before Ma'am undertook
to see to her teachin' and board her and clothe her.

I could not help overhearing this conversation.  "Board her and
clothe her!"--speaking of such a young creature!  Oh, dear!--Yes,--
she must be fed,--just like Bridget, maid-of-all-work at this
establishment.  Somebody must pay for it.  Somebody has a right to
watch her and see how much it takes to "keep" her, and growl at her,
if she has too good an appetite.  Somebody has a right to keep an eye
on her and take care that she does not dress too prettily.  No mother
to see her own youth over again in these fresh features and rising
reliefs of half-sculptured womanhood, and, seeing its loveliness,
forget her lessons of neutral-tinted propriety, and open the cases
that hold her own ornaments to find for her a necklace or a bracelet
or a pair of ear-rings,--those golden lamps that light up the deep,
shadowy dimples on the cheeks of young beauties,--swinging in a semi-
barbaric splendor that carries the wild fancy to Abyssinian queens
and musky Odalisques!  I don't believe any woman has utterly given up
the great firm of Mundus & Co., so long as she wears ear-rings.

I think Iris loves to hear the Little Gentleman talk.  She smiles
sometimes at his vehement statements, but never laughs at him.  When
he speaks to her, she keeps her eye always steadily upon him.  This
may be only natural good-breeding, so to speak, but it is worth
noticing.  I have often observed that vulgar persons, and public
audiences of inferior collective intelligence, have this in common:
the least thing draws off their minds, when you are speaking to them.
I love this young creature's rapt attention to her diminutive
neighbor while he is speaking.

He is evidently pleased with it.  For a day or two after she came, he
was silent and seemed nervous and excited.  Now he is fond of getting
the talk into his own hands, and is obviously conscious that he has
at least one interested listener.  Once or twice I have seen marks of
special attention to personal adornment, a ruffled shirt-bosom, one
day, and a diamond pin in it,--not so very large as the Koh-i-noor's,
but more lustrous.  I mentioned the death's-head ring he wears on his
right hand.  I was attracted by a very handsome red stone, a ruby or
carbuncle or something of the sort, to notice his left hand, the
other day.  It is a handsome hand, and confirms my suspicion that the
cast mentioned was taken from his arm.  After all, this is just what
I should expect.  It is not very uncommon to see the upper limbs, or
one of them, running away with the whole strength, and, therefore,
with the whole beauty, which we should never have noticed, if it had
been divided equally between all four extremities.  If it is so, of
course he is proud of his one strong and beautiful arm; that is human
nature.  I am afraid he can hardly help betraying his favoritism, as
people who have any one showy point are apt to do,--especially
dentists with handsome teeth, who always smile back to their last
molars.

Sitting, as he does, next to the young girl, and next but one to the
calm lady who has her in charge, he cannot help seeing their
relations to each other.

That is an admirable woman, Sir,--he said to me one day, as we sat
alone at the table after breakfast,--an admirable woman, Sir,--and I
hate her.

Of course, I begged an explanation.

An admirable woman, Sir, because she does good things, and even kind
things,--takes care of this--this--young lady--we have here, talks
like a sensible person, and always looks as if she was doing her duty
with all her might.  I hate her because her voice sounds as if it
never trembled and her eyes look as if she never knew what it was to
cry.  Besides, she looks at me, Sir, stares at me, as if she wanted
to get an image of me for some gallery in her brain,--and we don't
love to be looked at in this way, we that have--I hate her,--I hate
her,--her eyes kill me,--it is like being stabbed with icicles to be
looked at so,--the sooner she goes home, the better.  I don't want a
woman to weigh me in a balance; there are men enough for that sort of
work.  The judicial character is n't captivating in females, Sir.  A
woman fascinates a man quite as often by what she overlooks as by
what she sees.  Love prefers twilight to daylight; and a man doesn't
think much of, nor care much for, a woman outside of his household,
unless he can couple the idea of love, past, present, or future, with
her.  I don't believe the Devil would give half as much for the
services of a sinner as he would for those of one of these folks that
are always doing virtuous acts in a way to make them unpleasing.
--That young girl wants a tender nature to cherish her and give her a
chance to put out her leaves,--sunshine, and not east winds.

He was silent,--and sat looking at his handsome left hand with the
red stone ring upon it.--Is he going to fall in love with Iris?

Here are some lines I read to the boarders the other day:--

      THE CROOKED FOOTPATH

Ah, here it is! the sliding rail
That marks the old remembered spot,--
The gap that struck our schoolboy trail,--
The crooked path across the lot.

It left the road by school and church,
A pencilled shadow, nothing more,
That parted from the silver birch
And ended at the farmhouse door.

No line or compass traced its plan;
With frequent bends to left or right,
In aimless, wayward curves it ran,
But always kept the door in sight.

The gabled porch, with woodbine green,--
The broken millstone at the sill,--
Though many a rood might stretch between,
The truant child could see them still.

No rocks, across the pathway lie,--
No fallen trunk is o'er it thrown,--
And yet it winds, we know not why,
And turns as if for tree or stone.

Perhaps some lover trod the way
With shaking knees and leaping heart,--
And so it often runs astray
With sinuous sweep or sudden start.

Or one, perchance, with clouded brain
From some unholy banquet reeled,--
And since, our devious steps maintain
His track across the trodden field.

Nay, deem not thus,--no earthborn will
Could ever trace a faultless line;
Our truest steps are human still,--
To walk unswerving were divine!

Truants from love, we dream of wrath;--
Oh, rather let us trust the more!
Through all the wanderings of the path,
We still can see our Father's door!




V

The Professor finds a Fly in his Teacup.

I have a long theological talk to relate, which must be dull reading
to some of my young and vivacious friends.  I don't know, however,
that any of them have entered into a contract to read all that I
write, or that I have promised always to write to please them.  What
if I should sometimes write to please myself?

Now you must know that there are a great many things which interest
me, to some of which this or that particular class of readers may be
totally indifferent.  I love Nature, and human nature, its thoughts,
affections, dreams, aspirations, delusions,--Art in all its forms,--
virtu in all its eccentricities,--old stories from black-letter
volumes and yellow manuscripts, and new projects out of hot brains
not yet imbedded in the snows of age.  I love the generous impulses
of the reformer; but not less does my imagination feed itself upon
the old litanies, so often warmed by the human breath upon which they
were wafted to Heaven that they glow through our frames like our own
heart's blood.  I hope I love good men and women; I know that they
never speak a word to me, even if it be of question or blame, that I
do not take pleasantly, if it is expressed with a reasonable amount
of human kindness.

I have before me at this time a beautiful and affecting letter, which
I have hesitated to answer, though the postmark upon it gave its
direction, and the name is one which is known to all, in some of its
representatives.  It contains no reproach, only a delicately-hinted
fear.  Speak gently, as this dear lady has spoken, and there is no
heart so insensible that it does not answer to the appeal, no
intellect so virile that it does not own a certain deference to the
claims of age, of childhood, of sensitive and timid natures, when
they plead with it not to look at those sacred things by the broad
daylight which they see in mystic shadow.  How grateful would it be
to make perpetual peace with these pleading saints and their
confessors, by the simple act that silences all complainings!  Sleep,
sleep, sleep!  says the Arch-Enchantress of them all,--and pours her
dark and potent anodyne, distilled over the fires that consumed her
foes,--its large, round drops changing, as we look, into the beads of
her convert's rosary!  Silence! the pride of reason! cries another,
whose whole life is spent in reasoning down reason.

I hope I love good people, not for their sake, but for my own.  And
most assuredly, if any deed of wrong or word of bitterness led me
into an act of disrespect towards that enlightened and excellent
class of men who make it their calling to teach goodness and their
duty to practise it, I should feel that I had done myself an injury
rather than them.  Go and talk with any professional man holding any
of the medieval creeds, choosing one who wears upon his features the
mark of inward and outward health, who looks cheerful, intelligent,
and kindly, and see how all your prejudices melt away in his
presence!  It is impossible to come into intimate relations with a
large, sweet nature, such as you may often find in this class,
without longing to be at one with it in all its modes of being and
believing.  But does it not occur to you that one may love truth as
he sees it, and his race as he views it, better than even the
sympathy and approbation of many good men whom he honors,--better
than sleeping to the sound of the Miserere or listening to the
repetition of an effete Confession of Faith?

The three learned professions have but recently emerged from a state
of quasi-barbarism.  None of them like too well to be told of it, but
it must be sounded in their ears whenever they put on airs.  When a
man has taken an overdose of laudanum, the doctors tell us to place
him between two persons who shall make him walk up and down
incessantly; and if he still cannot be kept from going to sleep, they
say that a lash or two over his back is of great assistance.

So we must keep the doctors awake by telling them that they have not
yet shaken off astrology and the doctrine of signatures, as is shown
by the form of their prescriptions, and their use of nitrate of
silver, which turns epileptics into Ethiopians.  If that is not
enough, they must be given over to the scourgers, who like their task
and get good fees for it.  A few score years ago, sick people were
made to swallow burnt toads and powdered earthworms and the expressed
juice of wood-lice.  The physician of Charles I. and II. prescribed
abominations not to be named.  Barbarism, as bad as that of Congo or
Ashantee.  Traces of this barbarism linger even in the greatly
improved medical science of our century.  So while the solemn farce
of over-drugging is going on, the world over, the harlequin pseudo-
science jumps on to the stage, whip in hand, with half-a-dozen
somersets, and begins laying about him.

In 1817, perhaps you remember, the law of wager by battle was
unrepealed, and the rascally murderous, and worse than murderous,
clown, Abraham Thornton, put on his gauntlet in open court and defied
the appellant to lift the other which he threw down.  It was not
until the reign of George II. that the statutes against witchcraft
were repealed.  As for the English Court of Chancery, we know that
its antiquated abuses form one of the staples of common proverbs and
popular literature.  So the laws and the lawyers have to be watched
perpetually by public opinion as much as the doctors do.

I don't think the other profession is an exception.  When the
Reverend Mr. Cauvin and his associates burned my distinguished
scientific brother,--he was burned with green fagots, which made it
rather slow and painful,--it appears to me they were in a state of
religious barbarism.  The dogmas of such people about the Father of
Mankind and his creatures are of no more account in my opinion than
those of a council of Aztecs.  If a man picks your pocket, do you not
consider him thereby disqualified to pronounce any authoritative
opinion on matters of ethics?  If a man hangs my ancient female
relatives for sorcery, as they did in this neighborhood a little
while ago, or burns my instructor for not believing as he does, I
care no more for his religious edicts than I should for those of any
other barbarian.

Of course, a barbarian may hold many true opinions; but when the
ideas of the healing art, of the administration of justice, of
Christian love, could not exclude systematic poisoning, judicial
duelling, and murder for opinion's sake, I do not see how we can
trust the verdict of that time relating to any subject which involves
the primal instincts violated in these abominations and absurdities.
--What if we are even now in a state of semi-barbarism?


[This physician believes we "are even now in a state of semi-
barbarism": invasive procedures for the prolongation of death rather
than prolongation of life; "faith",as slimly based as medieval faith
in minute differences between control and treated groups; statistical
manipulation to prove a prejudice.  Medicine has a good deal to
answer for!  D.W.]


Perhaps some think we ought not to talk at table about such things.
--I am not so sure of that.  Religion and government appear to me the
two subjects which of all others should belong to the common talk of
people who enjoy the blessings of freedom.  Think, one moment.  The
earth is a great factory-wheel, which, at every revolution on its
axis, receives fifty thousand raw souls and turns off nearly the same
number worked up more or less completely.  There must be somewhere a
population of two hundred thousand million, perhaps ten or a hundred
times as many, earth-born intelligences.  Life, as we call it, is
nothing but the edge of the boundless ocean of existence where it
comes on soundings.  In this view, I do not see anything so fit to
talk about, or half so interesting, as that which relates to the
innumerable majority of our fellow-creatures, the dead-living, who
are hundreds of thousands to one of the live-living, and with whom we
all potentially belong, though we have got tangled for the present in
some parcels of fibrine, albumen, and phosphates, that keep us on the
minority side of the house.  In point of fact, it is one of the many
results of Spiritualism to make the permanent destiny of the race a
matter of common reflection and discourse, and a vehicle for the
prevailing disbelief of the Middle-Age doctrines on the subject.  I
cannot help thinking, when I remember how many conversations my
friend and myself have sported, that it would be very extraordinary,
if there were no mention of that class of subjects which involves all
that we have and all that we hope, not merely for ourselves, but for
the dear people whom we love best,--noble men, pure and lovely women,
ingenuous children, about the destiny of nine tenths of whom you know
the opinions that would have been taught by those old man-roasting,
woman-strangling dogmatists.--However, I fought this matter with one
of our boarders the other day, and I am going to report the
conversation.

The divinity-student came down, one morning, looking rather more
serious than usual.  He said little at breakfast-time, but lingered
after the others, so that I, who am apt to be long at the table,
found myself alone with him.

When the rest were all gone, he turned his chair round towards mine,
and began.

I am afraid,--he said,--you express yourself a little too freely on a
most important class of subjects.  Is there not danger in introducing
discussions or allusions relating to matters of religion into common
discourse?

Danger to what?--I asked.

Danger to truth,--he replied, after a slight pause.

I didn't know Truth was such an invalid,' I said.--How long is it
since she could only take the air in a close carriage, with a
gentleman in a black coat on the box?  Let me tell you a story,
adapted to young persons, but which won't hurt older ones.

--There was a very little boy who had one of those balloons you may
have seen, which are filled with light gas, and are held by a string
to keep them from running off in aeronautic voyages on their own
account.  This little boy had a naughty brother, who said to him, one
day,--Brother, pull down your balloon, so that I can look at it and
take hold of it.  Then the little boy pulled it down.  Now the
naughty brother had a sharp pin in his hand, and he thrust it into
the balloon, and all the gas oozed out, so that there was nothing
left but a shrivelled skin.

One evening, the little boy's father called him to the window to see
the moon, which pleased him very much; but presently he said,--
Father, do not pull the string and bring down the moon, for my
naughty brother will prick it, and then it will all shrivel up and we
shall not see it any more.

Then his father laughed, and told him how the moon had been shining a
good while, and would shine a good while longer, and that all we
could do was to keep our windows clean, never letting the dust get
too thick on them, and especially to keep our eyes open, but that we
could not pull the moon down with a string, nor prick it with a pin.
--Mind you this, too, the moon is no man's private property, but is
seen from a good many parlor-windows.

--Truth is tough.  It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay,
you may kick it about all day, like a football, and it will be round
and full at evening.  Does not Mr. Bryant say, that Truth gets well
if she is run over by a locomotive, while Error dies of lockjaw if
she scratches her finger?  [Would that this was so:--error,
superstition, mysticism, authoritarianism, pseudo-science all have a
tenacity that survives inexplicably.  D.W.]  I never heard that a
mathematician was alarmed for the safety of a demonstrated
proposition.  I think, generally, that fear of open discussion
implies feebleness of inward conviction, and great sensitiveness to
the expression of individual opinion is a mark of weakness.

--I am not so much afraid for truth,--said the divinity-student,--as
for the conceptions of truth in the minds of persons not accustomed
to judge wisely the opinions uttered before them.

Would you, then, banish all allusions to matters of this nature from
the society of people who come together habitually?

I would be very careful in introducing them,--said the divinity-
student.

Yes, but friends of yours leave pamphlets in people's entries, to be
picked up by nervous misses and hysteric housemaids, full of
doctrines these people do not approve.  Some of your friends stop
little children in the street, and give them books, which their
parents, who have had them baptized into the Christian fold and give
them what they consider proper religious instruction, do not think
fit for them.  One would say it was fair enough to talk about matters
thus forced upon people's attention.

The divinity-student could not deny that this was what might be
called opening the subject to the discussion of intelligent people.

But,--he said,--the greatest objection is this, that persons who have
not made a professional study of theology are not competent to speak
on such subjects.  Suppose a minister were to undertake to express
opinions on medical subjects, for instance, would you not think he
was going beyond his province?

I laughed,--for I remembered John Wesley's "sulphur and
supplication," and so many other cases where ministers had meddled
with medicine,--sometimes well and sometimes ill, but, as a general
rule, with a tremendous lurch to quackery, owing to their very loose
way of admitting evidence,--that I could not help being amused.

I beg your pardon,--I said,--I do not wish to be impolite, but I was
thinking of their certificates to patent medicines.  Let us look at
this matter.

If a minister had attended lectures on the theory and practice of
medicine, delivered by those who had studied it most deeply, for
thirty or forty years, at the rate of from fifty to one hundred a
year,--if he had been constantly reading and hearing read the most
approved text-books on the subject,--if he had seen medicine actually
practised according to different methods, daily, for the same length
of time,--I should think, that if a person of average understanding,
he was entitled to express an opinion on the subject of medicine, or
else that his instructors were a set of ignorant and incompetent
charlatans.

If, before a medical practitioner would allow me to enjoy the full
privileges of the healing art, he expected me to affirm my belief in
a considerable number of medical doctrines, drugs, and formulae, I
should think that he thereby implied my right to discuss the same,
and my ability to do so, if I knew how to express myself in English.

Suppose, for instance, the Medical Society should refuse to give us
an opiate, or to set a broken limb, until we had signed our belief in
a certain number of propositions,--of which we will say this is the
first:

I.  All men's teeth are naturally in a state of total decay or
caries, and, therefore, no man can bite until every one of them is
extracted and a new set is inserted according to the principles of
dentistry adopted by this Society.

I, for one, should want to discuss that before signing my name to it,
and I should say this:--Why, no, that is n't true.  There are a good
many bad teeth, we all know, but a great many more good ones.  You
must n't trust the dentists; they are all the time looking at the
people who have bad teeth, and such as are suffering from toothache.
The idea that you must pull out every one of every nice young man and
young woman's natural teeth!  Poh, poh!  Nobody believes that.  This
tooth must be straightened, that must be filled with gold, and this
other perhaps extracted, but it must be a very rare case, if they are
all so bad as to require extraction; and if they are, don't blame the
poor soul for it!  Don't tell us, as some old dentists used to, that
everybody not only always has every tooth in his head good for
nothing, but that he ought to have his head cut off as a punishment
for that misfortune!  No, I can't sign Number One.  Give us Number
Two.

II.  We hold that no man can be well who does not agree with our
views of the efficacy of calomel, and who does not take the doses of
it prescribed in our tables, as there directed.

To which I demur, questioning why it should be so, and get for answer
the two following:

III.  Every man who does not take our prepared calomel, as prescribed
by us in our Constitution and By-Laws, is and must be a mass of
disease from head to foot; it being self-evident that he is
simultaneously affected with Apoplexy, Arthritis, Ascites, Asphyxia,
and Atrophy; with Borborygmus, Bronchitis, and Bulimia; with
Cachexia, Carcinoma, and Cretinismus; and so on through the alphabet,
to Xerophthahnia and Zona, with all possible and incompatible
diseases which are necessary to make up a totally morbid state; and
he will certainly die, if he does not take freely of our prepared
calomel, to be obtained only of one of our authorized agents.

IV.  No man shall be allowed to take our prepared calomel who does
not give in his solemn adhesion to each and all of the above-named
and the following propositions (from ten to a hundred) and show his
mouth to certain of our apothecaries, who have not studied dentistry,
to examine whether all his teeth have been extracted and a new set
inserted according to our regulations.

Of course, the doctors have a right to say we sha'n't have any
rhubarb, if we don't sign their articles, and that, if, after signing
them, we express doubts (in public), about any of them, they will cut
us off from our jalap and squills,--but then to ask a fellow not to
discuss the propositions before he signs them is what I should call
boiling it down a little too strong!

If we understand them, why can't we discuss them?  If we can't
understand them, because we have n't taken a medical degree, what the
Father of Lies do they ask us to sign them for?

Just so with the graver profession.  Every now and then some of its
members seem to lose common sense and common humanity.  The laymen
have to keep setting the divines right constantly.  Science, for
instance,--in other words, knowledge,--is not the enemy of religion;
for, if so, then religion would mean ignorance: But it is often the
antagonist of school-divinity.

Everybody knows the story of early astronomy and the school-divines.
Come down a little later, Archbishop Usher, a very learned Protestant
prelate, tells us that the world was created on Sunday, the twenty-
third of October, four thousand and four years before the birth of
Christ.  Deluge, December 7th, two thousand three hundred and forty-
eight years B. C.  Yes, and the earth stands on an elephant, and the
elephant on a tortoise.  One statement is as near the truth as the
other.

Again, there is nothing so brutalizing to some natures as moral
surgery.  I have often wondered that Hogarth did not add one more
picture to his four stages of Cruelty.  Those wretched fools,
reverend divines and others, who were strangling men and women for
imaginary crimes a little more than a century ago among us, were set
right by a layman, and very angry it made them to have him meddle.

The good people of Northampton had a very remarkable man for their
clergyman,--a man with a brain as nicely adjusted for certain
mechanical processes as Babbage's calculating machine.  The
commentary of the laymen on the preaching and practising of Jonathan
Edwards was, that, after twenty-three years of endurance, they turned
him out by a vote of twenty to one, and passed a resolve that he
should never preach for them again.  A man's logical and analytical
adjustments are of little consequence, compared to his primary
relations with Nature and truth: and people have sense enough to find
it out in the long ran; they know what "logic" is worth.

In that miserable delusion referred to above, the reverend Aztecs and
Fijians argued rightly enough from their premises, no doubt, for many
men can do this.  But common sense and common humanity were
unfortunately left out from their premises, and a layman had to
supply them.  A hundred more years and many of the barbarisms still
lingering among us will, of course, have disappeared like witch-
hanging.  But people are sensitive now, as they were then.  You will
see by this extract that the Rev. Cotton Mather did not like
intermeddling with his business very well.

"Let the Levites of the Lord keep close to their Instructions," he
says, "and God will smite thro' the loins of those that rise up
against them.  I will report unto you a Thing which many Hundreds
among us know to be true.  The Godly Minister of a certain Town in
Connecticut, when he had occasion to be absent on a Lord's Day from
his Flock, employ'd an honest Neighbour of some small Talents for a
Mechanick, to read a Sermon out of some good Book unto 'em.  This
Honest, whom they ever counted also a Pious Man, had so much conceit
of his Talents, that instead of Reading a Sermon appointed, he to the
Surprize of the People, fell to preaching one of his own.  For his
Text he took these Words, 'Despise not Prophecyings'; and in his
Preachment he betook himself to bewail the Envy of the Clergy in the
Land, in that they did not wish all the Lord's People to be Prophets,
and call forth Private Brethren publickly to prophesie.  While he was
thus in the midst of his Exercise, God smote him with horrible
Madness; he was taken ravingly distracted; the People were forc'd
with violent Hands to carry him home.  I will not mention his Name:
He was reputed a Pious Man."--This is one of Cotton Mather's
"Remarkable Judgments of God, on Several Sorts of Offenders,"--and
the next cases referred to are the Judgments on the "Abominable
Sacrilege" of not paying the Ministers' Salaries.

This sort of thing does n't do here and now, you see, my young
friend!  We talk about our free institutions;--they are nothing but a
coarse outside machinery to secure the freedom of individual thought.
The President of the United States is only the engine driver of our
broad-gauge mail-train; and every honest, independent thinker has a
seat in the first-class cars behind him.

--There is something in what you say,--replied the divinity-student;-
-and yet it seems to me there are places and times where disputed
doctrines of religion should not be introduced.  You would not attack
a church dogma--say Total Depravity--in a lyceum-lecture, for
instance?

Certainly not; I should choose another place,--I answered.--But,
mind you, at this table I think it is very different.  I shall
express my ideas on any subject I like.  The laws of the lecture-
room, to which my friends and myself are always amenable, do not hold
here.  I shall not often give arguments, but frequently opinions,--I
trust with courtesy and propriety, but, at any rate, with such
natural forms of expression as it has pleased the Almighty to bestow
upon me.

A man's opinions, look you, are generally of much more value than his
arguments.  These last are made by his brain, and perhaps he does not
believe the proposition they tend to prove,--as is often the case
with paid lawyers; but opinions are formed by our whole nature,--
brain, heart, instinct, brute life, everything all our experience has
shaped for us by contact with the whole circle of our being.

--There is one thing more,--said the divinity-student,--that I wished
to speak of; I mean that idea of yours, expressed some time since, of
depolarizing the text of sacred books in order to judge them fairly.
May I ask why you do not try the experiment yourself?

Certainly,--I replied,--if it gives you any pleasure to ask foolish
questions.  I think the ocean telegraph-wire ought to be laid and
will be laid, but I don't know that you have any right to ask me to
go and lay it.  But, for that matter, I have heard a good deal of
Scripture depolarized in and out of the pulpit.  I heard the Rev.
Mr. F. once depolarize the story of the Prodigal Son in Park-Street
Church.  Many years afterwards, I heard him repeat the same or a
similar depolarized version in Rome, New York.  I heard an admirable
depolarization of the story of the young man who "had great
possessions" from the Rev.  Mr. H.  in another pulpit, and felt that
I had never half understood it before.  All paraphrases are more or
less perfect depolarizations.  But I tell you this: the faith of our
Christian community is not robust enough to bear the turning of our
most sacred language into its depolarized equivalents.  You have only
to look back to Dr. Channing's famous Baltimore discourse and
remember the shrieks of blasphemy with which it was greeted, to
satisfy yourself on this point.  Time, time only, can gradually wean
us from our Epeolatry, or word-worship, by spiritualizing our ideas
of the thing signified.  Man is an idolater or symbol-worshipper by
nature, which, of course, is no fault of his; but sooner or later all
his local and temporary symbols must be ground to powder, like the
golden calf,--word-images as well as metal and wooden ones.  Rough
work, iconoclasm,--but the only way to get at truth.  It is, indeed,
as that quaint and rare old discourse, "A Summons for Sleepers," hath
it, "no doubt a thankless office, and a verie unthriftie occupation;
veritas odium parit, truth never goeth without a scratcht face; he
that will be busie with voe vobis, let him looke shortly for coram
nobas."

The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may
think what we like and say what we think.

--Think what we like!--said the divinity-student;--think what we
like!  What! against all human and divine authority?

Against all human versions of its own or any other authority.  At our
own peril always, if we do not like the right,--but not at the risk
of being hanged and quartered for political heresy, or broiled on
green fagots for ecclesiastical treason!  Nay, we have got so far,
that the very word heresy has fallen into comparative disuse among
us.

And now, my young friend, let-us shake hands and stop our discussion,
which we will not make a quarrel.  I trust you know, or will learn, a
great many things in your profession which we common scholars do not
know; but mark this: when the common people of New England stop
talking politics and theology, it will be because they have got an
Emperor to teach them the one, and a Pope to teach them the other!

That was the end of my long conference with the divinity-student.
The next morning we got talking a little on the same subject, very
good-naturedly, as people return to a matter they have talked out.

You must look to yourself,--said the divinity-student,--if your
democratic notions get into print.  You will be fired into from all
quarters.

If it were only a bullet, with the marksman's name on it!--I said.
--I can't stop to pick out the peep-shot of the anonymous scribblers.

Right, Sir!  right!--said the Little Gentleman.  The scamps!  I know
the fellows.  They can't give fifty cents to one of the Antipodes,
but they must have it jingled along through everybody's palms all the
way, till it reaches him,--and forty cents of it gets spilt, like the
water out of the fire-buckets passed along a "lane" at a fire;--but
when it comes to anonymous defamation, putting lies into people's
mouths, and then advertising those people through the country as the
authors of them,--oh, then it is that they let not their left hand
know what their right hand doeth!

I don't like Ehud's style of doing business, Sir.  He comes along
with a very sanctimonious look, Sir, with his "secret errand unto
thee," and his "message from God unto thee," and then pulls out his
hidden knife with that unsuspected hand of his,---(the Little
Gentleman lifted his clenched left hand with the blood-red jewel on
the ring-finger,)--and runs it, blade and haft, into a man's stomach!
Don't meddle with these fellows, Sir.  They are read mostly by
persons whom you would not reach, if you were to write ever so much.
Let 'em alone.  A man whose opinions are not attacked is beneath
contempt.

I hope so,--I said.--I got three pamphlets and innumerable squibs
flung at my head for attacking one of the pseudo-sciences, in former
years.  When, by the permission of Providence, I held up to the
professional public the damnable facts connected with the conveyance
of poison from one young mother's chamber to another's,--for doing
which humble office I desire to be thankful that I have lived, though
nothing else good should ever come of my life,--I had to bear the
sneers of those whose position I had assailed, and, as I believe,
have at last demolished, so that nothing but the ghosts of dead women
stir among the ruins.--What would you do, if the folks without names
kept at you, trying to get a San Benito on to your shoulders that
would fit you?--Would you stand still in fly-time, or would you give
a kick now and then?

Let 'em bite!--said the Little Gentleman,--let 'em bite!  It makes
'em hungry to shake 'em off, and they settle down again as thick as
ever and twice as savage.  Do you know what meddling with the folks
without names, as you call 'em, is like?--It is like riding at the
quintaan.  You run full tilt at the board, but the board is on a
pivot, with a bag of sand on an arm that balances it.  The board
gives way as soon as you touch it; and before you have got by, the
bag of sand comes round whack on the back of your neck.  "Ananias,"
for instance, pitches into your lecture, we will say, in some paper
taken by the people in your kitchen.  Your servants get saucy and
negligent.  If their newspaper calls you names, they need not be so
particular about shutting doors softly or boiling potatoes.  So you
lose your temper, and come out in an article which you think is going
to finish "Ananias," proving him a booby who doesn't know enough to
understand even a lyceum-lecture, or else a person that tells lies.
Now you think you 've got him!  Not so fast.  "Ananias" keeps still
and winks to "Shimei," and "Shimei" comes out in the paper which they
take in your neighbor's kitchen, ten times worse than t'other fellow.
If you meddle with "Shimei," he steps out, and next week appears
"Rab-shakeh," an unsavory wretch; and now, at any rate, you find out
what good sense there was in Hezekiah's "Answer him not."--No, no,--
keep your temper.--So saying, the Little Gentleman doubled his left
fist and looked at it as if he should like to hit something or
somebody a most pernicious punch with it.

Good!--said I.--Now let me give you some axioms I have arrived at,
after seeing something of a great many kinds of good folks.

--Of a hundred people of each of the different leading religious
sects, about the same proportion will be safe and pleasant persons to
deal and to live with.

--There are, at least, three real saints among the women to one among
the men, in every denomination.

--The spiritual standard of different classes I would reckon thus:

1.  The comfortably rich.
2.  The decently comfortable.
3.  The very rich, who are apt to be irreligious.
4.  The very poor, who are apt to be immoral.

--The cut nails of machine-divinity may be driven in, but they won't
clinch.

--The arguments which the greatest of our schoolmen could not refute
were two: the blood in men's veins, and the milk in women's breasts.

--Humility is the first of the virtues--for other people.

--Faith always implies the disbelief of a lesser fact in favor of a
greater.  A little mind often sees the unbelief, without seeing the
belief of a large one.

The Poor Relation had been fidgeting about and working her mouth
while all this was going on.  She broke out in speech at this point.

I hate to hear folks talk so.  I don't see that you are any better
than a heathen.

I wish I were half as good as many heathens have been,--I said.
--Dying for a principle seems to me a higher degree of virtue than
scolding for it; and the history of heathen races is full of
instances where men have laid down their lives for the love of their
kind, of their country, of truth, nay, even for simple manhood's
sake, or to show their obedience or fidelity.  What would not such
beings have done for the souls of men, for the Christian
commonwealth, for the King of Kings, if they had lived in days of
larger light?  Which seems to you nearest heaven, Socrates drinking
his hemlock, Regulus going back to the enemy's camp, or that old New
England divine sitting comfortably in his study and chuckling over
his conceit of certain poor women, who had been burned to death in
his own town, going "roaring out of one fire into another"?

I don't believe he said any such thing,--replied the Poor Relation.

It is hard to believe,--said I,--but it is true for all that.  In
another hundred years it will be as incredible that men talked as we
sometimes hear them now.

Pectus est quod facit theologum.  The heart makes the theologian.
Every race, every civilization, either has a new revelation of its
own or a new interpretation of an old one.  Democratic America, has a
different humanity from feudal Europe, and so must have a new
divinity.  See, for one moment, how intelligence reacts on our
faiths.  The Bible was a divining-book to our ancestors, and is so
still in the hands of some of the vulgar.  The Puritans went to the
Old Testament for their laws; the Mormons go to it for their
patriarchal institution.  Every generation dissolves something new
and precipitates something once held in solution from that great
storehouse of temporary and permanent truths.

You may observe this: that the conversation of intelligent men of the
stricter sects is strangely in advance of the formula that belong to
their organizations.  So true is this, that I have doubts whether a
large proportion of them would not have been rather pleased than
offended, if they could have overheard our, talk.  For, look you, I
think there is hardly a professional teacher who will not in private
conversation allow a large part of what we have said, though it may
frighten him in print; and I know well what an under-current of
secret sympathy gives vitality to those poor words of mine which
sometimes get a hearing.

I don't mind the exclamation of any old stager who drinks Madeira
worth from two to six Bibles a bottle, and burns, according to his
own premises, a dozen souls a year in the cigars with which he
muddles his brains.  But as for the good and true and intelligent men
whom we see all around us, laborious, self-denying, hopeful,
helpful,--men who know that the active mind of the century is tending
more and more to the two poles, Rome and Reason, the sovereign church
or the free soul, authority or personality, God in us or God in our
masters, and that, though a man may by accident stand half-way
between these two points, he must look one way or the other,--I don't
believe they would take offence at anything I have reported of our
late conversation.

But supposing any one do take offence at first sight, let him look
over these notes again, and see whether he is quite sure he does not
agree with most of these things that were said amongst us.  If he
agrees with most of them, let him be patient with an opinion he does
not accept, or an expression or illustration a little too vivacious.
I don't know that I shall report any more conversations on these
topics; but I do insist on the right to express a civil opinion on
this class of subjects without giving offence, just when and where I
please,---unless, as in the lecture-room, there is an implied
contract to keep clear of doubtful matters.  You did n't think a man
could sit at a breakfast-table doing nothing but making puns every
morning for a year or two, and never give a thought to the two
thousand of his fellow-creatures who are passing into another state
during every hour that he sits talking and laughing.  Of course, the
one matter that a real human being cares for is what is going to
become of them and of him.  And the plain truth is, that a good many
people are saying one thing about it and believing another.

--How do I know that?  Why, I have known and loved to talk with good
people, all the way from Rome to Geneva in doctrine, as long as I can
remember.  Besides, the real religion of the world comes from women
much more than from men,--from mothers most of all, who carry the key
of our souls in their bosoms.  It is in their hearts that the
"sentimental" religion some people are so fond of sneering at has its
source.  The sentiment of love, the sentiment of maternity, the
sentiment of the paramount obligation of the parent to the child as
having called it into existence, enhanced just in proportion to the
power and knowledge of the one and the weakness and ignorance of the
other,--these are the "sentiments" that have kept our soulless
systems from driving men off to die in holes like those that riddle
the sides of the hill opposite the Monastery of St. Saba, where the
miserable victims of a falsely-interpreted religion starved and
withered in their delusion.

I have looked on the face of a saintly woman this very day, whose
creed many dread and hate, but whose life is lovely and noble beyond
all praise.  When I remember the bitter words I have heard spoken
against her faith, by men who have an Inquisition which
excommunicates those who ask to leave their communion in peace, and
an Index Expurgatorius on which this article may possibly have the
honor of figuring,--and, far worse than these, the reluctant,
pharisaical confession, that it might perhaps be possible that one
who so believed should be accepted of the Creator,--and then recall
the sweet peace and love that show through all her looks, the price
of untold sacrifices and labors, and again recollect how thousands of
women, filled with the same spirit, die, without a murmur, to earthly
life, die to their own names even, that they may know nothing but
their holy duties,--while men are torturing and denouncing their
fellows, and while we can hear day and night the clinking of the
hammers that are trying, like the brute forces in the "Prometheus,"
to rivet their adamantine wedges right through the breast of human
nature,--I have been ready to believe that we have even now a new
revelation, and the name of its Messiah is WOMAN!

--I should be sorry,--I remarked, a day or two afterwards, to the
divinity-student,--if anything I said tended in any way to foster any
jealousy between the professions, or to throw disrespect upon that
one on whose counsel and sympathies almost all of us lean in our
moments of trial.  But we are false to our new conditions of life, if
we do not resolutely maintain our religious as well as our political
freedom, in the face of any and all supposed monopolies.  Certain men
will, of course, say two things, if we do not take their views:
first, that we don't know anything about these matters; and,
secondly, that we are not so good as they are.  They have a polarized
phraseology for saying these things, but it comes to precisely that.
To which it may be answered, in the first place, that we have good
authority for saying that even babes and sucklings know something;
and, in the second, that, if there is a mote or so to be removed from
our premises, the courts and councils of the last few years have
found beams enough in some other quarters to build a church that
would hold all the good people in Boston and have sticks enough left
to make a bonfire for all the heretics.

As to that terrible depolarizing process of mine, of which we were
talking the other day, I will give you a specimen of one way of
managing it, if you like.  I don't believe it will hurt you or
anybody.  Besides, I had a great deal rather finish our talk with
pleasant images and gentle words than with sharp sayings, which will
only afford a text, if anybody repeats them, for endless relays of
attacks from Messrs.  Ananias, Shimei, and Rabshakeh.

[I must leave such gentry, if any of them show themselves, in the
hands of my clerical friends, many of whom are ready to stand up for
the rights of the laity,--and to those blessed souls, the good women,
to whom this version of the story of a mother's hidden hopes and
tender anxieties is dedicated by their peaceful and loving servant.]



          A MOTHER'S SECRET.

How sweet the sacred legend--if unblamed
In my slight verse such holy things are named--
Of Mary's secret hours of hidden joy,
Silent, but pondering on her wondrous boy!
Ave, Maria!  Pardon, if I wrong
Those heavenly words that shame my earthly song!

The choral host had closed the angel's strain
Sung to the midnight watch on Bethlehem's plain;
And now the shepherds, hastening on their way,
Sought the still hamlet where the Infant lay.
They passed the fields that gleaning Ruth toiled O'er,
They saw afar the ruined threshing-floor
Where Moab's daughter, homeless and forlorn,
Found Boaz slumbering by his heaps of corn;
And some remembered how the holy scribe,
Skilled in the lore of every jealous tribe,
Traced the warm blood of Jesse's royal son
To that fair alien, bravely wooed and won.
So fared they on to seek the promised sign
That marked the anointed heir of David's line.

At last, by forms of earthly semblance led,
They found the crowded inn, the oxen's shed.
No pomp was there, no glory shone around
On the coarse straw that strewed the reeking ground;
One dim retreat a flickering torch betrayed,
In that poor cell the Lord of Life was laid!

The wondering shepherds told their breathless tale
Of the bright choir that woke the sleeping vale;
Told how the skies with sudden glory flamed;
Told how the shining multitude proclaimed
"Joy, joy to earth!  Behold the hallowed morn!
In David's city Christ the Lord is born!
'Glory to God!' let angels shout on high,
'Good-will to men!' the listening Earth reply!"

They spoke with hurried words and accents wild;
Calm in his cradle slept the heavenly child.
No trembling word the mother's joy revealed,
One sigh of rapture, and her lips were sealed;
Unmoved she saw the rustic train depart,
But kept their words to ponder in her heart.

Twelve years had passed; the boy was fair and tall,
Growing in wisdom, finding grace with all.
The maids of Nazareth, as they trooped to fill
Their balanced urns beside the mountain-rill,
The gathered matrons, as they sat and spun,
Spoke in soft words of Joseph's quiet son.
No voice had reached the Galilean vale
Of star-led kings or awe-struck shepherds' tale;
In the meek, studious child they only saw
The future Rabbi, learned in Israel's law.

So grew the boy; and now the feast was near,
When at the holy place the tribes appear.
Scarce had the home-bred child of Nazareth seen
Beyond the hills that girt the village-green,
Save when at midnight, o'er the star-lit sands,
Snatched from the steel of Herod's murdering bands,
A babe, close-folded to his mother's breast,
Through Edom's wilds he sought the sheltering West.

Then Joseph spake: "Thy boy hath largely grown;
Weave him fine raiment, fitting to be shown;
Fair robes beseem the pilgrim, as the priest
Goes he not with us to the holy feast?"

And Mary culled the flaxen fibres white;
Till eve she spun; she spun till morning light.
The thread was twined; its parting meshes through
From hand to hand her restless shuttle flew,
Till the full web was wound upon the beam,
Love's curious toil,--a vest without a seam!

They reach the holy place, fulfil the days
To solemn feasting given, and grateful praise.
At last they turn, and far Moriah's height
Melts in the southern sky and fades from sight.
All day the dusky caravan has flowed
In devious trails along the winding road,
(For many a step their homeward path attends,
And all the sons of Abraham are as friends.)
Evening has come,--the hour of rest and joy;
Hush! hush!--that whisper,-"Where is Mary's boy?"

O weary hour!  O aching days that passed
Filled with strange fears, each wilder than the last:
The soldier's lance,--the fierce centurion's sword,
The crushing wheels that whirl some Roman lord,
The midnight crypt that suck's the captive's breath,
The blistering sun on Hinnom's vale of death!

Thrice on his cheek had rained the morning light,
Thrice on his lips the mildewed kiss of night,
Crouched by some porphyry column's shining plinth,
Or stretched beneath the odorous terebinth.

At last, in desperate mood, they sought once more
The Temple's porches, searched in vain before;
They found him seated with the ancient men,
The grim old rufflers of the tongue and pen,
Their bald heads glistening as they clustered near;
Their gray beards slanting as they turned to hear,
Lost in half-envious wonder and surprise
That lips so fresh should utter words so wise.

And Mary said,--as one who, tried too long,
Tells all her grief and half her sense of wrong,
"What is this thoughtless thing which thou hast done?
Lo, we have sought thee sorrowing, O my son!"
Few words he spake, and scarce of filial tone,
Strange words, their sense a mystery yet unknown;
Then turned with them and left the holy hill,
To all their mild commands obedient still.

The tale was told to Nazareth's sober men,
And Nazareth's matrons told it oft again;
The maids retold it at the fountain's side;
The youthful shepherds doubted or denied;
It passed around among the listening friends,
With all that fancy adds and fiction fends,
Till newer marvels dimmed the young renown
Of Joseph's son, who talked the Rabbis down.

But Mary, faithful to its lightest word,
Kept in her heart the sayings she had heard,
Till the dread morning rent the Temple's veil,
And shuddering Earth confirmed the wondrous tale.

Youth fades; love droops; the leaves of friendship fall;
A mother's secret hope outlives them all.




VI

You don't look so dreadful poor in the face as you did a while back.
Bloated some, I expect.

This was the cheerful and encouraging and elegant remark with which
the Poor Relation greeted the divinity-student one morning.

Of course every good man considers it a great sacrifice on his part
to continue living in this transitory, unsatisfactory, and
particularly unpleasant world.  This is so much a matter of course,
that I was surprised to see the divinity-student change color.  He
took a look at a small and uncertain-minded glass which hung slanting
forward over the chapped sideboard.  The image it returned to him had
the color of a very young pea somewhat overboiled.  The scenery of a
long tragic drama flashed through his mind as the lightning-express-
train whishes by a station: the gradual dismantling process of
disease; friends looking on, sympathetic, but secretly chuckling over
their own stomachs of iron and lungs of caoutchouc; nurses attentive,
but calculating their crop, and thinking how soon it will be ripe, so
that they can go to your neighbor, who is good for a year or so
longer; doctors assiduous, but giving themselves a mental shake, as
they go out of your door, which throws off your particular grief as a
duck sheds a raindrop from his oily feathers; undertakers solemn, but
happy; then the great subsoil cultivator, who plants, but never looks
for fruit in his garden; then the stone-cutter, who puts your name on
the slab which has been waiting for you ever since the birds or
beasts made their tracks on the new red sandstone; then the grass and
the dandelions and the buttercups,----Earth saying to the mortal
body, with her sweet symbolism, "You have scarred my bosom, but you
are forgiven"; then a glimpse of the soul as a floating consciousness
without very definite form or place, but dimly conceived of as an
upright column of vapor or mist several times larger than life-size,
so far as it could be said to have any size at all, wandering about
and living a thin and half-awake life for want of good old-fashioned
solid matter to come down upon with foot and fist,--in fact, having
neither foot nor fist, nor conveniences for taking the sitting
posture.

And yet the divinity-student was a good Christian, and those heathen
images which remind one of the childlike fancies of the dying Adrian
were only the efforts of his imagination to give shape to the
formless and position to the placeless.  Neither did his thoughts
spread themselves out and link themselves as I have displayed them.
They came confusedly into his mind like a heap of broken mosaics,--
sometimes a part of the picture complete in itself, sometimes
connected fragments, and sometimes only single severed stones.

They did not diffuse a light of celestial joy over his countenance.
On the contrary, the Poor Relation's remark turned him pale, as I
have said; and when the terrible wrinkled and jaundiced looking-glass
turned him green in addition, and he saw himself in it, it seemed to
him as if it were all settled, and his book of life were to be shut
not yet half-read, and go back to the dust of the under-ground
archives.  He coughed a mild short cough, as if to point the
direction in which his downward path was tending.  It was an honest
little cough enough, so far as appearances went.  But coughs are
ungrateful things.  You find one out in the cold, take it up and
nurse it and make everything of it, dress it up warm, give it all
sorts of balsams and other food it likes, and carry it round in your
bosom as if it were a miniature lapdog.  And by-and-by its little
bark grows sharp and savage, and--confound the thing!--you find it
is a wolf's whelp that you have got there, and he is gnawing in the
breast where he has been nestling so long.--The Poor Relation said
that somebody's surrup was good for folks that were gettin' into a
bad way.--The landlady had heard of desperate cases cured by cherry-
pictorial.

Whiskey's the fellah,--said the young man John.--Make it into punch,
cold at dinner-time 'n' hot at bed-time.  I'll come up 'n' show you
how to mix it.  Have n't any of you seen the wonderful fat man
exhibitin' down in Hanover Street?

Master Benjamin Franklin rushed into the dialogue with a breezy
exclamation, that he had seen a great picter outside of the place
where the fat man was exhibitin'.  Tried to get in at half-price, but
the man at the door looked at his teeth and said he was more'n ten
year old.

It is n't two years,--said the young man John, since that fat fellah
was exhibitin' here as the Livin' Skeleton.  Whiskey--that's what did
it,--real Burbon's the stuff.  Hot water, sugar, 'n' jest a little
shavin' of lemon-skin in it,--skin, mind you, none o' your juice;
take it off thin,--shape of one of them flat curls the factory-girls
wear on the sides of their foreheads.

But I am a teetotaller,--said the divinity-student in a subdued
tone;--not noticing the enormous length of the bow-string the young
fellow had just drawn.

He took up his hat and went out.

I think you have worried that young man more than you meant,--I said.
--I don't believe he will jump off one of the bridges, for he has too
much principle; but I mean to follow him and see where he goes, for
he looks as if his mind were made up to something.

I followed him at a reasonable distance.  He walked doggedly along,
looking neither to the right nor the left, turned into State Street,
and made for a well-known Life-Insurance Office.  Luckily, the doctor
was there and overhauled him on the spot.  There was nothing the
matter with him, he said, and he could have his life insured as a
sound one.  He came out in good spirits, and told me this soon after.

This led me to make some remarks the next morning on the manners of
well-bred and ill-bred people.

I began,--The whole essence of true gentle-breeding (one does not
like to say gentility) lies in the wish and the art to be agreeable.
Good-breeding is surface-Christianity.  Every look, movement, tone,
expression, subject of discourse, that may give pain to another is
habitually excluded from conversational intercourse.  This is the
reason why rich people are apt to be so much more agreeable than
others.

--I thought you were a great champion of equality,--said the discreet
and severe lady who had accompanied our young friend, the Latin
Tutor's daughter.

I go politically for equality,--I said,--and socially for the
quality.

Who are the "quality,"--said the Model, etc., in a community like
ours?

I confess I find this question a little difficult to answer,--I said.
--Nothing is better known than the distinction of social ranks which
exists in every community, and nothing is harder to define.  The
great gentlemen and ladies of a place are its real lords and masters
and mistresses; they are the quality, whether in a monarchy or a
republic; mayors and governors and generals and senators and ex-
presidents are nothing to them.  How well we know this, and how
seldom it finds a distinct expression!  Now I tell you truly, I
believe in man as man, and I disbelieve in all distinctions except
such as follow the natural lines of cleavage in a society which has
crystallized according to its own true laws.  But the essence of
equality is to be able to say the truth; and there is nothing more
curious than these truths relating to the stratification of society.

Of all the facts in this world that do not take hold of immortality,
there is not one so intensely real, permanent, and engrossing as this
of social position,--as you see by the circumstances that the core of
all the great social orders the world has seen has been, and is
still, for the most part, a privileged class of gentlemen and ladies
arranged in a regular scale of precedence among themselves, but
superior as a body to all else.

Nothing but an ideal Christian equality, which we have been getting
farther away from since the days of the Primitive Church, can prevent
this subdivision of society into classes from taking place
everywhere,--in the great centres of our republic as much as in old
European monarchies.  Only there position is more absolutely
hereditary,--here it is more completely elective.

--Where is the election held? and what are the qualifications? and
who are the electors?--said the Model.

Nobody ever sees when the vote is taken; there never is a formal
vote.  The women settle it mostly; and they know wonderfully well
what is presentable, and what can't stand the blaze of the
chandeliers and the critical eye and ear of people trained to know a
staring shade in a ribbon, a false light in a jewel, an ill-bred
tone, an angular movement, everything that betrays a coarse fibre and
cheap training.  As a general thing, you do not get elegance short of
two or three removes from the soil, out of which our best blood
doubtless comes,--quite as good, no doubt, as if it came from those
old prize-fighters with iron pots on their heads, to whom some great
people are so fond of tracing their descent through a line of small
artisans and petty shopkeepers whose veins have held "base" fluid
enough to fill the Cloaca Maxima!

Does not money go everywhere?--said the Model.

Almost.  And with good reason.  For though there are numerous
exceptions, rich people are, as I said, commonly altogether the most
agreeable companions.  The influence of a fine house, graceful
furniture, good libraries, well-ordered tables, trim servants, and,
above all, a position so secure that one becomes unconscious of it,
gives a harmony and refinement to the character and manners which we
feel, if we cannot explain their charm.  Yet we can get at the reason
of it by thinking a little.

All these appliances are to shield the sensibility from disagreeable
contacts, and to soothe it by varied natural and artificial
influences.  In this way the mind, the taste, the feelings, grow
delicate, just as the hands grow white and soft when saved from toil
and incased in soft gloves.  The whole nature becomes subdued into
suavity.  I confess I like the quality ladies better than the common
kind even of literary ones.  They have n't read the last book,
perhaps, but they attend better to you when you are talking to them.
If they are never learned, they make up for it in tact and elegance.
Besides, I think, on the whole, there is less self-assertion in
diamonds than in dogmas.  I don't know where you will find a sweeter
portrait of humility than in Esther, the poor play-girl of King
Ahasuerus; yet Esther put on her royal apparel when she went before
her lord.  I have no doubt she was a more gracious and agreeable
person than Deborah, who judged the people and wrote the story of
Sisera.  The wisest woman you talk with is ignorant of something
that you know, but an elegant woman never forgets her elegance.

Dowdyism is clearly an expression of imperfect vitality.  The
highest fashion is intensely alive,--not alive necessarily to the
truest and best things, but with its blood tingling, as it were, in
all its extremities and to the farthest point of its surface, so
that the feather in its bonnet is as fresh as the crest of a
fighting-cock, and the rosette on its slipper as clean-cut and
pimpant (pronounce it English fashion,--it is a good word) as a
dahlia.  As a general rule, that society where flattery is acted is
much more agreeable than that where it is spoken.  Don't you see
why?  Attention and deference don't require you to make fine
speeches expressing your sense of unworthiness (lies) and returning
all the compliments paid you.  This is one reason.

--A woman of sense ought to be above flattering any man,--said the
Model.

[My reflection.  Oh! oh! no wonder you did n't get married.  Served
you right.]  My remark.  Surely, Madam,--if you mean by flattery
telling people boldly to their faces that they are this or that,
which they are not.  But a woman who does not carry about with her
wherever she goes a halo of good feeling and desire to make
everybody contented,--an atmosphere of grace, mercy, and peace, of
at least six feet radius, which wraps every human being upon whom
she voluntarily bestows her presence, and so flatters him with the
comfortable thought that she is rather glad he is alive than
otherwise, isn't worth the trouble of talking to, as a woman; she
may do well enough to hold discussions with.

--I don't think the Model exactly liked this.  She said,--a little
spitefully, I thought,--that a sensible man might stand a little
praise, but would of course soon get sick of it, if he were in the
habit of getting much.

Oh, yes,--I replied,--just as men get sick of tobacco.  It is
notorious how apt they are to get tired of that vegetable.

--That 's so!--said the young fellow John,--I've got tired of my
cigars and burnt 'em all up.

I am heartily glad to hear it,--said the Model,--I wish they were
all disposed of in the same way.

So do I,--said the young fellow John.

Can't you get your friends to unite with you in committing those
odious instruments of debauchery to the flames in which you have
consumed your own?

I wish I could,--said the young fellow John.

It would be a noble sacrifice,--said the Model, and every American
woman would be grateful to you.  Let us burn them all in a heap out
in the yard.

That a'n't my way,--said the young fellow John;--I burn 'em one 't'
time,--little end in my mouth and big end outside.

--I watched for the effect of this sudden change of programme, when
it should reach the calm stillness of the Model's interior
apprehension, as a boy watches for the splash of a stone which he
has dropped into a well.  But before it had fairly reached the
water, poor Iris, who had followed the conversation with a certain
interest until it turned this sharp corner, (for she seems rather to
fancy the young fellow John,) laughed out such a clear, loud laugh,
that it started us all off, as the locust-cry of some full-throated
soprano drags a multitudinous chorus after it.  It was plain that
some dam or other had broken in the soul of this young girl, and she
was squaring up old scores of laughter, out of which she had been
cheated, with a grand flood of merriment that swept all before it.
So we had a great laugh all round, in which the Model--who, if she
had as many virtues as there are spokes to a wheel, all compacted
with a personality as round and complete as its tire, yet wanted
that one little addition of grace, which seems so small, and is as
important as the linchpin in trundling over the rough ways of life--
had not the tact to join.  She seemed to be "stuffy" about it, as
the young fellow John said.  In fact, I was afraid the joke would
have cost us both our new lady-boarders.  It had no effect, however,
except, perhaps, to hasten the departure of the elder of the two,
who could, on the whole, be spared.

--I had meant to make this note of our conversation a text for a few
axioms on the matter of breeding.  But it so happened, that, exactly
at this point of my record, a very distinguished philosopher, whom
several of our boarders and myself go to hear, and whom no doubt
many of my readers follow habitually, treated this matter of
manners.  Up to this point, if I have been so fortunate as to
coincide with him in opinion, and so unfortunate as to try to
express what he has more felicitously said, nobody is to blame; for
what has been given thus far was all written before the lecture was
delivered.  But what shall I do now?  He told us it was childish to
lay down rules for deportment,--but he could not help laying down a
few.

Thus,--Nothing so vulgar as to be in a hurry.  True, but hard of
application.  People with short legs step quickly, because legs are
pendulums, and swing more times in a minute the shorter they are.
Generally a natural rhythm runs through the whole organization:
quick pulse, fast breathing, hasty speech, rapid trains of thought,
excitable temper.  Stillness of person and steadiness of features
are signal marks of good-breeding.  Vulgar persons can't sit still,
or, at least, they must work their limbs or features.

Talking of one's own ails and grievances.--Bad enough, but not so
bad as insulting the person you talk with by remarking on his ill-
looks, or appealing to notice any of his personal peculiarities.

Apologizing.--A very desperate habit,--one that is rarely cured.
Apology is only egotism wrong side out.  Nine times out of ten, the
first thing a man's companion knows of his shortcoming is from his
apology.  It is mighty presumptuous on your part to suppose your
small failures of so much consequence that you must make a talk
about them.

Good dressing, quiet ways, low tones of voice, lips that can wait,
and eyes that do not wander,--shyness of personalities, except in
certain intimate communions,--to be light in hand in conversation,
to have ideas, but to be able to make talk, if necessary, without
them,--to belong to the company you are in, and not to yourself,--to
have nothing in your dress or furniture so fine that you cannot
afford to spoil it and get another like it, yet to preserve the
harmonies, throughout your person and--dwelling: I should say that
this was a fair capital of manners to begin with.

Under bad manners, as under graver faults, lies very commonly an
overestimate of our special individuality, as distinguished from our
generic humanity.  It is just here that the very highest society
asserts its superior breeding.  Among truly elegant people of the
highest ton, you will find more real equality in social intercourse
than in a country village.  As nuns drop their birth-names and
become Sister Margaret and Sister Mary, so high-bred people drop
their personal distinctions and become brothers and sisters of
conversational charity.  Nor are fashionable people without their
heroism.  I believe there are men who have shown as much self-
devotion in carrying a lone wall-flower down to the supper-table as
ever saint or martyr in the act that has canonized his name.  There
are Florence Nightingales of the ballroom, whom nothing can hold
back from their errands of mercy.  They find out the red-handed,
gloveless undergraduate of bucolic antecedents, as he squirms in his
corner, and distill their soft words upon him like dew upon the
green herb.  They reach even the poor relation, whose dreary
apparition saddens the perfumed atmosphere of the sumptuous drawing-
room.  I have known one of these angels ask, of her own accord, that
a desolate middle-aged man, whom nobody seemed to know, should be
presented to her by the hostess.  He wore no shirt-collar,--he had
on black gloves,--and was flourishing a red bandanna handkerchief!
Match me this, ye proud children of poverty, who boast of your
paltry sacrifices for each other!  Virtue in humble life!  What is
that to the glorious self-renunciation of a martyr in pearls and
diamonds?  As I saw this noble woman bending gracefully before the
social mendicant,--the white billows of her beauty heaving under the
foam of the traitorous laces that half revealed them,--I should have
wept with sympathetic emotion, but that tears, except as a private
demonstration, are an ill-disguised expression of self-consciousness
and vanity, which is inadmissible in good society.

I have sometimes thought, with a pang, of the position in which
political chance or contrivance might hereafter place some one of
our fellow-citizens.  It has happened hitherto, so far as my limited
knowledge goes, that the President of the United States has always
been what might be called in general terms a gentleman.  But what if
at some future time the choice of the people should fall upon one on
whom that lofty title could not, by any stretch of charity, be
bestowed?  This may happen,--how soon the future only knows.  Think
of this miserable man of coming political possibilities,--an
unpresentable boor sucked into office by one of those eddies in the
flow of popular sentiment which carry straws and chips into the
public harbor, while the prostrate trunks of the monarchs of the
forest hurry down on the senseless stream to the gulf of political
oblivion!  Think of him, I say, and of the concentrated gaze of good
society through its thousand eyes, all confluent, as it were, in one
great burning-glass of ice that shrivels its wretched object in
fiery torture, itself cold as the glacier of an unsunned cavern!
No,--there will be angels of good-breeding then as now, to shield
the victim of free institutions from himself and from his torturers.
I can fancy a lovely woman playfully withdrawing the knife which he
would abuse by making it an instrument for the conveyance of food,--
or, failing in this kind artifice, sacrificing herself by imitating
his use of that implement; how much harder than to plunge it into
her bosom, like Lucretia!  I can see her studying in his provincial
dialect until she becomes the Champollion of New England or Western
or Southern barbarisms.  She has learned that haow means what; that
think-in' is the same thing as thinking, or she has found out the
meaning of that extraordinary mono syllable, which no single-tongued
phonographer can make legible, prevailing on the banks of the Hudson
and at its embouchure, and elsewhere,--what they say when they think
they say first, (fe-eest,--fe as in the French le),--or that cheer
means chair,--or that urritation means irritation,--and so of other
enormities.  Nothing surprises her.  The highest breeding, you know,
comes round to the Indian standard,--to take everything coolly,--nil
admirari,--if you happen to be learned and like the Roman phrase for
the same thing.

If you like the company of people that stare at you from head to
foot to see if there is a hole in your coat, or if you have not
grown a little older, or if your eyes are not yellow with jaundice,
or if your complexion is not a little faded, and so on, and then
convey the fact to you, in the style in which the Poor Relation
addressed the divinity-student,--go with them as much as you like.
I hate the sight of the wretches.  Don't for mercy's sake think I
hate them; the distinction is one my friend or I drew long ago.  No
matter where you find such people; they are clowns.

The rich woman who looks and talks in this way is not half so much a
lady as her Irish servant, whose pretty "saving your presence," when
she has to say something which offends her natural sense of good
manners, has a hint in it of the breeding of courts, and the blood
of old Milesian kings, which very likely runs in her veins,--thinned
by two hundred years of potato, which, being an underground fruit,
tends to drag down the generations that are made of it to the earth
from which it came, and, filling their veins with starch, turn them
into a kind of human vegetable.

I say, if you like such people, go with them.  But I am going to
make a practical application of the example at the beginning of this
particular record, which some young people who are going to choose
professional advisers by-and-by may remember and thank me for.  If
you are making choice of a physician, be sure you get one, if
possible, with a cheerful and serene countenance.  A physician is
not--at least, ought not to be--an executioner; and a sentence of
death on his face is as bad as a warrant for execution signed by the
Governor.  As a general rule, no man has a right to tell another by
word or look that he is going to die.  It may be necessary in some
extreme cases; but as a rule, it is the last extreme of impertinence
which one human being can offer to another.  "You have killed me,"
said a patient once to a physician who had rashly told him he was
incurable.  He ought to have lived six months, but he was dead in
six' weeks.  If we will only let Nature and the God of Nature alone,
persons will commonly learn their condition as early as they ought
to know it, and not be cheated out of their natural birthright of
hope of recovery, which is intended to accompany sick people as long
as life is comfortable, and is graciously replaced by the hope of
heaven, or at least of rest, when life has become a burden which the
bearer is ready to let fall.

Underbred people tease their sick and dying friends to death.  The
chance of a gentleman or lady with a given mortal ailment to live a
certain time is as good again as that of the common sort of coarse
people.  As you go down the social scale, you reach a point at
length where the common talk in sick rooms is of churchyards and
sepulchres, and a kind of perpetual vivisection is forever carried
on, upon the person of the miserable sufferer.

And so, in choosing your clergyman, other things being equal, prefer
the one of a wholesome and cheerful habit of mind and body.  If you
can get along with people who carry a certificate in their faces
that their goodness is so great as to make them very miserable, your
children cannot.  And whatever offends one of these little ones
cannot be right in the eyes of Him who loved them so well.

After all, as you are a gentleman or a lady, you will probably
select gentlemen for your bodily and spiritual advisers, and then
all will be right.

This repetition of the above words,--gentleman and lady,--which
could not be conveniently avoided, reminds me what strange uses are
made of them by those who ought to know what they mean.  Thus, at a
marriage ceremony, once, of two very excellent persons who had been
at service, instead of, Do you take this man, etc.?  and, Do you
take this woman?  how do you think the officiating clergyman put the
questions?  It was, Do you, Miss So and So, take this GENTLEMAN?
and, Do you, Mr. This or That, take this LADY?!  What would any
English duchess, ay, or the Queen of England herself, have thought,
if the Archbishop of Canterbury had called her and her bridegroom
anything but plain woman and man at such a time?

I don't doubt the Poor Relation thought it was all very fine, if she
happened to be in the church; but if the worthy man who uttered
these monstrous words--monstrous in such a connection--had known the
ludicrous surprise, the convulsion of inward disgust and contempt,
that seized upon many of the persons who were present,--had guessed
what a sudden flash of light it threw on the Dutch gilding, the
pinchbeck, the shabby, perking pretension belonging to certain
social layers,--so inherent in their whole mode of being, that the
holiest offices of religion cannot exclude its impertinences,--the
good man would have given his marriage-fee twice over to recall that
superb and full-blown vulgarism.  Any persons whom it could please
could have no better notion of what the words referred to signify
than of the meaning of apsides and asymptotes.

MAN!  Sir!  WOMAN!  Sir!  Gentility is a fine thing, not to be
undervalued, as I have been trying to explain; but humanity comes
before that.

         "When Adam delved and Eve span,
          Who was then the gentleman?"

The beauty of that plainness of speech and manners which comes from
the finest training is not to be understood by those whose habitat
is below a certain level.  Just as the exquisite sea-anemones and
all the graceful ocean-flowers die out at some fathoms below the
surface, the elegances and suavities of life die out one by one as
we sink through the social scale.  Fortunately, the virtues are more
tenacious of life, and last pretty well until we get down to the mud
of absolute pauperism, where they do not flourish greatly.

--I had almost forgotten about our boarders.  As the Model of all
the Virtues is about to leave us, I find myself wondering what is
the reason we are not all very sorry.  Surely we all like good
persons.  She is a good person.  Therefore we like her.--Only we
don't.

This brief syllogism, and its briefer negative, involving the
principle which some English conveyancer borrowed from a French wit
and embodied in the lines by which Dr. Fell is made unamiably
immortal, this syllogism, I say, is one that most persons have had
occasion to construct and demolish, respecting somebody or other, as
I have done for the Model.  "Pious and painefull."  Why has that
excellent old phrase gone out of use?  Simply because these good
painefull or painstaking persons proved to be such nuisances in the
long run, that the word "painefull" came, before people thought of
it, to mean pain-giving instead of painstaking.

--So, the old fellah's off to-morrah,--said the young man John.

Old fellow?--said I,--whom do you mean?

Why, the one that came with our little beauty, the old fellah in
petticoats.

--Now that means something,--said I to myself.--These rough young
rascals very often hit the nail on the head, if they do strike with
their eyes shut.  A real woman does a great many things without
knowing why she does them; but these pattern machines mix up their
intellects with everything they do, just like men.  They can't help
it, no doubt; but we can't help getting sick of them, either.
Intellect is to a woman's nature what her watch-spring skirt is to
her dress; it ought to underlie her silks and embroideries, but not
to show itself too staringly on the outside.---You don't know,
perhaps, but I will tell you; the brain is the palest of all the
internal organs, and the heart the reddest.  Whatever comes from the
brain carries the hue of the place it came from, and whatever comes
from the heart carries the heat and color of its birthplace.

The young man John did not hear my soliloquy, of course, but sent up
one more bubble from our sinking conversation, in the form of a
statement, that she was at liberty to go to a personage who receives
no visits, as is commonly supposed, from virtuous people.

Why, I ask again, (of my reader,) should a person who never did
anybody any wrong, but, on the contrary, is an estimable and
intelligent, nay, a particularly enlightened and exemplary member of
society, fail to inspire interest, love, and devotion?  Because of
the reversed current in the flow of thought and emotion.  The red
heart sends all its instincts up to the white brain to be analyzed,
chilled, blanched, and so become pure reason, which is just exactly
what we do not want of woman as woman.  The current should run the
other-way.  The nice, calm, cold thought, which in women shapes
itself so rapidly that they hardly know it as thought, should always
travel to the lips via the heart.  It does so in those women whom
all love and admire.  It travels the wrong way in the Model.  That
is the reason why the Little Gentleman said "I hate her, I hate
her."  That is the reason why the young man John called her the "old
fellah," and banished her to the company of the great Unpresentable.
That is the reason why I, the Professor, am picking her to pieces
with scalpel and forceps.  That is the reason why the young girl
whom she has befriended repays her kindness with gratitude and
respect, rather than with the devotion and passionate fondness which
lie sleeping beneath the calmness of her amber eyes.  I can see her,
as she sits between this estimable and most correct of personages
and the misshapen, crotchety, often violent and explosive little man
on the other side of her, leaning and swaying towards him as she
speaks, and looking into his sad eyes as if she found some fountain
in them at which her soul could quiet its thirst.

Women like the Model are a natural product of a chilly climate and
high culture.  It is not

    "The frolic wind that breathes the spring,
     Zephyr with Aurora playing,"

when the two meet

    "---on beds of violets blue,
     And fresh-blown roses washed in dew,"

that claim such women as their offspring.  It is rather the east
wind, as it blows out of the fogs of Newfoundland, and clasps a
clear-eyed wintry noon on the chill bridal couch of a New England
ice-quarry.--Don't throw up your cap now, and hurrah as if this
were giving up everything, and turning against the best growth of
our latitudes,--the daughters of the soil.  The brain-women never
interest us like the heart women; white roses please less than red.
But our Northern seasons have a narrow green streak of spring, as
well as a broad white zone of winter,--they have a glowing band of
summer and a golden stripe of autumn in their many-colored wardrobe;
and women are born to us that wear all these hues of earth and
heaven in their souls.  Our ice-eyed brain-women are really
admirable, if we only ask of them just what they can give, and no
more.  Only compare them, talking or writing, with one of those
babbling, chattering dolls, of warmer latitudes, who do not know
enough even to keep out of print, and who are interesting to us only
as specimens of arrest of development for our psychological
cabinets.

Good-bye, Model of all the Virtues!  We can spare you now.  A little
clear perfection, undiluted with human weakness, goes a great way.
Go! be useful, be honorable and honored, be just, be charitable,
talk pure reason, and help to disenchant the world by the light of
an achromatic understanding.  Goodbye!  Where is my Beranger?  I
must read a verse or two of "Fretillon."

Fair play for all.  But don't claim incompatible qualities for
anybody.  Justice is a very rare virtue in our community.
Everything that public sentiment cares about is put into a Papin's
digester, and boiled under high pressure till all is turned into one
homogeneous pulp, and the very bones give up their jelly.  What are
all the strongest epithets of our dictionary to us now?  The critics
and politicians, and especially the philanthropists, have chewed
them, till they are mere wads of syllable-fibre, without a
suggestion of their old pungency and power.

Justice!  A good man respects the rights even of brute matter and
arbitrary symbols.  If he writes the same word twice in succession,
by accident, he always erases the one that stands second; has not
the first-comer the prior right?  This act of abstract justice,
which I trust many of my readers, like myself, have often performed,
is a curious anti-illustration, by the way, of the absolute
wickedness of human dispositions.  Why doesn't a man always strike
out the first of the two words, to gratify his diabolical love of
injustice?

So, I say, we owe a genuine, substantial tribute of respect to these
filtered intellects which have left their womanhood on the strainer.
They are so clear that it is a pleasure at times to look at the
world of thought through them.  But the rose and purple tints of
richer natures they cannot give us, and it is not just to them to
ask it.

Fashionable society gets at these rich natures very often in a way
one would hardly at first think of.  It loves vitality above all
things, sometimes disguised by affected languor, always well kept
under by the laws of good-breeding,--but still it loves abundant
life, opulent and showy organizations,--the spherical rather than
the plane trigonometry of female architecture,--plenty of red blood,
flashing eyes, tropical voices, and forms that bear the splendors of
dress without growing pale beneath their lustre.  Among these you
will find the most delicious women you will ever meet,--women whom
dress and flattery and the round of city gayeties cannot spoil,--
talking with whom, you forget their diamonds and laces,--and around
whom all the nice details of elegance, which the cold-blooded beauty
next them is scanning so nicely, blend in one harmonious whole, too
perfect to be disturbed by the petulant sparkle of a jewel, or the
yellow glare of a bangle, or the gay toss of a feather.

There are many things that I, personally, love better than fashion
or wealth.  Not to speak of those highest objects of our love and
loyalty, I think I love ease and independence better than the golden
slavery of perpetual matinees and soirees, or the pleasures of
accumulation.

But fashion and wealth are two very solemn realities, which the
frivolous class of moralists have talked a great deal of silly stuff
about.  Fashion is only the attempt to realize Art in living forms
and social intercourse.  What business has a man who knows nothing
about the beautiful, and cannot pronounce the word view, to talk
about fashion to a set of people who, if one of the quality left a
card at their doors, would contrive to keep it on the very top of
their heap of the names of their two-story acquaintances, till it
was as yellow as the Codex Vaticanus?

Wealth, too,--what an endless repetition of the same foolish
trivialities about it!  Take the single fact of its alleged
uncertain tenure and transitory character.  In old times, when men
were all the time fighting and robbing each other,--in those
tropical countries where the Sabeans and the Chaldeans stole all a
man's cattle and camels, and there were frightful tornadoes and
rains of fire from heaven, it was true enough that riches took wings
to themselves not unfrequently in a very unexpected way.  But, with
common prudence in investments, it is not so now.  In fact, there is
nothing earthly that lasts so well, on the whole, as money.  A man's
learning dies with him; even his virtues fade out of remembrance,
but the dividends on the stocks he bequeaths to his children live
and keep his memory green.

I do not think there is much courage or originality in giving
utterance to truths that everybody knows, but which get overlaid by
conventional trumpery.  The only distinction which it is necessary
to point out to feeble-minded folk is this: that, in asserting the
breadth and depth of that significance which gives to fashion and
fortune their tremendous power, we do not indorse the extravagances
which often disgrace the one, nor the meanness which often degrades
the other.

A remark which seems to contradict a universally current opinion is
not generally to be taken "neat," but watered with the ideas of
common-sense and commonplace people.  So, if any of my young friends
should be tempted to waste their substance on white kids and "all-
rounds," or to insist on becoming millionaires at once, by anything
I have said, I will give them references to some of the class
referred to, well known to the public as providers of literary
diluents, who will weaken any truth so that there is not an old
woman in the land who cannot take it with perfect impunity.

I am afraid some of the blessed saints in diamonds will think I mean
to flatter them.  I hope not;--if I do, set it down as a weakness.
But there is so much foolish talk about wealth and fashion, (which,
of course, draw a good many heartless and essentially vulgar people
into the glare of their candelabra, but which have a real
respectability and meaning, if we will only look at them
stereoscopically, with both eyes instead of one,) that I thought it
a duty to speak a few words for them.  Why can't somebody give us a
list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another
list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks?

Lest my parish should suppose we have forgotten graver matters in
these lesser topics, I beg them to drop these trifles and read the
following lesson for the day.

     THE TWO STREAMS.

Behold the rocky wall
That down its sloping sides
Pours the swift rain-drops, blending, as they fall,
In rushing river-tides!

Yon stream, whose sources run
Turned by a pebble's edge,
Is Athabasca, rolling toward the sun
Through the cleft mountain-ledge.

The slender rill had strayed,
But for the slanting stone,
To evening's ocean, with the tangled braid
Of foam-flecked Oregon.

So from the heights of Will
Life's parting stream descends,
And, as a moment turns its slender rill,
Each widening torrent bends,

From the same cradle's side,
From the same mother's knee,--
One to long darkness and the frozen tide,
One to the Peaceful Sea!




VII

Our landlady's daughter is a young lady of some pretensions to
gentility.  She wears her bonnet well back on her head, which is
known by all to be a mark of high breeding.  She wears her trains
very long, as the great ladies do in Europe.  To be sure, their
dresses are so made only to sweep the tapestried floors of chateaux
and palaces; as those odious aristocrats of the other side do not go
draggling through the mud in silks and satins, but, forsooth, must
ride in coaches when they are in full dress.  It is true, that,
considering various habits of the American people, also the little
accidents which the best-kept sidewalks are liable to, a lady who
has swept a mile of them is not exactly in such a condition that one
would care to be her neighbor.  But then there is no need of being
so hard on these slight weaknesses of the poor, dear women as our
little deformed gentleman was the other day.

--There are no such women as the Boston women, Sir,--he said.
Forty-two degrees, north latitude, Rome, Sir, Boston, Sir!  They had
grand women in old Rome, Sir,--and the women bore such men--children
as never the world saw before.  And so it was here, Sir.  I tell
you, the revolution the Boston boys started had to run in woman's
milk before it ran in man's blood, Sir!

But confound the make-believe women we have turned loose in our
streets!--where do they come from?  Not out of Boston parlors, I
trust.  Why, there is n't a beast or a bird that would drag its tail
through the dirt in the way these creatures do their dresses.
Because a queen or a duchess wears long robes on great occasions, a
maid-of-all-work or a factory-girl thinks she must make herself a
nuisance by trailing through the street, picking up and carrying
about with her pah!--that's what I call getting vulgarity into your
bones and marrow.  Making believe be what you are not is the essence
of vulgarity.  Show over dirt is the one attribute of vulgar people.
If any man can walk behind one of these women and see what she rakes
up as she goes, and not feel squeamish, he has got a tough stomach.
I wouldn't let one of 'em into my room without serving 'em as David
served Saul at the cave in the wilderness,--cut off his skirts, Sir!
cut off his skirts!

I suggested, that I had seen some pretty stylish ladies who offended
in the way he condemned.

Stylish women, I don't doubt,--said the Little Gentleman.--Don't
tell me that a true lady ever sacrifices the duty of keeping all
about her sweet and clean to the wish of making a vulgar show.  I
won't believe it of a lady.  There are some things that no fashion
has any right to touch, and cleanliness is one of those things.  If
a woman wishes to show that her husband or her father has got money,
which she wants and means to spend, but doesn't know how, let her
buy a yard or two of silk and pin it to her dress when she goes out
to walk, but let her unpin it before she goes into the house;--there
may be poor women that will think it worth disinfecting.  It is an
insult to a respectable laundress to carry such things into a house
for her to deal with.  I don't like the Bloomers any too well,--in
fact, I never saw but one, and she--or he, or it--had a mob of boys
after her, or whatever you call the creature, as if she had been
a-----

The Little Gentleman stopped short,--flushed somewhat, and looked
round with that involuntary, suspicious glance which the subjects of
any bodily misfortune are very apt to cast round them.  His eye
wandered over the company, none of whom, excepting myself and one
other, had, probably, noticed the movement.  They fell at last on
Iris,--his next neighbor, you remember.

--We know in a moment, on looking suddenly at a person, if that
person's eyes have been fixed on us.

Sometimes we are conscious of it before we turn so as to see the
person.  Strange secrets of curiosity, of impertinence, of malice,
of love, leak out in this way.  There is no need of Mrs. Felix
Lorraine's reflection in the mirror, to tell us that she is plotting
evil for us behind our backs.  We know it, as we know by the ominous
stillness of a child that some mischief or other is going-on.  A
young girl betrays, in a moment, that her eyes have been feeding on.
the face where you find them fixed, and not merely brushing over it
with their pencils of blue or brown light.

A certain involuntary adjustment assimilates us, you may also
observe, to that upon which we look.  Roses redden the cheeks of her
who stoops to gather them, and buttercups turn little people's chins
yellow.  When we look at a vast landscape, our chests expand as if
we would enlarge to fill it.  When we examine a minute object, we
naturally contract, not only our foreheads, but all our dimensions.
If I see two men wrestling, I wrestle too, with my limbs and
features.  When a country-fellow comes upon the stage, you will see
twenty faces in the boxes putting on the bumpkin expression.  There
is no need of multiplying instances to reach this generalization;
every person and thing we look upon puts its special mark upon us.
If this is repeated often enough, we get a permanent resemblance to
it, or, at least, a fixed aspect which we took from it.  Husband and
wife come to look alike at last, as has often been noticed.  It is a
common saying of a jockey, that he is "all horse"; and I have often
fancied that milkmen get a stiff, upright carriage, and an angular
movement of the arm, that remind one of a pump and the working of
its handle.

All this came in by accident, just because I happened to mention
that the Little Gentleman found that Iris had been looking at him
with her soul in her eyes, when his glance rested on her after
wandering round the company.  What he thought, it is hard to say;
but the shadow of suspicion faded off from his face, and he looked
calmly into the amber eyes, resting his cheek upon the hand that
wore the red jewel.

--If it were a possible thing,--women are such strange creatures!
Is there any trick that love and their own fancies do not play them?
Just see how they marry!  A woman that gets hold of a bit of manhood
is like one of those Chinese wood-carvers who work on any odd,
fantastic root that comes to hand, and, if it is only bulbous above
and bifurcated below, will always contrive to make a man--such as he
is--out of it.  I should like to see any kind of a man,
distinguishable from a Gorilla, that some good and even pretty woman
could not shape a husband out of.

--A child,--yes, if you choose to call her so, but such a child!  Do
you know how Art brings all ages together?  There is no age to the
angels and ideal human forms among which the artist lives, and he
shares their youth until his hand trembles and his eye grows dim.
The youthful painter talks of white-bearded Leonardo as if he were a
brother, and the veteran forgets that Raphael died at an age to
which his own is of patriarchal antiquity.

But why this lover of the beautiful should be so drawn to one whom
Nature has wronged so deeply seems hard to explain.  Pity, I
suppose.  They say that leads to love.

--I thought this matter over until I became excited and curious, and
determined to set myself more seriously at work to find out what was
going on in these wild hearts and where their passionate lives were
drifting.  I say wild hearts and passionate lives, because I think I
can look through this seeming calmness of youth and this apparent
feebleness of organization, and see that Nature, whom it is very
hard to cheat, is only waiting as the sapper waits in his mine,
knowing that all is in readiness and the slow-match burning quietly
down to the powder.  He will leave it by-and-by, and then it will
take care of itself.

One need not wait to see the smoke coming through the roof of a
house and the flames breaking out of the windows to know that the
building is on fire.  Hark!  There is a quiet, steady, unobtrusive,
crisp, not loud, but very knowing little creeping crackle that is
tolerably intelligible.  There is a whiff of something floating
about, suggestive of toasting shingles.  Also a sharp pyroligneous-
acid pungency in the air that stings one's eyes.  Let us get up and
see what is going on.--Oh,--oh,--oh! do you know what has got hold
of you?  It is the great red dragon that is born of the little red
eggs we call sparks, with his hundred blowing red manes, and his
thousand lashing red tails, and his multitudinous red eyes glaring
at every crack and key-hole, and his countless red tongues lapping
the beams he is going to crunch presently, and his hot breath
warping the panels and cracking the glass and making old timber
sweat that had forgotten it was ever alive with sap.  Run for your
life! leap! or you will be a cinder in five minutes, that nothing
but a coroner would take for the wreck of a human being!

If any gentleman will have the kindness to stop this run-away
comparison, I shall be much obliged to him.  All I intended to say
was, that we need not wait for hearts to break out in flames to know
that they are full of combustibles and that a spark has got among
them.  I don't pretend to say or know what it is that brings these
two persons together;--and when I say together, I only mean that
there is an evident affinity of some kind or other which makes their
commonest intercourse strangely significant, as that each seems to
understand a look or a word of the other.  When the young girl laid
her hand on the Little Gentleman's arm,--which so greatly shocked
the Model, you may remember,--I saw that she had learned the lion-
tamer's secret.  She masters him, and yet I can see she has a kind
of awe of him, as the man who goes into the cage has of the monster
that he makes a baby of.

One of two things must happen.  The first is love, downright love,
on the part of this young girl, for the poor little misshapen man.
You may laugh, if you like.  But women are apt to love the men who
they think have the largest capacity of loving;--and who can love
like one that has thirsted all his life long for the smile of youth
and beauty, and seen it fly his presence as the wave ebbed from the
parched lips of him whose fabled punishment is the perpetual type of
human longing and disappointment?  What would become of him, if this
fresh soul should stoop upon him in her first young passion, as the
flamingo drops out of the sky upon some lonely and dark lagoon in
the marshes of Cagliari, with a flutter of scarlet feathers and a
kindling of strange fires in the shadowy waters that hold her
burning image?

--Marry her, of course?--Why, no, not of course.  I should think the
chance less, on the whole, that he would be willing to marry her
than she to marry him.

There is one other thing that might happen.  If the interest he
awakes in her gets to be a deep one, and yet has nothing of love in
it, she will glance off from him into some great passion or other.
All excitements run to love in women of a certain--let us not say
age, but youth.  An electrical current passing through a coil of
wire makes a magnet of a bar of iron lying within it, but not
touching it.  So a woman is turned into a love-magnet by a tingling
current of life running round her.  I should like to see one of them
balanced on a pivot properly adjusted, and watch if she did not turn
so as to point north and south,--as she would, if the love-currents
are like those of the earth our mother.

Pray, do you happen to remember Wordsworth's "Boy of Windermere"?
This boy used to put his hands to his mouth, and shout aloud,
mimicking the hooting of the owls, who would answer him

               "with quivering peals,
     And long halloos and screams, and echoes loud
     Redoubled and redoubled."

When they failed to answer him, and he hung listening intently for
their voices, he would sometimes catch the faint sound of far
distant waterfalls, or the whole scene around him would imprint
itself with new force upon his perceptions.--Read the sonnet, if
you please;--it is Wordsworth all over,--trivial in subject, solemn
in style, vivid in description, prolix in detail, true meta-
physically, but immensely suggestive of "imagination," to use a mild
term, when related as an actual fact of a sprightly youngster.
All I want of it is to enforce the principle, that, when the door of
the soul is once opened to a guest, there is no knowing who will
come in next.

--Our young girl keeps up her early habit of sketching heads and
characters.  Nobody is, I should think, more faithful and exact in
the drawing of the academical figures given her as lessons, but
there is a perpetual arabesque of fancies that runs round the margin
of her drawings, and there is one book which I know she keeps to run
riot in, where, if anywhere, a shrewd eye would be most likely to
read her thoughts.  This book of hers I mean to see, if I can get at
it honorably.

I have never yet crossed the threshold of the Little Gentleman's
chamber.  How he lives, when he once gets within it, I can only
guess.  His hours are late, as I have said; often, on waking late in
the night, I see the light through cracks in his window-shutters on
the wall of the house opposite.  If the times of witchcraft were not
over, I should be afraid to be so close a neighbor to a place from
which there come such strange noises.  Sometimes it is the dragging
of something heavy over the floor, that makes me shiver to hear it,-
-it sounds so like what people that kill other people have to do now
and then.  Occasionally I hear very sweet strains of music,--whether
of a wind or stringed instrument, or a human voice, strange as it
may seem, I have often tried to find out, but through the partition
I could not be quite sure.  If I have not heard a woman cry and
moan, and then again laugh as though she would die laughing, I have
heard sounds so like them that--I am a fool to confess it--I have
covered my head with the bedclothes; for I have had a fancy in my
dreams, that I could hardly shake off when I woke up, about that so-
called witch that was his great-grandmother, or whatever it was,--a
sort of fancy that she visited the Little Gentleman,--a young woman
in old-fashioned dress, with a red ring round her white neck,--not a
neck-lace, but a dull-stain.

Of course you don't suppose that I have any foolish superstitions
about the matter,--I, the Professor, who have seen enough to take
all that nonsense out of any man's head!  It is not our beliefs that
frighten us half so much as our fancies.  A man not only believes,
but knows he runs a risk, whenever he steps into a railroad car; but
it does n't worry him much.  On the other hand, carry that man
across a pasture a little way from some dreary country-village, and
show him an old house where there were strange deaths a good many
years ago, and there are rumors of ugly spots on the walls,--the old
man hung himself in the garret, that is certain, and ever since the
country-people have called it "the haunted house,"--the owners
have n't been able to let it since the last tenants left on account
of the noises,--so it has fallen into sad decay, and the moss grows
on the rotten shingles of the roof, and the clapboards have turned
black, and the windows rattle like teeth that chatter with fear, and
the walls of the house begin to lean as if its knees were shaking,--
take the man who did n't mind the real risk of the cars to that old
house, on some dreary November evening, and ask him to sleep there
alone,--how do you think he will like it?  He doesn't believe one
word of ghosts,--but then he knows, that, whether waking or
sleeping, his imagination will people the haunted chambers with
ghostly images.  It is not what we believe, as I said before, that
frightens us commonly, but what we conceive.  A principle that
reaches a good way if I am not mistaken.  I say, then, that, if
these odd sounds coming from the Little Gentleman's chamber
sometimes make me nervous, so that I cannot get to sleep, it is not
because I suppose he is engaged in any unlawful or mysterious way.
The only wicked suggestion that ever came into my head was one that
was founded on the landlady's story of his having a pile of gold; it
was a ridiculous fancy; besides, I suspect the story of sweating
gold was only one of the many fables got up to make the Jews odious
and afford a pretext for plundering them.  As for the sound like a
woman laughing and crying, I never said it was a woman's voice; for,
in the first place, I could only hear indistinctly; and, secondly,
he may have an organ, or some queer instrument or other, with what
they call the vox humana stop.  If he moves his bed round to get
away from the window, or for any such reason, there is nothing very
frightful in that simple operation.  Most of our foolish conceits
explain themselves in some such simple way.  And, yet, for all that,
I confess, that, when I woke up the other evening, and heard, first
a sweet complaining cry, and then footsteps, and then the dragging
sound,--nothing but his bed, I am quite sure,--I felt a stirring in
the roots of my hair as the feasters did in Keats's terrible poem of
"Lamia."

There is nothing very odd in my feeling nervous when I happen to lie
awake and get listening for sounds.  Just keep your ears open any
time after midnight, when you are lying in bed in a lone attic of a
dark night.  What horrid, strange, suggestive, unaccountable noises
you will hear!  The stillness of night is a vulgar error.  All the
dead things seem to be alive.  Crack!  That is the old chest of
drawers; you never hear it crack in the daytime.  Creak!  There's a
door ajar; you know you shut them all.

Where can that latch be that rattles so?  Is anybody trying it
softly?  or, worse than any body, is----?  (Cold shiver.) Then a
sudden gust that jars all the windows;--very strange!--there does
not seem to be any wind about that it belongs to.  When it stops,
you hear the worms boring in the powdery beams overhead.  Then steps
outside,--a stray animal, no doubt.  All right,--but a gentle
moisture breaks out all over you; and then something like a whistle
or a cry,--another gust of wind, perhaps; that accounts for the
rustling that just made your heart roll over and tumble about, so
that it felt more like a live rat under your ribs than a part of
your own body; then a crash of something that has fallen,--blown
over, very likely----Pater noster, qui es in coelis! for you are
damp and cold, and sitting bolt upright, and the bed trembling so
that the death-watch is frightened and has stopped ticking!

No,--night is an awful time for strange noises and secret doings.
Who ever dreamed, till one of our sleepless neighbors told us of it,
of that Walpurgis gathering of birds and beasts of prey,--foxes, and
owls, and crows, and eagles, that come from all the country round on
moonshiny nights to crunch the clams and muscles, and pick out the
eyes of dead fishes that the storm has thrown on Chelsea Beach?  Our
old mother Nature has pleasant and cheery tones enough for us when
she comes in her dress of blue and gold over the eastern hill-tops;
but when she follows us up-stairs to our beds in her suit of black
velvet and diamonds, every creak of her sandals and every whisper of
her lips is full of mystery and fear.

You understand, then, distinctly, that I do not believe there is
anything about this singular little neighbor of mine which is as it
should not be.  Probably a visit to his room would clear up all that
has puzzled me, and make me laugh at the notions which began, I
suppose, in nightmares, and ended by keeping my imagination at work
so as almost to make me uncomfortable at times.  But it is not so
easy to visit him as some of our other boarders, for various reasons
which I will not stop to mention.  I think some of them are rather
pleased to get "the Professor" under their ceilings.

The young man John, for instance, asked me to come up one day and
try some "old Burbon," which he said was A 1.  On asking him what
was the number of his room, he answered, that it was forty-'leven,
sky-parlor floor, but that I shouldn't find it, if he did n't go
ahead to show me the way.  I followed him to his habitat, being very
willing to see in what kind of warren he burrowed, and thinking I
might pick up something about the boarders who had excited my
curiosity.

Mighty close quarters they were where the young man John bestowed
himself and his furniture; this last consisting of a bed, a chair, a
bureau, a trunk, and numerous pegs with coats and "pants" and
"vests,"--as he was in the habit of calling waist-coats and
pantaloons or trousers,--hanging up as if the owner had melted out
of them.  Several prints were pinned up unframed,--among them that
grand national portrait-piece, "Barnum presenting Ossian E. Dodge to
Jenny Lind," and a picture of a famous trot, in which I admired anew
the cabalistic air of that imposing array of expressions, and
especially the Italicized word, "Dan Mace names b. h. Major Slocum,"
and "Hiram Woodruff names g. m. Lady Smith."  "Best three in five.
Time: 2.40, 2.46, 2.50."

That set me thinking how very odd this matter of trotting horses is,
as an index of the mathematical exactness of the laws of living
mechanism.  I saw Lady Suffolk trot a mile in 2.26.  Flora Temple
has trotted close down to 2.20; and Ethan Allen in 2.25, or less.
Many horses have trotted their mile under 2.30; none that I remember
in public as low down as 2.20.  From five to ten seconds, then, in
about a hundred and sixty is the whole range of the maxima of the
present race of trotting horses.  The same thing is seen in the
running of men.  Many can run a mile in five minutes; but when one
comes to the fractions below, they taper down until somewhere about
4.30 the maximum is reached.  Averages of masses have been studied
more than averages of maxima and minima.  We know from the
Registrar-General's Reports, that a certain number of children--say
from one to two dozen--die every year in England from drinking hot
water out of spouts of teakettles.  We know, that, among suicides,
women and men past a certain age almost never use fire-arms.  A
woman who has made up her mind to die is still afraid of a pistol or
a gun.  Or is it that the explosion would derange her costume?

I say, averages of masses we have, but our tables of maxima we owe
to the sporting men more than to the philosophers.  The lesson their
experience teaches is, that Nature makes no leaps,--does nothing per
saltum.  The greatest brain that ever lived, no doubt, was only a
small fraction of an idea ahead of the second best.  Just look at
the chess-players.  Leaving out the phenomenal exceptions, the nice
shades that separate the skilful ones show how closely their brains
approximate,--almost as closely as chronometers.  Such a person is a
"knight-player,"--he must have that piece given him.  Another must
have two pawns.  Another, "pawn and two," or one pawn and two moves.
Then we find one who claims "pawn and move," holding himself, with
this fractional advantage, a match for one who would be pretty sure
to beat him playing even.--So much are minds alike; and you and I
think we are "peculiar,"--that Nature broke her jelly-mould after
shaping our cerebral convolutions.  So I reflected, standing and
looking at the picture.

--I say, Governor,--broke in the young man John,--them bosses '11
stay jest as well, if you'll only set down.  I've had 'em this year,
and they haven't stirred.--He spoke, and handed the chair towards
me,--seating himself, at the same time, on the end of the bed.

You have lived in this house some time?--I said,--with a note of
interrogation at the end of the statement.

Do I look as if I'd lost much flesh--said he, answering my question
by another.

No,--said I;--for that matter, I think you do credit to "the
bountifully furnished table of the excellent lady who provides so
liberally for the company that meets around her hospitable board."

[The sentence in quotation-marks was from one of those disinterested
editorials in small type, which I suspect to have been furnished by
a friend of the landlady's, and paid for as an advertisement.  This
impartial testimony to the superior qualities of the establishment
and its head attracted a number of applicants for admission, and a
couple of new boarders made a brief appearance at the table.  One of
them was of the class of people who grumble if they don't get
canvas-backs and woodcocks every day, for three-fifty per week.  The
other was subject to somnambulism, or walking in the night, when he
ought to have been asleep in his bed.  In this state he walked into
several of the boarders' chambers, his eyes wide open, as is usual
with somnambulists, and, from some odd instinct or other, wishing to
know what the hour was, got together a number of their watches, for
the purpose of comparing them, as it would seem.  Among them was a
repeater, belonging to our young Marylander.  He happened to wake up
while the somnambulist was in his chamber, and, not knowing his
infirmity, caught hold of him and gave him a dreadful shaking, after
which he tied his hands and feet, and so left him till morning, when
he introduced him to a gentleman used to taking care of such cases
of somnambulism.]

If you, my reader, will please to skip backward, over this
parenthesis, you will come to our conversation, which it has
interrupted.

It a'n't the feed,--said the young man John,--it's the old woman's
looks when a fellah lays it in too strong.  The feed's well enough.
After geese have got tough, 'n' turkeys have got strong, 'n' lamb's
got old, 'n' veal's pretty nigh beef, 'n' sparragrass 's growin'
tall 'n' slim 'n' scattery about the head, 'n' green peas are
gettin' so big 'n' hard they'd be dangerous if you fired 'em out of
a revolver, we get hold of all them delicacies of the season.  But
it's too much like feedin' on live folks and devourin' widdah's
substance, to lay yourself out in the eatin' way, when a fellah 's
as hungry as the chap that said a turkey was too much for one 'n'
not enough for two.  I can't help lookin' at the old woman.  Corned-
beef-days she's tolerable calm.  Roastin'-days she worries some, 'n'
keeps a sharp eye on the chap that carves.  But when there's
anything in the poultry line, it seems to hurt her feelin's so to
see the knife goin' into the breast and joints comin' to pieces,
that there's no comfort in eatin'.  When I cut up an old fowl and
help the boarders, I always feel as if I ought to say, Won't you
have a slice of widdah?--instead of chicken.

The young man John fell into a train of reflections which ended in
his producing a Bologna sausage, a plate of "crackers," as we Boston
folks call certain biscuits, and the bottle of whiskey described as
being A 1.

Under the influence of the crackers and sausage, he grew cordial and
communicative.

It was time, I thought, to sound him as to those of our boarders who
had excited my curiosity.

What do you think of our young Iris?--I began.

Fust-rate little filly;-he said.--Pootiest and nicest little chap
I've seen since the schoolma'am left.  Schoolma'am was a brown-
haired one,--eyes coffee-color.  This one has got wine-colored
eyes,--'n' that 's the reason they turn a fellah's head, I suppose.

This is a splendid blonde,--I said,--the other was a brunette.
Which style do you like best?

Which do I like best, boiled mutton or roast mutton?--said the young
man John.  Like 'em both,--it a'n't the color of 'em makes the
goodness.  I 've been kind of lonely since schoolma'am went away.
Used to like to look at her.  I never said anything particular to
her, that I remember, but---

I don't know whether it was the cracker and sausage, or that the
young fellow's feet were treading on the hot ashes of some longing
that had not had time to cool, but his eye glistened as he stopped.

I suppose she wouldn't have looked at a fellah like me,--he said,--
but I come pretty near tryin'.  If she had said, Yes, though, I
shouldn't have known what to have done with her.  Can't marry a
woman now-a-days till you're so deaf you have to cock your head like
a parrot to hear what she says, and so longsighted you can't see
what she looks like nearer than arm's-length.

Here is another chance for you,--I said.--What do you want nicer
than such a young lady as Iris?

It's no use,--he answered.--I look at them girls and feel as the
fellah did when he missed catchin' the trout.--'To'od 'a' cost more
butter to cook him 'n' he's worth,--says the fellah.--Takes a whole
piece o' goods to cover a girl up now-a-days.  I'd as lief undertake
to keep a span of elephants,--and take an ostrich to board, too,--as
to marry one of 'em.  What's the use?  Clerks and counter-jumpers
ain't anything.  Sparragrass and green peas a'n't for them,--not
while they're young and tender.  Hossback-ridin' a'n't for them,--
except once a year, on Fast-day.  And marryin' a'n't for them.
Sometimes a fellah feels lonely, and would like to have a nice young
woman, to tell her how lonely he feels.  And sometimes a fellah,--
here the young man John looked very confidential, and, perhaps, as
if a little ashamed of his weakness,--sometimes a fellah would like
to have one o' them small young ones to trot on his knee and push
about in a little wagon,--a kind of a little Johnny, you know;--it's
odd enough, but, it seems to me, nobody can afford them little
articles, except the folks that are so rich they can buy everything,
and the folks that are so poor they don't want anything.  It makes
nice boys of us young fellahs, no doubt!  And it's pleasant to see
fine young girls sittin', like shopkeepers behind their goods,
waitin', and waitin', and waitin', 'n' no customers,--and the men
lingerin' round and lookin' at the goods, like folks that want to be
customers, but have n't the money!

Do you think the deformed gentleman means to make love to Iris?--I
said.

What!  Little Boston ask that girl to marry him!  Well, now, that's
cumin' of it a little too strong.  Yes, I guess she will marry him
and carry him round in a basket, like a lame bantam: Look here!--he
said, mysteriously;--one of the boarders swears there's a woman
comes to see him, and that he has heard her singin' and screechin'.
I should like to know what he's about in that den of his.  He lays
low 'n' keeps dark,--and, I tell you, there's a good many of the
boarders would like to get into his chamber, but he don't seem to
want 'em.  Biddy could tell somethin' about what she's seen when she
's been to put his room to rights.  She's a Paddy 'n' a fool, but
she knows enough to keep her tongue still.  All I know is, I saw her
crossin' herself one day when she came out of that room.  She looked
pale enough, 'n' I heard her mutterin' somethin' or other about the
Blessed Virgin.  If it had n't been for the double doors to that
chamber of his, I'd have had a squint inside before this; but,
somehow or other, it never seems to happen that they're both open at
once.

What do you think he employs himself about?  said I.

The young man John winked.

I waited patiently for the thought, of which this wink was the
blossom, to come to fruit in words.

I don't believe in witches,--said the young man John.

Nor I.

We were both silent for a few minutes.


--Did you ever see the young girl's drawing-books,--I said,
presently.

All but one,--he answered;--she keeps a lock on that, and won't show
it.  Ma'am Allen, (the young rogue sticks to that name, in speaking
of the gentleman with the diamond,) Ma'am Allen tried to peek into
it one day when she left it on the sideboard.  "If you please," says
she,--'n' took it from him, 'n' gave him a look that made him curl
up like a caterpillar on a hot shovel.  I only wished he had n't,
and had jest given her a little sass, for I've been takin' boxin'-
lessons, 'n' I 've got a new way of counterin' I want to try on to
somebody.

--The end of all this was, that I came away from the young fellow's
room, feeling that there were two principal things that I had to
live for, for the next six weeks or six months, if it should take so
long.  These were, to get a sight of the young girl's drawing.
book, which I suspected had her heart shut up in it, and to get a
look into the Little Gentleman's room.

I don't doubt you think it rather absurd that I should trouble
myself about these matters.  You tell me, with some show of reason,
that all I shall find in the young girl's--book will be some
outlines of angels with immense eyes, traceries of flowers, rural
sketches, and caricatures, among which I shall probably have the
pleasure of seeing my own features figuring.  Very likely.  But I'll
tell you what I think I shall find.  If this child has idealized the
strange little bit of humanity over which she seems to have spread
her wings like a brooding dove,--if, in one of those wild vagaries
that passionate natures are so liable to, she has fairly sprung upon
him with her clasping nature, as the sea-flowers fold about the
first stray shell-fish that brushes their outspread tentacles,
depend upon it, I shall find the marks of it in this drawing-book of
hers,--if I can ever get a look at it,--fairly, of course, for I
would not play tricks to satisfy my curiosity.

Then, if I can get into this Little Gentleman's room under any fair
pretext, I shall, no doubt, satisfy myself in five minutes that he
is just like other people, and that there is no particular mystery
about him.

The night after my visit to the young man John, I made all these and
many more reflections.  It was about two o'clock in the morning,--
bright starlight,--so light that I could make out the time on my
alarm-clock,--when I woke up trembling and very moist.  It was the
heavy dragging sound, as I had often heard it before that waked me.
Presently a window was softly closed.  I had just begun to get over
the agitation with which we always awake from nightmare dreams, when
I heard the sound which seemed to me as of a woman's voice,--the
clearest, purest soprano which one could well conceive of.  It was
not loud, and I could not distinguish a word, if it was a woman's
voice; but there were recurring phrases of sound and snatches of
rhythm that reached me, which suggested the idea of complaint, and
sometimes, I thought, of passionate grief and despair.  It died away
at last,--and then I heard the opening of a door, followed by a low,
monotonous sound, as of one talking,--and then the closing of a
door,--and presently the light on the opposite wall disappeared and
all was still for the night.

By George!  this gets interesting,--I said, as I got out of bed for
a change of night-clothes.

I had this in my pocket the other day, but thought I would n't read
it at our celebration.  So I read it to the boarders instead, and
print it to finish off this record with.


          ROBINSON OF LEYDEN.

He sleeps not here; in hope and prayer
His wandering flock had gone before,
But he, the shepherd, might not share
Their sorrows on the wintry shore.

Before the Speedwell's anchor swung,
Ere yet the Mayflower's sail was spread,
While round his feet the Pilgrims clung,
The pastor spake, and thus he said:--

"Men, brethren, sisters, children dear!
God calls you hence from over sea;
Ye may not build by Haerlem Meer,
Nor yet along the Zuyder-Zee.

"Ye go to bear the saving word
To tribes unnamed and shores untrod:
Heed well the lessons ye have heard
From those old teachers taught of God.

"Yet think not unto them was lent
All light for all the coming days,
And Heaven's eternal wisdom spent
In making straight the ancient ways.

"The living fountain overflows
For every flock, for every lamb,
Nor heeds, though angry creeds oppose
With Luther's dike or Calvin's dam."

He spake; with lingering, long embrace,
With tears of love and partings fond,
They floated down the creeping Maas,
Along the isle of Ysselmond.

They passed the frowning towers of Briel,
The "Hook of Holland's" shelf of sand,
And grated soon with lifting keel
The sullen shores of Fatherland.

No home for these!--too well they knew
The mitred king behind the throne;
The sails were set, the pennons flew,
And westward ho!  for worlds unknown.

--And these were they who gave us birth,
The Pilgrims of the sunset wave,
Who won for us this virgin earth,
And freedom with the soil they gave.

The pastor slumbers by the Rhine,--
In alien earth the exiles lie,--
Their nameless graves our holiest shrine,
His words our noblest battle-cry!

Still cry them, and the world shall hear,
Ye dwellers by the storm-swept sea!
Ye have not built by Haerlem Meer,
Nor on the land-locked Zuyder-Zee!




VIII

There has been a sort of stillness in the atmosphere of our
boarding-house since my last record, as if something or other were
going on.  There is no particular change that I can think of in the
aspect of things; yet I have a feeling as if some game of life were
quietly playing and strange forces were at work, underneath this
smooth surface of every-day boardinghouse life, which would show
themselves some fine morning or other in events, if not in
catastrophes.  I have been watchful, as I said I should be, but have
little to tell as yet.  You may laugh at me, and very likely think
me foolishly fanciful to trouble myself about what is going on in a
middling-class household like ours.  Do as you like.  But here is
that terrible fact to begin with,--a beautiful young girl, with the
blood and the nerve-fibre that belong to Nature's women, turned
loose among live men.

-Terrible fact?

Very terrible.  Nothing more so.  Do you forget the angels who lost
heaven for the daughters of men?  Do you forget Helen, and the fair
women who made mischief and set nations by the ears before Helen was
born?  If jealousies that gnaw men's hearts out of their bodies,--if
pangs that waste men to shadows and drive them into raving madness
or moping melancholy,--if assassination and suicide are dreadful
possibilities, then there is always something frightful about a
lovely young woman.--I love to look at this "Rainbow," as her
father used sometimes to call her, of ours.  Handsome creature that
she is in forms and colors,--the very picture, as it seems to me, of
that "golden blonde" my friend whose book you read last year fell in
love with when he was a boy, (as you remember, no doubt,)--handsome
as she is, fit for a sea-king's bride, it is not her beauty alone
that holds my eyes upon her.  Let me tell you one of my fancies, and
then you will understand the strange sort of fascination she has for
me.

It is in the hearts of many men and women--let me add children--that
there is a Great Secret waiting for them,--a secret of which they
get hints now and then, perhaps oftener in early than in later
years.  These hints come sometimes in dreams, sometimes in sudden
startling flashes,--second wakings, as it were,--a waking out of the
waking state, which last is very apt to be a half-sleep.  I have
many times stopped short and held my breath, and felt the blood
leaving my cheeks, in one of these sudden clairvoyant flashes.  Of
course I cannot tell what kind of a secret this is, but I think of
it as a disclosure of certain relations of our personal being to
time and space, to other intelligences, to the procession of events,
and to their First Great Cause.  This secret seems to be broken up,
as it were, into fragments, so that we find here a word and there a
syllable, and then again only a letter of it; but it never is
written out for most of us as a complete sentence, in this life.  I
do not think it could be; for I am disposed to consider our beliefs
about such a possible disclosure rather as a kind of premonition of
an enlargement of our faculties in some future state than as an
expectation to be fulfilled for most of us in this life.  Persons,
however, have fallen into trances,--as did the Reverend William
Tennent, among many others,--and learned some things which they
could not tell in our human words.

Now among the visible objects which hint to us fragments of this
infinite secret for which our souls are waiting, the faces of women
are those that carry the most legible hieroglyphics of the great
mystery.  There are women's faces, some real, some ideal, which
contain something in them that becomes a positive element in our
creed, so direct and palpable a revelation is it of the infinite
purity and love.  I remember two faces of women with wings, such as
they call angels, of Fra Angelico,--and I just now came across a
print of Raphael's Santa Apollina, with something of the same
quality,--which I was sure had their prototypes in the world above
ours.  No wonder the Catholics pay their vows to the Queen of
Heaven!  The unpoetical side of Protestantism is, that it has no
women to be worshipped.

But mind you, it is not every beautiful face that hints the Great
Secret to us, nor is it only in beautiful faces that we find traces
of it.  Sometimes it looks out from a sweet sad eye, the only beauty
of a plain countenance; sometimes there is so much meaning in the
lips of a woman, not otherwise fascinating, that we know they have a
message for us, and wait almost with awe to hear their accents.  But
this young girl has at once the beauty of feature and the unspoken
mystery of expression.  Can she tell me anything?

Is her life a complement of mine, with the missing element in it
which I have been groping after through so many friendships that I
have tired of, and through--Hush!  Is the door fast?  Talking loud
is a bad trick in these curious boarding-houses.

You must have sometimes noted this fact that I am going to remind
you of and to use for a special illustration.  Riding along over a
rocky road, suddenly the slow monotonous grinding of the crushing
gravel changes to a deep heavy rumble.  There is a great hollow
under your feet,--a huge unsunned cavern.  Deep, deep beneath you in
the core of the living rock, it arches its awful vault, and far away
it stretches its winding galleries, their roofs dripping into
streams where fishes have been swimming and spawning in the dark
until their scales are white as milk and their eyes have withered
out, obsolete and useless.

So it is in life.  We jog quietly along, meeting the same faces,
grinding over the same thoughts, the gravel of the soul's highway,--
now and then jarred against an obstacle we cannot crush, but must
ride over or round as we best may, sometimes bringing short up
against a disappointment, but still working along with the creaking
and rattling and grating and jerking that belong to the journey of
life, even in the smoothest-rolling vehicle.  Suddenly we hear the
deep underground reverberation that reveals the unsuspected depth of
some abyss of thought or passion beneath us.

I wish the girl would go.  I don't like to look at her so much, and
yet I cannot help it.  Always that same expression of something that
I ought to know,--something that she was made to tell and I to
hear,--lying there ready to fall off from her lips, ready to leap
out of her eyes and make a saint of me, or a devil or a lunatic, or
perhaps a prophet to tell the truth and be hated of men, or a poet
whose words shall flash upon the dry stubble-field of worn-out
thoughts and burn over an age of lies in an hour of passion.

It suddenly occurs to me that I may have put you on the wrong track.
The Great Secret that I refer to has nothing to do with the Three
Words.  Set your mind at ease about that,--there are reasons I could
give you which settle all that matter.  I don't wonder, however,
that you confounded the Great Secret with the Three Words.

I LOVE YOU is all the secret that many, nay, most women have to
tell.  When that is said, they are like China-crackers on the
morning of the fifth of July.  And just as that little patriotic
implement is made with a slender train which leads to the magazine
in its interior, so a sharp eye can almost always see the train
leading from a young girl's eye or lip to the "I love you" in her
heart.  But the Three Words are not the Great Secret I mean.  No,
women's faces are only one of the tablets on which that is written
in its partial, fragmentary symbols.  It lies deeper than Love,
though very probably Love is a part of it.  Some, I think,--
Wordsworth might be one of them,--spell out a portion of it from
certain beautiful natural objects, landscapes, flowers, and others.
I can mention several poems of his that have shadowy hints which
seem to me to come near the region where I think it lies.  I have
known two persons who pursued it with the passion of the old
alchemists,--all wrong evidently, but infatuated, and never giving
up the daily search for it until they got tremulous and feeble, and
their dreams changed to visions of things that ran and crawled about
their floor and ceilings, and so they died.  The vulgar called them
drunkards.

I told you that I would let you know the mystery of the effect this
young girl's face produces on me.  It is akin to those influences a
friend of mine has described, you may remember, as coming from
certain voices.  I cannot translate it into words,--only into
feelings; and these I have attempted to shadow by showing that her
face hinted that revelation of something we are close to knowing,
which all imaginative persons are looking for either in this world
or on the very threshold of the next.

You shake your head at the vagueness and fanciful
incomprehensibleness of my description of the expression in a young
girl's face.  You forget what a miserable surface-matter this
language is in which we try to reproduce our interior state of
being.  Articulation is a shallow trick.  From the light Poh! which
we toss off from our lips as we fling a nameless scribbler's
impertinence into our waste-baskets, to the gravest utterances which
comes from our throats in our moments of deepest need, is only a
space of some three or four inches.  Words, which are a set of
clickings, hissings, lispings, and so on, mean very little, compared
to tones and expression of the features.  I give it up; I thought I
could shadow forth in some feeble way, by their aid, the effect this
young girl's face produces on my imagination; but it is of no use.
No doubt your head aches, trying to make something of my
description.  If there is here and there one that can make anything
intelligible out of my talk about the Great Secret, and who has
spelt out a syllable or two of it on some woman's face, dead or
living, that is all I can expect.  One should see the person with
whom he converses about such matters.  There are dreamy-eyed people
to whom I should say all these things with a certainty of being
understood;--

          That moment that his face I see,
          I know the man that must hear me
          To him my tale I teach.

--I am afraid some of them have not got a spare quarter of a dollar
for this August number, so that they will never see it.

--Let us start again, just as if we had not made this ambitious
attempt, which may go for nothing, and you can have your money
refunded, if you will make the change.

This young girl, about whom I have talked so unintelligibly, is the
unconscious centre of attraction to the whole solar system of our
breakfast-table.  The Little Gentleman leans towards her, and she
again seems to be swayed as by some invisible gentle force towards
him.  That slight inclination of two persons with a strong affinity
towards each other, throwing them a little out of plumb when they
sit side by side, is a physical fact I have often noticed.  Then
there is a tendency in all the men's eyes to converge on her; and I
do firmly believe, that, if all their chairs were examined, they
would be found a little obliquely placed, so as to favor the
direction in which their occupants love to look.

That bland, quiet old gentleman, of whom I have spoken as sitting
opposite to me, is no exception to the rule.  She brought down some
mignonette one morning, which she had grown in her chamber.  She
gave a sprig to her little neighbor, and one to the landlady, and
sent another by the hand of Bridget to this old gentleman.

--Sarvant, Ma'am I Much obleeged,--he said, and put it gallantly in
his button-hole.--After breakfast he must see some of her drawings.
Very fine performances,--very fine!--truly elegant productions,
truly elegant!--Had seen Miss Linwood's needlework in London, in
the year (eighteen hundred and little or nothing, I think he said,)-
patronized by the nobility and gentry, and Her Majesty,--elegant,
truly elegant productions, very fine performances; these drawings
reminded him of them;--wonderful resemblance to Nature; an
extraordinary art, painting; Mr. Copley made some very fine pictures
that he remembered seeing when he was a boy.  Used to remember some
lines about a portrait Written by Mr. Cowper, beginning,

         "Oh that those lips had language! Life has pass'd
          With me but roughly since I heard thee last."

And with this the old gentleman fell to thinking about a dead mother
of his that he remembered ever so much younger than he now was, and
looking, not as his mother, but as his daughter should look.  The
dead young mother was looking at the old man, her child, as she used
to look at him so many, many years ago.  He stood still as if in a
waking dream, his eyes fixed on the drawings till their outlines
grew indistinct and they ran into each other, and a pale, sweet face
shaped itself out of the glimmering light through which he saw them.
--What is there quite so profoundly human as an old man's memory of
a mother who died in his earlier years?  Mother she remains till
manhood, and by-and-by she grows to be as a sister; and at last,
when, wrinkled and bowed and broken, he looks back upon her in her
fair youth, he sees in the sweet image he caresses, not his parent,
but, as it were, his child.

If I had not seen all this in the old gentleman's face, the words
with which he broke his silence would have betrayed his train of
thought.

--If they had only taken pictures then as they do now!--he said.
--All gone! all gone! nothing but her face as she leaned on the arms
of her great chair; and I would give a hundred pound for the poorest
little picture of her, such as you can buy for a shilling of anybody
that you don't want to see.--The old gentleman put his hand to his
forehead so as to shade his eyes.  I saw he was looking at the dim
photograph of memory, and turned from him to Iris.

How many drawing-books have you filled,--I said,--since you began to
take lessons?--This was the first,--she answered,--since she was
here; and it was not full, but there were many separate sheets of
large size she had covered with drawings.

I turned over the leaves of the book before us.  Academic studies,
principally of the human figure.  Heads of sibyls, prophets, and so
forth.  Limbs from statues.  Hands and feet from Nature.  What a
superb drawing of an arm!  I don't remember it among the figures
from Michel Angelo, which seem to have been her patterns mainly.
From Nature, I think, or after a cast from Nature.--Oh!

--Your smaller studies are in this, I suppose,--I said, taking up
the drawing-book with a lock on it,--Yes,--she said.--I should like
to see her style of working on a small scale.--There was nothing in
it worth showing,--she said; and presently I saw her try the lock,
which proved to be fast.  We are all caricatured in it, I haven't
the least doubt.  I think, though, I could tell by her way of
dealing with us what her fancies were about us boarders.  Some of
them act as if they were bewitched with her, but she does not seem
to notice it much.  Her thoughts seem to be on her little neighbor
more than on anybody else.  The young fellow John appears to stand
second in her good graces.  I think he has once or twice sent her
what the landlady's daughter calls bo-kays of flowers,--somebody
has, at any rate.--I saw a book she had, which must have come from
the divinity-student.  It had a dreary title-page, which she had
enlivened with a fancy portrait of the author,--a face from memory,
apparently,--one of those faces that small children loathe without
knowing why, and which give them that inward disgust for heaven so
many of the little wretches betray, when they hear that these are
"good men," and that heaven is full of such.--The gentleman with
the diamond--the Koh-i-noor, so called by us--was not encouraged, I
think, by the reception of his packet of perfumed soap.  He pulls
his purple moustache and looks appreciatingly at Iris, who never
sees him, as it should seem.  The young Marylander, who I thought
would have been in love with her before this time, sometimes looks
from his corner across the long diagonal of the table, as much as to
say, I wish you were up here by me, or I were down there by you,--
which would, perhaps, be a more natural arrangement than the present
one.  But nothing comes of all this,--and nothing has come of my
sagacious idea of finding out the girl's fancies by looking into her
locked drawing-book.

Not to give up all the questions I was determined to solve, I made
an attempt also to work into the Little Gentleman's chamber.  For
this purpose, I kept him in conversation, one morning, until he was
just ready to go up-stairs, and then, as if to continue the talk,
followed him as he toiled back to his room.  He rested on the
landing and faced round toward me.  There was something in his eye
which said, Stop there!  So we finished our conversation on the
landing.  The next day, I mustered assurance enough to knock at his
door, having a pretext ready.--No answer.--Knock again.  A door,
as if of a cabinet, was shut softly and locked, and presently I
heard the peculiar dead beat of his thick-soled, misshapen boots.
The bolts and the lock of the inner door were unfastened,--with
unnecessary noise, I thought,--and he came into the passage.  He
pulled the inner door after him and opened the outer one at which I
stood.  He had on a flowered silk dressing-gown, such as
"Mr. Copley" used to paint his old-fashioned merchant-princes in;
and a quaint-looking key in his hand.  Our conversation was short,
but long enough to convince me that the Little Gentleman did not
want my company in his chamber, and did not mean to have it.

I have been making a great fuss about what is no mystery at all,--a
schoolgirl's secrets and a whimsical man's habits.  I mean to give
up such nonsense and mind my own business.--Hark!  What the deuse
is that odd noise in his chamber?

--I think I am a little superstitious.  There were two things, when
I was a boy, that diabolized my imagination,--I mean, that gave me a
distinct apprehension of a formidable bodily shape which prowled
round the neighborhood where I was born and bred.  The first was a
series of marks called the "Devil's footsteps."  These were patches
of sand in the pastures, where no grass grew, where the low-bush
blackberry, the "dewberry," as our Southern neighbors call it, in
prettier and more Shakspearian language, did not spread its clinging
creepers,--where even the pale, dry, sadly-sweet "everlasting" could
not grow, but all was bare and blasted.  The second was a mark in
one of the public buildings near my home,--the college dormitory
named after a Colonial Governor.  I do not think many persons are
aware of the existence of this mark,--little having been said about
the story in print, as it was considered very desirable, for the
sake of the Institution, to hush it up.  In the northwest corner,
and on the level of the third or fourth story, there are signs of a
breach in the walls, mended pretty well, but not to be mistaken.  A
considerable portion of that corner must have been carried away,
from within outward.  It was an unpleasant affair; and I do not care
to repeat the particulars; but some young men had been using sacred
things in a profane and unlawful way, when the occurrence, which was
variously explained, took place.  The story of the Appearance in the
chamber was, I suppose, invented afterwards; but of the injury to
the building there could be no question; and the zig-zag line, where
the mortar is a little thicker than before, is still distinctly
visible.  The queer burnt spots, called the "Devil's footsteps," had
never attracted attention before this time, though there is no
evidence that they had not existed previously, except that of the
late Miss M., a "Goody," so called, or sweeper, who was positive on
the subject, but had a strange horror of referring to an affair of
which she was thought to know something.--I tell you it was not so
pleasant for a little boy of impressible nature to go up to bed in
an old gambrel-roofed house, with untenanted, locked upper-chambers,
and a most ghostly garret,--with the "Devil's footsteps" in the
fields behind the house and in front of it the patched dormitory
where the unexplained occurrence had taken place which startled
those godless youths at their mock devotions, so that one of them
was epileptic from that day forward, and another, after a dreadful
season of mental conflict, took holy orders and became renowned for
his ascetic sanctity.

There were other circumstances that kept up the impression produced
by these two singular facts I have just mentioned.  There was a dark
storeroom, on looking through the key-hole of which, I could dimly
see a heap of chairs and tables, and other four-footed things, which
seemed to me to have rushed in there, frightened, and in their
fright to have huddled together and climbed up on each other's
backs,--as the people did in that awful crush where so many were
killed, at the execution of Holloway and Haggerty.  Then the Lady's
portrait, up-stairs, with the sword-thrusts through it,--marks of
the British officers' rapiers,--and the tall mirror in which they
used to look at their red coats,--confound them for smashing its
mate?--and the deep, cunningly wrought arm-chair in which Lord Percy
used to sit while his hair was dressing;--he was a gentleman, and
always had it covered with a large peignoir, to save the silk
covering my grandmother embroidered.  Then the little room
downstairs from which went the orders to throw up a bank of earth on
the hill yonder, where you may now observe a granite obelisk,--"the
study" in my father's time, but in those days the council-chamber of
armed men,--sometimes filled with soldiers; come with me, and I will
show you the "dents" left by the butts of their muskets all over the
floor.  With all these suggestive objects round me, aided by the
wild stories those awful country-boys that came to live in our
service brought with them;--of contracts written in blood and left
out over night, not to be found the next morning, (removed by the
Evil One, who takes his nightly round among our dwellings, and filed
away for future use,)--of dreams coming true,--of death-signs,--of
apparitions, no wonder that my imagination got excited, and I was
liable to superstitious fancies.

Jeremy Bentham's logic, by which he proved that he couldn't possibly
see a ghost is all very well-in the day-time.  All the reason in the
world will never get those impressions of childhood, created by just
such circumstances as I have been telling, out of a man's head.
That is the only excuse I have to give for the nervous kind of
curiosity with which I watch my little neighbor, and the obstinacy
with which I lie awake whenever I hear anything going on in his
chamber after midnight.

But whatever further observations I may have made must be deferred
for the present.  You will see in what way it happened that my
thoughts were turned from spiritual matters to bodily ones, and how
I got my fancy full of material images,--faces, heads, figures,
muscles, and so forth,--in such a way that I should have no chance
in this number to gratify any curiosity you may feel, if I had the
means of so doing.

Indeed, I have come pretty near omitting my periodical record this
time.  It was all the work of a friend of mine, who would have it
that I should sit to him for my portrait.  When a soul draws a body
in the great lottery of life, where every one is sure of a prize,
such as it is, the said soul inspects the said body with the same
curious interest with which one who has ventured into a "gift
enterprise" examines the "massive silver pencil-case" with the
coppery smell and impressible tube, or the "splendid gold ring" with
the questionable specific gravity, which it has been his fortune to
obtain in addition to his purchase.

The soul, having studied the article of which it finds itself
proprietor, thinks, after a time, it knows it pretty well.  But
there is this difference between its view and that of a person
looking at us:--we look from within, and see nothing but the mould
formed by the elements in which we are incased; other observers look
from without, and see us as living statues.  To be sure, by the aid
of mirrors, we get a few glimpses of our outside aspect; but this
occasional impression is always modified by that look of the soul
from within outward which none but ourselves can take.  A portrait
is apt, therefore, to be a surprise to us.  The artist looks only
from without.  He sees us, too, with a hundred aspects on our faces
we are never likely to see.  No genuine expression can be studied by
the subject of it in the looking-glass.

More than this; he sees us in a way in which many of our friends or
acquaintances never see us.  Without wearing any mask we are
conscious of, we have a special face for each friend.  For, in the
first place, each puts a special reflection of himself upon us, on
the principle of assimilation you found referred to in my last
record, if you happened to read that document.  And secondly, each
of our friends is capable of seeing just so far, and no farther,
into our face, and each sees in it the particular thing that he
looks for.  Now the artist, if he is truly an artist, does not take
any one of these special views.  Suppose he should copy you as you
appear to the man who wants your name to a subscription-list, you
could hardly expect a friend who entertains you to recognize the
likeness to the smiling face which sheds its radiance at his board.
Even within your own family, I am afraid there is a face which the
rich uncle knows, that is not so familiar to the poor relation.  The
artist must take one or the other, or something compounded of the
two, or something different from either.  What the daguerreotype and
photograph do is to give the features and one particular look, the
very look which kills all expression, that of self-consciousness.
The artist throws you off your guard, watches you in movement and in
repose, puts your face through its exercises, observes its
transitions, and so gets the whole range of its expression.  Out of
all this he forms an ideal portrait, which is not a copy of your
exact look at any one time or to any particular person.  Such a
portrait cannot be to everybody what the ungloved call "as nat'ral
as life."  Every good picture, therefore, must be considered wanting
in resemblance by many persons.

There is one strange revelation which comes out, as the artist
shapes your features from his outline.  It is that you resemble so
many relatives to whom you yourself never had noticed any particular
likeness in your countenance.

He is at work at me now, when I catch some of these resemblances,
thus:

There! that is just the look my father used to have sometimes; I
never thought I had a sign of it.  The mother's eyebrow and grayish-
blue eye, those I knew I had.  But there is a something which
recalls a smile that faded away from my sister's lips--how many
years ago!  I thought it so pleasant in her, that I love myself
better for having a trace of it.

Are we not young?  Are we not fresh and blooming?  Wait, a bit.  The
artist takes a mean little brush and draws three fine lines,
diverging outwards from the eye over the temple.  Five years.--The
artist draws one tolerably distinct and two faint lines,
perpendicularly between the eyebrows.  Ten years.--The artist
breaks up the contours round the mouth, so that they look a little
as a hat does that has been sat upon and recovered itself, ready, as
one would say, to crumple up again in the same creases, on smiling
or other change of feature.--Hold on!  Stop that!  Give a young
fellow a chance!  Are we not whole years short of that interesting
period of life when Mr. Balzac says that a man, etc., etc., etc.?

There now!  That is ourself, as we look after finishing an article,
getting a three-mile pull with the ten-foot sculls, redressing the
wrongs of the toilet, and standing with the light of hope in our eye
and the reflection of a red curtain on our cheek.  Is he not a POET
that painted us?

          "Blest be the art that can immortalize!"
                                        COWPER.

--Young folks look on a face as a unit; children who go to school
with any given little John Smith see in his name a distinctive
appellation, and in his features as special and definite an
expression of his sole individuality as if he were the first created
of his race: As soon as we are old enough to get the range of three
or four generations well in hand, and to take in large family
histories, we never see an individual in a face of any stock we
know, but a mosaic copy of a pattern, with fragmentary tints from
this and that ancestor.  The analysis of a face into its ancestral
elements requires that it should be examined in the very earliest
infancy, before it has lost that ancient and solemn look it brings
with it out of the past eternity; and again in that brief space when
Life, the mighty sculptor, has done his work, and Death, his silent
servant, lifts the veil and lets us look at the marble lines he has
wrought so faithfully; and lastly, while a painter who can seize all
the traits of a countenance is building it up, feature after
feature, from the slight outline to the finished portrait.

--I am satisfied, that, as we grow older, we learn to look upon our
bodies more and more as a temporary possession and less and less as
identified with ourselves.  In early years, while the child "feels
its life in every limb," it lives in the body and for the body to a
very great extent.  It ought to be so.  There have been many very
interesting children who have shown a wonderful indifference to the
things of earth and an extraordinary development of the spiritual
nature.  There is a perfect literature of their biographies, all
alike in their essentials; the same "disinclination to the usual
amusements of childhood "; the same remarkable sensibility; the same
docility; the same conscientiousness; in short, an almost uniform
character, marked by beautiful traits, which we look at with a
painful admiration.  It will be found that most of these children
are the subjects of some constitutional unfitness for living, the
most frequent of which I need not mention.  They are like the
beautiful, blushing, half-grown fruit that falls before its time
because its core is gnawed out.  They have their meaning,--they do
not-live in vain,--but they are windfalls.  I am convinced that many
healthy children are injured morally by being forced to read too
much about these little meek sufferers and their spiritual
exercises.  Here is a boy that loves to run, swim, kick football,
turn somersets, make faces, whittle, fish, tear his clothes, coast,
skate, fire crackers, blow squash "tooters," cut his name on fences,
read about Robinson Crusoe and Sinbad the Sailor, eat the widest-
angled slices of pie and untold cakes and candies, crack nuts with
his back teeth and bite out the better part of another boy's apple
with his front ones, turn up coppers, "stick" knives, call names,
throw stones, knock off hats, set mousetraps, chalk doorsteps, "cut
behind" anything on wheels or runners, whistle through his teeth,
"holler" Fire! on slight evidence, run after soldiers, patronize an
engine-company, or, in his own words, "blow for tub No. 11," or
whatever it may be;--isn't that a pretty nice sort of a boy, though
he has not got anything the matter with him that takes the taste of
this world out?  Now, when you put into such a hot-blooded, hard-
fisted, round-cheeked little rogue's hand a sad-looking volume or
pamphlet, with the portrait of a thin, white-faced child, whose life
is really as much a training for death as the last month of a
condemned criminal's existence, what does he find in common between
his own overflowing and exulting sense of vitality and the
experiences of the doomed offspring of invalid parents?  The time
comes when we have learned to understand the music of sorrow, the
beauty of resigned suffering, the holy light that plays over the
pillow of those who die before their time, in humble hope and trust.
But it is not until he has worked his way through the period of
honest hearty animal existence, which every robust child should make
the most of,--not until he has learned the use of his various
faculties, which is his first duty,--that a boy of courage and
animal vigor is in a proper state to read these tearful records of
premature decay.  I have no doubt that disgust is implanted in the
minds of many healthy children by early surfeits of pathological
piety.  I do verily believe that He who took children in His arms
and blessed them loved the healthiest and most playful of them just
as well as those who were richest in the tuberculous virtues.  I
know what I am talking about, and there are more parents in this
country who will be willing to listen to what I say than there are
fools to pick a quarrel with me.  In the sensibility and the
sanctity which often accompany premature decay I see one of the most
beautiful instances of the principle of compensation which marks the
Divine benevolence.  But to get the spiritual hygiene of robust
natures out of the exceptional regimen of invalids is just simply
what we Professors call "bad practice"; and I know by experience
that there are worthy people who not only try it on their own
children, but actually force it on those of their neighbors.

--Having been photographed, and stereographed, and chromatographed,
or done in colors, it only remained to be phrenologized.  A polite
note from Messrs. Bumpus and Crane, requesting our attendance at
their Physiological Emporium, was too tempting to be resisted.  We
repaired to that scientific Golgotha.

Messrs. Bumpus and Crane are arranged on the plan of the man and the
woman in the toy called a "weather-house," both on the same wooden
arm suspended on a pivot,--so that when one comes to the door, the
other retires backwards, and vice versa.  The more particular
speciality of one is to lubricate your entrance and exit,--that of
the other to polish you off phrenologically in the recesses of the
establishment.  Suppose yourself in a room full of casts and
pictures, before a counterful of books with taking titles.  I wonder
if the picture of the brain is there, "approved" by a noted
Phrenologist, which was copied from my, the Professor's, folio
plate, in the work of Gall and Spurzheim.  An extra convolution, No.
9, Destructiveness, according to the list beneath, which was not to
be seen in the plate, itself a copy of Nature, was very liberally
supplied by the artist, to meet the wants of the catalogue of
"organs."  Professor Bumpus is seated in front of a row of women,--
horn-combers and gold-beaders, or somewhere about that range of
life,--looking so credulous, that, if any Second-Advent Miller or
Joe Smith should come along, he could string the whole lot of them
on his cheapest lie, as a boy strings a dozen "shiners" on a
stripped twig of willow.

The Professor (meaning ourselves) is in a hurry, as usual; let the
horn-combers wait,--he shall be bumped without inspecting the
antechamber.

Tape round the head,--22 inches.  (Come on, old 23 inches, if you
think you are the better man!)

Feels thorax and arm, and nuzzles round among muscles as those
horrid old women poke their fingers into the salt-meat on the
provision-stalls at the Quincy Market.  Vitality, No.  5 or 6, or
something or other.  Victuality, (organ at epigastrium,) some
other number equally significant.

Mild champooing of head now commences.  'Extraordinary revelations!
Cupidiphilous, 6!  Hymeniphilous, 6 +!  Paediphilous, 5!
Deipniphilous, 6!  Gelasmiphilous, 6!  Musikiphilous, 5!
Uraniphilous, 5!  Glossiphilous, 8!! and so on.  Meant for a
linguist.--Invaluable information.  Will invest in grammars and
dictionaries immediately.--I have nothing against the grand total
of my phrenological endowments.

I never set great store by my head, and did not think Messrs.
Bumpus and Crane would give me so good a lot of organs as they did,
especially considering that I was a dead-head on that occasion.
Much obliged to them for their politeness.  They have been useful in
their way by calling attention to important physiological facts.
(This concession is due to our immense bump of Candor.)


A short Lecture on Phrenology, read to the Boarders at our
Breakfast-Table.

I shall begin, my friends, with the definition of a Pseudo-science.
A Pseudo-science consists of a nomenclature, with a self-adjusting
arrangement, by which all positive evidence, or such as favors its
doctrines, is admitted, and all negative evidence, or such as tells
against it, is excluded.  It is invariably connected with some
lucrative practical application.  Its professors and practitioners
are usually shrewd people; they are very serious with the public,
but wink and laugh a good deal among themselves.  The believing
multitude consists of women of both sexes, feeble minded inquirers,
poetical optimists, people who always get cheated in buying horses,
philanthropists who insist on hurrying up the millennium, and others
of this class, with here and there a clergyman, less frequently a
lawyer, very rarely a physician, and almost never a horse-jockey or
a member of the detective police.--I do not say that Phrenology was
one of the Pseudo-sciences.

A Pseudo-science does not necessarily consist wholly of lies.  It
may contain many truths, and even valuable ones.  The rottenest bank
starts with a little specie.  It puts out a thousand promises to pay
on the strength of a single dollar, but the dollar is very commonly
a good one.  The practitioners of the Pseudo-sciences know that
common minds, after they have been baited with a real fact or two,
will jump at the merest rag of a lie, or even at the bare hook.
When we have one fact found us, we are very apt to supply the next
out of our own imagination.  (How many persons can read Judges xv.
16 correctly the first time?) The Pseudo-sciences take advantage of
this.--I did not say that it was so with Phrenology.

I have rarely met a sensible man who would not allow that there was
something in Phrenology.  A broad, high forehead, it is commonly
agreed, promises intellect; one that is "villanous low" and has a
huge hind-head back of it, is wont to mark an animal nature.  I have
as rarely met an unbiassed and sensible man who really believed in
the bumps.  It is observed, however, that persons with what the
Phrenologists call "good heads" are more prone than others toward
plenary belief in the doctrine.

It is so hard to prove a negative, that, if a man should assert that
the moon was in truth a green cheese, formed by the coagulable
substance of the Milky Way, and challenge me to prove the contrary,
I might be puzzled.  But if he offer to sell me a ton of this lunar
cheese, I call on him to prove the truth of the Gaseous nature of
our satellite, before I purchase.

It is not necessary to prove the falsity of the phrenological
statement.  It is only necessary to show that its truth is not
proved, and cannot be, by the common course of argument.  The walls
of the head are double, with a great air-chamber between them, over
the smallest and most closely crowded "organs."  Can you tell how
much money there is in a safe, which also has thick double walls, by
kneading its knobs with your fingers?  So when a man fumbles about
my forehead, and talks about the organs of Individuality, Size,
etc., I trust him as much as I should if he felt of the outside of
my strong-box and told me that there was a five-dollar or a ten-
dollar-bill under this or that particular rivet.  Perhaps there is;
only he does n't know anything about at.  But this is a point that
I, the Professor, understand, my friends, or ought to, certainly,
better than you do.  The next argument you will all appreciate.

I proceed, therefore, to explain the self-adjusting mechanism of
Phrenology, which is very similar to that of the Pseudo-sciences.
An example will show it most conveniently.

A. is a notorious thief.  Messrs. Bumpus and Crane examine him and
find a good-sized organ of Acquisitiveness.  Positive fact for
Phrenology.  Casts and drawings of A. are multiplied, and the bump
does not lose in the act of copying.--I did not say it gained.--
What do you look so for?  (to the boarders.)

Presently B. turns up, a bigger thief than A.  But B. has no bump at
all over Acquisitiveness.  Negative fact; goes against Phrenology.
--Not a bit of it.  Don't you see how small Conscientiousness is?
That's the reason B. stole.

And then comes C., ten times as much a thief as either A. or B.,--
used to steal before he was weaned, and would pick one of his own
pockets and put its contents in another, if he could find no other
way of committing petty larceny.  Unfortunately, C.  has a hollow,
instead of a bump, over Acquisitiveness.  Ah, but just look and see
what a bump of Alimentiveness!  Did not C. buy nuts and gingerbread,
when a boy, with the money he stole?  Of course you see why he is a
thief, and how his example confirms our noble science.

At last comes along a case which is apparently a settler, for there
is a little brain with vast and varied powers,--a case like that of
Byron, for instance.  Then comes out the grand reserve-reason which
covers everything and renders it simply impossible ever to corner a
Phrenologist.  "It is not the size alone, but the quality of an
organ, which determines its degree of power."

Oh! oh!  I see.--The argument may be briefly stated thus by the
Phrenologist: "Heads I win, tails you lose."  Well, that's
convenient.

It must be confessed that Phrenology has a certain resemblance to
the Pseudo-sciences.  I did not say it was a Pseudo-science.

I have often met persons who have been altogether struck up and
amazed at the accuracy with which some wandering Professor of
Phrenology had read their characters written upon their skulls.  Of
course the Professor acquires his information solely through his
cranial inspections and manipulations.--What are you laughing at?
(to the boarders.)--But let us just suppose, for a moment, that a
tolerably cunning fellow, who did not know or care anything about
Phrenology, should open a shop and undertake to read off people's
characters at fifty cents or a dollar apiece.  Let us see how well
he could get along without the "organs."

I will suppose myself to set up such a shop.  I would invest one
hundred dollars, more or less, in casts of brains, skulls, charts,
and other matters that would make the most show for the money.  That
would do to begin with.  I would then advertise myself as the
celebrated Professor Brainey, or whatever name I might choose, and
wait for my first customer.  My first customer is a middle-aged man.
I look at him,--ask him a question or two, so as to hear him talk.
When I have got the hang of him, I ask him to sit down, and proceed
to fumble his skull, dictating as follows:
SCALE FROM 1 TO 10.

LIST OF FACULTIES FOR           PRIVATE NOTES FOR MY PUPIL.
      CUSTOMER.
                             Each to be accompanied with a wink.

Amativeness, 7.        Most men love the conflicting sex, and all
                    men love to be told they do.

Alimentiveness, 8.     Don't you see that he has burst off his
                 lowest waistcoat-button with feeding,--hey

Acquisitiveness, 8.    Of course.  A middle-aged Yankee.

Approbativeness 7+.    Hat well brushed.  Hair ditto.  Mark the
                       effect of that plus sign.

Self-Esteem 6.         His face shows that.

Benevolence 9.         That'll please him.

Conscientiousness 8 1/2  That fraction looks first-rate.

Mirthfulness 7         Has laughed twice since he came in.

Ideality 9             That sounds well.

Form, Size, Weight,    4 to 6.  Average everything that
Color, Locality,       cannot be guessed.
Eventuality, etc. etc.


                And so of the other faculties.


Of course, you know, that isn't the way the Phrenologists do.  They
go only by the bumps.--What do you keep laughing so for?  (to the
boarders.) I only said that is the way I should practise
"Phrenology" for a living.

                    End of my Lecture.


--The Reformers have good heads, generally.  Their faces are
commonly serene enough, and they are lambs in private intercourse,
even though their voices may be like

         The wolf's long howl from Oonalaska's shore,

when heard from the platform.  Their greatest spiritual danger is
from the perpetual flattery of abuse to which they are exposed.
These lines are meant to caution them.


     SAINT ANTHONY THE REFORMER.

          HIS TEMPTATION.

No fear lest praise should make us proud!
We know how cheaply that is won;
The idle homage of the crowd
Is proof of tasks as idly done.

A surface-smile may pay the toil
That follows still the conquering Right,
With soft, white hands to dress the spoil
That sunbrowned valor clutched in fight.

Sing the sweet song of other days,
Serenely placid, safely true,
And o'er the present's parching ways
Thy verse distils like evening dew.

But speak in words of living power,--
They fall like drops of scalding rain
That plashed before the burning shower
Swept o'er the cities of the plain!

Then scowling Hate turns deadly pale,--
Then Passion's half-coiled adders spring,
And, smitten through their leprous mail,
Strike right and left in hope to sting.

If thou, unmoved by poisoning wrath,
Thy feet on earth, thy heart above,
Canst walk in peace thy kingly path,
Unchanged in trust, unchilled in love,--

Too kind for bitter words to grieve,
Too firm for clamor to dismay,
When Faith forbids thee to believe,
And Meekness calls to disobey,--

Ah, then beware of mortal pride!
The smiling pride that calmly scorns
Those foolish fingers, crimson dyed
In laboring on thy crown of thorns!




IX

One of our boarders--perhaps more than one was concerned in it--sent
in some questions to me, the other day, which, trivial as some of
them are, I felt bound to answer.

1.--Whether a lady was ever known to write a letter covering only a
single page?

To this I answered, that there was a case on record where a lady had
but half a sheet of paper and no envelope; and being obliged to send
through the post-office, she covered only one side of the paper
(crosswise, lengthwise, and diagonally).

2.--What constitutes a man a gentleman?

To this I gave several answers, adapted to particular classes of
questioners.

a.  Not trying to be a gentleman.

b.  Self-respect underlying courtesy.

c.  Knowledge and observance of the fitness of things in social
intercourse.

d.  f. s. d.  (as many suppose.)

3.--Whether face or figure is most attractive in the female sex?

Answered in the following epigram, by a young man about town:

     Quoth Tom, "Though fair her features be,
     It is her figure pleases me."
     "What may her figure be?" I cried.
     "One hundred thousand!" he replied.

When this was read to the boarders, the young man John said he
should like a chance to "step up" to a figger of that kind, if the
girl was one of the right sort.

The landlady said them that merried for money didn't deserve the
blessin' of a good wife.  Money was a great thing when them that had
it made a good use of it.  She had seen better days herself, and
knew what it was never to want for anything.  One of her cousins
merried a very rich old gentleman, and she had heerd that he said he
lived ten year longer than if he'd staid by himself without anybody
to take care of him.  There was nothin' like a wife for nussin' sick
folks and them that couldn't take care of themselves.

The young man John got off a little wink, and pointed slyly with his
thumb in the direction of our diminutive friend, for whom he seemed
to think this speech was intended.

If it was meant for him, he did n't appear to know that it was.
Indeed, he seems somewhat listless of late, except when the
conversation falls upon one of those larger topics that specially
interest him, and then he grows excited, speaks loud and fast,
sometimes almost savagely,--and, I have noticed once or twice,
presses his left hand to his right side, as if there were something
that ached, or weighed, or throbbed in that region.

While he speaks in this way, the general conversation is
interrupted, and we all listen to him.  Iris looks steadily in his
face, and then he will turn as if magnetized and meet the amber eyes
with his own melancholy gaze.  I do believe that they have some kind
of understanding together, that they meet elsewhere than at our
table, and that there is a mystery, which is going to break upon us
all of a sudden, involving the relations of these two persons.  From
the very first, they have taken to each other.  The one thing they
have in common is the heroic will.  In him, it shows itself in
thinking his way straightforward, in doing battle for "free trade
and no right of search" on the high seas of religious controversy,
and especially in fighting the battles of his crooked old city.  In
her, it is standing up for her little friend with the most queenly
disregard of the code of boarding-house etiquette.  People may say
or look what they like,--she will have her way about this sentiment
of hers.

The Poor Relation is in a dreadful fidget whenever the Little
Gentleman says anything that interferes with her own infallibility.
She seems to think Faith must go with her face tied up, as if she
had the toothache,--and that if she opens her mouth to the quarter
the wind blows from, she will catch her "death o' cold."

The landlady herself came to him one day, as I have found out, and
tried to persuade him to hold his tongue.--The boarders was gettin'
uneasy,--she said,--and some of 'em would go, she mistrusted, if he
talked any more about things that belonged to the ministers to
settle.  She was a poor woman, that had known better days, but all
her livin' depended on her boarders, and she was sure there was n't
any of 'em she set so much by as she did by him; but there was them
that never liked to hear about sech things, except on Sundays.

The Little Gentleman looked very smiling at the landlady, who smiled
even more cordially in return, and adjusted her cap-ribbon with an
unconscious movement,--a reminiscence of the long-past pairing-time,
when she had smoothed her locks and softened her voice, and won her
mate by these and other bird-like graces.--My dear Madam,--he
said,--I will remember your interests, and speak only of matters to
which I am totally indifferent.--I don't doubt he meant this; but a
day or two after, something stirred him up, and I heard his voice
uttering itself aloud, thus:

-It must be done, Sir!--he was saying,--it must be done!  Our
religion has been Judaized, it has been Romanized, it has been
Orientalized, it has been Anglicized, and the time is at hand when
it must be AMERICANIZED!  Now, Sir, you see what Americanizing is in
politics;--it means that a man shall have a vote because he is a
man,--and shall vote for whom he pleases, without his neighbor's
interference.  If he chooses to vote for the Devil, that is his
lookout;--perhaps he thinks the Devil is better than the other
candidates; and I don't doubt he's often right, Sir.  Just so a
man's soul has a vote in the spiritual community; and it doesn't do,
Sir, or it won't do long, to call him "schismatic" and "heretic" and
those other wicked names that the old murderous Inquisitors have
left us to help along "peace and goodwill to men"!

As long as you could catch a man and drop him into an oubliette, or
pull him out a few inches longer by machinery, or put a hot iron
through his tongue, or make him climb up a ladder and sit on a board
at the top of a stake so that he should be slowly broiled by the
fire kindled round it, there was some sense in these words; they led
to something.  But since we have done with those tools, we had
better give up those words.  I should like to see a Yankee
advertisement like this!--(the Little Gentleman laughed fiercely as
he uttered the words,--)

--Patent thumb-screws,--will crush the bone in three turns.

--The cast-iron boot, with wedge and mallet, only five dollars!

--The celebrated extension-rack, warranted to stretch a man six
inches in twenty minutes,--money returned, if it proves
unsatisfactory.

I should like to see such an advertisement, I say, Sir!  Now, what's
the use of using the words that belonged with the thumb-screws, and
the Blessed Virgin with the knives under her petticoats and sleeves
and bodice, and the dry pan and gradual fire, if we can't have the
things themselves, Sir?  What's the use of painting the fire round a
poor fellow, when you think it won't do to kindle one under him,--as
they did at Valencia or Valladolid, or wherever it was?

--What story is that?--I said.

Why,--he answered,--at the last auto-da-fe, in 1824 or '5, or
somewhere there,--it's a traveller's story, but a mighty knowing
traveller he is,--they had a "heretic" to use up according to the
statutes provided for the crime of private opinion.  They could n't
quite make up their minds to burn him, so they only hung him in a
hogshead painted all over with flames!

No, Sir!  when a man calls you names because you go to the ballot-
box and vote for your candidate, or because you say this or that is
your opinion, he forgets in which half of the world he was born,
Sir!  It won't be long, Sir, before we have Americanized religion as
we have Americanized government; and then, Sir, every soul God sends
into the world will be good in the face of all men for just so much
of His "inspiration" as "giveth him understanding"!--None of my
words, Sir!  none of my words!

--If Iris does not love this Little Gentleman, what does love look
like when one sees it?  She follows him with her eyes, she leans
over toward him when he speaks, her face changes with the changes of
his speech, so that one might think it was with her as with
Christabel,--

          That all her features were resigned
          To this sole image in her mind.

But she never looks at him with such intensity of devotion as when
he says anything about the soul and the soul's atmosphere, religion.

Women are twice as religious as men;--all the world knows that.
Whether they are any better, in the eyes of Absolute Justice, might
be questioned; for the additional religious element supplied by sex
hardly seems to be a matter of praise or blame.  But in all common
aspects they are so much above us that we get most of our religion
from them,--from their teachings, from their example,--above all,
from their pure affections.

Now this poor little Iris had been talked to strangely in her
childhood.  Especially she had been told that she hated all good
things,--which every sensible parent knows well enough is not true
of a great many children, to say the least.  I have sometimes
questioned whether many libels on human nature had not been a
natural consequence of the celibacy of the clergy, which was
enforced for so long a period.

The child had met this and some other equally encouraging statements
as to her spiritual conditions, early in life, and fought the battle
of spiritual independence prematurely, as many children do.  If all
she did was hateful to God, what was the meaning of the approving or
else the disapproving conscience, when she had done "right" or
"wrong"?  No "shoulder-striker" hits out straighter than a child
with its logic.  Why, I can remember lying in my bed in the nursery
and settling questions which all that I have heard since and got out
of books has never been able to raise again.  If a child does not
assert itself in this way in good season, it becomes just what its
parents or teachers were, and is no better than a plastic image.--
How old was I at the time?--I suppose about 5823 years old,--that
is, counting from Archbishop Usher's date of the Creation, and
adding the life of the race, whose accumulated intelligence is a
part of my inheritance, to my own.  A good deal older than Plato,
you see, and much more experienced than my Lord Bacon and most of
the world's teachers.--Old books, as you well know, are books of
the world's youth, and new books are fruits of its age.  How many of
all these ancient folios round me are like so many old cupels!  The
gold has passed out of them long ago, but their pores are full of
the dross with which it was mingled.

And so Iris--having thrown off that first lasso which not only
fetters, but chokes those whom it can hold, so that they give
themselves up trembling and breathless to the great soul-subduer,
who has them by the windpipe had settled a brief creed for herself,
in which love of the neighbor, whom we have seen, was the first
article, and love of the Creator, whom we have not seen, grew out of
this as its natural development, being necessarily second in order
of time to the first unselfish emotions which we feel for the
fellow-creatures who surround us in our early years.

The child must have some place of worship.  What would a young girl
be who never mingled her voice with the songs and prayers that rose
all around her with every returning day of rest?  And Iris was free
to choose.  Sometimes one and sometimes another would offer to carry
her to this or that place of worship; and when the doors were
hospitably opened, she would often go meekly in by herself.  It was
a curious fact, that two churches as remote from each other in
doctrine as could well be divided her affections.

The Church of Saint Polycarp had very much the look of a Roman
Catholic chapel.  I do not wish to run the risk of giving names to
the ecclesiastical furniture which gave it such a Romish aspect; but
there were pictures, and inscriptions in antiquated characters, and
there were reading-stands, and flowers on the altar, and other
elegant arrangements.  Then there were boys to sing alternately in
choirs responsive to each other, and there was much bowing, with
very loud responding, and a long service and a short sermon, and a
bag, such as Judas used to hold in the old pictures, was carried
round to receive contributions.  Everything was done not only
"decently and in order," but, perhaps one might say, with a certain
air of magnifying their office on the part of the dignified
clergymen, often two or three in number.  The music and the free
welcome were grateful to Iris, and she forgot her prejudices at the
door of the chapel.  For this was a church with open doors, with
seats for all classes and all colors alike,--a church of zealous
worshippers after their faith, of charitable and serviceable men and
women, one that took care of its children and never forgot its poor,
and whose people were much more occupied in looking out for their
own souls than in attacking the faith of their neighbors.  In its
mode of worship there was a union of two qualities,--the taste and
refinement, which the educated require just as much in their
churches as elsewhere, and the air of stateliness, almost of pomp,
which impresses the common worshipper, and is often not without its
effect upon those who think they hold outward forms as of little
value.  Under the half-Romish aspect of the Church of Saint
Polycarp, the young girl found a devout and loving and singularly
cheerful religious spirit.  The artistic sense, which betrayed
itself in the dramatic proprieties of its ritual, harmonized with
her taste.  The mingled murmur of the loud responses, in those
rhythmic phrases, so simple, yet so fervent, almost as if every
tenth heart-beat, instead of its dull tic-tac, articulated itself as
"Good Lord, deliver us!  "--the sweet alternation of the two choirs,
as their holy song floated from side to side, the keen young voices
rising like a flight of singing-birds that passes from one grove to
another, carrying its music with it back and forward,--why should
she not love these gracious outward signs of those inner harmonies
which none could deny made beautiful the lives of many of her
fellow-worshippers in the humble, yet not inelegant Chapel of Saint
Polycarp?

The young Marylander, who was born and bred to that mode of worship,
had introduced her to the chapel, for which he did the honors for
such of our boarders as were not otherwise provided for.  I saw them
looking over the same prayer-book one Sunday, and I could not help
thinking that two such young and handsome persons could hardly
worship together in safety for a great while.  But they seemed to
mind nothing but their prayer-book.  By-and-by the silken bag was
handed round.--I don't believe she will; so awkward, you know;-
besides, she only came by invitation.  There she is, with her hand
in her pocket, though,--and sure enough, her little bit of silver
tinkled as it struck the coin beneath.  God bless her! she has n't
much to give; but her eye glistens when she gives it, and that is
all Heaven asks.--That was the first time I noticed these young
people together, and I am sure they behaved with the most charming
propriety,--in fact, there was one of our silent lady-boarders with
them, whose eyes would have kept Cupid and Psyche to their good
behavior.  A day or two after this I noticed that the young
gentleman had left his seat, which you may remember was at the
corner diagonal to that of Iris, so that they have been as far
removed from each other as they could be at the table.  His new seat
is three or four places farther down the table.  Of course I made a
romance out of this, at once.  So stupid not to see it!  How could
it be otherwise?--Did you speak, Madam?  I beg your pardon.  (To my
lady-reader.)

I never saw anything like the tenderness with which this young girl
treats her little deformed neighbor.  If he were in the way of going
to church, I know she would follow him.  But his worship, if any, is
not with the throng of men and women and staring children.

I, the Professor, on the other hand, am a regular church-goer.  I
should go for various reasons if I did not love it; but I am happy
enough to find great pleasure in the midst of devout multitudes,
whether I can accept all their creeds or not.  One place of worship
comes nearer than the rest to my ideal standard, and to this it was
that I carried our young girl.

The Church of the Galileans, as it is called, is even humbler in
outside pretensions than the Church of Saint Polycarp.  Like that,
it is open to all comers.  The stranger who approaches it looks down
a quiet street and sees the plainest of chapels,--a kind of wooden
tent, that owes whatever grace it has to its pointed windows and the
high, sharp roofs--traces, both, of that upward movement of
ecclesiastical architecture which soared aloft in cathedral-spires,
shooting into the sky as the spike of a flowering aloe from the
cluster of broad, sharp-wedged leaves below.  This suggestion of
medieval symbolism, aided by a minute turret in which a hand-bell
might have hung and found just room enough to turn over, was all of
outward show the small edifice could boast.  Within there was very
little that pretended to be attractive.  A small organ at one side,
and a plain pulpit, showed that the building was a church; but it
was a church reduced to its simplest expression:

Yet when the great and wise monarch of the East sat upon his throne,
in all the golden blaze of the spoils of Ophir and the freights of
the navy of Tarshish, his glory was not like that of this simple
chapel in its Sunday garniture.  For the lilies of the field, in
their season, and the fairest flowers of the year, in due
succession, were clustered every Sunday morning over the preacher's
desk.  Slight, thin-tissued blossoms of pink and blue and virgin
white in early spring, then the full-breasted and deep-hearted roses
of summer, then the velvet-robed crimson and yellow flowers of
autumn, and in the winter delicate exotics that grew under skies of
glass in the false summers of our crystal palaces without knowing
that it was the dreadful winter of New England which was rattling
the doors and frosting the panes,--in their language the whole year
told its history of life and growth and beauty from that simple
desk.  There was always at least one good sermon,--this floral
homily.  There was at least one good prayer,--that brief space when
all were silent, after the manner of the Friends at their devotions.

Here, too, Iris found an atmosphere of peace and love.  The same
gentle, thoughtful faces, the same cheerful but reverential spirit,
the same quiet, the same life of active benevolence.  But in all
else how different from the Church of Saint Polycarp!  No clerical
costume, no ceremonial forms, no carefully trained choirs.  A
liturgy they have, to be sure, which does not scruple to borrow from
the time-honored manuals of devotion, but also does not hesitate to
change its expressions to its own liking.

Perhaps the good people seem a little easy with each other;--they
are apt to nod familiarly, and have even been known to whisper
before the minister came in.  But it is a relief to get rid of that
old Sunday--no,--Sabbath face, which suggests the idea that the
first day of the week is commemorative of some most mournful event.
The truth is, these brethren and sisters meet very much as a family
does for its devotions, not putting off their humanity in the least,
considering it on the whole quite a delightful matter to come
together for prayer and song and good counsel from kind and wise
lips.  And if they are freer in their demeanor than some very
precise congregations, they have not the air of a worldly set of
people.  Clearly they have not come to advertise their tailors and
milliners, nor for the sake of exchanging  criticisms on the
literary character of the sermon they  may hear.  There is no
restlessness and no restraint  among these quiet, cheerful
worshippers.  One thing  that keeps them calm and happy during the
season so evidently trying to many congregations is, that they join
very generally in the singing.  In this way they  get rid of that
accumulated nervous force which escapes in all sorts of fidgety
movements, so that a minister trying to keep his congregation still
reminds one of a boy with his hand over the nose of a pump which
another boy is working,--this spirting impatience of the people is
so like the jets that find their way through his fingers, and the
grand rush out at the final Amen! has such a wonderful likeness to
the gush that takes place when the boy pulls his hand away, with
immense relief, as it seems, to both the pump and the officiating
youngster.

How sweet is this blending of all voices and all hearts in one
common song of praise!  Some will sing a little loud, perhaps,--and
now and then an impatient chorister will get a syllable or two in
advance, or an enchanted singer so lose all thought of time and
place in the luxury of a closing cadence that he holds on to the
last semi-breve upon his private responsibility; but how much more
of the spirit of the old Psalmist in the music of these imperfectly
trained voices than in the academic niceties of the paid performers
who take our musical worship out of our hands!

I am of the opinion that the creed of the Church of the Galileans is
not laid down in as many details as that of the Church of Saint
Polycarp.  Yet I suspect, if one of the good people from each of
those churches had met over the bed of a suffering fellow-creature,
or for the promotion of any charitable object, they would have found
they had more in common than all the special beliefs or want of
beliefs that separated them would amount to.  There are always many
who believe that the fruits of a tree afford a better test of its
condition than a statement of the composts with which it is dressed,
though the last has its meaning and importance, no doubt.

Between these two churches, then, our young Iris divides her
affections.  But I doubt if she listens to the preacher at either
with more devotion than she does to her little neighbor when he
talks of these matters.

What does he believe?  In the first place, there is some deep-rooted
disquiet lying at the bottom of his soul, which makes him very
bitter against all kinds of usurpation over the right of private
judgment.  Over this seems to lie a certain tenderness for humanity
in general, bred out of life-long trial, I should say, but sharply
streaked with fiery lines of wrath at various individual acts of
wrong, especially if they come in an ecclesiastical shape, and
recall to him the days when his mother's great-grandmother was
strangled on Witch Hill, with a text from the Old Testament for her
halter.  With all this, he has a boundless belief in the future of
this experimental hemisphere, and especially in the destiny of the
free thought of its northeastern metropolis.

--A man can see further, Sir,--he said one day,--from the top of
Boston State House, and see more that is worth seeing, than from all
the pyramids and turrets and steeples in all the places in the
world!  No smoke, Sir; no fog, Sir; and a clean sweep from the Outer
Light and the sea beyond it to the New Hampshire mountains!  Yes,
Sir,--and there are great truths that are higher than mountains and
broader than seas, that people are looking for from the tops of
these hills of ours;--such as the world never saw, though it might
have seen them at Jerusalem, if its eyes had been open!--Where do
they have most crazy people?  Tell me that, Sir!

I answered, that I had heard it said there were more in New England
than in most countries, perhaps more than in any part of the world.

Very good, Sir,--he answered.--When have there been most people
killed and wounded in the course of this century?

During the wars of the French Empire, no doubt,--I said.

That's it! that's it!--said the Little Gentleman;--where the battle
of intelligence is fought, there are most minds bruised and broken!
We're battling for a faith here, Sir.

The divinity-student remarked, that it was rather late in the
world's history for men to be looking out for a new faith.

I did n't say a new faith,--said the Little Gentleman;--old or new,
it can't help being different here in this American mind of ours
from anything that ever was before; the people are new, Sir, and
that makes the difference.  One load of corn goes to the sty, and
makes the fat of swine,--another goes to the farm-house, and becomes
the muscle that clothes the right arms of heroes.  It is n't where a
pawn stands on the board that makes the difference, but what the
game round it is when it is on this or that square.

Can any man look round and see what Christian countries are now
doing, and how they are governed, and what is the general condition
of society, without seeing that Christianity is the flag under which
the world sails, and not the rudder that steers its course?  No,
Sir!  There was a great raft built about two thousand years ago,--
call it an ark, rather,--the world's great ark! big enough to hold
all mankind, and made to be launched right out into the open waves
of life,--and here it has been lying, one end on the shore and one
end bobbing up and down in the water, men fighting all the time as
to who should be captain and who should have the state-rooms, and
throwing each other over the side because they could not agree about
the points of compass, but the great vessel never getting afloat
with its freight of nations and their rulers;--and now, Sir, there
is and has been for this long time a fleet of "heretic" lighters
sailing out of Boston Bay, and they have been saying, and they say
now, and they mean to keep saying, "Pump out your bilge-water,
shovel over your loads of idle ballast, get out your old rotten
cargo, and we will carry it out into deep waters and sink it where
it will never be seen again; so shall the ark of the world's hope
float on the ocean, instead of sticking in the dock-mud where it is
lying!"

It's a slow business, this of getting the ark launched.  The Jordan
was n't deep enough, and the Tiber was n't deep enough, and the
Rhone was n't deep enough, and the Thames was n't deep enough, and
perhaps the Charles is n't deep enough; but I don't feel sure of
that, Sir, and I love to hear the workmen knocking at the old blocks
of tradition and making the ways smooth with the oil of the Good
Samaritan.  I don't know, Sir,--but I do think she stirs a little,--
I do believe she slides;--and when I think of what a work that is
for the dear old three-breasted mother of American liberty, I would
not take all the glory of all the greatest cities in the world for
my birthright in the soil of little Boston!

--Some of us could not help smiling at this burst of local
patriotism, especially when it finished with the last two words.

And Iris smiled, too.  But it was the radiant smile of pleasure
which always lights up her face when her little neighbor gets
excited on the great topics of progress in freedom and religion, and
especially on the part which, as he pleases himself with believing,
his own city is to take in that consummation of human development to
which he looks forward.

Presently she looked into his face with a changed expression,--the
anxiety of a mother that sees her child suffering.

You are not well,--she said.

I am never well,--he answered.--His eyes fell mechanically on the
death's-head ring he wore on his right hand.  She took his hand as
if it had been a baby's, and turned the grim device so that it
should be out of sight.  One slight, sad, slow movement of the head
seemed to say, "The death-symbol is still there!"

A very odd personage, to be sure!  Seems to know what is going on,--
reads books, old and new,--has many recent publications sent him,
they tell me, but, what is more curious, keeps up with the everyday
affairs of the world, too.  Whether he hears everything that is said
with preternatural acuteness, or whether some confidential friend
visits him in a quiet way, is more than I can tell.  I can make
nothing more of the noises I hear in his room than my old
conjectures.  The movements I mention are less frequent, but I often
hear the plaintive cry,--I observe that it is rarely laughing of
late;--I never have detected one articulate word, but I never heard
such tones from anything but a human voice.

There has been, of late, a deference approaching to tenderness, on
the part of the boarders generally so far as he is concerned.  This
is doubtless owing to the air of suffering which seems to have
saddened his look of late.  Either some passion is gnawing at him
inwardly, or some hidden disease is at work upon him.

--What 's the matter with Little Boston?--said the young man John to
me one day.--There a'n't much of him, anyhow; but 't seems to me he
looks peakeder than ever.  The old woman says he's in a bad way, 'n'
wants a puss to take care of him.  Them pusses that take care of old
rich folks marry 'em sometimes,--'n' they don't commonly live a
great while after that.  No, Sir!  I don't see what he wants to die
for, after he's taken so much trouble to live in such poor
accommodations as that crooked body of his.  I should like to know
how his soul crawled into it, 'n' how it's goin' to get out.  What
business has he to die, I should like to know?  Let Ma'am Allen (the
gentleman with the diamond) die, if he likes, and be (this is a
family-magazine); but we a'n't goin' to have him dyin'.  Not by a
great sight.  Can't do without him anyhow.  A'n't it fun to hear him
blow off his steam?

I believe the young fellow would take it as a personal insult, if
the Little Gentleman should show any symptoms of quitting our table
for a better world.

--In the mean time, what with going to church in company with our
young lady, and taking every chance I could get to talk with her, I
have found myself becoming, I will not say intimate, but well
acquainted with Miss Iris.  There is a certain frankness and
directness about her that perhaps belong to her artist nature.  For,
you see, the one thing that marks the true artist is a clear
perception and a firm, bold hand, in distinction from that imperfect
mental vision and uncertain touch which give us the feeble pictures
and the lumpy statues of the mere artisans on canvas or in stone.  A
true artist, therefore, can hardly fail to have a sharp, well-
defined mental physiognomy.  Besides this, many young girls have a
strange audacity blended with their instinctive delicacy.  Even in
physical daring many of them are a match for boys; whereas you will
find few among mature women, and especially if they are mothers, who
do not confess, and not unfrequently proclaim, their timidity.  One
of these young girls, as many of us hereabouts remember, climbed to
the top of a jagged, slippery rock lying out in the waves,--an ugly
height to get up, and a worse one to get down, even for a bold young
fellow of sixteen.  Another was in the way of climbing tall trees
for crows' nests,--and crows generally know about how far boys can
"shin up," and set their household establishments above that high-
water mark.  Still another of these young ladies I saw for the first
time in an open boat, tossing on the ocean ground-swell, a mile or
two from shore, off a lonely island.  She lost all her daring, after
she had some girls of her own to look out for.

Many blondes are very gentle, yielding in character, impressible,
unelastic.  But the positive blondes, with the golden tint running
through them, are often full of character.  They come, probably
enough, from those deep-bosomed German women that Tacitus portrayed
in such strong colors.  The negative blondes, or those women whose
tints have faded out as their line of descent has become
impoverished, are of various blood, and in them the soul has often
become pale with that blanching of the hair and loss of color in the
eyes which makes them approach the character of Albinesses.

I see in this young girl that union of strength and sensibility
which, when directed and impelled by the strong instinct so apt to
accompany this combination of active and passive capacity, we call
genius.  She is not an accomplished artist, certainly, as yet; but
there is always an air in every careless figure she draws, as it
were of upward aspiration,--the elan of John of Bologna's Mercury,--
a lift to them, as if they had on winged sandals, like the herald of
the Gods.  I hear her singing sometimes; and though she evidently is
not trained, yet is there a wild sweetness in her fitful and
sometimes fantastic melodies,--such as can come only from the
inspiration of the moment,--strangely enough, reminding me of those
long passages I have heard from my little neighbor's room, yet of
different tone, and by no means to be mistaken for those weird
harmonies.

I cannot pretend to deny that I am interested in the girl.  Alone,
unprotected, as I have seen so many young girls left in boarding-
houses, the centre of all the men's eyes that surround the table,
watched with jealous sharpness by every woman, most of all by that
poor relation of our landlady, who belongs to the class of women
that like to catch others in mischief when they themselves are too
mature for indiscretions, (as one sees old rogues turn to thief-
catchers,) one of Nature's gendarmerie, clad in a complete suit of
wrinkles, the cheapest coat-of-mail against the shafts of the great
little enemy,--so surrounded, Iris spans this commonplace household-
life of ours with her arch of beauty, as the rainbow, whose name she
borrows, looks down on a dreary pasture with its feeding flocks and
herds of indifferent animals.

These young girls that live in boarding-houses can do pretty much as
they will.  The female gendarmes are off guard occasionally.  The
sitting-room has its solitary moments, when any two boarders who
wish to meet may come together accidentally, (accidentally, I said,
Madam, and I had not the slightest intention of Italicizing the
word,) and discuss the social or political questions of the day, or
any other subject that may prove interesting.  Many charming
conversations take place at the foot of the stairs, or while one of
the parties is holding the latch of a door,--in the shadow of
porticoes, and especially on those outside balconies which some of
our Southern neighbors call "stoops," the most charming places in
the world when the moon is just right and the roses and honeysuckles
are in full blow,--as we used to think in eighteen hundred and never
mention it.

On such a balcony or "stoop," one evening, I walked with Iris.  We
were on pretty good terms now, and I had coaxed her arm under mine,-
-my left arm, of course.  That leaves one's right arm free to defend
the lovely creature, if the rival--odious wretch! attempt, to ravish
her from your side.  Likewise if one's heart should happen to beat a
little, its mute language will not be without its meaning, as you
will perceive when the arm you hold begins to tremble, a
circumstance like to occur, if you happen to be a good-looking young
fellow, and you two have the "stoop" to yourselves.

We had it to ourselves that evening.  The Koh-inoor, as we called
him, was in a corner with our landlady's daughter.  The young fellow
John was smoking out in the yard.  The gendarme was afraid of the
evening air, and kept inside, The young Marylander came to the door,
looked out and saw us walking together, gave his hat a pull over his
forehead and stalked off.  I felt a slight spasm, as it were, in the
arm I held, and saw the girl's head turn over her shoulder for a
second.  What a kind creature this is!  She has no special interest
in this youth, but she does not like to see a young fellow going off
because he feels as if he were not wanted.

She had her locked drawing-book under her arm.--Let me take it,--I
said.

She gave it to me to carry.

This is full of caricatures of all of us, I am sure,--said I.

She laughed, and said,--No,--not all of you.

I was there, of course?

Why, no,--she had never taken so much pains with me.

Then she would let me see the inside of it?

She would think of it.

Just as we parted, she took a little key from her pocket and handed
it to me.  This unlocks my naughty book,--she said,--you shall see
it.  I am not afraid of you.

I don't know whether the last words exactly pleased me.  At any
rate, I took the book and hurried with it to my room.  I opened it,
and saw, in a few glances, that I held the heart of Iris in my hand.

--I have no verses for you this month, except these few lines
suggested by the season.


          MIDSUMMER.

Here!  sweep these foolish leaves away,
I will not crush my brains to-day!
Look! are the southern curtains drawn?
Fetch me a fan, and so begone!

Not that,--the palm-tree's rustling leaf
Brought from a parching coral-reef!
Its breath is heated;--I would swing
The broad gray plumes,--the eagle's wing.

I hate these roses' feverish blood!
Pluck me a half-blown lily-bud,
A long-stemmed lily from the lake,
Cold as a coiling water-snake.

Rain me sweet odors on the air,
And wheel me up my Indian chair,
And spread some book not overwise
Flat out before my sleepy eyes.

--Who knows it not,--this dead recoil
Of weary fibres stretched with toil,
The pulse that flutters faint and low
When Summer's seething breezes blow?

O Nature!  bare thy loving breast
And give thy child one hour of rest,
One little hour to lie unseen
Beneath thy scarf of leafy green!

So, curtained by a singing pine,
Its murmuring voice shall blend with mine,
Till, lost in dreams, my faltering lay
In sweeter music dies away.




X

          IRIS, HER BOOK

I pray thee by the soul of her that bore thee,
By thine own sister's spirit I implore thee,
Deal gently with the leaves that lie before thee!

For Iris had no mother to infold her,
Nor ever leaned upon a sister's shoulder,
Telling the twilight thoughts that Nature told her.

She had not learned the mystery of awaking
Those chorded keys that soothe a sorrow's aching,
Giving the dumb heart voice, that else were breaking.

Yet lived, wrought, suffered.  Lo, the pictured token!
Why should her fleeting day-dreams fade unspoken,
Like daffodils that die with sheaths unbroken?

She knew not love, yet lived in maiden fancies,
Walked simply clad, a queen of high romances,
And talked strange tongues with angels in her trances.

Twin-souled she seemed, a twofold nature wearing,
Sometimes a flashing falcon in her daring,
Then a poor mateless dove that droops despairing.

Questioning all things: Why her Lord had sent her?
What were these torturing gifts, and wherefore lent her?
Scornful as spirit fallen, its own tormentor.

And then all tears and anguish: Queen of Heaven,
Sweet Saints, and Thou by mortal sorrows riven,
Save me!  oh, save me!  Shall I die forgiven?

And then--Ah, God!  But nay, it little matters
Look at the wasted seeds that autumn scatters,
The myriad germs that Nature shapes and shatters!

If she had--Well!  She longed, and knew not wherefore
Had the world nothing she might live to care for?
No second self to say her evening prayer for?

She knew the marble shapes that set men dreaming,
Yet with her shoulders bare and tresses streaming
Showed not unlovely to her simple seeming.

Vain?  Let it be so!  Nature was her teacher.
What if a lonely and unsistered creature
Loved her own harmless gift of pleasing feature,

Saying, unsaddened,--This shall soon be faded,
And double-hued the shining tresses braided,
And all the sunlight of the morning shaded?

--This her poor book is full of saddest follies,
Of tearful smiles and laughing melancholies,
With summer roses twined and wintry hollies.

In the strange crossing of uncertain chances,
Somewhere, beneath some maiden's tear-dimmed glances
May fall her little book of dreams and fancies.

Sweet sister!  Iris, who shall never name thee,
Trembling for fear her open heart may shame thee,
Speaks from this vision-haunted page to claim thee.

Spare her, I pray thee!  If the maid is sleeping,
Peace with her! she has had her hour of weeping.
No more!  She leaves her memory in thy keeping.


These verses were written in the first leaves of the locked volume.
As I turned the pages, I hesitated for a moment.  Is it quite fair
to take advantage of a generous, trusting impulse to read the
unsunned depths of a young girl's nature, which I can look through,
as the balloon-voyagers tell us they see from their hanging-baskets
through the translucent waters which the keenest eye of such as sail
over them in ships might strive to pierce in vain?  Why has the
child trusted me with such artless confessions,--self-revelations,
which might be whispered by trembling lips, under the veil of
twilight, in sacred confessionals, but which I cannot look at in the
light of day without a feeling of wronging a sacred confidence?

To all this the answer seemed plain enough after a little thought.
She did not know how fearfully she had disclosed herself; she was
too profoundly innocent.  Her soul was no more ashamed than the fair
shapes that walked in Eden without a thought of over-liberal
loveliness.  Having nobody to tell her story to,--having, as she
said in her verses, no musical instrument to laugh and cry with
her,--nothing, in short, but the language of pen and pencil,--all
the veinings of her nature were impressed on these pages as those of
a fresh leaf are transferred to the blank sheets which inclose it.
It was the same thing which I remember seeing beautifully shown in a
child of some four or five years we had one day at our boarding-
house.  The child was a deaf mute.  But its soul had the inner sense
that answers to hearing, and the shaping capacity which through
natural organs realizes itself in words.  Only it had to talk with
its face alone; and such speaking eyes, such rapid alternations of
feeling and shifting expressions of thought as flitted over its
face, I have never seen in any other human countenance.

I wonder if something of spiritual transparency is not typified in
the golden-blonde organization.  There are a great many little
creatures,--many small fishes, for instance,--which are literally
transparent, with the exception of some of the internal organs.  The
heart can be seen beating as if in a case of clouded crystal.  The
central nervous column with its sheath runs as a dark stripe through
the whole length of the diaphanous muscles of the body.  Other
little creatures are so darkened with pigment that we can see only
their surface.  Conspirators and poisoners are painted with black,
beady-eyes and swarthy hue; Judas, in Leonardo's picture, is the
model of them all.

However this may be, I should say there never had been a book like
this of Iris,--so full of the heart's silent language, so
transparent that the heart itself could be seen beating through it.
I should say there never could have been such a book, but for one
recollection, which is not peculiar to myself, but is shared by a
certain number of my former townsmen.  If you think I over-color
this matter of the young girl's book, hear this, which there are
others, as I just said, besides myself, will tell you is strictly
true.


THE BOOK OF THE THREE MAIDEN SISTERS.

In the town called Cantabridge, now a city, water-veined and gas
windpiped, in the street running down to the Bridge, beyond which
dwelt Sally, told of in a book of a friend of mine, was of old a
house inhabited by three maidens.  They left no near kinsfolk, I
believe; whether they did or not, I have no ill to speak of them;
for they lived and died in all good report and maidenly credit.  The
house they lived in was of the small, gambrel-roofed cottage
pattern, after the shape of Esquires' houses, but after the size of
the dwellings of handicraftsmen.  The lower story was fitted up as a
shop.  Specially was it provided with one of those half-doors now so
rarely met with, which are to whole doors as spencers worn by old
folk are to coats.  They speak of limited commerce united with a
social or observing disposition--on the part of the shopkeeper,--
allowing, as they do, talk with passers-by, yet keeping off such as
have not the excuse of business to cross the threshold.  On the
door-posts, at either side, above the half-door, hung certain
perennial articles of merchandise, of which my memory still has
hanging among its faded photographs a kind of netted scarf and some
pairs of thick woollen stockings.  More articles, but not very many,
were stored inside; and there was one drawer, containing children's
books, out of which I once was treated to a minute quarto ornamented
with handsome cuts.  This was the only purchase I ever knew to be
made at the shop kept by the three maiden ladies, though it is
probable there were others.  So long as I remember the shop, the
same scarf and, I should say, the same stockings hung on the door-
posts.--You think I am exaggerating again, and that shopkeepers
would not keep the same article exposed for years.  Come to me, the
Professor, and I will take you in five minutes to a shop in this
city where I will show you an article hanging now in the very place
where more than thirty years ago I myself inquired the price of it
of the present head of the establishment. [ This was a glass
alembic, which hung up in Daniel Henchman's apothecary shop, corner
of Cambridge and Chambers streets.]

The three maidens were of comely presence, and one of them had had
claims to be considered a Beauty.  When I saw them in the old
meeting-house on Sundays, as they rustled in through the aisles in
silks and satins, not gay, but more than decent, as I remember them,
I thought of My Lady Bountiful in the history of "Little King
Pippin," and of the Madam Blaize of Goldsmith (who, by the way, must
have taken the hint of it from a pleasant poem, "Monsieur de la
Palisse," attributed to De la Monnoye, in the collection of French
songs before me).  There was some story of an old romance in which
the Beauty had played her part.  Perhaps they all had had lovers;
for, as I said, they were shapely and seemly personages, as I
remember them; but their lives were out of the flower and in the
berry at the time of my first recollections.

One after another they all three dropped away, objects of kindly
attention to the good people round, leaving little or almost
nothing, and nobody to inherit it.  Not absolutely nothing, of
course.  There must have been a few old dresses--perhaps some bits
of furniture, a Bible, and the spectacles the good old souls read it
through, and little keepsakes, such as make us cry to look at, when
we find them in old drawers;--such relics there must have been.  But
there was more.  There was a manuscript of some hundred pages,
closely written, in which the poor things had chronicled for many
years the incidents of their daily life.  After their death it was
passed round somewhat freely, and fell into my hands.  How I have
cried and laughed and colored over it!  There was nothing in it to
be ashamed of, perhaps there was nothing in it to laugh at, but such
a picture of the mode of being of poor simple good old women I do
believe was never drawn before.  And there were all the smallest
incidents recorded, such as do really make up humble life, but which
die out of all mere literary memoirs, as the houses where the
Egyptians or the Athenians lived crumble and leave only their
temples standing.  I know, for instance, that on a given day of a
certain year, a kindly woman, herself a poor widow, now, I trust,
not without special mercies in heaven for her good deeds,--for I
read her name on a proper tablet in the churchyard a week ago,--sent
a fractional pudding from her own table to the Maiden Sisters, who,
I fear, from the warmth and detail of their description, were
fasting, or at least on short allowance, about that time.  I know
who sent them the segment of melon, which in her riotous fancy one
of them compared to those huge barges to which we give the
ungracious name of mudscows.  But why should I illustrate further
what it seems almost a breach of confidence to speak of?  Some kind
friend, who could challenge a nearer interest than the curious
strangers into whose hands the book might fall, at last claimed it,
and I was glad that it should be henceforth sealed to common eyes.
I learned from it that every good and, alas! every evil act we do
may slumber unforgotten even in some earthly record.  I got a new
lesson in that humanity which our sharp race finds it so hard to
learn.  The poor widow, fighting hard to feed and clothe and educate
her children, had not forgotten the poorer ancient maidens.
I remembered it the other day, as I stood by her place of rest, and
I felt sure that it was remembered elsewhere.  I know there are
prettier words than pudding, but I can't help it,--the pudding went
upon the record, I feel sure, with the mite which was cast into the
treasury by that other poor widow whose deed the world shall
remember forever, and with the coats and garments which the good
women cried over, when Tabitha, called by interpretation Dorcas, lay
dead in the upper chamber, with her charitable needlework strewed
around her.

--Such was the Book of the Maiden Sisters.  You will believe me more
readily now when I tell you that I found the soul of Iris in the one
that lay open before me.  Sometimes it was a poem that held it,
sometimes a drawing, angel, arabesque, caricature, or a mere
hieroglyphic symbol of which I could make nothing.  A rag of cloud
on one page, as I remember, with a streak of red zigzagging out of
it across the paper as naturally as a crack runs through a China
bowl.  On the next page a dead bird,--some little favorite, I
suppose; for it was worked out with a special love, and I saw on the
leaf that sign with which once or twice in my life I have had a
letter sealed,--a round spot where the paper is slightly corrugated,
and, if there is writing there, the letters are somewhat faint and
blurred.  Most of the pages were surrounded with emblematic
traceries.  It was strange to me at first to see how often she
introduced those homelier wild-flowers which we call weeds,--for it
seemed there was none of them too humble for her to love, and none
too little cared for by Nature to be without its beauty for her
artist eye and pencil.  By the side of the garden-flowers,--of
Spring's curled darlings, the hyacinths, of rosebuds, dear to
sketching maidens, of flower-de-luces and morning-glories, nay,
oftener than these, and more tenderly caressed by the colored brush
that rendered them,--were those common growths which fling
themselves to be crushed under our feet and our wheels, making
themselves so cheap in this perpetual martyrdom that we forget each
of them is a ray of the Divine beauty.

Yellow japanned buttercups and star-disked dandelions,--just as we
see them lying in the grass, like sparks that have leaped from the
kindling sun of summer; the profuse daisy-like flower which whitens
the fields, to the great disgust of liberal shepherds, yet seems
fair to loving eyes, with its button-like mound of gold set round
with milk-white rays; the tall-stemmed succory, setting its pale
blue flowers aflame, one after another, sparingly, as the lights are
kindled in the candelabra of decaying palaces where the heirs of
dethroned monarchs are dying out; the red and white clovers, the
broad, flat leaves of the plantain,--"the white man's foot," as the
Indians called it,--the wiry, jointed stems of that iron creeping
plant which we call "knot-grass," and which loves its life so dearly
that it is next to impossible to murder it with a hoe, as it clings
to the cracks of the pavement;--all these plants, and many more, she
wove into her fanciful garlands and borders.--On one of the pages
were some musical notes.  I touched them from curiosity on a piano
belonging to one of our boarders.  Strange!  There are passages that
I have heard before, plaintive, full of some hidden meaning, as if
they were gasping for words to interpret them.  She must have heard
the strains that have so excited my curiosity, coming from my
neighbor's chamber.  The illuminated border she had traced round the
page that held these notes took the place of the words they seemed
to be aching for.  Above, a long monotonous sweep of waves, leaden-
hued, anxious and jaded and sullen, if you can imagine such an
expression in water.  On one side an Alpine needle, as it were, of
black basalt, girdled with snow.  On the other a threaded waterfall.
The red morning-tint that shone in the drops had a strange look,--
one would say the cliff was bleeding;--perhaps she did not mean it.
Below, a stretch of sand, and a solitary bird of prey, with his
wings spread over some unseen object.--And on the very next page a
procession wound along, after the fashion of that on the title-page
of Fuller's "Holy War," in which I recognized without difficulty
every boarder at our table in all the glory of the most resplendent
caricature--three only excepted,--the Little Gentleman, myself, and
one other.

I confess I did expect to see something that would remind me of the
girl's little deformed neighbor, if not portraits of him.--There is
a left arm again, though;--no,--that is from the "Fighting
Gladiator," the "Jeune Heros combattant" of the Louvre;--there is the
broad ring of the shield.  From a cast, doubtless.  [The separate
casts of the "Gladiator's" arm look immense; but in its place the
limb looks light, almost slender,--such is the perfection of that
miraculous marble.  I never felt as if I touched the life of the old
Greeks until I looked on that statue.]--Here is something very odd,
to be sure.  An Eden of all the humped and crooked creatures!  What
could have been in her head when she worked out such a fantasy?  She
has contrived to give them all beauty or dignity or melancholy
grace.  A Bactrian camel lying under a palm.  A dromedary flashing
up the sands,--spray of the dry ocean sailed by the "ship of the
desert."  A herd of buffaloes, uncouth, shaggy-maned, heavy in the
forehand, light in the hind-quarter.  [The buffalo is the lion of
the ruminants.] And there is a Norman horse, with his huge, rough
collar, echoing, as it were, the natural form of the other beast.
And here are twisted serpents; and stately swans, with answering
curves in their bowed necks, as if they had snake's blood under
their white feathers; and grave, high-shouldered herons standing on
one foot like cripples, and looking at life round them with the cold
stare of monumental effigies.--A very odd page indeed!  Not a
creature in it without a curve or a twist, and not one of them a
mean figure to look at.  You can make your own comment; I am
fanciful, you know.  I believe she is trying to idealize what we
vulgarly call deformity, which she strives to look at in the light
of one of Nature's eccentric curves, belonging to her system of
beauty, as the hyperbola, and parabola belong to the conic sections,
though we cannot see them as symmetrical and entire figures, like
the circle and ellipse.  At any rate, I cannot help referring this
paradise of twisted spines to some idea floating in her head
connected with her friend whom Nature has warped in the moulding.
--That is nothing to another transcendental fancy of mine.  I
believe her soul thinks itself in his little crooked body at times,
--if it does not really get freed or half freed from her own.  Did
you ever see a case of catalepsy?  You know what I mean,--transient
loss of sense, will, and motion; body and limbs taking any position
in which they are put, as if they belonged to a lay-figure.  She had
been talking with him and listening to him one day when the boarders
moved from the table nearly all at once.  But she sat as before, her
cheek resting on her hand, her amber eyes wide open and still.  I
went to her, she was breathing as usual, and her heart was beating
naturally enough,--but she did not answer.  I bent her arm; it was
as plastic as softened wag, and kept the place I gave it.--This
will never do, though, and I sprinkled a few drops of water on her
forehead.  She started and looked round.--I have been in a dream,--
she said;--I feel as if all my strength were in this arm;--give me
your hand!--She took my right hand in her left, which looked soft
and white enough, but--Good Heaven!  I believe she will crack my
bones!  All the nervous power in her body must have flashed through
those muscles; as when a crazy lady snaps her iron window-bars,--she
who could hardly glove herself when in her common health.  Iris
turned pale, and the tears came to her eyes;--she saw she had given
pain.  Then she trembled, and might have fallen but for me;--the
poor little soul had been in one of those trances that belong to the
spiritual pathology of higher natures, mostly those of women.

To come back to this wondrous book of Iris.  Two pages faced each
other which I took for symbolical expressions of two states of mind.
On the left hand, a bright blue sky washed over the page, specked
with a single bird.  No trace of earth, but still the winged
creature seemed to be soaring upward and upward.  Facing it, one of
those black dungeons such as Piranesi alone of all men has pictured.
I am sure she must have seen those awful prisons of his, out of
which the Opium-Eater got his nightmare vision, described by another
as "cemeteries of departed greatness, where monstrous and forbidden
things are crawling and twining their slimy convolutions among
mouldering bones, broken sculpture, and mutilated inscriptions."
Such a black dungeon faced the page that held the blue sky and the
single bird; at the bottom of it something was coiled,--what, and
whether meant for dead or alive, my eyes could not make out.

I told you the young girl's soul was in this book.  As I turned over
the last leaves I could not help starting.  There were all sorts of
faces among the arabesques which laughed and scowled in the borders
that ran round the pages.  They had mostly the outline of childish
or womanly or manly beauty, without very distinct individuality.
But at last it seemed to me that some of them were taking on a look
not wholly unfamiliar to me; there were features that did not seem
new.--Can it be so?  Was there ever such innocence in a creature so
full of life?  She tells her heart's secrets as a three-years-old
child betrays itself without need of being questioned!  This was no
common miss, such as are turned out in scores from the young-lady-
factories, with parchments warranting them accomplished and
virtuous,--in case anybody should question the fact.  I began to
understand her;--and what is so charming as to read the secret of a
real femme incomprise?--for such there are, though they are not the
ones who think themselves uncomprehended women.

Poets are never young, in one sense.  Their delicate ear hears the
far-off whispers of eternity, which coarser souls must travel
towards for scores of years before their dull sense is touched by
them.  A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.  I
have frequently seen children, long exercised by pain and
exhaustion, whose features had a strange look of advanced age.  Too
often one meets such in our charitable institutions.  Their faces
are saddened and wrinkled, as if their few summers were threescore
years and ten.

And so, many youthful poets have written as if their hearts were old
before their time; their pensive morning twilight has been as cool
and saddening as that of evening in more common lives.  The profound
melancholy of those lines of Shelley,

     "I could lie down like a tired child
      And weep away the life of care
      Which I have borne and yet must bear."

came from a heart, as he says, "too soon grown old,"--at twenty-six
years, as dull people count time, even when they talk of poets.

I know enough to be prepared for an exceptional nature,--only this
gift of the hand in rendering every thought in form and color, as
well as in words, gives a richness to this young girl's alphabet of
feeling and imagery that takes me by surprise.  And then besides,
and most of all, I am puzzled at her sudden and seemingly easy
confidence in me.  Perhaps I owe it to my--Well, no matter!  How one
must love the editor who first calls him the venerable So-and-So!

--I locked the book and sighed as I laid it down.  The world is
always ready to receive talent with open arms.  Very often it does
not know what to do with genius.  Talent is a docile creature.  It
bows its head meekly while the world slips the collar over it.  It
backs into the shafts like a lamb.  It draws its load cheerfully,
and is patient of the bit and of the whip.  But genius is always
impatient of its harness; its wild blood makes it hard to train.

Talent seems, at first, in one sense, higher than genius,--namely,
that it is more uniformly and absolutely submitted to the will, and
therefore more distinctly human in its character.  Genius, on the
other hand, is much more like those instincts which govern the
admirable movements of the lower creatures, and therefore seems to
have something of the lower or animal character.  A goose flies by a
chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend.  A poet,
like the goose, sails without visible landmarks to unexplored
regions of truth, which philosophy has yet to lay down on its atlas.
The philosopher gets his track by observation; the poet trusts to
his inner sense, and makes the straighter and swifter line.

And yet, to look at it in another light, is not even the lowest
instinct more truly divine than any voluntary human act done by the
suggestion of reason?  What is a bee's architecture but an
unobstructed divine thought?--what is a builder's approximative rule
but an obstructed thought of the Creator, a mutilated and imperfect
copy of some absolute rule Divine Wisdom has established,
transmitted through a human soul as an image through clouded glass?

Talent is a very common family-trait; genius belongs rather to
individuals;--just as you find one giant or one dwarf in a family,
but rarely a whole brood of either.  Talent is often to be envied,
and genius very commonly to be pitied.  It stands twice the chance
of the other of dying in hospital, in jail, in debt, in bad repute.
It is a perpetual insult to mediocrity; its every word is a trespass
against somebody's vested ideas,--blasphemy against somebody's O'm,
or intangible private truth.

--What is the use of my weighing out antitheses in this way, like a
rhetorical grocer?--You know twenty men of talent, who are making
their way in the world; you may, perhaps, know one man of genius,
and very likely do not want to know any more.  For a divine
instinct, such as drives the goose southward and the poet
heavenward, is a hard thing to manage, and proves too strong for
many whom it possesses.  It must have been a terrible thing to have
a friend like Chatterton or Burns.  And here is a being who
certainly has more than talent, at once poet and artist in tendency,
if not yet fairly developed,--a woman, too;--and genius grafted on
womanhood is like to overgrow it and break its stem, as you may see
a grafted fruit-tree spreading over the stock which cannot keep pace
with its evolution.

I think now you know something of this young person.  She wants
nothing but an atmosphere to expand in.  Now and then one meets with
a nature for which our hard, practical New England life is obviously
utterly incompetent.  It comes up, as a Southern seed, dropped by
accident in one of our gardens, finds itself trying to grow and blow
into flower among the homely roots and the hardy shrubs that
surround it.  There is no question that certain persons who are born
among us find themselves many degrees too far north.  Tropical by
organization, they cannot fight for life with our eastern and
northwestern breezes without losing the color and fragrance into
which their lives would have blossomed in the latitude of myrtles
and oranges.  Strange effects are produced by suffering any living
thing to be developed under conditions such as Nature had not
intended for it.  A French physiologist confined some tadpoles under
water in the dark.  Removed from the natural stimulus of light, they
did not develop legs and arms at the proper period of their growth,
and so become frogs; they swelled and spread into gigantic tadpoles.
I have seen a hundred colossal human tadpoles, overgrown Zarvce or
embryos; nay, I am afraid we Protestants should look on a
considerable proportion of the Holy Father's one hundred and thirty-
nine millions as spiritual larvae, sculling about in the dark by the
aid of their caudal extremities, instead of standing on their legs,
and breathing by gills, instead of taking the free air of heaven
into the lungs made to receive it.  Of course we never try to keep
young souls in the tadpole state, for fear they should get a pair or
two of legs by-and-by and jump out of the pool where they have been
bred and fed!  Never!  Never.  Never?

Now to go back to our plant.  You may know, that, for the earlier
stages of development of almost any vegetable, you only want air,
water, light, and warmth.  But by-and-by, if it is to have special
complex principles as a part of its organization, they must be
supplied by the soil;--your pears will crack, if the root of the
tree gets no iron,--your asparagus-bed wants salt as much as you do.
Just at the period of adolescence, the mind often suddenly begins to
come into flower and to set its fruit.  Then it is that many young
natures, having exhausted the spiritual soil round them of all it
contains of the elements they demand, wither away, undeveloped and
uncolored, unless they are transplanted.

Pray for these dear young souls!  This is the second natural birth;-
for I do not speak of those peculiar religious experiences which
form the point of transition in many lives between the consciousness
of a general relation to the Divine nature and a special personal
relation.  The litany should count a prayer for them in the list of
its supplications; masses should be said for them as for souls in
purgatory; all good Christians should remember them as they remember
those in peril through travel or sickness or in warfare.

I would transport this child to Rome at once, if I had my will.  She
should ripen under an Italian sun.  She should walk under the
frescoed vaults of palaces, until her colors deepened to those of
Venetian beauties, and her forms were perfected into rivalry with
the Greek marbles, and the east wind was out of her soil.  Has she
not exhausted this lean soil of the elements her growing nature
requires?

I do not know.  The magnolia grows and comes into full flower on
Cape Ann, many degrees out of its proper region.  I was riding once
along that delicious road between the hills and the sea, when we
passed a thicket where there seemed to be a chance of finding it.
In five minutes I had fallen on the trees in full blossom, and
filled my arms with the sweet, resplendent flowers.  I could not
believe I was in our cold, northern Essex, which, in the dreary
season when I pass its slate-colored, unpainted farm-houses, and
huge, square, windy, 'squire-built "mansions," looks as brown and
unvegetating as an old rug with its patterns all trodden out and the
colored fringe worn from all its border.

If the magnolia can bloom in northern New England, why should not a
poet or a painter come to his full growth here just as well?  Yes,
but if the gorgeous tree-flower is rare, and only as if by a freak
of Nature springs up in a single spot among the beeches and alders,
is there not as much reason to think the perfumed flower of
imaginative genius will find it hard to be born and harder to spread
its leaves in the clear, cold atmosphere of our ultra-temperate zone
of humanity?

Take the poet.  On the one hand, I believe that a person with the
poetical faculty finds material everywhere.  The grandest objects of
sense and thought are common to all climates and civilizations.  The
sky, the woods, the waters, the storms, life, death love, the hope
and vision of eternity,--these are images that write themselves in
poetry in every soul which has anything of the divine gift.

On the other hand, there is such a thing as a lean, impoverished
life, in distinction from a rich and suggestive one.  Which our
common New England life might be considered, I will not decide.  But
there are some things I think the poet misses in our western Eden.
I trust it is not unpatriotic to mention them in this point of view
as they come before us in so many other aspects.

There is no sufficient flavor of humanity in the soil out of which
we grow.  At Cantabridge, near the sea, I have once or twice picked
up an Indian arrowhead in a fresh furrow.  At Canoe Meadow, in the
Berkshire Mountains, I have found Indian arrowheads.  So everywhere
Indian arrowheads.  Whether a hundred or a thousand years old, who
knows? who cares?  There is no history to the red race,--there is
hardly an individual in it;--a few instincts on legs and holding a
tomahawk--there is the Indian of all time.  The story of one red ant
is the story of all red ants.  So, the poet, in trying to wing his
way back through the life that has kindled, flitted, and faded along
our watercourses and on our southern hillsides for unknown
generations, finds nothing to breathe or fly in; he meets

    "A vast vacuity!  all unawares,
     Fluttering his pennons vain, plumb down he drops
     Ten thousand fathom deep."

But think of the Old World,--that part of it which is the seat of
ancient civilization!  The stakes of the Britons' stockades are
still standing in the bed of the Thames.  The ploughman turns up an
old Saxon's bones, and beneath them is a tessellated pavement of the
time of the Caesars.  In Italy, the works of mediaeval Art seem to
be of yesterday,--Rome, under her kings, is but an intruding
newcomer, as we contemplate her in the shadow of the Cyclopean walls
of Fiesole or Volterra.  It makes a man human to live on these old
humanized soils.  He cannot help marching in step with his kind in
the rear of such a procession.  They say a dead man's hand cures
swellings, if laid on them.  There is nothing like the dead cold
hand of the Past to take down our tumid egotism and lead us into the
solemn flow of the life of our race.  Rousseau came out of one of
his sad self-torturing fits, as he cast his eye on the arches of the
old Roman aqueduct, the Pont du Gard.

I am far from denying that there is an attraction in a thriving
railroad village.  The new "depot," the smartly-painted pine houses,
the spacious brick hotel, the white meeting-house, and the row of
youthful and leggy trees before it, are exhilarating.  They speak of
progress, and the time when there shall be a city, with a His Honor
the Mayor, in the place of their trim but transient architectural
growths.  Pardon me, if I prefer the pyramids.  They seem to me
crystals formed from a stronger solution of humanity than the
steeple of the new meeting-house.  I may be wrong, but the Tiber has
a voice for me, as it whispers to the piers of the Pons Alius, even
more full of meaning than my well-beloved Charles eddying round the
piles of West Boston Bridge.

Then, again, we Yankees are a kind of gypsies,--a mechanical and
migratory race.  A poet wants a home.  He can dispense with an
apple-parer and a reaping-machine.  I feel this more for others than
for myself, for the home of my birth and childhood has been as yet
exempted from the change which has invaded almost everything around
it.

--Pardon me a short digression.  To what small things our memory and
our affections attach themselves!  I remember, when I was a child,
that one of the girls planted some Star-of-Bethlehem bulbs in the
southwest gorner of our front-yard.  Well, I left the paternal roof
and wandered in other lands, and learned to think in the words of
strange people.  But after many years, as I looked on the little
front-yard again, it occurred to me that there used to be some Star-
of-Bethlehems in the southwest corner.  The grass was tall there,
and the blade of the plant is very much like grass, only thicker and
glossier.  Even as Tully parted the briers and brambles when he
hunted for the sphere-containing cylinder that marked the grave of
Archimedes, so did I comb the grass with my fingers for my
monumental memorial-flower.  Nature had stored my keepsake tenderly
in her bosom; the glossy, faintly streaked blades were there; they
are there still, though they never flower, darkened as they are by
the shade of the elms and rooted in the matted turf.

Our hearts are held down to our homes by innumerable fibres, trivial
as that I have just recalled; but Gulliver was fixed to the soil,
you remember, by pinning his head a hair at a time.  Even a stone
with a whitish band crossing it, belonging to the pavement of the
back-yard, insisted on becoming one of the talismans of memory.
This intussusception of the ideas of inanimate objects, and their
faithful storing away among the sentiments, are curiously prefigured
in the material structure of the thinking centre itself.  In the
very core of the brain, in the part where Des Cartes placed the
soul, is a small mineral deposit, consisting, as I have seen it in
the microscope, of grape-like masses of crystalline matter.

But the plants that come up every year in the same place, like the
Star-of-Bethlehems, of all the lesser objects, give me the liveliest
home-feeling.  Close to our ancient gambrel-roofed house is the
dwelling of pleasant old Neighbor Walrus.  I remember the sweet
honeysuckle that I saw in flower against the wall of his house a few
months ago, as long as I remember the sky and stars.  That clump of
peonies, butting their purple heads through the soil every spring in
just the same circle, and by-and-by unpacking their hard balls of
buds in flowers big enough to make a double handful of leaves, has
come up in just that place, Neighbor Walrus tells me, for more years
than I have passed on this planet.  It is a rare privilege in our
nomadic state to find the home of one's childhood and its immediate
neighborhood thus unchanged.  Many born poets, I am afraid, flower
poorly in song, or not at all, because they have been too often
transplanted.

Then a good many of our race are very hard and unimaginative;--their
voices have nothing caressing; their movements are as of machinery
without elasticity or oil.  I wish it were fair to print a letter a
young girl, about the age of our Iris, wrote a short time since.  "I
am *** *** ***," she says, and tells her whole name outright.  Ah!--
said I, when I read that first frank declaration,--you are one of
the right sort!--She was.  A winged creature among close-clipped
barn door fowl.  How tired the poor girl was of the dull life about
her,--the old woman's "skeleton hand" at the window opposite,
drawing her curtains,--"Ma'am shooing away the hens,"--the vacuous
country eyes staring at her as only country eyes can stare,--a
routine of mechanical duties, and the soul's half-articulated cry
for sympathy, without an answer! Yes,--pray for her, and for all
such!  Faith often cures their longings; but it is so hard to give a
soul to heaven that has not first been trained in the fullest and
sweetest human affections!  Too often they fling their hearts away
on unworthy objects.  Too often they pine in a secret discontent,
which spreads its leaden cloud over the morning of their youth.  The
immeasurable distance between one of these delicate natures and the
average youths among whom is like to be her only choice makes one's
heart ache.  How many women are born too finely organized in sense
and soul for the highway they must walk with feet unshod!  Life is
adjusted to the wants of the stronger sex.  There are plenty of
torrents to be crossed in its journey; but their stepping-stones are
measured by the stride of man, and not of woman.

Women are more subject than men to atrophy of the heart.  So says
the great medical authority, Laennec.  Incurable cases of this kind
used to find their hospitals in convents.  We have the disease in
New England,--but not the hospitals.  I don't like to think of it.
I will not believe our young Iris is going to die out in this way.
Providence will find her some great happiness, or affliction, or
duty,--and which would be best for her, I cannot tell.  One thing is
sure: the interest she takes in her little neighbor is getting to be
more engrossing than ever.  Something is the matter with him, and
she knows it, and I think worries herself about it.

I wonder sometimes how so fragile and distorted a frame has kept the
fiery spirit that inhabits it so long its tenant.  He accounts for
it in his own way.

The air of the Old World is good for nothing, he said, one day.--
Used up, Sir,--breathed over and over again.  You must come to this
side, Sir, for an atmosphere fit to breathe nowadays.  Did not
worthy Mr. Higginson say that a breath of New England's air is
better than a sup of Old England's ale?  I ought to have died when I
was a boy, Sir; but I could n't die in this Boston air,--and I think
I shall have to go to New York one of these days, when it's time for
me to drop this bundle,--or to New Orleans, where they have the
yellow fever,--or to Philadelphia, where they have so many doctors.

This was some time ago; but of late he has seemed, as I have before
said, to be ailing.  An experienced eye, such as I think I may call
mine, can tell commonly whether a man is going to die, or not, long
before he or his friends are alarmed about him.  I don't like it.

Iris has told me that the Scottish gift of second-sight runs in her
family, and that she is afraid she has it.  Those who are so endowed
look upon a well man and see a shroud wrapt about him.  According to
the degree to which it covers him, his death will be near or more
remote.  It is an awful faculty; but science gives one too much like
it.  Luckily for our friends, most of us who have the scientific
second-sight school ourselves not to betray our knowledge by word or
look.

Day by day, as the Little Gentleman comes to the table, it seems to
me that the shadow of some approaching change falls darker and
darker over his countenance.  Nature is struggling with something,
and I am afraid she is under in the wrestling-match.  You do not
care much, perhaps, for my particular conjectures as to the nature
of his difficulty.  I should say, however, from the sudden flushes
to which he is subject, and certain other marks which, as an expert,
I know how to interpret, that his heart was in trouble; but then he
presses his hand to the right side, as if there were the centre of
his uneasiness.

When I say difficulty about the heart, I do not mean any of those
sentimental maladies of that organ which figure more largely in
romances than on the returns which furnish our Bills of Mortality.
I mean some actual change in the organ itself, which may carry him
off by slow and painful degrees, or strike him down with one huge
pang and only time for a single shriek,--as when the shot broke
through the brave Captain Nolan's breast, at the head of the Light
Brigade at Balaklava, and with a loud cry he dropped dead from his
saddle.

I thought it only fair to say something of what I apprehended to
some who were entitled to be warned.  The landlady's face fell when
I mentioned my fears.

Poor man!--she said.--And will leave the best room empty!  Has n't
he got any sisters or nieces or anybody to see to his things, if he
should be took away?  Such a sight of cases, full of everything!
Never thought of his failin' so suddin.  A complication of diseases,
she expected.  Liver-complaint one of 'em?

After this first involuntary expression of the too natural selfish
feelings, (which we must not judge very harshly, unless we happen to
be poor widows ourselves, with children to keep filled, covered, and
taught,--rents high,--beef eighteen to twenty cents per pound,)--
after this first squeak of selfishness, followed by a brief movement
of curiosity, so invariable in mature females, as to the nature of
the complaint which threatens the life of a friend or any person who
may happen to be mentioned as ill,--the worthy soul's better
feelings struggled up to the surface, and she grieved for the doomed
invalid, until a tear or two came forth and found their way down a
channel worn for them since the early days of her widowhood.

Oh, this dreadful, dreadful business of being the prophet of evil!
Of all the trials which those who take charge of others' health and
lives have to undergo, this is the most painful.  It is all so plain
to the practised eye!--and there is the poor wife, the doting
mother, who has never suspected anything, or at least has clung
always to the hope which you are just going to wrench away from her!
--I must tell Iris that I think her poor friend is in a precarious
state.  She seems nearer to him than anybody.

I did tell her.  Whatever emotion it produced, she kept a still
face, except, perhaps, a little trembling of the lip.--Could I be
certain that there was any mortal complaint?--Why, no, I could not
be certain; but it looked alarming to me.--He shall have some of my
life,--she said.

I suppose this to have been a fancy of hers, or a kind of magnetic
power she could give out;--at any rate, I cannot help thinking she
wills her strength away from herself, for she has lost vigor and
color from that day.  I have sometimes thought he gained the force
she lost; but this may have been a whim, very probably.

One day she came suddenly to me, looking deadly pale.  Her lips
moved, as if she were speaking; but I could not at first hear a
word.  Her hair looked strangely, as if lifting itself, and her eyes
were full of wild light.  She sunk upon a chair, and I thought was
falling into one of her trances.  Something had frozen her blood
with fear; I thought, from what she said, half audibly, that she
believed she had seen a shrouded figure.

That night, at about eleven o'clock, I was sent for to see the
Little Gentleman, who was taken suddenly ill.  Bridget, the servant,
went before me with a light.  The doors were both unfastened, and I
found myself ushered, without hindrance, into the dim light of the
mysterious apartment I had so longed to enter.

I found these stanzas in the young girl's book among many others.  I
give them as characterizing the tone of her sadder moments.


          UNDER THE VIOLETS.

Her hands are cold; her face is white;
No more her pulses come and go;
Her eyes are shut to life and light;
Fold the white vesture, snow on snow,
And lay her where the violets blow.

But not beneath a graven stone,
To plead for tears with alien eyes;
A slender cross of wood alone
Shall say, that here a maiden lies
In peace beneath the peaceful skies.

And gray old trees of hugest limb
Shall wheel their circling shadows round
To make the scorching sunlight dim
That drinks the greenness from the ground,
And drop their dead leaves on her mound.

When o'er their boughs the squirrels run,
And through their leaves the robins call,
And, ripening in the autumn sun,
The acorns and the chestnuts fall,
Doubt not that she will heed them all.

For her the morning choir shall sing
Its matins from the branches high,
And every minstrel voice of spring,
That trills beneath the April sky,
Shall greet her with its earliest cry.

When, turning round their dial-track,
Eastward the lengthening shadows pass,
Her little mourners, clad in black,
The crickets, sliding through the grass,
Shall pipe for her an evening mass.

At last the rootlets of the trees
Shall find the prison where she lies,
And bear the buried dust they seize
In leaves and blossoms to the skies.
So may the soul that warmed it rise!

If any, born of kindlier blood,
Should ask, What maiden lies below?
Say only this: A tender bud,
That tried to blossom in the snow,
Lies withered where the violets blow.




XI

You will know, perhaps, in the course of half an hour's reading,
what has been haunting my hours of sleep and waking for months.  I
cannot tell, of course, whether you are a nervous person or not.
If, however, you are such a person,--if it is late at night,--if all
the rest of the household have gone off to bed,--if the wind is
shaking your windows as if a human hand were rattling the sashes,--
if your candle or lamp is low and will soon burn out,--let me advise
you to take up some good quiet sleepy volume, or attack the
"Critical Notices" of the last Quarterly and leave this to be read
by daylight, with cheerful voices round, and people near by who
would hear you, if you slid from your chair and came down in a lump
on the floor.

I do not say that your heart will beat as mine did, I am willing to
confess, when I entered the dim chamber.  Did I not tell you that I
was sensitive and imaginative, and that I had lain awake with
thinking what were the strange movements and sounds which I heard
late at night in my little neighbor's apartment?  It had come to
that pass that I was truly unable to separate what I had really
heard from what I had dreamed in those nightmares to which I have
been subject, as before mentioned.  So, when I walked into the room,
and Bridget, turning back, closed the door and left me alone with
its tenant, I do believe you could have grated a nutmeg on my skin,
such a "goose-flesh" shiver ran over it.  It was not fear, but what
I call nervousness,--unreasoning, but irresistible; as when, for
instance, one looking at the sun going down says, "I will count
fifty before it disappears"; and as he goes on and it becomes
doubtful whether he will reach the number, he gets strangely
flurried, and his imagination pictures life and death and heaven and
hell as the issues depending on the completion or non-completion of
the fifty he is counting.  Extreme curiosity will excite some people
as much as fear, or what resembles fear, acts on some other less
impressible natures.

I may find myself in the midst of strange facts in this little
conjurer's room.  Or, again, there may be nothing in this poor
invalid's chamber but some old furniture, such as they say came over
in the Mayflower.  All this is just what I mean to, find out while
I am looking at the Little Gentleman, who has suddenly become my
patient.  The simplest things turn out to be unfathomable mysteries;
the most mysterious appearances prove to be the most commonplace
objects in disguise.

I wonder whether the boys who live in Roxbury and Dorchester are
ever moved to tears or filled with silent awe as they look upon the
rocks and fragments of "puddingstone" abounding in those localities.
I have my suspicions that those boys "heave a stone" or "fire a
brickbat," composed of the conglomerate just mentioned, without any
more tearful or philosophical contemplations than boys of less
favored regions expend on the same performance.  Yet a lump of
puddingstone is a thing to look at, to think about, to study over,
to dream upon, to go crazy with, to beat one's brains out against.
Look at that pebble in it.  From what cliff was it broken?  On what
beach rolled by the waves of what ocean?  How and when imbedded in
soft ooze, which itself became stone, and by-and-by was lifted into
bald summits and steep cliffs, such as you may see on Meetinghouse-
Hill any day--yes, and mark the scratches on their faces left when
the boulder-carrying glaciers planed the surface of the continent
with such rough tools that the storms have not worn the marks out of
it with all the polishing of ever so many thousand years?

Or as you pass a roadside ditch or pool in springtime, take from it
any bit of stick or straw which has lain undisturbed for a time.
Some little worm-shaped masses of clear jelly containing specks are
fastened to the stick: eggs of a small snail-like shell-fish.  One
of these specks magnified proves to be a crystalline sphere with an
opaque mass in its centre.  And while you are looking, the opaque
mass begins to stir, and by-and-by slowly to turn upon its axis like
a forming planet,--life beginning in the microcosm, as in the great
worlds of the firmament, with the revolution that turns the surface
in ceaseless round to the source of life and light.

A pebble and the spawn of a mollusk!  Before you have solved their
mysteries, this earth where you first saw them may be a vitrified
slag, or a vapor diffused through the planetary spaces.  Mysteries
are common enough, at any rate, whatever the boys in Roxbury and
Dorchester think of "brickbats" and the spawn of creatures that
live in roadside puddles.

But then a great many seeming mysteries are relatively perfectly
plain, when we can get at them so as to turn them over.  How many
ghosts that "thick men's blood with cold" prove to be shirts hung
out to dry!  How many mermaids have been made out of seals!  How
many times have horse-mackerels been taken for the sea-serpent!

--Let me take the whole matter coolly, while I see what is the
matter with the patient.  That is what I say to myself, as I draw a
chair to the bedside.  The bed is an old-fashioned, dark mahogany
four-poster.  It was never that which made the noise of something
moving.  It is too heavy to be pushed about the room.--The Little
Gentleman was sitting, bolstered up by pillows, with his hands
clasped and their united palms resting on the back of the head, one
of the three or four positions specially affected by persons whose
breathing is difficult from disease of the heart or other causes.

Sit down, Sir,--he said,--sit down!  I have come to the hill
Difficulty, Sir, and am fighting my way up.--His speech was
laborious and interrupted.

Don't talk,--I said,--except to answer my questions.--And I
proceeded to "prospect" for the marks of some local mischief, which
you know is at the bottom of all these attacks, though we do not
always find it.  I suppose I go to work pretty much like other
professional folks of my temperament.  Thus:

Wrist, if you please.--I was on his right side, but he presented
his left wrist, crossing it over the other.--I begin to count,
holding watch in left hand.  One, two, three, four,--What a handsome
hand! wonder if that splendid stone is a carbuncle.--One, two,
three, four, five, six, seven,--Can't see much, it is so dark,
except one white object.--One, two, three, four,--Hang it!  eighty
or ninety in the minute, I guess.--Tongue, if you please.--Tongue
is put out.  Forget to look at it, or, rather, to take any
particular notice of it;--but what is that white object, with the
long arm stretching up as if pointing to the sky, just as Vesalius
and Spigelius and those old fellows used to put their skeletons?  I
don't think anything of such objects, you know; but what should he
have it in his chamber for?  As I had found his pulse irregular and
intermittent, I took out a stethoscope, which is a pocket-spyglass
for looking into people's chests with your ears, and laid it over
the place where the heart beats.  I missed the usual beat of the
organ.--How is this?--I said,--where is your heart gone to?--He
took the stethoscope and shifted it across to the right side; there
was a displacement of the organ.--I am ill-packed,--he said;--there
was no room for my heart in its place as it is with other men.--God
help him!

It is hard to draw the line between scientific curiosity and the
desire for the patient's sake to learn all the details of his
condition.  I must look at this patient's chest, and thump it and
listen to it.  For this is a case of ectopia cordis, my boy,--
displacement of the heart; and it is n't every day you get a chance
to overhaul such an interesting malformation.  And so I managed to
do my duty and satisfy my curiosity at the same time.  The torso was
slight and deformed; the right arm attenuated,--the left full,
round, and of perfect symmetry.  It had run away with the life of
the other limbs,--a common trick enough of Nature's, as I told you
before.  If you see a man with legs withered from childhood, keep
out of the way of his arms, if you have a quarrel with him.  He has
the strength of four limbs in two; and if he strikes you, it is an
arm-blow plus a kick administered from the shoulder instead of the
haunch, where it should have started from.

Still examining him as a patient, I kept my eyes about me to search
all parts of the chamber and went on with the double process, as
before.--Heart hits as hard as a fist,--bellows-sound over mitral
valves (professional terms you need not attend to).--What the deuse
is that long case for?  Got his witch grandmother mummied in it?
And three big mahogany presses,--hey?--A diabolical suspicion came
over me which I had had once before,--that he might be one of our
modern alchemists,--you understand, make gold, you know, or what
looks like it, sometimes with the head of a king or queen or of
Liberty to embellish one side of the piece.--Don't I remember
hearing him shut a door and lock it once?  What do you think was
kept under that lock?  Let's have another look at his hand, to see
if there are any calluses.

One can tell a man's business, if it is a handicraft, very often by
just taking a look at his open hand.  Ah!  Four calluses at the end
of the fingers of the right hand.  None on those of the left.  Ah,
ha!  What do those mean?

All this seems longer in the telling, of course, than it was in
fact.  While I was making these observations of the objects around
me, I was also forming my opinion as to the kind of case with which
I had to deal.

There are three wicks, you know, to the lamp of a man's life: brain,
blood, and breath.  Press the brain a little, its light goes out,
followed by both the others.  Stop the heart a minute and out go all
three of the wicks.  Choke the air out of the lungs, and presently
the fluid ceases to supply the other centres of flame, and all is
soon stagnation, cold, and darkness.  The "tripod of life" a French
physiologist called these three organs.  It is all clear enough
which leg of the tripod is going to break down here.  I could tell
you exactly what the difficulty is;--which would be as intelligible
and amusing as a watchmaker's description of a diseased timekeeper
to a ploughman.  It is enough to say, that I found just what I
expected to, and that I think this attack is only the prelude of
more serious consequences,--which expression means you very well
know what.

And now the secrets of this life hanging on a thread must surely
come out.  If I have made a mystery where there was none, my
suspicions will be shamed, as they have often been before.  If there
is anything strange, my visits will clear it up.

I sat an hour or two by the side of the Little Gentleman's bed,
after giving him some henbane to quiet his brain, and some foxglove,
which an imaginative French professor has called the "Opium of the
Heart."  Under their influence he gradually fell into an uneasy,
half-waking slumber, the body fighting hard for every breath, and
the mind wandering off in strange fancies and old recollections,
which escaped from his lips in broken sentences.

--The last of 'em,--he said,--the last of 'em all,--thank God!  And
the grave he lies in will look just as well as if he had been
straight.  Dig it deep, old Martin, dig it deep,--and let it be as
long as other folks' graves.  And mind you get the sods flat, old
man,--flat as ever a straight-backed young fellow was laid under.
And then, with a good tall slab at the head, and a foot-stone six
foot away from it, it'll look just as if there was a man underneath.

A man!  Who said he was a man?  No more men of that pattern to bear
his name!--Used to be a good-looking set enough.--Where 's all the
manhood and womanhood gone to since his great-grandfather was the
strongest man that sailed out of the town of Boston, and poor Leah
there the handsomest woman in Essex, if she was a witch?

--Give me some light,--he said,--more light.  I want to see the
picture.

He had started either from a dream or a wandering reverie.  I was
not unwilling to have more light in the apartment, and presently had
lighted an astral lamp that stood on a table.--He pointed to a
portrait hanging against the wall.--Look at her,--he said,--look at
her!  Wasn't that a pretty neck to slip a hangman's noose over?

The portrait was of a young woman, something more than twenty years
old, perhaps.  There were few pictures of any merit painted in New
England before the time of Smibert, and I am at a loss to know what
artist could have taken this half-length, which was evidently from
life.  It was somewhat stiff and flat, but the grace of the figure
and the sweetness of the expression reminded me of the angels of the
early Florentine painters.  She must have been of some
consideration, for she was dressed in paduasoy and lace with hanging
sleeves, and the old carved frame showed how the picture had been
prized by its former owners.  A proud eye she had, with all her
sweetness.--I think it was that which hanged her, as his strong arm
hanged Minister George Burroughs;--but it may have been a little
mole on one cheek, which the artist had just hinted as a beauty
rather than a deformity.  You know, I suppose, that nursling imps
addict themselves, after the fashion of young opossums, to these
little excrescences.  "Witch-marks" were good evidence that a young
woman was one of the Devil's wet-nurses;--I should like to have seen
you make fun of them in those days!--Then she had a brooch in her
bodice, that might have been taken for some devilish amulet or
other; and she wore a ring upon one of her fingers, with a red stone
in it, that flamed as if the painter had dipped his pencil in fire;
--who knows but that it was given her by a midnight suitor fresh
from that fierce element, and licensed for a season to leave his
couch of flame to tempt the unsanctified hearts of earthly maidens
and brand their cheeks with the print of his scorching kisses?

She and I,--he said, as he looked steadfastly at the canvas,--she
and I are the last of 'em.--She will stay, and I shall go.  They
never painted me,--except when the boys used to make pictures of me
with chalk on the board-fences.  They said the doctors would want my
skeleton when I was dead.--You are my friend, if you are a doctor,
--a'n't you?

I just gave him my hand.  I had not the heart to speak.

I want to lie still,--he said,--after I am put to bed upon the hill
yonder.  Can't you have a great stone laid over me, as they did over
the first settlers in the old burying-ground at Dorchester, so as to
keep the wolves from digging them up?  I never slept easy over the
sod;--I should like to lie quiet under it.  And besides,--he said,
in a kind of scared whisper,--I don't want to have my bones stared
at, as my body has been.  I don't doubt I was a remarkable case;
but, for God's sake, oh, for God's sake, don't let 'em make a show
of the cage I have been shut up in and looked through the bars of
for so many years.

I have heard it said that the art of healing makes men hard-hearted
and indifferent to human suffering.  I am willing to own that there
is often a professional hardness in surgeons, just as there is in
theologians,--only much less in degree than in these last.  It does
not commonly improve the sympathies of a man to be in the habit of
thrusting knives into his fellow-creatures and burning them with
red-hot irons, any more than it improves them to hold the blinding-
white cantery of Gehenna by its cool handle and score and crisp
young souls with it until they are scorched into the belief of--
Transubstantiation or the Immaculate Conception.  And, to say the
plain truth, I think there are a good many coarse people in both
callings.  A delicate nature will not commonly choose a pursuit
which implies the habitual infliction of suffering, so readily as
some gentler office.  Yet, while I am writing this paragraph, there
passes by my window, on his daily errand of duty, not seeing me,
though I catch a glimpse of his manly features through the oval
glass of his chaise, as he drives by, a surgeon of skill and
standing, so friendly, so modest, so tenderhearted in all his ways,
that, if he had not approved himself at once adroit and firm, one
would have said he was of too kindly a mould to be the minister of
pain, even if he were saving pain.

You may be sure that some men, even among those who have chosen the
task of pruning their fellow-creatures, grow more and more
thoughtful and truly compassionate in the midst of their cruel
experience.  They become less nervous, but more sympathetic.  They
have a truer sensibility for others' pain, the more they study pain
and disease in the light of science.  I have said this without
claiming any special growth in humanity for myself, though I do hope
I grow tenderer in my feelings as I grow older.  At any rate, this
was not a time in which professional habits could keep down certain
instincts of older date than these.

This poor little man's appeal to my humanity against the supposed
rapacity of Science, which he feared would have her "specimen," if
his ghost should walk restlessly a thousand years, waiting for his
bones to be laid in the dust, touched my heart.  But I felt bound to
speak cheerily.

--We won't die yet awhile, if we can help it,--I said,--and I trust
we can help it.  But don't be afraid; if I live longest, I will see
that your resting place is kept sacred till the dandelions and
buttercups blow over you.

He seemed to have got his wits together by this time, and to have a
vague consciousness that he might have been saying more than he
meant for anybody's ears.--I have been talking a little wild, Sir,
eh? he said.--There is a great buzzing in my head with those drops
of yours, and I doubt if my tongue has not been a little looser than
I would have it, Sir.  But I don't much want to live, Sir; that's
the truth of the matter, and it does rather please me to think that
fifty years from now nobody will know that the place where I lie
does n't hold as stout and straight a man as the best of 'em that
stretch out as if they were proud of the room they take.  You may
get me well, if you can, Sir, if you think it worth while to try;
but I tell you there has been no time for this many a year when the
smell of fresh earth was not sweeter to me than all the flowers that
grow out of it.  There's no anodyne like your good clean gravel,
Sir.  But if you can keep me about awhile, and it amuses you to try,
you may show your skill upon me, if you like.  There is a pleasure
or two that I love the daylight for, and I think the night is not
far off, at best.--I believe I shall sleep now; you may leave me,
and come, if you like, in the morning.

Before I passed out, I took one more glance round the apartment.
The beautiful face of the portrait looked at me, as portraits often
do, with a frightful kind of intelligence in its eyes.  The drapery
fluttered on the still outstretched arm of the tall object near the
window;--a crack of this was open, no doubt, and some breath of wind
stirred the hanging folds.  In my excited state, I seemed to see
something ominous in that arm pointing to the heavens.  I thought of
the figures in the Dance of Death at Basle, and that other on the
panels of the covered Bridge at Lucerne, and it seemed to me that
the grim mask who mingles with every crowd and glides over every
threshold was pointing the sick man to his far home, and would soon
stretch out his bony hand and lead him or drag him on the unmeasured
journey towards it.

The fancy had possession of me, and I shivered again as when I first
entered the chamber.  The picture and the shrouded shape; I saw only
these two objects.  They were enough.  The house was deadly still,
and the night-wind, blowing through an open window, struck me as
from a field of ice, at the moment I passed into the creaking
corridor.  As I turned into the common passage, a white figure,
holding a lamp, stood full before me.  I thought at first it was one
of those images made to stand in niches and hold a light in their
hands.  But the illusion was momentary, and my eyes speedily
recovered from the shock of the bright flame and snowy drapery to
see that the figure was a breathing one.  It was Iris, in one of her
statue-trances.  She had come down, whether sleeping or waking, I
knew not at first, led by an instinct that told her she was wanted,-
-or, possibly, having overheard and interpreted the sound of our
movements,--or, it may be, having learned from the servant that
there was trouble which might ask for a woman's hand.  I sometimes
think women have a sixth sense, which tells them that others, whom
they cannot see or hear, are in suffering.  How surely we find them
at the bedside of the dying!  How strongly does Nature plead for
them, that we should draw our first breath in their arms, as we sigh
away our last upon their faithful breasts!

With white, bare feet, her hair loosely knotted, clad as the
starlight knew her, and the morning when she rose from slumber, save
that she had twisted a scarf round her long dress, she stood still
as a stone before me, holding in one hand a lighted coil of
waxtaper, and in the other a silver goblet.  I held my own lamp
close to her, as if she had been a figure of marble, and she did not
stir.  There was no breach of propriety then, to scare the Poor
Relation with and breed scandal out of.  She had been "warned in a
dream," doubtless suggested by her waking knowledge and the sounds
which had reached her exalted sense.  There was nothing more natural
than that she should have risen and girdled her waist, and lighted
her taper, and found the silver goblet with "Ex dono pupillorum" on
it, from which she had taken her milk and possets through all her
childish years, and so gone blindly out to find her place at the
bedside,--a Sister of Charity without the cap and rosary; nay,
unknowing whither her feet were leading her, and with wide blank
eyes seeing nothing but the vision that beckoned her along.--Well,
I must wake her from her slumber or trance.--I called her name, but
she did not heed my voice.

The Devil put it into my head that I would kiss one handsome young
girl before I died, and now was my chance.  She never would know it,
and I should carry the remembrance of it with me into the grave, and
a rose perhaps grow out of my dust, as a brier did out of Lord
Lovers, in memory of that immortal moment!  Would it wake her from
her trance?  and would she see me in the flush of my stolen triumph,
and hate and despise me ever after?  Or should I carry off my trophy
undetected, and always from that time say to myself, when I looked
upon her in the glory of youth and the splendor of beauty, "My lips
have touched those roses and made their sweetness mine forever"?
You think my cheek was flushed, perhaps, and my eyes were glittering
with this midnight flash of opportunity.  On the contrary, I believe
I was pale, very pale, and I know that I trembled.  Ah, it is the
pale passions that are the fiercest,--it is the violence of the
chill that gives the measure of the fever!  The fighting-boy of our
school always turned white when he went out to a pitched battle with
the bully of some neighboring village; but we knew what his
bloodless cheeks meant,--the blood was all in his stout heart,--he
was a slight boy, and there was not enough to redden his face and
fill his heart both at once.

Perhaps it is making a good deal of a slight matter, to tell the
internal conflicts in the heart of a quiet person something more
than juvenile and something less than senile, as to whether he
should be guilty of an impropriety, and, if he were, whether he
would get caught in his indiscretion.  And yet the memory of the
kiss that Margaret of Scotland gave to Alain Chartier has lasted
four hundred years, and put it into the head of many an ill-favored
poet, whether Victoria, or Eugenie, would do as much by him, if she
happened to pass him when he was asleep.  And have we ever forgotten
that the fresh cheek of the young John Milton tingled under the lips
of some high-born Italian beauty, who, I believe, did not think to
leave her card by the side of the slumbering youth, but has
bequeathed the memory of her pretty deed to all coming time?  The
sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo
lasts a deal longer.

There is one disadvantage which the man of philosophical habits of
mind suffers, as compared with the man of action.  While he is
taking an enlarged and rational view of the matter before him, he
lets his chance slip through his fingers.  Iris woke up, of her own
accord, before I had made up my mind what I was going to do about
it.

When I remember how charmingly she looked, I don't blame myself at
all for being tempted; but if I had been fool enough to yield to the
impulse, I should certainly have been ashamed to tell of it.  She
did not know what to make of it, finding herself there alone, in
such guise, and me staring at her.  She looked down at her white
robe and bare feet, and colored,--then at the goblet she held in her
hand, then at the taper; and at last her thoughts seemed to clear
up.

I know it all,--she said.--He is going to die, and I must go and
sit by him.  Nobody will care for him as I shall, and I have nobody
else to care for.

I assured her that nothing was needed for him that night but rest,
and persuaded her that the excitement of her presence could only do
harm.  Let him sleep, and he would very probably awake better in the
morning.  There was nothing to be said, for I spoke with authority;
and the young girl glided away with noiseless step and sought her
own chamber.

The tremor passed away from my limbs, and the blood began to burn in
my cheeks.  The beautiful image which had so bewitched me faded
gradually from my imagination, and I returned to the still
perplexing mysteries of my little neighbor's chamber.

All was still there now.  No plaintive sounds, no monotonous
murmurs, no shutting of windows and doors at strange hours, as if
something or somebody were coming in or going out, or there was
something to be hidden in those dark mahogany presses.  Is there an
inner apartment that I have not seen?  The way in which the house is
built might admit of it.  As I thought it over, I at once imagined a
Bluebeard's chamber.  Suppose, for instance, that the narrow
bookshelves to the right are really only a masked door, such as we
remember leading to the private study of one of our most
distinguished townsmen, who loved to steal away from his stately
library to that little silent cell.  If this were lighted from
above, a person or persons might pass their days there without
attracting attention from the household, and wander where they
pleased at night,--to Copp's-Hill burial-ground, if they liked,--I
said to myself, laughing, and pulling the bed-clothes over my head.
There is no logic in superstitious-fancies any more than in dreams.
A she-ghost wouldn't want an inner chamber to herself.  A live
woman, with a valuable soprano voice, wouldn't start off at night to
sprain her ankles over the old graves of the North-End cemetery.

It is all very easy for you, middle-aged reader, sitting over this
page in the broad daylight, to call me by all manner of asinine and
anserine unchristian names, because I had these fancies running
through my head.  I don't care much for your abuse.  The question is
not, what it is reasonable for a man to think about, but what he
actually does think about, in the dark, and when be is alone, and
his whole body seems but one great nerve of hearing, and he sees the
phosphorescent flashes of his own eyeballs as they turn suddenly in
the direction of the last strange noise,--what he actually does
think about, as he lies and recalls all the wild stories his head is
full of, his fancy hinting the most alarming conjectures to account
for the simplest facts about him, his common-sense laughing them to
scorn the next minute, but his mind still returning to them, under
one shape or another, until he gets very nervous and foolish, and
remembers how pleasant it used to be to have his mother come and
tuck him up and go and sit within call, so that she could hear him
at any minute, if he got very much scared and wanted her.  Old
babies that we are!

Daylight will clear up all that lamp-light has left doubtful.  I
longed for the morning to come, for I was more curious than ever.
So, between my fancies and anticipations, I had but a poor night of
it, and came down tired to the breakfast-table.  My visit was not to
be made until after this morning hour; there was nothing urgent, so
the servant was ordered to tell me.

It was the first breakfast at which the high chair at the side of
Iris had been unoccupied.--You might jest as well take away that
chair,--said our landlady,--he'll never want it again.  He acts like
a man that 's struck with death, 'n' I don't believe he 'll ever
come out of his chamber till he 's laid out and brought down a
corpse.--These good women do put things so plainly!  There were two
or three words in her short remark that always sober people, and
suggest silence or brief moral reflections.

--Life is dreadful uncerting,--said the Poor Relation,--and pulled
in her social tentacles to concentrate her thoughts on this fact of
human history.

--If there was anything a fellah could do,--said the young man John,
so called,--a fellah 'd like the chance o' helpin' a little cripple
like that.  He looks as if he couldn't turn over any handier than a
turtle that's laid on his back; and I guess there a'n't many people
that know how to lift better than I do.  Ask him if he don't want
any watchers.  I don't mind settin' up any more 'n a cat-owl.  I was
up all night twice last month.

[My private opinion is, that there was no small amount of punch
absorbed on those two occasions, which I think I heard of at the
time];--but the offer is a kind one, and it is n't fair to question
how he would like sitting up without the punch and the company and
the songs and smoking.  He means what he says, and it would be a
more considerable achievement for him to sit quietly all night by a
sick man than for a good many other people.  I tell you this odd
thing: there are a good many persons, who, through the habit of
making other folks uncomfortable, by finding fault with all their
cheerful enjoyments, at last get up a kind of hostility to comfort
in general, even in their own persons.  The correlative to loving
our neighbors as ourselves is hating ourselves as we hate our
neighbors.  Look at old misers; first they starve their dependants,
and then themselves.  So I think it more for a lively young fellow
to be ready to play nurse than for one of those useful but forlorn
martyrs who have taken a spite against themselves and love to
gratify it by fasting and watching.

--The time came at last for me to make my visit.  I found Iris
sitting by the Little Gentleman's pillow.  To my disappointment, the
room was darkened.  He did not like the light, and would have the
shutters kept nearly closed.  It was good enough for me; what
business had I to be indulging my curiosity, when I had nothing to
do but to exercise such skill as I possessed for the benefit of my
patient?  There was not much to be said or done in such a case; but
I spoke as encouragingly as I could, as I think we are always bound
to do.  He did not seem to pay any very anxious attention, but the
poor girl listened as if her own life and more than her own life
were depending on the words I uttered.  She followed me out of the
room, when I had got through my visit.

How long?--she said.

Uncertain.  Any time; to-day,--next week, next month,--I answered.
--One of those cases where the issue is not doubtful, but may be
sudden or slow.

The women of the house were kind, as women always are in trouble.
But Iris pretended that nobody could spare the time as well as she,
and kept her place, hour after hour, until the landlady insisted
that she'd be killin' herself, if she begun at that rate, 'n' haf to
give up, if she didn't want to be clean beat out in less 'n a week.

At the table we were graver than common.  The high chair was set
back against the wall, and a gap left between that of the young girl
and her nearest neighbor's on the right.  But the next morning, to
our great surprise, that good-looking young Marylander had very
quietly moved his own chair to the vacant place.  I thought he was
creeping down that way, but I was not prepared for a leap spanning
such a tremendous parenthesis of boarders as this change of position
included.  There was no denying that the youth and maiden were a
handsome pair, as they sat side by side.  But whatever the young
girl may have thought of her new neighbor she never seemed for a
moment to forget the poor little friend who had been taken from her
side.  There are women, and even girls, with whom it is of no use to
talk.  One might as well reason with a bee as to the form of his
cell, or with an oriole as to the construction of his swinging nest,
as try to stir these creatures from their own way of doing their own
work.  It was not a question with Iris, whether she was entitled by
any special relation or by the fitness of things to play the part of
a nurse.  She was a wilful creature that must have her way in this
matter.  And it so proved that it called for much patience and long
endurance to carry through the duties, say rather the kind offices,
the painful pleasures, which she had chosen as her share in the
household where accident had thrown her.  She had that genius of
ministration which is the special province of certain women, marked
even among their helpful sisters by a soft, low voice, a quiet
footfall, a light hand, a cheering smile, and a ready self-surrender
to the objects of their care, which such trifles as their own food,
sleep, or habits of any kind never presume to interfere with.
Day after day, and too often through the long watches of the night,
she kept her place by the pillow.

That girl will kill herself over me, Sir,--said the poor Little
Gentleman to me, one day,--she will kill herself, Sir, if you don't
call in all the resources of your art to get me off as soon as may
be.  I shall wear her out, Sir, with sitting in this close chamber
and watching when she ought to be sleeping, if you leave me to the
care of Nature without dosing me.

This was rather strange pleasantry, under the circumstances.  But
there are certain persons whose existence is so out of parallel with
the larger laws in the midst of which it is moving, that life
becomes to them as death and death as life.--How am I getting
along?--he said, another morning.  He lifted his shrivelled hand,
with the death's-head ring on it, and looked at it with a sad sort
of complacency.  By this one movement, which I have seen repeatedly
of late, I know that his thoughts have gone before to another
condition, and that he is, as it were, looking back on the
infirmities of the body as accidents of the past.  For, when he was
well, one might see him often looking at the handsome hand with the
flaming jewel on one of its fingers.  The single well-shaped limb
was the source of that pleasure which in some form or other Nature
almost always grants to her least richly endowed children.  Handsome
hair, eyes, complexion, feature, form, hand, foot, pleasant voice,
strength, grace, agility, intelligence,--how few there are that have
not just enough of one at least of these gifts to show them that the
good Mother, busy with her millions of children, has not quite
forgotten them!  But now he was thinking of that other state, where,
free from all mortal impediments, the memory of his sorrowful burden
should be only as that of the case he has shed to the insect whose
"deep-damasked wings" beat off the golden dust of the lily-anthers,
as he flutters in the ecstasy of his new life over their full-blown
summer glories.

No human being can rest for any time in a state of equilibrium,
where the desire to live and that to depart just balance each other.
If one has a house, which he has lived and always means to live in,
he pleases himself with the thought of all the conveniences it
offers him, and thinks little of its wants and imperfections.  But
once having made up his mind to move to a better, every incommodity
starts out upon him, until the very ground-plan of it seems to have
changed in his mind, and his thoughts and affections, each one of
them packing up its little bundle of circumstances, have quitted
their several chambers and nooks and migrated to the new home, long
before its apartments are ready to receive their coming tenant.  It
is so with the body.  Most persons have died before they expire,--
died to all earthly longings, so that the last breath is only, as it
were, the locking of the door of the already deserted mansion.  The
fact of the tranquillity with which the great majority of dying
persons await this locking of those gates of life through which its
airy angels have been going and coming, from the moment of the first
cry, is familiar to those who have been often called upon to witness
the last period of life.  Almost always there is a preparation made
by Nature for unearthing a soul, just as on the smaller scale there
is for the removal of a milktooth.  The roots which hold human life
to earth are absorbed before it is lifted from its place.  Some of
the dying are weary and want rest, the idea of which is almost
inseparable in the universal mind from death.  Some are in pain, and
want to be rid of it, even though the anodyne be dropped, as in the
legend, from the sword of the Death-Angel.  Some are stupid,
mercifully narcotized that they may go to sleep without long tossing
about.  And some are strong in faith and hope, so that, as they draw
near the next world, they would fair hurry toward it, as the caravan
moves faster over the sands when the foremost travellers send word
along the file that water is in sight.  Though each little party
that follows in a foot-track of its own will have it that the water
to which others think they are hastening is a mirage, not the less
has it been true in all ages and for human beings of every creed
which recognized a future, that those who have fallen worn out by
their march through the Desert have dreamed at least of a River of
Life, and thought they heard its murmurs as they lay dying.

The change from the clinging to the present to the welcoming of the
future comes very soon, for the most part, after all hope of life is
extinguished, provided this be left in good degree to Nature, and
not insolently and cruelly forced upon those who are attacked by
illness, on the strength of that odious foreknowledge often imparted
by science, before the white fruit whose core is ashes, and which we
call death, has set beneath the pallid and drooping flower of
sickness.  There is a singular sagacity very often shown in a
patient's estimate of his own vital force.  His physician knows the
state of his material frame well enough, perhaps,--that this or that
organ is more or less impaired or disintegrated; but the patient has
a sense that he can hold out so much longer,--sometimes that he must
and will live for a while, though by the logic of disease he ought
to die without any delay.

The Little Gentleman continued to fail, until it became plain that
his remaining days were few.  I told the household what to expect.
There was a good deal of kind feeling expressed among the boarders,
in various modes, according to their characters and style of
sympathy.  The landlady was urgent that he should try a certain
nostrum which had saved somebody's life in jest sech a case.  The
Poor Relation wanted me to carry, as from her, a copy of "Allein's
Alarm," etc.  I objected to the title, reminding her that it
offended people of old, so that more than twice as many of the book
were sold when they changed the name to "A Sure Guide to Heaven."
The good old gentleman whom I have mentioned before has come to the
time of life when many old men cry easily, and forget their tears as
children do.--He was a worthy gentleman,--he said,--a very worthy
gentleman, but unfortunate,--very unfortunate.  Sadly deformed about
the spine and the feet.  Had an impression that the late Lord Byron
had some malformation of this kind.  Had heerd there was something
the matter with the ankle-j'ints of that nobleman, but he was a man
of talents.  This gentleman seemed to be a man of talents.  Could
not always agree with his statements,--thought he was a little over-
partial to this city, and had some free opinions; but was sorry to
lose him,--and if--there was anything--he--could--.  In the midst of
these kind expressions, the gentleman with the diamond, the Koh-i-
noor, as we called him, asked, in a very unpleasant sort of way, how
the old boy was likely to cut up,--meaning what money our friend was
going to leave behind.

The young fellow John spoke up, to the effect that this was a
diabolish snobby question, when a man was dying and not dead.--To
this the Koh-i-noor replied, by asking if the other meant to insult
him.  Whereto the young man John rejoined that he had no particul'r
intentions one way or t'other. -The Kohi-noor then suggested the
young man's stepping out into the yard, that he, the speaker, might
"slap his chops."--Let 'em alone, said young Maryland,--it 'll soon
be over, and they won't hurt each other much.--So they went out.

The Koh-i-noor entertained the very common idea, that, when one
quarrels with another, the simple thing to do is to knock the man
down, and there is the end of it.  Now those who have watched such
encounters are aware of two things: first, that it is not so easy to
knock a man down as it is to talk about it; secondly, that, if you
do happen to knock a man down, there is a very good chance that he
will be angry, and get up and give you a thrashing.

So the Koh-i-noor thought he would begin, as soon as they got into
the yard, by knocking his man down, and with this intention swung
his arm round after the fashion of rustics and those unskilled in
the noble art, expecting the young fellow John to drop when his
fist, having completed a quarter of a circle, should come in contact
with the side of that young man's head.  Unfortunately for this
theory, it happens that a blow struck out straight is as much
shorter, and therefore as much quicker than the rustic's swinging
blow, as the radius is shorter than the quarter of a circle.  The
mathematical and mechanical corollary was, that the Koh-i-noor felt
something hard bring up suddenly against his right eye, which
something he could have sworn was a paving-stone, judging by his
sensations; and as this threw his person somewhat backwards, and the
young man John jerked his own head back a little, the swinging blow
had nothing to stop it; and as the Jewel staggered between the hit
he got and the blow he missed, he tripped and "went to grass," so
far as the back-yard of our boardinghouse was provided with that
vegetable.  It was a signal illustration of that fatal mistake, so
frequent in young and ardent natures with inconspicuous calves and
negative pectorals, that they can settle most little quarrels on the
spot by "knocking the man down."

We are in the habit of handling our faces so carefully, that a heavy
blow, taking effect on that portion of the surface, produces a most
unpleasant surprise, which is accompanied with odd sensations, as of
seeing sparks, and a kind of electrical or ozone-like odor, half-
sulphurous in character, and which has given rise to a very vulgar
and profane threat sometimes heard from the lips of bullies.  A
person not used to pugilistic gestures does not instantly recover
from this surprise.  The Koh-i-noor exasperated by his failure, and
still a little confused by the smart hit he had received, but
furious, and confident of victory over a young fellow a good deal
lighter than himself, made a desperate rush to bear down all before
him and finish the contest at once.  That is the way all angry
greenhorns and incompetent persons attempt to settle matters.  It
does n't do, if the other fellow is only cool, moderately quick, and
has a very little science.  It didn't do this time; for, as the
assailant rushed in with his arms flying everywhere, like the vans
of a windmill, be ran a prominent feature of his face against a fist
which was travelling in the other direction, and immediately after
struck the knuckles of the young man's other fist a severe blow with
the part of his person known as the epigastrium to one branch of
science and the bread-basket to another.  This second round closed
the battle.  The Koh-i-noor had got enough, which in such cases is
more than as good as a feast.  The young fellow asked him if he was
satisfied, and held out his hand.  But the other sulked, and
muttered something about revenge.--Jest as ye like,--said the young
man John.--Clap a slice o' raw beefsteak on to that mouse o' yours
'n' 't'll take down the swellin'.  (Mouse is a technical term for a
bluish, oblong, rounded elevation occasioned by running one's
forehead or eyebrow against another's knuckles.) The young fellow
was particularly pleased that he had had an opportunity of trying
his proficiency in the art of self-defence without the gloves.  The
Koh-i-noor did not favor us with his company for a day or two, being
confined to his chamber, it was said, by a slight feverish, attack.
He was chop-fallen always after this, and got negligent in his
person.  The impression must have been a deep one; for it was
observed, that, when he came down again, his moustache and whiskers
had turned visibly white about the roots.  In short, it disgraced
him, and rendered still more conspicuous a tendency to drinking, of
which he had been for some time suspected.  This, and the disgust
which a young lady naturally feels at hearing that her lover has
been "licked by a fellah not half his size," induced the landlady's
daughter to take that decided step which produced a change in the
programme of her career I may hereafter allude to.

I never thought he would come to good, when I heard him attempting
to sneer at an unoffending city so respectable as Boston.  After a
man begins to attack the State-House, when he gets bitter about the
Frog-Pond, you may be sure there is not much left of him.  Poor
Edgar Poe died in the hospital soon after he got into this way of
talking; and so sure as you find an unfortunate fellow reduced to
this pass, you had better begin praying for him, and stop lending
him money, for he is on his last legs.  Remember poor Edgar!  He is
dead and gone; but the State-House has its cupola fresh-gilded, and
the Frog-Pond has got a fountain that squirts up a hundred feet into
the air and glorifies that humble sheet with a fine display of
provincial rainbows.

--I cannot fulfil my promise in this number.  I expected to gratify
your curiosity, if you have become at all interested in these
puzzles, doubts, fancies, whims, or whatever you choose to call
them, of mine.  Next month you shall hear all about it.

--It was evening, and I was going to the sick-chamber.  As I paused
at the door before entering, I heard a sweet voice singing.  It was
not the wild melody I had sometimes heard at midnight:--no, this was
the voice of Iris, and I could distinguish every word.  I had seen
the verses in her book; the melody was new to me.  Let me finish my
page with them.


          HYMN OF TRUST.

O Love Divine, that stooped to share
Our sharpest pang, our bitterest tear,
On Thee we cast each earthborn care,
We smile at pain while Thou art near!

Though long the weary way we tread,
And sorrow crown each lingering year,
No path we shun, no darkness dread,
Our hearts still whispering, Thou art near!

When drooping pleasure turns to grief,
And trembling faith is changed to fear,
The murmuring wind, the quivering leaf
Shall softly tell us, Thou art near!

On Thee we fling our burdening woe,
O Love Divine, forever dear,
Content to suffer, while we know,
Living and dying, Thou art near!




XII

A young fellow, born of good stock, in one of the more thoroughly
civilized portions of these United States of America, bred in good
principles, inheriting a social position which makes him at his ease
everywhere, means sufficient to educate him thoroughly without
taking away the stimulus to vigorous exertion, and with a good
opening in some honorable path of labor, is the finest sight our
private satellite has had the opportunity of inspecting on the
planet to which she belongs.  In some respects it was better to be a
young Greek.  If we may trust the old marbles, my friend with his
arm stretched over my head, above there, (in plaster of Paris,) or
the discobolus, whom one may see at the principal sculpture gallery
of this metropolis,--those Greek young men were of supreme beauty.
Their close curls, their elegantly set heads, column-like necks,
straight noses, short, curled lips, firm chins, deep chests, light
flanks, large muscles, small joints, were finer than anything we
ever see.  It may well be questioned whether the human shape will
ever present itself again in a race of such perfect symmetry.  But
the life of the youthful Greek was local, not planetary, like that
of the young American.  He had a string of legends, in place of our
Gospels.  He had no printed books, no newspaper, no steam caravans,
no forks, no soap, none of the thousand cheap conveniences which
have become matters of necessity to our modern civilization.  Above
all things, if he aspired to know as well as to enjoy, he found
knowledge not diffused everywhere about him, so that a day's labor
would buy him more wisdom than a year could master, but held in
private hands, hoarded in precious manuscripts, to be sought for
only as gold is sought in narrow fissures, and in the beds of
brawling streams.  Never, since man came into this atmosphere of
oxygen and azote, was there anything like the condition of the young
American of the nineteenth century.  Having in possession or in
prospect the best part of half a world, with all its climates and
soils to choose from; equipped with wings of fire and smoke than fly
with him day and night, so that he counts his journey not in miles,
but in degrees, and sees the seasons change as the wild fowl sees
them in his annual flights; with huge leviathans always ready to
take him on their broad backs and push behind them with their
pectoral or caudal fins the waters that seam the continent or
separate the hemispheres; heir of all old civilizations, founder of
that new one which, if all the prophecies of the human heart are not
lies, is to be the noblest, as it is the last; isolated in space
from the races that are governed by dynasties whose divine right
grows out of human wrong, yet knit into the most absolute solidarity
with mankind of all times and places by the one great thought he
inherits as his national birthright; free to form and express his
opinions on almost every subject, and assured that he will soon
acquire the last franchise which men withhold from man,--that of
stating the laws of his spiritual being and the beliefs he accepts
without hindrance except from clearer views of truth,--he seems to
want nothing for a large, wholesome, noble, beneficent life.  In
fact, the chief danger is that he will think the whole planet is
made for him, and forget that there are some possibilities left in
the debris of the old-world civilization which deserve a certain
respectful consideration at his hands.

The combing and clipping of this shaggy wild continent are in some
measure done for him by those who have gone before.  Society has
subdivided itself enough to have a place for every form of talent.
Thus, if a man show the least sign of ability as a sculptor or a
painter, for instance, he finds the means of education and a demand
for his services.  Even a man who knows nothing but science will be
provided for, if he does not think it necessary to hang about his
birthplace all his days,--which is a most unAmerican weakness.  The
apron-strings of an American mother are made of India-rubber.  Her
boy belongs where he is wanted; and that young Marylander of ours
spoke for all our young men, when he said that his home was wherever
the stars and stripes blew over his head.

And that leads me to say a few words of this young gentleman, who
made that audacious movement lately which I chronicled in my last
record,--jumping over the seats of I don't know how many boarders to
put himself in the place which the Little Gentleman's absence had
left vacant at the side of Iris.  When a young man is found
habitually at the side of any one given young lady,--when he lingers
where she stays, and hastens when she leaves,--when his eyes follow
her as she moves and rest upon her when she is still,--when he
begins to grow a little timid, he who was so bold, and a little
pensive, he who was so gay, whenever accident finds them alone,--
when he thinks very often of the given young lady, and names her
very seldom,--

What do you say about it, my charming young expert in that sweet
science in which, perhaps, a long experience is not the first of
qualifications?

--But we don't know anything about this young man, except that he is
good-looking, and somewhat high-spirited, and strong-limbed, and has
a generous style of nature,--all very promising, but by no means
proving that he is a proper lover for Iris, whose heart we turned
inside out when we opened that sealed book of hers.

Ah, my dear young friend!  When your mamma then, if you will believe
it, a very slight young lady, with very pretty hair and figure--came
and told her mamma that your papa had--had--asked No, no, no! she
could n't say it; but her mother--oh the depth of maternal sagacity!
--guessed it all without another word!--When your mother, I say,
came and told her mother she was engaged, and your grandmother told
your grandfather, how much did they know of the intimate nature of
the young gentleman to whom she had pledged her existence?  I will
not be so hard as to ask how much your respected mamma knew at that
time of the intimate nature of your respected papa, though, if we
should compare a young girl's man-as-she-thinks-him with a forty-
summered matron's man-as-she-finds-him, I have my doubts as to
whether the second would be a facsimile of the first in most cases.

The idea that in this world each young person is to wait until he or
she finds that precise counterpart who alone of all creation was
meant for him or her, and then fall instantly in love with it, is
pretty enough, only it is not Nature's way.  It is not at all
essential that all pairs of human beings should be, as we sometimes
say of particular couples, "born for each other."  Sometimes a man
or a woman is made a great deal better and happier in the end for
having had to conquer the faults of the one beloved, and make the
fitness not found at first, by gradual assimilation.  There is a
class of good women who have no right to marry perfectly good men,
because they have the power of saving those who would go to ruin but
for the guiding providence of a good wife.  I have known many such
cases.  It is the most momentous question a woman is ever called
upon to decide, whether the faults of the man she loves are beyond
remedy and will drag her down, or whether she is competent to be his
earthly redeemer and lift him to her own level.

A person of genius should marry a person of character.  Genius does
not herd with genius.  The musk-deer and the civet-cat are never
found in company.  They don't care for strange scents,--they like
plain animals better than perfumed ones.  Nay, if you will have the
kindness to notice, Nature has not gifted my lady musk-deer with the
personal peculiarity by which her lord is so widely known.

Now when genius allies itself with character, the world is very apt
to think character has the best of the bargain.  A brilliant woman
marries a plain, manly fellow, with a simple intellectual
mechanism;--we have all seen such cases.  The world often stares a
good deal and wonders.  She should have taken that other, with a far
more complex mental machinery.  She might have had a watch with the
philosophical compensation-balance, with the metaphysical index
which can split a second into tenths, with the musical chime which
can turn every quarter of an hour into melody.  She has chosen a
plain one, that keeps good time, and that is all.

Let her alone!  She knows what she is about.  Genius has an
infinitely deeper reverence for character than character can have
for genius.  To be sure, genius gets the world's praise, because its
work is a tangible product, to be bought, or had for nothing.  It
bribes the common voice to praise it by presents of speeches, poems,
statues, pictures, or whatever it can please with.  Character
evolves its best products for home consumption; but, mind you, it
takes a deal more to feed a family for thirty years than to make a
holiday feast for our neighbors once or twice in our lives.  You
talk of the fire of genius.  Many a blessed woman, who dies unsung
and unremembered, has given out more of the real vital heat that
keeps the life in human souls, without a spark flitting through her
humble chimney to tell the world about it, than would set a dozen
theories smoking, or a hundred odes simmering, in the brains of so
many men of genius.  It is in latent caloric, if I may borrow a
philosophical expression, that many of the noblest hearts give out
the life that warms them.  Cornelia's lips grow white, and her pulse
hardly warms her thin fingers,--but she has melted all the ice out
of the hearts of those young Gracchi, and her lost heat is in the
blood of her youthful heroes.  We are always valuing the soul's
temperature by the thermometer of public deed or word.  Yet the
great sun himself, when he pours his noonday beams upon some vast
hyaline boulder, rent from the eternal ice-quarries, and floating
toward the tropics, never warms it a fraction above the thirty-two
degrees of Fahrenheit that marked the moment when the first drop
trickled down its side.

How we all like the spirting up of a fountain, seemingly against the
law that makes water everywhere slide, roll, leap, tumble headlong,
to get as low as the earth will let it!  That is genius.  But what
is this transient upward movement, which gives us the glitter and
the rainbow, to that unsleeping, all-present force of gravity, the
same yesterday, to-day, and forever, (if the universe be eternal,)
--the great outspread hand of God himself, forcing all things down
into their places, and keeping them there?  Such, in smaller
proportion, is the force of character to the fitful movements of
genius, as they are or have been linked to each other in many a
household, where one name was historic, and the other, let me say
the nobler, unknown, save by some faint reflected ray, borrowed from
its lustrous companion.

Oftentimes, as I have lain swinging on the water, in the swell of
the Chelsea ferry-boats, in that long, sharp-pointed, black cradle
in which I love to let the great mother rock me, I have seen a tall
ship glide by against the tide, as if drawn by some invisible
towline, with a hundred strong arms pulling it.  Her sails hung
unfilled, her streamers were drooping, she had neither side-wheel
nor stern-wheel; still she moved on, stately, in serene triumph, as
if with her own life.  But I knew that on the other side of the
ship, hidden beneath the great hulk that swam so majestically, there
was a little toiling steam-tug, with heart of fire and arms of iron,
that was hugging it close and dragging it bravely on; and I knew,
that, if the little steam-tug untwined her arms and left the tall
ship, it would wallow and roll about, and drift hither and thither,
and go off with the refluent tide, no man knows whither.  And so I
have known more than one genius, high-decked, full-freighted, wide-
sailed, gay-pennoned, that, but for the bare toiling arms, and
brave, warm, beating heart of the faithful little wife, that nestled
close in his shadow, and clung to him, so that no wind or wave could
part them, and dragged him on against all the tide of circumstance,
would soon have gone down the stream and been heard of no more.
--No, I am too much a lover of genius, I sometimes think, and too
often get impatient with dull people, so that, in their weak talk,
where nothing is taken for granted, I look forward to some future
possible state of development, when a gesture passing between a
beatified human soul and an archangel shall signify as much as the
complete history of a planet, from the time when it curdled to the
time when its sun was burned out.  And yet, when a strong brain is
weighed with a true heart, it seems to me like balancing a bubble
against a wedge of gold.

--It takes a very true man to be a fitting companion for a woman of
genius, but not a very great one.  I am not sure that she will not
embroider her ideal better on a plain ground than on one with a
brilliant pattern already worked in its texture.  But as the very
essence of genius is truthfulness, contact with realities, (which
are always ideas behind shows of form or language,) nothing is so
contemptible as falsehood and pretence in its eyes.  Now it is not
easy to find a perfectly true woman, and it is very hard to find a
perfectly true man.  And a woman of genius, who has the sagacity to
choose such a one as her companion, shows more of the divine gift in
so doing than in her finest talk or her most brilliant work of
letters or of art.

I have been a good while coming at a secret, for which I wished to
prepare you before telling it.  I think there is a kindly feeling
growing up between Iris and our young Marylander.  Not that I
suppose there is any distinct understanding between them, but that
the affinity which has drawn him from the remote corner where he sat
to the side of the young girl is quietly bringing their two natures
together.  Just now she is all given up to another; but when he no
longer calls upon her daily thoughts and cares, I warn you not to be
surprised, if this bud of friendship open like the evening primrose,
with a sound as of a sudden stolen kiss, and lo! the flower of full-
blown love lies unfolded before you.

And now the days had come for our little friend, whose whims and
weaknesses had interested us, perhaps, as much as his better traits,
to make ready for that long journey which is easier to the cripple
than to the strong man, and on which none enters so willingly as he
who has borne the life-long load of infirmity during his earthly
pilgrimage.  At this point, under most circumstances, I would close
the doors and draw the veil of privacy before the chamber where the
birth which we call death, out of life into the unknown world, is
working its mystery.  But this friend of ours stood alone in the
world, and, as the last act of his life was mainly in harmony with
the rest of its drama, I do not here feel the force of the objection
commonly lying against that death-bed literature which forms the
staple of a certain portion of the press.  Let me explain what I
mean, so that my readers may think for themselves a little, before
they accuse me of hasty expressions.

The Roman Catholic Church has certain formulas for its dying
children, to which almost all of them attach the greatest
importance.  There is hardly a criminal so abandoned that he is not
anxious to receive the "consolations of religion" in his last hours.
Even if he be senseless, but still living, I think that the form is
gone through with, just as baptism is administered to the
unconscious new-born child.  Now we do not quarrel with these forms.
We look with reverence and affection upon all symbols which give
peace and comfort to our fellow-creatures.  But the value of the
new-born child's passive consent to the ceremony is null, as
testimony to the truth of a doctrine.  The automatic closing of a
dying man's lips on the consecrated wafer proves nothing in favor of
the Real Presence, or any other dogma.  And, speaking generally, the
evidence of dying men in favor of any belief is to be received with
great caution.

They commonly tell the truth about their present feelings, no doubt.
A dying man's deposition about anything he knows is good evidence.
But it is of much less consequence what a man thinks and says when
he is changed by pain, weakness, apprehension, than what he thinks
when he is truly and wholly himself.  Most murderers die in a very
pious frame of mind, expecting to go to glory at once; yet no man
believes he shall meet a larger average of pirates and cut-throats
in the streets of the New Jerusalem than of honest folks that died
in their beds.

Unfortunately, there has been a very great tendency to make capital
of various kinds out of dying men's speeches.  The lies that have
been put into their mouths for this purpose are endless.  The prime
minister, whose last breath was spent in scolding his nurse, dies
with a magnificent apothegm on his lips, manufactured by a reporter.
Addison gets up a tableau and utters an admirable sentiment,--or
somebody makes the posthumous dying epigram for him.  The incoherent
babble of green fields is translated into the language of stately
sentiment.  One would think, all that dying men had to do was to say
the prettiest thing they could,--to make their rhetorical point,--
and then bow themselves politely out of the world.

Worse than this is the torturing of dying people to get their
evidence in favor of this or that favorite belief.  The camp-
followers of proselyting sects have come in at the close of every
life where they could get in, to strip the languishing soul of its
thoughts, and carry them off as spoils.  The Roman Catholic or other
priest who insists on the reception of his formula means kindly, we
trust, and very commonly succeeds in getting the acquiescence of the
subject of his spiritual surgery, but do not let us take the
testimony of people who are in the worst condition to form opinions
as evidence of the truth or falsehood of that which they accept.  A
lame man's opinion of dancing is not good for much.  A poor fellow
who can neither eat nor drink, who is sleepless and full of pains,
whose flesh has wasted from him, whose blood is like water, who is
gasping for breath, is not in a condition to judge fairly of human
life, which in all its main adjustments is intended for men in a
normal, healthy condition.  It is a remark I have heard from the
wise Patriarch of the Medical Profession among us, that the moral
condition of patients with disease above the great breathing-muscle,
the diaphragm, is much more hopeful than that of patients with
disease below it, in the digestive organs.  Many an honest ignorant
man has given us pathology when he thought he was giving us
psychology.  With this preliminary caution I shall proceed to the
story of the Little Gentleman's leaving us.

When the divinity-student found that our fellow-boarder was not
likely to remain long with us, he, being a young man of tender
conscience and kindly nature, was not a little exercised on his
behalf.  It was undeniable that on several occasions the Little
Gentleman had expressed himself with a good deal of freedom on a
class of subjects which, according to the divinity-student, he had
no right to form an opinion upon.  He therefore considered his
future welfare in jeopardy.

The Muggletonian sect have a very odd way of dealing with people.
If I, the Professor, will only give in to the Muggletonian doctrine,
there shall be no question through all that persuasion that I am
competent to judge of that doctrine; nay, I shall be quoted as
evidence of its truth, while I live, and cited, after I am dead, as
testimony in its behalf.  But if I utter any ever so slight Anti-
Muggletonian sentiment, then I become incompetent to form any
opinion on the matter.  This, you cannot fail to observe, is exactly
the way the pseudo-sciences go to work, as explained in my Lecture
on Phrenology.  Now I hold that he whose testimony would be accepted
in behalf of the Muggletonian doctrine has a right to be heard
against it.  Whoso offers me any article of belief for my signature
implies that I am competent to form an opinion upon it; and if my
positive testimony in its favor is of any value, then my negative
testimony against it is also of value.

I thought my young friend's attitude was a little too much like that
of the Muggletonians.  I also remarked a singular timidity on his
part lest somebody should "unsettle" somebody's faith,--as if faith
did not require exercise as much as any other living thing, and were
not all the better for a shaking up now and then.  I don't mean that
it would be fair to bother Bridget, the wild Irish girl, or Joice
Heth, the centenarian, or any other intellectual non-combatant; but
all persons who proclaim a belief which passes judgment on their
neighbors must be ready to have it "unsettled," that is, questioned,
at all times and by anybody,--just as those who set up bars across a
thoroughfare must expect to have them taken down by every one who
wants to pass, if he is strong enough.

Besides, to think of trying to water-proof the American mind against
the questions that Heaven rains down upon it shows a misapprehension
of our new conditions.  If to question everything be unlawful and
dangerous, we had better undeclare our independence at once; for
what the Declaration means is the right to question everything, even
the truth of its own fundamental proposition.

The old-world order of things is an arrangement of locks and canals,
where everything depends on keeping the gates shut, and so holding
the upper waters at their level; but the system under which the
young republican American is born trusts the whole unimpeded tide of
life to the great elemental influences, as the vast rivers of the
continent settle their own level in obedience to the laws that
govern the planet and the spheres that surround it.

The divinity-student was not quite up to the idea of the
commonwealth, as our young friend the Marylander, for instance,
understood it.  He could not get rid of that notion of private
property in truth, with the right to fence it in, and put up a sign-
board, thus:

               ALL TRESPASSERS ARE WARNED OFF THESE
                              GROUNDS!

He took the young Marylander to task for going to the Church of the
Galileans, where he had several times accompanied Iris of late.

I am a Churchman,--the young man said,--by education and habit.  I
love my old Church for many reasons, but most of all because I think
it has educated me out of its own forms into the spirit of its
highest teachings.  I think I belong to the "Broad Church," if any
of you can tell what that means.

I had the rashness to attempt to answer the question myself.--Some
say the Broad Church means the collective mass of good people of all
denominations.  Others say that such a definition is nonsense; that
a church is an organization, and the scattered good folks are no
organization at all.  They think that men will eventually come
together on the basis of one or two or more common articles of
belief, and form a great unity.  Do they see what this amounts to?
It means an equal division of intellect!  It is mental agrarianism!
a thing that never was and never will be until national and
individual idiosyncrasies have ceased to exist.  The man of thirty-
nine beliefs holds the man of one belief a pauper; he is not going
to give up thirty-eight of them for the sake of fraternizing with
the other in the temple which bears on its front, "Deo erexit
Voltaire."  A church is a garden, I have heard it said, and the
illustration was neatly handled.  Yes, and there is no such thing as
a broad garden.  It must be fenced in, and whatever is fenced in is
narrow.  You cannot have arctic and tropical plants growing together
in it, except by the forcing system, which is a mighty narrow piece
of business.  You can't make a village or a parish or a family think
alike, yet you suppose that you can make a world pinch its beliefs
or pad them to a single pattern!  Why, the very life of an
ecclesiastical organization is a life of induction, a state of
perpetually disturbed equilibrium kept up by another charged body in
the neighborhood.  If the two bodies touch and share their
respective charges, down goes the index of the electrometer!

Do you know that every man has a religious belief peculiar to
himself?  Smith is always a Smithite.  He takes in exactly Smith's-
worth of knowledge, Smith's-worth of truth, of beauty, of divinity.
And Brown has from time immemorial been trying to burn him, to
excommunicate him, to anonymous-article him, because he did not take
in Brown's-worth of knowledge, truth, beauty, divinity.  He cannot
do it, any more than a pint-pot can hold a quart, or a quart-pot be
filled by a pint.  Iron is essentially the same everywhere and
always; but the sulphate of iron is never the same as the carbonate
of iron.  Truth is invariable; but the Smithate of truth must always
differ from the Brownate of truth.

The wider the intellect, the larger and simpler the expressions in
which its knowledge is embodied.  The inferior race, the degraded
and enslaved people, the small-minded individual, live in the
details which to larger minds and more advanced tribes of men reduce
themselves to axioms and laws.  As races and individual minds must
always differ just as sulphates and carbonates do, I cannot see
ground for expecting the Broad Church to be founded on any fusion of
intellectual beliefs, which of course implies that those who hold
the larger number of doctrines as essential shall come down to those
who hold the smaller number.  These doctrines are to the negative
aristocracy what the quarterings of their coats are to the positive
orders of nobility.

The Broad Church, I think, will never be based on anything that
requires the use of language. Freemasonry gives an idea of such a
church, and a brother is known and cared for in a strange land where
no word of his can be understood.  The apostle of this church may be
a deaf mute carrying a cup of cold water to a thirsting
fellow-creature.  The cup of cold water does not require to be
translated for a foreigner to understand it.  I am afraid the only
Broad Church possible is one that has its creed in the heart, and
not in the head,--that we shall know its members by their fruits,
and not by their words.  If you say this communion of well-doers is
no church, I can only answer, that all organized bodies have their
limits of size, and that when we find a man a hundred feet high and
thirty feet broad across the shoulders, we will look out for an
organization that shall include all Christendom.

Some of us do practically recognize a Broad Church and a Narrow
Church, however.  The Narrow Church may be seen in the ship's boats
of humanity, in the long boat, in the jolly boat, in the captain's
gig, lying off the poor old vessel, thanking God that they are safe,
and reckoning how soon the hulk containing the mass of their
fellow-creatures will go down.  The Broad Church is on board,
working hard at the pumps, and very slow to believe that the ship
will be swallowed up with so many poor people in it, fastened down
under the hatches ever since it floated.

--All this, of course, was nothing but my poor notion about these
matters. I am simply an "outsider," you know; only it doesn't do
very well for a nest of Hingham boxes to talk too much about
outsiders and insiders!

After this talk of ours, I think these two young people went pretty
regularly to the Church of the Galileans.  Still they could not keep
away from the sweet harmonies and rhythmic litanies of Saint
Polycarp on the great Church festival-days; so that, between the
two, they were so much together, that the boarders began to make
remarks, and our landlady said to me, one day, that, though it was
noon of her business, them that had eyes couldn't help seein' that
there was somethin' goin', on between them two young people; she
thought the young man was a very likely young man, though jest what
his prospecs was was unbeknown to her; but she thought he must be
doing well, and rather guessed he would be able to take care of a
femily, if he didn't go to takin' a house; for a gentleman and his
wife could board a great deal cheaper than they could keep house;
--but then that girl was nothin' but a child, and wouldn't think of
bein' married this five year.  They was good boarders, both of 'em,
paid regular, and was as pooty a couple as she ever laid eyes on.

--To come back to what I began to speak of before, -the divinity-
student was exercised in his mind about the Little Gentleman, and,
in the kindness of his heart,--for he was a good young man,--and in
the strength of his convictions,--for he took it for granted that he
and his crowd were right, and other folks and their crowd were
wrong,--he determined to bring the Little Gentleman round to his
faith before he died, if he could.  So he sent word to the sick man,
that he should be pleased to visit him and have some conversation
with him; and received for answer that he would be welcome.

The divinity-student made him a visit, therefore and had a somewhat
remarkable interview with him, which I shall briefly relate, without
attempting to justify the positions taken by the Little Gentleman.
He found him weak, but calm.  Iris sat silent by his pillow.

After the usual preliminaries, the divinity-student said; in a kind
way, that he was sorry to find him in failing health, that he felt
concerned for his soul, and was anxious to assist him in making
preparations for the great change awaiting him.

I thank you, Sir,--said the Little Gentleman, permit me to ask you,
what makes you think I am not ready for it, Sir, and that you can do
anything to help me, Sir?

I address you only as a fellow-man,--said the divinity-student,--and
therefore a fellow-sinner.

I am not a man, Sir!--said the Little Gentleman.--I was born into
this world the wreck of a man, and I shall not be judged with a race
to which I do not belong.  Look at this!--he said, and held up his
withered arm.--See there!--and he pointed to his misshapen
extremities.--Lay your hand here!--and he laid his own on the
region of his misplaced heart.--I have known nothing of the life of
your race.  When I first came to my consciousness, I found myself an
object of pity, or a sight to show.  The first strange child I ever
remember hid its face and would not come near me.  I was a broken-
hearted as well as broken-bodied boy.  I grew into the emotions of
ripening youth, and all that I could have loved shrank from my
presence.  I became a man in years, and had nothing in common with
manhood but its longings.  My life is the dying pang of a worn-out
race, and I shall go down alone into the dust, out of this world of
men and women, without ever knowing the fellowship of the one or the
love of the other.  I will not die with a lie rattling in my throat.
If another state of being has anything worse in store for me, I have
had a long apprenticeship to give me strength that I may bear it.  I
don't believe it, Sir!  I have too much faith for that.  God has not
left me wholly without comfort, even here.  I love this old place
where I was born;--the heart of the world beats under the three
hills of Boston, Sir!  I love this great land, with so many tall men
in it, and so many good, noble women.--His eyes turned to the
silent figure by his pillow.--I have learned to accept meekly what
has been allotted to me, but I cannot honestly say that I think my
sin has been greater than my suffering.  I bear the ignorance and
the evil-doing of whole generations in my single person.  I never
drew a breath of air nor took a step that was not a punishment for
another's fault.  I may have had many wrong thoughts, but I cannot
have done many wrong deeds,--for my cage has been a narrow one, and
I have paced it alone.  I have looked through the bars and seen the
great world of men busy and happy, but I had no part in their
doings.  I have known what it was to dream of the great passions;
but since my mother kissed me before she died, no woman's lips have
pressed my cheek,--nor ever will.

--The young girl's eyes glittered with a sudden film, and almost
without a thought, but with a warm human instinct that rushed up
into her face with her heart's blood, she bent over and kissed him.
It was the sacrament that washed out the memory of long years of
bitterness, and I should hold it an unworthy thought to defend her.
The Little Gentleman repaid her with the only tear any of us ever
saw him shed.

The divinity-student rose from his place, and, turning away from the
sick man, walked to the other side of the room, where he bowed his
head and was still.  All the questions he had meant to ask had faded
from his memory.  The tests he had.  prepared by which to judge of
his fellow-creature's fitness for heaven seemed to have lost their
virtue.  He could trust the crippled child of sorrow to the Infinite
Parent.  The kiss of the fair-haired girl had been like a sign from
heaven, that angels watched over him whom he was presuming but a
moment before to summon before the tribunal of his private judgment.
Shall I pray with you?--he said, after a pause.  A little before he
would have said, Shall I pray for you?--The Christian religion, as
taught by its Founder, is full of sentiment.  So we must not blame
the divinity-student, if he was overcome by those yearnings of human
sympathy which predominate so much more in the sermons of the Master
than in the writings of his successors, and which have made the
parable of the Prodigal Son the consolation of mankind, as it has
been the stumbling-block of all exclusive doctrines.

Pray!--said the Little Gentleman.

The divinity-student prayed, in low, tender tones,

Iris and the Little Gentleman that God would look on his servant
lying helpless at the feet of his mercy; that He would remember his
long years of bondage in the flesh; that He would deal gently with
the bruised reed.  Thou hast visited the sins of the fathers upon
this their child.  Oh, turn away from him the penalties of his own
transgressions!  Thou hast laid upon him, from infancy, the cross
which thy stronger children are called upon to take up; and now that
he is fainting under it, be Thou his stay, and do Thou succor him
that is tempted!  Let his manifold infirmities come between him and
Thy judgment; in wrath remember mercy!  If his eyes are not opened
to all Thy truth, let Thy compassion lighten the darkness that rests
upon him, even as it came through the word of thy Son to blind
Bartimeus, who sat by the wayside, begging!

Many more petitions he uttered, but all in the same subdued tone of
tenderness.  In the presence of helpless suffering, and in the fast-
darkening shadow of the Destroyer, he forgot all but his Christian
humanity, and cared more about consoling his fellow-man than making
a proselyte of him.

This was the last prayer to which the Little Gentleman ever
listened.  Some change was rapidly coming over him during this last
hour of which I have been speaking.  The excitement of pleading his
cause before his self-elected spiritual adviser,--the emotion which
overcame him, when the young girl obeyed the sudden impulse of her
feelings and pressed her lips to his cheek,--the thoughts that
mastered him while the divinity-student poured out his soul for him
in prayer, might well hurry on the inevitable moment.  When the
divinity-student had uttered his last petition, commending him to
the Father through his Son's intercession, he turned to look upon
him before leaving his chamber.  His face was changed.--There is a
language of the human countenance which we all understand without an
interpreter, though the lineaments belong to the rudest savage that
ever stammered in an unknown barbaric dialect.  By the stillness of
the sharpened features, by the blankness of the tearless eyes, by
the fixedness of the smileless mouth, by the deadening tints, by the
contracted brow, by the dilating nostril, we know that the soul is
soon to leave its mortal tenement, and is already closing up its
windows and putting out its fires.--Such was the aspect of the face
upon which the divinity-student looked, after the brief silence
which followed his prayer.  The change had been rapid, though not
that abrupt one which is liable to happen at any moment in these
cases.--The sick man looked towards him.--Farewell,--he said,--I
thank you.  Leave me alone with her.

When the divinity-student had gone, and the Little Gentleman found
himself alone with Iris, he lifted his hand to his neck, and took
from it, suspended by a slender chain, a quaint, antique-looking
key,--the same key I had once seen him holding.  He gave this to
her, and pointed to a carved cabinet opposite his bed, one of those
that had so attracted my curious eyes and set me wondering as to
what it might contain.

Open it,--he said,--and light the lamp.--The young girl walked to
the cabinet and unlocked the door.  A deep recess appeared, lined
with black velvet, against which stood in white relief an ivory
crucifix.  A silver lamp hung over it.  She lighted the lamp and
came back to the bedside.  The dying man fixed his eyes upon the
figure of the dying Saviour.--Give me your hand, he said; and Iris
placed her right hand in his left.  So they remained, until
presently his eyes lost their meaning, though they still remained
vacantly fixed upon the white image.  Yet he held the young girl's
hand firmly, as if it were leading him through some deep-shadowed
valley and it was all he could cling to.  But presently an
involuntary muscular contraction stole over him, and his terrible
dying grasp held the poor girl as if she were wedged in an engine of
torture.  She pressed her lips together and sat still.  The
inexorable hand held her tighter and tighter, until she felt as if
her own slender fingers would be crushed in its gripe.  It was one
of the tortures of the Inquisition she was suffering, and she could
not stir from her place.  Then, in her great anguish, she, too, cast
her eyes upon that dying figure, and, looking upon its pierced hands
and feet and side and lacerated forehead, she felt that she also
must suffer uncomplaining.  In the moment of her sharpest pain she
did not forget the duties of her under office, but dried the dying
man's moist forehead with her handkerchief, even while the dews of
agony were glistening on her own.  How long this lasted she never
could tell.  Time and thirst are two things you and I talk about;
but the victims whom holy men and righteous judges used to stretch
on their engines knew better what they meant than you or I!--What
is that great bucket of water for?  said the Marchioness de
Brinvilliers, before she was placed on the rack.--For you to
drink,--said the torturer to the little woman.--She could not think
that it would take such a flood to quench the fire in her and so
keep her alive for her confession.  The torturer knew better than
she.

After a time not to be counted in minutes, as the clock measures,--
without any warning,--there came a swift change of his features; his
face turned white, as the waters whiten when a sudden breath passes
over their still surface; the muscles instantly relaxed, and Iris,
released at once from her care for the sufferer and from his
unconscious grasp, fell senseless, with a feeble cry,--the only
utterance of her long agony.

Perhaps you sometimes wander in through the iron gates of the Copp's
Hill burial-ground.  You love to stroll round among the graves that
crowd each other in the thickly peopled soil of that breezy summit.
You love to lean on the freestone slab which lies over the bones of
the Mathers,--to read the epitaph of stout William Clark, "Despiser
of Sorry Persons and little Actions,"--to stand by the stone grave
of sturdy Daniel Malcolm and look upon the splintered slab that
tells the old rebel's story,--to kneel by the triple stone that says
how the three Worthylakes, father, mother, and young daughter, died
on the same day and lie buried there; a mystery; the subject of a
moving ballad, by the late BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, as may be seen in his
autobiography, which will explain the secret of the triple
gravestone; though the old philosopher has made a mistake, unless
the stone is wrong.

Not very far from that you will find a fair mound, of dimensions fit
to hold a well-grown man.  I will not tell you the inscription upon
the stone which stands at its head; for I do not wish you to be sure
of the resting-place of one who could not bear to think that he
should be known as a cripple among the dead, after being pointed at
so long among the living.  There is one sign, it is true, by which,
if you have been a sagacious reader of these papers, you will at
once know it; but I fear you read carelessly, and must study them
more diligently before you will detect the hint to which I allude.

The Little Gentleman lies where he longed to lie, among the old
names and the old bones of the old Boston people.  At the foot of
his resting-place is the river, alive with the wings and antennae of
its colossal water-insects; over opposite are the great war-ships,
and the heavy guns, which, when they roar, shake the soil in which
he lies; and in the steeple of Christ Church, hard by, are the sweet
chimes which are the Boston boy's Ranz des Vaches, whose echoes
follow him all the world over.


                         In Pace!

I, told you a good while ago that the Little Gentleman could not do
a better thing than to leave all his money, whatever it might be, to
the young girl who has since that established such a claim upon him.
He did not, however.  A considerable bequest to one of our public
institutions keeps his name in grateful remembrance.  The telescope
through which he was fond of watching the heavenly bodies, and the
movements of which had been the source of such odd fancies on my
part, is now the property of a Western College.  You smile as you
think of my taking it for a fleshless human figure, when I saw its
tube pointing to the sky, and thought it was an arm, under the white
drapery thrown over it for protection.  So do I smile now; I belong
to the numerous class who are prophets after the fact, and hold my
nightmares very cheap by daylight

I have received many letters of inquiry as to the sound resembling a
woman's voice, which occasioned me so many perplexities.  Some
thought there was no question that he had a second apartment, in
which he had made an asylum for a deranged female relative.  Others
were of opinion that he was, as I once suggested, a "Bluebeard" with
patriarchal tendencies, and I have even been censured for
introducing so Oriental an element into my record of boarding-house
experience.

Come in and see me, the Professor, some evening when I have nothing
else to do, and ask me to play you Tartini's Devil's Sonata on that
extraordinary instrument in my possession, well known to amateurs as
one of the masterpieces of Joseph Guarnerius.  The vox humana of the
great Haerlem organ is very lifelike, and the same stop in the organ
of the Cambridge chapel might be mistaken in some of its tones for a
human voice; but I think you never heard anything come so near the
cry of a prima donna as the A string and the E string of this
instrument.  A single fact will illustrate the resemblance.  I was
executing some tours de force upon it one evening, when the
policeman of our district rang the bell sharply, and asked what was
the matter in the house.  He had heard a woman's screams,--he was
sure of it.  I had to make the instrument sing before his eyes
before he could be satisfied that he had not heard the cries of a
woman.  The instrument was bequeathed to me by the Little Gentleman.
Whether it had anything to do with the sounds I heard coming from
his chamber, you can form your own opinion;--I have no other
conjecture to offer.  It is not true that a second apartment with a
secret entrance was found; and the story of the veiled lady is the
invention of one of the Reporters.

Bridget, the housemaid, always insisted that he died a Catholic.
She had seen the crucifix, and believed that he prayed on his knees
before it.  The last circumstance is very probably true; indeed,
there was a spot worn on the carpet just before this cabinet which
might be thus accounted for.  Why he, whose whole life was a
crucifixion, should not love to look on that divine image of
blameless suffering, I cannot see; on the contrary, it seems to me
the most natural thing in the world that he should.  But there are
those who want to make private property of everything, and can't
make up their minds that people who don't think as they do should
claim any interest in that infinite compassion expressed in the
central figure of the Christendom which includes us all.

The divinity-student expressed a hope before the boarders that he
should meet him in heaven.--The question is, whether he'll meet
you,--said the young fellow John, rather smartly.  The divinity-
student had n't thought of that.

However, he is a worthy young man, and I trust I have shown him in a
kindly and respectful light.  He will get a parish by-and-by; and,
as he is about to marry the sister of an old friend,--the
Schoolmistress, whom some of us remember,--and as all sorts of
expensive accidents happen to young married ministers, he will be
under bonds to the amount of his salary, which means starvation, if
they are forfeited, to think all his days as he thought when he was
settled,--unless the majority of his people change with him or in
advance of him.  A hard ease, to which nothing could reconcile a
man, except that the faithful discharge of daily duties in his
personal relations with his parishioners will make him useful enough
in his way, though as a thinker he may cease to exist before he has
reached middle age.

--Iris went into mourning for the Little Gentleman.  Although, as I
have said, he left the bulk of his property, by will, to a public
institution, he added a codicil, by which he disposed of various
pieces of property as tokens of kind remembrance.  It was in this
way I became the possessor of the wonderful instrument I have spoken
of, which had been purchased for him out of an Italian convent.  The
landlady was comforted with a small legacy.  The following extract
relates to Iris: "in consideration of her manifold acts of
kindness, but only in token of grateful remembrance, and by no means
as a reward for services which cannot be compensated, a certain
messuage, with all the land thereto appertaining, situated in ______
Street, at the North End, so called, of Boston, aforesaid, the same
being the house in which I was born, but now inhabited by several
families, and known as 'The Rookery.'" Iris had also the crucifix,
the portrait, and the red-jewelled ring.  The funeral or death's-
head ring was buried with him.

It was a good while, after the Little Gentleman was gone, before our
boarding-house recovered its wonted cheerfulness.  There was a
flavor in his whims and local prejudices that we liked, even while
we smiled at them.  It was hard to see the tall chair thrust away
among useless lumber, to dismantle his room, to take down the
picture of Leah, the handsome Witch of Essex, to move away the
massive shelves that held the books he loved, to pack up the tube
through which he used to study the silent stars, looking down at him
like the eyes of dumb creatures, with a kind of stupid half-
consciousness that did not worry him as did the eyes of men and
women,--and hardest of all to displace that sacred figure to which
his heart had always turned and found refuge, in the feelings it
inspired, from all the perplexities of his busy brain.  It was hard,
but it had to be done.

And by-and-by we grew cheerful again, and the breakfast-table wore
something of its old look.  The Koh-i-noor, as we named the
gentleman with the diamond, left us, however, soon after that
"little mill," as the young fellow John called it, where he came off
second best.  His departure was no doubt hastened by a note from the
landlady's daughter, inclosing a lock of purple hair which she "had
valued as a pledge of affection, ere she knew the hollowness of the
vows he had breathed," speedily followed by another, inclosing the
landlady's bill.  The next morning he was missing, as were his
limited wardrobe and the trunk that held it.  Three empty bottles of
Mrs. Allen's celebrated preparation, each of them asserting, on its
word of honor as a bottle, that its former contents were "not a
dye," were all that was left to us of the Koh-i-noor.

From this time forward, the landlady's daughter manifested a decided
improvement in her style of carrying herself before the boarders.
She abolished the odious little flat, gummy side-curl.  She left off
various articles of "jewelry."  She began to help her mother in some
of her household duties.  She became a regular attendant on the
ministrations of a very worthy clergyman, having been attracted to
his meetin' by witnessing a marriage ceremony in which he called a
man and a woman a "gentleman" and a "lady,"--a stroke of gentility
which quite overcame her.  She even took a part in what she called a
Sabbath school, though it was held on Sunday, and by no means on
Saturday, as the name she intended to utter implied.  All this,
which was very sincere, as I believe, on her part, and attended with
a great improvement in her character, ended in her bringing home a
young man, with straight, sandy hair, brushed so as to stand up
steeply above his forehead, wearing a pair of green spectacles, and
dressed in black broadcloth.  His personal aspect, and a certain
solemnity of countenance, led me to think he must be a clergyman;
and as Master Benjamin Franklin blurted out before several of us
boarders, one day, that "Sis had got a beau," I was pleased at the
prospect of her becoming a minister's wife.  On inquiry, however, I
found that the somewhat solemn look which I had noticed was indeed a
professional one, but not clerical.  He was a young undertaker, who
had just succeeded to a thriving business.  Things, I believe, are
going on well at this time of writing, and I am glad for the
landlady's daughter and her mother.  Sextons and undertakers are the
cheerfullest people in the world at home, as comedians and circus-
clowns are the most melancholy in their domestic circle.

As our old boarding-house is still in existence, I do not feel at
liberty to give too minute a statement of the present condition of
each and all of its inmates.  I am happy to say, however, that they
are all alive and well, up to this time.  That amiable old gentleman
who sat opposite to me is growing older, as old men will, but still
smiles benignantly on all the boarders, and has come to be a kind of
father to all of them,--so that on his birthday there is always
something like a family festival.  The Poor Relation, even, has
warmed into a filial feeling towards him, and on his last birthday
made him a beautiful present, namely, a very handsomely bound copy
of Blair's celebrated poem, "The Grave."

The young man John is still, as he says, "in fustrate fettle."  I
saw him spar, not long since, at a private exhibition, and do
himself great credit in a set-to with Henry Finnegass, Esq., a
professional gentleman of celebrity.  I am pleased to say that he
has been promoted to an upper clerkship, and, in consequence of his
rise in office, has taken an apartment somewhat lower down than
number "forty-'leven," as he facetiously called his attic.  Whether
there is any truth, or not, in the story of his attachment to, and
favorable reception by, the daughter of the head of an extensive
wholesale grocer's establishment, I will not venture an opinion; I
may say, however, that I have met him repeatedly in company with a
very well-nourished and high-colored young lady, who, I understand,
is the daughter of the house in question.

Some of the boarders were of opinion that Iris did not return the
undisguised attentions of the handsome young Marylander.  Instead of
fixing her eyes steadily on him, as she used to look upon the Little
Gentleman, she would turn them away, as if to avoid his own.  They
often went to church together, it is true; but nobody, of course,
supposes there is any relation between religious sympathy and those
wretched "sentimental" movements of the human heart upon which it is
commonly agreed that nothing better is based than society,
civilization, friendship, the relation of husband and wife, and of
parent and child, and which many people must think were singularly
overrated by the Teacher of Nazareth, whose whole life, as I said
before, was full of sentiment, loving this or that young man,
pardoning this or that sinner, weeping over the dead, mourning for
the doomed city, blessing, and perhaps kissing, the little children,
so that the Gospels are still cried over almost as often as the last
work of fiction!

But one fine June morning there rumbled up to the door of our
boarding-house a hack containing a lady inside and a trunk on the
outside.  It was our friend the lady-patroness of Miss Iris, the
same who had been called by her admiring pastor "The Model of all
the Virtues."  Once a week she had written a letter, in a rather
formal hand, but full of good advice, to her young charge.  And now
she had come to carry her away, thinking that she had learned all
she was likely to learn under her present course of teaching.  The
Model, however, was to stay awhile,--a week, or more,--before they
should leave together.

Iris was obedient, as she was bound to be.  She was respectful,
grateful, as a child is with a just, but not tender parent.  Yet
something was wrong.  She had one of her trances, and became statue-
like, as before, only the day after the Model's arrival.  She was
wan and silent, tasted nothing at table, smiled as if by a forced
effort, and often looked vaguely away from those who were looking at
her, her eyes just glazed with the shining moisture of a tear that
must not be allowed to gather and fall.  Was it grief at parting
from the place where her strange friendship had grown up with the
Little Gentleman?  Yet she seemed to have become reconciled to his
loss, and rather to have a deep feeling of gratitude that she had
been permitted to care for him in his last weary days.

The Sunday after the Model's arrival, that lady had an attack of
headache, and was obliged to shut herself up in a darkened room
alone.  Our two young friends took the opportunity to go together to
the Church of the Galileans.  They said but little going,--
"collecting their thoughts" for the service, I devoutly hope.  My
kind good friend the pastor preached that day one of his sermons
that make us all feel like brothers and sisters, and his text was
that affectionate one from John, "My little children, let us not
love in word, neither in tongue, but in deed and in truth."  When
Iris and her friend came out of church, they were both pale, and
walked a space without speaking.

At last the young man said,--You and I are not little children,
Iris!

She looked in his face an instant, as if startled, for there was
something strange in the tone of his voice.  She smiled faintly, but
spoke never a word.

In deed and in truth, Iris,----

What shall a poor girl say or do, when a strong man falters in his
speech before her, and can do nothing better than hold out his hand
to finish his broken sentence?

The poor girl said nothing, but quietly laid her ungloved hand in
his,--the little soft white hand which had ministered so tenderly
and suffered so patiently.

The blood came back to the young man's cheeks, as he lifted it to
his lips, even as they walked there in the street, touched it gently
with them, and said, "It is mine!"

Iris did not contradict him.

The seasons pass by so rapidly, that I am startled to think how much
has happened since these events I was describing.  Those two young
people would insist on having their own way about their own affairs,
notwithstanding the good lady, so justly called the Model, insisted
that the age of twenty-five years was as early as any discreet young
lady should think of incurring the responsibilities, etc., etc.
Long before Iris had reached that age, she was the wife of a young
Maryland engineer, directing some of the vast constructions of his
native State,--where he was growing rich fast enough to be able to
decline that famous Russian offer which would have made him a kind
of nabob in a few years.  Iris does not write verse often, nowadays,
but she sometimes draws.  The last sketch of hers I have seen in my
Southern visits was of two children, a boy and girl, the youngest
holding a silver goblet, like the one she held that evening when I--
I was so struck with her statue-like beauty.  If in the later,
summer months you find the grass marked with footsteps around that
grave on Copp's Hill I told you of, and flowers scattered over it,
you may be sure that Iris is here on her annual visit to the home of
her childhood and that excellent lady whose only fault was, that
Nature had written out her list of virtues an ruled paper, and
forgotten to rub out the lines.

One thing more I must mention.  Being on the Common, last Sunday, I
was attracted by the cheerful spectacle of a well-dressed and
somewhat youthful papa wheeling a very elegant little carriage
containing a stout baby.  A buxom young lady watched them from one
of the stone seats, with an interest which could be nothing less
than maternal.  I at once recognized my old friend, the young fellow
whom we called John.  He was delighted to see me, introduced me to
"Madam," and would have the lusty infant out of the carriage, and
hold him up for me to look at.

Now, then,--he said to the two-year-old,--show the gentleman how you
hit from the shoulder.  Whereupon the little imp pushed his fat fist
straight into my eye, to his father's intense satisfaction.

Fust-rate little chap,--said the papa.--Chip of the old block.
Regl'r little Johnny, you know.

I was so much pleased to find the young fellow settled in life, and
pushing about one of "them little articles" he had seemed to want so
much, that I took my "punishment" at the hands of the infant
pugilist with great equanimity.--And how is the old boarding-
house?--I asked.

A 1,--he answered.--Painted and papered as good as new.  Gabs in
all the rooms up to the skyparlors.  Old woman's layin' up money,
they say.  Means to send Ben Franklin to college.  Just then the
first bell rang for church, and my friend, who, I understand, has
become a most exemplary member of society, said he must be off to
get ready for meetin', and told the young one to "shake dada," which
he did with his closed fist, in a somewhat menacing manner.  And so
the young man John, as we used to call him, took the pole of the
miniature carriage, and pushed the small pugilist before him
homewards, followed, in a somewhat leisurely way, by his pleasant-
looking lady-companion, and I sent a sigh and a smile after him.

That evening, as soon as it was dark, I could not help going round
by the old boarding-house.  The "gahs" was lighted, but the
curtains, or more properly, the painted shades; were not down.  And
so I stood there and looked in along the table where the boarders
sat at the evening meal,--our old breakfast-table, which some of us
feel as if we knew so well.  There were new faces at it, but also
old and familiar ones.--The landlady, in a wonderfully smart cap,
looking young, comparatively speaking, and as if half the wrinkles
had been ironed out of her forehead.--Her daughter, in rather
dressy half-mourning, with a vast brooch of jet, got up, apparently,
to match the gentleman next her, who was in black costume and sandy
hair,--the last rising straight from his forehead, like the marble
flame one sometimes sees at the top of a funeral urn.--The Poor
Relation, not in absolute black, but in a stuff with specks of
white; as much as to say, that, if there were any more Hirams left
to sigh for her, there were pin-holes in the night of her despair,
through which a ray of hope might find its way to an adorer.
--Master Benjamin Franklin, grown taller of late, was in the act of
splitting his face open with a wedge of pie, so that his features
were seen to disadvantage for the moment.--The good old gentleman
was sitting still and thoughtful.  All at once he turned his face
toward the window where I stood, and, just as if he had seen me,
smiled his benignant smile.  It was a recollection of some past
pleasant moment; but it fell upon me like the blessing of a father.

I kissed my hand to them all, unseen as I stood in the outer
darkness; and as I turned and went my way, the table and all around
it faded into the realm of twilight shadows and of midnight dreams.

                   ---------------------

And so my year's record is finished. The Professor has talked less
than his predecessor, but he has heard and seen more.  Thanks to all
those friends who from time to time have sent their messages of
kindly recognition and fellow-feeling!  Peace to all such as may
have been vexed in spirit by any utterance these pages have
repeated!  They will, doubtless, forget for the moment the
difference in the hues of truth we look at through our human prisms,
and join in singing (inwardly) this hymn to the Source of the light
we all need to lead us, and the warmth which alone can make us all
brothers.


          A SUN-DAY HYMN.

Lord of all being! throned afar,
Thy glory flames from sun and star,
Centre and soul of every sphere,
Yet to each loving heart how near!

Sun of our life, thy quickening ray
Sheds on our path the glow of day;
Star of our hope, thy softened light
Cheers the long watches of the night.

Our midnight is thy smile withdrawn;
Our noontide is thy gracious dawn;
Our rainbow arch thy mercy's sign;
All, save the clouds of sin, are thine!

Lord of all life, below, above,
Whose light is truth, whose warmth is love,
Before thy ever-blazing throne
We ask no lustre of our own.

Grant us thy truth to make us free,
And kindling hearts that burn for thee,
Till all thy living altars claim
One holy light, one heavenly flame.





End of The Project Gutenberg Etext The Professor at the Breakfast Table






THE POET AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE

by Oliver Wendell Holmes




PREFACE.

In this, the third series of Breakfast-Table conversations, a slight
dramatic background shows off a few talkers and writers, aided by
certain silent supernumeraries.  The machinery is much like that of
the two preceding series.  Some of the characters must seem like old
acquaintances to those who have read the former papers.  As I read
these over for the first time for a number of years, I notice one
character; presenting a class of beings who have greatly multiplied
during the interval which separates the earlier and later
Breakfast-Table papers,--I mean the scientific specialists.  The
entomologist, who confines himself rigidly to the study of the
coleoptera, is intended to typify this class.  The subdivision of
labor, which, as we used to be told, required fourteen different
workmen to make a single pin, has reached all branches of knowledge.
We find new terms in all the Professions, implying that special
provinces have been marked off, each having its own school of
students.  In theology we have many curious subdivisions; among the
rest eschatology, that is to say, the geography, geology, etc., of
the "undiscovered country;" in medicine, if the surgeon who deals
with dislocations of the right shoulder declines to meddle with a
displacement on the other side, we are not surprised, but ring the
bell of the practitioner who devotes himself to injuries of the left
shoulder.

On the other hand, we have had or have the encyclopaedic
intelligences like Cuvier, Buckle, and more emphatically Herbert
Spencer, who take all knowledge, or large fields of it, to be their
province.  The author of "Thoughts on the Universe" has something in
common with these, but he appears also to have a good deal about him
of what we call the humorist; that is, an individual with a somewhat
heterogeneous personality, in which various distinctly human elements
are mixed together, so as to form a kind of coherent and sometimes
pleasing whole, which is to a symmetrical character as a breccia is
to a mosaic.

As for the Young Astronomer, his rhythmical discourse may be taken as
expressing the reaction of what some would call "the natural man"
against the unnatural beliefs which he found in that lower world to
which be descended by day from his midnight home in the firmament.

I have endeavored to give fair play to the protest of gentle and
reverential conservatism in the letter of the Lady, which was not
copied from, but suggested by, one which I received long ago from a
lady bearing an honored name, and which I read thoughtfully and with
profound respect.

December, 1882.







PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION.

It is now nearly twenty years since this book was published.  Being
the third of the Breakfast-Table series, it could hardly be expected
to attract so much attention as the earlier volumes.  Still, I had no
reason to be disappointed with its reception.  It took its place with
the others, and was in some points a clearer exposition of my views
and feelings than either of the other books, its predecessors.  The
poems "Homesick in Heaven" and the longer group of passages coming
from the midnight reveries of the Young Astronomer have thoughts in
them not so fully expressed elsewhere in my writings.

The first of these two poems is at war with our common modes of
thought.  In looking forward to rejoining in a future state those
whom we have loved on earth,--as most of us hope and many of us
believe we shall,--we are apt to forget that the same individuality
is remembered by one relative as a babe, by another as an adult in
the strength of maturity, and by a third as a wreck with little left
except its infirmities and its affections.  The main thought of this
poem is a painful one to some persons.  They have so closely
associated life with its accidents that they expect to see their
departed friends in the costume of the time in which they best
remember them, and feel as if they should meet the spirit of their
grandfather with his wig and cane, as they habitually recall him to
memory.

The process of scientific specialization referred to and illustrated
in this record has been going on more actively than ever during these
last twenty years.  We have only to look over the lists of the
Faculties and teachers of our Universities to see the subdivision of
labor carried out as never before.  The movement is irresistible; it
brings with it exactness, exhaustive knowledge, a narrow but complete
self-satisfaction, with such accompanying faults as pedantry,
triviality, and the kind of partial blindness which belong to
intellectual myopia.  The specialist is idealized almost into
sublimity in Browning's "Burial of the Grammarian."  We never need
fear that he will undervalue himself.  To be the supreme authority on
anything is a satisfaction to self-love next door to the precious
delusions of dementia.  I have never pictured a character more
contented with himself than the "Scarabee" of this story.

BEVERLY FARMS, MASS., August 1, 1891.

O. W. H.







                        THE POET

                         AT THE

                     BREAKFAST-TABLE.


I

The idea of a man's "interviewing" himself is rather odd, to be sure.
But then that is what we are all of us doing every day.  I talk half
the time to find out my own thoughts, as a school-boy turns his
pockets inside out to see what is in them.  One brings to light all
sorts of personal property he had forgotten in his inventory.

--You don't know what your thoughts are going to be beforehand? said
the "Member of the Haouse," as he calls himself.

--Why, of course I don't.  Bless your honest legislative soul, I
suppose I have as many bound volumes of notions of one kind and
another in my head as you have in your Representatives' library up
there at the State House.  I have to tumble them over and over, and
open them in a hundred places, and sometimes cut the leaves here and
there, to find what I think about this and that.  And a good many
people who flatter themselves they are talking wisdom to me, are only
helping me to get at the shelf and the book and the page where I
shall find my own opinion about the matter in question.

--The Member's eyes began to look heavy.

--It 's a very queer place, that receptacle a man fetches his talk
out of.  The library comparison does n't exactly hit it.  You stow
away some idea and don't want it, say for ten years.  When it turns
up at last it has got so jammed and crushed out of shape by the other
ideas packed with it, that it is no more like what it was than a
raisin is like a grape on the vine, or a fig from a drum like one
hanging on the tree.  Then, again, some kinds of thoughts breed in
the dark of one's mind like the blind fishes in the Mammoth Cave.  We
can't see them and they can't see us; but sooner or later the
daylight gets in and we find that some cold, fishy little negative
has been spawning all over our beliefs, and the brood of blind
questions it has given birth to are burrowing round and under and
butting their blunt noses against the pillars of faith we thought the
whole world might lean on.  And then, again, some of our old beliefs
are dying out every year, and others feed on them and grow fat, or
get poisoned as the case may be.  And so, you see, you can't tell
what the thoughts are that you have got salted down, as one may say,
till you run a streak of talk through them, as the market people run
a butterscoop through a firkin.

Don't talk, thinking you are going to find out your neighbor, for you
won't do it, but talk to find out yourself.  There is more of you--
and less of you, in spots, very likely--than you know.

--The Member gave a slight but unequivocal start just here.  It does
seem as if perpetual somnolence was the price of listening to other
people's wisdom.  This was one of those transient nightmares that one
may have in a doze of twenty seconds.  He thought a certain imaginary
Committee of Safety of a certain imaginary Legislature was proceeding
to burn down his haystack, in accordance with an Act, entitled an Act
to make the Poor Richer by making the Rich Poorer.  And the chairman
of the committee was instituting a forcible exchange of hats with
him, to his manifest disadvantage, for he had just bought him a new
beaver.  He told this dream afterwards to one of the boarders.

There was nothing very surprising, therefore, in his asking a
question not very closely related to what had gone before.

--Do you think they mean business?

--I beg your pardon, but it would be of material assistance to me in
answering your question if I knew who "they" might happen to be.

--Why, those chaps that are setting folks on to burn us all up in our
beds.  Political firebugs we call 'em up our way.  Want to substitoot
the match-box for the ballot-box.  Scare all our old women half to
death.

--Oh--ah--yes--to be sure.  I don't believe they say what the papers
put in their mouths any more than that a friend of mine wrote the
letter about Worcester's and Webster's Dictionaries, that he had
to disown the other day.  These newspaper fellows are half asleep
when they make up their reports at two or three o'clock in the
morning, and fill out the speeches to suit themselves.  I do remember
some things that sounded pretty bad,--about as bad as nitro-
glycerine, for that matter.  But I don't believe they ever said 'em,
when they spoke their pieces, or if they said 'em I know they did n't
mean 'em.  Something like this, wasn't it?  If the majority didn't do
something the minority wanted 'em to, then the people were to burn up
our cities, and knock us down and jump on our stomachs.  That was
about the kind of talk, as the papers had it; I don't wonder it
scared the old women.

--The Member was wide awake by this time.

--I don't seem to remember of them partickler phrases, he said.

--Dear me, no; only levelling everything smack, and trampling us
under foot, as the reporters made it out.  That means FIRE, I take
it, and knocking you down and stamping on you, whichever side of your
person happens to be uppermost.  Sounded like a threat; meant, of
course, for a warning.  But I don't believe it was in the piece as
they spoke it,--could n't have been.  Then, again, Paris wasn't to
blame,--as much as to say--so the old women thought--that New York or
Boston would n't be to blame if it did the same thing.  I've heard of
political gatherings where they barbecued an ox, but I can't think
there 's a party in this country that wants to barbecue a city.  But
it is n't quite fair to frighten the old women.  I don't doubt there
are a great many people wiser than I am that would n't be hurt by a
hint I am going to give them.  It's no matter what you say when you
talk to yourself, but when you talk to other people, your business is
to use words with reference to the way in which those other people
are like to understand them.  These pretended inflammatory speeches,
so reported as to seem full of combustibles, even if they were as
threatening as they have been represented, would do no harm if read
or declaimed in a man's study to his books, or by the sea-shore to
the waves.  But they are not so wholesome moral entertainment for the
dangerous classes.  Boys must not touch off their squibs and crackers
too near the powder-magazine.  This kind of speech does n't help on
the millennium much.

--It ain't jest the thing to grease your ex with ile o' vitrul, said
the Member.

--No, the wheel of progress will soon stick fast if you do.  You
can't keep a dead level long, if you burn everything down flat to
make it.  Why, bless your soul, if all the cities of the world were
reduced ashes, you'd have a new set of millionnaires in a couple of
years or so, out of the trade in potash.  In the mean time, what is
the use of setting the man with the silver watch against the man with
the gold watch, and the man without any watch against them both?

--You can't go agin human natur', said the Member

--You speak truly.  Here we are travelling through desert together
like the children of Israel.  Some pick up more manna and catch more
quails than others and ought to help their hungry neighbors more than
they do; that will always be so until we come back to primitive
Christianity, the road to which does not seem to be via Paris, just
now; but we don't want the incendiary's pillar of a cloud by day and
a pillar of fire by night to lead us in the march to civilization,
and we don't want a Moses who will smite rock, not to bring out water
for our thirst, but petroleum to burn us all up with.

--It is n't quite fair to run an opposition to the other funny
speaker, Rev. Petroleum V.  What 's-his-name,--spoke up an anonymous
boarder.

--You may have been thinking, perhaps, that it was I,--I, the Poet,
who was the chief talker in the one-sided dialogue to which you have
been listening.  If so, you were mistaken.  It was the old man in the
spectacles with large round glasses and the iron-gray hair.  He does
a good deal of the talking at our table, and, to tell the truth, I
rather like to hear him.  He stirs me up, and finds me occupation in
various ways, and especially, because he has good solid prejudices,
that one can rub against, and so get up and let off a superficial
intellectual irritation, just as the cattle rub their backs against a
rail (you remember Sydney Smith's contrivance in his pasture) or
their sides against an apple-tree (I don't know why they take to
these so particularly, but you will often find the trunk of an apple-
tree as brown and smooth as an old saddle at the height of a cow's
ribs).  I think they begin rubbing in cold blood, and then, you know,
l'appetit vient en mangeant, the more they rub the more they want to.
That is the way to use your friend's prejudices.  This is a sturdy-
looking personage of a good deal more than middle age, his face
marked with strong manly furrows, records of hard thinking and square
stand-up fights with life and all its devils.  There is a slight
touch of satire in his discourse now and then, and an odd way of
answering one that makes it hard to guess how much more or less he
means than he seems to say.  But he is honest, and always has a
twinkle in his eye to put you on your guard when he does not mean to
be taken quite literally.  I think old Ben Franklin had just that
look.  I know his great-grandson (in pace!) had it, and I don't doubt
he took it in the straight line of descent, as he did his grand
intellect.

The Member of the Haouse evidently comes from one of the lesser
inland centres of civilization, where the flora is rich in
checkerberries and similar bounties of nature, and the fauna lively
with squirrels, wood-chucks, and the like; where the leading
sportsmen snare patridges, as they are called, and "hunt" foxes with
guns; where rabbits are entrapped in "figgery fours," and trout
captured with the unpretentious earth-worm, instead of the gorgeous
fly; where they bet prizes for butter and cheese, and rag-carpets
executed by ladies more than seventy years of age; where whey wear
dress-coats before dinner, and cock their hats on one side when they
feel conspicuous and distinshed; where they say--Sir to you in their
common talk and have other Arcadian and bucolic ways which are highly
unobjectionable, but are not so much admired in cities, where the
people are said to be not half so virtuous.

There is with us a boy of modest dimensions, not otherwise especially
entitled to the epithet, who ought be six or seven years old, to
judge by the gap left by his front milk teeth, these having resigned
in favor of their successors, who have not yet presented their
credentials.  He is rather old for an enfant terrible, and quite too
young to have grown into the bashfulness of adolescence; but he has
some of the qualities of both these engaging periods of development,
The member of the Haouse calls him "Bub," invariably, such term I
take to be an abbreviation of "Beelzeb," as "bus" is the short form
of "omnibus."  Many eminently genteel persons, whose manners make
them at home anywhere, being evidently unaware of true derivation of
this word, are in the habit of addressing all unknown children by one
of the two terms, "bub" and "sis," which they consider endears them
greatly to the young people, and recommends them to the acquaintance
of their honored parents, if these happen to accompany them.  The
other boarders commonly call our diminutive companion That Boy.  He
is a sort of expletive at the table, serving to stop gaps, taking the
same place a washer does that makes a loose screw fit, and contriving
to get driven in like a wedge between any two chairs where there is a
crevice.  I shall not call that boy by the monosyllable referred to,
because, though he has many impish traits at present, he may become
civilized and humanized by being in good company.  Besides, it is a
term which I understand is considered vulgar by the nobility and
gentry of the Mother Country, and it is not to be found in Mr.
Worcester's Dictionary, on which, as is well known, the literary men
of this metropolis are by special statute allowed to be sworn in
place of the Bible.  I know one, certainly, who never takes his oath
on any other dictionary, any advertising fiction to the contrary,
notwithstanding.

I wanted to write out my account of some of the other boarders, but a
domestic occurrence--a somewhat prolonged visit from the landlady,
who is rather too anxious that I should be comfortable broke in upon
the continuity of my thoughts, and occasioned--in short, I gave up
writing for that day.

--I wonder if anything like this ever happened.
Author writing,
jacks?"

    "To be, or not to be: that is the question
     Whether 't is nobl--"

--"William, shall we have pudding to-day, or flapjacks?"

--"Flapjacks, an' it please thee, Anne, or a pudding, for that
matter; or what thou wilt, good woman, so thou come not betwixt me
and my thought."

--Exit Mistress Anne, with strongly accented closing of the door and
murmurs to the effect: "Ay, marry, 't is well for thee to talk as if
thou hadst no stomach to fill.  We poor wives must swink for our
masters, while they sit in their arm-chairs growing as great in the
girth through laziness as that ill-mannered fat man William hath writ
of in his books of players' stuff.  One had as well meddle with a
porkpen, which hath thorns all over him, as try to deal with William
when his eyes be rolling in that mad way."

William--writing once more--after an exclamation in strong English of
the older pattern,--

     "Whether 't is nobler--nobler--nobler--"

To do what?  O these women! these women! to have puddings or
flapjacks! Oh!--

    "Whether 't is nobler--in the mind--to suffer
     The slings--and arrows--of--"

Oh! Oh! these women! I will e'en step over to the parson's and have a
cup of sack with His Reverence for methinks Master Hamlet hath forgot
that which was just now on his lips to speak.


So I shall have to put off making my friends acquainted with the
other boarders, some of whom seem to me worth studying and
describing.  I have something else of a graver character for my
readers.  I am talking, you know, as a poet; I do not say I deserve
the name, but I have taken it, and if you consider me at all it must
be in that aspect.  You will, therefore, be willing to run your eyes
over a few pages read, of course by request, to a select party of the
boarders.



          THE GAMBREL-ROOFED HOUSE AND ITS OUTLOOK.

               A PANORAMA, WITH SIDE-SHOWS.

My birthplace, the home of my childhood and earlier and later
boyhood, has within a few months passed out of the ownership of my
family into the hands of that venerable Alma Mater who seems to have
renewed her youth, and has certainly repainted her dormitories.  In
truth, when I last revisited that familiar scene and looked upon the
flammantia mania of the old halls, "Massachusetts" with the dummy
clock-dial, "Harvard" with the garrulous belfry, little "Holden" with
the sculptured unpunishable cherub over its portal, and the rest of
my early brick-and-mortar acquaintances, I could not help saying to
myself that I had lived to see the peaceable establishment of the Red
Republic of Letters.

Many of the things I shall put down I have no doubt told before in a
fragmentary way, how many I cannot be quite sure, as I do not very
often read my own prose works.  But when a man dies a great deal is
said of him which has often been said in other forms, and now this
dear old house is dead to me in one sense, and I want to gather up my
recollections and wind a string of narrative round them, tying them
up like a nosegay for the last tribute: the same blossoms in it I
have often laid on its threshold while it was still living for me.

We Americans are all cuckoos,--we make our homes in the nests of
other birds.  I have read somewhere that the lineal descendants of
the man who carted off the body of William Rufus, with Walter
Tyrrel's arrow sticking in it, have driven a cart (not absolutely the
same one, I suppose) in the New Forest, from that day to this.  I
don't quite understand Mr. Ruskin's saying (if he said it) that he
couldn't get along in a country where there were no castles, but I do
think we lose a great deal in living where there are so few permanent
homes.  You will see how much I parted with which was not reckoned in
the price paid for the old homestead.

I shall say many things which an uncharitable reader might find fault
with as personal.  I should not dare to call myself a poet if I did
not; for if there is anything that gives one a title to that name, it
is that his inner nature is naked and is not ashamed.  But there are
many such things I shall put in words, not because they are personal,
but because they are human, and are born of just such experiences as
those who hear or read what I say are like to have had in greater or
less measure.  I find myself so much like other people that I often
wonder at the coincidence.  It was only the other day that I sent out
a copy of verses about my great-grandmother's picture, and I was
surprised to find how many other people had portraits of their great-
grandmothers or other progenitors, about which they felt as I did
about mine, and for whom I had spoken, thinking I was speaking for
myself only.  And so I am not afraid to talk very freely with you, my
precious reader or listener.  You too, Beloved, were born somewhere
and remember your birthplace or your early home; for you some house
is haunted by recollections; to some roof you have bid farewell.
Your hand is upon mine, then, as I guide my pen.  Your heart frames
the responses to the litany of my remembrance.  For myself it is a
tribute of affection I am rendering, and I should put it on record
for my own satisfaction, were there none to read or to listen.

I hope you will not say that I have built a pillared portico of
introduction to a humble structure of narrative.  For when you look
at the old gambrel-roofed house, you will see an unpretending
mansion, such as very possibly you were born in yourself, or at any
rate such a place of residence as your minister or some of your well-
to-do country cousins find good enough, but not at all too grand for
them.  We have stately old Colonial palaces in our ancient village,
now a city, and a thriving one,--square-fronted edifices that stand
back from the vulgar highway, with folded arms, as it were; social
fortresses of the time when the twilight lustre of the throne reached
as far as our half-cleared settlement, with a glacis before them in
the shape of a long broad gravel-walk, so that in King George's time
they looked as formidably to any but the silk-stocking gentry as
Gibraltar or Ehrenbreitstein to a visitor without the password.  We
forget all this in the kindly welcome they give us to-day; for some
of them are still standing and doubly famous, as we all know.  But
the gambrel-roofed house, though stately enough for college
dignitaries and scholarly clergymen, was not one of those old Tory,
Episcopal-church-goer's strongholds.  One of its doors opens directly
upon the green, always called the Common; the other, facing the
south, a few steps from it, over a paved foot-walk, on the other side
of which is the miniature front yard, bordered with lilacs and
syringas.  The honest mansion makes no pretensions.  Accessible,
companionable, holding its hand out to all, comfortable, respectable,
and even in its way dignified, but not imposing, not a house for his
Majesty's Counsellor, or the Right Reverend successor of Him who had
not where to lay his head, for something like a hundred and fifty
years it has stood in its lot, and seen the generations of men come
and go like the leaves of the forest.  I passed some pleasant hours,
a few years since, in the Registry of Deeds and the Town Records,
looking up the history of the old house.  How those dear friends of
mine, the antiquarians, for whose grave councils I compose my
features on the too rare Thursdays when I am at liberty to meet them,
in whose human herbarium the leaves and blossoms of past generations
are so carefully spread out and pressed and laid away, would listen
to an expansion of the following brief details into an Historical
Memoir!

The estate was the third lot of the eighth "Squadron" (whatever that
might be), and in the year 1707 was allotted in the distribution of
undivided lands to "Mr. ffox," the Reverend Jabez Fox of Woburn, it
may be supposed, as it passed from his heirs to the first Jonathan
Hastings; from him to his son, the long remembered College Steward;
from him in the year 1792 to the Reverend Eliphalet Pearson,
Professor of Hebrew and other Oriental languages in Harvard College,
whose large personality swam into my ken when I was looking forward
to my teens; from him the progenitors of my unborn self.

I wonder if there are any such beings nowadays as the great
Eliphalet, with his large features and conversational basso profundo,
seemed to me.  His very name had something elephantine about it, and
it seemed to me that the house shook from cellar to garret at his
footfall.  Some have pretended that he had Olympian aspirations, and
wanted to sit in the seat of Jove and bear the academic thunderbolt
and the aegis inscribed Christo et Ecclesiae.  It is a common
weakness enough to wish to find one's self in an empty saddle; Cotton
Mather was miserable all his days, I am afraid, after that entry in
his Diary: "This Day Dr. Sewall was chosen President, for his Piety."

There is no doubt that the men of the older generation look bigger
and more formidable to the boys whose eyes are turned up at their
venerable countenances than the race which succeeds them, to the same
boys grown older.  Everything is twice as large, measured on a three-
year-olds three-foot scale as on a thirty-year-olds six-foot scale;
but age magnifies and aggravates persons out of due proportion.  Old
people are a kind of monsters to little folks; mild manifestations of
the terrible, it may be, but still, with their white locks and ridged
and grooved features, which those horrid little eyes exhaust of their
details, like so many microscopes not exactly what human beings ought
to be.  The middle-aged and young men have left comparatively faint
impressions in my memory, but how grandly the procession of the old
clergymen who filled our pulpit from time to time, and passed the day
under our roof, marches before my closed eyes!  At their head the
most venerable David Osgood, the majestic minister of Medford, with
massive front and shaggy over-shadowing eyebrows; following in the
train, mild-eyed John Foster of Brighton, with the lambent aurora of
a smile about his pleasant mouth, which not even the "Sabbath" could
subdue to the true Levitical aspect; and bulky Charles Steams of
Lincoln, author of "The Ladies' Philosophy of Love.  A Poem.  1797"
(how I stared at him! he was the first living person ever pointed out
to me as a poet); and Thaddeus Mason Harris of Dorchester (the same
who, a poor youth, trudging along, staff in hand, being then in a
stress of sore need, found all at once that somewhat was adhering to
the end of his stick, which somewhat proved to be a gold ring of
price, bearing the words, "God speed thee, Friend!"), already in
decadence as I remember him, with head slanting forward and downward
as if looking for a place to rest in after his learned labors; and
that other Thaddeus, the old man of West Cambridge, who outwatched
the rest so long after they had gone to sleep in their own
churchyards, that it almost seemed as if he meant to sit up until the
morning of the resurrection; and bringing up the rear, attenuated but
vivacious little Jonathan Homer of Newton, who was, to look upon, a
kind of expurgated, reduced and Americanized copy of Voltaire, but
very unlike him in wickedness or wit.  The good-humored junior member
of our family always loved to make him happy by setting him
chirruping about Miles Coverdale's Version, and the Bishop's Bible,
and how he wrote to his friend Sir Isaac (Coffin) about something or
other, and how Sir Isaac wrote back that he was very much pleased
with the contents of his letter, and so on about Sir Isaac, ad
libitum,--for the admiral was his old friend, and he was proud of
him.  The kindly little old gentleman was a collector of Bibles, and
made himself believe he thought he should publish a learned
Commentary some day or other; but his friends looked for it only in
the Greek Calends,--say on the 31st of April, when that should come
round, if you would modernize the phrase.  I recall also one or two
exceptional and infrequent visitors with perfect distinctness:
cheerful Elijah Kellogg, a lively missionary from the region of the
Quoddy Indians, with much hopeful talk about Sock Bason and his
tribe; also poor old Poor-house-Parson Isaac Smith, his head going
like a China mandarin, as he discussed the possibilities of the
escape of that distinguished captive whom he spoke of under the name,
if I can reproduce phonetically its vibrating nasalities of "General
Mmbongaparty,"--a name suggestive to my young imagination of a
dangerous, loose-jointed skeleton, threatening us all like the armed
figure of Death in my little New England Primer.

I have mentioned only the names of those whose images come up
pleasantly before me, and I do not mean to say anything which any
descendant might not read smilingly.  But there were some of the
black-coated gentry whose aspect was not so agreeable to me.  It is
very curious to me to look back on my early likes and dislikes, and
see how as a child I was attracted or repelled by such and such
ministers, a good deal, as I found out long afterwards, according to
their theological beliefs.  On the whole, I think the old-fashioned
New England divine softening down into Arminianism was about as
agreeable as any of them.  And here I may remark, that a mellowing
rigorist is always a much pleasanter object to contemplate than a
tightening liberal, as a cold day warming up to 32 Fahrenheit is much
more agreeable than a warm one chilling down to the same temperature.
The least pleasing change is that kind of mental hemiplegia which now
and then attacks the rational side of a man at about the same period
of life when one side of the body is liable to be palsied, and in
fact is, very probably, the same thing as palsy, in another form.
The worst of it is that the subjects of it never seem to suspect that
they are intellectual invalids, stammerers and cripples at best, but
are all the time hitting out at their old friends with the well arm,
and calling them hard names out of their twisted mouths.

It was a real delight to have one of those good, hearty, happy,
benignant old clergymen pass the Sunday, with us, and I can remember.
some whose advent made the day feel almost like "Thanksgiving." But
now and then would come along a clerical visitor with a sad face and
a wailing voice, which sounded exactly as if somebody must be lying
dead up stairs, who took no interest in us children, except a painful
one, as being in a bad way with our cheery looks, and did more to
unchristianize us with his woebegone ways than all his sermons were
like to accomplish in the other direction.  I remember one in
particular, who twitted me so with my blessings as a Christian child,
and whined so to me about the naked black children who, like the
"Little Vulgar Boy," "had n't got no supper and hadn't got no ma,"
and hadn't got no Catechism, (how I wished for the moment I was a
little black boy!) that he did more in that one day to make me a
heathen than he had ever done in a month to make a Christian out of
an infant Hottentot.  What a debt we owe to our friends of the left
centre, the Brooklyn and the Park Street and the Summer street
ministers; good, wholesome, sound-bodied, one-minded, cheerful-
spirited men, who have taken the place of those wailing poitrinaires
with the bandanna handkerchiefs round their meagre throats and a
funeral service in their forlorn physiognomies!  I might have been a
minister myself, for aught I know, if this clergyman had not looked
and talked so like an undertaker.

All this belongs to one of the side-shows, to which I promised those
who would take tickets to the main exhibition should have entrance
gratis.  If I were writing a poem you would expect, as a matter of
course, that there would be a digression now and then.

To come back to the old house and its former tenant, the Professor of
Hebrew and other Oriental languages.  Fifteen years he lived with his
family under its roof.  I never found the slightest trace of him
until a few years ago, when I cleaned and brightened with pious hands
the brass lock of "the study," which had for many years been covered
with a thick coat of paint.  On that I found scratched; as with a
nail or fork, the following inscription:
                         E PE

Only that and nothing more, but the story told itself.  Master Edward
Pearson, then about as high as the lock, was disposed to immortalize
himself in monumental brass, and had got so far towards it, when a
sudden interruption, probably a smart box on the ear, cheated him of
his fame, except so far as this poor record may rescue it.  Dead long
ago.  I remember him well, a grown man, as a visitor at a later
period; and, for some reason, I recall him in the attitude of the
Colossus of Rhodes, standing full before a generous wood-fire, not
facing it, but quite the contrary, a perfect picture of the content
afforded by a blazing hearth contemplated from that point of view,
and, as the heat stole through his person and kindled his emphatic
features, seeming to me a pattern of manly beauty.  What a statue
gallery of posturing friends we all have in our memory!  The old
Professor himself sometimes visited the house after it had changed
hands.  Of course, my recollections are not to be wholly trusted, but
I always think I see his likeness in a profile face to be found among
the illustrations of Rees's Cyclopaedia.  (See Plates, Vol. IV.,
Plate 2, Painting, Diversities of the Human Face, Fig. 4.)

And now let us return to our chief picture.  In the days of my
earliest remembrance, a row of tall Lombardy poplars mounted guard on
the western side of the old mansion.  Whether, like the cypress,
these trees suggest the idea of the funeral torch or the monumental
spire, whether their tremulous leaves make wits afraid by sympathy
with their nervous thrills, whether the faint balsamic smell of their
foliage and their closely swathed limbs have in them vague hints of
dead Pharaohs stiffened in their cerements, I will guess; but they
always seemed to me to give an of sepulchral sadness to the house
before which stood sentries.  Not so with the row of elms which you
may see leading up towards the western entrance.  I think the
patriarch of them all went over in the great gale of 1815; I know I
used to shake the youngest of them with my hands, stout as it is now,
with a trunk that would defy the bully of Crotona, or the strong man
whose liaison with the Lady Delilah proved so disastrous.

The College plain would be nothing without its elms.  As the long
hair of a woman is a glory to her, are these green tresses that bank
themselves against sky in thick clustered masses the ornament and the
pride of the classic green.  You know the "Washington elm," or if you
do not, you had better rekindle our patriotism by reading the
inscription, which tells you that under its shadow the great leader
first drew his sword at the head of an American army.  In a line with
that you may see two others: the coral fan, as I always called it
from its resemblance in form to that beautiful marine growth, and a
third a little farther along.  I have heard it said that all three
were planted at the same time, and that the difference of their
growth is due to the slope of the ground,--the Washington elm being
lower than either of the others.  There is a row of elms just in
front of the old house on the south.  When I was a child the one at
the southwest corner was struck by lightning, and one of its limbs
and a long ribbon of bark torn away.  The tree never fully recovered
its symmetry and vigor, and forty years and more afterwards a second
thunderbolt crashed upon it and set its heart on fire, like those of
the lost souls in the Hall of Eblis.  Heaven had twice blasted it,
and the axe finished what the lightning had begun.

The soil of the University town is divided into patches of sandy and
of clayey ground.  The Common and the College green, near which the
old house stands, are on one of the sandy patches.  Four curses are
the local inheritance: droughts, dust, mud, and canker-worms.  I
cannot but think that all the characters of a region help to modify
the children born in it.  I am fond of making apologies for human
nature, and I think I could find an excuse for myself if I, too, were
dry and barren and muddy-witted and "cantankerous,"--disposed to get
my back up, like those other natives of the soil.

I know this, that the way Mother Earth treats a boy shapes out a kind
of natural theology for him.  I fell into Manichean ways of thinking
from the teaching of my garden experiences.  Like other boys in the
country, I had my patch of ground, to which, in the spring-time, I
entrusted the seeds furnished me, with a confident trust in their
resurrection and glorification in the better world of summer.  But I
soon found that my lines had fallen in a place where a vegetable
growth had to run the gauntlet of as many foes and dials as a
Christian pilgrim.  Flowers would not Blow; daffodils perished like
criminals in their cone demned caps, without their petals ever seeing
daylight; roses were disfigured with monstrous protrusions through
their very centres,--something that looked like a second bud pushing
through the middle of the corolla; lettuces and cabbages would not
head; radishes knotted themselves until they looked like
centenerians' fingers; and on every stem, on every leaf, and both
sides of it, and at the root of everything that dew, was a
professional specialist in the shape of grub, caterpillar, aphis, or
other expert, whose business it was to devour that particular part,
and help order the whole attempt at vegetation.  Such experiences
must influence a child born to them.  A sandy soil, where nothing
flourishes but weeds and evil beasts of small dimensions, must breed
different qualities in its human offspring from one of those fat and
fertile spots which the wit whom I have once before noted described
so happily that, if I quoted the passage, its brilliancy would spoil
one of my pages, as a diamond breastpin sometimes kills the social
effect of the wearer, who might have passed for a gentleman without
it.  Your arid patch of earth should seem to the natural birthplace
of the leaner virtues and the abler vices,--of temperance and the
domestic proprieties on the one hand, with a tendency to light
weights in groceries and provisions, and to clandestine abstraction
from the person on the other, as opposed to the free hospitality, the
broadly planned burglaries, and the largely conceived homicides of
our rich Western alluvial regions.  Yet Nature is never wholly
unkind.  Economical as she was in my unparadised Eden, hard as it was
to make some of my floral houris unveil, still the damask roses
sweetened the June breezes, the bladed and plumed flower-de-luces
unfolded their close-wrapped cones, and larkspurs and lupins, lady's
delights,--plebeian manifestations of the pansy,--self-sowing
marigolds, hollyhocks, the forest flowers of two seasons, and the
perennial lilacs and syringas,--all whispered to' the winds blowing
over them that some caressing presence was around me.

Beyond the garden was "the field," a vast domain of four acres or
thereabout, by the measurement of after years, bordered to the north
by a fathomless chasm,--the ditch the base-ball players of the
present era jump over; on the east by unexplored territory; on the
south by a barren enclosure, where the red sorrel proclaimed liberty
and equality under its drapeau rouge, and succeeded in establishing a
vegetable commune where all were alike, poor, mean, sour, and
uninteresting; and on the west by the Common, not then disgraced by
jealous enclosures, which make it look like a cattle-market.  Beyond,
as I looked round, were the Colleges, the meeting-house, the little
square market-house, long vanished; the burial-ground where the dead
Presidents stretched their weary bones under epitaphs stretched out
at as full length as their subjects; the pretty church where the
gouty Tories used to kneel on their hassocks; the district
schoolhouse, and hard by it Ma'am Hancock's cottage, never so called
in those days, but rather "tenfooter"; then houses scattered near and
far, open spaces, the shadowy elms, round hilltops in the distance,
and over all the great bowl of the sky. Mind you, this was the WORLD,
as I first knew it; terra veteribus cognita, as Mr. Arrowsmith would
have called it, if he had mapped the universe of my infancy:

But I am forgetting the old house again in the landscape.  The worst
of a modern stylish mansion is, that it has no place for ghosts.  I
watched one building not long since.  It had no proper garret, to
begin with, only a sealed interval between the roof and attics, where
a spirit could not be accommodated, unless it were flattened out like
Ravel, Brother, after the millstone had fallen on him.  There was not
a nook or a corner in the whole horse fit to lodge any respectable
ghost, for every part was as open to observation as a literary man's
character and condition, his figure and estate, his coat and his
countenance, are to his (or her) Bohemian Majesty on a tour of
inspection through his (or her) subjects' keyholes.

Now the old house had wainscots, behind which the mice were always
scampering and squeaking and rattling down the plaster, and enacting
family scenes and parlor theatricals.  It had a cellar where the cold
slug clung to the walls, and the misanthropic spider withdrew from
the garish day; where the green mould loved to grow, and the long
white potato-shoots went feeling along the floor, if haply they might
find the daylight; it had great brick pillars, always in a cold sweat
with holding up the burden they had been aching under day and night
far a century and more; it had sepulchral arches closed by rough
doors that hung on hinges rotten with rust, behind which doors, if
there was not a heap of bones connected with a mysterious
disappearance of long ago, there well might have been, for it was
just the place to look for them.  It had a garret; very nearly such a
one as it seems to me one of us has described in one of his books;
but let us look at this one as I can reproduce it from memory.  It
has a flooring of laths with ridges of mortar squeezed up between
them, which if you tread on you will go to--the Lord have mercy on
you! where will you go to?--the same being crossed by narrow bridges
of boards, on which you may put your feet, but with fear and
trembling.  Above you and around you are beams and joists, on some of
which you may see, when the light is let in, the marks of the
conchoidal clippings of the broadaxe, showing the rude way in which
the timber was shaped as it came, full of sap, from the neighboring
forest.  It is a realm of darkness and thick dust, and shroud-like
cobwebs and dead things they wrap in their gray folds.  For a garret
is like a seashore, where wrecks are thrown up and slowly go to
pieces.  There is the cradle which the old man you just remember was
rocked in; there is the ruin of the bedstead he died on; that ugly
slanting contrivance used to be put under his pillow in the days when
his breath came hard; there is his old chair with both arms gone,
symbol of the desolate time when he had nothing earthly left to lean
on; there is the large wooden reel which the blear-eyed old deacon
sent the minister's lady, who thanked him graciously, and twirled it
smilingly, and in fitting season bowed it out decently to the limbo
of troublesome conveniences.  And there are old leather portmanteaus,
like stranded porpoises, their mouths gaping in gaunt hunger for the
food with which they used to be gorged to bulging repletion; and old
brass andirons, waiting until time shall revenge them on their paltry
substitutes, and they shall have their own again, and bring with them
the fore-stick and the back-log of ancient days; and the empty churn,
with its idle dasher, which the Nancys and Phoebes, who have left
their comfortable places to the Bridgets and Norahs, used to handle
to good purpose; and the brown, shaky old spinning-wheel, which was
running, it may be, in the days when they were hinging the Salem
witches.

Under the dark and haunted garret were attic chambers which
themselves had histories.  On a pane in the northeastern chamber may
be read these names:

"John Tracy," "Robert Roberts," "Thomas Prince;" "Stultus" another
hand had added.  When I found these names a few years ago (wrong side
up, for the window had been reversed), I looked at once in the
Triennial to find them, for the epithet showed that they were
probably students.  I found them all under the years 1771 and 1773.
Does it please their thin ghosts thus to be dragged to the light of
day?  Has "Stultus" forgiven the indignity of being thus
characterized?

The southeast chamber was the Library Hospital.  Every scholar should
have a book infirmary attached his library.  There should find a
peaceable refuge the many books, invalids from their birth, which are
sent "with the best regards of the Author"; the respected, but
unpresentable cripples which have lost cover; the odd volumes of
honored sets which go mourning all their days for their lost brother;
the school-books which have been so often the subjects of assault and
battery, that they look as if the police must know them by heart;
these and still more the pictured story-books, beginning with Mother
Goose (which a dear old friend of mine has just been amusing his
philosophic leisure with turning most ingeniously and happily into
the tongues of Virgil and Homer), will be precious mementos by and
by, when children and grandchildren come along.  What would I not
give for that dear little paper-bound quarto, in large and most
legible type, on certain pages of which the tender hand that was the
shield of my infancy had crossed out with deep black marks something
awful, probably about BEARS, such as once tare two-and-forty of us
little folks for making faces, and the very name of which made us
hide our heads under the bedclothes.

I made strange acquaintances in that book infirmary up in the
southeast attic.  The "Negro Plot" at New York helped to implant a
feeling in me which it took Mr. Garrison a good many years to root
out.  "Thinks I to Myself," an old novel, which has been attributed
to a famous statesman, introduced me to a world of fiction which was
not represented on the shelves of the library proper, unless perhaps
by Coelebs in Search of a Wife, or allegories of the bitter tonic
class, as the young doctor that sits on the other side of the table
would probably call them.  I always, from an early age, had a keen
eye for a story with a moral sticking out of it, and gave it a wide
berth, though in my later years I have myself written a couple of
"medicated novels," as one of my dearest and pleasantest old friends
wickedly called them, when somebody asked her if she had read the
last of my printed performances.  I forgave the satire for the
charming esprit of the epithet.  Besides the works I have mentioned,
there was an old, old Latin alchemy book, with the manuscript
annotations of some ancient Rosicrucian, in the pages of which I had
a vague notion that I might find the mighty secret of the Lapis
Philosophorum, otherwise called Chaos, the Dragon, the Green Lion,
the Quinta Essentia, the Soap of Sages, the Vinegar of Philosophers,
the Dew of Heavenly Grace, the Egg, the Old Man, the Sun, the Moon,
and by all manner of odd aliases, as I am assured by the plethoric
little book before me, in parchment covers browned like a meerschaum
with the smoke of furnaces and the thumbing of dead gold seekers, and
the fingering of bony-handed book-misers, and the long intervals of
dusty slumber on the shelves of the bouquiniste; for next year it
will be three centuries old, and it had already seen nine generations
of men when I caught its eye (Alchemiae Doctrina) and recognized it
at pistol-shot distance as a prize, among the breviaries and Heures
and trumpery volumes of the old open-air dealer who exposed his
treasures under the shadow of St. Sulpice.  I have never lost my
taste for alchemy since I first got hold of the Palladium Spagyricum
of Peter John Faber, and sought--in vain, it is true--through its
pages for a clear, intelligible, and practical statement of how I
could turn my lead sinkers and the weights of tall kitchen clock into
good yellow gold, specific gravity 19.2, and exchangeable for
whatever I then wanted, and for many more things than I was then
aware of.  One of the greatest pleasures of childhood found in the
mysteries which it hides from the skepticism of the elders, and works
up into small mythologies of its own.  I have seen all this played
over again in adult life,--the same delightful bewilderment semi-
emotional belief in listening to the gaseous praises of this or that
fantastic system, that I found in the pleasing mirages conjured up
for me by the ragged old volume I used to pore over in the southeast
attic-chamber.

The rooms of the second story, the chambers of birth and death, are
sacred to silent memories.

Let us go down to the ground-floor.  I should have begun with this,
but that the historical reminiscences of the old house have been
recently told in a most interesting memoir by a distinguished student
of our local history.  I retain my doubts about those "dents" on the
floor of the right-hand room, "the study" of successive occupants,
said to have been made by the butts of the Continental militia's
firelocks, but this was the cause to which the story told me in
childhood laid them.  That military consultations were held in that
room when the house was General Ward's headquarters, that the
Provincial generals and colonels and other men of war there planned
the movement which ended in the fortifying of Bunker's Hill, that
Warren slept in the house the night before the battle, that President
Langdon went forth from the western door and prayed for God's
blessing on the men just setting forth on their bloody expedition,--
all these things have been told, and perhaps none of them need be
doubted.

But now for fifty years and more that room has been a meeting-ground
for the platoons and companies which range themselves at the
scholar's word of command.  Pleasant it is to think that the
retreating host of books is to give place to a still larger army of
volumes, which have seen service under the eye of a great commander.
For here the noble collection of him so freshly remembered as our
silver-tongued orator, our erudite scholar, our honored College
President, our accomplished statesman, our courtly ambassador, are to
be reverently gathered by the heir of his name, himself not unworthy
to be surrounded by that august assembly of the wise of all ages and
of various lands and languages.

Could such a many-chambered edifice have stood a century and a half
and not have had its passages of romance to bequeath their lingering
legends to the after-time?  There are other names on some of the
small window-panes, which must have had young flesh-and-blood owners,
and there is one of early date which elderly persons have whispered
was borne by a fair woman, whose graces made the house beautiful in
the eyes of the youth of that time.  One especially--you will find
the name of Fortescue Vernon, of the class of 1780, in the Triennial
Catalogue--was a favored visitor to the old mansion; but he went over
seas, I think they told me, and died still young, and the name of the
maiden which is scratched on the windowpane was never changed.  I am
telling the story honestly, as I remember it, but I may have colored
it unconsciously, and the legendary pane may be broken before this
for aught I know.  At least, I have named no names except the
beautiful one of the supposed hero of the romantic story.

It was a great happiness to have been born in an old house haunted by
such recollections, with harmless ghosts walking its corridors, with
fields of waving grass and trees and singing birds, and that vast
territory of four or five acres around it to give a child the sense
that he was born to a noble principality.  It has been a great
pleasure to retain a certain hold upon it for so many years; and
since in the natural course of things it must at length pass into
other hands, it is a gratification to see the old place making itself
tidy for a new tenant, like some venerable dame who is getting ready
to entertain a neighbor of condition.  Not long since a new cap of
shingles adorned this ancient mother among the village--now city--
mansions.  She has dressed herself in brighter colors than she has
hitherto worn, so they tell me, within the last few days.  She has
modernized her aspects in several ways; she has rubbed bright the
glasses through which she looks at the Common and the Colleges; and
as the sunsets shine upon her through the flickering leaves or the
wiry spray of the elms I remember from my childhood, they will
glorify her into the aspect she wore when President Holyoke, father
of our long since dead centenarian, looked upon her in her youthful
comeliness.

The quiet corner formed by this and the neighboring residences has
changed less than any place I can remember.  Our kindly, polite,
shrewd, and humorous old neighbor, who in former days has served the
town as constable and auctioneer, and who bids fair to become the
oldest inhabitant of the city, was there when I was born, and is
living there to-day.  By and by the stony foot of the great
University will plant itself on this whole territory, and the private
recollections which clung so tenaciously and fondly to the place and
its habitations will have died with those who cherished them.

Shall they ever live again in the memory of those who loved them here
below?  What is this life without the poor accidents which made it
our own, and by which we identify ourselves?  Ah me!  I might like to
be a winged chorister, but still it seems to me I should hardly be
quite happy if I could not recall at will the Old House with the Long
Entry, and the White Chamber (where I wrote the first verses that
made me known, with a pencil, stans pede in uno, pretty, nearly), and
the Little Parlor, and the Study, and the old books in uniforms as
varied as those of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company used
to be, if my memory serves me right, and the front yard with the
Star-of-Bethlehems growing, flowerless, among the grass, and the dear
faces to be seen no more there or anywhere on this earthly place of
farewells.

I have told my story.  I do not know what special gifts have been
granted or denied me; but this I know, that I am like so many others
of my fellow-creatures, that when I smile, I feel as if they must;
when I cry, I think their eyes fill; and it always seems to me that
when I am most truly myself I come nearest to them and am surest of
being listened to by the brothers and sisters of the larger family
into which I was born so long ago.  I have often feared they might be
tired of me and what I tell them.  But then, perhaps, would come a
letter from some quiet body in some out-of-the-way place, which
showed me that I had said something which another had often felt but
never said, or told the secret of another's heart in unburdening my
own.  Such evidences that one is in the highway of human experience
and feeling lighten the footsteps wonderfully.  So it is that one is
encouraged to go on writing as long as the world has anything that
interests him, for he never knows how many of his fellow-beings he
may please or profit, and in how many places his name will be spoken
as that of a friend.

In the mood suggested by my story I have ventured on the poem that
follows.  Most people love this world more than they are willing to
confess, and it is hard to conceive ourselves weaned from it so as to
feel no emotion at the thought of its most sacred recollections, even
after a sojourn of years, as we should count the lapse of earthly
time,--in the realm where, sooner or later, all tears shall be wiped
away.  I hope, therefore, the title of my lines will not frighten
those who are little accustomed to think of men and women as human
beings in any state but the present.


               HOMESICK IN HEAVEN.


               THE DIVINE VOICE.

Go seek thine earth-born sisters,--thus the Voice
That all obey,--the sad and silent three;
These only, while the hosts of heaven rejoice,
Smile never: ask them what their sorrows be:

And when the secret of their griefs they tell,
Look on them with thy mild, half-human eyes;
Say what thou wast on earth; thou knowest well;
So shall they cease from unavailing sighs.


               THE ANGEL.

--Why thus, apart,--the swift-winged herald spake,--
Sit ye with silent lips and unstrung lyres
While the trisagion's blending chords awake
In shouts of joy from all the heavenly choirs?


               THE FIRST SPIRIT.

--Chide not thy sisters,--thus the answer came;--
Children of earth, our half-weaned nature clings
To earth's fond memories, and her whispered name
Untunes our quivering lips, our saddened strings;

For there we loved, and where we love is home,
Home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts,
Though o'er us shine the jasper-lighted dome:--

The chain may lengthen, but it never parts!

Sometimes a sunlit sphere comes rolling by,
And then we softly whisper,--can it be?
And leaning toward the silvery orb, we try
To hear the music of its murmuring sea;

To catch, perchance, some flashing glimpse of green,
Or breathe some wild-wood fragrance, wafted through
The opening gates of pearl, that fold between
The blinding splendors and the changeless blue.


               THE ANGEL.

--Nay, sister, nay! a single healing leaf
Plucked from the bough of yon twelve-fruited tree,
Would soothe such anguish,--deeper stabbing grief
Has pierced thy throbbing heart--


               THE FIRST SPIRIT.

                                  ---Ah, woe is me!
I from my clinging babe was rudely torn;
His tender lips a loveless bosom pressed
Can I forget him in my life new born?
O that my darling lay upon my breast!


               THE ANGEL.

--And thou?


               THE SECOND SPIRIT.

                    I was a fair and youthful bride,

The kiss of love still burns upon my cheek,
He whom I worshipped, ever at my side,--
Him through the spirit realm in vain I seek.

Sweet faces turn their beaming eyes on mine;
Ah! not in these the wished-for look I read;
Still for that one dear human smile I pine;
Thou and none other!--is the lover's creed.


               THE ANGEL.

--And whence thy sadness in a world of bliss
Where never parting comes, nor mourner's tear?
Art thou, too, dreaming of a mortal's kiss
Amid the seraphs of the heavenly sphere?


               THE THIRD SPIRIT.

--Nay, tax not me with passion's wasting fire;
When the swift message set my spirit free,
Blind, helpless, lone, I left my gray-haired sire;
My friends were many, he had none save me.

I left him, orphaned, in the starless night;
Alas, for him no cheerful morning's dawn!
I wear the ransomed spirit's robe of white,
Yet still I hear him moaning, She is gone!


               THE ANGEL.

--Ye know me not, sweet sisters?--All in vain
Ye seek your lost ones in the shapes they wore;
The flower once opened may not bud again,
The fruit once fallen finds the stem no more.

Child, lover, sire,--yea, all things loved below,
Fair pictures damasked on a vapor's fold,
Fade like the roseate flush, the golden glow,
When the bright curtain of the day is rolled.

I was the babe that slumbered on thy breast.
--And, sister, mine the lips that called thee bride.
--Mine were the silvered locks thy hand caressed,
That faithful hand, my faltering footstep's guide!

Each changing form, frail vesture of decay,
The soul unclad forgets it once hath worn,
Stained with the travel of the weary day,
And shamed with rents from every wayside thorn.

To lie, an infant, in thy fond embrace,
To come with love's warm kisses back to thee,
To show thine eyes thy gray-haired father's face,
Not Heaven itself could grant; this may not be!

Then spread your folded wings, and leave to earth
The dust once breathing ye have mourned so long,
Till Love, new risen, owns his heavenly birth,
And sorrow's discords sweeten into song!




II

I am going to take it for granted now and henceforth, in my report of
what was said and what was to be seen at our table, that I have
secured one good, faithful, loving reader, who never finds fault, who
never gets sleepy over my pages, whom no critic can bully out of a
liking for me, and to whom I am always safe in addressing myself.  My
one elect may be man or woman, old or young, gentle or simple, living
in the next block or on a slope of Nevada, my fellow-countryman or an
alien; but one such reader I shall assume to exist and have always in
my thought when I am writing.

A writer is so like a lover!  And a talk with the right listener is
so like an arm-in-arm walk in the moonlight with the soft heartbeat
just felt through the folds of muslin and broadcloth!  But it takes
very little to spoil everything for writer, talker, lover.  There are
a great many cruel things besides poverty that freeze the genial
current of the soul, as the poet of the Elegy calls it.  Fire can
stand any wind, but is easily blown out, and then come smouldering
and smoke, and profitless, slow combustion without the cheerful blaze
which sheds light all round it.  The one Reader's hand may shelter
the flame; the one blessed ministering spirit with the vessel of oil
may keep it bright in spite of the stream of cold water on the other
side doing its best to put it out.

I suppose, if any writer, of any distinguishable individuality, could
look into the hearts of all his readers, he might very probably find
one in his parish of a thousand or a million who honestly preferred
him to any other of his kind.  I have no doubt we have each one of
us, somewhere, our exact facsimile, so like us in all things except
the accidents of condition, that we should love each other like a
pair of twins, if our natures could once fairly meet.  I know I have
my counterpart in some State of this Union.  I feel sure that there
is an Englishman somewhere precisely like myself.  (I hope he does
not drop his h's, for it does not seem to me possible that the Royal
Dane could have remained faithful to his love for Ophelia, if she had
addressed him as 'Amlet.) There is also a certain Monsieur, to me at
this moment unknown, and likewise a Herr Von Something, each of whom
is essentially my double.  An Arab is at this moment eating dates, a
mandarin is just sipping his tea, and a South-Sea-Islander (with
undeveloped possibilities) drinking the milk of a cocoa-nut, each one
of whom, if he had been born in the gambrel-roofed house, and
cultivated my little sand-patch, and grown up in "the study" from
the height of Walton's Polyglot Bible to that of the shelf which held
the Elzevir Tacitus and Casaubon's Polybius, with all the complex
influences about him that surrounded me, would have been so nearly
what I am that I should have loved him like a brother,--always
provided that I did not hate him for his resemblance to me, on the
same principle as that which makes bodies in the same electric
condition repel each other.

For, perhaps after all, my One Reader is quite as likely to be not
the person most resembling myself, but the one to whom my nature is
complementary.  Just as a particular soil wants some one element to
fertilize it, just as the body in some conditions has a kind of
famine--for one special food, so the mind has its wants, which do not
always call for what is best, but which know themselves and are as
peremptory as the salt-sick sailor's call for a lemon or a raw
potato, or, if you will, as those capricious "longings," which have a
certain meaning, we may suppose, and which at any rate we think it
reasonable to satisfy if we can.

I was going to say something about our boarders the other day when I
got run away with by my local reminiscences.  I wish you to
understand that we have a rather select company at the table of our
boarding-house.

Our Landlady is a most respectable person, who has seen better days,
of course,--all landladies have,--but has also, I feel sure, seen a
good deal worse ones.  For she wears a very handsome silk dress on
state occasions, with a breastpin set, as I honestly believe, with
genuine pearls, and appears habitually with a very smart cap, from
under which her gray curls come out with an unmistakable expression,
conveyed in the hieratic language of the feminine priesthood, to the
effect that while there is life there is hope.  And when I come to
reflect on the many circumstances which go to the making of
matrimonial happiness, I cannot help thinking that a personage of her
present able exterior, thoroughly experienced in all the domestic
arts which render life comfortable, might make the later years of
some hitherto companionless bachelor very endurable, not to say
pleasant.

The condition of the Landlady's family is, from what I learn, such as
to make the connection I have alluded to, I hope with delicacy,
desirable for incidental as well as direct reasons, provided a
fitting match could be found.  I was startled at hearing her address
by the familiar name of Benjamin the young physician I have referred
to, until I found on inquiry, what I might have guessed by the size
of his slices of pie and other little marks of favoritism, that he
was her son.  He has recently come back from Europe, where he has
topped off his home training with a first-class foreign finish.  As
the Landlady could never have educated him in this way out of the
profits of keeping boarders, I was not surprised when I was told that
she had received a pretty little property in the form of a bequest
from a former boarder, a very kind-hearted, worthy old gentleman who
had been long with her and seen how hard she worked for food and
clothes for herself and this son of hers, Benjamin Franklin by his
baptismal name.  Her daughter had also married well, to a member of
what we may call the post-medical profession, that, namely, which
deals with the mortal frame after the practitioners of the healing
art have done with it and taken their leave.  So thriving had this
son-in-law of hers been in his business, that his wife drove about in
her own carriage, drawn by a pair of jet-black horses of most
dignified demeanor, whose only fault was a tendency to relapse at
once into a walk after every application of a stimulus that quickened
their pace to a trot; which application always caused them to look
round upon the driver with a surprised and offended air, as if he had
been guilty of a grave indecorum.

The Landlady's daughter had been blessed with a number of children,
of great sobriety of outward aspect, but remarkably cheerful in their
inward habit of mind, more especially on the occasion of the death of
a doll, which was an almost daily occurrence, and gave them immense
delight in getting up a funeral, for which they had a complete
miniature outfit.  How happy they were under their solemn aspect!
For the head mourner, a child of remarkable gifts, could actually
make the tears run down her cheeks,--as real ones as if she had been
a grown person following a rich relative, who had not forgotten his
connections, to his last unfurnished lodgings.

So this was a most desirable family connection for the right man to
step into,--a thriving, thrifty  mother-in-law, who knew what was
good for the sustenance of the body, and had no doubt taught it to
her daughter; a medical artist at hand in case the luxuries of the
table should happen to disturb the physiological harmonies; and in
the worst event, a sweet consciousness that the last sad offices
would be attended to with affectionate zeal, and probably a large
discount from the usual charges.

It seems as if I could hardly be at this table for a year, if I
should stay so long, without seeing some romance or other work itself
out under my eyes; and I cannot help thinking that the Landlady is to
be the heroine of the love-history like to unfold itself.  I think I
see the little cloud in the horizon, with a silvery lining to it,
which may end in a rain of cards tied round with white ribbons.
Extremes meet, and who so like to be the other party as the elderly
gentleman at the other end of the table, as far from her now as the
length of the board permits?  I may be mistaken, but I think this is
to be the romantic episode of the year before me.  Only it seems so
natural it is improbable, for you never find your dropped money just
where you look for it, and so it is with these a priori matches.

This gentleman is a tight, tidy, wiry little man, with a small, brisk
head, close-cropped white hair, a good wholesome complexion, a quiet,
rather kindly face, quick in his movements, neat in his dress, but
fond of wearing a short jacket over his coat, which gives him the
look of a pickled or preserved schoolboy.  He has retired, they say,
from a thriving business, with a snug property, suspected by some to
be rather more than snug, and entitling him to be called a
capitalist, except that this word seems to be equivalent to highway
robber in the new gospel of Saint Petroleum.  That he is economical
in his habits cannot be denied, for he saws and splits his own wood,
for exercise, he says,--and makes his own fires, brushes his own
shoes, and, it is whispered, darns a hole in a stocking now and
then,--all for exercise, I suppose.  Every summer he goes out of town
for a few weeks.  On a given day of the month a wagon stops at the
door and takes up, not his trunks, for he does not indulge in any
such extravagance, but the stout brown linen bags in which he packs
the few conveniences he carries with him.

I do not think this worthy and economical personage will have much to
do or to say, unless he marries the Landlady.  If he does that, he
will play a part of some importance,--but I don't feel sure at all.
His talk is little in amount, and generally ends in some compact
formula condensing much wisdom in few words, as that a man, should
not put all his eggs in one basket; that there are as good fish in
the sea as ever came out of it; and one in particular, which he
surprised me by saying in pretty good French one day, to the effect
that the inheritance of the world belongs to the phlegmatic people,
which seems to me to have a good deal of truth in it.

The other elderly personage, the old man with iron-gray hair and
large round spectacles, sits at my right at table.  He is a retired
college officer, a man of books and observation, and himself an
author.  Magister Artium is one of his titles on the College
Catalogue, and I like best to speak of him as the Master, because he
has a certain air of authority which none of us feel inclined to
dispute.  He has given me a copy of a work of his which seems to me
not wanting in suggestiveness, and which I hope I shall be able to
make some use of in my records by and by.  I said the other day that
he had good solid prejudices, which is true, and I like him none the
worse for it; but he has also opinions more or less original,
valuable, probable, fanciful; fantastic, or whimsical, perhaps, now
and then; which he promulgates at table somewhat in the tone of
imperial edicts.  Another thing I like about him is, that he takes a
certain intelligent interest in pretty much everything that interests
other people.  I asked him the other day what he thought most about
in his wide range of studies.

--Sir,--said he,--I take stock in everything that concerns anybody.
Humani nihil,--you know the rest.  But if you ask me what is my
specialty, I should say, I applied myself more particularly to the
contemplation of the Order of Things.

--A pretty wide subject,--I ventured to suggest.

--Not wide enough, sir,--not wide enough to satisfy the desire of a
mind which wants to get at absolute truth, without reference to the
empirical arrangements of our particular planet and its environments.
I want to subject the formal conditions of space and time to a new
analysis, and project a possible universe outside of the Order of
Things.  But I have narrowed myself by studying the actual facts of
being.  By and by--by and by--perhaps--perhaps.  I hope to do some
sound thinking in heaven--if I ever get there,--he said seriously,
and it seemed to me not irreverently.

--I rather like that,--I said.  I think your telescopic people are,
on the whole, more satisfactory than your microscopic ones.

--My left-hand neighbor fidgeted about a little in his chair as I
said this.  But the young man sitting not far from the Landlady, to
whom my attention had been attracted by the expression of his eyes,
which seemed as if they saw nothing before him, but looked beyond
everything, smiled a sort of faint starlight smile, that touched me
strangely; for until that moment he had appeared as if his thoughts
were far away, and I had been questioning whether he had lost friends
lately, or perhaps had never had them, he seemed so remote from our
boarding-house life.  I will inquire about him, for he interests me,
and I thought he seemed interested as I went on talking.

--No,--I continued,--I don't want to have the territory of a man's
mind fenced in.  I don't want to shut out the mystery of the stars
and the awful hollow that holds them.  We have done with those
hypaethral temples, that were open above to the heavens, but we can
have attics and skylights to them.  Minds with skylights,--yes,--
stop, let us see if we can't get something out of that.

One-story intellects, two--story intellects, three story intellects
with skylights.  All fact--collectors, who have no aim beyond their
facts, are one-story men.  Two-story men compare, reason, generalize,
using the labors of the fact-collectors as well as their own.  Three-
story men idealize, imagine, predict; their best illumination comes
from above, through the skylight.  There are minds with large ground
floors, that can store an infinite amount of knowledge; some
librarians, for instance, who know enough of books to help other
people, without being able to make much other use of their knowledge,
have intellects of this class.  Your great working lawyer has two
spacious stories; his mind is clear, because his mental floors are
large, and he has room to arrange his thoughts so that he can get at
them,--facts below, principles above, and all in ordered series;
poets are often narrow below, incapable of clear statement, and with
small power of consecutive reasoning, but full of light, if sometimes
rather bare of furniture, in the attics.

--The old Master smiled.  I think he suspects himself of a three-
story intellect, and I don't feel sure that he is n't right.


--Is it dark meat or white meat you will be helped to?--said the
Landlady, addressing the Master.

--Dark meat for me, always,--he answered.  Then turning to me, he
began one of those monologues of his, such as that which put the
Member of the Haouse asleep the other day.

--It 's pretty much the same in men and women and in books and
everything, that it is in turkeys and chickens.  Why, take your
poets, now, say Browning and Tennyson.  Don't you think you can say
which is the dark-meat and which is the white-meat poet?  And so of
the people you know; can't you pick out the full-flavored, coarse-
fibred characters from the delicate, fine-fibred ones?  And in the
same person, don't you know the same two shades in different parts of
the character that you find in the wing and thigh of a partridge?  I
suppose you poets may like white meat best, very probably; you had
rather have a wing than a drumstick, I dare say.

--Why, yes,--said I,--I suppose some of us do.  Perhaps it is because
a bird flies with his white-fleshed limbs and walks with the dark-
fleshed ones.  Besides, the wing-muscles are nearer the heart than
the leg-muscles.

I thought that sounded mighty pretty, and paused a moment to pat
myself on the back, as is my wont when I say something that I think
of superior quality.  So I lost my innings; for the Master is apt to
strike in at the end of a bar, instead of waiting for a rest, if I
may borrow a musical phrase.  No matter, just at this moment, what he
said; but he talked the Member of the Haouse asleep again.

They have a new term nowadays (I am speaking to you, the Reader) for
people that do a good deal of talking; they call them
"conversationists," or "conversationalists "; talkists, I suppose,
would do just as well.  It is rather dangerous to get the name of
being one of these phenomenal manifestations, as one is expected to
say something remarkable every time one opens one's mouth in company.
It seems hard not to be able to ask for a piece of bread or a tumbler
of water, without a sensation running round the table, as if one were
an electric eel or a torpedo, and couldn't be touched without giving
a shock.  A fellow is n't all battery, is he?  The idea that a
Gymnotus can't swallow his worm without a coruscation of animal
lightning is hard on that brilliant but sensational being.  Good talk
is not a matter of will at all; it depends--you know we are all half-
materialists nowadays--on a certain amount of active congestion of
the brain, and that comes when it is ready, and not before.  I saw a
man get up the other day in a pleasant company, and talk away for
about five minutes, evidently by a pure effort of will.  His person
was good, his voice was pleasant, but anybody could see that it was
all mechanical labor; he was sparring for wind, as the Hon. John
Morrissey, M. C., would express himself.  Presently,--

Do you,--Beloved, I am afraid you are not old enough,--but do you
remember the days of the tin tinder-box, the flint, and steel?
Click!  click!  click!--Al-h-h!  knuckles that time!  click!  click!
CLICK!  a spark has taken, and is eating into the black tinder, as a
six-year-old eats into a sheet of gingerbread.

Presently, after hammering away for his five minutes with mere words,
the spark of a happy expression took somewhere among the mental
combustibles, and then for ten minutes we had a pretty, wandering,
scintillating play of eloquent thought, that enlivened, if it did not
kindle, all around it.  If you want the real philosophy of it, I will
give it to you.  The chance thought or expression struck the nervous
centre of consciousness, as the rowel of a spur stings the flank of a
racer.  Away through all the telegraphic radiations of the nervous
cords flashed the intelligence that the brain was kindling, and must
be fed with something or other, or it would burn itself to ashes.


And all the great hydraulic engines poured in their scarlet blood,
and the fire kindled, and the flame rose; for the blood is a stream
that, like burning rock-oil, at once kindles, and is itself the fuel.
You can't order these organic processes, any more than a milliner can
make a rose.  She can make something that looks like a rose, more or
less, but it takes all the forces of the universe to finish and
sweeten that blossom in your button-hole; and you may be sure that
when the orator's brain is in a flame, when the poet's heart is in a
tumult, it is something mightier than he and his will that is dealing
with him!  As I have looked from one of the northern windows of the
street which commands our noble estuary,--the view through which is a
picture on an illimitable canvas and a poem in innumerable cantos,--I
have sometimes seen a pleasure-boat drifting along, her sail
flapping, and she seeming as if she had neither will nor aim.  At her
stern a man was laboring to bring her head round with an oar, to
little purpose, as it seemed to those who watched him pulling and
tugging.  But all at once the wind of heaven, which had wandered all
the way from Florida or from Labrador, it may be, struck full upon
the sail, and it swelled and rounded itself, like a white bosom that
had burst its bodice, and--

--You are right; it is too true!  but how I love these pretty
phrases!  I am afraid I am becoming an epicure in words, which is a
bad thing to be, unless it is dominated by something infinitely
better than itself.  But there is a fascination in the mere sound of
articulated breath; of consonants that resist with the firmness of a
maid of honor, or half or wholly yield to the wooing lips; of vowels
that flow and murmur, each after its kind; the peremptory b and p,
the brittle k, the vibrating r, the insinuating s, the feathery f,
the velvety v, the bell-voiced m, the tranquil broad a, the
penetrating e, the cooing u, the emotional o, and the beautiful
combinations of alternate rock and stream, as it were, that they give
to the rippling flow of speech,--there is a fascination in the
skilful handling of these, which the great poets and even prose-
writers have not disdained to acknowledge and use to recommend their
thought.  What do you say to this line of Homer as a piece of
poetical full-band music?  I know you read the Greek characters with
perfect ease, but permit me, just for my own satisfaction, to put it
into English letters:--

          Aigle pamphanoosa di' aitheros ouranon ike!

as if he should have spoken in our poorer phrase of


          Splendor far shining through ether to heaven ascending.

That Greek line, which I do not remember having heard mention of as
remarkable, has nearly every consonantal and vowel sound in the
language.  Try it by the Greek and by the English alphabet; it is a
curiosity.  Tell me that old Homer did not roll his sightless
eyeballs about with delight, as he thundered out these ringing
syllables!  It seems hard to think of his going round like a hand-
organ man, with such music and such thought as his to earn his bread
with.  One can't help wishing that Mr. Pugh could have got at him for
a single lecture, at least, of the "Star Course," or that he could
have appeared in the Music Hall, "for this night only."

--I know I have rambled, but I hope you see that this is a delicate
way of letting you into the nature of the individual who is,
officially, the principal personage at our table.  It would hardly do
to describe him directly, you know.  But you must not think, because
the lightning zigzags, it does not know where to strike.

I shall try to go through the rest of my description of our boarders
with as little of digression as is consistent with my nature.  I
think we have a somewhat exceptional company.  Since our Landlady has
got up in the world, her board has been decidedly a favorite with
persons a little above the average in point of intelligence and
education.  In fact, ever since a boarder of hers, not wholly unknown
to the reading public, brought her establishment into notice, it has
attracted a considerable number of literary and scientific people,
and now and then a politician, like the Member of the House of
Representatives, otherwise called the Great and General Court of the
State of Massachusetts.  The consequence is, that there is more
individuality of character than in a good many similar
boardinghouses, where all are business-men, engrossed in the same
pursuit of money-making, or all are engaged in politics, and so
deeply occupied with the welfare of the community that they can think
and talk of little else.

At my left hand sits as singular-looking a human being as I remember
seeing outside of a regular museum or tent-show.  His black coat
shines as if it had been polished; and it has been polished on the
wearer's back, no doubt, for the arms and other points of maximum
attrition are particularly smooth and bright.  Round shoulders,--
stooping over some minute labor, I suppose.  Very slender limbs, with
bends like a grasshopper's; sits a great deal, I presume; looks as if
he might straighten them out all of a sudden, and jump instead of
walking.  Wears goggles very commonly; says it rests his eyes, which
he strains in looking at very small objects.  Voice has a dry creak,
as if made by some small piece of mechanism that wanted oiling.  I
don't think he is a botanist, for he does not smell of dried herbs,
but carries a camphorated atmosphere about with him, as if to keep
the moths from attacking him.  I must find out what is his particular
interest.  One ought to know something about his immediate neighbors
at the table.  This is what I said to myself, before opening a
conversation with him.  Everybody in our ward of the city was in a
great stir about a certain election, and I thought I might as well
begin with that as anything.

--How do you think the vote is likely to go tomorrow?--I said.

--It isn't to-morrow,--he answered,--it 's next month.

--Next month!--said I.---Why, what election do you mean?

--I mean the election to the Presidency of the Entomological Society,
sir,--he creaked, with an air of surprise, as if nobody could by any
possibility have been thinking of any other.  Great competition, sir,
between the dipterists and the lepidopterists as to which shall get
in their candidate.  Several close ballotings already; adjourned for
a fortnight.  Poor concerns, both of 'em.  Wait till our turn comes.

--I suppose you are an entomologist?--I said with a note of
interrogation.

-Not quite so ambitious as that, sir.  I should like to put my eyes
on the individual entitled to that name!  A society may call itself
an Entomological Society, but the man who arrogates such a broad
title as that to himself, in the present state of science, is a
pretender, sir, a dilettante, an impostor!  No man can be truly
called an entomologist, sir; the subject is too vast for any single
human intelligence to grasp.

--May I venture to ask,--I said, a little awed by his statement and
manner,--what is your special province of study?

I am often spoken of as a Coleopterist,--he said,--but I have no
right to so comprehensive a name.  The genus Scarabaeus is what I
have chiefly confined myself to, and ought to have studied
exclusively.  The beetles proper are quite enough for the labor of
one man's life.  Call me a Scarabaeist if you will; if I can prove
myself worthy of that name, my highest ambition will be more than
satisfied.

I think, by way of compromise and convenience, I shall call him the
Scarabee.  He has come to look wonderfully like those creatures,--the
beetles, I mean,---by being so much among them.  His room is hung
round with cases of them, each impaled on a pin driven through him,
something as they used to bury suicides.  These cases take the place
for him of pictures and all other ornaments.  That Boy steals into
his room sometimes, and stares at them with great admiration, and has
himself undertaken to form a rival cabinet, chiefly consisting of
flies, so far, arranged in ranks superintended by an occasional
spider.

The old Master, who is a bachelor, has a kindly feeling for this
little monkey, and those of his kind.

--I like children,--he said to me one day at table,--I like 'em, and
I respect 'em.  Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in
the world is done by them.  Do you know they play the part in the
household which the king's jester, who very often had a mighty long
head under his cap and bells, used to play for a monarch?  There 's
no radical club like a nest of little folks in a nursery.  Did you
ever watch a baby's fingers?  I have, often enough, though I never
knew what it was to own one.---The Master paused half a minute or
so,--sighed,--perhaps at thinking what he had missed in life,--looked
up at me a little vacantly.  I saw what was the matter; he had lost
the thread of his talk.

--Baby's fingers,--I intercalated.

-Yes, yes; did you ever see how they will poke those wonderful little
fingers of theirs into every fold and crack and crevice they can get
at?  That is their first education, feeling their way into the solid
facts of the material world.  When they begin to talk it is the same
thing over again in another shape.  If there is a crack or a flaw in
your answer to their confounded shoulder-hitting questions, they will
poke and poke until they have got it gaping just as the baby's
fingers have made a rent out of that atom of a hole in his pinafore
that your old eyes never took notice of.  Then they make such fools
of us by copying on a small scale what we do in the grand manner.  I
wonder if it ever occurs to our dried-up neighbor there to ask
himself whether That Boy's collection of flies is n't about as
significant in the Order of Things as his own Museum of Beetles?

--I couldn't help thinking that perhaps That Boy's questions about
the simpler mysteries of life might have a good deal of the same kind
of significance as the Master's inquiries into the Order of Things.

--On my left, beyond my next neighbor the Scarabee, at the end of the
table, sits a person of whom we know little, except that he carries
about him more palpable reminiscences of tobacco and the allied
sources of comfort than a very sensitive organization might find
acceptable.  The Master does not seem to like him much, for some
reason or other,--perhaps he has a special aversion to the odor of
tobacco.  As his forefinger shows a little too distinctly that he
uses a pen, I shall compliment him by calling him the Man of Letters,
until I find out more about him.

--The Young Girl who sits on my right, next beyond the Master, can
hardly be more than nineteen or twenty years old.  I wish I could
paint her so as to interest others as much as she does me.  But she
has not a profusion of sunny tresses wreathing a neck of alabaster,
and a cheek where the rose and the lily are trying to settle their
old quarrel with alternating victory.  Her hair is brown, her cheek
is delicately pallid, her forehead is too ample for a ball-room
beauty's.  A single faint line between the eyebrows is the record of
long--continued anxious efforts to please in the task she has chosen,
or rather which has been forced upon her.  It is the same line of
anxious and conscientious effort which I saw not long since on the
forehead of one of the sweetest and truest singers who has visited
us; the same which is so striking on the masks of singing women
painted upon the facade of our Great Organ,--that Himalayan home of
harmony which you are to see and then die, if you don't live where
you can see and hear it often.  Many deaths have happened in a
neighboring large city from that well-known complaint, Icterus
Invidiosorum, after returning from a visit to the Music Hall.  The
invariable symptom of a fatal attack is the Risus Sardonicus.--But
the Young Girl.  She gets her living by writing stories for a
newspaper.  Every week she furnishes a new story.  If her head aches
or her heart is heavy, so that she does not come to time with her
story, she falls behindhand and has to live on credit.  It sounds
well enough to say that "she supports herself by her pen," but her
lot is a trying one; it repeats the doom of the Danaides.  The
"Weekly Bucket" has no bottom, and it is her business to help fill
it.  Imagine for one moment what it is to tell a tale that must flow
on, flow ever, without pausing; the lover miserable and happy this
week, to begin miserable again next week and end as before; the
villain scowling, plotting, punished; to scowl, plot, and get
punished again in our next; an endless series of woes and busses,
into each paragraph of which the forlorn artist has to throw all the
liveliness, all the emotion, all the graces of style she is mistress
of, for the wages of a maid of all work, and no more recognition or
thanks from anybody than the apprentice who sets the types for the
paper that prints her ever-ending and ever-beginning stories.  And
yet she has a pretty talent, sensibility, a natural way of writing,
an ear for the music of verse, in which she sometimes indulges to
vary the dead monotony of everlasting narrative, and a sufficient
amount of invention to make her stories readable.  I have found my
eyes dimmed over them oftener than once, more with thinking about
her, perhaps, than about her heroes and heroines.  Poor little body!
Poor little mind!  Poor little soul!  She is one of that great
company of delicate, intelligent, emotional young creatures, who are
waiting, like that sail I spoke of, for some breath of heaven to fill
their white bosoms,--love, the right of every woman; religious
emotion, sister of love, with the same passionate eyes, but cold,
thin, bloodless hands,--some enthusiasm of humanity or divinity; and
find that life offers them, instead, a seat on a wooden bench, a
chain to fasten them to it, and a heavy oar to pull day and night.
We read the Arabian tales and pity the doomed lady who must amuse her
lord and master from day to day or have her head cut off; how much
better is a mouth without bread to fill it than no mouth at all to
fill, because no head?  We have all round us a weary-eyed company of
Scheherezades!  This is one of them, and I may call her by that name
when it pleases me to do so.

The next boarder I have to mention is the one who sits between the
Young Girl and the Landlady.  In a little chamber into which a small
thread of sunshine finds its way for half an hour or so every day
during a month or six weeks of the spring or autumn, at all other
times obliged to content itself with ungilded daylight, lives this
boarder, whom, without wronging any others of our company, I may
call, as she is very generally called in the household, The Lady.  In
giving her this name it is not meant that there are no other ladies
at our table, or that the handmaids who serve us are not ladies, or
to deny the general proposition that everybody who wears the
unbifurcated garment is entitled to that appellation.  Only this lady
has a look and manner which there is no mistaking as belonging to a
person always accustomed to refined and elegant society.  Her style
is perhaps a little more courtly and gracious than some would like.
The language and manner which betray the habitual desire of pleasing,
and which add a charm to intercourse in the higher social circles,
are liable to be construed by sensitive beings unused to such
amenities as an odious condescension when addressed to persons of
less consideration than the accused, and as a still more odious--you
know the word--when directed to those who are esteemed by the world
as considerable person ages.  But of all this the accused are
fortunately wholly unconscious, for there is nothing so entirely
natural and unaffected as the highest breeding.

From an aspect of dignified but undisguised economy which showed
itself in her dress as well as in her limited quarters, I suspected a
story of shipwrecked fortune, and determined to question our
Landlady.  That worthy woman was delighted to tell the history of her
most distinguished boarder.  She was, as I had supposed, a
gentlewoman whom a change of circumstances had brought down from her
high estate.

--Did I know the Goldenrod family?--Of course I did.---Well, the
Lady, was first cousin to Mrs. Midas Goldenrod.  She had been here in
her carriage to call upon her,--not very often.---Were her rich
relations kind and helpful to her?--Well, yes; at least they made her
presents now and then.  Three or four years ago they sent her a
silver waiter, and every Christmas they sent her a boquet,--it must
cost as much as five dollars, the Landlady thought.

--And how did the Lady receive these valuable and useful gifts?

--Every Christmas she got out the silver waiter and borrowed a glass
tumbler and filled it with water, and put the boquet in it and set it
on the waiter.  It smelt sweet enough and looked pretty for a day or
two, but the Landlady thought it wouldn't have hurt 'em if they'd
sent a piece of goods for a dress, or at least a pocket-handkercher
or two, or something or other that she could 'a' made some kind of
use of; but beggars must n't be choosers; not that she was a beggar,
for she'd sooner die than do that if she was in want of a meal of
victuals.  There was a lady I remember, and she had a little boy and
she was a widow, and after she'd buried her husband she was dreadful
poor, and she was ashamed to let her little boy go out in his old
shoes, and copper-toed shoes they was too, because his poor little
ten--toes--was a coming out of 'em; and what do you think my
husband's rich uncle,--well, there now, it was me and my little
Benjamin, as he was then, there's no use in hiding of it,--and what
do you think my husband's uncle sent me but a plaster of Paris image
of a young woman, that was,--well, her appearance wasn't respectable,
and I had to take and wrap her up in a towel and poke her right into
my closet, and there she stayed till she got her head broke and
served her right, for she was n't fit to show folks.  You need n't
say anything about what I told you, but the fact is I was desperate
poor before I began to support myself taking boarders, and a lone
woman without her--her--

The sentence plunged into the gulf of her great remembered sorrow,
and was lost to the records of humanity.

--Presently she continued in answer to my questions: The Lady was not
very sociable; kept mostly to herself.  The Young Girl (our
Scheherezade) used to visit her sometimes, and they seemed to like
each other, but the Young Girl had not many spare hours for visiting.
The Lady never found fault, but she was very nice in her tastes, and
kept everything about her looking as neat and pleasant as she could.

---What did she do?--Why, she read, and she drew pictures, and she
did needlework patterns, and played on an old harp she had; the gilt
was mostly off, but it sounded very sweet, and she sung to it
sometimes, those old songs that used to be in fashion twenty or
thirty years ago, with words to 'em that folks could understand.

Did she do anything to help support herself ?--The Landlady couldn't
say she did, but she thought there was rich people enough that ought
to buy the flowers and things she worked and painted.

All this points to the fact that she was bred to be an ornamental
rather than what is called a useful member of society.  This is all
very well so long as fortune favors those who are chosen to be the
ornamental personages; but if the golden tide recedes and leaves them
stranded, they are more to be pitied than almost any other class.  "I
cannot dig, to beg I am ashamed."

I think it is unpopular in this country to talk much about gentlemen
and gentlewomen.  People are touchy about social distinctions, which
no doubt are often invidious and quite arbitrary and accidental, but
which it is impossible to avoid recognizing as facts of natural
history.  Society stratifies itself everywhere, and the stratum which
is generally recognized as the uppermost will be apt to have the
advantage in easy grace of manner and in unassuming confidence, and
consequently be more agreeable in the superficial relations of life.
To compare these advantages with the virtues and utilities would be
foolish.  Much of the noblest work in life is done by ill-dressed,
awkward, ungainly persons; but that is no more reason for
undervaluing good manners and what we call high-breeding, than the
fact that the best part of the sturdy labor of the world is done by
men with exceptionable hands is to be urged against the use of Brown
Windsor as a preliminary to appearance in cultivated society.

I mean to stand up for this poor lady, whose usefulness in the world
is apparently problematical.  She seems to me like a picture which
has fallen from its gilded frame and lies, face downward, on the
dusty floor.  The picture never was as needful as a window or a door,
but it was pleasant to see it in its place, and it would be pleasant
to see it there again, and I, for one, should be thankful to have the
Lady restored by some turn of fortune to the position from which she
has been so cruelly cast down.

--I have asked the Landlady about the young man sitting near her, the
same who attracted my attention the other day while I was talking, as
I mentioned.  He passes most of his time in a private observatory, it
appears; a watcher of the stars.  That I suppose gives the peculiar
look to his lustrous eyes.  The Master knows him and was pleased to
tell me something about him.

You call yourself a Poet,--he said,--and we call you so, too, and so
you are; I read your verses and like 'em.  But that young man lives
in a world beyond the imagination of poets, let me tell you.  The
daily home of his thought is in illimitable space, hovering between
the two eternities.  In his contemplations the divisions of time run
together, as in the thought of his Maker.  With him also,--I say it
not profanely,--one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years
as one day.

This account of his occupation increased the interest his look had
excited in me, and I have observed him more particularly and found
out more about him.  Sometimes, after a long night's watching, he
looks so pale and worn, that one would think the cold moonlight had
stricken him with some malign effluence such as it is fabled to send
upon those who sleep in it.  At such times he seems more like one who
has come from a planet farther away from the sun than our earth, than
like one of us terrestrial creatures.  His home is truly in the
heavens, and he practises an asceticism in the cause of science
almost comparable to that of Saint Simeon Stylites.  Yet they tell me
he might live in luxury if he spent on himself what he spends on
science.  His knowledge is of that strange, remote character, that it
seems sometimes almost superhuman.  He knows the ridges and chasms of
the moon as a surveyor knows a garden-plot he has measured.  He
watches the snows that gather around the poles of Mars; he is on the
lookout for the expected comet at the moment when its faint stain of
diffused light first shows itself; he analyzes the ray that comes
from the sun's photosphere; he measures the rings of Saturn; he
counts his asteroids to see that none are missing, as the shepherd
counts the sheep in his flock.  A strange unearthly being; lonely,
dwelling far apart from the thoughts and cares of the planet on which
he lives,--an enthusiast who gives his life to knowledge; a student
of antiquity, to whom the records of the geologist are modern pages
in the great volume of being, and the pyramids a memorandum of
yesterday, as the eclipse or occultation that is to take place
thousands of years hence is an event of to-morrow in the diary
without beginning and without end where he enters the aspect of the
passing moment as it is read on the celestial dial.

In very marked contrast with this young man is the something more
than middle-aged Register of Deeds, a rusty, sallow, smoke-dried
looking personage, who belongs to this earth as exclusively as the
other belongs to the firmament.  His movements are as mechanical as
those of a pendulum,--to the office, where he changes his coat and
plunges into messuages and building-lots; then, after changing his
coat again, back to our table, and so, day by day, the dust of years
gradually gathering around him as it does on the old folios that fill
the shelves all round the great cemetery of past transactions of
which he is the sexton.

Of the Salesman who sits next him, nothing need be said except that
he is good-looking, rosy, well-dressed, and of very polite manners,
only a little more brisk than the approved style of carriage permits,
as one in the habit of springing with a certain alacrity at the call
of a customer.

You would like to see, I don't doubt, how we sit at the table, and I
will help you by means of a diagram which shows the present
arrangement of our seats.


            4     3     2     1     14    13
          ---------------------------------
          | O     O     O     O     O     O |
          |                                 |
        5 | O       Breakfast-Table       O |12
          |                                 |
          | O     O     O     O     O     O |
          ---------------------------------
            6     7     8     9     10    11

     1.  The Poet.
     2.  The Master Of Arts.
     3.  The Young Girl (Scheherezade).
     4.  The Lady.
     5.  The Landlady.
     6.  Dr. B. Franklin.
     7.  That Boy.
     8.  The Astronomer.
     9.  The Member of the Haouse.
    10.  The Register of Deeds.
    11.  The Salesman.
    12.  The Capitalist.
    13.  The Man of Letters(?).
    14.  The Scarabee.


Our young Scheherezade varies her prose stories now and then, as I
told you, with compositions in verse, one or two of which she has let
me look over.  Here is one of them, which she allowed me to copy.  It
is from a story of hers, "The Sun-Worshipper's Daughter," which you
may find in the periodical before mentioned, to which she is a
contributor, if your can lay your hand upon a file of it.  I think
our Scheherezade has never had a lover in human shape, or she would
not play so lightly with the firebrands of the great passion.



          FANTASIA.

Kiss mine eyelids, beauteous Morn,
Blushing into life new-born!
Lend me violets for my hair,
And thy russet robe to wear,
And thy ring of rosiest hue
Set in drops of diamond dew!

Kiss my cheek, thou noontide ray,
From my Love so far away!
Let thy splendor streaming down
Turn its pallid lilies brown,
Till its darkening shades reveal
Where his passion pressed its seal!

Kiss my lips, thou Lord of light,
Kiss my lips a soft good night!
Westward sinks thy golden car;
Leave me but the evening star,
And my solace that shall be,
Borrowing all its light from thee!




III

The old Master was talking about a concert he had been to hear.
--I don't like your chopped music anyway.  That woman--she had more
sense in her little finger than forty medical societies--Florence
Nightingale--says that the music you pour out is good for sick folks,
and the music you pound out isn't.  Not that exactly, but something
like it.  I have been to hear some music-pounding.  It was a young
woman, with as many white muslin flounces round her as the planet
Saturn has rings, that did it.  She--gave the music-stool a twirl or
two and fluffed down on to it like a whirl of soap-suds in a hand-
basin.  Then she pushed up her cuffs as if she was going to fight for
the champion's belt.  Then she worked her wrists and her hands, to
limber 'em, I suppose, and spread out her fingers till they looked as
though they would pretty much cover the key-board, from the growling
end to the little squeaky one.  Then those two hands of hers made a
jump at the keys as if they were a couple of tigers coming down on a
flock of black and white sheep, and the piano gave a great howl as if
its tail had been trod on.  Dead stop,--so still you could hear your
hair growing.  Then another jump, and another howl, as if the piano
had two tails and you had trod on both of 'em at once, and, then a
grand clatter and scramble and string of jumps, up and down, back and
forward, one hand over the other, like a stampede of rats and mice
more than like anything I call music.  I like to hear a woman sing,
and I like to hear a fiddle sing, but these noises they hammer out of
their wood and ivory anvils--don't talk to me, I know the difference
between a bullfrog and a woodthrush and

Pop!  went a small piece of artillery such as is made of a stick of
elder and carries a pellet of very moderate consistency.  That Boy
was in his seat and looking demure enough, but there could be no
question that he was the artillery-man who had discharged the
missile.  The aim was not a bad one, for it took the Master full in
the forehead, and had the effect of checking the flow of his
eloquence.  How the little monkey had learned to time his
interruptions I do not know, but I have observed more than once
before this, that the popgun would go off just at the moment when
some one of the company was getting too energetic or prolix.  The Boy
isn't old enough to judge for himself when to intervene to change the
order of conversation; no, of course he isn't.  Somebody must give
him a hint.  Somebody.--Who is it?  I suspect Dr. B. Franklin.  He
looks too knowing.  There is certainly a trick somewhere.  Why, a day
or two ago I was myself discoursing, with considerable effect, as I
thought, on some of the new aspects of humanity, when I was struck
full on the cheek by one of these little pellets, and there was such
a confounded laugh that I had to wind up and leave off with a
preposition instead of a good mouthful of polysyllables.  I have
watched our young Doctor, however, and have been entirely unable to
detect any signs of communication between him and this audacious
child, who is like to become a power among us, for that popgun is
fatal to any talker who is hit by its pellet.  I have suspected a
foot under the table as the prompter, but I have been unable to
detect the slightest movement or look as if he were making one, on
the part of Dr. Benjamin Franklin.  I cannot help thinking of the
flappers in Swift's Laputa, only they gave one a hint when to speak
and another a hint to listen, whereas the popgun says unmistakably,
"Shut up!"

--I should be sorry to lose my confidence in Dr. B. Franklin, who
seems very much devoted to his business, and whom I mean to consult
about some small symptoms I have had lately.  Perhaps it is coming to
a new boarding-house.  The young people who come into Paris from the
provinces are very apt--so I have been told by one that knows--to
have an attack of typhoid fever a few weeks or months after their
arrival.  I have not been long enough at this table to get well
acclimated; perhaps that is it.  Boarding-House Fever.  Something
like horse-ail, very likely,--horses get it, you know, when they are
brought to city stables.  A little "off my feed," as Hiram Woodruff
would say.  A queer discoloration about my forehead.  Query, a bump?
Cannot remember any.  Might have got it against bedpost or something
while asleep.  Very unpleasant to look so.  I wonder how my portrait
would look, if anybody should take it now!  I hope not quite so badly
as one I saw the other day, which I took for the end man of the
Ethiopian Serenaders, or some traveller who had been exploring the
sources of the Niger, until I read the name at the bottom and found
it was a face I knew as well as my own.

I must consult somebody, and it is nothing more than fair to give our
young Doctor a chance.  Here goes for Dr. Benjamin Franklin.

The young Doctor has a very small office and a very large sign, with
a transparency at night big enough for an oyster-shop.  These young
doctors are particularly strong, as I understand, on what they call
diagnosis,--an excellent branch of the healing art, full of
satisfaction to the curious practitioner, who likes to give the right
Latin name to one's complaint; not quite so satisfactory to the
patient, as it is not so very much pleasanter to be bitten by a dog
with a collar round his neck telling you that he is called Snap or
Teaser, than by a dog without a collar.  Sometimes, in fact, one
would a little rather not know the exact name of his complaint, as if
he does he is pretty sure to look it out in a medical dictionary, and
then if he reads, This terrible disease is attended with vast
suffering and is inevitably mortal, or any such statement, it is apt
to affect him unpleasantly.

I confess to a little shakiness when I knocked at Dr. Benjamin's
office door.  "Come in!" exclaimed Dr. B. F. in tones that sounded
ominous and sepulchral.  And I went in.

I don't believe the chambers of the Inquisition ever presented a more
alarming array of implements for extracting a confession, than our
young Doctor's office did of instruments to make nature tell what was
the matter with a poor body.

There were Ophthalmoscopes and Rhinoscopes and Otoscopes and
Laryngoscopes and Stethoscopes; and Thermometers and Spirometers and
Dynamometers and Sphygmometers and Pleximeters; and Probes and
Probangs and all sorts of frightful inquisitive exploring
contrivances; and scales to weigh you in, and tests and balances and
pumps and electro-magnets and magneto-electric machines; in short,
apparatus for doing everything but turn you inside out.

Dr. Benjamin set me down before his one window and began looking at
me with such a superhuman air of sagacity, that I felt like one of
those open-breasted clocks which make no secret of their inside
arrangements, and almost thought he could see through me as one sees
through a shrimp or a jelly-fish.  First he looked at the place
inculpated, which had a sort of greenish-brown color, with his naked
eyes, with much corrugation of forehead and fearful concentration of
attention; then through a pocket-glass which he carried.  Then he
drew back a space, for a perspective view.  Then he made me put out
my tongue and laid a slip of blue paper on it, which turned red and
scared me a little.  Next he took my wrist; but instead of counting
my pulse in the old-fashioned way, he fastened a machine to it that
marked all the beats on a sheet of paper,--for all the world like a
scale of the heights of mountains, say from Mount Tom up to
Chimborazo and then down again, and up again, and so on.  In the mean
time he asked me all sorts of questions about myself and all my
relatives, whether we had been subject to this and that malady, until
I felt as if we must some of us have had more or less of them, and
could not feel quite sure whether Elephantiasis and Beriberi and
Progressive Locomotor Ataxy did not run in the family.

After all this overhauling of myself and my history, he paused and
looked puzzled.  Something was suggested about what he called an
"exploratory puncture."  This I at once declined, with thanks.
Suddenly a thought struck him.  He looked still more closely at the
discoloration I have spoken of.

--Looks like--I declare it reminds me of--very rare! very curious!
It would be strange if my first case--of this kind--should be one of
our boarders!

What kind of a case do you call it?--I said, with a sort of feeling
that he could inflict a severe or a light malady on me, as if he were
a judge passing sentence.

--The color reminds me,--said Dr. B. Franklin,--of what I have seen
in a case of Addison's Disease, Morbus Addisonii.

--But my habits are quite regular,--I said; for I remembered that the
distinguished essayist was too fond of his brandy and water, and I
confess that the thought was not pleasant to me of following Dr.
Johnson's advice, with the slight variation of giving my days and my
nights to trying on the favorite maladies of Addison.

--Temperance people are subject to it!--exclaimed Dr. Benjamin,
almost exultingly, I thought.

--But I had the impression that the author of the Spectator was
afflicted with a dropsy, or some such inflated malady, to which
persons of sedentary and bibacious habits are liable.  [A literary
swell,--I thought to myself, but I did not say it.  I felt too
serious.]

--The author of the Spectator!--cried out Dr. Benjamin,--I mean the
celebrated Dr. Addison, inventor, I would say discoverer, of the
wonderful new disease called after him.

---And what may this valuable invention or discovery consist in?--I
asked, for I was curious to know the nature of the gift which this
benefactor of the race had bestowed upon us.

--A most interesting affection, and rare, too.  Allow me to look
closely at that discoloration once more for a moment.  Cutis cenea,
bronze skin, they call it sometimes--extraordinary pigmentation--a
little more to the light, if you please--ah! now I get the bronze
coloring admirably, beautifully!  Would you have any objection to
showing your case to the Societies of Medical Improvement and Medical
Observation?

[--My case!  O dear!] May I ask if any vital organ is commonly
involved in this interesting complaint?--I said, faintly.

--Well, sir,--the young Doctor replied,--there is an organ which is--
sometimes--a little touched, I may say; a very curious and ingenious
little organ or pair of organs.  Did you ever hear of the Capsulae,
Suprarenales?

--No,--said I,--is it a mortal complaint?--I ought to have known
better than to ask such a question, but I was getting nervous and
thinking about all sorts of horrid maladies people are liable to,
with horrid names to match.

--It is n't a complaint,--I mean they are not a complaint,--they are
two small organs, as I said, inside of you, and nobody knows what is
the use of them.  The most curious thing is that when anything is the
matter with them you turn of the color of bronze.  After all, I
didn't mean to say I believed it was Morbus Addisonii; I only thought
of that when I saw the discoloration.

So he gave me a recipe, which I took care to put where it could do no
hurt to anybody, and I paid him his fee (which he took with the air
of a man in the receipt of a great income) and said Good-morning.


--What in the name of a thousand diablos is the reason these
confounded doctors will mention their guesses about "a case," as they
call it, and all its conceivable possibilities, out loud before their
patients?  I don't suppose there is anything in all this nonsense
about "Addison's Disease," but I wish he hadn't spoken of that very
interesting ailment, and I should feel a little easier if that
discoloration would leave my forehead.  I will ask the Landlady about
it,--these old women often know more than the young doctors just come
home with long names for everything they don't know how to cure.  But
the name of this complaint sets me thinking.  Bronzed skin!  What an
odd idea!  Wonder if it spreads all over one.  That would be
picturesque and pleasant, now, wouldn't it?  To be made a living
statue of,--nothing to do but strike an attitude.  Arm up--so--like
the one in the Garden.  John of Bologna's Mercury--thus on one foot.
Needy knife-grinder in the Tribune at Florence.  No, not "needy,"
come to think of it.  Marcus Aurelius on horseback.  Query.  Are
horses subject to the Morbus Addisonii?  Advertise for a bronzed
living horse--Lyceum invitations and engagements--bronze versus
brass.---What 's the use in being frightened?  Bet it was a bump.
Pretty certain I bumped my forehead against something.  Never heard
of a bronzed man before.  Have seen white men, black men, red men,
yellow men, two or three blue men, stained with doctor's stuff; some
green ones, from the country; but never a bronzed man.  Poh, poh!
Sure it was a bump.  Ask Landlady to look at it.

--Landlady did look at it.  Said it was a bump, and no mistake.
Recommended a piece of brown paper dipped in vinegar.  Made the house
smell as if it were in quarantine for the plague from Smyrna, but
discoloration soon disappeared,--so I did not become a bronzed man
after all,--hope I never shall while I am alive.  Should n't mind
being done in bronze after I was dead.  On second thoughts not so
clear about it, remembering how some of them look that we have got
stuck up in public; think I had rather go down to posterity in an
Ethiopian Minstrel portrait, like our friend's the other day.


--You were kind enough to say, I remarked to the Master, that you
read my poems and liked them.  Perhaps you would be good enough to
tell me what it is you like about them?

The Master harpooned a breakfast-roll and held it up before me.--Will
you tell me,--he said,--why you like that breakfast-roll?--I suppose
he thought that would stop my mouth in two senses.  But he was
mistaken.

--To be sure I will,--said I.---First, I like its mechanical
consistency; brittle externally,--that is for the teeth, which want
resistance to be overcome; soft, spongy, well tempered and flavored
internally, that is for the organ of taste; wholesome, nutritious,--
that is for the internal surfaces and the system generally.

--Good,--said the Master, and laughed a hearty terrestrial laugh.

I hope he will carry that faculty of an honest laugh with him
wherever he goes,--why shouldn't he?  The "order of things," as he
calls it, from which hilarity was excluded, would be crippled and
one-sided enough.  I don't believe the human gamut will be cheated of
a single note after men have done breathing this fatal atmospheric
mixture and die into the ether of immortality!

I did n't say all that; if I had said it, it would have brought a
pellet from the popgun, I feel quite certain.

The Master went on after he had had out his laugh.--There is one
thing I am His Imperial Majesty about, and that is my likes and
dislikes.  What if I do like your verses,--you can't help yourself.
I don't doubt somebody or other hates 'em and hates you and
everything you do, or ever did, or ever can do.  He is all right;
there is nothing you or I like that somebody does n't hate.  Was
there ever anything wholesome that was not poison to somebody?  If
you hate honey or cheese, or the products of the dairy,--I know a
family a good many of whose members can't touch milk, butter, cheese,
and the like, why, say so, but don't find fault with the bees and the
cows.  Some are afraid of roses, and I have known those who thought a
pond-lily a disagreeable neighbor.  That Boy will give you the
metaphysics of likes and dislikes.  Look here,--you young philosopher
over there,--do you like candy?

That Boy.---You bet!  Give me a stick and see if I don't.

And can you tell me why you like candy?

That Boy.--Because I do.

--There, now, that is the whole matter in a nutshell.  Why do your
teeth like crackling crust, and your organs of taste like spongy
crumb, and your digestive contrivances take kindly to bread rather
than toadstools--

That Boy (thinking he was still being catechised).--Because they do.

Whereupon the Landlady said, Sh! and the Young Girl laughed, and the
Lady smiled; and Dr. Ben Franklin kicked him, moderately, under the
table, and the Astronomer looked up at the ceiling to see what had
happened, and the Member of the Haouse cried, Order! Order! and the
Salesman said, Shut up, cash-boy! and the rest of the boarders kept
on feeding; except the Master, who looked very hard but half
approvingly at the small intruder, who had come about as nearly right
as most professors would have done.

--You poets,--the Master said after this excitement had calmed down,
--you poets have one thing about you that is odd.  You talk about
everything as if you knew more about it than the people whose
business it is to know all about it.  I suppose you do a little of
what we teachers used to call "cramming" now and then?

--If you like your breakfast you must n't ask the cook too many
questions,--I answered.

--Oh, come now, don't be afraid of letting out your secrets.  I have
a notion I can tell a poet that gets himself up just as I can tell a
make-believe old man on the stage by the line where the gray skullcap
joins the smooth forehead of the young fellow of seventy.  You'll
confess to a rhyming dictionary anyhow, won't you?

--I would as lief use that as any other dictionary, but I don't want
it.  When a word comes up fit to end a line with I can feel all the
rhymes in the language that are fit to go with it without naming
them.  I have tried them all so many times, I know all the polygamous
words and all the monogamous ones, and all the unmarrying ones,--the
whole lot that have no mates,--as soon as I hear their names called.
Sometimes I run over a string of rhymes, but generally speaking it is
strange what a short list it is of those that are good for anything.
That is the pitiful side of all rhymed verse.  Take two such words as
home and world.  What can you do with chrome or loam or gnome or
tome?  You have dome, foam, and roam, and not much more to use in
your pome, as some of our fellow-countrymen call it.  As for world,
you know that in all human probability somebody or something will be
hurled into it or out of it; its clouds may be furled or its grass
impearled; possibly something may be whirled, or curled, or have
swirled, one of Leigh Hunt's words, which with lush, one of Keats's,
is an important part of the stock in trade of some dealers in rhyme.

--And how much do you versifiers know of all those arts and sciences
you refer to as if you were as familiar with them as a cobbler is
with his wax and lapstone?

--Enough not to make too many mistakes.  The best way is to ask some
expert before one risks himself very far in illustrations from a
branch he does not know much about.  Suppose, for instance, I wanted
to use the double star to illustrate anything, say the relation of
two human souls to each other, what would I--do?  Why, I would ask
our young friend there to let me look at one of those loving
celestial pairs through his telescope, and I don't doubt he'd let me
do so, and tell me their names and all I wanted to know about them.

--I should be most happy to show any of the double stars or whatever
else there might be to see in the heavens to any of our friends at
this table,--the young man said, so cordially and kindly that it was
a real invitation.

--Show us the man in the moon,--said That Boy.---I should so like to
see a double star!--said Scheherezade, with a very pretty air of
smiling modesty.

--Will you go, if we make up a party?--I asked the Master.

--A cold in the head lasts me from three to five days,--answered the
Master.--I am not so very fond of being out in the dew like
Nebuchadnezzar: that will do for you young folks.

--I suppose I must be one of the young folks, not so young as our
Scheherezade, nor so old as the Capitalist,--young enough at any rate
to want to be of the party.  So we agreed that on some fair night
when the Astronomer should tell us that there was to be a fine show
in the skies, we would make up a party and go to the Observatory.  I
asked the Scarabee whether he would not like to make one of us.

--Out of the question, sir, out of the question.  I am altogether too
much occupied with an important scientific investigation to devote
any considerable part of an evening to star-gazing.

--Oh, indeed,--said I,--and may I venture to ask on what particular
point you are engaged just at present?

-Certainly, sir, you may.  It is, I suppose, as difficult and
important a matter to be investigated as often comes before a student
of natural history.  I wish to settle the point once for all whether
the Pediculus Mellitae is or is not the larva of Meloe.

[--Now is n't this the drollest world to live in that one could
imagine, short of being in a fit of delirium tremens?  Here is a
fellow-creature of mine and yours who is asked to see all the glories
of the firmament brought close to him, and he is too busy with a
little unmentionable parasite that infests the bristly surface of a
bee to spare an hour or two of a single evening for the splendors of
the universe!  I must get a peep through that microscope of his and
see the pediculus which occupies a larger space in his mental vision
than the midnight march of the solar systems.---The creature, the
human one, I mean, interests me.]

--I am very curious,--I said,--about that pediculus melittae,--(just
as if I knew a good deal about the little wretch and wanted to know
more, whereas I had never heard him spoken of before, to my
knowledge,)--could you let me have a sight of him in your microscope?

--You ought to have seen the way in which the poor dried-up little
Scarabee turned towards me.  His eyes took on a really human look,
and I almost thought those antennae-like arms of his would have
stretched themselves out and embraced me.  I don't believe any of the
boarders had ever shown any interest in--him, except the little
monkey of a Boy, since he had been in the house.  It is not strange;
he had not seemed to me much like a human being, until all at once I
touched the one point where his vitality had concentrated itself, and
he stood revealed a man and a brother.

--Come in,--said he,--come in, right after breakfast, and you shall
see the animal that has convulsed the entomological world with
questions as to his nature and origin.

--So I went into the Scarabee's parlor, lodging-room, study,
laboratory, and museum,--a--single apartment applied to these various
uses, you understand.

--I wish I had time to have you show me all your treasures,--I said,
--but I am afraid I shall hardly be able to do more than look at the
bee-parasite.  But what a superb butterfly you have in that case!

--Oh, yes, yes, well enough,--came from South America with the beetle
there; look at him!  These Lepidoptera are for children to play with,
pretty to look at, so some think.  Give me the Coleoptera, and the
kings of the Coleoptera are the beetles!  Lepidoptera and Neuroptera
for little folks; Coleopteras for men, sir!

--The particular beetle he showed me in the case with the magnificent
butterfly was an odious black wretch that one would say, Ugh! at, and
kick out of his path, if he did not serve him worse than that.  But
he looked at it as a coin-collector would look at a Pescennius Niger,
if the coins of that Emperor are as scarce as they used to be when I
was collecting half-penny tokens and pine-tree shillings and battered
bits of Roman brass with the head of Gallienus or some such old
fellow on them.

--A beauty!--he exclaimed,--and the only specimen of the kind in this
country, to the best of my belief.  A unique, sir, and there is a
pleasure in exclusive possession.  Not another beetle like that short
of South America, sir.

--I was glad to hear that there were no more like it in this
neighborhood, the present supply of cockroaches answering every
purpose, so far as I am concerned, that such an animal as this would
be likely to serve.

--Here are my bee-parasites,--said the Scarabee, showing me a box
full of glass slides, each with a specimen ready mounted for the
microscope.  I was most struck with one little beast flattened out
like a turtle, semi-transparent, six-legged, as I remember him, and
every leg terminated by a single claw hooked like a lion's and as
formidable for the size of the creature as that of the royal beast.

--Lives on a bumblebee, does he?--I said.  That's the way I call it.
Bumblebee or bumblybee and huckleberry.  Humblebee and whortleberry
for people that say Woos-ses-ter and Nor-wich.

--The Scarabee did not smile; he took no interest in trivial matters
like this.

--Lives on a bumblebee.  When you come to think of it, he must lead a
pleasant kind of life.  Sails through the air without the trouble of
flying.  Free pass everywhere that the bee goes.  No fear of being
dislodged; look at those six grappling-hooks.  Helps himself to such
juices of the bee as he likes best; the bee feeds on the choicest
vegetable nectars, and he feeds on the bee.  Lives either in the air
or in the perfumed pavilion of the fairest and sweetest flowers.
Think what tents the hollyhocks and the great lilies spread for him!
And wherever he travels a band of music goes with him, for this hum
which wanders by us is doubtless to him a vast and inspiring strain
of melody.--I thought all this, while the Scarabee supposed I was
studying the minute characters of the enigmatical specimen.

--I know what I consider your pediculus melittae, I said at length.

Do you think it really the larva of meloe?

--Oh, I don't know much about that, but I think he is the best cared
for, on the whole, of any animal that I know of; and if I wasn't a
man I believe I had rather be that little sybarite than anything that
feasts at the board of nature.

--The question is, whether he is the larva of meloe,--the Scarabee
said, as if he had not heard a word of what I had just been saying.--
--If I live a few years longer it shall be settled, sir; and if my
epitaph can say honestly that I settled it, I shall be willing to
trust my posthumous fame to that achievement.

I said good morning to the specialist, and went off feeling not only
kindly, but respectfully towards him.  He is an enthusiast, at any
rate, as "earnest" a man as any philanthropic reformer who, having
passed his life in worrying people out of their misdoings into good
behavior, comes at last to a state in which he is never contented
except when he is making somebody uncomfortable.  He does certainly
know one thing well, very likely better than anybody in the world.

I find myself somewhat singularly placed at our table between a
minute philosopher who has concentrated all his faculties on a single
subject, and my friend who finds the present universe too restricted
for his intelligence.  I would not give much to hear what the
Scarabee says about the old Master, for he does not pretend to form a
judgment of anything but beetles, but I should like to hear what the
Master has to say about the Scarabee.  I waited after breakfast until
he had gone, and then asked the Master what he could make of our
dried-up friend.

--Well,--he said,--I am hospitable enough in my feelings to him and
all his tribe.  These specialists are the coral-insects that build up
a reef.  By and by it will be an island, and for aught we know may
grow into a continent.  But I don't want to be a coral-insect myself.
I had rather be a voyager that visits all the reefs and islands the
creatures build, and sails over the seas where they have as yet built
up nothing.  I am a little afraid that science is breeding us down
too fast into coral-insects.  A man like Newton or Leibnitz or Haller
used to paint a picture of outward or inward nature with a free hand,
and stand back and look at it as a whole and feel like an archangel;
but nowadays you have a Society, and they come together and make a
great mosaic, each man bringing his little bit and sticking it in its
place, but so taken up with his petty fragment that he never thinks
of looking at the picture the little bits make when they are put
together.  You can't get any talk out of these specialists away from
their own subjects, any more than you can get help from a policeman
outside of his own beat.

--Yes,--said I,--but why should n't we always set a man talking about
the thing he knows best?

--No doubt, no doubt, if you meet him once; but what are you going to
do with him if you meet him every day?  I travel with a man and we
want to make change very often in paying bills.  But every time I ask
him to change a pistareen, or give me two fo'pencehappennies for a
ninepence, or help me to make out two and thrippence (mark the old
Master's archaisms about the currency), what does the fellow do but
put his hand in his pocket and pull out an old Roman coin; I have no
change, says he, but this assarion of Diocletian.  Mighty deal of
good that'll do me!

--It isn't quite so handy as a few specimens of the modern currency
would be, but you can pump him on numismatics.

--To be sure, to be sure.  I've pumped a thousand men of all they
could teach me, or at least all I could learn from 'em; and if it
comes to that, I never saw the man that couldn't teach me something.
I can get along with everybody in his place, though I think the place
of some of my friends is over there among the feeble-minded pupils,
and I don't believe there's one of them, I couldn't go to school to
for half an hour and be the wiser for it.  But people you talk with
every day have got to have feeders for their minds, as much as the
stream that turns a millwheel has.  It isn't one little rill that's
going to keep the float-boards turning round.  Take a dozen of the
brightest men you can find in the brightest city, wherever that may
be,--perhaps you and I think we know,--and let 'em come together once
a month, and you'll find out in the course of a year or two the ones
that have feeders from all the hillsides.  Your common talkers, that
exchange the gossip of the day, have no wheel in particular to turn,
and the wash of the rain as it runs down the street is enough for
them.

--Do you mean you can always see the sources from which a man fills
his mind,--his feeders, as you call them?

-I don't go quite so far as that,--the Master said.---I've seen men
whose minds were always overflowing, and yet they did n't read much
nor go much into the world.  Sometimes you'll find a bit of a pond-
hole in a pasture, and you'll plunge your walking-stick into it and
think you are going to touch bottom.  But you find you are mistaken.
Some of these little stagnant pond-holes are a good deal deeper than
you think; you may tie a stone to a bed-cord and not get soundings in
some of 'em.  The country boys will tell you they have no bottom, but
that only means that they are mighty deep; and so a good many
stagnant, stupid-seeming people are a great deal deeper than the
length of your intellectual walking-stick, I can tell you.  There are
hidden springs that keep the little pond-holes full when the mountain
brooks are all dried up.  You poets ought to know that.

--I can't help thinking you are more tolerant towards the specialists
than I thought at first, by the way you seemed to look at our dried-
up neighbor and his small pursuits.

--I don't like the word tolerant,--the Master said.---As long as the
Lord can tolerate me I think I can stand my fellow-creatures.
Philosophically, I love 'em all; empirically, I don't think I am very
fond of all of 'em.  It depends on how you look at a man or a woman.
Come here, Youngster, will you?  he said to That Boy.

The Boy was trying to catch a blue-bottle to add to his collection,
and was indisposed to give up the chase; but he presently saw that
the Master had taken out a small coin and laid it on the table, and
felt himself drawn in that direction.

Read that,--said the Master.

U-n-i-ni United States of America 5 cents.

The Master turned the coin over.  Now read that.

In God is our t-r-u-s-t--trust.  1869.

--Is that the same piece of money as the other one?

--There ain't any other one,--said the Boy, there ain't but one, but
it's got two sides to it with different reading.

--That 's it, that 's it,--said the Master,--two sides to everybody,
as there are to that piece of money.  I've seen an old woman that
wouldn't fetch five cents if you should put her up for sale at public
auction; and yet come to read the other side of her, she had a trust
in God Almighty that was like the bow anchor of a three-decker.  It's
faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life
worth looking at.  I don't think your ant-eating specialist, with his
sharp nose and pin-head eyes, is the best every-day companion; but
any man who knows one thing well is worth listening to for once; and
if you are of the large-brained variety of the race, and want to fill
out your programme of the Order of Things in a systematic and
exhaustive way, and get all the half-notes and flats and sharps of
humanity into your scale, you'd a great deal better shut your front
door and open your two side ones when you come across a fellow that
has made a real business of doing anything.

--That Boy stood all this time looking hard at the five-cent piece.

--Take it,--said the Master, with a good-natured smile.

--The Boy made a snatch at it and was off for the purpose of
investing it.

--A child naturally snaps at a thing as a dog does at his meat,--said
the Master.---If you think of it, we've all been quadrupeds.  A child
that can only crawl has all the instincts of a four-footed beast.  It
carries things in its mouth just as cats and dogs do.  I've seen the
little brutes do it over and over again.  I suppose a good many
children would stay quadrupeds all their lives, if they didn't learn
the trick of walking on their hind legs from seeing all the grown
people walking in that way.

--Do you accept Mr. Darwin's notions about the origin of the race?--
said I.

The Master looked at me with that twinkle in his eye which means that
he is going to parry a question.

--Better stick to Blair's Chronology; that settles it.  Adam and Eve,
created Friday, October 28th, B. C. 4004.  You've been in a ship for
a good while, and here comes Mr. Darwin on deck with an armful of
sticks and says, "Let's build a raft, and trust ourselves to that."

If your ship springs a leak, what would you do?

He looked me straight in the eyes for about half a minute.---If I
heard the pumps going, I'd look and see whether they were gaining on
the leak or not.  If they were gaining I'd stay where I was.---Go and
find out what's the matter with that young woman.

I had noticed that the Young Girl--the storywriter, our Scheherezade,
as I called her--looked as if she had been crying or lying awake half
the night.  I found on asking her,--for she is an honest little body
and is disposed to be confidential with me for some reason or other,
--that she had been doing both.

--And what was the matter now, I questioned her in a semi-paternal
kind of way, as soon as I got a chance for a few quiet words with
her.

She was engaged to write a serial story, it seems, and had only got
as far as the second number, and some critic had been jumping upon
it, she said, and grinding his heel into it, till she couldn't bear
to look at it.  He said she did not write half so well as half a
dozen other young women.  She did n't write half so well as she used
to write herself.  She hadn't any characters and she had n't any
incidents.  Then he went to work to show how her story was coming
out, trying to anticipate everything she could make of it, so that
her readers should have nothing to look forward to, and he should
have credit for his sagacity in guessing, which was nothing so very
wonderful, she seemed to think.  Things she had merely hinted and
left the reader to infer, he told right out in the bluntest and
coarsest way.  It had taken all the life out of her, she said.  It
was just as if at a dinner-party one of the guests should take a
spoonful of soup and get up and say to the company, "Poor stuff, poor
stuff; you won't get anything better; let's go somewhere else where
things are fit to eat."

What do you read such things for, my dear?  said I.

The film glistened in her eyes at the strange sound of those two soft
words; she had not heard such very often, I am afraid.

--I know I am a foolish creature to read them, she answered,--but I
can't help it; somebody always sends me everything that will make me
wretched to read, and so I sit down and read it, and ache all over
for my pains, and lie awake all night.

--She smiled faintly as she said this, for she saw the sub-ridiculous
side of it, but the film glittered still in her eyes.  There are a
good many real miseries in life that we cannot help smiling at, but
they are the smiles that make wrinkles and not dimples.  "Somebody
always sends her everything that will make her wretched."  Who can
those creatures be who cut out the offensive paragraph and send it
anonymously to us, who mail the newspaper which has the article we
had much better not have seen, who take care that we shall know
everything which can, by any possibility, help to make us
discontented with ourselves and a little less light-hearted than we
were before we had been fools enough to open their incendiary
packages?  I don't like to say it to myself, but I cannot help
suspecting, in this instance, the doubtful-looking personage who sits
on my left, beyond the Scarabee.  I have some reason to think that he
has made advances to the Young Girl which were not favorably
received, to state the case in moderate terms, and it may be that he
is taking his revenge in cutting up the poor girl's story.  I know
this very well, that some personal pique or favoritism is at the
bottom of half the praise and dispraise which pretend to be so very
ingenuous and discriminating.  (Of course I have been thinking all
this time and telling you what I thought.)

--What you want is encouragement, my dear, said I,--I know that as
well, as you.  I don't think the fellows that write such criticisms
as you tell me of want to correct your faults.  I don't mean to say
that you can learn nothing from them, because they are not all fools
by any means, and they will often pick out your weak points with a
malignant sagacity, as a pettifogging lawyer will frequently find a
real flaw in trying to get at everything he can quibble about.  But
is there nobody who will praise you generously when you do well,--
nobody that will lend you a hand now while you want it,--or must they
all wait until you have made yourself a name among strangers, and
then all at once find out that you have something in you?
Oh,--said the girl, and the bright film gathered too fast for her
young eyes to hold much longer,--I ought not to be ungrateful!  I
have found the kindest friend in the world.  Have you ever heard the
Lady--the one that I sit next to at the table--say anything about me?

I have not really made her acquaintance, I said.  She seems to me a
little distant in her manners and I have respected her pretty evident
liking for keeping mostly to herself.

--Oh, but when you once do know her!  I don't believe I could write
stories all the time as I do, if she didn't ask me up to her chamber,
and let me read them to her.  Do you know, I can make her laugh and
cry, reading my poor stories?  And sometimes, when I feel as if I had
written out all there is in me, and want to lie down and go to sleep
and never wake up except in a world where there are no weekly
papers,--when everything goes wrong, like a car off the track,--she
takes hold and sets me on the rails again all right.

--How does she go to work to help you?

--Why, she listens to my stories, to begin with, as if she really
liked to hear them.  And then you know I am dreadfully troubled now
and then with some of my characters, and can't think how to get rid
of them.  And she'll say, perhaps, Don't shoot your villain this
time, you've shot three or four already in the last six weeks; let
his mare stumble and throw him and break his neck.  Or she'll give me
a hint about some new way for my lover to make a declaration.  She
must have had a good many offers, it's my belief, for she has told me
a dozen different ways for me to use in my stories.  And whenever I
read a story to her, she always laughs and cries in the right places;
and that's such a comfort, for there are some people that think
everything pitiable is so funny, and will burst out laughing when
poor Rip Van Winkle--you've seen Mr. Jefferson, haven't you?--is
breaking your heart for you if you have one.  Sometimes she takes a
poem I have written and reads it to me so beautifully, that I fall in
love with it, and sometimes she sets my verses to music and sings
them to me.

--You have a laugh together sometimes, do you?

--Indeed we do.  I write for what they call the "Comic Department" of
the paper now and then.  If I did not get so tired of story-telling,
I suppose I should be gayer than I am; but as it is, we two get a
little fun out of my comic pieces.  I begin them half-crying
sometimes, but after they are done they amuse me.  I don't suppose my
comic pieces are very laughable; at any rate the man who makes a
business of writing me down says the last one I wrote is very
melancholy reading, and that if it was only a little better perhaps
some bereaved person might pick out a line or two that would do to
put on a gravestone.

--Well, that is hard, I must confess.  Do let me see those lines
which excite such sad emotions.

--Will you read them very good-naturedly?  If you will, I will get
the paper that has "Aunt Tabitha."  That is the one the fault-finder
said produced such deep depression of feeling.  It was written for
the "Comic Department."  Perhaps it will make you cry, but it was n't
meant to.

--I will finish my report this time with our Scheherezade's poem,
hoping that--any critic who deals with it will treat it with the
courtesy due to all a young lady's literary efforts.


          AUNT TABITHA.

Whatever I do, and whatever I say,
Aunt Tabitha tells me that isn't the way;
When she was a girl (forty summers ago)
Aunt Tabitha tells me they never did so.

Dear aunt!  If I only would take her advice!
But I like my own way, and I find it so nice!
And besides, I forget half the things I am told;
But they all will come back to me--when I am old.

If a youth passes by, it may happen, no doubt,
He may chance to look in as I chance to look out;
She would never endure an impertinent stare,
It is horrid, she says, and I mustn't sit there.

A walk in the moonlight has pleasures, I own,
But it is n't quite safe to be walking alone;
So I take a lad's arm,--just for safety, you know,
But Aunt Tabitha tells me they didn't do so.

How wicked we are, and how good they were then!
They kept at arm's length those detestable men;
What an era of virtue she lived in!--But stay
Were the men all such rogues in Aunt Tabitha's day?

If the men were so wicked, I'll ask my papa
How he dared to propose to my darling mamma;
Was he like the rest of them?  Goodness!  Who knows
And what shall I say if a wretch should propose?

I am thinking if aunt knew so little of sin,
What a wonder Aunt Tabitha's aunt must have been!
And her grand-aunt--it scares me--how shockingly sad.
That we girls of to-day are so frightfully bad!

A martyr will save us, and nothing else can;
Let me perish--to rescue some wretched young man!
Though when to the altar a victim I go,
Aunt Tabitha'll tell me she never did so!




IV

The old Master has developed one quality of late for which I am
afraid I hardly gave him credit.  He has turned out to be an
excellent listener.

--I love to talk,--he said,--as a goose loves to swim.  Sometimes I
think it is because I am a goose.  For I never talked much at any one
time in my life without saying something or other I was sorry for.

--You too!--said I--Now that is very odd, for it is an experience I
have habitually.  I thought you were rather too much of a philosopher
to trouble yourself about such small matters as to whether you had
said just what you meant to or not; especially as you know that the
person you talk to does not remember a word of what you said the next
morning, but is thinking, it is much more likely, of what she said,
or how her new dress looked, or some other body's new dress which
made--hers look as if it had been patched together from the leaves of
last November.  That's what she's probably thinking about.

--She!--said the Master, with a look which it would take at least
half a page to explain to the entire satisfaction of thoughtful
readers of both sexes.

--I paid the respect due to that most significant monosyllable,
which, as the old Rabbi spoke it, with its targum of tone and
expression, was not to be answered flippantly, but soberly,
advisedly, and after a pause long enough for it to unfold its meaning
in the listener's mind.  For there are short single words (all the
world remembers Rachel's Helas!) which are like those Japanese toys
that look like nothing of any significance as you throw them on the
water, but which after a little time open out into various strange
and unexpected figures, and then you find that each little shred had
a complicated story to tell of itself.

-Yes,--said I, at the close of this silent interval, during which the
monosyllable had been opening out its meanings,--She.  When I think
of talking, it is of course with a woman.  For talking at its best
being an inspiration, it wants a corresponding divine quality of
receptiveness; and where will you find this but in woman?

The Master laughed a pleasant little laugh,--not a harsh, sarcastic
one, but playful, and tempered by so kind a look that it seemed as if
every wrinkled line about his old eyes repeated, "God bless you," as
the tracings on the walls of the Alhambra repeat a sentence of the
Koran.

I said nothing, but looked the question, What are you laughing at?

--Why, I laughed because I couldn't help saying to myself that a
woman whose mind was taken up with thinking how she looked, and how
her pretty neighbor looked, wouldn't have a great deal of thought to
spare for all your fine discourse.

--Come, now,--said I,--a man who contradicts himself in the course of
two minutes must have a screw loose in his mental machinery.  I never
feel afraid that such a thing can happen to me, though it happens
often enough when I turn a thought over suddenly, as you did that
five-cent piece the other day, that it reads differently on its two
sides.  What I meant to say is something like this.  A woman,
notwithstanding she is the best of listeners, knows her business, and
it is a woman's business to please.  I don't say that it is not her
business to vote, but I do say that a woman who does not please is a
false note in the harmonies of nature.  She may not have youth, or
beauty, or even manner; but she must have something in her voice or
expression, or both, which it makes you feel better disposed towards
your race to look at or listen to.  She knows that as well as we do;
and her first question after you have been talking your soul into her
consciousness is, Did I please?  A woman never forgets her sex.  She
would rather talk with a man than an angel, any day.

--This frightful speech of mine reached the ear of our Scheherezade,
who said that it was perfectly shocking and that I deserved to be
shown up as the outlaw in one of her bandit stories.

Hush, my dear,--said the Lady,--you will have to bring John Milton
into your story with our friend there, if you punish everybody who
says naughty things like that.  Send the little boy up to my chamber
for Paradise Lost, if you please.  He will find it lying on my table.
The little old volume,--he can't mistake it.

So the girl called That Boy round and gave him the message; I don't
know why she should give it, but she did, and the Lady helped her out
with a word or two.

The little volume--its cover protected with soft white leather from a
long kid glove, evidently suggesting the brilliant assemblies of the
days when friends and fortune smiled-came presently and the Lady
opened it.---You may read that, if you like, she said,--it may show
you that our friend is to be pilloried in good company.

The Young Girl ran her eye along the passage the Lady pointed out,
blushed, laughed, and slapped the book down as though she would have
liked to box the ears of Mr. John Milton, if he had been a
contemporary and fellow-contributor to the "Weekly Bucket."--I won't
touch the thing,--she said.---He was a horrid man to talk so: and he
had as many wives as Blue-Beard.

--Fair play,--said the Master.---Bring me the book, my little
fractional superfluity,--I mean you, my nursling,--my boy, if that
suits your small Highness better.

The Boy brought the book.

The old Master, not unfamiliar with the great epic opened pretty
nearly to the place, and very soon found the passage: He read, aloud
with grand scholastic intonation and in a deep voice that silenced
the table as if a prophet had just uttered Thus saith the Lord:--

    "So spake our sire, and by his countenance seemed
     Entering on studious thoughts abstruse; which Eve
     Perceiving--"

went to water her geraniums, to make a short story of it, and left
the two "conversationists," to wit, the angel Raphael and the
gentleman,--there was but one gentleman in society then, you know,--
to talk it out.

    "Yet went she not, as not with such discourse
     Delighted, or not capable her ear
     Of what was high; such pleasure she reserved,
     Adam relating, she sole auditress;
     Her husband the relater she preferred
     Before the angel, and of him to ask
     Chose rather; he she knew would intermix
     Grateful digressions, and solve high dispute
     With conjugal caresses: from his lips
     Not words alone pleased her."

Everybody laughed, except the Capitalist, who was a little hard of
hearing, and the Scarabee, whose life was too earnest for
demonstrations of that kind.  He had his eyes fixed on the volume,
however, with eager interest.


--The p'int 's carried,--said the Member of the Haouse.

Will you let me look at that book a single minute?--said the
Scarabee.  I passed it to him, wondering what in the world he wanted
of Paradise Lost.

Dermestes lardarius,--he said, pointing to a place where the edge of
one side of the outer cover had been slightly tasted by some insect.
--Very fond of leather while they 're in the larva state.

--Damage the goods as bad as mice,--said the Salesman.

--Eat half the binding off Folio 67,--said the Register of Deeds.
Something did, anyhow, and it was n't mice.  Found the shelf covered
with little hairy cases belonging to something or other that had no
business there.

Skins of the Dermestes lardaraus,--said the Scarabee,--you can always
tell them by those brown hairy coats.  That 's the name to give them.

--What good does it do to give 'em a name after they 've eat the
binding off my folios?--asked the Register of Deeds.

The Scarabee had too much respect for science to answer such a
question as that; and the book, having served its purposes, was
passed back to the Lady.

I return to the previous question,--said I,--if our friend the Member
of the House of Representatives will allow me to borrow the phrase.
Womanly women are very kindly critics, except to themselves and now
and then to their own sex.  The less there is of sex about a woman,
the more she is to be dreaded.  But take a real woman at her best
moment,--well dressed enough to be pleased with herself, not so
resplendent as to be a show and a sensation, with those varied
outside influences which set vibrating the harmonic notes of her
nature stirring in the air about her, and what has social life to
compare with one of those vital interchanges of thought and feeling
with her that make an hour memorable?  What can equal her tact, her
delicacy, her subtlety of apprehension, her quickness to feel the
changes of temperature as the warm and cool currents of talk blow by
turns?  At one moment she is microscopically intellectual, critical,
scrupulous in judgment as an analyst's balance, and the next as
sympathetic as the open rose that sweetens the wind from whatever
quarter it finds its way to her bosom.  It is in the hospitable soul
of a woman that a man forgets he is a stranger, and so becomes
natural and truthful, at the same time that he is mesmerized by all
those divine differences which make her a mystery and a bewilderment
to

If you fire your popgun at me, you little chimpanzee, I will stick a
pin right through the middle of you and put you into one of this
gentleman's beetle-cases!

I caught the imp that time, but what started him was more than I
could guess.  It is rather hard that this spoiled child should spoil
such a sentence as that was going to be; but the wind shifted all at
once, and the talk had to come round on another tack, or at least
fall off a point or two from its course.

--I'll tell you who I think are the best talkers in all probability,
--said I to the Master, who, as I mentioned, was developing
interesting talent as a listener,--poets who never write verses.  And
there are a good many more of these than it would seem at first
sight.  I think you may say every young lover is a poet, to begin
with.  I don't mean either that all young lovers are good talkers,--
they have an eloquence all their own when they are with the beloved
object, no doubt, emphasized after the fashion the solemn bard of
Paradise refers to with such delicious humor in the passage we just
heard,--but a little talk goes a good way in most of these cooing
matches, and it wouldn't do to report them too literally.  What I
mean is, that a man with the gift of musical and impassioned phrase
(and love often deeds that to a young person for a while), who
"wreaks" it, to borrow Byron's word, on conversation as the natural
outlet of his sensibilities and spiritual activities, is likely to
talk better than the poet, who plays on the instrument of verse.  A
great pianist or violinist is rarely a great singer.  To write a poem
is to expend the vital force which would have made one brilliant for
an hour or two, and to expend it on an instrument with more pipes,
reeds, keys, stops, and pedals than the Great Organ that shakes New
England every time it is played in full blast.

Do you mean that it is hard work to write a poem?--said the old
Master.---I had an idea that a poem wrote itself, as it were, very
often; that it came by influx, without voluntary effort; indeed, you
have spoken of it as an inspiration rather than a result of volition.

--Did you ever see a great ballet-dancer?--I asked him.

--I have seen Taglioni,--he answered.---She used to take her steps
rather prettily.  I have seen the woman that danced the capstone on
to Bunker Hill Monument, as Orpheus moved the rocks by music, the
Elssler woman,--Fanny Elssler.  She would dance you a rigadoon or cut
a pigeon's wing for you very respectably.

(Confound this old college book-worm,----he has seen everything!)

Well, did these two ladies dance as if it was hard work to them?

--Why no, I should say they danced as if they liked it and couldn't
help dancing; they looked as if they felt so "corky" it was hard to
keep them down.

--And yet they had been through such work to get their limbs strong
and flexible and obedient, that a cart-horse lives an easy life
compared to theirs while they were in training.

--The Master cut in just here--I had sprung the trap of a
reminiscence.

--When I was a boy,--he said,--some of the mothers in our small town,
who meant that their children should know what was what as well as
other people's children, laid their heads together and got a dancing-
master to come out from the city and give instruction at a few
dollars a quarter to the young folks of condition in the village.
Some of their husbands were ministers and some were deacons, but the
mothers knew what they were about, and they did n't see any reason
why ministers' and deacons' wives' children shouldn't have as easy
manners as the sons and daughters of Belial.  So, as I tell you, they
got a dancing-master to come out to our place,--a man of good repute,
a most respectable man,--madam (to the Landlady), you must remember
the worthy old citizen, in his advanced age, going about the streets,
a most gentlemanly bundle of infirmities,--only he always cocked his
hat a little too much on one side, as they do here and there along
the Connecticut River, and sometimes on our city sidewalks, when
they've got a new beaver; they got him, I say, to give us boys and
girls lessons in dancing and deportment.  He was as gray and as
lively as a squirrel, as I remember him, and used to spring up in the
air and "cross his feet," as we called it, three times before he came
down.  Well, at the end of each term there was what they called an
"exhibition ball," in which the scholars danced cotillons and
country-dances; also something called a "gavotte," and I think one or
more walked a minuet.  But all this is not what--I wanted to say.  At
this exhibition ball he used to bring out a number of hoops wreathed
with roses, of the perennial kind, by the aid of which a number of
amazingly complicated and startling evolutions were exhibited; and
also his two daughters, who figured largely in these evolutions, and
whose wonderful performances to us, who had not seen Miss Taglioni or
Miss Elssler, were something quite bewildering, in fact, surpassing
the natural possibilities of human beings.  Their extraordinary
powers were, however, accounted for by the following explanation,
which was accepted in the school as entirely satisfactory.  A certain
little bone in the ankles of each of these young girls had been
broken intentionally, secundum artem, at a very early age, and thus
they had been fitted to accomplish these surprising feats which threw
the achievements of the children who were left in the condition of
the natural man into ignominious shadow.

--Thank you,--said I,--you have helped out my illustration so as to
make it better than I expected.  Let me begin again.  Every poem that
is worthy of the name, no matter how easily it seems to be written,
represents a great amount of vital force expended at some time or
other.  When you find a beach strewed with the shells and other
spoils that belonged once to the deep sea, you know the tide has been
there, and that the winds and waves have wrestled over its naked
sands.  And so, if I find a poem stranded in my soul and have nothing
to do but seize it as a wrecker carries off the treasure he finds
cast ashore, I know I have paid at some time for that poem with some
inward commotion, were it only an excess of enjoyment, which has used
up just so much of my vital capital.  But besides all the impressions
that furnished the stuff of the poem, there has been hard work to get
the management of that wonderful instrument I spoke of,---the great
organ, language.  An artist who works in marble or colors has them
all to himself and his tribe, but the man who moulds his thought in
verse has to employ the materials vulgarized by everybody's use, and
glorify them by his handling.  I don't know that you must break any
bones in a poet's mechanism before his thought can dance in rhythm,
but read your Milton and see what training, what patient labor, it
took before he could shape our common speech into his majestic
harmonies.

It is rather singular, but the same kind of thing has happened to me
not very rarely before, as I suppose it has to most persons, that
just when I happened to be thinking about poets and their conditions,
this very morning, I saw a paragraph or two from a foreign paper
which is apt to be sharp, if not cynical, relating to the same
matter.  I can't help it; I want to have my talk about it, and if I
say the same things that writer did, somebody else can have the
satisfaction of saying I stole them all.

[I thought the person whom I have called hypothetically the Man of
Letters changed color a little and betrayed a certain awkward
consciousness that some of us were looking at him or thinking of him;
but I am a little suspicious about him and may do him wrong.]

That poets are treated as privileged persons by their admirers and
the educated public can hardly be disputed.  That they consider
themselves so there is no doubt whatever.  On the whole, I do not
know so easy a way of shirking all the civic and social and domestic
duties, as to settle it in one's mind that one is a poet.  I have,
therefore, taken great pains to advise other persons laboring under
the impression that they were gifted beings, destined to soar in the
atmosphere of song above the vulgar realities of earth, not to
neglect any homely duty under the influence of that impression.  The
number of these persons is so great that if they were suffered to
indulge their prejudice against every-day duties and labors, it would
be a serious loss to the productive industry of the country.  My
skirts are clear (so far as other people are concerned) of
countenancing that form of intellectual opium-eating in which rhyme
takes the place of the narcotic.  But what are you going to do when
you find John Keats an apprentice to a surgeon or apothecary?  Is n't
it rather better to get another boy to sweep out the shop and shake
out the powders and stir up the mixtures, and leave him undisturbed
to write his Ode on a Grecian Urn or to a Nightingale?  Oh yes, the
critic I have referred to would say, if he is John Keats; but not if
he is of a much lower grade, even though he be genuine, what there is
of him.  But the trouble is, the sensitive persons who belong to the
lower grades of the poetical hierarchy do not--know their own
poetical limitations, while they do feel a natural unfitness and
disinclination for many pursuits which young persons of the average
balance of faculties take to pleasantly enough.  What is forgotten is
this, that every real poet, even of the humblest grade, is an artist.
Now I venture to say that any painter or sculptor of real genius,
though he may do nothing more than paint flowers and fruit, or carve
cameos, is considered a privileged person.  It is recognized
perfectly that to get his best work he must be insured the freedom
from disturbances which the creative power absolutely demands, more
absolutely perhaps in these slighter artists than in the great
masters.  His nerves must be steady for him to finish a rose-leaf or
the fold of a nymph's drapery in his best manner; and they will be
unsteadied if he has to perform the honest drudgery which another can
do for him quite as well.  And it is just so with the poet, though he
were only finishing an epigram; you must no more meddle roughly with
him than you would shake a bottle of Chambertin and expect the
"sunset glow" to redden your glass unclouded.  On the other hand, it
may be said that poetry is not an article of prime necessity, and
potatoes are.  There is a disposition in many persons just now to
deny the poet his benefit of clergy, and to hold him no better than
other people.  Perhaps he is not, perhaps he is not so good, half the
time; but he is a luxury, and if you want him you must pay for him,
by not trying to make a drudge of him while he is all his lifetime
struggling with the chills and heats of his artistic intermittent
fever.


There may have been some lesser interruptions during the talk I have
reported as if it was a set speech, but this was the drift of what I
said and should have said if the other man, in the Review I referred
to, had not seen fit to meddle with the subject, as some fellow
always does, just about the time when I am going to say something
about it.  The old Master listened beautifully, except for cutting in
once, as I told you he did.  But now he had held in as long as it was
in his nature to contain himself, and must have his say or go off in
an apoplexy, or explode in some way.--I think you're right about the
poets,--he said.--They are to common folks what repeaters are to
ordinary watches.  They carry music in their inside arrangements, but
they want to be handled carefully or you put them out of order.  And
perhaps you must n't expect them to be quite as good timekeepers as
the professional chronometer watches that make a specialty of being
exact within a few seconds a month.  They think too much of
themselves.  So does everybody that considers himself as having a
right to fall back on what he calls his idiosyncrasy.  Yet a man has
such a right, and it is no easy thing to adjust the private claim to
the fair public demand on him.  Suppose you are subject to tic
douloureux, for instance.  Every now and then a tiger that nobody can
see catches one side of your face between his jaws and holds on till
he is tired and lets go.  Some concession must be made to you on that
score, as everybody can see.  It is fair to give you a seat that is
not in the draught, and your friends ought not to find fault with you
if you do not care to join a party that is going on a sleigh-ride.
Now take a poet like Cowper.  He had a mental neuralgia, a great deal
worse in many respects than tic douloureux confined to the face.  It
was well that he was sheltered and relieved, by the cares of kind
friends, especially those good women, from as many of the burdens of
life as they could lift off from him.  I am fair to the poets,--don't
you agree that I am?

Why, yes,--I said,--you have stated the case fairly enough, a good
deal as I should have put it myself.

Now, then,--the Master continued,--I 'll tell you what is necessary
to all these artistic idiosyncrasies to bring them into good square
human relations outside of the special province where their ways
differ from those of other people.  I am going to illustrate what I
mean by a comparison.  I don't know, by the way, but you would be
disposed to think and perhaps call me a wine-bibber on the strength
of the freedom with which I deal with that fluid for the purposes of
illustration.  But I make mighty little use of it, except as it
furnishes me an image now and then, as it did, for that matter, to
the Disciples and their Master.  In my younger days they used to
bring up the famous old wines, the White-top, the Juno, the Eclipse,
the Essex Junior, and the rest, in their old cobwebbed, dusty
bottles.  The resurrection of one of these old sepulchred dignitaries
had something of solemnity about it; it was like the disinterment of
a king; the bringing to light of the Royal Martyr King Charles I.,
for instance, that Sir Henry Halford gave such an interesting account
of.  And the bottle seemed to inspire a personal respect; it was
wrapped in a napkin and borne tenderly and reverently round to the
guests, and sometimes a dead silence went before the first gush of
its amber flood, and

    "The boldest held his breath
     For a time."

But nowadays the precious juice of a long-dead vintage is transferred
carefully into a cut-glass decanter, and stands side by side with the
sherry from a corner grocery, which looks just as bright and
apparently thinks just as well of itself.  The old historic Madeiras,
which have warmed the periods of our famous rhetoricians of the past
and burned in the impassioned eloquence of our earlier political
demigods, have nothing to mark them externally but a bit of thread,
it may be, round the neck of the decanter, or a slip of ribbon, pink
on one of them and blue on another.

Go to a London club,--perhaps I might find something nearer home that
would serve my turn,--but go to a London club, and there you will see
the celebrities all looking alike modern, all decanted off from their
historic antecedents and their costume of circumstance into the
every-day aspect of the gentleman of common cultivated society.  That
is Sir Coeur de Lion Plantagenet in the mutton-chop whiskers and the
plain gray suit; there is the Laureate in a frockcoat like your own,
and the leader of the House of Commons in a necktie you do not envy.
That is the kind of thing you want to take the nonsense out of you.
If you are not decanted off from yourself every few days or weeks,
you will think it sacrilege to brush a cobweb from your cork by and
by.  O little fool, that has published a little book full of little
poems or other sputtering tokens of an uneasy condition, how I love
you for the one soft nerve of special sensibility that runs through
your exiguous organism, and the one phosphorescent particle in your
unilluminated intelligence!  But if you don't leave your spun-sugar
confectionery business once in a while, and come out among lusty
men,--the bristly, pachydermatous fellows that hew out the highways
for the material progress of society, and the broad-shouldered, out-
of-door men that fight for the great prizes of life,--you will come
to think that the spun-sugar business is the chief end of man, and
begin to feel and look as if you believed yourself as much above
common people as that personage of whom Tourgueneff says that "he had
the air of his own statue erected by national subscription."

--The Master paused and fell into a deep thinking fit, as he does
sometimes.  He had had his own say, it is true, but he had
established his character as a listener to my own perfect
satisfaction, for I, too, was conscious of having preached with a
certain prolixity.

--I am always troubled when I think of my very limited mathematical
capacities.  It seems as if every well-organized mind should be able
to handle numbers and quantities through their symbols to an
indefinite extent; and yet, I am puzzled by what seems to a clever
boy with a turn for calculation as plain as counting his fingers.  I
don't think any man feels well grounded in knowledge unless he has a
good basis of mathematical certainties, and knows how to deal with
them and apply them to every branch of knowledge where they can come
in to advantage.

Our Young Astronomer is known for his mathematical ability, and I
asked him what he thought was the difficulty in the minds that are
weak in that particular direction, while they may be of remarkable
force in other provinces of thought, as is notoriously the case with
some men of great distinction in science.

The young man smiled and wrote a few letters and symbols on a piece
of paper.---Can you see through that at once?--he said.

I puzzled over it for some minutes and gave it up.

--He said, as I returned it to him, You have heard military men say
that such a person had an eye for country, have n't you?  One man
will note all the landmarks, keep the points of compass in his head,
observe how the streams run, in short, carry a map in his brain of
any region that he has marched or galloped through.  Another man
takes no note of any of these things; always follows somebody else's
lead when he can, and gets lost if he is left to himself; a mere owl
in daylight.  Just so some men have an eye for an equation, and would
read at sight the one that you puzzled over.  It is told of Sir Isaac
Newton that he required no demonstration of the propositions in
Euclid's Geometry, but as soon as he had read the enuciation the
solution or answer was plain at once.  The power may be cultivated,
but I think it is to a great degree a natural gift, as is the eye for
color, as is the ear for music.

--I think I could read equations readily enough,--I said,--if I could
only keep my attention fixed on them; and I think I could keep my
attention on them if I were imprisoned in a thinking-cell, such as
the Creative Intelligence shapes for its studio when at its divinest
work.

The young man's lustrous eyes opened very widely as he asked me to
explain what I meant.

--What is the Creator's divinest work?--I asked.

--Is there anything more divine than the sun; than a sun with its
planets revolving about it, warming them, lighting them, and giving
conscious life to the beings that move on them?

--You agree, then, that conscious life is the grand aim and end of
all this vast mechanism.  Without life that could feel and enjoy, the
splendors and creative energy would all be thrown away.  You know
Harvey's saying, omnia animalia ex ovo,--all animals come from an
egg.  You ought to know it, for the great controversy going on about
spontaneous generation has brought it into special prominence lately.
Well, then, the ovum, the egg, is, to speak in human phrase, the
Creator's more private and sacred studio, for his magnum opus.  Now,
look at a hen's egg, which is a convenient one to study, because it
is large enough and built solidly enough to look at and handle
easily.  That would be the form I would choose for my thinking-cell.
Build me an oval with smooth, translucent walls, and put me in the
centre of it with Newton's "Principia" or Kant's "Kritik," and I
think I shall develop "an eye for an equation," as you call it, and a
capacity for an abstraction.

But do tell me,--said the Astronomer, a little incredulously,--what
there is in that particular form which is going to help you to be a
mathematician or a metaphysician?

--It is n't help I want, it is removing hindrances.  I don't want to
see anything to draw off my attention.  I don't want a cornice, or an
angle, or anything but a containing curve.  I want diffused light and
no single luminous centre to fix my eye, and so distract my mind from
its one object of contemplation.  The metaphysics of attention have
hardly been sounded to their depths.  The mere fixing the look on any
single object for a long time may produce very strange effects.
Gibbon's well-known story of the monks of Mount Athos and their
contemplative practice is often laughed over, but it has a meaning.
They were to shut the door of the cell, recline the beard and chin on
the breast, and contemplate the abdominal centre.

"At first all will be dark and comfortless; but if you persevere day
and night, you will feel an ineffable joy; and no sooner has the soul
discovered the place of the heart, than it is involved in a mystic
and ethereal light."  And Mr.  Braid produces absolute anaesthesia,
so that surgical operations can be performed without suffering to the
patient, only by making him fix his eyes and his mind on a single
object; and Newton is said to have said, as you remember, "I keep the
subject constantly before me, and wait till the first dawnings open
slowly by little and little into a full and clear light."  These are
different, but certainly very wonderful, instances of what can be
done by attention.  But now suppose that your mind is in its nature
discursive, erratic, subject to electric attractions and repulsions,
volage; it may be impossible for you to compel your attention except
by taking away all external disturbances.  I think the poets have an
advantage and a disadvantage as compared with the steadier-going
people.  Life is so vivid to the poet, that he is too eager to seize
and exhaust its multitudinous impressions.  Like Sindbad in the
valley of precious stones, he wants to fill his pockets with
diamonds, but, lo! there is a great ruby like a setting sun in its
glory, and a sapphire that, like Bryant's blue gentian, seems to have
dropped from the cerulean walls of heaven, and a nest of pearls that
look as if they might be unhatched angel's eggs, and so he hardly
knows what to seize, and tries for too many, and comes out of the
enchanted valley with more gems than he can carry, and those that he
lets fall by the wayside we call his poems.  You may change the image
a thousand ways to show you how hard it is to make a mathematician or
a logician out of a poet.  He carries the tropics with him wherever
he goes; he is in the true sense felius naturae, and Nature tempts
him, as she tempts a child walking through a garden where all the
finest fruits are hanging over him and dropping round him, where

     The luscious clusters of the vine
     Upon (his) mouth do crush their wine,
     The nectarine and curious peach,
     Into (his) hands themselves do reach;

and he takes a bite out of the sunny side of this and the other, and,
ever stimulated and never satisfied, is hurried through the garden,
and, before he knows it, finds himself at an iron gate which opens
outward, and leaves the place he knows and loves

--For one he will perhaps soon learn to love and know better,--said
the Master.---But I can help you out with another comparison, not
quite so poetical as yours.  Why did not you think of a railway-
station, where the cars stop five minutes for refreshments?  Is n't
that a picture of the poet's hungry and hurried feast at the banquet
of life?  The traveller flings himself on the bewildering miscellany
of delicacies spread before him, the various tempting forms of
ambrosia and seducing draughts of nectar, with the same eager hurry
and restless ardor that you describe in the poet.  Dear me!  If it
wasn't for All aboard! that summons of the deaf conductor which tears
one away from his half-finished sponge-cake and coffee, how I, who do
not call myself a poet, but only a questioner, should have enjoyed a
good long stop--say a couple of thousand years--at this way-station
on the great railroad leading to the unknown terminus!

--You say you are not a poet,--I said, after a little pause, in which
I suppose both of us were thinking where the great railroad would
land us after carrying us into the dark tunnel, the farther end of
which no man has seen and taken a return train to bring us news about
it,--you say you are not a poet, and yet it seems to me you have some
of the elements which go to make one.

--I don't think you mean to flatter me,--the Master answered,--and,
what is more, for I am not afraid to be honest with you, I don't
think you do flatter me.  I have taken the inventory of my faculties
as calmly as if I were an appraiser.  I have some of the qualities,
perhaps I may say many of the qualities, that make a man a poet, and
yet I am not one.  And in the course of a pretty wide experience of
men--and women--(the Master sighed, I thought, but perhaps I was
mistaken)--I have met a good many poets who were not rhymesters and a
good many rhymesters who were not poets.  So I am only one of the
Voiceless, that I remember one of you singers had some verses about.
I think there is a little music in me, but it has not found a voice,
and it never will.  If I should confess the truth, there is no mere
earthly immortality that I envy so much as the poet's.  If your name
is to live at all, it is so much more to have it live in people's
hearts than only in their brains!  I don't know that one's eyes fill
with tears when he thinks of the famous inventor of logarithms, but
song of Burns's or a hymn of Charles Wesley's goes straight to your
heart, and you can't help loving both of them, the sinner as well as
the saint.  The works of other men live, but their personality dies
out of their labors; the poet, who reproduces himself in his
creation, as no other artist does or can, goes down to posterity with
all his personality blended with whatever is imperishable in his
song.  We see nothing of the bees that built the honeycomb and stored
it with its sweets, but we can trace the veining in the wings of
insects that flitted through the forests which are now coal-beds,
kept unchanging in the amber that holds them; and so the passion of
Sappho, the tenderness of Simonides, the purity of holy George
Herbert, the lofty contemplativeness of James Shirley, are before us
to-day as if they were living, in a few tears of amber verse.  It
seems, when one reads,

     "Sweet day! so cool, so calm, so bright,"

or,

     "The glories of our birth and state,"

as if it were not a very difficult matter to gain immortality,--such
an immortality at least as a perishable language can give.  A single
lyric is enough, if one can only find in his soul and finish in his
intellect one of those jewels fit to sparkle "on the stretched
forefinger of all time." A coin, a ring, a string of verses.  These
last, and hardly anything else does.  Every century is an overloaded
ship that must sink at last with most of its cargo.  The small
portion of its crew that get on board the new vessel which takes them
off don't pretend to save a great many of the bulky articles.  But
they must not and will not leave behind the hereditary jewels of the
race; and if you have found and cut a diamond, were it only a spark
with a single polished facet, it will stand a better chance of being
saved from the wreck than anything, no matter what, that wants much
room for stowage.

The pyramids last, it is true, but most of them have forgotten their
builders' names.  But the ring of Thothmes III., who reigned some
fourteen hundred years before our era, before Homer sang, before the
Argonauts sailed, before Troy was built, is in the possession of Lord
Ashburnham, and proclaims the name of the monarch who wore it more
than three thousand years ago.  The gold coins with the head of
Alexander the Great are some of them so fresh one might think they
were newer than much of the silver currency we were lately handling.
As we have been quoting from the poets this morning, I will follow
the precedent, and give some lines from an epistle of Pope to Addison
after the latter had written, but not yet published, his Dialogue on
Medals.  Some of these lines have been lingering in my memory for a
great many years, but I looked at the original the other day and was
so pleased with them that I got them by heart.  I think you will say
they are singularly pointed and elegant.

    "Ambition sighed; she found it vain to trust
     The faithless column and the crumbling bust;
     Huge moles, whose shadows stretched from shore to shore,
     Their ruins perished, and their place no more!
     Convinced, she now contracts her vast design,
     And all her triumphs shrink into a coin.
     A narrow orb each crowded conquest keeps,
     Beneath her palm here sad Judaea weeps;
     Now scantier limits the proud arch confine,
     And scarce are seen the prostrate Nile or Rhine;
     A small Euphrates through the piece is rolled,
     And little eagles wave their wings in gold."

It is the same thing in literature.  Write half a dozen folios full
of other people's ideas (as all folios are pretty sure to be), and
you serve as ballast to the lower shelves of a library, about as like
to be disturbed as the kentledge in the hold of a ship.  Write a
story, or a dozen stories, and your book will be in demand like an
oyster while it is freshly opened, and after tha--.  The highways of
literature are spread over with the shells of dead novels, each of
which has been swallowed at a mouthful by the public, and is done
with.  But write a volume of poems.  No matter if they are all bad
but one, if that one is very good.  It will carry your name down to
posterity like the ring of Thothmes, like the coin of Alexander.  I
don't suppose one would care a great deal about it a hundred or a
thousand years after he is dead, but I don't feel quite sure.  It
seems as if, even in heaven, King David might remember "The Lord is
my Shepherd" with a certain twinge of earthly pleasure.  But we don't
know, we don't know.


--What in the world can have become of That Boy and his popgun while
all this somewhat extended sermonizing was going on?  I don't wonder
you ask, beloved Reader, and I suppose I must tell you how we got on
so long without interruption.  Well, the plain truth is, the
youngster was contemplating his gastric centre, like the monks of
Mount Athos, but in a less happy state of mind than those tranquil
recluses, in consequence of indulgence in the heterogeneous
assortment of luxuries procured with the five-cent piece given him by
the kind-hearted old Master.  But yon need not think I am going to
tell you every time his popgun goes off, making a Selah of him
whenever I want to change the subject.  Occasionally he was ill-timed
in his artillery practice and ignominiously rebuked, sometimes he was
harmlessly playful and nobody minded him, but every now and then he
came in so apropos that I am morally certain he gets a hint from
somebody who watches the course of the conversation, and means
through him to have a hand in it and stop any of us when we are
getting prosy.  But in consequence of That Boy's indiscretion, we
were without a check upon our expansiveness, and ran on in the way
you have observed and may be disposed to find fault with.


One other thing the Master said before we left the table, after our
long talk of that day.

--I have been tempted sometimes,--said he, to envy the immediate
triumphs of the singer.  He enjoys all that praise can do for him and
at the very moment of exerting his talent.  And the singing women!
Once in a while, in the course of my life, I have found myself in the
midst of a tulip-bed of full-dressed, handsome women in all their
glory, and when some one among them has shaken her gauzy wings, and
sat down before the piano, and then, only giving the keys a soft
touch now and then to support her voice, has warbled some sweet, sad
melody intertwined with the longings or regrets of some tender-
hearted poet, it has seemed to me that so to hush the rustling of the
silks and silence the babble of the buds, as they call the chicks of
a new season, and light up the flame of romance in cold hearts, in
desolate ones, in old burnt-out ones,--like mine, I was going to say,
but I won't, for it isn't so, and you may laugh to hear me say it
isn't so, if you like,--was perhaps better than to be remembered a
few hundred years by a few perfect stanzas, when your gravestone is
standing aslant, and your name is covered over with a lichen as big
as a militia colonel's cockade, and nobody knows or cares enough
about you to scrape it off and set the tipsy old slate-stone upright
again.

--I said nothing in reply to this, for I was thinking of a sweet
singer to whose voice I had listened in its first freshness, and
which is now only an echo in my memory.  If any reader of the
periodical in which these conversations are recorded can remember so
far back as the first year of its publication, he will find among the
papers contributed by a friend not yet wholly forgotten a few verses,
lively enough in their way, headed "The Boys."  The sweet singer was
one of this company of college classmates, the constancy of whose
friendship deserves a better tribute than the annual offerings,
kindly meant, as they are, which for many years have not been wanting
at their social gatherings.  The small company counts many noted
personages on its list, as is well known to those who are interested
in such local matters, but it is not known that every fifth man of
the whole number now living is more or less of a poet,--using that
word with a generous breadth of significance.  But it should seem
that the divine gift it implies is more freely dispensed than some
others, for while there are (or were, for one has taken his Last
Degree) eight musical quills, there was but one pair of lips which
could claim any special consecration to vocal melody.  Not that one
that should undervalue the half-recitative of doubtful barytones, or
the brilliant escapades of slightly unmanageable falsettos, or the
concentrated efforts of the proprietors of two or three effective
notes, who may be observed lying in wait for them, and coming down on
them with all their might, and the look on their countenances of "I
too am a singer."  But the voice that led all, and that all loved to
listen to, the voice that was at once full, rich, sweet, penetrating,
expressive, whose ample overflow drowned all the imperfections and
made up for all the shortcomings of the others, is silent henceforth
forevermore for all earthly listeners.

And these were the lines that one of "The Boys," as they have always
called themselves for ever so many years, read at the first meeting
after the voice which had never failed them was hushed in the
stillness of death.


          J. A.

          1871.

One memory trembles on our lips
It throbs in every breast;
In tear-dimmed eyes, in mirth's eclipse,
The shadow stands confessed.

O silent voice, that cheered so long
Our manhood's marching day,
Without thy breath of heavenly song,
How weary seems the way!

Vain every pictured phrase to tell
Our sorrowing hearts' desire;
The shattered harp, the broken shell,
The silent unstrung lyre;

For youth was round us while he sang;
It glowed in every tone;
With bridal chimes the echoes rang,
And made the past our own.

O blissful dream!  Our nursery joys
We know must have an end,
But love and friendships broken toys
May God's good angels mend!

The cheering smile, the voice of mirth
And laughter's gay surprise
That please the children born of earth,
Why deem that Heaven denies?

Methinks in that refulgent sphere
That knows not sun or moon,
An earth-born saint might long to hear
One verse of "Bonny Doon";

Or walking through the streets of gold
In Heaven's unclouded light,
His lips recall the song of old
And hum "The sky is bright."

And can we smile when thou art dead?
Ah, brothers, even so!
The rose of summer will be red,
In spite of winter's snow.

Thou wouldst not leave us all in gloom
Because thy song is still,
Nor blight the banquet-garland's bloom
With grief's untimely chill.

The sighing wintry winds complain,
The singing bird has flown,--
Hark! heard I not that ringing strain,
That clear celestial tone?

How poor these pallid phrases seem,
How weak this tinkling line,
As warbles through my waking dream
That angel voice of thine!

Thy requiem asks a sweeter lay;
It falters on my tongue;
For all we vainly strive to say,
Thou shouldst thyself have sung!




V

I fear that I have done injustice in my conversation and my report of
it to a most worthy and promising young man whom I should be very
sorry to injure in any way.  Dr. Benjamin Franklin got hold of my
account of my visit to him, and complained that I had made too much
of the expression he used.  He did not mean to say that he thought I
was suffering from the rare disease he mentioned, but only that the
color reminded him of it.  It was true that he had shown me various
instruments, among them one for exploring the state of a part by
means of a puncture, but he did not propose to make use of it upon my
person.  In short, I had colored the story so as to make him look
ridiculous.

--I am afraid I did,--I said,--but was n't I colored myself so as to
look ridiculous?  I've heard it said that people with the jaundice
see everything yellow; perhaps I saw things looking a little queerly,
with that black and blue spot I could n't account for threatening to
make a colored man and brother of me.  But I am sorry if I have done
you any wrong.  I hope you won't lose any patients by my making a
little fun of your meters and scopes and contrivances.  They seem so
odd to us outside people.  Then the idea of being bronzed all over
was such an alarming suggestion.  But I did not mean to damage your
business, which I trust is now considerable, and I shall certainly
come to you again if I have need of the services of a physician.
Only don't mention the names of any diseases in English or Latin
before me next time.  I dreamed about cutis oenea half the night
after I came to see you.

Dr. Benjamin took my apology very pleasantly.  He did not want to be
touchy about it, he said, but he had his way to make in the world,
and found it a little hard at first, as most young men did.  People
were afraid to trust them, no matter how much they knew.  One of the
old doctors asked him to come in and examine a patient's heart for
him the other day.  He went with him accordingly, and when they stood
by the bedside, he offered his stethoscope to the old doctor.  The
old doctor took it and put the wrong end to his ear and the other to
the patient's chest, and kept it there about two minutes, looking all
the time as wise as an old owl.  Then he, Dr. Benjamin, took it and
applied it properly, and made out where the trouble was in no time at
all.  But what was the use of a young man's pretending to know
anything in the presence of an old owl?  I saw by their looks, he
said, that they all thought I used the, stethoscope wrong end up, and
was nothing but a 'prentice hand to the old doctor.

--I am much pleased to say that since Dr. Benjamin has had charge of
a dispensary district, and been visiting forty or fifty patients a
day, I have reason to think he has grown a great deal more practical
than when I made my visit to his office.  I think I was probably one
of his first patients, and that he naturally made the most of me.
But my second trial was much more satisfactory.  I got an ugly cut
from the carving-knife in an affair with a goose of iron constitution
in which I came off second best.  I at once adjourned with Dr.
Benjamin to his small office, and put myself in his hands.  It was
astonishing to see what a little experience of miscellaneous practice
had done for him.  He did not ask me anymore questions about my
hereditary predispositions on the paternal and maternal sides.  He
did not examine me with the stethoscope or the laryngoscope.  He only
strapped up my cut, and informed me that it would speedily get well
by the "first intention,"--an odd phrase enough, but sounding much
less formidable than cutis oenea.

I am afraid I have had something of the French prejudice which
embodies itself in the maxim "young surgeon, old physician."  But a
young physician who has been taught by great masters of the
profession, in ample hospitals, starts in his profession knowing more
than some old doctors have learned in a lifetime.  Give him a little
time to get the use of his wits in emergencies, and to know the
little arts that do so much for a patient's comfort,--just as you
give a young sailor time to get his sea-legs on and teach his stomach
to behave itself,--and he will do well enough.

The old Master knows ten times more about this matter and about all
the professions, as he does about everything else, than I do.  My
opinion is that he has studied two, if not three, of these
professions in a regular course.  I don't know that he has ever
preached, except as Charles Lamb said Coleridge always did, for when
he gets the bit in his teeth he runs away with the conversation, and
if he only took a text his talk would be a sermon; but if he has not
preached, he has made a study of theology, as many laymen do.  I know
he has some shelves of medical books in his library, and has ideas on
the subject of the healing art.  He confesses to having attended law
lectures and having had much intercourse with lawyers.  So he has
something to say on almost any subject that happens to come up.  I
told him my story about my visit to the young doctor, and asked him
what he thought of youthful practitioners in general and of Dr.
Benjamin in particular.

I 'll tell you what,--the Master said,--I know something about these
young fellows that come home with their heads full of "science," as
they call it, and stick up their signs to tell people they know how
to cure their headaches and stomach-aches.  Science is a first-rate
piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense
on the ground-floor.  But if a man has n't got plenty of good common
sense, the more science he has the worse for his patient.

--I don't know that I see exactly how it is worse for the patient,--I
said.

--Well, I'll tell you, and you'll find it's a mighty simple matter.
When a person is sick, there is always something to be done for him,
and done at once.  If it is only to open or shut a window, if it is
only to tell him to keep on doing just what he is doing already, it
wants a man to bring his mind right down to the fact of the present
case and its immediate needs.  Now the present case, as the doctor
sees it, is just exactly such a collection of paltry individual facts
as never was before,--a snarl and tangle of special conditions which
it is his business to wind as much thread out of as he can.  It is a
good deal as when a painter goes to take the portrait of any sitter
who happens to send for him.  He has seen just such noses and just
such eyes and just such mouths, but he never saw exactly such a face
before, and his business is with that and no other person's,--with
the features of the worthy father of a family before him, and not
with the portraits he has seen in galleries or books, or Mr.
Copley's grand pictures of the fine old Tories, or the Apollos and
Jupiters of Greek sculpture.  It is the same thing with the patient.
His disease has features of its own; there never was and never will
be another case in all respects exactly like it.  If a doctor has
science without common sense, he treats a fever, but not this man's
fever.  If he has common sense without science, he treats this man's
fever without knowing the general laws that govern all fevers and all
vital movements.  I 'll tell you what saves these last fellows.  They
go for weakness whenever they see it, with stimulants and
strengtheners, and they go for overaction, heat, and high pulse, and
the rest, with cooling and reducing remedies.  That is three quarters
of medical practice.  The other quarter wants science and common
sense too.  But the men that have science only, begin too far back,
and, before they get as far as the case in hand, the patient has very
likely gone to visit his deceased relatives.  You remember Thomas
Prince's "Chronological History of New England," I suppose?  He
begins, you recollect, with Adam, and has to work down five thousand
six hundred and twenty-four years before he gets to the Pilgrim
fathers and the Mayflower.  It was all very well, only it did n't
belong there, but got in the way of something else.  So it is with
"science" out of place.  By far the larger part of the facts of
structure and function you find in the books of anatomy and
physiology have no immediate application to the daily duties of the
practitioner.  You must learn systematically, for all that; it is the
easiest way and the only way that takes hold of the memory, except
mere empirical repetition, like that of the handicraftsman.  Did you
ever see one of those Japanese figures with the points for
acupuncture marked upon it?

--I had to own that my schooling had left out that piece of
information.

Well, I 'll tell you about it.  You see they have a way of pushing
long, slender needles into you for the cure of rheumatism and other
complaints, and it seems there is a choice of spots for the
operation, though it is very strange how little mischief it does in a
good many places one would think unsafe to meddle with.  So they had
a doll made, and marked the spots where they had put in needles
without doing any harm.  They must have had accidents from sticking
the needles into the wrong places now and then, but I suppose they
did n't say a great deal about those.  After a time, say a few
centuries of experience, they had their doll all spotted over with
safe places for sticking in the needles.  That is their way of
registering practical knowledge: We, on the other hand, study the
structure of the body as a whole, systematically, and have no
difficulty at all in remembering the track of the great vessels and
nerves, and knowing just what tracks will be safe and what unsafe.
It is just the same thing with the geologists.  Here is a man close
by us boring for water through one of our ledges, because somebody
else got water somewhere else in that way; and a person who knows
geology or ought to know it, because he has given his life to it,
tells me he might as well bore there for lager-beer as for water.

--I thought we had had enough of this particular matter, and that I
should like to hear what the Master had to say about the three
professions he knew something about, each compared with the others.

What is your general estimate of doctors, lawyers, and ministers?--
said I.

--Wait a minute, till I have got through with your first question,--
said the Master.---One thing at a time.  You asked me about the young
doctors, and about our young doctor.  They come home tres biens
chausses, as a Frenchman would say, mighty well shod with
professional knowledge.  But when they begin walking round among
their poor patients, they don't commonly start with millionnaires,--
they find that their new shoes of scientific acquirements have got to
be broken in just like a pair of boots or brogans.  I don't know that
I have put it quite strong enough.  Let me try again.  You've seen
those fellows at the circus that get up on horseback so big that you
wonder how they could climb into the saddle.  But pretty soon they
throw off their outside coat, and the next minute another one, and
then the one under that, and so they keep peeling off one garment
after another till people begin to look queer and think they are
going too far for strict propriety.  Well, that is the way a fellow
with a real practical turn serves a good many of his scientific
wrappers, flings 'em off for other people to pick up, and goes right
at the work of curing stomach-aches and all the other little mean
unscientific complaints that make up the larger part of every
doctor's business.  I think our Dr. Benjamin is a worthy young man,
and if you are in need of a doctor at any time I hope you will go to
him; and if you come off without harm, I will recommend some other
friend to try him.

--I thought he was going to say he would try him in his own person,
but the Master is not fond of committing himself.

Now, I will answer your other question, he said.  The lawyers are the
cleverest men, the ministers are the most learned, and the doctors
are the most sensible.

The lawyers are a picked lot, "first scholars" and the like, but
their business is as unsympathetic as Jack Ketch's.  There is nothing
humanizing in their relations with their fellow-creatures.  They go
for the side that retains them.  They defend the man they know to be
a rogue, and not very rarely throw suspicion on the man they know to
be innocent.  Mind you, I am not finding fault with them; every side
of a case has a right to the best statement it admits of; but I say
it does not tend to make them sympathetic.  Suppose in a case of
Fever vs. Patient, the doctor should side with either party according
to whether the old miser or his expectant heir was his employer.
Suppose the minister should side with the Lord or the Devil,
according to the salary offered and other incidental advantages,
where the soul of a sinner was in question.  You can see what a piece
of work it would make of their sympathies.  But the lawyers are
quicker witted than either of the other professions, and abler men
generally.  They are good-natured, or, if they quarrel, their
quarrels are above-board.  I don't think they are as accomplished as
the ministers, but they have a way of cramming with special knowledge
for a case which leaves a certain shallow sediment of intelligence in
their memories about a good many things.  They are apt to talk law in
mixed company, and they have a way of looking round when they make a
point, as if they were addressing a jury, that is mighty aggravating,
as I once had occasion to see when one of 'em, and a pretty famous
one, put me on the witness-stand at a dinner-party once.

The ministers come next in point of talent.  They are far more
curious and widely interested outside of their own calling than
either of the other professions.  I like to talk with 'em.  They are
interesting men, full of good feelings, hard workers, always foremost
in good deeds, and on the whole the most efficient civilizing class,
working downwards from knowledge to ignorance, that is,--not so much
upwards, perhaps,--that we have.  The trouble is, that so many of 'em
work in harness, and it is pretty sure to chafe somewhere.  They feed
us on canned meats mostly.  They cripple our instincts and reason,
and give us a crutch of doctrine.  I have talked with a great many of
'em of all sorts of belief, and I don't think they are quite so easy
in their minds, the greater number of them; nor so clear in their
convictions, as one would think to hear 'em lay down the law in the
pulpit.  They used to lead the intelligence of their parishes; now
they do pretty well if they keep up with it, and they are very apt to
lag behind it.  Then they must have a colleague.  The old minister
thinks he can hold to his old course, sailing right into the wind's
eye of human nature, as straight as that famous old skipper John
Bunyan; the young minister falls off three or four points and catches
the breeze that left the old man's sails all shivering.  By and by
the congregation will get ahead of him, and then it must, have
another new skipper.  The priest holds his own pretty well; the
minister is coming down every generation nearer and nearer to the
common level of the useful citizen,--no oracle at all, but a man of
more than average moral instincts, who, if he knows anything, knows
how little he knows.  The ministers are good talkers, only the
struggle between nature and grace makes some of 'em a little awkward
occasionally.  The women do their best to spoil 'em, as they do the
poets; you find it very pleasant to be spoiled, no doubt; so do they.
Now and then one of 'em goes over the dam; no wonder, they're always
in the rapids.

By this time our three ladies had their faces all turned toward the
speaker, like the weathercocks in a northeaster, and I thought it
best to switch off the talk on to another rail.

How about the doctors?--I said.

--Theirs is the least learned of the professions, in this country at
least.  They have not half the general culture of the lawyers, nor a
quarter of that of the ministers.  I rather think, though, they are
more agreeable to the common run of people than the men with black
coats or the men with green bags.  People can swear before 'em if
they want to, and they can't very well before ministers.  I don't
care whether they want to swear or not, they don't want to be on
their good behavior.  Besides, the minister has a little smack of the
sexton about him; he comes when people are in extremis, but they
don't send for him every time they make a slight moral slip, tell a
lie for instance, or smuggle a silk dress through the customhouse;
but they call in the doctor when a child is cutting a tooth or gets a
splinter in its finger.  So it does n't mean much to send for him,
only a pleasant chat about the news of the day; for putting the baby
to rights does n't take long.  Besides, everybody does n't like to
talk about the next world; people are modest in their desires, and
find this world as good as they deserve; but everybody loves to talk
physic.  Everybody loves to hear of strange cases; people are eager
to tell the doctor of the wonderful cures they have heard of; they
want to know what is the matter with somebody or other who is said to
be suffering from "a complication of diseases," and above all to get
a hard name, Greek or Latin, for some complaint which sounds
altogether too commonplace in plain English.  If you will only call a
headache a Cephalgia, it acquires dignity at once, and a patient
becomes rather proud of it.  So I think doctors are generally welcome
in most companies.

In old times, when people were more afraid of the Devil and of
witches than they are now, they liked to have a priest or a minister
somewhere near to scare 'em off; but nowadays, if you could find an
old woman that would ride round the room on a broomstick, Barnum
would build an amphitheatre to exhibit her in; and if he could come
across a young imp, with hoofs, tail, and budding horns, a lineal
descendant of one of those "daemons" which the good people of
Gloucester fired at, and were fired at by "for the best part of a
month together" in the year 1692, the, great showman would have him
at any cost for his museum or menagerie.  Men are cowards, sir, and
are driven by fear as the sovereign motive.  Men are idolaters, and
want something to look at and kiss and hug, or throw themselves down
before; they always did, they always will; and if you don't make it
of wood, you must make it of words, which are just as much used for
idols as promissory notes are used for values.  The ministers have a
hard time of it without bell and book and holy water; they are
dismounted men in armor since Luther cut their saddle-girths, and you
can see they are quietly taking off one piece of iron after another
until some of the best of 'em are fighting the devil (not the
zoological Devil with the big D) with the sword of the Spirit, and
precious little else in the way of weapons of offence or defence.
But we couldn't get on without the spiritual brotherhood, whatever
became of our special creeds.  There is a genius for religion, just
as there is for painting or sculpture.  It is half-sister to the
genius for music, and has some of the features which remind us of
earthly love.  But it lifts us all by its mere presence.  To see a
good man and hear his voice once a week would be reason enough for
building churches and pulpits.  The Master stopped all at once, and
after about half a minute laughed his pleasant laugh.

What is it?--I asked him.

I was thinking of the great coach and team that is carrying us fast
enough, I don't know but too fast, somewhere or other.  The D. D.'s
used to be the leaders, but now they are the wheel-horses.  It's
pretty hard to tell how much they pull, but we know they can hold
back like the

--When we're going down hill,--I said, as neatly as if I had been a
High-Church curate trained to snap at the last word of the response,
so that you couldn't wedge in the tail of a comma between the end of
the congregation's closing syllable and the beginning of the next
petition.  They do it well, but it always spoils my devotion.  To
save my life, I can't help watching them, as I watch to see a duck
dive at the flash of a gun, and that is not what I go to church for.
It is a juggler's trick, and there is no more religion in it than in
catching a ball on the fly.

I was looking at our Scheherezade the other day, and thinking what a
pity it was that she had never had fair play in the world.  I wish I
knew more of her history.  There is one way of learning it,--making
love to her.  I wonder whether she would let me and like it.  It is
an absurd thing, and I ought not to confess, but I tell you and you
only, Beloved, my heart gave a perceptible jump when it heard the
whisper of that possibility overhead!  Every day has its ebb and
flow, but such a thought as that is like one of those tidal waves
they talk about, that rolls in like a great wall and overtops and
drowns out all your landmarks, and you, too, if you don't mind what
you are about and stand ready to run or climb or swim.  Not quite so
bad as that, though, this time.  I take an interest in our
Scheherezade.  I am glad she did n't smile on the pipe and the
Bohemian-looking fellow that finds the best part of his life in
sucking at it.  A fine thing, isn't it; for a young woman to marry a
man who will hold her

   "Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse,"

but not quite so good as his meerschaum?  It is n't for me to throw
stones, though, who have been a Nicotian a good deal more than half
my days.  Cigar-stump out now, and consequently have become very
bitter on more persevering sinners.  I say I take an interest in our
Scheherezade, but I rather think it is more paternal than anything
else, though my heart did give that jump.  It has jumped a good many
times without anything very remarkable coming of it.

This visit to the Observatory is going to bring us all, or most of
us, together in a new way, and it wouldn't be very odd if some of us
should become better acquainted than we ever have been.  There is a
chance for the elective affinities.  What tremendous forces they are,
if two subjects of them come within range!  There lies a bit of iron.
All the dynamic agencies of the universe are pledged to hold it just
in that position, and there it will lie until it becomes a heap of
red-brown rust.  But see, I hold a magnet to it,--it looks to you
like just such a bit of iron as the other,--and lo! it leaves them
all,--the tugging of the mighty earth; of the ghostly moon that walks
in white, trailing the snaky waves of the ocean after her; of the
awful sun, twice as large as a sphere that the whole orbit of the
moon would but just girdle,--it leaves the wrestling of all their
forces, which are at a dead lock with each other, all fighting for
it, and springs straight to the magnet.  What a lucky thing it is for
well-conducted persons that the maddening elective affinities don't
come into play in full force very often!

I suppose I am making a good deal more of our prospective visit than
it deserves.  It must be because I have got it into my head that we
are bound to have some kind of sentimental outbreak amongst us, and
that this will give a chance for advances on the part of anybody
disposed in that direction.  A little change of circumstance often
hastens on a movement that has been long in preparation.  A chemist
will show you a flask containing a clear liquid; he will give it a
shake or two, and the whole contents of the flask will become solid
in an instant.  Or you may lay a little heap of iron-filings on a
sheet of paper with a magnet beneath it, and they will be quiet
enough as they are, but give the paper a slight jar and the specks of
metal will suddenly find their way to the north or the south pole of
the magnet and take a definite shape not unpleasing to contemplate,
and curiously illustrating the laws of attraction, antagonism, and
average, by which the worlds, conscious and unconscious, are alike
governed.  So with our little party, with any little party of persons
who have got used to each other; leave them undisturbed and they
might remain in a state of equilibrium forever; but let anything give
them a shake or a jar, and the long-striving but hindered affinities
come all at once into play and finish the work of a year in five
minutes.

We were all a good deal excited by the anticipation of this visit.
The Capitalist, who for the most part keeps entirely to himself,
seemed to take an interest in it and joined the group in the parlor
who were making arrangements as to the details of the eventful
expedition, which was very soon to take place.  The Young Girl was
full of enthusiasm; she is one of those young persons, I think, who
are impressible, and of necessity depressible when their nervous
systems are overtasked, but elastic, recovering easily from mental
worries and fatigues, and only wanting a little change of their
conditions to get back their bloom and cheerfulness.  I could not
help being pleased to see how much of the child was left in her,
after all the drudgery she had been through.  What is there that
youth will not endure and triumph over?  Here she was; her story for
the week was done in good season; she had got rid of her villain by a
new and original catastrophe; she had received a sum of money for an
extra string of verses,--painfully small, it is true, but it would
buy her a certain ribbon she wanted for the great excursion; and now
her eyes sparkled so that I forgot how tired and hollow they
sometimes looked when she had been sitting up half the night over her
endless manuscript.

The morning of the day we had looked forward to--promised as good an
evening as we could wish.  The Capitalist, whose courteous and bland
demeanor would never have suggested the thought that he was a robber
and an enemy of his race, who was to be trampled underfoot by the
beneficent regenerators of the social order as preliminary to the
universal reign of peace on earth and good-will to men, astonished us
all with a proposal to escort the three ladies and procure a carriage
for their conveyance.  The Lady thanked him in a very cordial way,
but said she thought nothing of the walk.  The Landlady looked
disappointed at this answer.  For her part she was on her legs all
day and should be glad enough to ride, if so be he was going to have
a carriage at any rate.  It would be a sight pleasanter than to
trudge afoot, but she would n't have him go to the expense on her
account.  Don't mention it, madam,--r--said the Capitalist, in a
generous glow of enthusiasm.  As for the Young Girl, she did not
often get a chance for a drive, and liked the idea of it for its own
sake, as children do, and she insisted that the Lady should go in the
carriage with her.  So it was settled that the Capitalist should take
the three ladies in a carriage, and the rest of us go on foot.

The evening behaved as it was bound to do on so momentous an
occasion.  The Capitalist was dressed with almost suspicious nicety.
We pedestrians could not help waiting to see them off, and I thought
he handed the ladies into the carriage with the air of a French
marquis.

I walked with Dr. Benjamin and That Boy, and we had to keep the
little imp on the trot a good deal of the way in order not to be too
long behind the carriage party.  The Member of the Haouse walked with
our two dummies,--I beg their pardon, I mean the Register of Deeds
and the Salesman.

The Man of Letters, hypothetically so called, walked by himself,
smoking a short pipe which was very far from suggesting the spicy
breezes that blow soft from Ceylon's isle.

I suppose everybody who reads this paper has visited one or more
observatories, and of course knows all about them.  But as it may
hereafter be translated into some foreign tongue and circulated among
barbarous, but rapidly improving people, people who have as yet no
astronomers among them, it may be well to give a little notion of
what kind of place an observatory is.

To begin then: a deep and solid stone foundation is laid in the
earth, and a massive pier of masonry is built up on it.  A heavy
block of granite forms the summit of this pier, and on this block
rests the equatorial telescope.  Around this structure a circular
tower is built, with two or more floors which come close up to the
pier, but do not touch it at any point.  It is crowned with a
hemispherical dome, which, I may remark, half realizes the idea of my
egg-shell studio.  This dome is cleft from its base to its summit by
a narrow, ribbon-like opening, through which is seen the naked sky.
It revolves on cannon-balls, so easily that a single hand can move
it, and thus the opening may be turned towards any point of the
compass.  As the telescope can be raised or depressed so as to be
directed to any elevation from the horizon to the zenith, and turned
around the entire circle with the dome, it can be pointed to any part
of the heavens.  But as the star or other celestial object is always
apparently moving, in consequence of the real rotatory movement of
the earth, the telescope is made to follow it automatically by an
ingenious clock-work arrangement.  No place, short of the temple of
the living God, can be more solemn.  The jars of the restless life
around it do not disturb the serene intelligence of the half-
reasoning apparatus.  Nothing can stir the massive pier but the
shocks that shake the solid earth itself.  When an earthquake thrills
the planet, the massive turret shudders with the shuddering rocks on
which it rests, but it pays no heed to the wildest tempest, and while
the heavens are convulsed and shut from the eye of the far-seeing
instrument it waits without a tremor for the blue sky to come back.
It is the type of the true and steadfast man of the Roman poet, whose
soul remains unmoved while the firmament cracks and tumbles about
him.  It is the material image of the Christian; his heart resting on
the Rock of Ages, his eye fixed on the brighter world above.

I did not say all this while we were looking round among these
wonders, quite new to many of us.  People don't talk in straight-off
sentences like that.  They stumble and stop, or get interrupted,
change a word, begin again, miss connections of verbs and nouns, and
so on, till they blunder out their meaning.  But I did let fall a
word or two, showing the impression the celestial laboratory produced
upon me.  I rather think I must own to the "Rock of Ages" comparison.
Thereupon the "Man of Letters," so called, took his pipe from his
mouth, and said that he did n't go in "for sentiment and that sort of
thing.  Gush was played out."

The Member of the Haouse, who, as I think, is not wanting in that
homely good sense which one often finds in plain people from the
huckleberry districts, but who evidently supposes the last speaker to
be what he calls "a tahlented mahn," looked a little puzzled.  My
remark seemed natural and harmless enough to him, I suppose, but I
had been distinctly snubbed, and the Member of the Haouse thought I
must defend myself, as is customary in the deliberative body to which
he belongs, when one gentleman accuses another gentleman of mental
weakness or obliquity.  I could not make up my mind to oblige him at
that moment by showing fight.  I suppose that would have pleased my
assailant, as I don't think he has a great deal to lose, and might
have made a little capital out of me if he could have got a laugh out
of the Member or either of the dummies,--I beg their pardon again, I
mean the two undemonstrative boarders.  But I will tell you, Beloved,
just what I think about this matter.

We poets, you know, are much given to indulging in sentiment, which
is a mode of consciousness at a discount just now with the new
generation of analysts who are throwing everything into their
crucibles.  Now we must not claim too much for sentiment.  It does
not go a great way in deciding questions of arithmetic, or algebra,
or geometry.  Two and two will undoubtedly make four, irrespective of
the emotions or other idiosyncrasies of the calculator; and the three
angles of a triangle insist on being equal to two right angles, in
the face of the most impassioned rhetoric or the most inspired verse.
But inasmuch as religion and law and the whole social order of
civilized society, to say nothing of literature and art, are so
founded on and pervaded by sentiment that they would all go to pieces
without it, it is a word not to be used too lightly in passing
judgment, as if it were an element to be thrown out or treated with
small consideration.  Reason may be the lever, but sentiment gives
you the fulcrum and the place to stand on if you want to move the
world.  Even "sentimentality," which is sentiment overdone, is better
than that affectation of superiority to human weakness which is only
tolerable as one of the stage properties of full-blown dandyism, and
is, at best, but half-blown cynicism; which participle and noun you
can translate, if you happen to remember the derivation of the last
of them, by a single familiar word.  There is a great deal of false
sentiment in the world, as there is of bad logic and erroneous
doctrine; but--it is very much less disagreeable to hear a young poet
overdo his emotions, or even deceive himself about them, than to hear
a caustic-epithet flinger repeating such words as "sentimentality"
and "entusymusy,"--one of the least admirable of Lord Byron's
bequests to our language,--for the purpose of ridiculing him into
silence.  An overdressed woman is not so pleasing as she might be,
but at any rate she is better than the oil of vitriol squirter, whose
profession it is to teach young ladies to avoid vanity by spoiling
their showy silks and satins.

The Lady was the first of our party who was invited to look through
the equatorial.  Perhaps this world had proved so hard to her that
she was pained to think that other worlds existed, to be homes of
suffering and sorrow.  Perhaps she was thinking it would be a happy
change when she should leave this dark planet for one of those
brighter spheres.  She sighed, at any rate, but thanked the Young
Astronomer for the beautiful sights he had shown her, and gave way to
the next comer, who was That Boy, now in a state of irrepressible
enthusiasm to see the Man in the Moon.  He was greatly disappointed
at not making out a colossal human figure moving round among the
shining summits and shadowy ravines of the "spotty globe."

The Landlady came next and wished to see the moon also, in preference
to any other object.  She was astonished at the revelations of the
powerful telescope.  Was there any live creatures to be seen on the
moon? she asked.  The Young Astronomer shook his head, smiling a
little at the question.--Was there any meet'n'-houses?  There was no
evidence, he said, that the moon was inhabited.  As there did not
seem to be either air or water on its surface, the inhabitants would
have a rather hard time of it, and if they went to meeting the
sermons would be apt to be rather dry.  If there were a building on
it as big as York minster, as big as the Boston Coliseum, the great
telescopes like Lord Rosse's would make it out.  But it seemed to be
a forlorn place; those who had studied it most agreed in considering
it a "cold, crude, silent, and desolate" ruin of nature, without the
possibility, if life were on it, of articulate speech, of music, even
of sound.  Sometimes a greenish tint was seen upon its surface, which
might have been taken for vegetation, but it was thought not
improbably to be a reflection from the vast forests of South America.
The ancients had a fancy, some of them, that the face of the moon was
a mirror in which the seas and shores of the earth were imaged.  Now
we know the geography of the side toward us about as well as that of
Asia, better than that of Africa.  The Astronomer showed them one of
the common small photographs of the moon.  He assured them that he
had received letters inquiring in all seriousness if these alleged
lunar photographs were not really taken from a peeled orange.  People
had got angry with him for laughing at them for asking such a
question.  Then he gave them an account of the famous moon-hoax which
came out, he believed, in 1835.  It was full of the most bare-faced
absurdities, yet people swallowed it all, and even Arago is said to
have treated it seriously as a thing that could not well be true, for
Mr. Herschel would have certainly notified him of these marvellous
discoveries.  The writer of it had not troubled himself to invent
probabilities, but had borrowed his scenery from the Arabian Nights
and his lunar inhabitants from Peter Wilkins.

After this lecture the Capitalist stepped forward and applied his eye
to the lens.  I suspect it to have been shut most of the time, for I
observe a good many elderly people adjust the organ of vision to any
optical instrument in that way.  I suppose it is from the instinct of
protection to the eye, the same instinct as that which makes the raw
militia-man close it when he pulls the, trigger of his musket the
first time.  He expressed himself highly gratified, however, with
what he saw, and retired from the instrument to make room for the
Young Girl.

She threw her hair back and took her position at the instrument.
Saint Simeon Stylites the Younger explained the wonders of the moon
to her,--Tycho and the grooves radiating from it, Kepler and
Copernicus with their craters and ridges, and all the most brilliant
shows of this wonderful little world.  I thought he was more diffuse
and more enthusiastic in his descriptions than he had been with the
older members of the party.  I don't doubt the old gentleman who
lived so long on the top of his pillar would have kept a pretty
sinner (if he could have had an elevator to hoist her up to him)
longer than he would have kept her grandmother.  These young people
are so ignorant, you know.  As for our Scheherezade, her delight was
unbounded, and her curiosity insatiable.  If there were any living
creatures there, what odd things they must be.  They could n't have
any lungs, nor any hearts.  What a pity!  Did they ever die?  How
could they expire if they didn't breathe?  Burn up?  No air to burn
in.  Tumble into some of those horrid pits, perhaps, and break all to
bits.  She wondered how the young people there liked it, or whether
there were any young people there; perhaps nobody was young and
nobody was old, but they were like mummies all of them--what an idea
--two mummies making love to each other!  So she went on in a
rattling, giddy kind of way, for she was excited by the strange scene
in which she found herself, and quite astonished the Young Astronomer
with her vivacity.  All at once she turned to him.

Will you show me the double star you said I should see?

With the greatest pleasure,--he said, and proceeded to wheel the
ponderous dome, and then to adjust the instrument, I think to the one
in Andromeda, or that in Cygnus, but I should not know one of them
from the other.

How beautiful!--she said as she looked at the wonderful object.---One
is orange red and one is emerald green.

The young man made an explanation in which he said something about
complementary colors.

Goodness!--exclaimed the Landlady.---What!  complimentary to our
party?

Her wits must have been a good deal confused by the strange sights of
the evening.  She had seen tickets marked complimentary, she
remembered, but she could not for the life of her understand why our
party should be particularly favored at a celestial exhibition like
this.  On the whole, she questioned inwardly whether it might not be
some subtle pleasantry, and smiled, experimentally, with a note of
interrogation in the smile, but, finding no encouragement, allowed
her features to subside gradually as if nothing had happened.  I saw
all this as plainly as if it had all been printed in great-primer
type, instead of working itself out in her features.  I like to see
other people muddled now and then, because my own occasional dulness
is relieved by a good solid background of stupidity in my neighbors.

--And the two revolve round each other?--said the Young Girl.

--Yes,--he answered,--two suns, a greater and a less, each shining,
but with a different light, for the other.

--How charming!  It must be so much pleasanter than to be alone in
such a great empty space!  I should think one would hardly care to
shine if its light wasted itself in the monstrous solitude of the
sky.  Does not a single star seem very lonely to you up there?

--Not more lonely than I am myself,--answered the Young Astronomer.

--I don't know what there was in those few words, but I noticed that
for a minute or two after they, were uttered I heard the ticking of
the clock-work that moved the telescope as clearly as if we had all
been holding our breath, and listening for the music of the spheres.

The Young Girl kept her eye closely applied to the eye-piece of the
telescope a very long time, it seemed to me.  Those double stars
interested her a good deal, no doubt.  When she looked off from the
glass I thought both her eyes appeared very much as if they had been
a little strained, for they were suffused and glistening.  It may be
that she pitied the lonely young man.

I know nothing in the world tenderer than the pity that a kind-
hearted young girl has for a young man who feels lonely.  It is true
that these dear creatures are all compassion for every form of human
woe, and anxious to alleviate all human misfortunes.  They will go to
Sunday-schools through storms their brothers are afraid of, to teach
the most unpleasant and intractable classes of little children the
age of Methuselah and the dimensions of Og the King of Bashan's
bedstead.  They will stand behind a table at a fair all day until
they are ready to drop, dressed in their prettiest clothes and their
sweetest smiles, and lay hands upon you, like--so many Lady
Potiphars,--perfectly correct ones, of course,--to make you buy what
you do not want, at prices which you cannot afford; all this as
cheerfully as if it were not martyrdom to them as well as to you.
Such is their love for all good objects, such their eagerness to
sympathize with all their suffering fellow-creatures!  But there is
nothing they pity as they pity a lonely young man.

I am sure, I sympathize with her in this instance.  To see a pale
student burning away, like his own midnight lamp, with only dead
men's hands to hold, stretched out to him from the sepulchres of
books, and dead men's souls imploring him from their tablets to warm
them over again just for a little while in a human consciousness,
when all this time there are soft, warm, living hands that would ask
nothing better than to bring the blood back into those cold thin
fingers, and gently caressing natures that would wind all their
tendrils about the unawakened heart which knows so little of itself,
is pitiable enough and would be sadder still if we did not have the
feeling that sooner or later the pale student will be pretty sure to
feel the breath of a young girl against his cheek as she looks over
his shoulder; and that he will come all at once to an illuminated
page in his book that never writer traced in characters, and never
printer set up in type, and never binder enclosed within his covers!
But our young man seems farther away from life than any student whose
head is bent downwards over his books.  His eyes are turned away from
all human things.  How cold the moonlight is that falls upon his
forehead, and how white he looks in it!  Will not the rays strike
through to his brain at last, and send him to a narrower cell than
this egg-shell dome which is his workshop and his prison?

I cannot say that the Young Astronomer seemed particularly impressed
with a sense of his miserable condition.  He said he was lonely, it
is true, but he said it in a manly tone, and not as if he were
repining at the inevitable condition of his devoting himself to that
particular branch of science.  Of course, he is lonely, the most
lonely being that lives in the midst of our breathing world.  If he
would only stay a little longer with us when we get talking; but he
is busy almost always either in observation or with his calculations
and studies, and when the nights are fair loses so much sleep that he
must make it up by day.  He wants contact with human beings.  I wish
he would change his seat and come round and sit by our Scheherezade!

The rest of the visit went off well enough, except that the "Man of
Letters," so called, rather snubbed some of the heavenly bodies as
not quite up to his standard of brilliancy.  I thought myself that
the double-star episode was the best part of it.


I have an unexpected revelation to make to the reader.  Not long
after our visit to the Observatory, the Young Astronomer put a
package into my hands, a manuscript, evidently, which he said he
would like to have me glance over.  I found something in it which
interested me, and told him the next day that I should like to read
it with some care.  He seemed rather pleased at this, and said that
he wished I would criticise it as roughly as I liked, and if I saw
anything in it which might be dressed to better advantage to treat it
freely, just as if it were my own production.  It had often happened
to him, he went on to say, to be interrupted in his observations by
clouds covering the objects he was examining for a longer or shorter
time.  In these idle moments he had put down many thoughts,
unskilfully he feared, but just as they came into his mind.  His
blank verse he suspected was often faulty.  His thoughts he knew must
be crude, many of them.  It would please him to have me amuse myself
by putting them into shape.  He was kind enough to say that I was an
artist in words, but he held himself as an unskilled apprentice.

I confess I was appalled when I cast my eye upon the title of the
manuscript, "Cirri and Nebulae."

--Oh!  oh!--I said,--that will never do.  People don't know what
Cirri are, at least not one out of fifty readers.  "Wind-Clouds and
Star-Drifts" will do better than that.

--Anything you like,--he answered,--what difference does it make how
you christen a foundling?  These are not my legitimate scientific
offspring, and you may consider them left on your doorstep.

--I will not attempt to say just how much of the diction of these
lines belongs to him, and how much to me.  He said he would never
claim them, after I read them to him in my version.  I, on my part,
do not wish to be held responsible for some of his more daring
thoughts, if I should see fit to reproduce them hereafter.  At this
time I shall give only the first part of the series of poetical
outbreaks for which the young devotee of science must claim his share
of the responsibility.  I may put some more passages into shape by
and by.


     WIND-CLOUDS AND STAR-DRIFTS.

               I

Another clouded night; the stars are hid,
The orb that waits my search is hid with them.
Patience!  Why grudge an hour, a month, a year,
To plant my ladder and to gain the round
That leads my footsteps to the heaven of fame,
Where waits the wreath my sleepless midnights won?
Not the stained laurel such as heroes wear
That withers when some stronger conqueror's heel
Treads down their shrivelling trophies in the dust;
But the fair garland whose undying green
Not time can change, nor wrath of gods or men!

With quickened heart-beats I shall hear the tongues
That speak my praise; but better far the sense
That in the unshaped ages, buried deep
In the dark mines of unaccomplished time
Yet to be stamped with morning's royal die
And coined in golden days,--in those dim years
I shall be reckoned with the undying dead,
My name emblazoned on the fiery arch,
Unfading till the stars themselves shall fade.
Then, as they call the roll of shining worlds,
Sages of race unborn in accents new
Shall count me with the Olympian ones of old,
Whose glories kindle through the midnight sky
Here glows the God of Battles; this recalls
The Lord of Ocean, and yon far-off sphere
The Sire of Him who gave his ancient name
To the dim planet with the wondrous rings;
Here flames the Queen of Beauty's silver lamp,
And there the moon-girt orb of mighty Jove;
But this, unseen through all earth's aeons past,
A youth who watched beneath the western star
Sought in the darkness, found, and showed to men;
Linked with his name thenceforth and evermore!
So shall that name be syllabled anew
In all the tongues of all the tribes of men:
I that have been through immemorial years
Dust in the dust of my forgotten time
Shall live in accents shaped of blood-warm breath,
Yea, rise in mortal semblance, newly born
In shining stone, in undecaying bronze,
And stand on high, and look serenely down
On the new race that calls the earth its own.

Is this a cloud, that, blown athwart my soul,
Wears a false seeming of the pearly stain
Where worlds beyond the world their mingling rays
Blend in soft white,--a cloud that, born of earth,
Would cheat the soul that looks for light from heaven?
Must every coral-insect leave his sign
On each poor grain he lent to build the reef,
As Babel's builders stamped their sunburnt clay,
Or deem his patient service all in vain?
What if another sit beneath the shade
Of the broad elm I planted by the way,--
What if another heed the beacon light
I set upon the rock that wrecked my keel,
Have I not done my task and served my kind?
Nay, rather act thy part, unnamed, unknown,
And let Fame blow her trumpet through the world
With noisy wind to swell a fool's renown,
Joined with some truth be stumbled blindly o'er,
Or coupled with some single shining deed
That in the great account of all his days
Will stand alone upon the bankrupt sheet
His pitying angel shows the clerk of Heaven.
The noblest service comes from nameless hands,
And the best servant does his work unseen.
Who found the seeds of fire and made them shoot,
Fed by his breath, in buds and flowers of flame?
Who forged in roaring flames the ponderous stone,
And shaped the moulded metal to his need?
Who gave the dragging car its rolling wheel,
And tamed the steed that whirls its circling round?
All these have left their work and not their names,
Why should I murmur at a fate like theirs?
This is the heavenly light; the pearly stain
Was but a wind-cloud drifting oer the stars!




VI

I find I have so many things in common with the old Master of Arts,
that I do not always know whether a thought was originally his or
mine.  That is what always happens where two persons of a similar
cast of mind talk much together.  And both of them often gain by the
interchange.  Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another
mind than in the one where they sprang up.  That which was a weed in
one intelligence becomes a flower in the other.  A flower, on the
other hand, may dwindle down to a mere weed by the same change.
Healthy growths may become poisonous by falling upon the wrong mental
soil, and what seemed a night-shade in one mind unfold as a morning-
glory in the other.

--I thank God,--the Master said,--that a great many people believe a
great deal more than I do.  I think, when it comes to serious
matters, I like those who believe more than I do better than those
who believe less.

--Why,--said I,--you have got hold of one of my own working axioms.
I should like to hear you develop it.

The Member of the Haouse said he should be glad to listen to the
debate.  The gentleman had the floor.  The Scarabee rose from his
chair and departed;--I thought his joints creaked as he straightened
himself.

The Young Girl made a slight movement; it was a purely accidental
coincidence, no doubt, but I saw That Boy put his hand in his pocket
and pull out his popgun, and begin loading it.  It cannot be that our
Scheherezade, who looks so quiet and proper at the table, can make
use of That Boy and his catapult to control the course of
conversation and change it to suit herself!  She certainly looks
innocent enough; but what does a blush prove, and what does its
absence prove, on one of these innocent faces?  There is nothing in
all this world that can lie and cheat like the face and the tongue of
a young girl.  Just give her a little touch of hysteria,--I don't
mean enough of it to make her friends call the doctor in, but a
slight hint of it in the nervous system,--and "Machiavel the waiting-
maid" might take lessons of her.  But I cannot think our Scheherezade
is one of that kind, and I am ashamed of myself for noting such a
trifling coincidence as that which excited my suspicion.

--I say,--the Master continued,--that I had rather be in the company
of those who believe more than I do, in spiritual matters at least,
than of those who doubt what I accept as a part of my belief.

--To tell the truth,--said I,--I find that difficulty sometimes in
talking with you.  You have not quite so many hesitations as I have
in following out your logical conclusions.  I suppose you would bring
some things out into daylight questioning that I had rather leave in
that twilight of half-belief peopled with shadows--if they are only
shadows--more sacred to me than many realities.

There is nothing I do not question,--said the Master;--I not only
begin with the precept of Descartes, but I hold all my opinions
involving any chain of reasoning always open to revision.

--I confess that I smiled internally to hear him say that.  The old
Master thinks he is open to conviction on all subjects; but if you
meddle with some of his notions and don't get tossed on his horns as
if a bull had hold of you, I should call you lucky.

--You don't mean you doubt everything?--I said.

--What do you think I question everything for, the Master replied,--
if I never get any answers?  You've seen a blind man with a stick,
feeling his way along?  Well, I am a blind man with a stick, and I
find the world pretty full of men just as blind as I am, but without
any stick.  I try the ground to find out whether it is firm or not
before I rest my weight on it; but after it has borne my weight, that
question at least is answered.  It very certainly was strong enough
once; the presumption is that it is strong enough now.  Still the
soil may have been undermined, or I may have grown heavier.  Make as
much of that as you will.  I say I question everything; but if I find
Bunker Hill Monument standing as straight as when I leaned against it
a year or ten years ago, I am not very much afraid that Bunker Hill
will cave in if I trust myself again on the soil of it.

I glanced off, as one often does in talk.

The Monument is an awful place to visit,--I said.---The waves of time
are like the waves of the ocean; the only thing they beat against
without destroying it is a rock; and they destroy that at last.  But
it takes a good while.  There is a stone now standing in very good
order that was as old as a monument of Louis XIV. and Queen Anne's
day is now when Joseph went down into Egypt.  Think of the shaft on
Bunker Hill standing in the sunshine on the morning of January 1st in
the year 5872!

It won't be standing,--the Master said.---We are poor bunglers
compared to those old Egyptians.  There are no joints in one of their
obelisks.  They are our masters in more ways than we know of, and in
more ways than some of us are willing to know.  That old Lawgiver
wasn't learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians for nothing.  It
scared people well a couple of hundred years ago when Sir John
Marsham and Dr. John Spencer ventured to tell their stories about the
sacred ceremonies of the Egyptian priesthood.  People are beginning
to find out now that you can't study any religion by itself to any
good purpose.  You must have comparative theology as you have
comparative anatomy.  What would you make of a cat's foolish little
good-for-nothing collar-bone, if you did not know how the same bone
means a good deal in other creatures,--in yourself, for instance, as
you 'll find out if you break it?  You can't know too much of your
race and its beliefs, if you want to know anything about your Maker.
I never found but one sect large enough to hold the whole of me.

--And may I ask what that was?--I said.

--The Human sect,--the Master answered.  That has about room enough
for me,--at present, I mean to say.

--Including cannibals and all?--said I.

-Oh, as to that, the eating of one's kind is a matter of taste, but
the roasting of them has been rather more a specialty of our own
particular belief than of any other I am acquainted with.  If you
broil a saint, I don't see why, if you have a mind, you shouldn't
serve him up at your

Pop!  went the little piece of artillery.  Don't tell me it was
accident.  I know better.  You can't suppose for one minute that a
boy like that one would time his interruptions so cleverly.  Now it
so happened that at that particular moment Dr. B. Franklin was not at
the table.  You may draw your own conclusions.  I say nothing, but I
think a good deal.

--I came back to the Bunker Hill Monument.---I often think--I said--
of the dynasty which is to reign in its shadow for some thousands of
years, it may be.

The "Man of Letters," so called, asked me, in a tone I did not
exactly like, whether I expected to live long enough to see a
monarchy take the place of a republic in this country.

--No,--said I,--I was thinking of something very different.  I was
indulging a fancy of mine about the Man who is to sit at the foot of
the monument for one, or it may be two or three thousand years.  As
long as the monument stands and there is a city near it, there will
always be a man to take the names of visitors and extract some small
tribute from their pockets, I suppose.  I sometimes get thinking of
the long, unbroken succession of these men, until they come to look
like one Man; continuous in being, unchanging as the stone he
watches, looking upon the successive generations of human beings as
they come and go, and outliving all the dynasties of the world in all
probability.  It has come to such a pass that I never speak to the
Man of the Monument without wanting to take my hat off and feeling as
if I were looking down a vista of twenty or thirty centuries.

The "Man of Letters," so called, said, in a rather contemptuous way,
I thought, that he had n't got so far as that.  He was n't quite up
to moral reflections on toll-men and ticket-takers.  Sentiment was
n't his tap.

He looked round triumphantly for a response: but the Capitalist was a
little hard of hearing just then; the Register of Deeds was browsing
on his food in the calm bovine abstraction of a quadruped, and paid
no attention; the Salesman had bolted his breakfast, and whisked
himself away with that peculiar alacrity which belongs to the retail
dealer's assistant; and the Member of the Haouse, who had sometimes
seemed to be impressed with his "tahlented mahn's" air of superiority
to the rest of us, looked as if he thought the speaker was not
exactly parliamentary.  So he failed to make his point, and reddened
a little, and was not in the best humor, I thought, when he left the
table.  I hope he will not let off any of his irritation on our poor
little Scheherezade; but the truth is, the first person a man of this
sort (if he is what I think him) meets, when he is out of humor, has
to be made a victim of, and I only hope our Young Girl will not have
to play Jephthah's daughter.

And that leads me to say, I cannot help thinking that the kind of
criticism to which this Young Girl has been subjected from some
person or other, who is willing to be smart at her expense, is
hurtful and not wholesome.  The question is a delicate one.  So many
foolish persons are rushing into print, that it requires a kind of
literary police to hold them back and keep them in order.  Where
there are mice there must be cats, and where there are rats we may
think it worth our while to keep a terrier, who will give them a
shake and let them drop, with all the mischief taken out of them.
But the process is a rude and cruel one at best, and it too often
breeds a love of destructiveness for its own sake in those who get
their living by it.  A poor poem or essay does not do much harm after
all; nobody reads it who is like to be seriously hurt by it.  But a
sharp criticism with a drop of witty venom in it stings a young
author almost to death, and makes an old one uncomfortable to no
purpose.  If it were my business to sit in judgment on my neighbors,
I would try to be courteous, at least, to those who had done any good
service, but, above all, I would handle tenderly those young authors
who are coming before the public in the flutter of their first or
early appearance, and are in the trembling delirium of stage-fright
already.  Before you write that brilliant notice of some alliterative
Angelina's book of verses, I wish you would try this experiment.

Take half a sheet of paper and copy upon it any of Angelina's
stanzas,--the ones you were going to make fun of, if you will.  Now
go to your window, if it is a still day, open it, and let the half-
sheet of paper drop on the outside.  How gently it falls through the
soft air, always tending downwards, but sliding softly, from side to
side, wavering, hesitating, balancing, until it settles as
noiselessly as a snow-flake upon the all-receiving bosom of the
earth!  Just such would have been the fate of poor Angelina's
fluttering effort, if you had left it to itself.  It would have
slanted downward into oblivion so sweetly and softly that she would
have never known when it reached that harmless consummation.

Our epizoic literature is becoming so extensive that nobody is safe
from its ad infinitum progeny.  A man writes a book of criticisms.  A
Quarterly Review criticises the critic.  A Monthly Magazine takes up
the critic's critic.  A Weekly Journal criticises the critic of the
critic's critic, and a daily paper favors us with some critical
remarks on the performance of the writer in the Weekly, who has
criticised the critical notice in the Monthly of the critical essay
in the Quarterly on the critical work we started with.  And thus we
see that as each flea "has smaller fleas that on him prey," even the
critic himself cannot escape the common lot of being bitten.  Whether
all this is a blessing or a curse, like that one which made Pharaoh
and all his household run to their toilet-tables, is a question about
which opinions might differ.  The physiologists of the time of Moses
--if there were vivisectors other than priests in those days--would
probably have considered that other plague, of the frogs, as a
fortunate opportunity for science, as this poor little beast has been
the souffre-douleur of experimenters and schoolboys from time
immemorial.

But there is a form of criticism to which none will object.  It is
impossible to come before a public so alive with sensibilities as
this we live in, with the smallest evidence of a sympathetic
disposition, without making friends in a very unexpected way.
Everywhere there are minds tossing on the unquiet waves of doubt.  If
you confess to the same perplexities and uncertainties that torture
them, they are grateful for your companionship.  If you have groped
your way out of the wilderness in which you were once wandering with
them, they will follow your footsteps, it may be, and bless you as
their deliverer.  So, all at once, a writer finds he has a parish of
devout listeners, scattered, it is true, beyond the reach of any
summons but that of a trumpet like the archangel's, to whom his
slight discourse may be of more value than the exhortations they hear
from the pulpit, if these last do not happen to suit their special
needs.  Young men with more ambition and intelligence than force of
character, who have missed their first steps in life and are
stumbling irresolute amidst vague aims and changing purposes, hold
out their hands, imploring to be led into, or at least pointed
towards, some path where they can find a firm foothold.  Young women
born into a chilling atmosphere of circumstance which keeps all the
buds of their nature unopened and always striving to get to a ray of
sunshine, if one finds its way to their neighborhood, tell their
stories, sometimes simply and touchingly, sometimes in a more or less
affected and rhetorical way, but still stories of defeated and
disappointed instincts which ought to make any moderately impressible
person feel very tenderly toward them.

In speaking privately to these young persons, many of whom have
literary aspirations, one should be very considerate of their human
feelings.  But addressing them collectively a few plain truths will
not give any one of them much pain.  Indeed, almost every individual
among them will feel sure that he or she is an exception to those
generalities which apply so well to the rest.

If I were a literary Pope sending out an Encyclical, I would tell
these inexperienced persons that nothing is so frequent as to mistake
an ordinary human gift for a special and extraordinary endowment.
The mechanism of breathing and that of swallowing are very wonderful,
and if one had seen and studied them in his own person only, he might
well think himself a prodigy.  Everybody knows these and other bodily
faculties are common gifts; but nobody except editors and school-
teachers and here and there a literary than knows how common is the
capacity of rhyming and prattling in readable prose, especially among
young women of a certain degree of education.  In my character of
Pontiff, I should tell these young persons that most of them labored
under a delusion.  It is very hard to believe it; one feels so full
of intelligence and so decidedly superior to one's dull relations and
schoolmates; one writes so easily and the lines sound so prettily to
one's self; there are such felicities of expression, just like those
we hear quoted from the great poets; and besides one has been told by
so many friends that all one had to do was to print and be famous!
Delusion, my poor dear, delusion at least nineteen times out of
twenty, yes, ninety-nine times in a hundred.

But as private father confessor, I always allow as much as I can for
the one chance in the hundred.  I try not to take away all hope,
unless the case is clearly desperate, and then to direct the
activities into some other channel.

Using kind language, I can talk pretty freely.  I have counselled
more than one aspirant after literary fame to go back to his tailor's
board or his lapstone.  I have advised the dilettanti, whose foolish
friends praised their verses or their stories, to give up all their
deceptive dreams of making a name by their genius, and go to work in
the study of a profession which asked only for the diligent use of
average; ordinary talents.  It is a very grave responsibility which
these unknown correspondents throw upon their chosen counsellors.
One whom you have never seen, who lives in a community of which you
know nothing, sends you specimens more or less painfully voluminous
of his writings, which he asks you to read over, think over, and pray
over, and send back an answer informing him whether fame and fortune
are awaiting him as the possessor of the wonderful gifts his writings
manifest, and whether you advise him to leave all,--the shop he
sweeps out every morning, the ledger he posts, the mortar in which he
pounds, the bench at which he urges the reluctant plane,--and follow
his genius whithersoever it may lead him.  The next correspondent
wants you to mark out a whole course of life for him, and the means
of judgment he gives you are about as adequate as the brick which the
simpleton of old carried round as an advertisement of the house he
had to sell.  My advice to all the young men that write to me depends
somewhat on the handwriting and spelling.  If these are of a certain
character, and they have reached a mature age, I recommend some
honest manual calling, such as they have very probably been bred to,
and which will, at least, give them a chance of becoming President of
the United States by and by, if that is any object to them.  What
would you have done with the young person who called on me a good
many years ago, so many that he has probably forgotten his literary
effort,--and read as specimens of his literary workmanship lines like
those which I will favor you with presently?  He was an able-bodied,
grown-up young person, whose ingenuousness interested me; and I am
sure if I thought he would ever be pained to see his maiden effort in
print, I would deny myself the pleasure of submitting it to the
reader.  The following is an exact transcript of the lines he showed
me, and which I took down on the spot:

    "Are you in the vein for cider?
     Are you in the tune for pork ?
     Hist!  for Betty's cleared the larder
     And turned the pork to soap."

Do not judge too hastily this sincere effort of a maiden muse.  Here
was a sense of rhythm, and an effort in the direction of rhyme; here
was an honest transcript of an occurrence of daily life, told with a
certain idealizing expression, recognizing the existence of impulses,
mysterious instincts, impelling us even in the selection of our
bodily sustenance.  But I had to tell him that it wanted dignity of
incident and grace of narrative, that there was no atmosphere to it,
nothing of the light that never was and so forth.  I did not say this
in these very words, but I gave him to understand, without being too
hard upon him, that he had better not desert his honest toil in
pursuit of the poet's bays.  This, it must be confessed, was a rather
discouraging case.  A young person like this may pierce, as the
Frenchmen say, by and by, but the chances are all the other way.

I advise aimless young men to choose some profession without needless
delay, and so get into a good strong current of human affairs, and
find themselves bound up in interests with a compact body of their
fellow-men.

I advise young women who write to me for counsel,--perhaps I do not
advise them at all, only sympathize a little with them, and listen to
what they have to say (eight closely written pages on the average,
which I always read from beginning to end, thinking of the widow's
cruse and myself in the character of Elijah) and--and--come now, I
don't believe Methuselah would tell you what he said in his letters
to young ladies, written when he was in his nine hundred and sixty-
ninth year.

But, dear me! how much work all this private criticism involves!  An
editor has only to say "respectfully declined," and there is the end
of it.  But the confidential adviser is expected to give the reasons
of his likes and dislikes in detail, and sometimes to enter into an
argument for their support.  That is more than any martyr can stand,
but what trials he must go through, as it is!  Great bundles of
manuscripts, verse or prose, which the recipient is expected to read,
perhaps to recommend to a publisher, at any rate to express a well-
digested and agreeably flavored opinion about; which opinion, nine
times out of ten, disguise it as we may, has to be a bitter draught;
every form of egotism, conceit, false sentiment, hunger for
notoriety, and eagerness for display of anserine plumage before the
admiring public;--all these come in by mail or express, covered with
postage-stamps of so much more cost than the value of the waste words
they overlie, that one comes at last to groan and change color at the
very sight of a package, and to dread the postman's knock as if it
were that of the other visitor whose naked knuckles rap at every
door.

Still there are experiences which go far towards repaying all these
inflictions.  My last young man's case looked desperate enough; some
of his sails had blown from the rigging, some were backing in the
wind, and some were flapping and shivering, but I told him which way
to head, and to my surprise he promised to do just as I directed, and
I do not doubt is under full sail at this moment.

What if I should tell my last, my very recent experience with the
other sex?  I received a paper containing the inner history of a
young woman's life, the evolution of her consciousness from its
earliest record of itself, written so thoughtfully, so sincerely,
with so much firmness and yet so much delicacy, with such truth of
detail and such grace in the manner of telling, that I finished the
long manuscript almost at a sitting, with a pleasure rarely, almost
never experienced in voluminous communications which one has to spell
out of handwriting.  This was from a correspondent who made my
acquaintance by letter when she was little more than a child, some
years ago.  How easy at that early period to have silenced her by
indifference, to have wounded her by a careless epithet, perhaps even
to have crushed her as one puts his heel on a weed!  A very little
encouragement kept her from despondency, and brought back one of
those overflows of gratitude which make one more ashamed of himself
for being so overpaid than he would be for having committed any of
the lesser sins.  But what pleased me most in the paper lately
received was to see how far the writer had outgrown the need of any
encouragement of mine; that she had strengthened out of her tremulous
questionings into a self-reliance and self-poise which I had hardly
dared to anticipate for her.  Some of my readers who are also writers
have very probably had more numerous experiences of this kind than I
can lay claim to; self-revelations from unknown and sometimes
nameless friends, who write from strange corners where the winds have
wafted some stray words of theirs which have lighted in the minds and
reached the hearts of those to whom they were as the angel that
stirred the pool of Bethesda.  Perhaps this is the best reward
authorship brings; it may not imply much talent or literary
excellence, but it means that your way of thinking and feeling is
just what some one of your fellow-creatures needed.

--I have been putting into shape, according to his request, some
further passages from the Young Astronomer's manuscript, some of
which the reader will have a chance to read if he is so disposed.
The conflict in the young man's mind between the desire for fame and
the sense of its emptiness as compared with nobler aims has set me
thinking about the subject from a somewhat humbler point of view.  As
I am in the habit of telling you, Beloved, many of my thoughts, as
well as of repeating what was said at our table, you may read what
follows as if it were addressed to you in the course of an ordinary
conversation, where I claimed rather more than my share, as I am
afraid I am a little in the habit of doing.

I suppose we all, those of us who write in verse or prose, have the
habitual feeling that we should like to be remembered.  It is to be
awake when all of those who were round us have been long wrapped in
slumber.  It is a pleasant thought enough that the name by which we
have been called shall be familiar on the lips of those who come
after us, and the thoughts that wrought themselves out in our
intelligence, the emotions that trembled through our frames, shall
live themselves over again in the minds and hearts of others.

But is there not something of rest, of calm, in the thought of gently
and gradually fading away out of human remembrance?  What line have
we written that was on a level with our conceptions?  What page of
ours that does not betray some weakness we would fain have left
unrecorded?  To become a classic and share the life of a language is
to be ever open to criticisms, to comparisons, to the caprices of
successive generations, to be called into court and stand a trial
before a new jury, once or more than once in every century.  To be
forgotten is to sleep in peace with the undisturbed myriads, no
longer subject to the chills and heats, the blasts, the sleet, the
dust, which assail in endless succession that shadow of a man which
we call his reputation.  The line which dying we could wish to blot
has been blotted out for us by a hand so tender, so patient, so used
to its kindly task, that the page looks as fair as if it had never
borne the record of our infirmity or our transgression.  And then so
few would be wholly content with their legacy of fame.  You remember
poor Monsieur Jacques's complaint of the favoritism shown to Monsieur
Berthier,--it is in that exquisite "Week in a French Country-House."
"Have you seen his room?  Have you seen how large it is?  Twice as
large as mine!  He has two jugs, a large one and a little one.  I
have only one small one.  And a tea-service and a gilt Cupid on the
top of his looking-glass." The famous survivor of himself has had his
features preserved in a medallion, and the slice of his countenance
seems clouded with the thought that it does not belong to a bust; the
bust ought to look happy in its niche, but the statue opposite makes
it feel as if it had been cheated out of half its personality, and
the statue looks uneasy because another stands on a loftier pedestal.
But "Ignotus " and "Miserrimus" are of the great majority in that
vast assembly, that House of Commons whose members are all peers,
where to be forgotten is the standing rule.  The dignity of a silent
memory is not to be undervalued.  Fame is after all a kind of rude
handling, and a name that is often on vulgar lips seems to borrow
something not to be desired, as the paper money that passes from hand
to hand gains somewhat which is a loss thereby.  O sweet, tranquil
refuge of oblivion, so far as earth is concerned, for us poor
blundering, stammering, misbehaving creatures who cannot turn over a
leaf of our life's diary without feeling thankful that its failure
can no longer stare us in the face!  Not unwelcome shall be the
baptism of dust which hides forever the name that was given in the
baptism of water!  We shall have good company whose names are left
unspoken by posterity.  "Who knows whether the best of men be known,
or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot than any that
stand remembered in the known account of time?  The greater part must
be content to be as though they had not been; to be found in the
register of God, not in the record of man.  Twenty-seven names make
up the first story before the flood, and the recorded names ever
since contain not one living century."

I have my moods about such things as the Young Astronomer has, as we
all have.  There are times when the thought of becoming utterly
nothing to the world we knew so well and loved so much is painful and
oppressive; we gasp as if in a vacuum, missing the atmosphere of life
we have so long been in the habit of breathing.  Not the less are
there moments when the aching need of repose comes over us and the
requiescat in pace, heathen benediction as it is, sounds more sweetly
in our ears than all the promises that Fame can hold out to us.

I wonder whether it ever occurred to you to reflect upon another
horror there must be in leaving a name behind you.  Think what a
horrid piece of work the biographers make of a man's private history!
Just imagine the subject of one of those extraordinary fictions
called biographies coming back and reading the life of himself,
written very probably by somebody or other who thought he could turn
a penny by doing it, and having the pleasure of seeing

    "His little bark attendant sail,
     Pursue the triumph and partake the gale."

The ghost of the person condemned to walk the earth in a biography
glides into a public library, and goes to the shelf where his mummied
life lies in its paper cerements.  I can see the pale shadow glancing
through the pages and hear the comments that shape themselves in the
bodiless intelligence as if they were made vocal by living lips.

"Born in July, 1776!  " And my honored father killed at the battle of
Bunker Hill!  Atrocious libeller!  to slander one's family at the
start after such a fashion!

"The death of his parents left him in charge of his Aunt Nancy, whose
tender care took the place of those parental attentions which should
have guided and protected his infant years, and consoled him for the
severity of another relative."

--Aunt Nancy!  It was Aunt Betsey, you fool!  Aunt Nancy used to--she
has been dead these eighty years, so there is no use in mincing
matters--she used to keep a bottle and a stick, and when she had been
tasting a drop out of the bottle the stick used to come off the shelf
and I had to taste that.  And here she is made a saint of, and poor
Aunt Betsey, that did everything for me, is slandered by implication
as a horrid tyrant

"The subject of this commemorative history was remarkable for a
precocious development of intelligence.  An old nurse who saw him at
the very earliest period of his existence is said to have spoken of
him as one of the most promising infants she had seen in her long
experience.  At school he was equally remarkable, and at a tender age
he received a paper adorned with a cut, inscribed REWARD OF MERIT."

--I don't doubt the nurse said that,--there were several promising
children born about that time.  As for cuts, I got more from the
schoolmaster's rattan than in any other shape.  Didn't one of my
teachers split a Gunter's scale into three pieces over the palm of my
hand?  And didn't I grin when I saw the pieces fly?  No humbug, now,
about my boyhood!

"His personal appearance was not singularly prepossessing.
Inconspicuous in stature and unattractive in features"

--You misbegotten son of an ourang and grandson of an ascidian
(ghosts keep up with science, you observe), what business have you to
be holding up my person to the contempt of my posterity?  Haven't I
been sleeping for this many a year in quiet, and don't the dandelions
and buttercups look as yellow over me as over the best-looking
neighbor I have in the dormitory?  Why do you want to people the
minds of everybody that reads your good-for-nothing libel which you
call a "biography" with your impudent caricatures of a man who was a
better-looking fellow than yourself, I 'll bet you ten to one, a man
whom his Latin tutor called fommosus puer when he was only a
freshman?  If that's what it means to make a reputation,--to leave
your character and your person, and the good name of your sainted
relatives, and all you were, and all you had and thought and felt, so
far as can be gathered by digging you out of your most private
records, to be manipulated and bandied about and cheapened in the
literary market as a chicken or a turkey or a goose is handled and
bargained over at a provision stall, is n't it better to be content
with the honest blue slate-stone and its inscription informing
posterity that you were a worthy citizen and a respected father of a
family?

--I should like to see any man's biography with corrections and
emendations by his ghost.  We don't know each other's secrets quite
so well as we flatter ourselves we do.  We don't always know our own
secrets as well as we might.  You have seen a tree with different
grafts upon it, an apple or a pear tree we will say.  In the late
summer months the fruit on one bough will ripen; I remember just such
a tree, and the early ripening fruit was the Jargonelle.  By and by
the fruit of another bough will begin to come into condition; the
lovely Saint Michael, as I remember, grew on the same stock as the
Jargonelle in the tree I am thinking of; and then, when these have
all fallen or been gathered, another, we will say the Winter Nelis,
has its turn, and so out of the same juices have come in succession
fruits of the most varied aspects and flavors.  It is the same thing
with ourselves, but it takes us a long while to find it out.  The
various inherited instincts ripen in succession.  You may be nine
tenths paternal at one period of your life, and nine tenths maternal
at another.  All at once the traits of some immediate ancestor may
come to maturity unexpectedly on one of the branches of your
character, just as your features at different periods of your life
betray different resemblances to your nearer or more remote
relatives.

But I want you to let me go back to the Bunker Hill Monument and the
dynasty of twenty or thirty centuries whose successive
representatives are to sit in the gate, like the Jewish monarchs,
while the people shall come by hundreds and by thousands to visit the
memorial shaft until the story of Bunker's Hill is as old as that of
Marathon.

Would not one like to attend twenty consecutive soirees, at each one
of which the lion of the party should be the Man of the Monument, at
the beginning of each century, all the way, we will say, from Anno
Domini 2000 to Ann. Dom. 4000,--or, if you think the style of dating
will be changed, say to Ann.  Darwinii (we can keep A. D. you see)
1872?  Will the Man be of the Indian type, as President Samuel
Stanhope Smith and others have supposed the transplanted European
will become by and by?  Will he have shortened down to four feet and
a little more, like the Esquimaux, or will he have been bred up to
seven feet by the use of new chemical diets, ozonized and otherwise
improved atmospheres, and animal fertilizers?  Let us summon him in
imagination and ask him a few questions.

Is n't it like splitting a toad out of a rock to think of this man of
nineteen or twenty centuries hence coming out from his stony
dwelling-place and speaking with us?  What are the questions we
should ask him?  He has but a few minutes to stay.  Make out your own
list; I will set down a few that come up to me as I write.

--What is the prevalent religious creed of civilization ?

--Has the planet met with any accident of importance?

--How general is the republican form of government ?

--Do men fly yet?

--Has the universal language come into use?

--Is there a new fuel since the English coal-mines have given out?

--Is the euthanasia a recognized branch of medical science?

--Is the oldest inhabitant still living?

--Is the Daily Advertiser still published?

--And the Evening Transcript?

--Is there much inquiry for the works of a writer of the nineteenth
century (Old Style) by--the name of--of--

My tongue cleaves to the roof of my mouth.  I cannot imagine the
putting of that question without feeling the tremors which shake a
wooer as he falters out the words the answer to which will make him
happy or wretched.

Whose works was I going to question him about, do you ask me?
Oh, the writings of a friend of mine, much esteemed by his relatives
and others.  But it's of no consequence, after all; I think he says
he does not care much for posthumous reputation.

I find something of the same interest in thinking about one of the
boarders at our table that I find in my waking dreams concerning the
Man of the Monument.  This personage is the Register of Deeds.  He is
an unemotional character, living in his business almost as
exclusively as the Scarabee, but without any of that eagerness and
enthusiasm which belong to our scientific specialist.  His work is
largely, principally, I may say, mechanical.  He has developed,
however, a certain amount of taste for the antiquities of his
department, and once in a while brings out some curious result of his
investigations into ancient documents.  He too belongs to a dynasty
which will last as long as there is such a thing as property in land
and dwellings.  When that is done away with, and we return to the
state of villanage, holding our tenement-houses, all to be of the
same pattern, of the State, that is to say, of the Tammany Ring which
is to take the place of the feudal lord,--the office of Register of
Deeds will, I presume, become useless, and the dynasty will be
deposed.

As we grow older we think more and more of old persons and of old
things and places.  As to old persons, it seems as if we never know
how much they have to tell until we are old ourselves and they have
been gone twenty or thirty years.  Once in a while we come upon some
survivor of his or her generation that we have overlooked, and feel
as if we had recovered one of the lost books of Livy or fished up the
golden candlestick from the ooze of the Tiber.  So it was the other
day after my reminiscences of the old gambrel-roofed house and its
visitors.  They found an echo in the recollections of one of the
brightest and liveliest of my suburban friends, whose memory is exact
about everything except her own age, which, there can be no doubt,
she makes out a score or two of years more than it really is.  Still
she was old enough to touch some lights--and a shadow or two--into
the portraits I had drawn, which made me wish that she and not I had
been the artist who sketched the pictures.  Among the lesser regrets
that mingle with graver sorrows for the friends of an earlier
generation we have lost, are our omissions to ask them so many
questions they could have answered easily enough, and would have been
pleased to be asked.  There!  I say to myself sometimes, in an absent
mood, I must ask her about that.  But she of whom I am now thinking
has long been beyond the reach of any earthly questioning, and I sigh
to think how easily I could have learned some fact which I should
have been happy to have transmitted with pious care to those who are
to come after me.  How many times I have heard her quote the line
about blessings brightening as they take their flight, and how true
it proves in many little ways that one never thinks of until it is
too late.

The Register of Deeds is not himself advanced in years.  But he
borrows an air of antiquity from the ancient records which are stored
in his sepulchral archives.  I love to go to his ossuary of dead
transactions, as I would visit the catacombs of Rome or Paris.  It is
like wandering up the Nile to stray among the shelves of his
monumental folios.  Here stands a series of volumes, extending over a
considerable number of years, all of which volumes are in his
handwriting.  But as you go backward there is a break, and you come
upon the writing of another person, who was getting old apparently,
for it is beginning to be a little shaky, and then you know that you
have gone back as far as the last days of his predecessor.  Thirty or
forty years more carry you to the time when this incumbent began the
duties of his office; his hand was steady then; and the next volume
beyond it in date betrays the work of a still different writer.  All
this interests me, but I do not see how it is going to interest my
reader.  I do not feel very happy about the Register of Deeds.  What
can I do with him?  Of what use is he going to be in my record of
what I have seen and heard at the breakfast-table?  The fact of his
being one of the boarders was not so important that I was obliged to
speak of him, and I might just as well have drawn on my imagination
and not allowed this dummy to take up the room which another guest
might have profitably filled at our breakfast-table.

I suppose he will prove a superfluity, but I have got him on my
hands, and I mean that he shall be as little in the way as possible.
One always comes across people in actual life who have no particular
business to be where we find them, and whose right to be at all is
somewhat questionable.

I am not going to get rid of the Register of Deeds by putting him out
of the way; but I confess I do not see of what service he is going to
be to me in my record.  I have often found, however, that the
Disposer of men and things understands much better than we do how to
place his pawns and other pieces on the chess-board of life.  A fish
more or less in the ocean does not seem to amount to much.  It is not
extravagant to say that any one fish may be considered a
supernumerary.  But when Captain Coram's ship sprung a leak and the
carpenter could not stop it, and the passengers had made up their
minds that it was all over with them, all at once, without any
apparent reason, the pumps began gaining on the leak, and the sinking
ship to lift herself out of the abyss which was swallowing her up.
And what do you think it was that saved the ship, and Captain Coram,
and so in due time gave to London that Foundling Hospital which he
endowed, and under the floor of which he lies buried?  Why, it was
that very supernumerary fish, which we held of so little account, but
which had wedged itself into the rent of the yawning planks, and
served to keep out the water until the leak was finally stopped.

I am very sure it was Captain Coram, but I almost hope it was
somebody else, in order to give some poor fellow who is lying in wait
for the periodicals a chance to correct me.  That will make him happy
for a month, and besides, he will not want to pick a quarrel about
anything else if he has that splendid triumph.  You remember
Alcibiades and his dog's tail.

Here you have the extracts I spoke of from the manuscript placed in
my hands for revision and emendation.  I can understand these
alternations of feeling in a young person who has been long absorbed
in a single pursuit, and in whom the human instincts which have been
long silent are now beginning to find expression.  I know well what
he wants; a great deal better, I think, than he knows himself.


     WIND-CLOUDS AND STAR-DRIFTS.

               II

Brief glimpses of the bright celestial spheres,
False lights, false shadows, vague, uncertain gleams,
Pale vaporous mists, wan streaks of lurid flame,
The climbing of the upward-sailing cloud,
The sinking of the downward-falling star,
All these are pictures of the changing moods
Borne through the midnight stillness of my soul.

Here am I, bound upon this pillared rock,
Prey to the vulture of a vast desire
That feeds upon my life.  I burst my bands
And steal a moment's freedom from the beak,
The clinging talons and the shadowing plumes;
Then comes the false enchantress, with her song;
"Thou wouldst not lay thy forehead in the dust
Like the base herd that feeds and breeds and dies!
Lo, the fair garlands that I weave for thee,
Unchanging as the belt Orion wears,
Bright as the jewels of the seven-starred Crown,
The spangled stream of Berenice's hair!"
And so she twines the fetters with the flowers
Around my yielding limbs, and the fierce bird
Stoops to his quarry,--then to feed his rage
Of ravening hunger I must drain my blood
And let the dew-drenched, poison-breeding night
Steal all the freshness from my fading cheek,
And leave its shadows round my caverned eyes.
All for a line in some unheeded scroll;
All for a stone that tells to gaping clowns,
"Here lies a restless wretch beneath a clod
Where squats the jealous nightmare men call Fame!"

I marvel not at him who scorns his kind
And thinks not sadly of the time foretold
When the old hulk we tread shall be a wreck,
A slag, a cinder drifting through the sky
Without its crew of fools!  We live too long
And even so are not content to die,
But load the mould that covers up our bones
With stones that stand like beggars by the road
And show death's grievous wound and ask for tears;
Write our great books to teach men who we are,
Sing our fine songs that tell in artful phrase
The secrets of our lives, and plead and pray
For alms of memory with the after time,
Those few swift seasons while the earth shall wear
Its leafy summers, ere its core grows cold
And the moist life of all that breathes shall die;
Or as the new-born seer, perchance more wise,
Would have us deem, before its growing mass,
Pelted with stardust, atoned with meteor-balls,
Heats like a hammered anvil, till at last Man
and his works and all that stirred itself
Of its own motion, in the fiery glow
Turns to a flaming vapor, and our orb
Shines a new sun for earths that shall be born.

I am as old as Egypt to myself,
Brother to them that squared the pyramids
By the same stars I watch.  I read the page
Where every letter is a glittering world,
With them who looked from Shinar's clay-built towers,
Ere yet the wanderer of the Midland sea
Had missed the fallen sister of the seven.
I dwell in spaces vague, remote, unknown,
Save to the silent few, who, leaving earth,
Quit all communion with their living time.
I lose myself in that ethereal void,
Till I have tired my wings and long to fill
My breast with denser air, to stand, to walk
With eyes not raised above my fellow-men.
Sick of my unwalled, solitary realm,
I ask to change the myriad lifeless worlds
I visit as mine own for one poor patch
Of this dull spheroid and a little breath
To shape in word or deed to serve my kind.

Was ever giant's dungeon dug so deep,
Was ever tyrant's fetter forged so strong,
Was e'er such deadly poison in the draught
The false wife mingles for the trusting fool,
As he whose willing victim is himself,
Digs, forges, mingles, for his captive soul?




VII

I was very sure that the old Master was hard at work about
something,--he is always very busy with something,--but I mean
something particular.

Whether it was a question of history or of cosmogony, or whether he
was handling a test-tube or a blow-pipe; what he was about I did not
feel sure; but I took it for granted that it was some crucial
question or other he was at work on, some point bearing on the
thought of the time.  For the Master, I have observed, is pretty
sagacious in striking for the points where his work will be like to
tell.  We all know that class of scientific laborers to whom all
facts are alike nourishing mental food, and who seem to exercise no
choice whatever, provided only they can get hold of these same
indiscriminate facts in quantity sufficient.  They browse on them, as
the animal to which they would not like to be compared browses on his
thistles.  But the Master knows the movement of the age he belongs
to; and if he seems to be busy with what looks like a small piece of
trivial experimenting, one may feel pretty sure that he knows what he
is about, and that his minute operations are looking to a result that
will help him towards attaining his great end in life,--an insight,
so far as his faculties and opportunities will allow, into that order
of things which he believes he can study with some prospect of taking
in its significance.

I became so anxious to know what particular matter he was busy with,
that I had to call upon him to satisfy my curiosity.  It was with a
little trepidation that I knocked at his door.  I felt a good deal as
one might have felt on disturbing an alchemist at his work, at the
very moment, it might be, when he was about to make projection.

--Come in!--said the Master in his grave, massive tones.

I passed through the library with him into a little room evidently
devoted to his experiments.

--You have come just at the right moment,--he said.--Your eyes are
better than mine.  I have been looking at this flask, and I should
like to have you look at it.

It was a small matrass, as one of the elder chemists would have
called it, containing a fluid, and hermetically sealed.  He held it
up at the window; perhaps you remember the physician holding a flask
to the light in Gerard Douw's "Femme hydropique"; I thought of that
fine figure as I looked at him.  Look!--said he,--is it clear or
cloudy?

--You need not ask me that,--I answered.  It is very plainly turbid.
I should think that some sediment had been shaken up in it.  What is
it, Elixir Vitae or Aurum potabile?

--Something that means more than alchemy ever did!  Boiled just three
hours, and as clear as a bell until within the last few days; since
then has been clouding up.

--I began to form a pretty shrewd guess at the meaning of all this,
and to think I knew very nearly what was coming next.  I was right in
my conjecture.  The Master broke off the sealed end of his little
flask, took out a small portion of the fluid on a glass rod, and
placed it on a slip of glass in the usual way for a microscopic
examination.

--One thousand diameters,--he said, as he placed it on the stage of
the microscope.---We shall find signs of life, of course.--He bent
over the instrument and looked but an instant.

--There they are!--he exclaimed,--look in.

I looked in and saw some objects:

The straight linear bodies were darting backward and forward in every
direction.  The wavy ones were wriggling about like eels or water-
snakes.  The round ones were spinning on their axes and rolling in
every direction.  All of them were in a state of incessant activity,
as if perpetually seeking something and never finding it.

They are tough, the germs of these little bodies, said the Master.---
Three hours' boiling has n't killed 'em.  Now, then, let us see what
has been the effect of six hours' boiling.

He took up another flask just like the first, containing fluid and
hermetically sealed in the same way.

--Boiled just three hours longer than the other, he said,--six hours
in all.  This is the experimentum crucis.  Do you see any cloudiness
in it?

--Not a sign of it; it is as clear as crystal, except that there may
be a little sediment at the bottom.

--That is nothing.  The liquid is clear.  We shall find no signs of
life.---He put a minute drop of the liquid under the microscope as
before.  Nothing stirred.  Nothing to be seen but a clear circle of
light.  We looked at it again and again, but with the same result.

--Six hours kill 'em all, according to this experiment,--said the
Master.---Good as far as it goes.  One more negative result.  Do you
know what would have happened if that liquid had been clouded, and we
had found life in the sealed flask?  Sir, if that liquid had held
life in it the Vatican would have trembled to hear it, and there
would have been anxious questionings and ominous whisperings in the
halls of Lambeth palace!  The accepted cosmogonies on trial, sir!

Traditions, sanctities, creeds, ecclesiastical establishments, all
shaking to know whether my little sixpenny flask of fluid looks muddy
or not!  I don't know whether to laugh or shudder.  The thought of an
oecumenical council having its leading feature dislocated by my
trifling experiment!  The thought, again, of the mighty revolution in
human beliefs and affairs that might grow out of the same
insignificant little phenomenon.  A wine-glassful of clear liquid
growing muddy.  If we had found a wriggle, or a zigzag, or a shoot
from one side to the other, in this last flask, what a scare there
would have been, to be sure, in the schools of the prophets!  Talk
about your megatherium and your megalosaurus,--what are these to the
bacterium and the vibrio?  These are the dreadful monsters of today.
If they show themselves where they have no business, the little
rascals frighten honest folks worse than ever people were frightened
by the Dragon of Rhodes!

The Master gets going sometimes, there is no denying it, until his
imagination runs away with him.  He had been trying, as the reader
sees, one of those curious experiments in spontaneous generation, as
it is called, which have been so often instituted of late years, and
by none more thoroughly than by that eminent American student of
nature (Professor Jeffries Wyman) whose process he had imitated with
a result like his.

We got talking over these matters among us the next morning at the
breakfast-table.

We must agree they couldn't stand six hours' boiling,--I said.

--Good for the Pope of Rome!--exclaimed the Master.

--The Landlady drew back with a certain expression of dismay in her
countenance.  She hoped he did n't want the Pope to make any more
converts in this country.  She had heard a sermon only last Sabbath,
and the minister had made it out, she thought, as plain as could be,
that the Pope was the Man of Sin and that the Church of Rome was--
Well, there was very strong names applied to her in Scripture.

What was good for the Pope was good for your minister, too, my dear
madam,--said the Master.  Good for everybody that is afraid of what
people call "science." If it should prove that dead things come to
life of themselves, it would be awkward, you know, because then
somebody will get up and say if one dead thing made itself alive
another might, and so perhaps the earth peopled itself without any
help.  Possibly the difficulty wouldn't be so great as many people
suppose.  We might perhaps find room for a Creator after all, as we
do now, though we see a little brown seed grow till it sucks up the
juices of half an acre of ground, apparently all by its own inherent
power.  That does not stagger us; I am not sure that it would if Mr.
Crosses or Mr. Weekes's acarus should show himself all of a sudden,
as they said he did, in certain mineral mixtures acted on by
electricity.

The Landlady was off soundings, and looking vacant enough by this
time.

The Master turned to me.---Don't think too much of the result of our
one experiment.  It means something, because it confirms those other
experiments of which it was a copy; but we must remember that a
hundred negatives don't settle such a question.  Life does get into
the world somehow.  You don't suppose Adam had the cutaneous
unpleasantness politely called psora, do you?

--Hardly,--I answered.---He must have been a walking hospital if he
carried all the maladies about him which have plagued his
descendants.

--Well, then, how did the little beast which is peculiar to that
special complaint intrude himself into the Order of Things?  You
don't suppose there was a special act of creation for the express
purpose of bestowing that little wretch on humanity, do you?

I thought, on the whole, I would n't answer that question.

--You and I are at work on the same problem, said the Young
Astronomer to the Master.---I have looked into a microscope now and
then, and I have seen that perpetual dancing about of minute atoms in
a fluid, which you call molecular motion.  Just so, when I look
through my telescope I see the star-dust whirling about in the
infinite expanse of ether; or if I do not see its motion, I know that
it is only on account of its immeasurable distance.  Matter and
motion everywhere; void and rest nowhere.  You ask why your restless
microscopic atoms may not come together and become self-conscious and
self-moving organisms.  I ask why my telescopic star-dust may not
come together and grow and organize into habitable worlds,--the
ripened fruit on the branches of the tree Yggdrasil, if I may borrow
from our friend the Poet's province.  It frightens people, though, to
hear the suggestion that worlds shape themselves from star-mist.  It
does not trouble them at all to see the watery spheres that round
themselves into being out of the vapors floating over us; they are
nothing but raindrops.  But if a planet can grow as a rain-drop
grows, why then--It was a great comfort to these timid folk when
Lord Rosse's telescope resolved certain nebula into star-clusters.
Sir John Herschel would have told them that this made little
difference in accounting for the formation of worlds by aggregation,
but at any rate it was a comfort to them.

--These people have always been afraid of the astronomers,--said the
Master.--They were shy, you know, of the Copernican system, for a
long while; well they might be with an oubliette waiting for them if
they ventured to think that the earth moved round the sun.  Science
settled that point finally for them, at length, and then it was all
right,--when there was no use in disputing the fact any longer.  By
and by geology began turning up fossils that told extraordinary
stories about the duration of life upon our planet.  What subterfuges
were not used to get rid of their evidence!  Think of a man seeing
the fossilized skeleton of an animal split out of a quarry, his teeth
worn down by mastication, and the remains of food still visible in
his interior, and, in order to get rid of a piece of evidence
contrary to the traditions he holds to, seriously maintaining that
this skeleton never belonged to a living creature, but was created
with just these appearances; a make-believe, a sham, a Barnum's-
mermaid contrivance to amuse its Creator and impose upon his
intelligent children!  And now people talk about geological epochs
and hundreds of millions of years in the planet's history as calmly
as if they were discussing the age of their deceased great-
grandmothers.  Ten or a dozen years ago people said Sh! Sh! if you
ventured to meddle with any question supposed to involve a doubt of
the generally accepted Hebrew traditions.  To-day such questions are
recognized as perfectly fair subjects for general conversation; not
in the basement story, perhaps, or among the rank and file of the
curbstone congregations, but among intelligent and educated persons.
You may preach about them in your pulpit, you may lecture about them,
you may talk about them with the first sensible-looking person you
happen to meet, you may write magazine articles about them, and the
editor need not expect to receive remonstrances from angry
subscribers and withdrawals of subscriptions, as he would have been
sure to not a great many years ago.  Why, you may go to a tea-party
where the clergyman's wife shows her best cap and his daughters
display their shining ringlets, and you will hear the company
discussing the Darwinian theory of the origin of the human race as if
it were as harmless a question as that of the lineage of a spinster's
lapdog.  You may see a fine lady who is as particular in her
genuflections as any Buddhist or Mahometan saint in his
manifestations of reverence, who will talk over the anthropoid ape,
the supposed founder of the family to which we belong, and even go
back with you to the acephalous mollusk, first cousin to the clams
and mussels, whose rudimental spine was the hinted prophecy of
humanity; all this time never dreaming, apparently, that what she
takes for a matter of curious speculation involves the whole future
of human progress and destiny.

I can't help thinking that if we had talked as freely as we can and
do now in the days of the first boarder at this table,--I mean the
one who introduced it to the public,--it would have sounded a good
deal more aggressively than it does now.--The old Master got rather
warm in talking; perhaps the consciousness of having a number of
listeners had something to do with it.

--This whole business is an open question,--he said,--and there is no
use in saying, "Hush!  don't talk about such things!  "People do talk
about 'em everywhere; and if they don't talk about 'em they think
about 'em, and that is worse,--if there is anything bad about such
questions, that is.  If for the Fall of man, science comes to
substitute the RISE of man, sir, it means the utter disintegration of
all the spiritual pessimisms which have been like a spasm in the
heart and a cramp in the intellect of men for so many centuries.  And
yet who dares to say that it is not a perfectly legitimate and proper
question to be discussed, without the slightest regard to the fears
or the threats of Pope or prelate?

Sir, I believe,--the Master rose from his chair as he spoke, and said
in a deep and solemn tone, but without any declamatory vehemence,--
sir, I believe that we are at this moment in what will be recognized
not many centuries hence as one of the late watches in the night of
the dark ages.  There is a twilight ray, beyond question.  We know
something of the universe, a very little, and, strangely enough, we
know most of what is farthest from us.  We have weighed the planets
and analyzed the flames of the--sun and stars.  We predict their
movements as if they were machines we ourselves had made and
regulated.  We know a good deal about the earth on which we live.
But the study of man has been so completely subjected to our
preconceived opinions, that we have got to begin all over again.  We
have studied anthropology through theology; we have now to begin the
study of theology through anthropology.  Until we have exhausted the
human element in every form of belief, and that can only be done by
what we may call comparative spiritual anatomy, we cannot begin to
deal with the alleged extra-human elements without blundering into
all imaginable puerilities.  If you think for one moment that there
is not a single religion in the world which does not come to us
through the medium of a preexisting language; and if you remember
that this language embodies absolutely nothing but human conceptions
and human passions, you will see at once that every religion
presupposes its own elements as already existing in those to whom it
is addressed.  I once went to a church in London and heard the famous
Edward Irving preach, and heard some of his congregation speak in the
strange words characteristic of their miraculous gift of tongues.  I
had a respect for the logical basis of this singular phenomenon.  I
have always thought it was natural that any celestial message should
demand a language of its own, only to be understood by divine
illumination.  All human words tend, of course, to stop short in
human meaning.  And the more I hear the most sacred terms employed,
the more I am satisfied that they have entirely and radically
different meanings in the minds of those who use them.  Yet they deal
with them as if they were as definite as mathematical quantities or
geometrical figures.  What would become of arithmetic if the figure 2
meant three for one man and five for another and twenty for a third,
and all the other numerals were in the same way variable quantities?
Mighty intelligent correspondence business men would have with each
other!  But how is this any worse than the difference of opinion
which led a famous clergyman to say to a brother theologian, "Oh, I
see, my dear sir, your God is my Devil."

Man has been studied proudly, contemptuously, rather, from the point
of view supposed to be authoritatively settled.  The self-sufficiency
of egotistic natures was never more fully shown than in the
expositions of the worthlessness and wretchedness of their fellow-
creatures given by the dogmatists who have "gone back," as the vulgar
phrase is, on their race, their own flesh and blood.  Did you ever
read what Mr. Bancroft says about Calvin in his article on Jonathan
Edwards?--and mighty well said it is too, in my judgment.  Let me
remind you of it, whether you have read it or not.  "Setting himself
up over against the privileged classes, he, with a loftier pride than
theirs, revealed the power of a yet higher order of nobility, not of
a registered ancestry of fifteen generations, but one absolutely
spotless in its escutcheon, preordained in the council chamber of
eternity."  I think you'll find I have got that sentence right, word
for word, and there 's a great deal more in it than many good folks
who call themselves after the reformer seem to be aware of.  The Pope
put his foot on the neck of kings, but Calvin and his cohort crushed
the whole human race under their heels in the name of the Lord of
Hosts.  Now, you see, the point that people don't understand is the
absolute and utter humility of science, in opposition to this
doctrinal self-sufficiency.  I don't doubt this may sound a little
paradoxical at first, but I think you will find it is all right.  You
remember the courtier and the monarch,--Louis the Fourteenth, wasn't
it?--never mind, give the poor fellows that live by setting you
right a chance.  "What o'clock is it?" says the king.  "Just whatever
o'clock your Majesty pleases," says the courtier.  I venture to say
the monarch was a great deal more humble than the follower, who
pretended that his master was superior to such trifling facts as the
revolution of the planet.  It was the same thing, you remember, with
King Canute and the tide on the sea-shore.  The king accepted the
scientific fact of the tide's rising.  The loyal hangers-on, who
believed in divine right, were too proud of the company they found
themselves in to make any such humiliating admission.  But there are
people, and plenty of them, to-day, who will dispute facts just as
clear to those who have taken the pains to learn what is known about
them, as that of the tide's rising.  They don't like to admit these
facts, because they throw doubt upon some of their cherished
opinions.  We are getting on towards the last part of this nineteenth
century.  What we have gained is not so much in positive knowledge,
though that is a good deal, as it is in the freedom of discussion of
every subject that comes within the range of observation and
inference.  How long is it since Mrs. Piozzi wrote,--"Let me hope
that you will not pursue geology till it leads you into doubts
destructive of all comfort in this world and all happiness in the
next"?

The Master paused and I remained silent, for I was thinking things I
could not say.


--It is well always to have a woman near by when one is talking on
this class of subjects.  Whether there will be three or four women to
one man in heaven is a question which I must leave to those who talk
as if they knew all about the future condition of the race to answer.
But very certainly there is much more of hearty faith, much more of
spiritual life, among women than among men, in this world.  They need
faith to support them more than men do, for they have a great deal
less to call them out of themselves, and it comes easier to them, for
their habitual state of dependence teaches them to trust in others.
When they become voters, if they ever do, it may be feared that the
pews will lose what the ward-rooms gain.  Relax a woman's hold on
man, and her knee-joints will soon begin to stiffen.  Self-assertion
brings out many fine qualities, but it does not promote devotional
habits.

I remember some such thoughts as this were passing through my mind
while the Master was talking.  I noticed that the Lady was listening
to the conversation with a look of more than usual interest.  We men
have the talk mostly to ourselves at this table; the Master, as you
have found out, is fond of monologues, and I myself--well, I suppose
I must own to a certain love for the reverberated music of my own
accents; at any rate, the Master and I do most of the talking.  But
others help us do the listening.  I think I can show that they listen
to some purpose.  I am going to surprise my reader with a letter
which I received very shortly after the conversation took place which
I have just reported.  It is of course by a special license, such as
belongs to the supreme prerogative of an author, that I am enabled to
present it to him.  He need ask no questions: it is not his affair
how I obtained the right to give publicity to a private
communication.  I have become somewhat more intimately acquainted
with the writer of it than in the earlier period of my connection
with this establishment, and I think I may say have gained her
confidence to a very considerable degree.


MY DEAR SIR:  The conversations I have had with you, limited as they
have been, have convinced me that I am quite safe in addressing you
with freedom on a subject which interests me, and others more than
myself.  We at our end of the table have been listening, more or less
intelligently, to the discussions going on between two or three of
you gentlemen on matters of solemn import to us all.  This is nothing
very new to me.  I have been used, from an early period of my life,
to hear the discussion of grave questions, both in politics and
religion.  I have seen gentlemen at my father's table get as warm
over a theological point of dispute as in talking over their
political differences.  I rather think it has always been very much
so, in bad as well as in good company; for you remember how Milton's
fallen angels amused themselves with disputing on "providence,
foreknowledge, will, and fate," and it was the same thing in that
club Goldsmith writes so pleasantly about.  Indeed, why should not
people very often come, in the course of conversation, to the one
subject which lies beneath all else about which our thoughts are
occupied?  And what more natural than that one should be inquiring
about what another has accepted and ceased to have any doubts
concerning?  It seems to me all right that at the proper time, in the
proper place, those who are less easily convinced than their
neighbors should have the fullest liberty of calling to account all
the opinions which others receive without question.  Somebody must
stand sentry at the outposts of belief, and it is a sentry's
business, I believe, to challenge every one who comes near him,
friend or foe.

I want you to understand fully that I am not one of those poor
nervous creatures who are frightened out of their wits when any
question is started that implies the disturbance of their old
beliefs.  I manage to see some of the periodicals, and now and then
dip a little way into a new book which deals with these curious
questions you were talking about, and others like them.  You know
they find their way almost everywhere.  They do not worry me in the
least.  When I was a little girl, they used to say that if you put a
horsehair into a tub of water it would turn into a snake in the
course of a few days.  That did not seem to me so very much stranger
than it was that an egg should turn into a chicken.  What can I say
to that?  Only that it is the Lord's doings, and marvellous in my
eyes; and if our philosophical friend should find some little live
creatures, or what seem to be live creatures, in any of his messes, I
should say as much, and no more.  You do not think I would shut up my
Bible and Prayer-Book because there is one more thing I do not
understand in a world where I understand so very little of all the
wonders that surround me?

It may be very wrong to pay any attention to those speculations about
the origin of mankind which seem to conflict with the Sacred Record.
But perhaps there is some way of reconciling them, as there is of
making the seven days of creation harmonize with modern geology.  At
least, these speculations are curious enough in themselves; and I
have seen so many good and handsome children come of parents who were
anything but virtuous and comely, that I can believe in almost any
amount of improvement taking place in a tribe of living beings, if
time and opportunity favor it.  I have read in books of natural
history that dogs came originally from wolves.  When I remember my
little Flora, who, as I used to think, could do everything but talk,
it does not seem to me that she was much nearer her savage ancestors
than some of the horrid cannibal wretches are to their neighbors the
great apes.

You see that I am tolerably liberal in my habit of looking at all
these questions.  We women drift along with the current of the times,
listening, in our quiet way, to the discussions going on round us in
books and in conversation, and shift the phrases in which we think
and talk with something of the same ease as that with which we change
our style of dress from year to year.  I doubt if you of the other
sex know what an effect this habit of accommodating our tastes to
changing standards has upon us.  Nothing is fixed in them, as you
know; the very law of fashion is change.  I suspect we learn from our
dressmakers to shift the costume of our minds, and slip on the new
fashions of thinking all the more easily because we have been.
accustomed to new styles of dressing every season.

It frightens me to see how much I have written without having yet
said a word of what I began this letter on purpose to say.  I have
taken so much space in "defining my position," to borrow the
politicians' phrase, that I begin to fear you will be out of patience
before you come to the part of my letter I care most about your
reading.

What I want to say is this.  When these matters are talked about
before persons of different ages and various shades of intelligence,
I think one ought to be very careful that his use of language does
not injure the sensibilities, perhaps blunt the reverential feelings,
of those who are listening to him.  You of the sterner sex say that
we women have intuitions, but not logic, as our birthright.  I shall
not commit my sex by conceding this to be true as a whole, but I will
accept the first half of it, and I will go so far as to say that we
do not always care to follow out a train of thought until it ends in
a blind cul de sac, as some of what are called the logical people are
fond of doing.

Now I want to remind you that religion is not a matter of
intellectual luxury to those of us who are interested in it, but
something very different.  It is our life, and more than our life;
for that is measured by pulse-beats, but our religious consciousness
partakes of the Infinite, towards which it is constantly yearning.
It is very possible that a hundred or five hundred years from now the
forms of religious belief may be so altered that we should hardly
know them.  But the sense of dependence on Divine influence and the
need of communion with the unseen and eternal will be then just what
they are now.  It is not the geologist's hammer, or the astronomer's
telescope, or the naturalist's microscope, that is going to take away
the need of the human soul for that Rock to rest upon which is higher
than itself, that Star which never sets, that all-pervading Presence
which gives life to all the least moving atoms of the immeasurable
universe.

I have no fears for myself, and listen very quietly to all your
debates.  I go from your philosophical discussions to the reading of
Jeremy Taylor's "Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying " without feeling
that I have unfitted myself in the least degree for its solemn
reflections.  And, as I have mentioned his name, I cannot help saying
that I do not believe that good man himself would have ever shown the
bitterness to those who seem to be at variance with the received
doctrines which one may see in some of the newspapers that call
themselves "religious."  I have kept a few old books from my honored
father's library, and among them is another of his which I always
thought had more true Christianity in its title than there is in a
good many whole volumes.  I am going to take the book down, or up,--
for it is not a little one,--and write out the title, which, I dare
say, you remember, and very likely you have the book.  "Discourse of
the Liberty of Prophesying, showing the Unreasonableness of
prescribing to other Men's Faith, and the Iniquity of persecuting
Different Opinions."

Now, my dear sir, I am sure you believe that I want to be liberal and
reasonable, and not to act like those weak alarmists who, whenever
the silly sheep begin to skip as if something was after them, and
huddle together in their fright, are sure there must be a bear or a
lion coming to eat them up.  But for all that, I want to beg you to
handle some of these points, which are so involved in the creed of a
good many well-intentioned persons that you cannot separate them from
it without picking their whole belief to pieces, with more thought
for them than you might think at first they were entitled to.  I have
no doubt you gentlemen are as wise as serpents, and I want you to be
as harmless as doves.

The Young Girl who sits by me has, I know, strong religious
instincts.  Instead of setting her out to ask all sorts of questions,
I would rather, if I had my way, encourage her to form a habit of
attending to religious duties, and make the most of the simple faith
in which she was bred.  I think there are a good many questions young
persons may safely postpone to a more convenient season; and as this
young creature is overworked, I hate to have her excited by the fever
of doubt which it cannot be denied is largely prevailing in our time.

I know you must have looked on our other young friend, who has
devoted himself to the sublimest of the sciences, with as much
interest as I do.  When I was a little girl I used to write out a
line of Young's as a copy in my writing-book,

     "An undevout astronomer is mad";

but I do not now feel quite so sure that the contemplation of all the
multitude of remote worlds does not tend to weaken the idea of a
personal Deity.  It is not so much that nebular theory which worries
me, when I think about this subject, as a kind of bewilderment when I
try to conceive of a consciousness filling all those frightful blanks
of space they talk about.  I sometimes doubt whether that young man
worships anything but the stars.  They tell me that many young
students of science like him never see the inside of a church.  I
cannot help wishing they did.  It humanizes people, quite apart from
any higher influence it exerts upon them.  One reason, perhaps, why
they do not care to go to places of worship is that they are liable
to hear the questions they know something about handled in sermons by
those who know very much less about them.  And so they lose a great
deal.  Almost every human being, however vague his notions of the
Power addressed, is capable of being lifted and solemnized by the
exercise of public prayer.  When I was a young girl we travelled in
Europe, and I visited Ferney with my parents; and I remember we all
stopped before a chapel, and I read upon its front, I knew Latin
enough to understand it, I am pleased to say,--Deo erexit Voltaire.
I never forgot it; and knowing what a sad scoffer he was at most
sacred things, I could not but be impressed with the fact that even
he was not satisfied with himself, until he had shown his devotion in
a public and lasting form.

We all want religion sooner or later.  I am afraid there are some who
have no natural turn for it, as there are persons without an ear for
music, to which, if I remember right, I heard one of you comparing
what you called religious genius.  But sorrow and misery bring even
these to know what it means, in a great many instances.  May I not
say to you, my friend, that I am one who has learned the secret of
the inner life by the discipline of trials in the life of outward
circumstance?  I can remember the time when I thought more about the
shade of color in a ribbon, whether it matched my complexion or not,
than I did about my spiritual interests in this world or the next.
It was needful that I should learn the meaning of that text, "Whom
the Lord loveth he chasteneth."

Since I have been taught in the school of trial I have felt, as I
never could before, how precious an inheritance is the smallest
patrimony of faith.  When everything seemed gone from me, I found I
had still one possession.  The bruised reed that I had never leaned
on became my staff.  The smoking flax which had been a worry to my
eyes burst into flame, and I lighted the taper at it which has since
guided all my footsteps.  And I am but one of the thousands who have
had the same experience.  They have been through the depths of
affliction, and know the needs of the human soul.  It will find its
God in the unseen,--Father, Saviour, Divine Spirit, Virgin Mother, it
must and will breathe its longings and its griefs into the heart of a
Being capable of understanding all its necessities and sympathizing
with all its woes.

I am jealous, yes, I own I am jealous of any word, spoken or written,
that would tend to impair that birthright of reverence which becomes
for so many in after years the basis of a deeper religious sentiment.
And yet, as I have said, I cannot and will not shut my eyes to the
problems which may seriously affect our modes of conceiving the
eternal truths on which, and by which, our souls must live.  What a
fearful time is this into which we poor sensitive and timid creatures
are born!  I suppose the life of every century has more or less
special resemblance to that of some particular Apostle.  I cannot
help thinking this century has Thomas for its model.  How do you
suppose the other Apostles felt when that experimental philosopher
explored the wounds of the Being who to them was divine with his
inquisitive forefinger?  In our time that finger has multiplied
itself into ten thousand thousand implements of research, challenging
all mysteries, weighing the world as in a balance, and sifting
through its prisms and spectroscopes the light that comes from the
throne of the Eternal.

Pity us, dear Lord, pity us!  The peace in believing which belonged
to other ages is not for us.  Again Thy wounds are opened that we may
know whether it is the blood of one like ourselves which flows from
them, or whether it is a Divinity that is bleeding for His creatures.
Wilt Thou not take the doubt of Thy children whom the time commands
to try all things in the place of the unquestioning faith of earlier
and simpler-hearted generations?  We too have need of Thee.  Thy
martyrs in other ages were cast into the flames, but no fire could
touch their immortal and indestructible faith.  We sit in safety and
in peace, so far as these poor bodies are concerned; but our
cherished beliefs, the hopes, the trust that stayed the hearts of
those we loved who have gone before us, are cast into the fiery
furnace of an age which is fast turning to dross the certainties and
the sanctities once prized as our most precious inheritance.
You will understand me, my dear sir, and all my solicitudes and
apprehensions.  Had I never been assailed by the questions that meet
all thinking persons in our time, I might not have thought so
anxiously about the risk of perplexing others.  I know as well as you
must that there are many articles of belief clinging to the skirts of
our time which are the bequests of the ages of ignorance that God
winked at.  But for all that I would train a child in the nurture and
admonition of the Lord, according to the simplest and best creed I
could disentangle from those barbarisms, and I would in every way try
to keep up in young persons that standard of reverence for all sacred
subjects which may, without any violent transition, grow and ripen
into the devotion of later years.  Believe me,

Very sincerely yours,


I have thought a good deal about this letter and the writer of it
lately.  She seemed at first removed to a distance from all of us,
but here I find myself in somewhat near relations with her.  What has
surprised me more than that, however, is to find that she is becoming
so much acquainted with the Register of Deeds.  Of all persons in the
world, I should least have thought of him as like to be interested in
her, and still less, if possible, of her fancying him.  I can only
say they have been in pretty close conversation several times of
late, and, if I dared to think it of so very calm and dignified a
personage, I should say that her color was a little heightened after
one or more of these interviews.  No! that would be too absurd!  But
I begin to think nothing is absurd in the matter of the relations of
the two sexes; and if this high-bred woman fancies the attentions of
a piece of human machinery like this elderly individual, it is none
of my business.

I have been at work on some more of the Young Astronomer's lines.  I
find less occasion for meddling with them as he grows more used to
versification.  I think I could analyze the processes going on in his
mind, and the conflict of instincts which he cannot in the nature of
things understand.  But it is as well to give the reader a chance to
find out for himself what is going on in the young man's heart and
intellect.


     WIND-CLOUDS AND STAR-DRIFTS.

               III

The snows that glittered on the disk of Mars
Have melted, and the planet's fiery orb
Rolls in the crimson summer of its year;
But what to me the summer or the snow
Of worlds that throb with life in forms unknown,
If life indeed be theirs; I heed not these.
My heart is simply human; all my care
For them whose dust is fashioned like mine own;
These ache with cold and hunger, live in pain,
And shake with fear of worlds more full of woe;
There may be others worthier of my love,
But such I know not save through these I know.

There are two veils of language, hid beneath
Whose sheltering folds, we dare to be ourselves;
And not that other self which nods and smiles
And babbles in our name; the one is Prayer,
Lending its licensed freedom to the tongue
That tells our sorrows and our sins to Heaven;
The other, Verse, that throws its spangled web
Around our naked speech and makes it bold.
I, whose best prayer is silence; sitting dumb
In the great temple where I nightly serve
Him who is throned in light, have dared to claim
The poet's franchise, though I may not hope
To wear his garland; hear me while I tell
My story in such form as poets use,
But breathed in fitful whispers, as the wind
Sighs and then slumbers, wakes and sighs again.

Thou Vision, floating in the breathless air
Between me and the fairest of the stars,
I tell my lonely thoughts as unto thee.
Look not for marvels of the scholar's pen
In my rude measure; I can only show
A slender-margined, unillumined page,
And trust its meaning to the flattering eye
That reads it in the gracious light of love.
Ah, wouldst thou clothe thyself in breathing shape
And nestle at my side, my voice should lend
Whate'er my verse may lack of tender rhythm
To make thee listen.

                     I have stood entranced
When, with her fingers wandering o'er the keys,
The white enchantress with the golden hair
Breathed all her soul through some unvalued rhyme;
Some flower of song that long had lost its bloom;
Lo! its dead summer kindled as she sang!
The sweet contralto, like the ringdove's coo,
Thrilled it with brooding, fond, caressing tones,
And the pale minstrel's passion lived again,
Tearful and trembling as a dewy rose
The wind has shaken till it fills the air
With light and fragrance.  Such the wondrous charm
A song can borrow when the bosom throbs
That lends it breath.

                      So from the poet's lips
His verse sounds doubly sweet, for none like him
Feels every cadence of its wave-like flow;
He lives the passion over, while he reads,
That shook him as he sang his lofty strain,
And pours his life through each resounding line,
As ocean, when the stormy winds are hushed,
Still rolls and thunders through his billowy caves.

Let me retrace the record of the years
That made me what I am.  A man most wise,
But overworn with toil and bent with age,
Sought me to be his scholar,--me, run wild
From books and teachers,--kindled in my soul
The love of knowledge; led me to his tower,
Showed me the wonders of the midnight realm
His hollow sceptre ruled, or seemed to rule,
Taught me the mighty secrets of the spheres,
Trained me to find the glimmering specks of light
Beyond the unaided sense, and on my chart
To string them one by one, in order due,
As on a rosary a saint his beads.

I was his only scholar; I became
The echo to his thought; whate'er he knew
Was mine for asking; so from year to year
We wrought together, till there came a time
When I, the learner, was the master half
Of the twinned being in the dome-crowned tower.

Minds roll in paths like planets; they revolve
This in a larger, that a narrower ring,
But round they come at last to that same phase,
That self-same light and shade they showed before.
I learned his annual and his monthly tale,
His weekly axiom and his daily phrase,
I felt them coming in the laden air,
And watched them laboring up to vocal breath,
Even as the first-born at his father's board
Knows ere he speaks the too familiar jest
Is on its way, by some mysterious sign
Forewarned, the click before the striking bell.

He shrivelled as I spread my growing leaves,
Till trust and reverence changed to pitying care;
He lived for me in what he once had been,
But I for him, a shadow, a defence,
The guardian of his fame, his guide, his staff,
Leaned on so long he fell if left alone.
I was his eye, his ear, his cunning hand,
Love was my spur and longing after fame,
But his the goading thorn of sleepless age
That sees its shortening span, its lengthening shades,
That clutches what it may with eager grasp,
And drops at last with empty, outstretched hands.

All this he dreamed not.  He would sit him down
Thinking to work his problems as of old,
And find the star he thought so plain a blur,
The columned figures labyrinthine wilds
Without my comment, blind and senseless scrawls
That vexed him with their riddles; he would strive
And struggle for a while, and then his eye
Would lose its light, and over all his mind
The cold gray mist would settle; and erelong
The darkness fell, and I was left alone.

Alone! no climber of an Alpine cliff,
No Arctic venturer on the waveless sea,
Feels the dread stillness round him as it chills
The heart of him who leaves the slumbering earth
To watch the silent worlds that crowd the sky.

Alone!  And as the shepherd leaves his flock
To feed upon the hillside, he meanwhile
Finds converse in the warblings of the pipe
Himself has fashioned for his vacant hour,
So have I grown companion to myself,
And to the wandering spirits of the air
That smile and whisper round us in our dreams.
Thus have I learned to search if I may know
The whence and why of all beneath the stars
And all beyond them, and to weigh my life
As in a balance, poising good and ill
Against each other,-asking of the Power
That flung me forth among the whirling worlds,
If I am heir to any inborn right,
Or only as an atom of the dust
That every wind may blow where'er it will.

I am not humble; I was shown my place,
Clad in such robes as Nature had at hand;
Took what she gave, not chose; I know no shame,
No fear for being simply what I am.
I am not proud, I hold my every breath
At Nature's mercy.  I am as a babe
Borne in a giant's arms, he knows not where;
Each several heart-beat, counted like the coin
A miser reckons, is a special gift
As from an unseen hand; if that withhold
Its bounty for a moment, I am left
A clod upon the earth to which I fall.

Something I find in me that well might claim
The love of beings in a sphere above
This doubtful twilight world of right and wrong;
Something that shows me of the self-same clay
That creeps or swims or flies in humblest form.
Had I been asked, before I left my bed
Of shapeless dust, what clothing I would wear,
I would have said, More angel and less worm;
But for their sake who are even such as I,
Of the same mingled blood, I would not choose
To hate that meaner portion of myself
Which makes me brother to the least of men.

I dare not be a coward with my lips
Who dare to question all things in my soul;
Some men may find their wisdom on their knees,
Some prone and grovelling in the dust like slaves;
Let the meek glow-worm glisten in the dew;
I ask to lift my taper to the sky
As they who hold their lamps above their heads,
Trusting the larger currents up aloft,
Rather than crossing eddies round their breast,
Threatening with every puff the flickering blaze.

My life shall be a challenge, not a truce!
This is my homage to the mightier powers,
To ask my boldest question, undismayed
By muttered threats that some hysteric sense
Of wrong or insult will convulse the throne
Where wisdom reigns supreme; and if I err,
They all must err who have to feel their way
As bats that fly at noon; for what are we
But creatures of the night, dragged forth by day,
Who needs must stumble, and with stammering steps
Spell out their paths in syllables of pain ?

Thou wilt not hold in scorn the child who dares
Look up to Thee, the Father,--dares to ask
More than Thy wisdom answers.  From Thy hand
The worlds were cast; yet every leaflet claims
From that same hand its little shining sphere
Of star-lit dew; thine image, the great sun,
Girt with his mantle of tempestuous flame,

Glares in mid-heaven; but to his noontide blaze
The slender violet lifts its lidless eye,
And from his splendor steals its fairest hue,
Its sweetest perfume from his scorching fire.


I may just as well stop here as anywhere, for there is more of the
manuscript to come, and I can only give it in instalments.

The Young Astronomer had told me I might read any portions of his
manuscript I saw fit to certain friends.  I tried this last extract
on the old Master.

It's the same story we all have to tell,--said he, when I had done
reading.---We are all asking questions nowadays.  I should like to
hear him read some of his verses himself, and I think some of the
other boarders would like to.  I wonder if he wouldn't do it, if we
asked him!  Poets read their own compositions in a singsong sort of
way; but they do seem to love 'em so, that I always enjoy it.  It
makes me laugh a little inwardly to see how they dandle their
poetical babies, but I don't let them know it.  We must get up a
select party of the boarders to hear him read.  We'll send him a
regular invitation.  I will put my name at the head of it, and you
shall write it.

--That was neatly done.  How I hate writing such things!  But I
suppose I must do it.




VIII

The Master and I had been thinking for some time of trying to get the
Young Astronomer round to our side of the table.  There are many
subjects on which both of us like to talk with him, and it would be
convenient to have him nearer to us.  How to manage it was not quite
so clear as it might have been.  The Scarabee wanted to sit with his
back to the light, as it was in his present position.  He used his
eyes so much in studying minute objects, that he wished to spare them
all fatigue, and did not like facing a window.  Neither of us cared
to ask the Man of Letters, so called, to change his place, and of
course we could not think of making such a request of the Young Girl
or the Lady.  So we were at a stand with reference to this project of
ours.

But while we were proposing, Fate or Providence disposed everything
for us.  The Man of Letters, so called, was missing one morning,
having folded his tent--that is, packed his carpet-bag--with the
silence of the Arabs, and encamped--that is, taken lodgings--in some
locality which he had forgotten to indicate.

The Landlady bore this sudden bereavement remarkably well.  Her
remarks and reflections; though borrowing the aid of homely imagery
and doing occasional violence to the nicer usages of speech, were not
without philosophical discrimination.

--I like a gentleman that is a gentleman.  But there's a difference
in what folks call gentlemen as there is in what you put on table.
There is cabbages and there is cauliflowers.  There is clams and
there is oysters.  There is mackerel and there is salmon.  And there
is some that knows the difference and some that doos n't.  I had a
little account with that boarder that he forgot to settle before he
went off, so all of a suddin.  I sha'n't say anything about it.  I've
seen the time when I should have felt bad about losing what he owed
me, but it was no great matter; and if he 'll only stay away now he
's gone, I can stand losing it, and not cry my eyes out nor lay awake
all night neither.  I never had ought to have took him.  Where he
come from and where he's gone to is unbeknown to me.  If he'd only
smoked good tobacco, I wouldn't have said a word; but it was such
dreadful stuff, it 'll take a week to get his chamber sweet enough to
show them that asks for rooms.  It doos smell like all possest.

--Left any goods?--asked the Salesman.

--Or dockermunts?--added the Member of the Haouse.

The Landlady answered with a faded smile, which implied that there
was no hope in that direction.  Dr. Benjamin, with a sudden
recurrence of youthful feeling, made a fan with the fingers of his
right hand, the second phalanx of the thumb resting on the tip of the
nose, and the remaining digits diverging from each other, in the
plane of the median line of the face,--I suppose this is the way he
would have described the gesture, which is almost a specialty of the
Parisian gamin.  That Boy immediately copied it, and added greatly to
its effect by extending the fingers of the other hand in a line with
those of the first, and vigorously agitating those of the two hands,
--a gesture which acts like a puncture on the distended self-esteem
of one to whom it is addressed, and cheapens the memory of the absent
to a very low figure.

I wish the reader to observe that I treasure up with interest all the
words uttered by the Salesman.  It must have been noticed that he
very rarely speaks.  Perhaps he has an inner life, with its own deep
emotional, and lofty contemplative elements, but as we see him, he is
the boarder reduced to the simplest expression of that term.  Yet,
like most human creatures, he has generic and specific characters not
unworthy of being studied.  I notice particularly a certain
electrical briskness of movement, such as one may see in a squirrel,
which clearly belongs to his calling.  The dry-goodsman's life behind
his counter is a succession of sudden, snappy perceptions and brief
series of coordinate spasms; as thus:

"Purple calico, three quarters wide, six yards."

Up goes the arm; bang! tumbles out the flat roll and turns half a
dozen somersets, as if for the fun of the thing; the six yards of
calico hurry over the measuring nails, hunching their backs up, like
six cankerworms; out jump the scissors; snip, clip, rip; the stuff is
wisped up, brown--papered, tied, labelled, delivered, and the man is
himself again, like a child just come out of a convulsion-fit.  Think
of a man's having some hundreds of these semi-epileptic seizures
every day, and you need not wonder that he does not say much; these
fits take the talk all out of him.

But because he, or any other man, does not say much, it does not
follow that he may not have, as I have said, an exalted and intense
inner life.  I have known a number of cases where a man who seemed
thoroughly commonplace and unemotional has all at once surprised
everybody by telling the story of his hidden life far more pointedly
and dramatically than any playwright or novelist or poet could have
told it for him.  I will not insult your intelligence, Beloved, by
saying how he has told it.

--We had been talking over the subjects touched upon in the Lady's
letter.

--I suppose one man in a dozen--said the Master--ought to be born a
skeptic.  That was the proportion among the Apostles, at any rate.

--So there was one Judas among them,--I remarked.

--Well,--said the Master,--they 've been whitewashing Judas of late.
But never mind him.  I did not say there was not one rogue on the
average among a dozen men.  I don't see how that would interfere with
my proposition.  If I say that among a dozen men you ought to find
one that weighs over a hundred and fifty pounds, and you tell me that
there were twelve men in your club, and one of 'em had red hair, I
don't see that you have materially damaged my statement.

--I thought it best to let the old Master have his easy victory,
which was more apparent than real, very evidently, and he went on.

--When the Lord sends out a batch of human beings, say a hundred--Did
you ever read my book, the new edition of it, I mean?

It is rather awkward to answer such a question in the negative, but I
said, with the best grace I could, "No, not the last edition."

--Well, I must give you a copy of it.  My book and I are pretty much
the same thing.  Sometimes I steal from my book in my talk without
mentioning it, and then I say to myself, "Oh, that won't do;
everybody has read my book and knows it by heart."  And then the
other I says,--you know there are two of us, right and left, like a
pair of shoes,--the other I says, "You're a--something or other--
fool.  They have n't read your confounded old book; besides, if they
have, they have forgotten all about it."  Another time, I say,
thinking I will be very honest, "I have said something about that in
my book"; and then the other I says, "What a Balaam's quadruped you
are to tell 'em it's in your book; they don't care whether it is or
not, if it's anything worth saying; and if it isn't worth saying,
what are you braying for?  "That is a rather sensible fellow, that
other chap we talk with, but an impudent whelp.  I never got such
abuse from any blackguard in my life as I have from that No. 2 of me,
the one that answers the other's questions and makes the comments,
and does what in demotic phrase is called the "sarsing."

--I laughed at that.  I have just such a fellow always with me, as
wise as Solomon, if I would only heed him; but as insolent as Shimei,
cursing, and throwing stones and dirt, and behaving as if he had the
traditions of the "ape-like human being" born with him rather than
civilized instincts.  One does not have to be a king to know what it
is to keep a king's jester.

--I mentioned my book,--the Master said, because I have something in
it on the subject we were talking about.  I should like to read you a
passage here and there out of it, where I have expressed myself a
little more freely on some of those matters we handle in
conversation.  If you don't quarrel with it, I must give you a copy
of the book.  It's a rather serious thing to get a copy of a book
from the writer of it.  It has made my adjectives sweat pretty hard,
I know, to put together an answer returning thanks and not lying
beyond the twilight of veracity, if one may use a figure.  Let me try
a little of my book on you, in divided doses, as my friends the
doctors say.

-Fiat experimentum in corpore vili,--I said, laughing at my own
expense.  I don't doubt the medicament is quite as good as the
patient deserves, and probably a great deal better,--I added,
reinforcing my feeble compliment.


[When you pay a compliment to an author, don't qualify it in the next
sentence so as to take all the goodness out of it.  Now I am thinking
of it, I will give you one or two pieces of advice.  Be careful to
assure yourself that the person you are talking with wrote the
article or book you praise.  It is not very pleasant to be told,
"Well, there, now!  I always liked your writings, but you never did
anything half so good as this last piece," and then to have to tell
the blunderer that this last piece is n't yours, but t' other man's.
Take care that the phrase or sentence you commend is not one that is
in quotation-marks.  "The best thing in your piece, I think, is a
line I do not remember meeting before; it struck me as very true and
well expressed:

"'An honest man's the noblest work of God.'

"But, my dear lady, that line is one which is to be found in a writer
of the last century, and not original with me."  One ought not to
have undeceived her, perhaps, but one is naturally honest, and cannot
bear to be credited with what is not his own.  The lady blushes, of
course, and says she has not read much ancient literature, or some
such thing.  The pearl upon the Ethiop's arm is very pretty in verse,
but one does not care to furnish the dark background for other
persons' jewelry.]

I adjourned from the table in company with the old Master to his
apartments.  He was evidently in easy circumstances, for he had the
best accommodations the house afforded.  We passed through a
reception room to his library, where everything showed that he had
ample means for indulging the modest tastes of a scholar.

--The first thing, naturally, when one enters a scholar's study or
library, is to look at his books.  One gets a notion very speedily of
his tastes and the range of his pursuits by a glance round his
bookshelves.

Of course, you know there are many fine houses where the library is a
part of the upholstery, so to speak.  Books in handsome binding kept
locked under plate-glass in showy dwarf bookcases are as important to
stylish establishments as servants in livery; who sit with folded
arms, are to stylish equipages.  I suppose those wonderful statues
with the folded arms do sometimes change their attitude, and I
suppose those books with the gilded backs do sometimes get opened,
but it is nobody's business whether they do or not, and it is not
best to ask too many questions.

This sort of thing is common enough, but there is another case that
may prove deceptive if you undertake to judge from appearances.  Once
in a while you will come on a house where you will find a family of
readers and almost no library.  Some of the most indefatigable
devourers of literature have very few books.  They belong to book
clubs, they haunt the public libraries, they borrow of friends, and
somehow or other get hold of everything they want, scoop out all it
holds for them, and have done with it.  When I want a book, it is as
a tiger wants a sheep.  I must have it with one spring, and, if I
miss it, go away defeated and hungry.  And my experience with public
libraries is that the first volume of the book I inquire for is out,
unless I happen to want the second, when that is out.

--I was pretty well prepared to understand the Master's library and
his account of it.  We seated ourselves in two very comfortable
chairs, and I began the conversation.

-I see you have a large and rather miscellaneous collection of books.
Did you get them together by accident or according to some
preconceived plan?

--Both, sir, both,--the Master answered.  When Providence throws a
good book in my way, I bow to its decree and purchase it as an act of
piety, if it is reasonably or unreasonably cheap.  I adopt a certain
number of books every year, out of a love for the foundlings and
stray children of other people's brains that nobody seems to care
for.  Look here.

He took down a Greek Lexicon finely bound in calf, and spread it
open.

Do you see that Hedericus?  I had Greek dictionaries enough and to
spare, but I saw that noble quarto lying in the midst of an ignoble
crowd of cheap books, and marked with a price which I felt to be an
insult to scholarship, to the memory of Homer, sir, and the awful
shade of AEschylus.  I paid the mean price asked for it, and I wanted
to double it, but I suppose it would have been a foolish sacrifice of
coin to sentiment: I love that book for its looks and behavior.  None
of your "half-calf" economies in that volume, sir!  And see how it
lies open anywhere!  There is n't a book in my library that has such
a generous way of laying its treasures before you.  From Alpha to
Omega, calm, assured rest at any page that your choice or accident
may light on.  No lifting of a rebellious leaf like an upstart
servant that does not know his place and can never be taught manners,
but tranquil, well-bred repose.  A book may be a perfect gentleman in
its aspect and demeanor, and this book would be good company for
personages like Roger Ascham and his pupils the Lady Elizabeth and
the Lady Jane Grey.

The Master was evidently riding a hobby, and what I wanted to know
was the plan on which he had formed his library.  So I brought him
back to the point by asking him the question in so many words.

Yes,--he said,--I have a kind of notion of the way in which a library
ought to be put together--no, I don't mean that, I mean ought to
grow.  I don't pretend to say that mine is a model, but it serves my
turn well enough, and it represents me pretty accurately.  A scholar
must shape his own shell, secrete it one might almost say, for
secretion is only separation, you know, of certain elements derived
from the materials of the world about us.  And a scholar's study,
with the books lining its walls, is his shell.  It is n't a mollusk's
shell, either; it 's a caddice-worm's shell.  You know about the
caddice-worm?

--More or less; less rather than more,--was my humble reply.

Well, sir, the caddice-worm is the larva of a fly, and he makes a
case for himself out of all sorts of bits of everything that happen
to suit his particular fancy, dead or alive, sticks and stones and
small shells with their owners in 'em, living as comfortable as ever.
Every one of these caddice-worms has his special fancy as to what he
will pick up and glue together, with a kind of natural cement he
provides himself, to make his case out of.  In it he lives, sticking
his head and shoulders out once in a while, that is all.  Don't you
see that a student in his library is a caddice-worm in his case?
I've told you that I take an interest in pretty much everything, and
don't mean to fence out any human interests from the private grounds
of my intelligence.  Then, again, there is a subject, perhaps I may
say there is more than one, that I want to exhaust, to know to the
very bottom.  And besides, of course I must have my literary harem,
my pare aux cerfs, where my favorites await my moments of leisure and
pleasure,--my scarce and precious editions, my luxurious
typographical masterpieces; my Delilahs, that take my head in their
lap: the pleasant story-tellers and the like; the books I love
because they are fair to look upon, prized by collectors, endeared by
old associations, secret treasures that nobody else knows anything
about; books, in short, that I like for insufficient reasons it may
be, but peremptorily, and mean to like and to love and to cherish
till death us do part.

Don't you see I have given you a key to the way my library is made
up, so that you can apriorize the plan according to which I have
filled my bookcases?  I will tell you how it is carried out.

In the first place, you see, I have four extensive cyclopaedias.  Out
of these I can get information enough to serve my immediate purpose
on almost any subject.  These, of course, are supplemented by
geographical, biographical, bibliographical, and other dictionaries,
including of course lexicons to all the languages I ever meddle with.
Next to these come the works relating to my one or two specialties,
and these collections I make as perfect as I can.  Every library
should try to be complete on something, if it were only on the
history of pin-heads.  I don't mean that I buy all the trashy
compilations on my special subjects, but I try to have all the works
of any real importance relating to them, old as well as new.  In the
following compartment you will find the great authors in all the
languages I have mastered, from Homer and Hesiod downward to the last
great English name.

This division, you see, you can make almost as extensive or as
limited as you choose.  You can crowd the great representative
writers into a small compass; or you can make a library consisting
only of the different editions of Horace, if you have space and money
enough.  Then comes the Harem, the shelf or the bookcase of Delilahs,
that you have paid wicked prices for, that you love without
pretending to be reasonable about it, and would bag in case of fire
before all the rest, just as Mr.  Townley took the Clytie to his
carriage when the anti-Catholic mob threatened his house in 1780.  As
for the foundlings like my Hedericus, they go among their peers; it
is a pleasure to take them, from the dusty stall where they were
elbowed by plebeian school-books and battered odd volumes, and give
them Alduses and Elzevirs for companions.

Nothing remains but the Infirmary.  The most painful subjects are the
unfortunates that have lost a cover.  Bound a hundred years ago,
perhaps, and one of the rich old browned covers gone--what a pity!
Do you know what to do about it?  I 'll tell you,--no, I 'll show
you.  Look at this volume.  M. T.  Ciceronis Opera,--a dozen of 'em,
--one of 'em minus half his cover, a poor one-legged cripple, six
months ago,--now see him.

--He looked very respectably indeed, both covers dark, ancient, very
decently matched; one would hardly notice the fact that they were not
twins.

-I 'll tell you what I did.  You poor devil, said I, you are a
disgrace to your family.  We must send you to a surgeon and have some
kind of a Taliacotian operation performed on you.  (You remember the
operation as described in Hudibras, of course.) The first thing was
to find a subject of similar age and aspect ready to part with one of
his members.  So I went to Quidlibet's,--you know Quidlibet and that
hieroglyphic sign of his with the omniscient-looking eye as its most
prominent feature,--and laid my case before him.  I want you, said I,
to look up an old book of mighty little value,--one of your ten-cent
vagabonds would be the sort of thing,--but an old beggar, with a
cover like this, and lay it by for me.

And Quidlibet, who is a pleasant body to deal with,--only he has
insulted one or two gentlemanly books by selling them to me at very
low-bred and shamefully insufficient prices,--Quidlibet, I say, laid
by three old books for me to help myself from, and did n't take the
trouble even to make me pay the thirty cents for 'em.  Well, said I
to myself, let us look at our three books that have undergone the
last insult short of the trunkmaker's or the paper-mills, and see
what they are.  There may be something worth looking at in one or the
other of 'em.

Now do you know it was with a kind of a tremor that I untied the
package and looked at these three unfortunates, too humble for the
companionable dime to recognize as its equal in value.  The same sort
of feeling you know if you ever tried the Bible-and-key, or the
Sortes Virgiliance.  I think you will like to know what the three
books were which had been bestowed upon me gratis, that I might tear
away one of the covers of the one that best matched my Cicero, and
give it to the binder to cobble my crippled volume with.

The Master took the three books from a cupboard and continued.

No. I.  An odd volume of The Adventurer.  It has many interesting
things enough, but is made precious by containing Simon Browne's
famous Dedication to the Queen of his Answer to Tindal's
"Christianity as old as the Creation." Simon Browne was the Man
without a Soul.  An excellent person, a most worthy dissenting
minister, but lying under a strange delusion.

Here is a paragraph from his Dedication:

"He was once a man; and of some little name; but of no worth, as his
present unparalleled case makes but too manifest; for by the
immediate hand of an avenging GOD, his very thinking substance has,
for more than seven years, been continually wasting away, till it is
wholly perished out of him, if it be not utterly come to nothing.
None, no, not the least remembrance of its very ruins, remains, not
the shadow of an idea is left, nor any sense that so much as one
single one, perfect or imperfect, whole or diminished, ever did
appear to a mind within him, or was perceived by it."

Think of this as the Dedication of a book "universally allowed to be
the best which that controversy produced," and what a flood of light
it pours on the insanities of those self-analyzing diarists whose
morbid reveries have been so often mistaken for piety!  No. I. had
something for me, then, besides the cover, which was all it claimed
to have worth offering.

No. II. was "A View of Society and Manners in Italy."  Vol. III. By
John Moore, M. D.  (Zeluco Moore.) You know his pleasant book.  In
this particular volume what interested me most, perhaps, was the very
spirited and intelligent account of the miracle of the liquefaction
of the blood of Saint Januarius, but it gave me an hour's mighty
agreeable reading.  So much for Number Two.

No. III.  was "An ESSAY On the Great EFFECTS of Even Languid and
Unheeded LOCAL MOTION."  By the Hon. Robert Boyle.  Published in
1685, and, as appears from other sources, "received with great and
general applause."  I confess I was a little startled to find how
near this earlier philosopher had come to the modern doctrines, such
as are illustrated in Tyndall's "Heat considered as a Mode of
Motion."  He speaks of "Us, who endeavor to resolve the Phenomena of
Nature into Matter and Local motion."  That sounds like the
nineteenth century, but what shall we say to this?  "As when a bar of
iron or silver, having been well hammered, is newly taken off of the
anvil; though the eye can discern no motion in it, yet the touch will
readily perceive it to be very hot, and if you spit upon it, the
brisk agitation of the insensible parts will become visible in that
which they will produce in the liquor."  He takes a bar of tin, and
tries whether by bending it to and fro two or three times he cannot
"procure a considerable internal commotion among the parts "; and
having by this means broken or cracked it in the middle, finds, as he
expected, that the middle parts had considerably heated each other.
There are many other curious and interesting observations in the
volume which I should like to tell you of, but these will serve my
purpose.

--Which book furnished you the old cover you wanted?--said I.

--Did he kill the owl ?--said the Master, laughing.  [I suppose you,
the reader, know the owl story.]--It was Number Two that lent me one
of his covers.  Poor wretch!  He was one of three, and had lost his
two brothers.  From him that hath not shall be taken even that which
he hath.  The Scripture had to be fulfilled in his case.  But I
couldn't help saying to myself, What do you keep writing books for,
when the stalls are covered all over with 'em, good books, too, that
nobody will give ten cents apiece for, lying there like so many dead
beasts of burden, of no account except to strip off their hides?
What is the use, I say?  I have made a book or two in my time, and I
am making another that perhaps will see the light one of these days.
But if I had my life to live over again, I think I should go in for
silence, and get as near to Nirvana as I could.  This language is
such a paltry tool!  The handle of it cuts and the blade doesn't.
You muddle yourself by not knowing what you mean by a word, and send
out your unanswered riddles and rebuses to clear up other people's
difficulties.  It always seems to me that talk is a ripple and
thought is a ground swell.  A string of words, that mean pretty much
anything, helps you in a certain sense to get hold of a thought, just
as a string of syllables that mean nothing helps you to a word; but
it's a poor business, it's a poor business, and the more you study
definition the more you find out how poor it is.  Do you know I
sometimes think our little entomological neighbor is doing a sounder
business than we people that make books about ourselves and our
slippery abstractions?  A man can see the spots on a bug and count
'em, and tell what their color is, and put another bug alongside of
him and see whether the two are alike or different.  And when he uses
a word he knows just what he means.  There is no mistake as to the
meaning and identity of pulex irritans, confound him!

--What if we should look in, some day, on the Scarabeeist, as he
calls himself?--said I.---The fact is the Master had got agoing at
such a rate that I was willing to give a little turn to the
conversation.

--Oh, very well,--said the Master,--I had some more things to say,
but I don't doubt they'll keep.  And besides, I take an interest in
entomology, and have my own opinion on the meloe question.

--You don't mean to say you have studied insects as well as solar
systems and the order of things generally?

--He looked pleased.  All philosophers look pleased when people say
to them virtually, "Ye are gods."  The Master says he is vain
constitutionally, and thanks God that he is.  I don't think he has
enough vanity to make a fool of himself with it, but the simple truth
is he cannot help knowing that he has a wide and lively intelligence,
and it pleases him to know it, and to be reminded of it, especially
in an oblique and tangential sort of way, so as not to look like
downright flattery.

Yes, yes, I have amused a summer or two with insects, among other
things.  I described a new tabanus,--horsefly, you know,--which, I
think, had escaped notice.  I felt as grand when I showed up my new
discovery as if I had created the beast.  I don't doubt Herschel felt
as if he had made a planet when he first showed the astronomers
Georgium Sidus, as he called it.  And that reminds me of something.
I was riding on the outside of a stagecoach from London to Windsor in
the year--never mind the year, but it must have been in June, I
suppose, for I bought some strawberries.  England owes me a sixpence
with interest from date, for I gave the woman a shilling, and the
coach contrived to start or the woman timed it so that I just missed
getting my change.  What an odd thing memory is, to be sure, to have
kept such a triviality, and have lost so much that was invaluable!
She is a crazy wench, that Mnemosyne; she throws her jewels out of
the window and locks up straws and old rags in her strong box.

[De profundis!  said I to myself, the bottom of the bushel has
dropped out!  Sancta--Maria, ora pro nobis!]

--But as I was saying, I was riding on the outside of a stage-coach
from London to Windsor, when all at once a picture familiar to me
from my New England village childhood came upon me like a
reminiscence rather than a revelation.  It was a mighty bewilderment
of slanted masts and spars and ladders and ropes, from the midst of
which a vast tube, looking as if it might be a piece of ordnance such
as the revolted angels battered the walls of Heaven with, according
to Milton, lifted its muzzle defiantly towards the sky.  Why, you
blessed old rattletrap, said I to myself, I know you as well as I
know my father's spectacles and snuff-box!  And that same crazy witch
of a Memory, so divinely wise and foolish, travels thirty-five
hundred miles or so in a single pulse-beat, makes straight for an old
house and an old library and an old corner of it, and whisks out a
volume of an old cyclopaedia, and there is the picture of which this
is the original.  Sir William Herschel's great telescope!  It was
just about as big, as it stood there by the roadside, as it was in
the picture, not much different any way.  Why should it be?  The
pupil of your eye is only a gimlet-hole, not so very much bigger than
the eye of a sail-needle, and a camel has to go through it before you
can see him.  You look into a stereoscope and think you see a
miniature of a building or a mountain; you don't, you 're made a fool
of by your lying intelligence, as you call it; you see the building
and the mountain just as large as with your naked eye looking
straight at the real objects.  Doubt it, do you?  Perhaps you'd like
to doubt it to the music of a couple of gold five-dollar pieces.  If
you would, say the word, and man and money, as Messrs. Heenan and
Morrissey have it, shall be forthcoming; for I will make you look at
a real landscape with your right eye, and a stereoscopic view of it
with your left eye, both at once, and you can slide one over the
other by a little management and see how exactly the picture overlies
the true landscape.  We won't try it now, because I want to read you
something out of my book.

--I have noticed that the Master very rarely fails to come back to
his original proposition, though he, like myself, is fond of
zigzagging in order to reach it.  Men's minds are like the pieces on
a chess-board in their way of moving.  One mind creeps from the
square it is on to the next, straight forward, like the pawns.
Another sticks close to its own line of thought and follows it as far
as it goes, with no heed for others' opinions, as the bishop sweeps
the board in the line of his own color.  And another class of minds
break through everything that lies before them, ride over argument
and opposition, and go to the end of the board, like the castle.  But
there is still another sort of intellect which is very apt to jump
over the thought that stands next and come down in the unexpected way
of the knight.  But that same knight, as the chess manuals will show
you, will contrive to get on to every square of the board in a pretty
series of moves that looks like a pattern of embroidery, and so these
zigzagging minds like the Master's, and I suppose my own is something
like it, will sooner or later get back to the square next the one
they started from.

The Master took down a volume from one of the shelves.  I could not
help noticing that it was a shelf near his hand as he sat, and that
the volume looked as if he had made frequent use of it.  I saw, too,
that he handled it in a loving sort of way; the tenderness he would
have bestowed on a wife and children had to find a channel somewhere,
and what more natural than that he should look fondly on the volume
which held the thoughts that had rolled themselves smooth and round
in his mind like pebbles on a beach, the dreams which, under cover of
the simple artifices such as all writers use, told the little world
of readers his secret hopes and aspirations, the fancies which had
pleased him and which he could not bear to let die without trying to
please others with them?  I have a great sympathy with authors, most
of all with unsuccessful ones.  If one had a dozen lives or so, it
would all be very well, but to have only a single ticket in the great
lottery, and have that drawn a blank, is a rather sad sort of thing.
So I was pleased to see the affectionate kind of pride with which the
Master handled his book; it was a success, in its way, and he looked
on it with a cheerful sense that he had a right to be proud of it.
The Master opened the volume, and, putting on his large round
glasses, began reading, as authors love to read that love their
books.

--The only good reason for believing in the stability of the moral
order of things is to be found in the tolerable steadiness of human
averages.  Out of a hundred human beings fifty-one will be found in
the long run on the side of the right, so far as they know it, and
against the wrong.  They will be organizers rather than
disorganizers, helpers and not hinderers in the upward movement of
the race.  This is the main fact we have to depend on.  The right
hand of the great organism is a little stronger than the left, that
is all.

Now and then we come across a left-handed man.  So now and then we
find a tribe or a generation, the subject of what we may call moral
left-handedness, but that need not trouble us about our formula.  All
we have to do is to spread the average over a wider territory or a
longer period of time.  Any race or period that insists on being
left-handed must go under if it comes in contact with a right-handed
one.  If there were, as a general rule, fifty-one rogues in the
hundred instead of forty-nine, all other qualities of mind and body
being equally distributed between the two sections, the order of
things would sooner or later end in universal disorder.  It is the
question between the leak and the pumps.

It does not seem very likely that the Creator of all things is taken
by surprise at witnessing anything any of his creatures do or think.
Men have sought out many inventions, but they can have contrived
nothing which did not exist as an idea in the omniscient
consciousness to which past, present, and future are alike Now.

We read what travellers tell us about the King of Dahomey, or the
Fejee Island people, or the short and simple annals of the
celebrities recorded in the Newgate Calendar, and do not know just
what to make of these brothers and sisters of the race; but I do not
suppose an intelligence even as high as the angelic beings, to stop
short there, would see anything very peculiar or wonderful about
them, except as everything is wonderful and unlike everything else.

It is very curious to see how science, that is, looking at and
arranging the facts of a case with our own eyes and our own
intelligence, without minding what somebody else has said, or how
some old majority vote went in a pack of intriguing ecclesiastics,
--I say it is very curious to see how science is catching up with one
superstition after another.

There is a recognized branch of science familiar to all those who
know anything of the studies relating to life, under the name of
Teratology.  It deals with all sorts of monstrosities which are to be
met with in living beings, and more especially in animals.  It is
found that what used to be called lusus naturae, or freaks of nature,
are just as much subject to laws as the naturally developed forms of
living creatures.

The rustic looks at the Siamese twins, and thinks he is contemplating
an unheard-of anomaly; but there are plenty of cases like theirs in
the books of scholars, and though they are not quite so common as
double cherries, the mechanism of their formation is not a whit more
mysterious than that of the twinned fruits.  Such cases do not
disturb the average arrangement; we have Changs and Engs at one pole,
and Cains and Abels at the other.  One child is born with six fingers
on each hand, and another falls short by one or more fingers of his
due allowance; but the glover puts his faith in the great law of
averages, and makes his gloves with five fingers apiece, trusting
nature for their counterparts.

Thinking people are not going to be scared out of explaining or at
least trying to explain things by the shrieks of persons whose
beliefs are disturbed thereby.  Comets were portents to Increase
Mather, President of Harvard College; "preachers of Divine wrath,
heralds and messengers of evil tidings to the world."  It is not so
very long since Professor Winthrop was teaching at the same
institution.  I can remember two of his boys very well, old boys, it
is true, they were, and one of them wore a three-cornered cocked hat;
but the father of these boys, whom, as I say, I can remember, had to
defend himself against the minister of the Old South Church for the
impiety of trying to account for earthquakes on natural principles.
And his ancestor, Governor Winthrop, would probably have shaken his
head over his descendant's dangerous audacity, if one may judge by
the solemn way in which he mentions poor Mrs. Hutchinson's unpleasant
experience, which so grievously disappointed her maternal
expectations.  But people used always to be terribly frightened by
those irregular vital products which we now call "interesting
specimens" and carefully preserve in jars of alcohol.  It took next
to nothing to make a panic; a child was born a few centuries ago with
six teeth in its head, and about that time the Turks began gaining
great advantages over the Christians.  Of course there was an
intimate connection between the prodigy and the calamity.  So said
the wise men of that day.

--All these out-of-the-way cases are studied connectedly now, and are
found to obey very exact rules.  With a little management one can
even manufacture living monstrosities.  Malformed salmon and other
fish can be supplied in quantity, if anybody happens to want them.
Now, what all I have said is tending to is exactly this, namely, that
just as the celestial movements are regulated by fixed laws, just as
bodily monstrosities are produced according to rule, and with as good
reason as normal shapes, so obliquities of character are to be
accounted for on perfectly natural principles; they are just as
capable of classification as the bodily ones, and they all diverge
from a certain average or middle term which is the type of its kind.
If life had been a little longer I would have written a number of
essays for which, as it is, I cannot expect to have time.  I have set
down the titles of a hundred or more, and I have often been tempted
to publish these, for according to my idea, the title of a book very
often renders the rest of it unnecessary.  "Moral Teratology," for
instance, which is marked No. 67 on my list of "Essays Potential, not
Actual," suggests sufficiently well what I should be like to say in
the pages it would preface.  People hold up their hands at a moral
monster as if there was no reason for his existence but his own
choice.  That was a fine specimen we read of in the papers a few
years ago, the Frenchman, it may be remembered, who used to waylay
and murder young women, and after appropriating their effects, bury
their bodies in a private cemetery he kept for that purpose.  It is
very natural, and I do not say it is not very proper, to hang such
eccentric persons as this; but it is not clear whether his vagaries
produce any more sensation at Headquarters than the meek enterprises
of the mildest of city missionaries.  For the study of Moral
Teratology will teach you that you do not get such a malformed
character as that without a long chain of causes to account for it;
and if you only knew those causes, you would know perfectly well what
to expect.

You may feel pretty sure that our friend of the private cemetery was
not the child of pious and intelligent parents; that he was not
nurtured by the best of mothers, and educated by the most judicious
teachers; and that he did not come of a lineage long known and
honored for its intellectual and moral qualities.  Suppose that one
should go to the worst quarter of the city and pick out the worst-
looking child of the worst couple he could find, and then train him
up successively at the School for Infant Rogues, the Academy for
Young Scamps, and the College for Complete Criminal Education, would
it be reasonable to expect a Francois Xavier or a Henry Martyn to be
the result of such a training?  The traditionists, in whose
presumptuous hands the science of anthropology has been trusted from
time immemorial, have insisted on eliminating cause and effect from
the domain of morals.  When they have come across a moral monster
they have seemed to think that he put himself together, having a free
choice of all the constituents which make up manhood, and that
consequently no punishment could be too bad for him.

I say, hang him and welcome, if that is the best thing for society;
hate him, in a certain sense, as you hate a rattlesnake, but, if you
pretend to be a philosopher, recognize the fact that what you hate in
him is chiefly misfortune, and that if you had been born with his
villanous low forehead and poisoned instincts, and bred among
creatures of the Races Maudites whose natural history has to be
studied like that of beasts of prey and vermin, you would not have
been sitting there in your gold-bowed spectacles and passing judgment
on the peccadilloes of your fellow-creatures.

I have seen men and women so disinterested and noble, and devoted to
the best works, that it appeared to me if any good and faithful
servant was entitled to enter into the joys of his Lord, such as
these might be.  But I do not know that I ever met with a human being
who seemed to me to have a stronger claim on the pitying
consideration and kindness of his Maker than a wretched, puny,
crippled, stunted child that I saw in Newgate, who was pointed out as
one of the most notorious and inveterate little thieves in London.  I
have no doubt that some of those who were looking at this pitiable
morbid secretion of the diseased social organism thought they were
very virtuous for hating him so heartily.

It is natural, and in one sense is all right enough.  I want to catch
a thief and put the extinguisher on an incendiary as much as my
neighbors do; but I have two sides to my consciousness as I have two
sides to my heart, one carrying dark, impure blood, and the other the
bright stream which has been purified and vivified by the great
source of life and death,--the oxygen of the air which gives all
things their vital heat, and burns all things at last to ashes.

One side of me loves and hates; the other side of me judges, say
rather pleads and suspends judgment.  I think, if I were left to
myself, I should hang a rogue and then write his apology and
subscribe to a neat monument, commemorating, not his virtues, but his
misfortunes.  I should, perhaps, adorn the marble with emblems, as is
the custom with regard to the more regular and normally constituted
members of society.  It would not be proper to put the image of a
lamb upon the stone which marked the resting-place of him of the
private cemetery.  But I would not hesitate to place the effigy of a
wolf or a hyena upon the monument.  I do not judge these animals, I
only kill them or shut them up.  I presume they stand just as well
with their Maker as lambs and kids, and the existence of such beings
is a perpetual plea for God Almighty's poor, yelling, scalping
Indians, his weasand-stopping Thugs, his despised felons, his
murdering miscreants, and all the unfortunates whom we, picked
individuals of a picked class of a picked race, scrubbed, combed, and
catechized from our cradles upward, undertake to find accommodations
for in another state of being where it is to be hoped they will have
a better chance than they had in this.

The Master paused, and took off his great round spectacles.  I could
not help thinking that he looked benevolent enough to pardon Judas
Iscariot just at that moment, though his features can knot themselves
up pretty, formidably on occasion.

--You are somewhat of a phrenologist, I judge, by the way you talk of
instinctive and inherited tendencies--I said.

--They tell me I ought to be,--he answered, parrying my question, as
I thought.---I have had a famous chart made out of my cerebral
organs, according to which I ought to have been--something more than
a poor Magister Artaum.

--I thought a shade of regret deepened the lines on his broad,
antique-looking forehead, and I began talking about all the sights I
had seen in the way of monstrosities, of which I had a considerable
list, as you will see when I tell you my weakness in that direction.
This, you understand, Beloved, is private and confidential.

I pay my quarter of a dollar and go into all the side-shows that
follow the caravans and circuses round the country.  I have made
friends of all the giants and all the dwarfs.  I became acquainted
with Monsieur Bihin, le plus bel homme du monde, and one of the
biggest, a great many years ago, and have kept up my agreeable
relations with him ever since.  He is a most interesting giant, with
a softness of voice and tenderness of feeling which I find very
engaging.  I was on friendly terms with Mr. Charles Freeman, a very
superior giant of American birth, seven feet four, I think, in
height, "double-jointed," of mylodon muscularity, the same who in a
British prize-ring tossed the Tipton Slasher from one side of the
rope to the other, and now lies stretched, poor fellow! in a mighty
grave in the same soil which holds the sacred ashes of Cribb, and the
honored dust of Burke,--not the one "commonly called the sublime,"
but that other Burke to whom Nature had denied the sense of hearing
lest he should be spoiled by listening to the praises of the admiring
circles which looked on his dear-bought triumphs.  Nor have I
despised those little ones whom that devout worshipper of Nature in
her exceptional forms, the distinguished Barnum, has introduced to
the notice of mankind.  The General touches his chapeau to me, and
the Commodore gives me a sailor's greeting.  I have had confidential
interviews with the double-headed daughter of Africa,--so far, at
least, as her twofold personality admitted of private confidences.  I
have listened to the touching experiences of the Bearded Lady, whose
rough cheeks belie her susceptible heart.  Miss Jane Campbell has
allowed me to question her on the delicate subject of avoirdupois
equivalents; and the armless fair one, whose embrace no monarch could
hope to win, has wrought me a watch-paper with those despised digits
which have been degraded from gloves to boots in our evolution from
the condition of quadrumana.

I hope you have read my experiences as good-naturedly as the old
Master listened to them.  He seemed to be pleased with my whim, and
promised to go with me to see all the side-shows of the next caravan.
Before I left him he wrote my name in a copy of the new edition of
his book, telling me that it would not all be new to me by a great
deal, for he often talked what he had printed to make up for having
printed a good deal of what he had talked.

Here is the passage of his Poem the Young Astronomer read to us.


     WIND-CLOUDS AND STAR-DRIFTS.

               IV

From my lone turret as I look around
O'er the green meadows to the ring of blue,
From slope, from summit, and from half-hid vale
The sky is stabbed with dagger-pointed spires,
Their gilded symbols whirling in the wind,
Their brazen tongues proclaiming to the world,
Here truth is sold, the only genuine ware;
See that it has our trade-mark!
You will buy Poison instead of food across the way,
The lies of --this or that, each several name
The standard's blazon and the battle-cry
Of some true-gospel faction, and again
The token of the Beast to all beside.
And grouped round each I see a huddling crowd
Alike in all things save the words they use;
In love, in longing, hate and fear the same.

Whom do we trust and serve?  We speak of one
And bow to many; Athens still would find
The shrines of all she worshipped safe within
Our tall barbarian temples, and the thrones
That crowned Olympus mighty as of old.
The god of music rules the Sabbath choir;
The lyric muse must leave the sacred nine
To help us please the dilettante's ear;
Plutus limps homeward with us, as we leave
The portals of the temple where we knelt
And listened while the god of eloquence
(Hermes of ancient days, but now disguised
In sable vestments) with that other god
Somnus, the son of Erebus and Nog,
Fights in unequal contest for our souls;
The dreadful sovereign of the under world
Still shakes his sceptre at us, and we hear
The baying of the triple-throated hound;
Eros-is young as ever, and as fair
The lovely Goddess born of ocean's foam.

These be thy gods, O Israel!  Who is he,
The one ye name and tell us that ye serve,
Whom ye would call me from my lonely tower
To worship with the many-headed throng?
Is it the God that walked in Eden's grove
In the cool hour to seek our guilty sire?
The God who dealt with Abraham as the sons
Of that old patriarch deal with other men?
The jealous God of Moses, one who feels
An image as an insult, and is wroth
With him who made it and his child unborn?
The God who plagued his people for the sin
Of their adulterous king, beloved of him,
The same who offers to a chosen few
The right to praise him in eternal song
While a vast shrieking world of endless woe
Blends its dread chorus with their rapturous hymn?
Is this the God ye mean, or is it he
Who heeds the sparrow's fall, whose loving heart
Is as the pitying father's to his child,
Whose lesson to his children is, "Forgive,"
Whose plea for all, "They know not what they do"

I claim the right of knowing whom I serve,
Else is my service idle; He that asks
My homage asks it from a reasoning soul.
To crawl is not to worship; we have learned
A drill of eyelids, bended neck and knee,
Hanging our prayers on binges, till we ape
The flexures of the many-jointed worm.
Asia has taught her Aliabs and salaams
To the world's children,--we have grown to men!
We who have rolled the sphere beneath our feet
To find a virgin forest, as we lay
The beams of our rude temple, first of all
Must frame its doorway high enough for man
To pass unstooping; knowing as we do
That He who shaped us last of living forms
Has long enough been served by creeping things,
Reptiles that left their foot-prints in the sand
Of old sea-margins that have turned to stone,
And men who learned their ritual; we demand
To know him first, then trust him and then love
When we have found him worthy of our love,
Tried by our own poor hearts and not before;
He must be truer than the truest friend,
He must be tenderer than a woman's love,
A father better than the best of sires;
Kinder than she who bore us, though we sin
Oftener than did the brother we are told,
We-poor ill-tempered mortals-must forgive,
Though seven times sinning threescore times and ten.

This is the new world's gospel: Be ye men!
Try well the legends of the children's time;
Ye are the chosen people, God has led
Your steps across the desert of the deep
As now across the desert of the shore;
Mountains are cleft before you as the sea
Before the wandering tribe of Israel's sons;
Still onward rolls the thunderous caravan,
Its coming printed on the western sky,
A cloud by day, by night a pillared flame;
Your prophets are a hundred unto one
Of them of old who cried, "Thus saith the Lord";
They told of cities that should fall in heaps,
But yours of mightier cities that shall rise
Where yet the lonely fishers spread their nets,
Where hides the fox and hoots the midnight owl;
The tree of knowledge in your garden grows
Not single, but at every humble door;
Its branches lend you their immortal food,
That fills you with the sense of what ye are,
No servants of an altar hewed and carved
From senseless stone by craft of human hands,
Rabbi, or dervish, Brahmin, bishop, bonze,
But masters of the charm with which they work
To keep your hands from that forbidden tree!

Ye that have tasted that divinest fruit,
Look on this world of yours with opened eyes!
Ye are as gods!  Nay, makers of your gods,
Each day ye break an image in your shrine
And plant a fairer image where it stood
Where is the Moloch of your fathers' creed,
Whose fires of torment burned for span-long babes?
Fit object for a tender mother's love!
Why not?  It was a bargain duly made
For these same infants through the surety's act
Intrusted with their all for earth and heaven,
By Him who chose their guardian, knowing well
His fitness for the task,--this, even this,
Was the true doctrine only yesterday
As thoughts are reckoned,--and to-day you hear
In words that sound as if from human tongues
Those monstrous, uncouth horrors of the past
That blot the blue of heaven and shame the earth
As would the saurians of the age of slime,
Awaking from their stony sepulchres
And wallowing hateful in the eye of day!


Four of us listened to these lines as the young man read them,--the
Master and myself and our two ladies.  This was the little party we
got up to hear him read.  I do not think much of it was very new to
the Master or myself.  At any rate, he said to me when we were alone,
That is the kind of talk the "natural man," as the theologians call
him, is apt to fall into.

--I thought it was the Apostle Paul, and not the theologians, that
used the term "natural man", I ventured to suggest.

--I should like to know where the Apostle Paul learned English?--said
the Master, with the look of one who does not mean to be tripped up
if he can help himself.---But at any rate,--he continued,--the
"natural man," so called, is worth listening to now and then, for he
didn't make his nature, and the Devil did n't make it; and if the
Almighty made it, I never saw or heard of anything he made that
wasn't worth attending to.

The young man begged the Lady to pardon anything that might sound
harshly in these crude thoughts of his.  He had been taught strange
things, he said, from old theologies, when he was a child, and had
thought his way out of many of his early superstitions.  As for the
Young Girl, our Scheherezade, he said to her that she must have got
dreadfully tired (at which she colored up and said it was no such
thing), and he promised that, to pay for her goodness in listening,
he would give her a lesson in astronomy the next fair evening, if she
would be his scholar, at which she blushed deeper than before, and
said something which certainly was not No.




IX

There was no sooner a vacancy on our side of the table, than the
Master proposed a change of seats which would bring the Young
Astronomer into our immediate neighborhood.  The Scarabee was to move
into the place of our late unlamented associate, the Man of Letters,
so called.  I was to take his place, the Master to take mine, and the
young man that which had been occupied by the Master.  The advantages
of this change were obvious.  The old Master likes an audience,
plainly enough; and with myself on one side of him, and the young
student of science, whose speculative turn is sufficiently shown in
the passages from his poem, on the other side, he may feel quite sure
of being listened to.  There is only one trouble in the arrangement,
and that is that it brings this young man not only close to us, but
also next to our Scheherezade.

I am obliged to confess that he has shown occasional marks of
inattention even while the Master was discoursing in a way that I
found agreeable enough.  I am quite sure it is no intentional
disrespect to the old Master.  It seems to me rather that he has
become interested in the astronomical lessons he has been giving the
Young Girl.  He has studied so much alone, that it is naturally a
pleasure to him to impart some of his knowledge.  As for his young
pupil, she has often thought of being a teacher herself, so that she
is of course very glad to acquire any accomplishment that may be
useful to her in that capacity.  I do not see any reason why some of
the boarders should have made such remarks as they have done.  One
cannot teach astronomy to advantage, without going out of doors,
though I confess that when two young people go out by daylight to
study the stars, as these young folks have done once or twice, I do
not so much wonder at a remark or suggestion from those who have
nothing better to do than study their neighbors.

I ought to have told the reader before this that I found, as I
suspected, that our innocent-looking Scheherezade was at the bottom
of the popgun business.  I watched her very closely, and one day,
when the little monkey made us all laugh by stopping the Member of
the Haouse in the middle of a speech he was repeating to us,--it was
his great effort of the season on a bill for the protection of horn-
pout in Little Muddy River,--I caught her making the signs that set
him going.  At a slight tap of her knife against her plate, he got
all ready, and presently I saw her cross her knife and fork upon her
plate, and as she did so, pop! went the small piece of artillery.
The Member of the Haouse was just saying that this bill hit his
constitooents in their most vital--when a pellet hit him in the
feature of his countenance most exposed to aggressions and least
tolerant of liberties.  The Member resented this unparliamentary
treatment by jumping up from his chair and giving the small aggressor
a good shaking, at the same time seizing the implement which had
caused his wrath and breaking it into splinters.  The Boy blubbered,
the Young Girl changed color, and looked as if she would cry, and
that was the last of these interruptions.

I must own that I have sometimes wished we had the popgun back, for
it answered all the purpose of "the previous question" in a
deliberative assembly.  No doubt the Young Girl was capricious in
setting the little engine at work, but she cut short a good many
disquisitions that threatened to be tedious.  I find myself often
wishing for her and her small fellow-conspirator's intervention, in
company where I am supposed to be enjoying myself.  When my friend
the politician gets too far into the personal details of the quorum
pars magna fui, I find myself all at once exclaiming in mental
articulation, Popgun!  When my friend the story-teller begins that
protracted narrative which has often emptied me of all my voluntary
laughter for the evening, he has got but a very little way when I say
to myself, What wouldn't I give for a pellet from that popgun!  In
short, so useful has that trivial implement proved as a jaw-stopper
and a boricide, that I never go to a club or a dinner-party, without
wishing the company included our Scheherezade and That Boy with his
popgun.

How clearly I see now into the mechanism of the Young Girl's
audacious contrivance for regulating our table-talk!  Her brain is
tired half the time, and she is too nervous to listen patiently to
what a quieter person would like well enough, or at least would not
be annoyed by.  It amused her to invent a scheme for managing the
headstrong talkers, and also let off a certain spirit of mischief
which in some of these nervous girls shows itself in much more
questionable forms.  How cunning these half-hysteric young persons
are, to be sure!  I had to watch a long time before I detected the
telegraphic communication between the two conspirators.  I have no
doubt she had sedulously schooled the little monkey to his business,
and found great delight in the task of instruction.

But now that our Scheherezade has become a scholar instead of a
teacher, she seems to be undergoing a remarkable transformation.
Astronomy is indeed a noble science.  It may well kindle the
enthusiasm of a youthful nature.  I fancy at times that I see
something of that starry light which I noticed in the young man's
eyes gradually kindling in hers.  But can it be astronomy alone that
does it?  Her color comes and goes more readily than when the old
Master sat next her on the left.  It is having this young man at her
side, I suppose.  Of course it is.  I watch her with great, I may say
tender interest.  If he would only fall in love with her, seize upon
her wandering affections and fancies as the Romans seized the Sabine
virgins, lift her out of herself and her listless and weary
drudgeries, stop the outflow of this young life which is draining
itself away in forced literary labor--dear me, dear me--if, if, if

               "If I were God
     An' ye were Martin Elginbrod!"

I am afraid all this may never be.  I fear that he is too much given
to lonely study, to self-companionship, to all sorts of questionings,
to looking at life as at a solemn show where he is only a spectator.
I dare not build up a romance on what I have yet seen.  My reader
may, but I will answer for nothing.  I shall wait and see.

The old Master and I have at last made that visit to the Scarabee
which we had so long promised ourselves.

When we knocked at his door he came and opened it, instead of saying,
Come in.  He was surprised, I have no doubt, at the sound of our
footsteps; for he rarely has a visitor, except the little monkey of a
boy, and he may have thought a troop of marauders were coming to rob
him of his treasures.  Collectors feel so rich in the possession of
their rarer specimens, that they forget how cheap their precious
things seem to common eyes, and are as afraid of being robbed as if
they were dealers in diamonds.  They have the name of stealing from
each other now and then, it is true, but many of their priceless
possessions would hardly tempt a beggar.  Values are artificial: you
will not be able to get ten cents of the year 1799 for a dime.

The Scarabee was reassured as soon as he saw our faces, and he
welcomed us not ungraciously into his small apartment.  It was hard
to find a place to sit down, for all the chairs were already occupied
by cases and boxes full of his favorites.  I began, therefore,
looking round the room.  Bugs of every size and aspect met my eyes
wherever they turned.  I felt for the moment as I suppose a man may
feel in a fit of delirium tremens.  Presently my attention was drawn
towards a very odd-looking insect on the mantelpiece.  This animal
was incessantly raising its arms as if towards heaven and clasping
them together, as though it were wrestling in prayer.

Do look at this creature,--I said to the Master, he seems to be very
hard at work at his devotions.

Mantas religiosa,--said the Master,--I know the praying rogue.
Mighty devout and mighty cruel; crushes everything he can master, or
impales it on his spiny shanks and feeds upon it, like a gluttonous
wretch as he is.  I have seen the Mantis religiosa on a larger scale
than this, now and then.  A sacred insect, sir,--sacred to many
tribes of men; to the Hottentots, to the Turks, yes, sir, and to the
Frenchmen, who call the rascal prie dieu, and believe him to have
special charge of children that have lost their way.

Doesn't it seem as if there was a vein of satire as well as of fun
that ran through the solemn manifestations of creative wisdom?  And
of deception too--do you see how nearly those dried leaves resemble
an insect?

They do, indeed,--I answered,--but not so closely as to deceive me.
They remind me of an insect, but I could not mistake them for one.

--Oh, you couldn't mistake those dried leaves for an insect, hey?
Well, how can you mistake that insect for dried leaves?  That is the
question; for insect it is,--phyllum siccifolium, the "walking leaf,"
as some have called it.--The Master had a hearty laugh at my
expense.

The Scarabee did not seem to be amused at the Master's remarks or at
my blunder.  Science is always perfectly serious to him; and he would
no more laugh over anything connected with his study, than a
clergyman would laugh at a funeral.

They send me all sorts of trumpery,--he said, Orthoptera and
Lepidoptera; as if a coleopterist--a scarabeeist--cared for such
things.  This business is no boy's play to me.  The insect population
of the world is not even catalogued yet, and a lifetime given to the
scarabees is a small contribution enough to their study.  I like your
men of general intelligence well enough,--your Linnwuses and your
Buffons and your Cuviers; but Cuvier had to go to Latreille for his
insects, and if Latreille had been able to consult me,--yes, me,
gentlemen!--he would n't have made the blunders he did about some of
the coleoptera.

The old Master, as I think you must have found out by this time,--
you, Beloved, I mean, who read every word,--has a reasonably good
opinion, as perhaps he has a right to have, of his own intelligence
and acquirements.  The Scarabee's exultation and glow as he spoke of
the errors of the great entomologist which he himself could have
corrected, had the effect on the old Master which a lusty crow has
upon the feathered champion of the neighboring barnyard.  He too knew
something about insects.  Had he not discovered a, new tabanus?  Had
he not made preparations of the very coleoptera the Scarabee studied
so exclusively,--preparations which the illustrious Swammerdam would
not have been ashamed of, and dissected a melolontha as exquisitely
as Strauss Durckheim himself ever did it?  So the Master, recalling
these studies of his and certain difficult and disputed points at
which he had labored in one of his entomological paroxysms, put a
question which there can be little doubt was intended to puzzle the
Scarabee, and perhaps,--for the best of us is human (I am beginning
to love the old Master, but he has his little weaknesses, thank
Heaven, like the rest of us),--I say perhaps, was meant to show that
some folks knew as much about some things as some other folks.

The little dried-up specialist did not dilate into fighting
dimensions as--perhaps, again--the Master may have thought he would.
He looked a mild surprise, but remained as quiet as one of his own
beetles when you touch him and he makes believe he is dead.  The
blank silence became oppressive.  Was the Scarabee crushed, as so
many of his namesakes are crushed, under the heel of this trampling
omniscient?

At last the Scarabee creaked out very slowly, "Did I understand you
to ask the following question, to wit?" and so forth; for I was quite
out of my depth, and only know that he repeated the Master's somewhat
complex inquiry, word for word.

--That was exactly my question,--said the Master,--and I hope it is
not uncivil to ask one which seems to me to be a puzzler.

Not uncivil in the least,--said the Scarabee, with something as much
like a look of triumph as his dry face permitted,--not uncivil at
all, but a rather extraordinary question to ask at this date of
entomological history.  I settled that question some years ago, by a
series of dissections, six-and-thirty in number, reported in an essay
I can show you and would give you a copy of, but that I am a little
restricted in my revenue, and our Society has to be economical, so I
have but this one.  You see, sir,--and he went on with elytra and
antennae and tarsi and metatarsi and tracheae and stomata and wing-
muscles and leg-muscles and ganglions,--all plain enough, I do not
doubt, to those accustomed to handling dor-bugs and squash-bugs and
such undesirable objects of affection to all but naturalists.

He paused when he got through, not for an answer, for there evidently
was none, but to see how the Master would take it.  The Scarabee had
had it all his own way.

The Master was loyal to his own generous nature.  He felt as a
peaceful citizen might feel who had squared off at a stranger for
some supposed wrong, and suddenly discovered that he was undertaking
to chastise Mr. Dick Curtis, "the pet of the Fancy," or Mr. Joshua
Hudson; "the John Bull fighter."

He felt the absurdity of his discomfiture, for he turned to me good-
naturedly, and said,

    "Poor Johnny Raw!  What madness could impel
     So rum a flat to face so prime a swell?"

To tell the truth, I rather think the Master enjoyed his own defeat.
The Scarabee had a right to his victory; a man does not give his life
to the study of a single limited subject for nothing, and the moment
we come across a first-class expert we begin to take a pride in his
superiority.  It cannot offend us, who have no right at all to be his
match on his own ground.  Besides, there is a very curious sense of
satisfaction in getting a fair chance to sneer at ourselves and scoff
at our own pretensions.  The first person of our dual consciousness
has been smirking and rubbing his hands and felicitating himself on
his innumerable superiorities, until we have grown a little tired of
him.  Then, when the other fellow, the critic, the cynic, the Shimei,
who has been quiet, letting self-love and self-glorification have
their perfect work, opens fire upon the first half of our personality
and overwhelms it with that wonderful vocabulary of abuse of which he
is the unrivalled master, there is no denying that he enjoys it
immensely; and as he is ourself for the moment, or at least the chief
portion of ourself (the other half-self retiring into a dim corner of
semiconsciousness and cowering under the storm of sneers and
contumely,--you follow me perfectly, Beloved,--the way is as plain as
the path of the babe to the maternal fount), as, I say, the abusive
fellow is the chief part of us for the time, and he likes to exercise
his slanderous vocabulary, we on the whole enjoy a brief season of
self-depreciation and self-scolding very heartily.

It is quite certain that both of us, the Master and myself, conceived
on the instant a respect for the Scarabee which we had not before
felt.  He had grappled with one difficulty at any rate and mastered
it.  He had settled one thing, at least, so it appeared, in such a
way that it was not to be brought up again.  And now he was
determined, if it cost him the effort of all his remaining days, to
close another discussion and put forever to rest the anxious doubts
about the larva of meloe.

--Your thirty-six dissections must have cost you a deal of time and
labor,--the Master said.

--What have I to do with time, but to fill it up with labor?--
answered the Scarabee.---It is my meat and drink to work over my
beetles.  My holidays are when I get a rare specimen.  My rest is to
watch the habits of insects, those that I do not pretend to study.
Here is my muscarium, my home for house-flies; very interesting
creatures; here they breed and buzz and feed and enjoy themselves,
and die in a good old age of a few months.  My favorite insect lives
in this other case; she is at home, but in her private-chamber; you
shall see her.

He tapped on the glass lightly, and a large, gray, hairy spider came
forth from the hollow of a funnel-like web.

--And this is all the friend you have to love?  said the Master, with
a tenderness in his voice which made the question very significant.

--Nothing else loves me better than she does, that I know of,--he
answered.

--To think of it!  Not even a dog to lick his hand, or a cat to purr
and rub her fur against him!  Oh, these boarding-houses, these
boarding-houses!  What forlorn people one sees stranded on their
desolate shores!  Decayed gentlewomen with the poor wrecks of what
once made their households beautiful, disposed around them in narrow
chambers as they best may be, coming down day after day, poor souls!
to sit at the board with strangers; their hearts full of sad memories
which have no language but a sigh, no record but the lines of sorrow
on their features; orphans, creatures with growing tendrils and
nothing to cling to; lonely rich men, casting about them what to do
with the wealth they never knew how to enjoy, when they shall no
longer worry over keeping and increasing it; young men and young
women, left to their instincts, unguarded, unwatched, save by
malicious eyes, which are sure to be found and to find occupation in
these miscellaneous collections of human beings; and now and then a
shred of humanity like this little adust specialist, with just the
resources needed to keep the "radical moisture" from entirely
exhaling from his attenuated organism, and busying himself over a
point of science, or compiling a hymn-book, or editing a grammar or a
dictionary;--such are the tenants of boarding-houses whom we cannot
think of without feeling how sad it is when the wind is not tempered
to the shorn lamb; when the solitary, whose hearts are shrivelling,
are not set in families!

The Master was greatly interested in the Scarabee's Muscarium.

--I don't remember,--he said,--that I have heard of such a thing as
that before.  Mighty curious creatures, these same house-flies!  Talk
about miracles!  Was there ever anything more miraculous, so far as
our common observation goes, than the coming and the going of these
creatures?  Why didn't Job ask where the flies come from and where
they go to?  I did not say that you and I don't know, but how many
people do know anything about it?  Where are the cradles of the young
flies?  Where are the cemeteries of the dead ones, or do they die at
all except when we kill them?  You think all the flies of the year
are dead and gone, and there comes a warm day and all at once there
is a general resurrection of 'em; they had been taking a nap, that is
all.

--I suppose you do not trust your spider in the Muscarium ?--said I,
addressing the Scarabee.

--Not exactly,--he answered,--she is a terrible creature.  She loves
me, I think, but she is a killer and a cannibal among other insects.
I wanted to pair her with a male spider, but it wouldn't do.

-Wouldn't do?--said I,--why not?  Don't spiders have their mates as
well as other folks?

-Oh yes, sometimes; but the females are apt to be particular, and if
they don't like the mate you offer them they fall upon him and kill
him and eat him up.  You see they are a great deal bigger and
stronger than the males, and they are always hungry and not always
particularly anxious to have one of the other sex bothering round.

--Woman's rights!--said I,--there you have it!  Why don't those
talking ladies take a spider as their emblem?  Let them form
arachnoid associations, spinsters and spiders would be a good motto.

--The Master smiled.  I think it was an eleemosynary smile, for my
pleasantry seems to me a particularly basso rilievo, as I look upon
it in cold blood.  But conversation at the best is only a thin
sprinkling of occasional felicities set in platitudes and
commonplaces.  I never heard people talk like the characters in the
"School for Scandal,"--I should very much like to.---I say the Master
smiled.  But the Scarabee did not relax a muscle of his countenance.

--There are persons whom the very mildest of faecetiae sets off into
such convulsions of laughter, that one is afraid lest they should
injure themselves.  Even when a jest misses fire completely, so that
it is no jest at all, but only a jocular intention, they laugh just
as heartily.  Leave out the point of your story, get the word wrong
on the duplicity of which the pun that was to excite hilarity
depended, and they still honor your abortive attempt with the most
lusty and vociferous merriment.

There is a very opposite class of persons whom anything in the nature
of a joke perplexes, troubles, and even sometimes irritates, seeming
to make them think they are trifled with, if not insulted.  If you
are fortunate enough to set the whole table laughing, one of this
class of persons will look inquiringly round, as if something had
happened, and, seeing everybody apparently amused but himself, feel
as if he was being laughed at, or at any rate as if something had
been said which he was not to hear.  Often, however, it does not go
so far as this, and there is nothing more than mere insensibility to
the cause of other people's laughter, a sort of joke-blindness,
comparable to the well-known color-blindness with which many persons
are afflicted as a congenital incapacity.

I have never seen the Scarabee smile.  I have seen him take off his
goggles,--he breakfasts in these occasionally,--I suppose when he has
been tiring his poor old eyes out over night gazing through his
microscope,--I have seen him take his goggles off, I say, and stare
about him, when the rest of us were laughing at something which
amused us, but his features betrayed nothing more than a certain
bewilderment, as if we had been foreigners talking in an unknown
tongue.  I do not think it was a mere fancy of mine that he bears a
kind of resemblance to the tribe of insects he gives his life to
studying.  His shiny black coat; his rounded back, convex with years
of stooping over his minute work; his angular movements, made natural
to him by his habitual style of manipulation; the aridity of his
organism, with which his voice is in perfect keeping;--all these
marks of his special sedentary occupation are so nearly what might be
expected, and indeed so much, in accordance with the more general
fact that a man's aspect is subdued to the look of what he works in,
that I do not feel disposed to accuse myself of exaggeration in my
account of the Scarabee's appearance.  But I think he has learned
something else of his coleopterous friends.  The beetles never smile.
Their physiognomy is not adapted to the display of the emotions; the
lateral movement of their jaws being effective for alimentary
purposes, but very limited in its gamut of expression.  It is with
these unemotional beings that the Scarabee passes his life.  He has
but one object, and that is perfectly serious, to his mind, in fact,
of absorbing interest and importance.  In one aspect of the matter he
is quite right, for if the Creator has taken the trouble to make one
of His creatures in just such a way and not otherwise, from the
beginning of its existence on our planet in ages of unknown
remoteness to the present time, the man who first explains His idea
to us is charged with a revelation.  It is by no means impossible
that there may be angels in the celestial hierarchy to whom it would
be new and interesting.  I have often thought that spirits of a
higher order than man might be willing to learn something from a
human mind like that of Newton, and I see no reason why an angelic
being might not be glad to hear a lecture from Mr.  Huxley, or Mr.
Tyndall, or one of our friends at Cambridge.

I have been sinuous as the Links of Forth seen from Stirling Castle,
or as that other river which threads the Berkshire valley and runs, a
perennial stream, through my memory,--from which I please myself with
thinking that I have learned to wind without fretting against the
shore, or forgetting cohere I am flowing,--sinuous, I say, but not
jerky,--no, not jerky nor hard to follow for a reader of the right
sort, in the prime of life and full possession of his or her
faculties.

--All this last page or so, you readily understand, has been my
private talk with you, the Reader.  The cue of the conversation which
I interrupted by this digression is to be found in the words "a good
motto;" from which I begin my acccount of the visit again.

--Do you receive many visitors,--I mean vertebrates, not articulates?
--said the Master.

I thought this question might perhaps bring il disiato riso, the
long-wished-for smile, but the Scarabee interpreted it in the
simplest zoological sense, and neglected its hint of playfulness with
the most absolute unconsciousness, apparently, of anything not
entirely serious and literal.

--You mean friends, I suppose,--he answered.--I have correspondents,
but I have no friends except this spider.  I live alone, except when
I go to my subsection meetings; I get a box of insects now and then,
and send a few beetles to coleopterists in other entomological
districts; but science is exacting, and a man that wants to leave his
record has not much time for friendship.  There is no great chance
either for making friends among naturalists.  People that are at work
on different things do not care a great deal for each other's
specialties, and people that work on the same thing are always afraid
lest one should get ahead of the other, or steal some of his ideas
before he has made them public.  There are none too many people you
can trust in your laboratory.  I thought I had a friend once, but he
watched me at work and stole the discovery of a new species from me,
and, what is more, had it named after himself.  Since that time I
have liked spiders better than men.  They are hungry and savage, but
at any rate they spin their own webs out of their own insides.  I
like very well to talk with gentlemen that play with my branch of
entomology; I do not doubt it amused you, and if you want to see
anything I can show you, I shall have no scruple in letting you see
it.  I have never had any complaint to make of amatoors.

--Upon my honor,--I would hold my right hand up and take my Bible-
oath, if it was not busy with the pen at this moment,--I do not
believe the Scarabee had the least idea in the world of the satire on
the student of the Order of Things implied in his invitation to the
"amatoor."  As for the Master, he stood fire perfectly, as he always
does; but the idea that he, who had worked a considerable part of
several seasons at examining and preparing insects, who believed
himself to have given a new tabanus to the catalogue of native
diptera, the idea that he was playing with science, and might be
trusted anywhere as a harmless amateur, from whom no expert could
possibly fear any anticipation of his unpublished discoveries, went
beyond anything set down in that book of his which contained so much
of the strainings of his wisdom.

The poor little Scarabee began fidgeting round about this time, and
uttering some half-audible words, apologetical, partly, and involving
an allusion to refreshments.  As he spoke, he opened a small
cupboard, and as he did so out bolted an uninvited tenant of the
same, long in person, sable in hue, and swift of movement, on seeing
which the Scarabee simply said, without emotion, blatta, but I,
forgetting what was due to good manners, exclaimed cockroach!

We could not make up our minds to tax the Scarabee's hospitality,
already levied upon by the voracious articulate.  So we both alleged
a state of utter repletion, and did not solve the mystery of the
contents of the cupboard,--not too luxurious, it may be conjectured,
and yet kindly offered, so that we felt there was a moist filament of
the social instinct running like a nerve through that exsiccated and
almost anhydrous organism.

We left him with professions of esteem and respect which were real.
We had gone, not to scoff, but very probably to smile, and I will not
say we did not.  But the Master was more thoughtful than usual.

--If I had not solemnly dedicated myself to the study of the Order of
Things,--he said,--I do verily believe I would give what remains to
me of life to the investigation of some single point I could utterly
eviscerate and leave finally settled for the instruction and, it may
be, the admiration of all coming time.  The keel ploughs ten thousand
leagues of ocean and leaves no trace of its deep-graven furrows.  The
chisel scars only a few inches on the face of a rock, but the story
it has traced is read by a hundred generations.  The eagle leaves no
track of his path, no memory of the place where he built his nest;
but a patient mollusk has bored a little hole in a marble column of
the temple of Serapis, and the monument of his labor outlasts the
altar and the statue of the divinity.

--Whew!--said I to myself,--that sounds a little like what we college
boys used to call a "squirt."--The Master guessed my thought and
said, smiling,

--That is from one of my old lectures.  A man's tongue wags along
quietly enough, but his pen begins prancing as soon as it touches
paper.  I know what you are thinking--you're thinking this is a
squirt.  That word has taken the nonsense out of a good many high-
stepping fellows.  But it did a good deal of harm too, and it was a
vulgar lot that applied it oftenest.

I am at last perfectly satisfied that our Landlady has no designs on
the Capitalist, and as well convinced that any fancy of mine that he
was like to make love to her was a mistake.  The good woman is too
much absorbed in her children, and more especially in "the Doctor,"
as she delights to call her son, to be the prey of any foolish desire
of changing her condition.  She is doing very well as it is, and if
the young man succeeds, as I have little question that he will, I
think it probable enough that she will retire from her position as
the head of a boarding-house.  We have all liked the good woman who
have lived with her,--I mean we three friends who have put ourselves
on record.  Her talk, I must confess, is a little diffuse and not
always absolutely correct, according to the standard of the great
Worcester; she is subject to lachrymose cataclysms and semiconvulsive
upheavals when she reverts in memory to her past trials, and
especially when she recalls the virtues of her deceased spouse, who
was, I suspect, an adjunct such as one finds not rarely annexed to a
capable matron in charge of an establishment like hers; that is to
say, an easy-going, harmless, fetch-and-carry, carve-and-help, get-
out-of-the-way kind of neuter, who comes up three times (as they say
drowning people do) every day, namely, at breakfast, dinner, and tea,
and disappears, submerged beneath the waves of life, during the
intervals of these events.

It is a source of genuine delight to me, who am of a kindly nature
enough, according to my own reckoning, to watch the good woman, and
see what looks of pride and affection she bestows upon her Benjamin,
and how, in spite of herself, the maternal feeling betrays its
influence in her dispensations of those delicacies which are the
exceptional element in our entertainments.  I will not say that
Benjamin's mess, like his Scripture namesake's, is five times as
large as that of any of the others, for this would imply either an
economical distribution to the guests in general or heaping the poor
young man's plate in a way that would spoil the appetite of an
Esquimau, but you may be sure he fares well if anybody does; and I
would have you understand that our Landlady knows what is what as
well as who is who.

I begin really to entertain very sanguine expectations of young
Doctor Benjamin Franklin.  He has lately been treating a patient of
whose good-will may prove of great importance to him.  The Capitalist
hurt one of his fingers somehow or other, and requested our young
doctor to take a look at it.  The young doctor asked nothing better
than to take charge of the case, which proved more serious than might
have been at first expected, and kept him in attendance more than a
week.  There was one very odd thing about it.  The Capitalist seemed
to have an idea that he was like to be ruined in the matter of
bandages,--small strips of worn linen which any old woman could have
spared him from her rag-bag, but which, with that strange perversity
which long habits of economy give to a good many elderly people, he
seemed to think were as precious as if they had been turned into
paper and stamped with promises to pay in thousands, from the
national treasury.  It was impossible to get this whim out of him,
and the young doctor had tact enough to humor him in it.  All this
did not look very promising for the state of mind in which the
patient was like to receive his bill for attendance when that should
be presented.  Doctor Benjamin was man enough, however, to come up to
the mark, and sent him in such an account as it was becoming to send
a man of ample means who had been diligently and skilfully cared for.
He looked forward with some uncertainty as to how it would be
received.  Perhaps his patient would try to beat him down, and Doctor
Benjamin made up his mind to have the whole or nothing.  Perhaps he
would pay the whole amount, but with a look, and possibly a word,
that would make every dollar of it burn like a blister.

Doctor Benjamin's conjectures were not unnatural, but quite remote
from the actual fact.  As soon as his patient had got entirely well,
the young physician sent in his bill.  The Capitalist requested him
to step into his room with him, and paid the full charge in the
handsomest and most gratifying way, thanking him for his skill and
attention, and assuring him that he had had great satisfaction in
submitting himself to such competent hands, and should certainly
apply to him again in case he should have any occasion for a medical
adviser.  We must not be too sagacious in judging people by the
little excrescences of their character.  Ex pede Herculem may often
prove safe enough, but ex verruca Tullium is liable to mislead a
hasty judge of his fellow-men.

I have studied the people called misers and thought a good deal about
them.  In former years I used to keep a little gold by me in order to
ascertain for myself exactly the amount of pleasure to be got out of
handling it; this being the traditional delight of the old-fashioned
miser.  It is by no means to be despised.  Three or four hundred
dollars in double-eagles will do very well to experiment on.  There
is something very agreeable in the yellow gleam, very musical in the
metallic clink, very satisfying in the singular weight, and very
stimulating in the feeling that all the world over these same yellow
disks are the master-keys that let one in wherever he wants to go,
the servants that bring him pretty nearly everything he wants, except
virtue,--and a good deal of what passes for that.  I confess, then,
to an honest liking for the splendors and the specific gravity and
the manifold potentiality of the royal metal, and I understand, after
a certain imperfect fashion, the delight that an old ragged wretch,
starving himself in a crazy hovel, takes in stuffing guineas into old
stockings and filling earthen pots with sovereigns, and every now and
then visiting his hoards and fingering the fat pieces, and thinking
ever all that they represent of earthly and angelic and diabolic
energy.  A miser pouring out his guineas into his palm and bathing
his shrivelled and trembling hands in the yellow heaps before him, is
not the prosaic being we are in the habit of thinking him.  He is a
dreamer, almost a poet.  You and I read a novel or a poem to help our
imaginations to build up palaces, and transport us into the emotional
states and the felicitous conditions of the ideal characters pictured
in the book we are reading.  But think of him and the significance of
the symbols he is handling as compared with the empty syllables and
words we are using to build our aerial edifices with!  In this hand
he holds the smile of beauty and in that the dagger of revenge.  The
contents of that old glove will buy him the willing service of many
an adroit sinner, and with what that coarse sack contains he can
purchase the prayers of holy men for all succeeding time.  In this
chest is a castle in Spain, a real one, and not only in Spain, but
anywhere he will choose to have it.  If he would know what is the
liberality of judgment of any of the straiter sects, he has only to
hand over that box of rouleaux to the trustees of one of its
educational institutions for the endowment of two or three
professorships.  If he would dream of being remembered by coming
generations, what monument so enduring as a college building that
shall bear his name, and even when its solid masonry shall crumble
give place to another still charged with the same sacred duty of
perpetuating his remembrance.  Who was Sir Matthew Holworthy, that
his name is a household word on the lips of thousands of scholars,
and will be centuries hence, as that of Walter de Merton, dead six
hundred years ago, is to-day at Oxford?  Who was Mistress Holden,
that she should be blessed among women by having her name spoken
gratefully and the little edifice she caused to be erected preserved
as her monument from generation to generation?  All these
possibilities, the lust of the eye, the lust of the flesh, the pride
of life; the tears of grateful orphans by the gallon; the prayers of
Westminster Assembly's Catechism divines by the thousand; the masses
of priests by the century;--all these things, and more if more there
be that the imagination of a lover of gold is likely to range over,
the miser hears and sees and feels and hugs and enjoys as he paddles
with his lean hands among the sliding, shining, ringing, innocent-
looking bits of yellow metal, toying with them as the lion-tamer
handles the great carnivorous monster, whose might and whose terrors
are child's play to the latent forces and power of harm-doing of the
glittering counters played with in the great game between angels and
devils.

I have seen a good deal of misers, and I think I understand them as
well as most persons do.  But the Capitalist's economy in rags and
his liberality to the young doctor are very oddly contrasted with
each other.  I should not be surprised at any time to hear that he
had endowed a scholarship or professorship or built a college
dormitory, in spite of his curious parsimony in old linen.

I do not know where our Young Astronomer got the notions that he
expresses so freely in the lines that follow.  I think the statement
is true, however, which I see in one of the most popular
Cyclopaedias, that "the non-clerical mind in all ages is disposed to
look favorably upon the doctrine of the universal restoration to
holiness and happiness of all fallen intelligences, whether human or
angelic."  Certainly, most of the poets who have reached the heart of
men, since Burns dropped the tear for poor "auld Nickie-ben" that
softened the stony-hearted theology of Scotland, have had "non-
clerical" minds, and I suppose our young friend is in his humble way
an optimist like them.  What he says in verse is very much the same
thing as what is said in prose in all companies, and thought by a
great many who are thankful to anybody that will say it for them,--
not a few clerical as wall as "non-clerical" persons among them.


          WIND-CLOUDS AND STAR-DRIFTS.

                    V

What am I but the creature Thou hast made?
What have I save the blessings Thou hast lent?
What hope I but Thy mercy and Thy love?
Who but myself shall cloud my soul with fear?
Whose hand protect me from myself but Thine?

I claim the rights of weakness, I, the babe,
Call on my sire to shield me from the ills
That still beset my path, not trying me
With snares beyond my wisdom or my strength,
He knowing I shall use them to my harm,
And find a tenfold misery in the sense
That in my childlike folly I have sprung
The trap upon myself as vermin use
Drawn by the cunning bait to certain doom.
Who wrought the wondrous charm that leads us on
To sweet perdition, but the self-same power
That set the fearful engine to destroy
His wretched offspring (as the Rabbis tell),
And hid its yawning jaws and treacherous springs
In such a show of innocent sweet flowers
It lured the sinless angels and they fell?

Ah!  He who prayed the prayer of all mankind
Summed in those few brief words the mightiest plea
For erring souls before the courts of heaven,
Save us from being tempted,--lest we fall!
If we are only as the potter's clay
Made to be fashioned as the artist wills,
And broken into shards if we offend
The eye of Him who made us, it is well;
Such love as the insensate lump of clay
That spins upon the swift-revolving wheel
Bears to the hand that shapes its growing form,--
Such love, no more, will be our hearts' return
To the great Master-workman for his care,
Or would be, save that this, our breathing clay,
Is intertwined with fine innumerous threads
That make it conscious in its framer's hand;
And this He must remember who has filled
These vessels with the deadly draught of life,
Life, that means death to all it claims.  Our love
Must kindle in the ray that streams from heaven,
A faint reflection of the light divine;
The sun must warm the earth before the rose
Can show her inmost heart-leaves to the sun.

He yields some fraction of the Maker's right
Who gives the quivering nerve its sense of pain;
Is there not something in the pleading eye
Of the poor brute that suffers, which arraigns
The law that bids it suffer?  Has it not
A claim for some remembrance in the book
That fills its pages with the idle words
Spoken of men?  Or is it only clay,
Bleeding and aching in the potter's hand,
Yet all his own to treat it as he will
And when he will to cast it at his feet,
Shattered, dishonored, lost forevermore?
My dog loves me, but could he look beyond
His earthly master, would his love extend
To Him who--Hush!  I will not doubt that He
Is better than our fears, and will not wrong
The least, the meanest of created things!

He would not trust me with the smallest orb
That circles through the sky; he would not give
A meteor to my guidance; would not leave
The coloring of a cloudlet to my hand;
He locks my beating heart beneath its bars
And keeps the key himself; he measures out
The draughts of vital breath that warm my blood,
Winds up the springs of instinct which uncoil,
Each in its season; ties me to my home,
My race, my time, my nation, and my creed
So closely that if I but slip my wrist
Out of the band that cuts it to the bone,
Men say, "He hath a devil"; he has lent
All that I hold in trust, as unto one
By reason of his weakness and his years
Not fit to hold the smallest shred in fee
Of those most common things he calls his own
And yet--my Rabbi tells me--he has left
The care of that to which a million worlds.
Filled with unconscious life were less than naught,
Has left that mighty universe, the Soul,
To the weak guidance of our baby hands,
Turned us adrift with our immortal charge,
Let the foul fiends have access at their will,
Taking the shape of angels, to our hearts,
Our hearts already poisoned through and through
With the fierce virus of ancestral sin.
If what my Rabbi tells me is the truth,
Why did the choir of angels sing for joy?
Heaven must be compassed in a narrow space,
And offer more than room enough for all
That pass its portals; but the underworld,
The godless realm, the place where demons forge
Their fiery darts and adamantine chains,
Must swarm with ghosts that for a little while
Had worn the garb of flesh, and being heirs
Of all the dulness of their stolid sires,
And all the erring instincts of their tribe,
Nature's own teaching, rudiments of "sin,"
Fell headlong in the snare that could not fail
To trap the wretched creatures shaped of clay
And cursed with sense enough to lose their souls!

Brother, thy heart is troubled at my word;
Sister, I see the cloud is on thy brow.
He will not blame me, He who sends not peace,
But sends a sword, and bids us strike amain
At Error's gilded crest, where in the van
Of earth's great army, mingling with the best
And bravest of its leaders, shouting loud
The battle-cries that yesterday have led
The host of Truth to victory, but to-day
Are watchwords of the laggard and the slave,
He leads his dazzled cohorts.  God has made
This world a strife of atoms and of spheres;
With every breath I sigh myself away
And take my tribute from the wandering wind
To fan the flame of life's consuming fire;
So, while my thought has life, it needs must burn,
And burning, set the stubble-fields ablaze,
Where all the harvest long ago was reaped
And safely garnered in the ancient barns,
But still the gleaners, groping for their food,
Go blindly feeling through the close-shorn straw,
While the young reapers flash their glittering steel
Where later suns have ripened nobler grain!


We listened to these lines in silence.  They were evidently written
honestly, and with feeling, and no doubt meant to be reverential.  I
thought, however, the Lady looked rather serious as he finished
reading.  The Young Girl's cheeks were flushed, but she was not in
the mood for criticism.

As we came away the Master said to me--The stubble-fields are mighty
slow to take fire.  These young fellows catch up with the world's
ideas one after another,--they have been tamed a long while, but they
find them running loose in their minds, and think they are ferae
naturae.  They remind me of young sportsmen who fire at the first
feathers they see, and bring down a barnyard fowl.  But the chicken
may be worth bagging for all that, he said, good-humoredly.




X

Caveat Lector.  Let the reader look out for himself.  The old Master,
whose words I have so frequently quoted and shall quote more of, is a
dogmatist who lays down the law, ex cathedra, from the chair of his
own personality.  I do not deny that he has the ambition of knowing
something about a greater number of subjects than any one man ought
to meddle with, except in a very humble and modest way.  And that is
not his way.  There was no doubt something of, humorous bravado in
his saying that the actual "order of things" did not offer a field
sufficiently ample for his intelligence.  But if I found fault with
him, which would be easy enough, I should say that he holds and
expresses definite opinions about matters that he could afford to
leave open questions, or ask the judgment of others about.  But I do
not want to find fault with him.  If he does not settle all the
points he speaks of so authoritatively, he sets me thinking about
them, and I like a man as a companion who is not afraid of a half-
truth.  I know he says some things peremptorily that he may inwardly
debate with himself.  There are two ways of dealing with assertions
of this kind.  One may attack them on the false side and perhaps gain
a conversational victory.  But I like better to take them up on the
true side and see how much can be made of that aspect of the dogmatic
assertion.  It is the only comfortable way of dealing with persons
like the old Master.

There have been three famous talkers in Great Britain, either of whom
would illustrate what I say about dogmatists well enough for my
purpose.  You cannot doubt to what three I refer: Samuel the First,
Samuel the Second, and Thomas, last of the Dynasty.  (I mean the
living Thomas and not Thomas B.)

I say the last of the Dynasty, for the conversational dogmatist on
the imperial scale becomes every year more and more an impossibility.
If he is in intelligent company he will be almost sure to find some
one who knows more about some of the subjects he generalizes upon
than any wholesale thinker who handles knowledge by the cargo is like
to know.  I find myself, at certain intervals, in the society of a
number of experts in science, literature, and art, who cover a pretty
wide range, taking them all together, of human knowledge.  I have not
the least doubt that if the great Dr. Samuel Johnson should come in
and sit with this company at one of their Saturday dinners, he would
be listened to, as he always was, with respect and attention.  But
there are subjects upon which the great talker could speak
magisterially in his time and at his club, upon which so wise a man
would express himself guardedly at the meeting where I have supposed
him a guest.  We have a scientific man or two among us, for instance,
who would be entitled to smile at the good Doctor's estimate of their
labors, as I give it here:

"Of those that spin out life in trifles and die without a memorial,
many flatter themselves with high opinion of their own importance and
imagine that they are every day adding some improvement to human
life."--"Some turn the wheel of electricity, some suspend rings to a
loadstone, and find that what they did yesterday they can do again
to-day.  Some register the changes of the wind, and die fully
convinced that the wind is changeable.

"There are men yet more profound, who have heard that two colorless
liquors may produce a color by union, and that two cold bodies will
grow hot if they are mingled; they mingle them, and produce the
effect expected, say it is strange, and mingle them again."

I cannot transcribe this extract without an intense inward delight in
its wit and a full recognition of its thorough half-truthfulness.
Yet if while the great moralist is indulging in these vivacities, he
can be imagined as receiving a message from Mr. Boswell or Mrs.
Thrale flashed through the depths of the ocean, we can suppose he
might be tempted to indulge in another oracular utterance, something
like this:--
--A wise man recognizes the convenience of a general statement, but
he bows to the authority of a particular fact.  He who would bound
the possibilities of human knowledge by the limitations of present
acquirements would take the dimensions of the infant in ordering the
habiliments of the adult.  It is the province of knowledge to speak
and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.  Will the Professor have
the kindness to inform me by what steps of gradual development the
ring and the loadstone, which were but yesterday the toys of children
and idlers, have become the means of approximating the intelligences
of remote continents, and wafting emotions unchilled through the
abysses of the no longer unfathomable deep?

--This, you understand, Beloved, is only a conventional imitation of
the Doctor's style of talking.  He wrote in grand balanced phrases,
but his conversation was good, lusty, off-hand familiar talk.  He
used very often to have it all his own way.  If he came back to us we
must remember that to treat him fairly we must suppose him on a level
with the knowledge of our own time.  But that knowledge is more
specialized, a great deal, than knowledge was in his day.  Men cannot
talk about things they have seen from the outside with the same
magisterial authority the talking dynasty pretended to.  The sturdy
old moralist felt grand enough, no doubt, when he said, "He that is
growing great and happy by electrifying a bottle wonders how the
world can be engaged by trifling prattle about war or peace."
Benjamin Franklin was one of these idlers who were electrifying
bottles, but he also found time to engage in the trifling prattle
about war and peace going on in those times.  The talking Doctor hits
him very hard in "Taxation no Tyranny":  "Those who wrote the Address
(of the American Congress in 1775), though they have shown no great
extent or profundity of mind, are yet probably wiser than to believe
it: but they have been taught by some master of mischief how to put
in motion the engine of political electricity; to attract by the
sounds of Liberty and Property, to repel by those of Popery and
Slavery; and to give the great stroke by the name of Boston."
The talking dynasty has always been hard upon us Americans.  King
Samuel II. says: "It is, I believe, a fact verified beyond doubt,
that some years ago it was impossible to obtain a copy of the Newgate
Calendar, as they had all been bought up by the Americans, whether to
suppress the blazon of their forefathers or to assist in their
genealogical researches I could never learn satisfactorily."
As for King Thomas, the last of the monological succession, he made
such a piece of work with his prophecies and his sarcasms about our
little trouble with some of the Southern States, that we came rather
to pity him for his whims and crotchets than to get angry with him
for calling us bores and other unamiable names.

I do not think we believe things because considerable people say
them, on personal authority, that is, as intelligent listeners very
commonly did a century ago.  The newspapers have lied that belief out
of us.  Any man who has a pretty gift of talk may hold his company a
little while when there is nothing better stirring.  Every now and
then a man who may be dull enough prevailingly has a passion of talk
come over him which makes him eloquent and silences the rest.  I have
a great respect for these divine paroxysms, these half-inspired
moments of influx when they seize one whom we had not counted among
the luminaries of the social sphere.  But the man who can--give us a
fresh experience on anything that interests us overrides everybody
else.  A great peril escaped makes a great story-teller of a common
person enough.  I remember when a certain vessel was wrecked long
ago, that one of the survivors told the story as well as Defoe could
have told it.  Never a word from him before; never a word from him
since.  But when it comes to talking one's common thoughts,--those
that come and go as the breath does; those that tread the mental
areas and corridors with steady, even foot-fall, an interminable
procession of every hue and garb,--there are few, indeed, that can
dare to lift the curtain which hangs before the window in the breast
and throw open the window, and let us look and listen.  We are all
loyal enough to our sovereign when he shows himself, but sovereigns
are scarce.  I never saw the absolute homage of listeners but once,
that I remember, to a man's common talk, and that was to the
conversation of an old man, illustrious by his lineage and the
exalted honors he had won, whose experience had lessons for the
wisest, and whose eloquence had made the boldest tremble.


All this because I told you to look out for yourselves and not take
for absolute truth everything the old Master of our table, or anybody
else at it sees fit to utter.  At the same time I do not think that
he, or any of us whose conversation I think worth reporting, says
anything for the mere sake of saying it and without thinking that it
holds some truth, even if it is not unqualifiedly true.

I suppose a certain number of my readers wish very heartily that the
Young Astronomer whose poetical speculations I am recording would
stop trying by searching to find out the Almighty, and sign the
thirty-nine articles, or the Westminster Confession of Faith, at any
rate slip his neck into some collar or other, and pull quietly in the
harness, whether it galled him or not.  I say, rather, let him have
his talk out; if nobody else asks the questions he asks, some will be
glad to hear them, but if you, the reader, find the same questions in
your own mind, you need not be afraid to see how they shape
themselves in another's intelligence.  Do you recognize the fact that
we are living in a new time?  Knowledge--it excites prejudices to
call it science--is advancing as irresistibly, as majestically, as
remorselessly as the ocean moves in upon the shore.  The courtiers of
King Canute (I am not afraid of the old comparison), represented by
the adherents of the traditional beliefs of the period, move his
chair back an inch at a time, but not until his feet are pretty damp,
not to say wet.  The rock on which he sat securely awhile ago is
completely under water.  And now people are walking up and down the
beach and judging for themselves how far inland the chair of King
Canute is like to be moved while they and their children are looking
on, at the rate in which it is edging backward.  And it is quite too
late to go into hysterics about it.

The shore, solid, substantial, a great deal more than eighteen
hundred years old, is natural humanity.  The beach which the ocean of
knowledge--you may call it science if you like--is flowing over, is
theological humanity.  Somewhere between the Sermon on the Mount and
the teachings of Saint Augustine sin was made a transferable chattel.
(I leave the interval wide for others to make narrow.)

The doctrine of heritable guilt, with its mechanical consequences,
has done for our moral nature what the doctrine of demoniac
possession has done in barbarous times and still does among barbarous
tribes for disease.  Out of that black cloud came the lightning which
struck the compass of humanity.  Conscience, which from the dawn of
moral being had pointed to the poles of right and wrong only as the
great current of will flowed through the soul, was demagnetized,
paralyzed, and knew henceforth no fixed meridian, but stayed where
the priest or the council placed it.  There is nothing to be done but
to polarize the needle over again.  And for this purpose we must
study the lines of direction of all the forces which traverse our
human nature.

We must study man as we have studied stars and rocks.  We need not
go, we are told, to our sacred books for astronomy or geology or
other scientific knowledge.  Do not stop there!  Pull Canute's chair
back fifty rods at once, and do not wait until he is wet to the
knees!  Say now, bravely, as you will sooner or later have to say,
that we need not go to any ancient records for our anthropology.  Do
we not all hold, at least, that the doctrine of man's being a
blighted abortion, a miserable disappointment to his Creator, and
hostile and hateful to him from his birth, may give way to the belief
that he is the latest terrestrial manifestation of an ever upward-
striving movement of divine power?  If there lives a man who does not
want to disbelieve the popular notions about the condition and
destiny of the bulk of his race, I should like to have him look me in
the face and tell me so.

I am not writing for the basement story or the nursery, and I do not
pretend to be, but I say nothing in these pages which would not be
said without fear of offence in any intelligent circle, such as
clergymen of the higher castes are in the habit of frequenting.
There are teachers in type for our grandmothers and our grandchildren
who vaccinate the two childhoods with wholesome doctrine, transmitted
harmlessly from one infant to another.  But we three men at our table
have taken the disease of thinking in the natural way.  It is an
epidemic in these times, and those who are afraid of it must shut
themselves up close or they will catch it.

I hope none of us are wanting in reverence.  One at least of us is a
regular church-goer, and believes a man may be devout and yet very
free in the expression of his opinions on the gravest subjects.
There may be some good people who think that our young friend who
puts his thoughts in verse is going sounding over perilous depths,
and are frightened every time he throws the lead.  There is nothing
to be frightened at.  This is a manly world we live in.  Our
reverence is good for nothing if it does not begin with self-respect.
Occidental manhood springs from that as its basis; Oriental manhood
finds the greatest satisfaction in self-abasement.  There is no use
in trying to graft the tropical palm upon the Northern pine.  The
same divine forces underlie the growth of both, but leaf and flower
and fruit must follow the law of race, of soil, of climate.  Whether
the questions which assail my young friend have risen in my reader's
mind or not, he knows perfectly well that nobody can keep such
questions from springing up in every young mind of any force or
honesty.  As for the excellent little wretches who grow up in what
they are taught, with never a scruple or a query, Protestant or
Catholic, Jew or Mormon, Mahometan or Buddhist, they signify nothing
in the intellectual life of the race.  If the world had been wholly
peopled with such half-vitalized mental negatives, there never would
have been a creed like that of Christendom.

I entirely agree with the spirit of the verses I have looked over, in
this point at least, that a true man's allegiance is given to that
which is highest in his own nature.  He reverences truth, he loves
kindness, he respects justice.  The two first qualities he
understands well enough.  But the last, justice, at least as between
the Infinite and the finite, has been so utterly dehumanized,
disintegrated, decomposed, and diabolized in passing through the
minds of the half-civilized banditti who have peopled and unpeopled
the world for some scores of generations, that it has become a mere
algebraic x, and has no fixed value whatever as a human conception.

As for power, we are outgrowing all superstition about that.  We have
not the slightest respect for it as such, and it is just as well to
remember this in all our spiritual adjustments.  We fear power when
we cannot master it; but just as far as we can master it, we make a
slave and a beast of burden of it without hesitation.  We cannot
change the ebb and flow of the tides, or the course of the seasons,
but we come as near it as we can.  We dam out the ocean, we make
roses bloom in winter and water freeze in summer.  We have no more
reverence for the sun than we have for a fish-tail gas-burner; we
stare into his face with telescopes as at a ballet-dancer with opera-
glasses; we pick his rays to pieces with prisms as if they were so
many skeins of colored yarn; we tell him we do not want his company
and shut him out like a troublesome vagrant.  The gods of the old
heathen are the servants of to-day.  Neptune, Vulcan, Aolus, and the
bearer of the thunderbolt himself have stepped down from their
pedestals and put on our livery.  We cannot always master them,
neither can we always master our servant, the horse, but we have put
a bridle on the wildest natural agencies.  The mob of elemental
forces is as noisy and turbulent as ever, but the standing army of
civilization keeps it well under, except for an occasional outbreak.

When I read the Lady's letter printed some time since, I could not
help honoring the feeling which prompted her in writing it.  But
while I respect the innocent incapacity of tender age and the
limitations of the comparatively uninstructed classes, it is quite
out of the question to act as if matters of common intelligence and
universal interest were the private property of a secret society,
only to be meddled with by those who know the grip and the password.

We must get over the habit of transferring the limitations of the
nervous temperament and of hectic constitutions to the great Source
of all the mighty forces of nature, animate and inanimate.  We may
confidently trust that we have over us a Being thoroughly robust and
grandly magnanimous, in distinction from the Infinite Invalid bred in
the studies of sickly monomaniacs, who corresponds to a very common
human type, but makes us blush for him when we contrast him with a
truly noble man, such as most of us have had the privilege of knowing
both in public and in private life.

I was not a little pleased to find that the Lady, in spite of her
letter, sat through the young man's reading of portions of his poem
with a good deal of complacency.  I think I can guess what is in her
mind.  She believes, as so many women do, in that great remedy for
discontent, and doubts about humanity, and questionings of
Providence, and all sorts of youthful vagaries,--I mean the love-
cure.  And she thinks, not without some reason, that these
astronomical lessons, and these readings of poetry and daily
proximity at the table, and the need of two young hearts that have
been long feeling lonely, and youth and nature and "all impulses of
soul and sense," as Coleridge has it, will bring these two young
people into closer relations than they perhaps have yet thought of;
and so that sweet lesson of loving the neighbor whom he has seen may
lead him into deeper and more trusting communion with the Friend and
Father whom he has not seen.

The Young Girl evidently did not intend that her accomplice should be
a loser by the summary act of the Member of the Haouse: I took
occasion to ask That Boy what had become of all the popguns.  He gave
me to understand that popguns were played out, but that he had got a
squirt and a whip, and considered himself better off than before.

This great world is full of mysteries.  I can comprehend the pleasure
to be got out of the hydraulic engine; but what can be the
fascination of a whip, when one has nothing to flagellate but the
calves of his own legs, I could never understand.  Yet a small
riding-whip is the most popular article with the miscellaneous New-
Englander at all great gatherings,--cattle-shows and Fourth-of-July
celebrations.  If Democritus and Heraclitus could walk arm in arm
through one of these crowds, the first would be in a broad laugh to
see the multitude of young persons who were rejoicing in the
possession of one of these useless and worthless little commodities;
happy himself to see how easily others could purchase happiness.  But
the second would weep bitter tears to think what a rayless and barren
life that must be which could extract enjoyment from the miserable
flimsy wand that has such magic attraction for sauntering youths and
simpering maidens.  What a dynamometer of happiness are these paltry
toys, and what a rudimentary vertebrate must be the freckled
adolescent whose yearning for the infinite can be stayed even for a
single hour by so trifling a boon from the venal hands of the finite!

Pardon these polysyllabic reflections, Beloved, but I never
contemplate these dear fellow-creatures of ours without a delicious
sense of superiority to them and to all arrested embryos of
intelligence, in which I have no doubt you heartily sympathize with
me.  It is not merely when I look at the vacuous countenances of the
mastigophori, the whip-holders, that I enjoy this luxury (though I
would not miss that holiday spectacle for a pretty sum of money, and
advise you by all means to make sure of it next Fourth of July, if
you missed it this), but I get the same pleasure from many similar
manifestations.

I delight in Regalia, so called, of the kind not worn by kings, nor
obtaining their diamonds from the mines of Golconda.  I have a
passion for those resplendent titles which are not conferred by a
sovereign and would not be the open sesame to the courts of royalty,
yet which are as opulent in impressive adjectives as any Knight of
the Garter's list of dignities.  When I have recognized in the every-
day name of His Very Worthy High Eminence of some cabalistic
association, the inconspicuous individual whose trifling indebtedness
to me for value received remains in a quiescent state and is likely
long to continue so, I confess to having experienced a thrill of
pleasure.  I have smiled to think how grand his magnificent titular
appendages sounded in his own ears and what a feeble tintinnabulation
they made in mine.  The crimson sash, the broad diagonal belt of the
mounted marshal of a great procession, so cheap in themselves, yet so
entirely satisfactory to the wearer, tickle my heart's root.

Perhaps I should have enjoyed all these weaknesses of my infantile
fellow-creatures without an afterthought, except that on a certain
literary anniversary when I tie the narrow blue and pink ribbons in
my button-hole and show my decorated bosom to the admiring public, I
am conscious of a certain sense of distinction and superiority in
virtue of that trifling addition to my personal adornments which
reminds me that I too have some embryonic fibres in my tolerably
well-matured organism.

I hope I have not hurt your feelings, if you happen to be a High and
Mighty Grand Functionary in any illustrious Fraternity.  When I tell
you that a bit of ribbon in my button-hole sets my vanity prancing, I
think you cannot be grievously offended that I smile at the resonant
titles which make you something more than human in your own eyes.  I
would not for the world be mistaken for one of those literary roughs
whose brass knuckles leave their mark on the foreheads of so many
inoffensive people.

There is a human sub-species characterized by the coarseness of its
fibre and the acrid nature of its intellectual secretions.  It is to
a certain extent penetrative, as all creatures are which are provided
with stings.  It has an instinct which guides it to the vulnerable
parts of the victim on which it fastens.  These two qualities give it
a certain degree of power which is not to be despised.  It might
perhaps be less mischievous, but for the fact that the wound where it
leaves its poison opens the fountain from which it draws its
nourishment.

Beings of this kind can be useful if they will only find their
appropriate sphere, which is not literature, but that circle of
rough-and-tumble political life where the fine-fibred men are at a
discount, where epithets find their subjects poison-proof, and the
sting which would be fatal to a literary debutant only wakes the
eloquence of the pachydermatous ward-room politician to a fiercer
shriek of declamation.

The Master got talking the other day about the difference between
races and families.  I am reminded of what he said by what I have
just been saying myself about coarse-fibred and fine-fibred people.

--We talk about a Yankee, a New-Englander,---he said,-as if all of
'em were just the same kind of animal.  "There is knowledge and
knowledge," said John Bunyan.  There are Yankees and Yankees.  Do you
know two native trees called pitch pine and white pine respectively?
Of course you know 'em.  Well, there are pitch-pine Yankees and
white-pine Yankees.  We don't talk about the inherited differences of
men quite as freely, perhaps, as they do in the Old World, but
republicanism doesn't alter the laws of physiology.  We have a native
aristocracy, a superior race, just as plainly marked by nature as of
a higher and finer grade than the common run of people as the white
pine is marked in its form, its stature, its bark, its delicate
foliage, as belonging to the nobility of the forest; and the pitch
pine, stubbed, rough, coarse-haired, as of the plebeian order.  Only
the strange thing is to see in what a capricious way our natural
nobility is distributed.  The last born nobleman I have seen, I saw
this morning; he was pulling a rope that was fastened to a Maine
schooner loaded with lumber.  I should say he was about twenty years
old, as fine a figure of a young man as you would ask to see, and
with a regular Greek outline of countenance, waving hair, that fell
as if a sculptor had massed it to copy, and a complexion as rich as a
red sunset.  I have a notion that the State of Maine breeds the
natural nobility in a larger proportion than some other States, but
they spring up in all sorts of out-of-the-way places.  The young
fellow I saw this morning had on an old flannel shirt, a pair of
trowsers that meant hard work, and a cheap cloth cap pushed back on
his head so as to let the large waves of hair straggle out over his
forehead; he was tugging at his rope with the other sailors, but upon
my word I don't think I have seen a young English nobleman of all
those whom I have looked upon that answered to the notion of "blood"
so well as this young fellow did.  I suppose if I made such a
levelling confession as this in public, people would think I was
looking towards being the labor-reform candidate for President.  But
I should go on and spoil my prospects by saying that I don't think
the white-pine Yankee is the more generally prevailing growth, but
rather the pitch-pine Yankee.

--The Member of the Haouse seemed to have been getting a dim idea
that all this was not exactly flattering to the huckleberry
districts.  His features betrayed the growth of this suspicion so
clearly that the Master replied to his look as if it had been a
remark.  [I need hardly say that this particular member of the
General Court was a pitch-pine Yankee of the most thoroughly
characterized aspect and flavor.]

--Yes, Sir,--the Master continued,--Sir being anybody that listened,
--there is neither flattery nor offence in the views which a
physiological observer takes of the forms of life around him.  It
won't do to draw individual portraits, but the differences of natural
groups of human beings are as proper subjects of remark as those of
different breeds of horses, and if horses were Houyhnhnms I don't
think they would quarrel with us because we made a distinction
between a "Morgan" and a "Messenger." The truth is, Sir, the lean
sandy soil and the droughts and the long winters and the east-winds
and the cold storms, and all sorts of unknown local influences that
we can't make out quite so plainly as these, have a tendency to
roughen the human organization and make it coarse, something as it is
with the tree I mentioned.  Some spots and some strains of blood
fight against these influences, but if I should say right out what I
think, it would be that the finest human fruit, on the whole; and
especially the finest women that we get in New England are raised
under glass.

--Good gracious!--exclaimed the Landlady, under glass!

--Give me cowcumbers raised in the open air, said the Capitalist, who
was a little hard of hearing.

--Perhaps,--I remarked,--it might be as well if you would explain
this last expression of yours.  Raising human beings under glass I
take to be a metaphorical rather than a literal statement of your
meaning.

--No, Sir!--replied the Master, with energy,--I mean just what I say,
Sir.  Under glass, and with a south exposure.  During the hard
season, of course,--for in the heats of summer the tenderest hot-
house plants are not afraid of the open air.  Protection is what the
transplanted Aryan requires in this New England climate.  Keep him,
and especially keep her, in a wide street of a well-built city eight
months of the year; good solid brick walls behind her, good sheets of
plate-glass, with the sun shining warm through them, in front of her,
and you have put her in the condition of the pine-apple, from the
land of which, and not from that of the other kind of pine, her race
started on its travels.  People don't know what a gain there is to
health by living in cities, the best parts of them of course, for we
know too well what the worst parts are.  In the first place you get
rid of the noxious emanations which poison so many country localities
with typhoid fever and dysentery, not wholly rid of them, of course,
but to a surprising degree.  Let me tell you a doctor's story.  I was
visiting a Western city a good many years ago; it was in the autumn,
the time when all sorts of malarious diseases are about.  The doctor
I was speaking of took me to see the cemetery just outside the town,
I don't know how much he had done to fill it, for he didn't tell me,
but I'll tell you what he did say.

"Look round," said the doctor.  "There isn't a house in all the ten-
mile circuit of country you can see over, where there isn't one
person, at least, shaking with fever and ague.  And yet you need n't
be afraid of carrying it away with you, for as long as your home is
on a paved street you are safe."

--I think it likely--the Master went on to say--that my friend the
doctor put it pretty strongly, but there is no doubt at all that
while all the country round was suffering from intermittent fever,
the paved part of the city was comparatively exempted.  What do you
do when you build a house on a damp soil, and there are damp soils
pretty much everywhere?  Why you floor the cellar with cement, don't
you?  Well, the soil of a city is cemented all over, one may say,
with certain qualifications of course.  A first-rate city house is a
regular sanatorium.  The only trouble is, that the little good-for-
nothings that come of utterly used-up and worn-out stock, and ought
to die, can't die, to save their lives.  So they grow up to dilute
the vigor of the race with skim-milk vitality.  They would have died,
like good children, in most average country places; but eight months
of shelter in a regulated temperature, in a well-sunned house, in a
duly moistened air, with good sidewalks to go about on in all
weather, and four months of the cream of summer and the fresh milk of
Jersey cows, make the little sham organizations--the worm-eaten wind-
falls, for that 's what they look like--hang on to the boughs of life
like "froze-n-thaws"; regular struldbrugs they come to be, a good
many of 'em.

--The Scarabee's ear was caught by that queer word of Swift's, and he
asked very innocently what kind of bugs he was speaking of, whereupon
That Boy shouted out, Straddlebugs!  to his own immense amusement and
the great bewilderment of the Scarabee, who only saw that there was
one of those unintelligible breaks in the conversation which made
other people laugh, and drew back his antennae as usual, perplexed,
but not amused.

I do not believe the Master had said all he was going to say on this
subject, and of course all these statements of his are more or less
one-sided.  But that some invalids do much better in cities than in
the country is indisputable, and that the frightful dysenteries and
fevers which have raged like pestilences in many of our country towns
are almost unknown in the better built sections of some of our large
cities is getting to be more generally understood since our well-to-
do people have annually emigrated in such numbers from the cemented
surface of the city to the steaming soil of some of the dangerous
rural districts.  If one should contrast the healthiest country
residences with the worst city ones the result would be all the other
way, of course, so that there are two sides to the question, which we
must let the doctors pound in their great mortar, infuse and strain,
hoping that they will present us with the clear solution when they
have got through these processes.  One of our chief wants is a
complete sanitary map of every State in the Union.

The balance of our table, as the reader has no doubt observed, has
been deranged by the withdrawal of the Man of Letters, so called, and
only the side of the deficiency changed by the removal of the Young
Astronomer into our neighborhood.  The fact that there was a vacant
chair on the side opposite us had by no means escaped the notice of
That Boy.  He had taken advantage of his opportunity and invited in a
schoolmate whom he evidently looked upon as a great personage.  This
boy or youth was a good deal older than himself and stood to him
apparently in the light of a patron and instructor in the ways of
life.  A very jaunty, knowing young gentleman he was, good-looking,
smartly dressed, smooth-checked as yet, curly-haired, with a roguish
eye, a sagacious wink, a ready tongue, as I soon found out; and as I
learned could catch a ball on the fly with any boy of his age; not
quarrelsome, but, if he had to strike, hit from the shoulder; the
pride of his father (who was a man of property and a civic
dignitary), and answering to the name of Johnny.

I was a little surprised at the liberty That Boy had taken in
introducing an extra peptic element at our table, reflecting as I did
that a certain number of avoirdupois ounces of nutriment which the
visitor would dispose of corresponded to a very appreciable pecuniary
amount, so that he was levying a contribution upon our Landlady which
she might be inclined to complain of.  For the Caput mortuum (or
deadhead, in vulgar phrase) is apt to be furnished with a Venter
vivus, or, as we may say, a lively appetite.  But the Landlady
welcomed the new-comer very heartily.

--Why!  how--do--you--do Johnny?! with the notes of interrogation and
of admiration both together, as here represented.

Johnny signified that he was doing about as well as could be expected
under the circumstances, having just had a little difference with a
young person whom he spoke of as "Pewter-jaw" (I suppose he had worn
a dentist's tooth-straightening contrivance during his second
dentition), which youth he had finished off, as he said, in good
shape, but at the expense of a slight epistaxis, we will translate
his vernacular expression.

--The three ladies all looked sympathetic, but there did not seem to
be any great occasion for it, as the boy had come out all right, and
seemed to be in the best of spirits.

-And how is your father and your mother? asked the Landlady.

-Oh, the Governor and the Head Centre?  A 1, both of 'em.  Prime
order for shipping,--warranted to stand any climate.  The Governor
says he weighs a hunderd and seventy-five pounds.  Got a chin-tuft
just like Ed'in Forrest.  D'd y' ever see Ed'in Forrest play
Metamora?  Bully, I tell you!  My old gentleman means to be Mayor or
Governor or President or something or other before he goes off the
handle, you'd better b'lieve.  He's smart,--and I've heard folks say
I take after him.

--Somehow or other I felt as if I had seen this boy before, or known
something about him.  Where did he get those expressions "A 1" and
"prime" and so on?  They must have come from somebody who has been in
the retail dry-goods business, or something of that nature.  I have
certain vague reminiscences that carry me back to the early times of
this boardinghouse.---Johnny.---Landlady knows his father well.


---Boarded with her, no doubt.---There was somebody by the name of
John, I remember perfectly well, lived with her.  I remember both my
friends mentioned him, one of them very often.  I wonder if this boy
isn't a son of his!  I asked the Landlady after breakfast whether
this was not, as I had suspected, the son of that former boarder.

--To be sure he is,--she answered,--and jest such a good-natur'd sort
of creatur' as his father was.  I always liked John, as we used to
call his father.  He did love fun, but he was a good soul, and stood
by me when I was in trouble, always.  He went into business on his
own account after a while, and got merried, and settled down into a
family man.  They tell me he is an amazing smart business man,--grown
wealthy, and his wife's father left her money.  But I can't help
calling him John,--law, we never thought of calling him anything
else, and he always laughs and says, "That's right."  This is his
oldest son, and everybody calls him Johnny.  That Boy of ours goes to
the same school with his boy, and thinks there never was anybody like
him,--you see there was a boy undertook to impose on our boy, and
Johnny gave the other boy a good licking, and ever since that he is
always wanting to have Johnny round with him and bring him here with
him,--and when those two boys get together, there never was boys that
was so chock full of fun and sometimes mischief, but not very bad
mischief, as those two boys be.  But I like to have him come once in
a while when there is room at the table, as there is now, for it puts
me in mind of the old times, when my old boarders was all round me,
that I used to think so much of,--not that my boarders that I have
now a'nt very nice people, but I did think a dreadful sight of the
gentleman that made that first book; it helped me on in the world
more than ever he knew of,--for it was as good as one of them
Brandreth's pills advertisements, and did n't cost me a cent, and
that young lady he merried too, she was nothing but a poor young
schoolma'am when she come to my house, and now--and she deserved it
all too; for she was always just the same, rich or poor, and she is
n't a bit prouder now she wears a camel's-hair shawl, than she was
when I used to lend her a woollen one to keep her poor dear little
shoulders warm when she had to go out and it was storming,--and then
there was that old gentleman,--I can't speak about him, for I never
knew how good he was till his will was opened, and then it was too
late to thank him....

I respected the feeling which caused the interval of silence, and
found my own eyes moistened as I remembered how long it was since
that friend of ours was sitting in the chair where I now sit, and
what a tidal wave of change has swept over the world and more
especially over this great land of ours, since he opened his lips and
found so many kind listeners.

The Young Astronomer has read us another extract from his manuscript.
I ran my eye over it, and so far as I have noticed it is correct
enough in its versification.  I suppose we are getting gradually over
our hemispherical provincialism, which allowed a set of monks to pull
their hoods over our eyes and tell us there was no meaning in any
religious symbolism but our own.  If I am mistaken about this advance
I am very glad to print the young man's somewhat outspoken lines to
help us in that direction.


          WIND-CLOUDS AND STAR-DRIFTS.

                    VI

The time is racked with birth-pangs; every hour
Brings forth some gasping truth, and truth new-born
Looks a misshapen and untimely growth,
The terror of the household and its shame,
A monster coiling in its nurse's lap
That some would strangle, some would only starve;
But still it breathes, and passed from hand to hand,
And suckled at a hundred half-clad breasts,
Comes slowly to its stature and its form,
Calms the rough ridges of its dragon-scales,
Changes to shining locks its snaky hair,
And moves transfigured into angel guise,
Welcomed by all that cursed its hour of birth,
And folded in the same encircling arms
That cast it like a serpent from their hold!

If thou wouldst live in honor, die in peace,
Have the fine words the marble-workers learn
To carve so well, upon thy funeral-stone,
And earn a fair obituary, dressed
In all the many-colored robes of praise,
Be deafer than the adder to the cry
Of that same foundling truth, until it grows
To seemly favor, and at length has won
The smiles of hard-mouthed men and light-upped dames,
Then snatch it from its meagre nurse's breast,
Fold it in silk and give it food from gold;
So shalt thou share its glory when at last
It drops its mortal vesture, and revealed
In all the splendor of its heavenly form,
Spreads on the startled air its mighty wings!

Alas!  how much that seemed immortal truth
That heroes fought for, martyrs died to save,
Reveals its earth-born lineage, growing old
And limping in its march, its wings unplumed,
Its heavenly semblance faded like a dream!

Here in this painted casket, just unsealed,
Lies what was once a breathing shape like thine,
Once loved as thou art loved; there beamed the eyes
That looked on Memphis in its hour of pride,
That saw the walls of hundred-gated Thebes,
And all the mirrored glories of the Nile.
See how they toiled that all-consuming time
Might leave the frame immortal in its tomb;
Filled it with fragrant balms and odorous gums
That still diffuse their sweetness through the air,
And wound and wound with patient fold on fold
The flaxen bands thy hand has rudely torn!
Perchance thou yet canst see the faded stain
Of the sad mourner's tear.

                         But what is this?
The sacred beetle, bound upon the breast
Of the blind heathen!  Snatch the curious prize,
Give it a place among thy treasured spoils
Fossil and relic,--corals, encrinites,
The fly in amber and the fish in stone,
The twisted circlet of Etruscan gold,
Medal, intaglio, poniard, poison-ring,--
Place for the Memphian beetle with thine hoard!

Ah!  longer than thy creed has blest the world
This toy, thus ravished from thy brother's breast,
Was to the heart of Mizraim as divine,
As holy, as the symbol that we lay
On the still bosom of our white-robed dead,
And raise above their dust that all may know
Here sleeps an heir of glory.  Loving friends,
With tears of trembling faith and choking sobs,
And prayers to those who judge of mortal deeds,
Wrapped this poor image in the cerement's fold
That Isis and Osiris, friends of man,
Might know their own and claim the ransomed soul

An idol?  Man was born to worship such!
An idol is an image of his thought;
Sometimes he carves it out of gleaming stone,
And sometimes moulds it out of glittering gold,
Or rounds it in a mighty frescoed dome,
Or lifts it heavenward in a lofty spire,
Or shapes it in a cunning frame of words,
Or pays his priest to make it day by day;
For sense must have its god as well as soul;
A new-born Dian calls for silver shrines,
And Egypt's holiest symbol is our own,
The sign we worship as did they of old
When Isis and Osiris ruled the world.

Let us be true to our most subtle selves,
We long to have our idols like the rest.
Think!  when the men of Israel had their God
Encamped among them, talking with their chief,
Leading them in the pillar of the cloud
And watching o'er them in the shaft of fire,
They still must have an image; still they longed
For somewhat of substantial, solid form
Whereon to hang their garlands, and to fix
Their wandering thoughts, and gain a stronger hold
For their uncertain faith, not yet assured
If those same meteors of the day and night
Were not mere exhalations of the soil.

Are we less earthly than the chosen race?
Are we more neighbors of the living God
Than they who gathered manna every morn,
Reaping where none had sown, and heard the voice
Of him who met the Highest in the mount,
And brought them tables, graven with His hand?
Yet these must have their idol, brought their gold,
That star-browed Apis might be god again;
Yea, from their ears the women brake the rings
That lent such splendors to the gypsy brown
Of sunburnt cheeks,--what more could woman do
To show her pious zeal?  They went astray,
But nature led them as it leads us all.

We too, who mock at Israel's golden calf
And scoff at Egypt's sacred scarabee,
Would have our amulets to clasp and kiss,
And flood with rapturous tears, and bear with us
To be our dear companions in the dust,
Such magic works an image in our souls!

Man is an embryo; see at twenty years
His bones, the columns that uphold his frame
Not yet cemented, shaft and capital,
Mere fragments of the temple incomplete.
At twoscore, threescore, is he then full grown?
Nay, still a child, and as the little maids
Dress and undress their puppets, so he tries
To dress a lifeless creed, as if it lived,
And change its raiment when the world cries shame!
We smile to see our little ones at play
So grave, so thoughtful, with maternal care
Nursing the wisps of rags they call their babes;
Does He not smile who sees us with the toys
We call by sacred names, and idly feign
To be what we have called them?
He is still The Father of this helpless nursery-brood,
Whose second childhood joins so close its first,
That in the crowding, hurrying years between
We scarce have trained our senses to their task
Before the gathering mist has dimmed our eyes,
And with our hollowed palm we help our ear,
And trace with trembling hand our wrinkled names,
And then begin to tell our stories o'er,
And see--not hear-the whispering lips that say,
"You know--?  Your father knew him.--This is he,
Tottering and leaning on the hireling's arm,--"
And so, at length, disrobed of all that clad
The simple life we share with weed and worm,
Go to our cradles, naked as we came.




XI

I suppose there would have been even more remarks upon the growing
intimacy of the Young Astronomer and his pupil, if the curiosity of
the boarders had not in the mean time been so much excited at the
apparently close relation which had sprung up between the Register of
Deeds and the Lady.  It was really hard to tell what to make of it.
The Register appeared at the table in a new coat.  Suspicious.  The
Lady was evidently deeply interested in him, if we could judge by the
frequency and the length of their interviews.  On at least one
occasion he has brought a lawyer with him, which naturally suggested
the idea that there were some property arrangements to be attended
to, in case, as seems probable against all reasons to the contrary,
these two estimable persons, so utterly unfitted, as one would say,
to each other, contemplated an alliance.  It is no pleasure to me to
record an arrangement of this kind.  I frankly confess I do not know
what to make of it.  With her tastes and breeding, it is the last
thing that I should have thought of,--her uniting herself with this
most commonplace and mechanical person, who cannot even offer her the
elegances and luxuries to which she might seem entitled on changing
her condition.

While I was thus interested and puzzled I received an unexpected
visit from our Landlady.  She was evidently excited, and by some
event which was of a happy nature, for her countenance was beaming
and she seemed impatient to communicate what she had to tell.
Impatient or not, she must wait a moment, while I say a word about
her.  Our Landlady is as good a creature as ever lived.  She is a
little negligent of grammar at times, and will get a wrong word now
and then; she is garrulous, circumstantial, associates facts by their
accidental cohesion rather than by their vital affinities, is given
to choking and tears on slight occasions, but she has a warm heart,
and feels to her boarders as if they were her blood-relations.
She began her conversation abruptly.--I expect I'm a going to lose
one of my boarders,--she said.

--You don't seem very unhappy about it, madam,--I answered.---We all
took it easily when the person who sat on our side of the table
quitted us in such a hurry, but I do not think there is anybody left
that either you or the boarders want to get rid of--unless it is
myself,--I added modestly.

--You!  said the Landlady--you!  No indeed.  When I have a quiet
boarder that 's a small eater, I don't want to lose him.  You don't
make trouble, you don't find fault with your vit--[Dr. Benjamin had
schooled his parent on this point and she altered the word] with your
food, and you know when you 've had enough.

--I really felt proud of this eulogy, which embraces the most
desirable excellences of a human being in the capacity of boarder.

The Landlady began again.--I'm going to lose--at least, I suppose I
shall--one of the best boarders I ever had,--that Lady that's been
with me so long.

--I thought there was something going on between her and the
Register,--I said.

--Something!  I should think there was!  About three months ago he
began making her acquaintance.  I thought there was something
particular.  I did n't quite like to watch 'em very close; but I
could n't help overbearing some of the things he said to her, for,
you see, he used to follow her up into the parlor, they talked pretty
low, but I could catch a word now and then.  I heard him say
something to her one day about "bettering her condition," and she
seemed to be thinking very hard about it, and turning of it over in
her mind, and I said to myself, She does n't want to take up with
him, but she feels dreadful poor, and perhaps he has been saving and
has got money in the bank, and she does n't want to throw away a
chance of bettering herself without thinking it over.  But dear me,--
says I to myself,--to think of her walking up the broad aisle into
meeting alongside of such a homely, rusty-looking creatur' as that!
But there 's no telling what folks will do when poverty has got hold
of 'em.

--Well, so I thought she was waiting to make up her mind, and he was
hanging on in hopes she'd come round at last, as women do half the
time, for they don't know their own minds and the wind blows both
ways at once with 'em as the smoke blows out of the tall chimlies,--
east out of this one and west out of that,--so it's no use looking at
'em to know what the weather is.

--But yesterday she comes up to me after breakfast, and asks me to go
up with her into her little room.  Now, says I to myself, I shall
hear all about it.  I saw she looked as if she'd got some of her
trouble off her mind, and I guessed that it was settled, and so, says
I to myself, I must wish her joy and hope it's all for the best,
whatever I think about it.

--Well, she asked me to set down, and then she begun.  She said that
she was expecting to have a change in her condition of life, and had
asked me up so that I might' have the first news of it.  I am sure--
says I--I wish you both joy.  Merriage is a blessed thing when folks
is well sorted, and it is an honorable thing, and the first meracle
was at the merriage in Canaan.  It brings a great sight of happiness
with it, as I've had a chance of knowing, for my hus

The Landlady showed her usual tendency to "break" from the
conversational pace just at this point, but managed to rein in the
rebellious diaphragm, and resumed her narrative.

--Merriage!--says she,--pray who has said anything about merriage?
--I beg your pardon, ma'am,--says I,--I thought you had spoke of
changing your condition and I--She looked so I stopped right short.

-Don't say another word, says she, but jest listen to what I am going
to tell you.

--My friend, says she, that you have seen with me so often lately,
was hunting among his old Record books, when all at once he come
across an old deed that was made by somebody that had my family name.
He took it into his head to read it over, and he found there was some
kind of a condition that if it was n't kept, the property would all
go back to them that was the heirs of the one that gave the deed, and
that he found out was me.  Something or other put it into his head,
says she, that the company that owned the property--it was ever so
rich a company and owned land all round everywhere--hadn't kept to
the conditions.  So he went to work, says she, and hunted through his
books and he inquired all round, and he found out pretty much all
about it, and at last he come to me--it 's my boarder, you know, that
says all this--and says he, Ma'am, says he, if you have any kind of
fancy for being a rich woman you've only got to say so.  I didn't
know what he meant, and I began to think, says she, he must be crazy.
But he explained it all to me, how I'd nothing to do but go to court
and I could get a sight of property back.  Well, so she went on
telling me--there was ever so much more that I suppose was all plain
enough, but I don't remember it all--only I know my boarder was a
good deal worried at first at the thought of taking money that other
people thought was theirs, and the Register he had to talk to her,
and he brought a lawyer and he talked to her, and her friends they
talked to her, and the upshot of it all was that the company agreed
to settle the business by paying her, well, I don't know just how
much, but enough to make her one of the rich folks again.


I may as well add here that, as I have since learned, this is one of
the most important cases of releasing right of reentry for condition
broken which has been settled by arbitration for a considerable
period.  If I am not mistaken the Register of Deeds will get
something more than a new coat out of this business, for the Lady
very justly attributes her change of fortunes to his sagacity and his
activity in following up the hint he had come across by mere
accident.

So my supernumerary fellow-boarder, whom I would have dispensed with
as a cumberer of the table, has proved a ministering angel to one of
the personages whom I most cared for.

One would have thought that the most scrupulous person need not have
hesitated in asserting an unquestioned legal and equitable claim
simply because it had lain a certain number of years in abeyance.
But before the Lady could make up her mind to accept her good fortune
she had been kept awake many nights in doubt and inward debate
whether she should avail herself of her rights.  If it had been
private property, so that another person must be made poor that she
should become rich, she would have lived and died in want rather than
claim her own.  I do not think any of us would like to turn out the
possessor of a fine estate enjoyed for two or three generations on
the faith of unquestioned ownership by making use of some old
forgotten instrument, which accident had thrown in our way.

But it was all nonsense to indulge in any sentiment in a case like
this, where it was not only a right, but a duty which she owed
herself and others in relation with her, to accept what Providence,
as it appeared, had thrust upon her, and when no suffering would be
occasioned to anybody.  Common sense told her not to refuse it.  So
did several of her rich friends, who remembered about this time that
they had not called upon her for a good while, and among them Mrs.
Midas Goldenrod.

Never had that lady's carriage stood before the door of our boarding-
house so long, never had it stopped so often, as since the revelation
which had come from the Registry of Deeds.  Mrs. Midas Goldenrod was
not a bad woman, but she loved and hated in too exclusive and
fastidious a way to allow us to consider her as representing the
highest ideal of womanhood.  She hated narrow ill-ventilated courts,
where there was nothing to see if one looked out of the window but
old men in dressing-gowns and old women in caps; she hated little
dark rooms with air-tight stoves in them; she hated rusty bombazine
gowns and last year's bonnets; she hated gloves that were not as
fresh as new-laid eggs, and shoes that had grown bulgy and wrinkled
in service; she hated common crockeryware and teaspoons of slight
constitution; she hated second appearances on the dinner-table; she
hated coarse napkins and table-cloths; she hated to ride in the
horsecars; she hated to walk except for short distances, when she was
tired of sitting in her carriage.  She loved with sincere and
undisguised affection a spacious city mansion and a charming country
villa, with a seaside cottage for a couple of months or so; she loved
a perfectly appointed household, a cook who was up to all kinds of
salmis and vol-au-vents, a French maid, and a stylish-looking
coachman, and the rest of the people necessary to help one live in a
decent manner; she loved pictures that other people said were first-
rate, and which had at least cost first-rate prices; she loved books
with handsome backs, in showy cases; she loved heavy and richly
wought plate; fine linen and plenty of it; dresses from Paris
frequently, and as many as could be got in without troubling the
customhouse; Russia sables and Venetian point-lace; diamonds, and
good big ones; and, speaking generally, she loved dear things in
distinction from cheap ones, the real article and not the economical
substitute.

For the life of me I cannot see anything Satanic in all this.  Tell
me, Beloved, only between ourselves, if some of these things are not
desirable enough in their way, and if you and I could not make up our
minds to put up with some of the least objectionable of them without
any great inward struggle?  Even in the matter of ornaments there is
something to be said.  Why should we be told that the New Jerusalem
is paved with gold, and that its twelve gates are each of them a
pearl, and that its foundations are garnished with sapphires and
emeralds and all manner of precious stones, if these are not among
the most desirable of objects?  And is there anything very strange in
the fact that many a daughter of earth finds it a sweet foretaste of
heaven to wear about her frail earthly tabernacle these glittering
reminders of the celestial city?

Mrs.  Midas Goldenrod was not so entirely peculiar and anomalous in
her likes and dislikes; the only trouble was that she mixed up these
accidents of life too much with life itself, which is so often
serenely or actively noble and happy without reference to them.  She
valued persons chiefly according to their external conditions, and of
course the very moment her relative, the Lady of our breakfast-table,
began to find herself in a streak of sunshine she came forward with a
lighted candle to show her which way her path lay before her.

The Lady saw all this, how plainly, how painfully! yet she exercised
a true charity for the weakness of her relative.  Sensible people
have as much consideration for the frailties of the rich as for those
of the poor.  There is a good deal of excuse for them.  Even you and
I, philosophers and philanthropists as we may think ourselves, have a
dislike for the enforced economies, proper and honorable though they
certainly are, of those who are two or three degrees below us in the
scale of agreeable living.

--These are very worthy persons you have been living with, my dear,--
said Mrs. Midas--[the "My dear" was an expression which had flowered
out more luxuriantly than ever before in the new streak of sunshine]
--eminently respectable parties, I have no question, but then we
shall want you to move as soon as possible to our quarter of the
town, where we can see more of you than we have been able to in this
queer place.

It was not very pleasant to listen to this kind of talk, but the Lady
remembered her annual bouquet, and her occasional visits from the
rich lady, and restrained the inclination to remind her of the humble
sphere from which she herself, the rich and patronizing personage,
had worked her way up (if it was up) into that world which she seemed
to think was the only one where a human being could find life worth
having.  Her cheek flushed a little, however, as she said to Mrs.
Midas that she felt attached to the place where she had been living
so long.  She doubted, she was pleased to say, whether she should
find better company in any circle she was like to move in than she
left behind her at our boarding-house.  I give the old Master the
credit of this compliment.  If one does not agree with half of what
he says, at any rate he always has something to say, and entertains
and lets out opinions and whims and notions of one kind and another
that one can quarrel with if he is out of humor, or carry away to
think about if he happens to be in the receptive mood.

But the Lady expressed still more strongly the regret she should feel
at leaving her young friend, our Scheherezade.  I cannot wonder at
this.  The Young Girl has lost what little playfulness she had in the
earlier months of my acquaintance with her.  I often read her stories
partly from my interest in her, and partly because I find merit
enough in them to deserve something, better than the rough handling
they got from her coarse-fibred critic, whoever he was.  I see
evidence that her thoughts are wandering from her task, that she has
fits of melancholy, and bursts of tremulous excitement, and that she
has as much as she can do to keep herself at all to her stated,
inevitable, and sometimes almost despairing literary labor.  I have
had some acquaintance with vital phenomena of this kind, and know
something of the nervous nature of young women and its "magnetic
storms," if I may borrow an expression from the physicists, to
indicate the perturbations to which they are liable.  She is more in
need of friendship and counsel now than ever before, it seems to me,
and I cannot bear to think that the Lady, who has become like a
mother to her, is to leave her to her own guidance.

It is plain enough what is at the bottom of this disturbance.  The
astronomical lessons she has been taking have become interesting
enough to absorb too much of her thoughts, and she finds them
wandering to the stars or elsewhere, when they should be working
quietly in the editor's harness.

The Landlady has her own views on this matter which she communicated
to me something as follows:

--I don't quite like to tell folks what a lucky place my boarding-
house is, for fear I should have all sorts of people crowding in to
be my boarders for the sake of their chances.  Folks come here poor
and they go away rich.  Young women come here without a friend in the
world, and the next thing that happens is a gentleman steps up to 'em
and says, "If you'll take me for your pardner for life, I'll give you
a good home and love you ever so much besides"; and off goes my young
lady-boarder into a fine three-story house, as grand as the
governor's wife, with everything to make her comfortable, and a
husband to care for her into the bargain.  That's the way it is with
the young ladies that comes to board with me, ever since the
gentleman that wrote the first book that advertised my establishment
(and never charged me a cent for it neither) merried the Schoolma'am.
And I think but that's between you and me--that it 's going to be the
same thing right over again between that young gentleman and this
young girl here--if she doos n't kill herself with writing for them
news papers,--it 's too bad they don't pay her more for writing her
stories, for I read one of 'em that made me cry so the Doctor--my
Doctor Benjamin--said, "Ma, what makes your eyes look so?" and wanted
to rig a machine up and look at 'em, but I told him what the matter
was, and that he needn't fix up his peeking contrivances on my
account,--anyhow she's a nice young woman as ever lived, and as
industrious with that pen of hers as if she was at work with a
sewing-machine,--and there ain't much difference, for that matter,
between sewing on shirts and writing on stories,--one way you work
with your foot, and the other way you work with your fingers, but I
rather guess there's more headache in the stories than there is in
the stitches, because you don't have to think quite so hard while
your foot's going as you do when your fingers is at work, scratch,
scratch, scratch, scribble, scribble, scribble.

It occurred to me that this last suggestion of the Landlady was worth
considering by the soft-handed, broadcloth-clad spouters to the
laboring classes,--so called in distinction from the idle people who
only contrive the machinery and discover the processes and lay out
the work and draw the charts and organize the various movements which
keep the world going and make it tolerable.  The organ-blower works
harder with his muscles, for that matter, than the organ player, and
may perhaps be exasperated into thinking himself a downtrodden martyr
because he does not receive the same pay for his services.

I will not pretend that it needed the Landlady's sagacious guess
about the Young Astronomer and his pupil to open my eyes to certain
possibilities, if not probabilities, in that direction.  Our
Scheherezade kept on writing her stories according to agreement, so
many pages for so many dollars, but some of her readers began to
complain that they could not always follow her quite so well as in
her earlier efforts.  It seemed as if she must have fits of absence.
In one instance her heroine began as a blonde and finished as a
brunette; not in consequence of the use of any cosmetic, but through
simple inadvertence.  At last it happened in one of her stories that
a prominent character who had been killed in an early page, not
equivocally, but mortally, definitively killed, done for, and
disposed of, reappeared as if nothing had happened towards the close
of her narrative.  Her mind was on something else, and she had got
two stories mixed up and sent her manuscript without having looked it
over.  She told this mishap to the Lady, as something she was
dreadfully ashamed of and could not possibly account for.  It had
cost her a sharp note from the publisher, and would be as good as a
dinner to some half-starved Bohemian of the critical press.

The Lady listened to all this very thoughtfully, looking at her with
great tenderness, and said, "My poor child!" Not another word then,
but her silence meant a good deal.

When a man holds his tongue it does not signify much.  But when a
woman dispenses with the office of that mighty member, when she
sheathes her natural weapon at a trying moment, it means that she
trusts to still more formidable enginery; to tears it may be, a
solvent more powerful than that with which Hannibal softened the
Alpine rocks, or to the heaving bosom, the sight of which has subdued
so many stout natures, or, it may be, to a sympathizing, quieting
look which says "Peace, be still!" to the winds and waves of the
little inland ocean, in a language that means more than speech.

While these matters were going on the Master and I had many talks on
many subjects.  He had found me a pretty good listener, for I had
learned that the best way of getting at what was worth having from
him was to wind him up with a question and let him run down all of
himself.  It is easy to turn a good talker into an insufferable bore
by contradicting him, and putting questions for him to stumble over,
--that is, if he is not a bore already, as "good talkers" are apt to
be, except now and then.

We had been discussing some knotty points one morning when he said
all at once:

--Come into my library with me.  I want to read you some new passages
from an interleaved copy of my book.  You haven't read the printed
part yet.  I gave you a copy of it, but nobody reads a book that is
given to him.  Of course not.  Nobody but a fool expects him to.  He
reads a little in it here and there, perhaps, and he cuts all the
leaves if he cares enough about the writer, who will be sure to call
on him some day, and if he is left alone in his library for five
minutes will have hunted every corner of it until he has found the
book he sent,--if it is to be found at all, which does n't always
happen, if there's a penal colony anywhere in a garret or closet for
typographical offenders and vagrants.

--What do you do when you receive a book you don't want, from the
author?--said I.

--Give him a good-natured adjective or two if I can, and thank him,
and tell him I am lying under a sense of obligation to him.

--That is as good an excuse for lying as almost any,--I said.

--Yes, but look out for the fellows that send you a copy of their
book to trap you into writing a bookseller's advertisement for it.  I
got caught so once, and never heard the end of it and never shall
hear it.---He took down an elegantly bound volume, on opening which
appeared a flourishing and eminently flattering dedication to
himself.---There,--said he, what could I do less than acknowledge
such a compliment in polite terms, and hope and expect the book would
prove successful, and so forth and so forth?  Well, I get a letter
every few months from some new locality where the man that made that
book is covering the fences with his placards, asking me whether I
wrote that letter which he keeps in stereotype and has kept so any
time these dozen or fifteen years.  Animus tuus oculus, as the
freshmen used to say.  If her Majesty, the Queen of England, sends
you a copy of her "Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the
Highlands," be sure you mark your letter of thanks for it Private!

We had got comfortably seated in his library in the mean time, and
the Master had taken up his book.  I noticed that every other page
was left blank, and that he had written in a good deal of new matter.

--I tell you what,--he said,--there 's so much intelligence about
nowadays in books and newspapers and talk that it's mighty hard to
write without getting something or other worth listening to into your
essay or your volume.  The foolishest book is a kind of leaky boat on
a sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.  Every now
and then I find something in my book that seems so good to me, I
can't help thinking it must have leaked in.  I suppose other people
discover that it came through a leak, full as soon as I do.  You must
write a book or two to find out how much and how little you know and
have to say.  Then you must read some notices of it by somebody that
loves you and one or two by somebody that hates you.  You 'll find
yourself a very odd piece of property after you 've been through
these experiences.  They 're trying to the constitution; I'm always
glad to hear that a friend is as well as can be expected after he 's
had a book.

You must n't think there are no better things in these pages of mine
than the ones I'm going to read you, but you may come across
something here that I forgot to say when we were talking over these
matters.

He began, reading from the manuscript portion of his book:

--We find it hard to get and to keep any private property in thought.
Other people are all the time saying the same things we are hoarding
to say when we get ready.  [He looked up from his book just here and
said, "Don't be afraid, I am not going to quote Pereant."] One of our
old boarders--the one that called himself "The Professor" I think it
was--said some pretty audacious things about what he called
"pathological piety," as I remember, in one of his papers.  And here
comes along Mr. Galton, and shows in detail from religious
biographies that "there is a frequent correlation between an
unusually devout disposition and a weak constitution."  Neither of
them appeared to know that John Bunyan had got at the same fact long
before them.  He tells us, "The more healthy the lusty man is, the
more prone he is unto evil."  If the converse is true, no wonder that
good people, according to Bunyan, are always in trouble and terror,
for he says,

    "A Christian man is never long at ease;
     When one fright is gone, another doth him seize."

If invalidism and the nervous timidity which is apt to go with it are
elements of spiritual superiority, it follows that pathology and
toxicology should form a most important part of a theological
education, so that a divine might know how to keep a parish in a
state of chronic bad health in order that it might be virtuous.

It is a great mistake to think that a man's religion is going to rid
him of his natural qualities.  "Bishop Hall" (as you may remember to
have seen quoted elsewhere) "prefers Nature before Grace in the
Election of a wife, because, saith he, it will be a hard Task, where
the Nature is peevish and froward, for Grace to make an entire
conquest while Life lasteth."

"Nature" and "Grace" have been contrasted with each other in a way
not very respectful to the Divine omnipotence.  Kings and queens
reign "by the Grace of God," but a sweet, docile, pious disposition,
such as is born in some children and grows up with them,--that
congenital gift which good Bishop Hall would look for in a wife,--is
attributed to "Nature."  In fact "Nature" and "Grace," as handled by
the scholastics, are nothing more nor less than two hostile
Divinities in the Pantheon of post-classical polytheism.

What is the secret of the profound interest which "Darwinism" has
excited in the minds and hearts of more persons than dare to confess
their doubts and hopes?  It is because it restores "Nature" to its
place as a true divine manifestation.  It is that it removes the
traditional curse from that helpless infant lying in its mother's
arms.  It is that it lifts from the shoulders of man the
responsibility for the fact of death.  It is that, if it is true,
woman can no longer be taunted with having brought down on herself
the pangs which make her sex a martyrdom.  If development upward is
the general law of the race; if we have grown by natural evolution
out of the cave-man, and even less human forms of life, we have
everything to hope from the future.  That the question can be
discussed without offence shows that we are entering on a new era, a
Revival greater than that of Letters, the Revival of Humanity.

The prevalent view of "Nature" has been akin to that which long
reigned with reference to disease.  This used to be considered as a
distinct entity apart from the processes of life, of which it is one
of the manifestations.  It was a kind of demon to be attacked with
things of odious taste and smell; to be fumigated out of the system
as the evil spirit was driven from the bridal-chamber in the story of
Tobit.  The Doctor of earlier days, even as I can remember him, used
to exorcise the demon of disease with recipes of odor as potent as
that of the angel's diabolifuge,--the smoke from a fish's heart and
liver, duly burned,--"the which smell when the evil spirit had
smelled he fled into the uttermost parts of Egypt."  The very moment
that disease passes into the category of vital processes, and is
recognized as an occurrence absolutely necessary, inevitable, and as
one may say, normal under certain given conditions of constitution
and circumstance, the medicine-man loses his half-miraculous
endowments.  The mythical serpent is untwined from the staff of
Esculapius, which thenceforth becomes a useful walking-stick, and
does not pretend to be anything more.

Sin, like disease, is a vital process.  It is a function, and not an
entity.  It must be studied as a section of anthropology.  No
preconceived idea must be allowed to interfere with our investigation
of the deranged spiritual function, any more than the old ideas of
demoniacal possession must be allowed to interfere with our study of
epilepsy.  Spiritual pathology is a proper subject for direct
observation and analysis, like any other subject involving a series
of living actions.

In these living actions everything is progressive.  There are sudden
changes of character in what is called "conversion" which, at first,
hardly seem to come into line with the common laws of evolution.  But
these changes have been long preparing, and it is just as much in the
order of nature that certain characters should burst all at once from
the rule of evil propensities, as it is that the evening primrose
should explode, as it were, into bloom with audible sound, as you may
read in Keats's Endymion, or observe in your own garden.

There is a continual tendency in men to fence in themselves and a few
of their neighbors who agree with them in their ideas, as if they
were an exception to their race.  We must not allow any creed or
religion whatsoever to confiscate to its own private use and benefit
the virtues which belong to our common humanity.  The Good Samaritan
helped his wounded neighbor simply because he was a suffering fellow-
creature.  Do you think your charitable act is more acceptable than
the Good Samaritan's, because you do it in the name of Him who made
the memory of that kind man immortal?  Do you mean that you would not
give the cup of cold water for the sake simply and solely of the
poor, suffering fellow-mortal, as willingly as you now do, professing
to give it for the sake of Him who is not thirsty or in need of any
help of yours?  We must ask questions like this, if we are to claim
for our common nature what belongs to it.

The scientific study of man is the most difficult of all branches of
knowledge.  It requires, in the first place, an entire new
terminology to get rid of that enormous load of prejudices with which
every term applied to the malformations, the functional disturbances,
and the organic diseases of the moral nature is at present burdened.
Take that one word Sin, for instance: all those who have studied the
subject from nature and not from books know perfectly well that a
certain fraction of what is so called is nothing more or less than a
symptom of hysteria; that another fraction is the index of a limited
degree of insanity; that still another is the result of a congenital
tendency which removes the act we sit in judgment upon from the
sphere of self-determination, if not entirely, at least to such an
extent that the subject of the tendency cannot be judged by any
normal standard.

To study nature without fear is possible, but without reproach,
impossible.  The man who worships in the temple of knowledge must
carry his arms with him as our Puritan fathers had to do when they
gathered in their first rude meeting-houses.  It is a fearful thing
to meddle with the ark which holds the mysteries of creation.  I
remember that when I was a child the tradition was whispered round
among us little folks that if we tried to count the stars we should
drop down dead.  Nevertheless, the stars have been counted and the
astronomer has survived.  This nursery legend is the child's version
of those superstitions which would have strangled in their cradles
the young sciences now adolescent and able to take care of
themselves, and which, no longer daring to attack these, are watching
with hostile aspect the rapid growth of the comparatively new science
of man.

The real difficulty of the student of nature at this time is to
reconcile absolute freedom and perfect fearlessness with that respect
for the past, that reverence, for the spirit of reverence wherever we
find it, that tenderness for the weakest fibres by which the hearts
of our fellow-creatures hold to their religious convictions, which
will make the transition from old belief to a larger light and
liberty an interstitial change and not a violent mutilation.

I remember once going into a little church in a small village some
miles from a great European capital.  The special object of adoration
in this humblest of places of worship was a bambino, a holy infant,
done in wax, and covered with cheap ornaments such as a little girl
would like to beautify her doll with.  Many a good Protestant of the
old Puritan type would have felt a strong impulse to seize this
"idolatrous" figure and dash it to pieces on the stone floor of the
little church.  But one must have lived awhile among simple-minded
pious Catholics to know what this poor waxen image and the whole
baby-house of bambinos mean for a humble, unlettered, unimaginative
peasantry.  He will find that the true office of this eidolon is to
fix the mind of the worshipper, and that in virtue of the devotional
thoughts it has called forth so often for so many years in the mind
of that poor old woman who is kneeling before it, it is no longer a
wax doll for her, but has undergone a transubstantiation quite as
real as that of the Eucharist.  The moral is that we must not roughly
smash other people's idols because we know, or think we know, that
they are of cheap human manufacture.

--Do you think cheap manufactures encourage idleness?--said I.

The Master stared.  Well he might, for I had been getting a little
drowsy, and wishing to show that I had been awake and attentive,
asked a question suggested by some words I had caught, but which
showed that I had not been taking the slightest idea from what he was
reading me.  He stared, shook his head slowly, smiled good-humoredly,
took off his great round spectacles, and shut up his book.

--Sat prates biberunt,--he said.  A sick man that gets talking about
himself, a woman that gets talking about her baby, and an author that
begins reading out of his own book, never know when to stop.  You'll
think of some of these things you've been getting half asleep over by
and by.  I don't want you to believe anything I say; I only want you
to try to see what makes me believe it.

My young friend, the Astronomer, has, I suspect, been making some
addition to his manuscript.  At any rate some of the lines he read us
in the afternoon of this same day had never enjoyed the benefit of my
revision, and I think they had but just been written.  I noticed that
his manner was somewhat more excited than usual, and his voice just
towards the close a little tremulous.  Perhaps I may attribute his
improvement to the effect of my criticisms, but whatever the reason,
I think these lines are very nearly as correct as they would have
been if I had looked them over.


     WIND-CLOUDS AND STAR-DRIFTS.

               VII

What if a soul redeemed, a spirit that loved
While yet on earth and was beloved in turn,
And still remembered every look and tone
Of that dear earthly sister who was left
Among the unwise virgins at the gate,
Itself admitted with the bridegroom's train,
What if this spirit redeemed, amid the host
Of chanting angels, in some transient lull
Of the eternal anthem, heard the cry
Of its lost darling, whom in evil hour
Some wilder pulse of nature led astray
And left an outcast in a world of fire,
Condemned to be the sport of cruel fiends,
Sleepless, unpitying, masters of the skill
To wring the maddest ecstasies of pain
From worn-out souls that only ask to die,
Would it not long to leave the bliss of Heaven,
Bearing a little water in its hand
To moisten those poor lips that plead in vain
With Him we call our Father?  Or is all
So changed in such as taste celestial joy
They hear unmoved the endless wail of woe,
The daughter in the same dear tones that hushed
Her cradled slumbers; she who once had held
A babe upon her bosom from its voice
Hoarse with its cry of anguish, yet the same?

No! not in ages when the Dreadful Bird
Stamped his huge footprints, and the Fearful Beast
Strode with the flesh about those fossil bones
We build to mimic life with pygmy hands,
Not in those earliest days when men ran wild
And gashed each other with their knives of stone,
When their low foreheads bulged in ridgy brows
And their flat hands were callous in the palm
With walking in the fashion of their sires,
Grope as they might to find a cruel god
To work their will on such as human wrath
Had wrought its worst to torture, and had left
With rage unsated, white and stark and cold,
Could hate have shaped a demon more malign
Than him the dead men mummied in their creed
And taught their trembling children to adore!
Made in his image!  Sweet and gracious souls
Dear to my heart by nature's fondest names,
Is not your memory still the precious mould
That lends its form to Him who hears my prayer?
Thus only I behold him, like to them,
Long-suffering, gentle, ever slow to wrath,
If wrath it be that only wounds to heal,
Ready to meet the wanderer ere he reach
The door he seeks, forgetful of his sin,
Longing to clasp him in a father's arms,
And seal his pardon with a pitying tear!

Four gospels tell their story to mankind,
And none so full of soft, caressing words
That bring the Maid of Bethlehem and her Babe
Before our tear-dimmed eyes, as his who learned
In the meek service of his gracious art
The tones which like the medicinal balms
That calm the sufferer's anguish, soothe our souls.
--Oh that the loving woman, she who sat
So long a listener at her Master's feet,
Had left us Mary's Gospel,--all she heard
Too sweet, too subtle for the ear of man!
Mark how the tender-hearted mothers read
The messages of love between the lines
Of the same page that loads the bitter tongue
Of him who deals in terror as his trade
With threatening words of wrath that scorch like flame!
They tell of angels whispering round the bed
Of the sweet infant smiling in its dream,
Of lambs enfolded in the Shepherd's arms,
Of Him who blessed the children; of the land
Where crystal rivers feed unfading flowers,
Of cities golden-paved with streets of pearl,
Of the white robes the winged creatures wear,
The crowns and harps from whose melodious strings
One long, sweet anthem flows forevermore!

--We too bad human mothers, even as Thou,
Whom we have learned to worship as remote
From mortal kindred, wast a cradled babe.
The milk of woman filled our branching veins,
She lulled us with her tender nursery-song,
And folded round us her untiring arms,
While the first unremembered twilight year
Shaped us to conscious being; still we feel
Her pulses in our own,--too faintly feel;
Would that the heart of woman warmed our creeds!

Not from the sad-eyed hermit's lonely cell,
Not from the conclave where the holy men
Glare on each other, as with angry eyes
They battle for God's glory and their own,
Till, sick of wordy strife, a show of hands
Fixes the faith of ages yet unborn,
Ah, not from these the listening soul can hear
The Father's voice that speaks itself divine!
Love must be still our Master; till we learn
What he can teach us of a woman's heart,
We know not His, whose love embraces all.


There are certain nervous conditions peculiar to women in which the
common effects of poetry and of music upon their sensibilities are
strangely exaggerated.  It was not perhaps to be wondered at that
Octavia fainted when Virgil in reading from his great poem came to
the line beginning Tu Marcellus eris: It is not hard to believe the
story told of one of the two Davidson sisters, that the singing of
some of Moore's plaintive melodies would so impress her as almost to
take away the faculties of sense and motion.  But there must have
been some special cause for the singular nervous state into which
this reading threw the young girl, our Scheherezade.  She was
doubtless tired with overwork and troubled with the thought that she
was not doing herself justice, and that she was doomed to be the
helpless prey of some of those corbies who not only pick out corbies'
eyes, but find no other diet so nutritious and agreeable.

Whatever the cause may have been, her heart heaved tumultuously, her
color came and went, and though she managed to avoid a scene by the
exercise of all her self-control, I watched her very anxiously, for I
was afraid she would have had a hysteric turn, or in one of her
pallid moments that she would have fainted and fallen like one dead
before us.

I was very glad, therefore, when evening came, to find that she was
going out for a lesson on the stars.  I knew the open air was what
she needed, and I thought the walk would do her good, whether she
made any new astronomical acquisitions or not.

It was now late in the autumn, and the trees were pretty nearly
stripped of their leaves.--There was no place so favorable as the
Common for the study of the heavens.  The skies were brilliant with
stars, and the air was just keen enough to remind our young friends
that the cold season was at hand.  They wandered round for a while,
and at last found themselves under the Great Elm, drawn thither, no
doubt, by the magnetism it is so well known to exert over the natives
of its own soil and those who have often been under the shadow of its
outstretched arms.  The venerable survivor of its contemporaries that
flourished in the days when Blackstone rode beneath it on his bull
was now a good deal broken by age, yet not without marks of lusty
vitality.  It had been wrenched and twisted and battered by so many
scores of winters that some of its limbs were crippled and many of
its joints were shaky, and but for the support of the iron braces
that lent their strong sinews to its more infirm members it would
have gone to pieces in the first strenuous northeaster or the first
sudden and violent gale from the southwest.  But there it stood, and
there it stands as yet,--though its obituary was long ago written
after one of the terrible storms that tore its branches,--leafing out
hopefully in April as if it were trying in its dumb language to lisp
"Our Father," and dropping its slender burden of foliage in October
as softly as if it were whispering Amen!

Not far from the ancient and monumental tree lay a small sheet of
water, once agile with life and vocal with evening melodies, but now
stirred only by the swallow as he dips his wing, or by the morning
bath of the English sparrows, those high-headed, thick-bodied, full-
feeding, hot-tempered little John Bulls that keep up such a swashing
and swabbing and spattering round all the water basins, one might
think from the fuss they make about it that a bird never took a bath
here before, and that they were the missionaries of ablution to the
unwashed Western world.

There are those who speak lightly of this small aqueous expanse, the
eye of the sacred enclosure, which has looked unwinking on the happy
faces of so many natives and the curious features of so many
strangers.  The music of its twilight minstrels has long ceased, but
their memory lingers like an echo in the name it bears.  Cherish it,
inhabitants of the two-hilled city, once three-hilled; ye who have
said to the mountain, "Remove hence," and turned the sea into dry
land!  May no contractor fill his pockets by undertaking to fill
thee, thou granite girdled lakelet, or drain the civic purse by
drawing off thy waters!  For art thou not the Palladium of our Troy?
Didst thou not, like the Divine image which was the safeguard of
Ilium, fall from the skies, and if the Trojan could look with pride
upon the heaven-descended form of the Goddess of Wisdom, cannot he
who dwells by thy shining oval look in that mirror and contemplate
Himself,--the Native of Boston.

There must be some fatality which carries our young men and maidens
in the direction of the Common when they have anything very
particular to exchange their views about.  At any rate I remember two
of our young friends brought up here a good many years ago, and I
understand that there is one path across the enclosure which a young
man must not ask a young woman to take with him unless he means
business, for an action will hold--for breach of promise, if she
consents to accompany him, and he chooses to forget his obligations:

Our two young people stood at the western edge of the little pool,
studying astronomy in the reflected firmament.  The Pleiades were
trembling in the wave before them, and the three great stars of
Orion,--for these constellations were both glittering in the eastern
sky.

"There is no place too humble for the glories of heaven to shine in,"
she said

"And their splendor makes even this little pool beautiful and noble,"
he answered.  "Where is the light to come from that is to do as much
for our poor human lives?"

A simple question enough, but the young girl felt her color change as
she answered, "From friendship, I think."

--Grazing only as -yet,--not striking full, hardly hitting at all,--
but there are questions and answers that come so very near, the wind
of them alone almost takes the breath away.

There was an interval of silence.  Two young persons can stand
looking at water for a long time without feeling the necessity of
speaking.  Especially when the water is alive with stars and the
young persons are thoughtful and impressible.  The water seems to do
half the thinking while one is looking at it; its movements are felt
in the brain very much like thought.  When I was in full training as
a flaneur, I could stand on the Pont Neuf with the other experts in
the great science of passive cerebration and look at the river for
half an hour with so little mental articulation that when I moved on
it seemed as if my thinking-marrow had been asleep and was just
waking up refreshed after its nap.

So the reader can easily account for the interval of silence.  It is
hard to tell how long it would have lasted, but just then a lubberly
intrusive boy threw a great stone, which convulsed the firmament, the
one at their feet, I mean.  The six Pleiads disappeared as if in
search of their lost sister; the belt of Orion was broken asunder,
and a hundred worlds dissolved back into chaos.  They turned away and
strayed off into one of the more open paths, where the view of the
sky over them was unobstructed.  For some reason or other the
astronomical lesson did not get on very fast this evening.

Presently the young man asked his pupil:

--Do you know what the constellation directly over our heads is?

--Is it not Cassiopea?--she asked a little hesitatingly.

--No, it is Andromeda.  You ought not to have forgotten her, for I
remember showing you a double star, the one in her right foot,
through the equatorial telescope.  You have not forgotten the double
star,--the two that shone for each other and made a little world by
themselves?

--No, indeed,--she answered, and blushed, and felt ashamed because
she had said indeed, as if it had been an emotional recollection.

The double-star allusion struck another dead silence.  She would have
given a week's pay to any invisible attendant that would have cut her
stay-lace.

At last: Do you know the story of Andromeda?  he said.

--Perhaps I did once, but suppose I don't remember it.

He told her the story of the unfortunate maiden chained to a rock and
waiting for a sea-beast that was coming to devour her, and how
Perseus came and set her free, and won her love with her life.  And
then he began something about a young man chained to his rock, which
was a star-gazer's tower, a prey by turns to ambition, and lonely
self-contempt and unwholesome scorn of the life he looked down upon
after the serenity of the firmament, and endless questionings that
led him nowhere,--and now he had only one more question to ask.  He
loved her.  Would she break his chain?--He held both his hands out
towards her, the palms together, as if they were fettered at the
wrists.  She took hold of them very gently; parted them a little;
then wider--wider--and found herself all at once folded, unresisting,
in her lover's arms.

So there was a new double-star in the living firmament.  The
constellations seemed to kindle with new splendors as the student and
the story-teller walked homeward in their light; Alioth and Algol
looked down on them as on the first pair of lovers they shone over,
and the autumn air seemed full of harmonies as when the morning stars
sang together.




XII

The old Master had asked us, the Young Astronomer and myself, into
his library, to hear him read some passages from his interleaved
book.  We three had formed a kind of little club without knowing it
from the time when the young man began reading those extracts from
his poetical reveries which I have reproduced in these pages.
Perhaps we agreed in too many things,--I suppose if we could have had
a good hard-headed, old-fashioned New England divine to meet with us
it might have acted as a wholesome corrective.  For we had it all our
own way; the Lady's kindly remonstrance was taken in good part, but
did not keep us from talking pretty freely, and as for the Young
Girl, she listened with the tranquillity and fearlessness which a
very simple trusting creed naturally gives those who hold it.  The
fewer outworks to the citadel of belief, the fewer points there are
to be threatened and endangered.

The reader must not suppose that I even attempt to reproduce
everything exactly as it took place in our conversations, or when we
met to listen to the Master's prose or to the Young Astronomer's
verse.  I do not pretend to give all the pauses and interruptions by
question or otherwise.  I could not always do it if I tried, but I do
not want to, for oftentimes it is better to let the speaker or reader
go on continuously, although there may have been many breaks in the
course of the conversation or reading.  When, for instance, I by and
by reproduce what the Landlady said to us, I shall give it almost
without any hint that it was arrested in its flow from time to time
by various expressions on the part of the hearers.

I can hardly say what the reason of it was, but it is very certain
that I had a vague sense of some impending event as we took our seats
in the Master's library.  He seemed particularly anxious that we
should be comfortably seated, and shook up the cushions of the arm-
chairs himself, and got them into the right places.

Now go to sleep--he said--or listen,--just which you like best.  But
I am going to begin by telling you both a secret.

Liberavi animam meam.  That is the meaning of my book and of my
literary life, if I may give such a name to that party-colored shred
of human existence.  I have unburdened myself in this book, and in
some other pages, of what I was born to say.  Many things that I have
said in my ripe days have been aching in my soul since I was a mere
child.  I say aching, because they conflicted with many of my
inherited beliefs, or rather traditions.  I did not know then that
two strains of blood were striving in me for the mastery,--two!
twenty, perhaps,--twenty thousand, for aught I know,--but represented
to me by two,--paternal and maternal.  Blind forces in themselves;
shaping thoughts as they shaped features and battled for the moulding
of constitution and the mingling of temperament.

Philosophy and poetry came--to me before I knew their names.

     Je fis mes premiers vers, sans savoir les ecrire.

Not verses so much as the stuff that verses are made of.  I don't
suppose that the thoughts which came up of themselves in my mind were
so mighty different from what come up in the minds of other young
folks.  And that 's the best reason I could give for telling 'em.  I
don't believe anything I've written is as good as it seemed to me
when I wrote it,--he stopped, for he was afraid he was lying,--not
much that I 've written, at any rate,--he said--with a smile at the
honesty which made him qualify his statement.  But I do know this: I
have struck a good many chords, first and last, in the consciousness
of other people.  I confess to a tender feeling for my little brood
of thoughts.  When they have been welcomed and praised it has pleased
me, and if at any time they have been rudely handled and despitefully
entreated it has cost me a little worry.  I don't despise reputation,
and I should like to be remembered as having said something worth
lasting well enough to last.

But all that is nothing to the main comfort I feel as a writer.  I
have got rid of something my mind could not keep to itself and rise
as it was meant to into higher regions.  I saw the aeronauts the
other day emptying from the bags some of the sand that served as
ballast.  It glistened a moment in the sunlight as a slender shower,
and then was lost and seen no more as it scattered itself unnoticed.
But the airship rose higher as the sand was poured out, and so it
seems to me I have felt myself getting above the mists and clouds
whenever I have lightened myself of some portion of the mental
ballast I have carried with me.  Why should I hope or fear when I
send out my book?  I have had my reward, for I have wrought out my
thought, I have said my say, I have freed my soul.  I can afford to
be forgotten.

Look here!--he said.  I keep oblivion always before me.---He pointed
to a singularly perfect and beautiful trilobite which was lying on a
pile of manuscripts.---Each time I fill a sheet of paper with what I
am writing, I lay it beneath this relic of a dead world, and project
my thought forward into eternity as far as this extinct crustacean
carries it backward.  When my heart beats too lustily with vain hopes
of being remembered, I press the cold fossil against it and it grows
calm.  I touch my forehead with it, and its anxious furrows grow
smooth.  Our world, too, with all its breathing life, is but a leaf
to be folded with the other strata, and if I am only patient, by and
by I shall be just as famous as imperious Caesar himself, embedded
with me in a conglomerate.

He began reading:--"There is no new thing under the sun," said the
Preacher.  He would not say so now, if he should come to life for a
little while, and have his photograph taken, and go up in a balloon,
and take a trip by railroad and a voyage by steamship, and get a
message from General Grant by the cable, and see a man's leg cut off
without its hurting him.  If it did not take his breath away and lay
him out as flat as the Queen of Sheba was knocked over by the
splendors of his court, he must have rivalled our Indians in the nil
admarari line.

For all that, it is a strange thing to see what numbers of new things
are really old.  There are many modern contrivances that are of as
early date as the first man, if not thousands of centuries older.
Everybody knows how all the arrangements of our telescopes and
microscopes are anticipated in the eye, and how our best musical
instruments are surpassed by the larynx.  But there are some very odd
things any anatomist can tell, showing how our recent contrivances
are anticipated in the human body.  In the alimentary canal are
certain pointed eminences called villi, and certain ridges called
valvuloe conniventes.  The makers of heating apparatus have exactly
reproduced the first in the "pot" of their furnaces, and the second
in many of the radiators to be seen in our public buildings.  The
object in the body and the heating apparatus is the same; to increase
the extent of surface.--We mix hair with plaster (as the Egyptians
mixed straw with clay to make bricks) so that it shall hold more
firmly.  But before man had any artificial dwelling the same
contrivance of mixing fibrous threads with a cohesive substance had
been employed in the jointed fabric of his own spinal column.  India-
rubber is modern, but the yellow animal substance which is elastic
like that, and serves the same purpose in the animal economy which
that serves in our mechanical contrivances, is as old as the
mammalia.  The dome, the round and the Gothic arch, the groined roof,
the flying buttress, are all familiar to those who have studied the
bony frame of man.  All forms of the lever and all the principal
kinds of hinges are to be met with in our own frames.  The valvular
arrangements of the blood-vessels are unapproached by any artificial
apparatus, and the arrangements for preventing friction are so
perfect that two surfaces will play on each other for fourscore years
or more and never once trouble their owner by catching or rubbing so
as to be felt or heard.

But stranger than these repetitions are the coincidences one finds in
the manners and speech of antiquity and our own time.  In the days
when Flood Ireson was drawn in the cart by the Maenads of Marblehead,
that fishing town had the name of nurturing a young population not
over fond of strangers.  It used to be said that if an unknown
landsman showed himself in the streets, the boys would follow after
him, crying, "Rock him!  Rock him!  He's got a long-tailed coat on!"

Now if one opens the Odyssey, he will find that the Phaeacians, three
thousand years ago, were wonderfully like these youthful
Marbleheaders.  The blue-eyed Goddess who convoys Ulysses, under the
disguise of a young maiden of the place, gives him some excellent
advice.  "Hold your tongue," she says, "and don't look at anybody or
ask any questions, for these are seafaring people, and don't like to
have strangers round or anybody that does not belong here."

Who would have thought that the saucy question, "Does your mother
know you're out?" was the very same that Horace addressed to the bore
who attacked him in the Via Sacra?

     Interpellandi locus hic erat; Est tibi mater?
     Cognati, queis te salvo est opus?

And think of the London cockney's prefix of the letter h to innocent
words beginning with a vowel having its prototype in the speech of
the vulgar Roman, as may be seen in the verses of Catullus:

     Chommoda dicebat, siquando commoda vellet
     Dicere, et hinsidias Arrius insidias.
     Et tum mirifice sperabat se esse locutum,
     Cum quantum poterat, dixerat hinsidias...

     Hoc misso in Syriam, requierant omnibus aures...
     Cum subito affertur nuncius horribilis;
     Ionios fluctus, postquam illue Arrius isset,
     Jam non Ionios esse, sed Hionios.

--Our neighbors of Manhattan have an excellent jest about our crooked
streets which, if they were a little more familiar with a native
author of unquestionable veracity, they would strike out from the
letter of "Our Boston Correspondent," where it is a source of
perennial hilarity.  It is worth while to reprint, for the benefit of
whom it may concern, a paragraph from the authentic history of the
venerable Diedrich Knickerbocker:

"The sage council, as has been mentioned in a preceding chapter, not
being able to determine upon any plan for the building of their
city,--the cows, in a laudable fit of patriotism, took it under their
peculiar charge, and as they went to and from pasture, established
paths through the bushes, on each side of which the good folks built
their houses; which is one cause of the rambling and picturesque
turns and labyrinths, which distinguish certain streets of New York
at this very day."

--When I was a little boy there came to stay with us for a while a
young lady with a singularly white complexion.  Now I had often seen
the masons slacking lime, and I thought it was the whitest thing I
had ever looked upon.  So I always called this fair visitor of ours
Slacked Lime.  I think she is still living in a neighboring State,
and I am sure she has never forgotten the fanciful name I gave her.
But within ten or a dozen years I have seen this very same comparison
going the round of the papers, and credited to a Welsh poet, David Ap
Gwyllym, or something like that, by name.

--I turned a pretty sentence enough in one of my lectures about
finding poppies springing up amidst the corn; as if it had been
foreseen by nature that wherever there should be hunger that asked
for food, there would be pain that needed relief,--and many years
afterwards.  I had the pleasure of finding that Mistress Piozzi had
been beforehand with me in suggesting the same moral reflection.

--I should like to carry some of my friends to see a giant bee-hive I
have discovered.  Its hum can be heard half a mile, and the great
white swarm counts its tens of thousands.  They pretend to call it a
planing-mill, but if it is not a bee-hive it is so like one that if a
hundred people have not said so before me, it is very singular that
they have not.  If I wrote verses I would try to bring it in, and I
suppose people would start up in a dozen places, and say, "Oh, that
bee-hive simile is mine,--and besides, did not Mr. Bayard Taylor call
the snowflakes 'white bees'?"

I think the old Master had chosen these trivialities on purpose to
amuse the Young Astronomer and myself, if possible, and so make sure
of our keeping awake while he went on reading, as follows:

--How the sweet souls of all time strike the same note, the same
because it is in unison with the divine voice that sings to them!  I
read in the Zend Avesta, "No earthly man with a hundred-fold strength
speaks so much evil as Mithra with heavenly strength speaks good.  No
earthly man with a hundred-fold strength does so much evil as Mithra
with heavenly strength does good."

And now leave Persia and Zoroaster, and come down with me to our own
New England and one of our old Puritan preachers.  It was in the
dreadful days of the Salem Witchcraft delusion that one Jonathan
Singletary, being then in the prison at Ipswich, gave his testimony
as to certain fearful occurrences,--a great noise, as of many cats
climbing, skipping, and jumping, of throwing about of furniture, and
of men walking in the chambers, with crackling and shaking as if the
house would fall upon him.

"I was at present," he says, "something affrighted; yet considering
what I had lately heard made out by Mr. Mitchel at Cambridge, that
there is more good in God than there is evil in sin, and that
although God is the greatest good and sin the greatest evil, yet the
first Being of evil cannot weave the scales or overpower the first
Being of good: so considering that the authour of good was of greater
power than the authour of evil, God was pleased of his goodness to
keep me from being out of measure frighted."

I shall always bless the memory of this poor, timid creature for
saving that dear remembrance of "Matchless Mitchel."  How many, like
him, have thought they were preaching a new gospel, when they were
only reaffirming the principles which underlie the Magna Charta of
humanity, and are common to the noblest utterances of all the nobler
creeds!  But spoken by those solemn lips to those stern, simpleminded
hearers, the words I have cited seem to me to have a fragrance like
the precious ointment of spikenard with which Mary anointed her
Master's feet.  I can see the little bare meeting-house, with the
godly deacons, and the grave matrons, and the comely maidens, and the
sober manhood of the village, with the small group of college
students sitting by themselves under the shadow of the awful
Presidential Presence, all listening to that preaching, which was, as
Cotton Mather says, "as a very lovely song of one that hath a
pleasant voice"; and as the holy pastor utters those blessed words,
which are not of any one church or age, but of all time, the humble
place of worship is filled with their perfume, as the house where
Mary knelt was filled with the odor of the precious ointment.

--The Master rose, as he finished reading this sentence, and, walking
to the window, adjusted a curtain which he seemed to find a good deal
of trouble in getting to hang just as he wanted it.

He came back to his arm-chair, and began reading again

--If men would only open their eyes to the fact which stares them in
the face from history, and is made clear enough by the slightest
glance at the condition of mankind, that humanity is of immeasurably
greater importance than their own or any other particular belief,
they would no more attempt to make private property of the grace of
God than to fence in the sunshine for their own special use and
enjoyment.

We are all tattoed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the
record may seem superficial, but it is indelible.  You cannot educate
a man wholly out of the superstitious fears which were early
implanted in his imagination; no matter how utterly his reason may
reject them, he will still feel as the famous woman did about ghosts,
Je n'y crois pas, mais je les crains,--"I don't believe in them, but
I am afraid of them, nevertheless."

--As people grow older they come at length to live so much in memory
that they often think with a kind of pleasure of losing their dearest
blessings.  Nothing can be so perfect while we possess it as it will
seem when remembered.  The friend we love best may sometimes weary us
by his presence or vex us by his infirmities.  How sweet to think of
him as he will be to us after we have outlived him ten or a dozen
years!  Then we can recall him in his best moments, bid him stay with
us as long as we want his company, and send him away when we wish to
be alone again.  One might alter Shenstone's well-known epitaph to
suit such a case:--

     Hen!  quanto minus est cum to vivo versari

     Quam erit (vel esset) tui mortui reminisse!

    "Alas!  how much less the delight of thy living presence
     Than will (or would) be that of remembering thee when thou hast
     left us!"

I want to stop here--I the Poet--and put in a few reflections of my
own, suggested by what I have been giving the reader from the
Master's Book, and in a similar vein.

--How few things there are that do not change their whole aspect in
the course of a single generation!  The landscape around us is wholly
different.  Even the outlines of the hills that surround us are
changed by the creeping of the villages with their spires and school-
houses up their sides.  The sky remains the same, and the ocean.  A
few old churchyards look very much as they used to, except, of
course, in Boston, where the gravestones have been rooted up and
planted in rows with walks between them, to the utter disgrace and
ruin of our most venerated cemeteries.  The Registry of Deeds and the
Probate Office show us the same old folios, where we can read our
grandfather's title to his estate (if we had a grandfather and he
happened to own anything) and see how many pots and kettles there
were in his kitchen by the inventory of his personal property.

Among living people none remain so long unchanged as the actors.  I
can see the same Othello to-day, if I choose, that when I was a boy I
saw smothering Mrs. Duff-Desdemona with the pillow, under the
instigations of Mr. Cooper-Iago.  A few stone heavier than he was
then, no doubt, but the same truculent blackamoor that took by the
thr-r-r-oat the circumcised dog in Aleppo, and told us about it in
the old Boston Theatre.  In the course of a fortnight, if I care to
cross the water, I can see Mademoiselle Dejazet in the same parts I
saw her in under Louis Philippe, and be charmed by the same grace and
vivacity which delighted my grandmother (if she was in Paris, and
went to see her in the part of Fanchon toute seule at the Theatre des
Capucines) in the days when the great Napoleon was still only First
Consul.

The graveyard and the stage are pretty much the only places where you
can expect to find your friends--as you left them, five and twenty or
fifty years ago.  I have noticed, I may add, that old theatre-goers
bring back the past with their stories more vividly than men with any
other experiences.  There were two old New-Yorkers that I used to
love to sit talking with about the stage.  One was a scholar and a
writer of note; a pleasant old gentleman, with the fresh cheek of an
octogenarian Cupid.  The other not less noted in his way, deep in
local lore, large-brained, full-blooded, of somewhat perturbing and
tumultuous presence.  It was good to hear them talk of George
Frederic Cooke, of Kean, and the lesser stars of those earlier
constellations.  Better still to breakfast with old Samuel Rogers, as
some of my readers have done more than once, and hear him answer to
the question who was the best actor he remembered, "I think, on the
whole, Garrick."

If we did but know how to question these charming old people before
it is too late!  About ten years, more or less, after the generation
in advance of our own has all died off, it occurs to us all at once,
"There!  I can ask my old friend what he knows of that picture, which
must be a Copley; of that house and its legends about which there is
such a mystery.  He (or she) must know all about that."  Too late!
Too late!

Still, now and then one saves a reminiscence that means a good deal
by means of a casual question.  I asked the first of those two old
New-Yorkers the following question: "Who, on the whole, seemed to you
the most considerable person you ever met?"

Now it must be remembered that this was a man who had lived in a city
that calls itself the metropolis, one who had been a member of the
State and the National Legislature, who had come in contact with men.
of letters and men of business, with politicians and members of all
the professions, during a long and distinguished public career.  I
paused for his answer with no little curiosity.  Would it be one of
the great Ex-Presidents whose names were known to, all the world?
Would it be the silver-tongued orator of Kentucky or the "God-like"
champion of the Constitution, our New-England Jupiter Capitolinus?
Who would it be?

"Take it altogether," he answered, very deliberately, "I should say
Colonel Elisha Williams was the most notable personage that I have
met with."

--Colonel Elisha Williams!  And who might he be, forsooth?  A
gentleman of singular distinction, you may be well assured, even
though you are not familiar with his name; but as I am not writing a
biographical dictionary, I shall leave it to my reader to find out
who and what he was.

--One would like to live long enough to witness certain things which
will no doubt come to pass by and by.  I remember that when one of
our good kindhearted old millionnaires was growing very infirm, his
limbs failing him, and his trunk getting packed with the infirmities
which mean that one is bound on a long journey, he said very simply
and sweetly, "I don't care about living a great deal longer, but I
should like to live long enough to find out how much old (a many-
millioned fellow-citizen) is worth."  And without committing myself
on the longevity-question, I confess I should like to live long
enough to see a few things happen that are like to come, sooner or
later.

I want to hold the skull of Abraham in my hand.  They will go through
the cave of Machpelah at Hebron, I feel sure, in the course of a few
generations at the furthest, and as Dr. Robinson knows of nothing
which should lead us to question the correctness of the tradition
which regards this as the place of sepulture of Abraham and the other
patriarchs, there is no reason why we may not find his mummied body
in perfect preservation, if he was embalmed after the Egyptian
fashion.  I suppose the tomb of David will be explored by a
commission in due time, and I should like to see the phrenological
developments of that great king and divine singer and warm-blooded
man.  If, as seems probable, the anthropological section of society
manages to get round the curse that protects the bones of
Shakespeare, I should like to see the dome which rounded itself over
his imperial brain.  Not that I am what is called a phrenologist, but
I am curious as to the physical developments of these fellow-mortals
of mine, and a little in want of a sensation.

I should like to live long enough to see the course of the Tiber
turned, and the bottom of the river thoroughly dredged.  I wonder if
they would find the seven-branched golden candlestick brought from
Jerusalem by Titus, and said to have been dropped from the Milvian
bridge.  I have often thought of going fishing for it some year when
I wanted a vacation, as some of my friends used to go to Ireland to
fish for salmon.  There was an attempt of that kind, I think, a few
years ago.

We all know how it looks well enough, from the figure of it on the
Arch of Titus, but I should like to "heft" it in my own hand, and
carry it home and shine it up (excuse my colloquialisms), and sit
down and look at it, and think and think and think until the Temple
of Solomon built up its walls of hewn stone and its roofs of cedar
around me as noiselessly as when it rose, and "there was neither
hammer nor axe nor any tool of iron heard in the house while it was
in building."

All this, you will remember, Beloved, is a digression on my own
account, and I return to the old Master whom I left smiling at his
own alteration of Shenstone's celebrated inscription.  He now begin
reading again:

--I want it to be understood that I consider that a certain number of
persons are at liberty to dislike me peremptorily, without showing
cause, and that they give no offence whatever in so doing.

If I did not cheerfully acquiesce in this sentiment towards myself on
the part of others, I should not feel at liberty to indulge my own
aversions.  I try to cultivate a Christian feeling to all my fellow-
creatures, but inasmuch as I must also respect truth and honesty, I
confess to myself a certain number of inalienable dislikes and
prejudices, some of which may possibly be shared by others.  Some of
these are purely instinctive, for others I can assign a reason.  Our
likes and dislikes play so important a part in the Order of Things
that it is well to see on what they are founded.

There are persons I meet occasionally who are too intelligent by half
for my liking.  They know my thoughts beforehand, and tell me what I
was going to say.  Of course they are masters of all my knowledge,
and a good deal besides; have read all the books I have read, and in
later editions; have had all the experiences I have been through, and
more-too.  In my private opinion every mother's son of them will lie
at any time rather than confess ignorance.

--I have a kind of dread, rather than hatred, of persons with a large
excess of vitality; great feeders, great laughers, great story-
tellers, who come sweeping over their company with a huge tidal wave
of animal spirits and boisterous merriment.  I have pretty good
spirits myself, and enjoy a little mild pleasantry, but I am
oppressed and extinguished by these great lusty, noisy creatures,--
and feel as if I were a mute at a funeral when they get into full
blast.

--I cannot get along much better with those drooping, languid people,
whose vitality falls short as much as that of the others is in
excess.  I have not life enough for two; I wish I had.  It is not
very enlivening to meet a fellow-creature whose expression and
accents say, "You are the hair that breaks the camel's back of my
endurance, you are the last drop that makes my cup of woe run over";
persons whose heads drop on one side like those of toothless infants,
whose voices recall the tones in which our old snuffling choir used
to wail out the verses of:

     "Life is the time to serve the Lord."

--There is another style which does not captivate me.  I recognize an
attempt at the grand manner now and then, in persons who are well
enough in their way, but of no particular importance, socially or
otherwise.  Some family tradition of wealth or distinction is apt to
be at the bottom of it, and it survives all the advantages that used
to set it off.  I like family pride as well as my neighbors, and
respect the high-born fellow-citizen whose progenitors have not
worked in their shirt-sleeves for the last two generations full as
much as I ought to.  But grand pere oblige; a person with a known
grandfather is too distinguished to find it necessary to put on airs.
The few Royal Princes I have happened to know were very easy people
to get along with, and had not half the social knee-action I have
often seen in the collapsed dowagers who lifted their eyebrows at me
in my earlier years.

--My heart does not warm as it should do towards the persons, not
intimates, who are always too glad to see me when we meet by
accident, and discover all at once that they have a vast deal to
unbosom themselves of to me.

--There is one blameless person whom I cannot love and have no excuse
for hating.  It is the innocent fellow-creature, otherwise
inoffensive to me, whom I find I have involuntarily joined on turning
a corner.  I suppose the Mississippi, which was flowing quietly
along, minding its own business, hates the Missouri for coming into
it all at once with its muddy stream.  I suppose the Missouri in like
manner hates the Mississippi for diluting with its limpid, but
insipid current the rich reminiscences of the varied soils through
which its own stream has wandered.  I will not compare myself, to the
clear or the turbid current, but I will own that my heart sinks when
I find all of a sudden I am in for a corner confluence, and I cease
loving my neighbor as myself until I can get away from him.

--These antipathies are at least weaknesses; they may be sins in the
eye of the Recording Angel.  I often reproach myself with my wrong-
doings.  I should like sometimes to thank Heaven for saving me from
some kinds of transgression, and even for granting me some qualities
that if I dared I should be disposed to call virtues.  I should do
so, I suppose, if I did not remember the story of the Pharisee.  That
ought not to hinder me.  The parable was told to illustrate a single
virtue, humility, and the most unwarranted inferences have been drawn
from it as to the whole character of the two parties.  It seems not
at all unlikely, but rather probable, that the Pharisee was a fairer
dealer, a better husband, and a more charitable person than the
Publican, whose name has come down to us "linked with one virtue,"
but who may have been guilty, for aught that appears to the contrary,
of "a thousand crimes."  Remember how we limit the application of
other parables.  The lord, it will be recollected, commended the
unjust steward because he had done wisely.  His shrewdness was held
up as an example, but after all he was a miserable swindler, and
deserved the state-prison as much as many of our financial operators.
The parable of the Pharisee and the Publican is a perpetual warning
against spiritual pride.  But it must not frighten any one of us out
of being thankful that he is not, like this or that neighbor, under
bondage to strong drink or opium, that he is not an Erie-Railroad
Manager, and that his head rests in virtuous calm on his own pillow.
If he prays in the morning to be kept out of temptation as well as
for his daily bread, shall he not return thanks at night that he has
not fallen into sin as well as that his stomach has been filled?  I
do not think the poor Pharisee has ever had fair play, and I am
afraid a good many people sin with the comforting, half-latent
intention of smiting their breasts afterwards and repeating the
prayer of the Publican.

          (Sensation.)

This little movement which I have thus indicated seemed to give the
Master new confidence in his audience.  He turned over several pages
until he came to a part of the interleaved volume where we could all
see he had written in a passage of new matter in red ink as of
special interest.

--I told you, he said, in Latin, and I repeat it in English, that I
have freed my soul in these pages,--I have spoken my mind.  I have
read you a few extracts, most of them of rather slight texture, and
some of them, you perhaps thought, whimsical.  But I meant, if I
thought you were in the right mood for listening to it, to read you
some paragraphs which give in small compass the pith, the marrow, of
all that my experience has taught me.  Life is a fatal complaint, and
an eminently contagious one.  I took it early, as we all do, and have
treated it all along with the best palliatives I could get hold of,
inasmuch as I could find no radical cure for its evils, and have so
far managed to keep pretty comfortable under it.

It is a great thing for a man to put the whole meaning of his life
into a few paragraphs, if he does it so that others can make anything
out of it.  If he conveys his wisdom after the fashion of the old
alchemists, he may as well let it alone.  He must talk in very plain
words, and that is what I have done.  You want to know what a certain
number of scores of years have taught me that I think best worth
telling.  If I had half a dozen square inches of paper, and one
penful of ink, and five minutes to use them in for the instruction of
those who come after me, what should I put down in writing?  That is
the question.

Perhaps I should be wiser if I refused to attempt any such brief
statement of the most valuable lesson that life has taught me.  I am
by no means sure that I had not better draw my pen through the page
that holds the quintessence of my vital experiences, and leave those
who wish to know what it is to distil to themselves from my many
printed pages.  But I have excited your curiosity, and I see that you
are impatient to hear what the wisdom, or the folly, it may be, of a
life shows for, when it is crowded into a few lines as the fragrance
of a gardenful of roses is concentrated in a few drops of perfume.

--By this time I confess I was myself a little excited.  What was he
going to tell us?  The Young Astronomer looked upon him with an eye
as clear and steady and brilliant as the evening star, but I could
see that he too was a little nervous, wondering what would come next.

The old Master adjusted his large round spectacles, and began:

--It has cost me fifty years to find my place in the Order of Things.
I had explored all the sciences; I had studied the literature of all
ages; I had travelled in many lands; I had learned how to follow the
working of thought in men and of sentiment and instinct in women.  I
had examined for myself all the religions that could make out any
claim for themselves.  I had fasted and prayed with the monks of a
lonely convent; I had mingled with the crowds that shouted glory at
camp-meetings; I had listened to the threats of Calvinists and the
promises of Universalists; I had been a devout attendant on a Jewish
Synagogue; I was in correspondence with an intelligent Buddhist; and
I met frequently with the inner circle of Rationalists, who believed
in the persistence of Force, and the identity of alimentary
substances with virtue, and were reconstructing the universe on this
basis, with absolute exclusion of all Supernumeraries.  In these
pursuits I had passed the larger part of my half-century of
existence, as yet with little satisfaction.  It was on the morning of
my fiftieth birthday that the solution of the great problem I had
sought so long came to me as a simple formula, with a few grand but
obvious inferences.  I will repeat the substance of this final
intuition:

The one central fact an the Order of Things which solves all
questions is:

At this moment we were interrupted by a knock at the Master's door.
It was most inopportune, for he was on the point of the great
disclosure, but common politeness compelled him to answer it, and as
the step which we had heard was that of one of the softer-footed sex,
he chose to rise from his chair and admit his visitor.

This visitor was our Landlady.  She was dressed with more than usual
nicety, and her countenance showed clearly that she came charged with
an important communication.

--I did n't low there was company with you, said the Landlady,--but
it's jest as well.  I've got something to tell my boarders that I
don't want to tell them, and if I must do it, I may as well tell you
all at once as one to a time.  I 'm agoing to give up keeping
boarders at the end of this year,--I mean come the end of December.

She took out a white handkerchief, at hand in expectation of what was
to happen, and pressed it to her eyes.  There was an interval of
silence.  The Master closed his book and laid it on the table.  The
Young Astronomer did not look as much surprised as I should have
expected.  I was completely taken aback,--I had not thought of such a
sudden breaking up of our little circle.

When the Landlady had recovered her composure, she began again:

The Lady that's been so long with me is going to a house of her own,
--one she has bought back again, for it used to belong to her folks.
It's a beautiful house, and the sun shines in at the front windows
all day long.  She's going to be wealthy again, but it doos n't make
any difference in her ways.  I've had boarders complain when I was
doing as well as I knowed how for them, but I never heerd a word from
her that wasn't as pleasant as if she'd been talking to the
Governor's lady.  I've knowed what it was to have women-boarders that
find fault,--there's some of 'em would quarrel with me and everybody
at my table; they would quarrel with the Angel Gabriel if he lived in
the house with 'em, and scold at him and tell him he was always
dropping his feathers round, if they could n't find anything else to
bring up against him.

Two other boarders of mine has given me notice that they was
expecting to leave come the first of January.  I could fill up their
places easy enough, for ever since that first book was wrote that
called people's attention to my boarding-house, I've had more wanting
to come than I wanted to keep.

But I'm getting along in life, and I ain't quite so rugged as I used
to be.  My daughter is well settled and my son is making his own
living.  I've done a good deal of hard work in my time, and I feel as
if I had a right to a little rest.  There's nobody knows what a woman
that has the charge of a family goes through, but God Almighty that
made her.  I've done my best for them that I loved, and for them that
was under my roof.  My husband and my children was well cared for
when they lived, and he and them little ones that I buried has white
marble head-stones and foot-stones, and an iron fence round the lot,
and a place left for me betwixt him and the....

Some has always been good to me,--some has made it a little of a
strain to me to get along.  When a woman's back aches with
overworking herself to keep her house in shape, and a dozen mouths
are opening at her three times a day, like them little young birds
that split their heads open so you can a'most see into their empty
stomachs, and one wants this and another wants that, and provisions
is dear and rent is high, and nobody to look to,--then a sharp word
cuts, I tell you, and a hard look goes right to your heart.  I've
seen a boarder make a face at what I set before him, when I had tried
to suit him jest as well as I knew how, and I haven't cared to eat a
thing myself all the rest of that day, and I've laid awake without a
wink of sleep all night.  And then when you come down the next
morning all the boarders stare at you and wonder what makes you so
low-spirited, and why you don't look as happy and talk as cheerful as
one of them rich ladies that has dinner-parties, where they've
nothing to do but give a few orders, and somebody comes and cooks
their dinner, and somebody else comes and puts flowers on the table,
and a lot of men dressed up like ministers come and wait on
everybody, as attentive as undertakers at a funeral.

And that reminds me to tell you that I'm agoing to live with my
daughter.  Her husband's a very nice man, and when he isn't following
a corpse, he's as good company as if he was a member of the city
council.  My son, he's agoing into business with the old Doctor he
studied with, and he's agoing to board with me at my daughter's for a
while,--I suppose he'll be getting a wife before long.  [This with a
pointed look at our young friend, the Astronomer.]

It is n't but a little while longer that we are going to be together,
and I want to say to you gentlemen, as I mean to say to the others
and as I have said to our two ladies, that I feel more obligated to,
you for the way you 've treated me than I know very well how to put
into words.  Boarders sometimes expect too much of the ladies that
provides for them.  Some days the meals are better than other days;
it can't help being so.  Sometimes the provision-market is n't well
supplied, sometimes the fire in the cooking-stove does n't burn so
well as it does other days; sometimes the cook is n't so lucky as she
might be.  And there is boarders who is always laying in wait for the
days when the meals is not quite so good as they commonly be, to pick
a quarrel with the one that is trying to serve them so as that they
shall be satisfied.  But you've all been good and kind to me.  I
suppose I'm not quite so spry and quick-sighted as I was a dozen
years ago, when my boarder wrote that first book so many have asked
me about.  But--now I'm going to stop taking boarders.  I don't
believe you'll think much about what I did n't do,--because I
couldn't,--but remember that at any rate I tried honestly to serve
you.  I hope God will bless all that set at my table, old and young,
rich and poor, merried and single, and single that hopes soon to be
merried.  My husband that's dead and gone always believed that we all
get to heaven sooner or later,--and sence I've grown older and buried
so many that I've loved I've come to feel that perhaps I should meet
all of them that I've known here--or at least as many of 'em as I
wanted to--in a better world.  And though I don't calculate there is
any boarding-houses in heaven, I hope I shall some time or other meet
them that has set round my table one year after another, all
together, where there is no fault-finding with the food and no
occasion for it,--and if I do meet them and you there--or anywhere,--
if there is anything I can do for you....

....Poor dear soul!  Her ideas had got a little mixed, and her heart
was overflowing, and the white handkerchief closed the scene with its
timely and greatly needed service.

--What a pity, I have often thought, that she came in just at that
precise moment!  For the old Master was on the point of telling us,
and through one of us the reading world,--I mean that fraction of it
which has reached this point of the record,--at any rate, of telling
you, Beloved, through my pen, his solution of a great problem we all
have to deal with.  We were some weeks longer together, but he never
offered to continue his reading.  At length I ventured to give him a
hint that our young friend and myself would both of us be greatly
gratified if he would begin reading from his unpublished page where
he had left off.

--No, sir,--he said,--better not, better not.  That which means so
much to me, the writer, might be a disappointment, or at least a
puzzle, to you, the listener.  Besides, if you'll take my printed
book and be at the trouble of thinking over what it says, and put
that with what you've heard me say, and then make those comments and
reflections which will be suggested to a mind in so many respects
like mine as is your own,--excuse my good opinion of myself,

(It is a high compliment to me, I replied) you will perhaps find you
have the elements of the formula and its consequences which I was
about to read you.  It's quite as well to crack your own filberts as
to borrow the use of other people's teeth.  I think we will wait
awhile before we pour out the Elixir Vitae.

--To tell the honest truth, I suspect the Master has found out that
his formula does not hold water quite so perfectly as he was
thinking, so long as he kept it to himself, and never thought of
imparting it to anybody else.  The very minute a thought is
threatened with publicity it seems to shrink towards mediocrity, as.
I have noticed that a great pumpkin, the wonder of a village, seemed
to lose at least a third of its dimensions between the field where it
grew and the cattle-show fair-table, where it took its place with
other enormous pumpkins from other wondering villages.  But however
that maybe, I shall always regret that I had not the opportunity of
judging for myself how completely the Master's formula, which, for
him, at least, seemed to have solved the great problem, would have
accomplished that desirable end for me.

The Landlady's announcement of her intention to give up keeping
boarders was heard with regret by all who met around her table.  The
Member of the Haouse inquired of me whether I could tell him if the
Lamb Tahvern was kept well abaout these times.  He knew that members
from his place used to stop there, but he hadn't heerd much abaout it
of late years.  I had to inform him that that fold of rural innocence
had long ceased offering its hospitalities to the legislative, flock.
He found refuge at last, I have learned, in a great public house in
the northern section of the city, where, as he said, the folks all
went up stairs in a rat-trap, and the last I heard of him was looking
out of his somewhat elevated attic-window in a northwesterly
direction in hopes that he might perhaps get a sight of the Grand
Monadnock, a mountain in New Hampshire which I have myself seen from
the top of Bunker Hill Monument.

The Member of the Haouse seems to have been more in a hurry to find a
new resting-place than the other boarders.  By the first of January,
however, our whole company was scattered, never to meet again around
the board where we had been so long together.

The Lady moved to the house where she had passed many of her
prosperous years.  It had been occupied by a rich family who had
taken it nearly as it stood, and as the pictures had been dusted
regularly, and the books had never been handled, she found everything
in many respects as she had left it, and in some points improved, for
the rich people did not know what else to do, and so they spent money
without stint on their house and its adornments, by all of which she
could not help profiting.  I do not choose to give the street and
number of the house where she lives, but a-great many poor people
know very well where it is, and as a matter of course the rich ones
roll up to her door in their carriages by the dozen every fine Monday
while anybody is in town.

It is whispered that our two young folks are to be married before
another season, and that the Lady has asked them to come and stay
with her for a while.  Our Scheherezade is to write no more stories.
It is astonishing to see what a change for the better in her aspect a
few weeks of brain-rest and heart's ease have wrought in her.  I
doubt very much whether she ever returns to literary labor.  The work
itself was almost heart-breaking, but the effect upon her of the
sneers and cynical insolences of the literary rough who came at her
in mask and brass knuckles was to give her what I fear will be a
lifelong disgust against any writing for the public, especially in
any of the periodicals.  I am not sorry that she should stop writing,
but I am sorry that she should have been silenced in such a rude way.
I doubt, too, whether the Young Astronomer will pass the rest of his
life in hunting for comets and planets.  I think he has found an
attraction that will call him down from the celestial luminaries to a
light not less pure and far less remote.  And I am inclined to
believe that the best answer to many of those questions which have
haunted him and found expression in his verse will be reached by a
very different channel from that of lonely contemplation, the duties,
the cares, the responsible realities of a life drawn out of itself by
the power of newly awakened instincts and affections.  The double
star was prophetic,--I thought it would be.

The Register of Deeds is understood to have been very handsomely
treated by the boarder who owes her good fortune to his sagacity and
activity.  He has engaged apartments at a very genteel boarding-house
not far from the one where we have all been living.  The Salesman
found it a simple matter to transfer himself to an establishment over
the way; he had very little to move, and required very small
accommodations.

The Capitalist, however, seems to have felt it impossible to move
without ridding himself of a part at--least of his encumbrances.  The
community was startled by the announcement that a citizen who did not
wish his name to be known had made a free gift of a large sum of
money--it was in tens of thousands--to an institution of long
standing and high character in the city of which he was a quiet
resident.  The source of such a gift could not long be kept secret.
It, was our economical, not to say parsimonious Capitalist who had
done this noble act, and the poor man had to skulk through back
streets and keep out of sight, as if he were a show character in a
travelling caravan, to avoid the acknowledgments of his liberality,
which met him on every hand and put him fairly out of countenance.

That Boy has gone, in virtue of a special invitation, to make a visit
of indefinite length at the house of the father of the older boy,
whom we know by the name of Johnny.  Of course he is having a good
time, for Johnny's father is full of fun, and tells first-rate
stories, and if neither of the boys gets his brains kicked out by the
pony, or blows himself up with gunpowder, or breaks through the ice
and gets drowned, they will have a fine time of it this winter.

The Scarabee could not bear to remove his collections, and the old
Master was equally unwilling to disturb his books.  It was arranged,
therefore, that they should keep their apartments until the new
tenant should come into the house, when, if they were satisfied with
her management, they would continue as her boarders.

The last time I saw the Scarabee he was still at work on the meloe
question.  He expressed himself very pleasantly towards all of us,
his fellow-boarders, and spoke of the kindness and consideration with
which the Landlady had treated him when he had been straitened at
times for want of means.  Especially he seemed to be interested in
our young couple who were soon to be united.  His tired old eyes
glistened as he asked about them,--could it be that their little
romance recalled some early vision of his own?  However that may be,
he got up presently and went to a little box in which, as he said, he
kept some choice specimens.  He brought to me in his hand something
which glittered.  It was an exquisite diamond beetle.

--If you could get that to her,--he said,--they tell me that ladies
sometimes wear them in their hair.  If they are out of fashion, she
can keep it till after they're married, and then perhaps after a
while there may be--you know--you know what I mean--there may
be larvae, that 's what I 'm thinking there may be, and they 'll like
to look at it.

--As he got out the word larvae, a faint sense of the ridiculous
seemed to take hold of the Scarabee, and for the first and only time
during my acquaintance with him a slight attempt at a smile showed
itself on his features.  It was barely perceptible and gone almost as
soon as seen, yet I am pleased to put it on record that on one
occasion at least in his life the Scarabee smiled.

The old Master keeps adding notes and reflections and new suggestions
to his interleaved volume, but I doubt if he ever gives them to the
public.  The study he has proposed to himself does not grow easier
the longer it is pursued.  The whole Order of Things can hardly be
completely unravelled in any single person's lifetime, and I suspect
he will have to adjourn the final stage of his investigations to that
more luminous realm where the Landlady hopes to rejoin the company of
boarders who are nevermore to meet around her cheerful and well-
ordered table.

The curtain has now fallen, and I show myself a moment before it to
thank my audience and say farewell.  The second comer is commonly
less welcome than the first, and the third makes but a rash venture.
I hope I have not wholly disappointed those who have been so kind to
my predecessors.

To you, Beloved, who have never failed to cut the leaves which hold
my record, who have never nodded over its pages, who have never
hesitated in your allegiance, who have greeted me with unfailing
smiles and part from me with unfeigned regrets, to you I look my last
adieu as I bow myself out of sight, trusting my poor efforts to your
always kind remembrance.



          EPILOGUE TO THE BREAKFAST-TABLE SERIES

               AUTOCRAT--PROFESSOR--POET.

                    AT A BOOKSTORE.

                    Anno Domini 1972.

          A crazy bookcase, placed before
          A low-price dealer's open door;
          Therein arrayed in broken rows
          A ragged crew of rhyme and prose,
          The homeless vagrants, waifs and strays
          Whose low estate this line betrays
          (Set forth the lesser birds to lime)
          YOUR CHOICE AMONG THESE BOOKS, 1 DIME!


          Ho! dealer; for its motto's sake
          This scarecrow from the shelf I take;
          Three starveling volumes bound in one,
          Its covers warping in the sun.
          Methinks it hath a musty smell,
          I like its flavor none too well,
          But Yorick's brain was far from dull,
          Though Hamlet pah!'d, and dropped his skull.

          Why, here comes rain!  The sky grows dark,--
          Was that the roll of thunder?  Hark!
          The shop affords a safe retreat,
          A chair extends its welcome seat,
          The tradesman has a civil look
          (I've paid, impromptu, for my book),
          The clouds portend a sudden shower,
          I'll read my purchase for an hour.

                    ..............

          What have I rescued from the shelf?
          A Boswell, writing out himself!
          For though he changes dress and name,
          The man beneath is still the same,
          Laughing or sad, by fits and starts,
          One actor in a dozen parts,
          And whatsoe'er the mask may be,
          The voice assures us, This is he.

          I say not this to cry him clown;
          I find my Shakespeare in his clown,
          His rogues the self-same parent own;
          Nay!  Satan talks in Milton's tone!
          Where'er the ocean inlet strays,
          The salt sea wave its source betrays,
          Where'er the queen of summer blows,
          She tells the zephyr, "I'm the rose!"

          And his is not the playwright's page;
          His table does not ape the stage;
          What matter if the figures seen
          Are only shadows on a screen,
          He finds in them his lurking thought,
          And on their lips the words he sought,
          Like one who sits before the keys
          And plays a tune himself to please.

          And was he noted in his day?
          Read, flattered, honored?  Who shall say?
          Poor wreck of time the wave has cast
          To find a peaceful shore at last,
          Once glorying in thy gilded name
          And freighted deep with hopes of fame,
          Thy leaf is moistened with a tear,
          The first for many a long, long year!

          For be it more or less of art
          That veils the lowliest human heart
          Where passion throbs, where friendship glows,
          Where pity's tender tribute flows,
          Where love has lit its fragrant fire,
          And sorrow quenched its vain desire,
          For me the altar is divine,
          Its flame, its ashes,--all are mine!

          And thou, my brother, as I look
          And see thee pictured in thy book,
          Thy years on every page confessed
          In shadows lengthening from the west,
          Thy glance that wanders, as it sought
          Some freshly opening flower of thought,
          Thy hopeful nature, light and free,
          I start to find myself in thee!

          Come, vagrant, outcast, wretch forlorn
          In leather jerkin stained and torn,
          Whose talk has filled my idle hour
          And made me half forget the shower,
          I'll do at least as much for you,
          Your coat I'll patch, your gilt renew,
          Read you,--perhaps,--some other time.
          Not bad, my bargain!  Price one dime!





End of The Project Gutenberg Etext The Poet at the Breakfast Table






OVER THE TEACUPS

by Oliver W. Holmes




PREFACE.

The kind way in which this series of papers has been received has
been a pleasure greater than I dared to anticipate.  I felt that I
was a late comer in the midst of a crowd of ardent and eager
candidates for public attention, that I had already had my day, and
that if, like the unfortunate Frenchman we used read about, I had
"come again," I ought not to surprised if I received the welcome of
"Monsieur Tonson."

It has not proved so.  My old readers have come forward in the
pleasantest possible way and assured me that they were glad to see me
again.  There is no need, therefore, of apologies or explanations.  I
thought I had something left to say and I have found listeners.  In
writing these papers I have had occupation and kept myself in
relation with my fellow-beings.  New sympathies, new sources of
encouragement, if not of inspiration, have opened themselves before
me and cheated the least promising season of life of much that seemed
to render it dreary and depressing.  What particularly pleased me has
been the freedom of criticisms which I have seen from disadvantageous
comparisons of my later with my earlier writings.

I should like a little rest from literary work before the requiescat
ensures my repose from earthly labors, but I will not be rash enough
to promise that I will not even once again greet my old and new
readers if the impulse becomes irresistible to renew a companionship
which has been to me such a source of happiness.

BEVERLY FARM, Mass., August, 1891.

O.  W.  H.






OVER THE TEACUPS.

I

INTRODUCTION.

This series of papers was begun in March, 1888.  A single number was
printed, when it was interrupted the course of events, and not
resumed until nearly years later, in January, 1890.  The plan of the
series was not formed in my mind when I wrote the number.  In
returning to my task I found that my original plan had shaped itself
in the underground laboratory of my thought so that some changes had
to be made in what I had written.  As I proceeded, the slight story
which formed a part of my programme eloped itself without any need of
much contrivance on my, part.  Given certain characters in a writer's
conception, if they are real to him, as they ought to be they will
act in such or such a way, according to the law of their nature.  It
was pretty safe to assume that intimate relations would spring up
between some members of our mixed company; and it was not rash
conjecture that some of these intimacies might end in such attachment
as would furnish us hints, at least, of a love-story.

As to the course of the conversations which would take place, very
little could be guessed beforehand.  Various subjects of interest
would be likely to present themselves, without definite order,
oftentimes abruptly and, as it would seem, capriciously.
Conversation in such a mixed company as that of "The Teacups" is
likely to be suggestive rather than exhaustive.  Continuous discourse
is better adapted to the lecture-room than to the tea-table.  There
is quite enough of it, I fear too much,--in these pages.  But the
reader must take the reports of our talks as they were jotted down.
A patchwork quilt is not like a piece of Gobelin tapestry; but it has
its place and its use.

Some will feel a temptation to compare these conversations with those
earlier ones, and remark unamiably upon their difference.  This is
hardly fair, and is certainly not wise.  They are produced under very
different conditions, and betray that fact in every line.  It is
better to take them by themselves; and, if my reader finds anything
to please or profit from, I shall be contented, and he, I feel sure,
will not be ungrateful.


The readers who take up this volume may recollect a series of
conversations held many years ago over the breakfast-table, and
reported for their more or less profitable entertainment.  Those were
not very early breakfasts at which the talks took place, but at any
rate the sun was rising, and the guests had not as yet tired
themselves with the labors of the day.  The morning cup of coffee has
an exhilaration about it which the cheering influence of the
afternoon or evening cup of tea cannot be expected to reproduce.  The
toils of the forenoon, the heats of midday, in the warm season, the
slanting light of the descending sun, or the sobered translucency of
twilight have subdued the vivacity of the early day.  Yet under the
influence of the benign stimulant many trains of thought which will
bear recalling, may suggest themselves to some of our quiet circle
and prove not uninteresting to a certain number of readers.

How early many of my old breakfast companions went off to bed!  I am
thinking not merely of those who sat round our table, but of that
larger company of friends who listened to our conversations as
reported.  Dear girl with the silken ringlets, dear boy with the
down-shadowed cheek, your grandfather, your grandmother, turned over
the freshly printed leaves that told the story of those earlier
meetings around the plain board where so many things were said and
sung, not all of which have quite faded from memory of this
overburdened and forgetful time.  Your father, your mother, found the
scattered leaves gathered in a volume, and smiled upon them as not
uncompanionable acquaintances.  My tea-table makes no promises.
There is no programme of exercises to studied beforehand.  What if I
should content myself with a single report of what was said and done
over our teacups?  Perhaps my young reader would be glad to let me
off, for there are talkers enough who have not yet left their
breakfast-tables; and nobody can blame the young people for
preferring the thoughts and the language of their own generation,
with all its future before it, to those of their grandfathers
contemporaries.

My reader, young or old, will please to observe that I have left
myself entire freedom as to the sources of what may be said over the
teacups.  I have not told how many cups are commonly on the board,
but by using the plural I have implied that there is at least one
other talker or listener beside myself, and for all that appears
there may be a dozen.  There will be no regulation length to my
reports,--no attempt to make out a certain number of pages.  I have
no contract to fill so many columns, no pledge to contribute so many
numbers.  I can stop on this first page if I do not care to say
anything more, and let this article stand by itself if so minded.
What a sense of freedom it gives not to write by the yard or the
column!

When one writes for an English review or magazine at so many guineas
a sheet, the temptation is very great to make one's contribution
cover as many sheets as possible.  We all know the metallic taste of
articles written under this powerful stimulus.  If Bacon's Essays had
been furnished by a modern hand to the "Quarterly Review" at fifty
guineas a sheet, what a great book it would have taken to hold them!

The first thing which suggests itself to me, as I contemplate my
slight project, is the liability of repeating in the evening what I
may have said in the morning in one form or another, and printed in
these or other pages.  When it suddenly flashes into the
consciousness of a writer who had been long before the public, "Why,
I have said all that once or oftener in my books or essays, and here
it is again; the same old thought, the same old image, the same old
story!" it irritates him, and is likely to stir up the monosyllables
of his unsanctified vocabulary.  He sees in imagination a thousand
readers, smiling or yawning as they say to themselves, "We have had
all that before," and turn to another writer's performance for
something not quite so stale and superfluous.  This is what the
writer says to himself about the reader.

The idiot!  Does the simpleton really think that everybody has read
all he has written?  Does he really believe that everybody remembers
all of his, writer's, words he may happen to have read?  At one of
those famous dinners of the Phi Beta Kappa Society; where no reporter
was ever admitted, and which nothing ever leaks out about what is
said and done, Mr. Edward Everett, in his after-dinner speech, quoted
these lines from the AEneid, giving a liberal English version of
them, which he applied to the Oration just delivered by Mr.  Emerson:

     Tres imbris torti radios, tres nubis aquosae
     Addiderant, rutili tres ignis, et alitis Austri.

His nephew, the ingenious, inventive, and inexhaustible.  Edward
Everett Hale, tells the story of this quotation, and of the various
uses to which it might plied in after-dinner speeches.  How often he
ventured to repeat it at the Phi Beta Kappa dinners I am not sure;
but as he reproduced it with his lively embellishments and fresh
versions and artful circumlocutions, not one person in ten remembered
that he had listened to those same words in those same accents only a
twelvemonth ago.  The poor deluded creatures who take it for granted
that all the world remembers what they have said, and laugh at them
when they say it over again, may profit by this recollection.  But
what if one does say the same things,--of course in a little
different form each time,--over her?  If he has anything to say worth
saying, that is just what be ought to do.  Whether he ought to or
not, it is very certain that this is what all who write much or speak
much necessarily must and will do.  Think of the clergyman who
preaches fifty or a hundred or more sermons every year for fifty
years!  Think of the stump speaker who shouts before a hundred
audiences during the same political campaign, always using the same
arguments, illustrations, and catchwords!  Think of the editor, as
Carlyle has pictured him, threshing the same straw every morning,
until we know what is coming when we see the first line, as we do
when we read the large capitals at the head of a thrilling story,
which ends in an advertisement of an all-cleansing soap or an all-
curing remedy!

The latch-key which opens into the inner chambers of my consciousness
fits, as I have sufficient reason to believe, the private apartments
of a good many other people's thoughts.  The longer we live, the more
we find we are like other persons.  When I meet with any facts in my
own mental experience, I feel almost sure that I shall find them
repeated or anticipated in the writings or the conversation of
others.  This feeling gives one a freedom in telling his own personal
history he could not have enjoyed without it.  My story belongs to
you as much as to me.  De te fabula narratur.  Change the personal
pronoun,--that is all.  It gives many readers a singular pleasure to
find a writer telling them something they have long known or felt,
but which they have never before found any one to put in words for
them.  An author does not always know when he is doing the service of
the angel who stirred the waters of the pool of Bethesda.  Many a
reader is delighted to find his solitary thought has a companion, and
is grateful to the benefactor who has strengthened him.  This is the
advantage of the humble reader over the ambitious and self-
worshipping writer.  It is not with him pereant illi, but beati sunt
illi qui pro nobis nostra dixerunt,-Blessed are those who have said
our good things for us.

What I have been saying of repetitions leads me into a train of
reflections like which I think many readers will find something in
their own mental history.  The area of consciousness is covered by
layers of habitual thoughts, as a sea-beach is covered with wave-
worn, rounded pebbles, shaped, smoothed, and polished by long
attrition against each other.  These thoughts remain very much the
same from day to day, from week to week; and as we grow older, from
month to month, and from year to year.  The tides of wakening
consciousness roll in upon them daily as we unclose our eyelids, and
keep up the gentle movement and murmur of ordinary mental respiration
until we close them again in slumber.  When we think we are thinking,
we are for the most part only listening to sound of attrition between
these inert elements of intelligence.  They shift their places a
little, they change their relations to each other, they roll over and
turn up new surfaces.  Now and then a new fragment is cast in among
them, to be worn and rounded and takes its place with the others, but
the pebbled floor of consciousness is almost as stationary as the
pavement of a city thoroughfare.

It so happens that at this particular tine I have something to tell
which I am quite sure is not one of rolled pebbles which my reader
has seen before in any of my pages, or, as I feel confident, in those
of any other writer.

If my reader asks why I do not send the statement I am going to make
to some one of the special periodicals that deal with such subjects,
my answer is, that I like to tell my own stories at my own time, in
own chosen columns, where they will be read by a class of readers
with whom I like to talk.

All men of letters or of science, all writers well known to the
public, are constantly tampered with, in these days, by a class of
predaceous and hungry fellow-laborers who may be collectively spoken
of as the brain-tappers.  They want an author's ideas on the subjects
which interest them, the inquirers, from the gravest religious and
moral questions to the most trivial matters of his habits and his
whims and fancies.  Some of their questions he cannot answer; some he
does not choose to answer; some he is not yet ready to answer, and
when he is ready he prefers to select his own organ of publication.
I do not find fault with all the brain-tappers.  Some of them are
doing excellent service by accumulating facts which could not
otherwise be attained.  Rut one gets tired of the strings of
questions sent him, to which he is expected to return an answer,
plucked, ripe or unripe, from his private tree of knowledge.  The
braintappers are like the owner of the goose that laid the golden
eggs.  They would have the embryos and germs of one's thoughts out of
the mental oviducts, and cannot wait for their spontaneous evolution
and extrusion.

The story I have promised is, on the whole, the most remarkable of a
series which I may have told in part at some previous date, but
which, if I have not told, may be worth recalling at a future time.

Some few of my readers may remember that in a former paper I
suggested the possibility of the existence of an idiotic area in the
human mind, corresponding to the blind spot in the human retina.  I
trust that I shall not be thought to have let my wits go wandering in
that region of my own intellectual domain, when I relate a singular
coincidence which very lately occurred in my experience, and add a
few remarks made by one of our company on the delicate and difficult
but fascinating subject which it forces upon our attention.  I will
first copy the memorandum made at the time:

"Remarkable coincidence.  On Monday, April 18th, being at table from
6.30 P.  M.  to 7.30, with ________and ________ the two ladies of my
household, I told them of the case of 'trial by battel' offered by
Abraham Thornton in 1817.  I mentioned his throwing down his glove,
which was not taken up by the brother of his victim, and so he had to
be let off, for the old law was still in force.  I mentioned that
Abraham Thornton was said to have come to this country, 'and [I added]
he may be living near us, for aught that I know."  I rose from the
table, and found an English letter waiting for me, left while I sat
at dinner.  A copy the first portion of this letter:


'20 ALFRED PLACE, West (near Museum)
South Kensington, LONDON, S.  W.
April 7, 1887.

DR. O. W. HOLMES:

DEAR SIR,--In travelling, the other day, I met with a reprint of the
very interesting case of Thornton for murder, 1817.  The prisoner
pleaded successfully the old Wager of Battel.  I thought you would
like to read the account, and send it with this....

Yours faithfully,

FRED. RATHBONE.'


Mr.  Rathbone is a well-known dealer in old Wedgwood and eighteenth-
century art.  As a friend of my hospitable entertainer, Mr. Willett,
he had shown me many attentions in England, but I was not expecting
any communication from him; and when, fresh from my conversation, I
found this letter just arrived by mail, and left while I was at
table, and on breaking the seal read what I had a few moments before
been; telling, I was greatly surprised, and immediately made a note
of the occurrence, as given above.

I had long been familiar with all the details of this celebrated
case, but had not referred to it, so far as I can remember, for
months or years.  I know of no train of thought which led me to speak
of it on that particular day.  I had never alluded to it before in
that company, nor had I ever spoken of it with Mr. Rathbone.

I told this story over our teacups.  Among the company at the table
is a young English girl.  She seemed to be amused by the story.
"Fancy!" she said,--"how very very odd!"  "It was a striking and
curious coincidence," said the professor who was with us at the
table.  "As remarkable as two teaspoons in one saucer," was the
comment of a college youth who happened to be one of the company.
But the member of our circle whom the reader will hereafter know as
Number Seven, began stirring his tea in a nervous sort of way, and I
knew that he was getting ready to say something about the case.  An
ingenious man he is, with a brain like a tinder-box, its contents
catching at any spark that is flying about.  I always like to hear
what he says when his tinder brain has a spark fall into it.  It does
not follow that because he is often wrong he may not sometimes be
right, for he is no fool.  He treated my narrative very seriously.

The reader need not be startled at the new terms he introduces.
Indeed, I am not quite sure that some thinking people will not adopt
his view of the matter, which seems to have a degree of plausibility
as he states and illustrates it.

"The impulse which led you to tell that story passed directly from
the letter, which came charged from the cells of the cerebral battery
of your correspondent.  The distance at which the action took place
[the letter was left on a shelf twenty-four feet from the place where
I was sitting] shows this charge to have been of notable intensity.

"Brain action through space without material symbolism, such as
speech, expression, etc., is analogous to electrical induction.
Charge the prime conductor of an electrical machine, and a gold-leaf
electrometer, far off from it, will at once be disturbed.
Electricity, as we all know, can be stored and transported as if it
were a measurable fluid.

"Your incident is a typical example of cerebral induction from a
source containing stored cerebricity.  I use this word, not to be
found in my dictionaries, as expressing the brain-cell power
corresponding to electricity.  Think how long it was before we had
attained any real conception of the laws that govern the wonderful
agent, which now works in harness with the other trained and subdued
forces!  It is natural that cerebricity should be the last of the
unweighable agencies to be understood.  The human eye had seen heaven
and earth and all that in them is before it saw itself as our
instruments enable us to see it.  This fact of yours, which seems so
strange to you, belongs to a great series of similar facts familiarly
known now to many persons, and before long to be recognized as
generally as those relating to the electric telegraph and the slaving
`dynamo.'

"What! you cannot conceive of a charge of cerebricity fastening
itself on a letter-sheet and clinging to it for weeks, while it was
shuffling about in mail-bags, rolling over the ocean, and shaken up
in railroad cars?  And yet the odor of a grain of musk will hang
round a note or a dress for a lifetime.  Do you not remember what
Professor Silliman says, in that pleasant journal of his, about the
little ebony cabinet which Mary, Queen of Scots, brought with her
from France,--how 'its drawers still exhale the sweetest perfumes'?
If they could hold their sweetness for more than two hundred years,
why should not a written page retain for a week or a month the
equally mysterious effluence poured over it from the thinking marrow,
and diffuse its vibrations to another excitable nervous centre?"

I have said that although our imaginative friend is given to wild
speculations, he is not always necessarily wrong.  We know too little
about the laws of brain-force to be dogmatic with reference to it.  I
am, myself, therefore, fully in sympathy with the psychological
investigators.  When it comes to the various pretended sciences by
which men and women make large profits, attempts at investigation are
very apt to be used as lucrative advertisements for the charlatans.
But a series of investigations of the significance of certain popular
beliefs and superstitions, a careful study of the relations of
certain facts to each other,--whether that of cause and effect, or
merely of coincidence,--is a task not unworthy of sober-minded and
well-trained students of nature.  Such a series of investigations has
been recently instituted, and was reported at a late meeting held in
the rooms of the Boston Natural History Society.  The results were,
mostly negative, and in one sense a disappointment.  A single case,
related by Professor Royce, attracted a good deal of attention.  It
was reported in the next morning's newspapers, and will be given at
full length, doubtless, in the next number of the Psychological
Journal.  The leading facts were, briefly, these: A lady in Hamburg,
Germany, wrote, on the 22d of June last, that she had what she
supposed to be nightmare on the night of the 17th, five days before.
"It seemed," she wrote, "to belong to you; to be a horrid pain in
your head, as if it were being forcibly jammed into an iron casque,
or some such pleasant instrument of torture."  It proved that on that
same 17th of June her sister was undergoing a painful operation at
the hands of a dentist.  "No single case," adds Professor Royce,
"proves, or even makes probable, the existence of telepathic
toothaches; but if there are any more cases of this sort, we want to
hear of them, and that all the more because no folk-lore and no
supernatural horrors have as yet mingled with the natural and well-
known impressions that people associate with the dentist's chair."

The case I have given is, I am confident, absolutely free from every
source of error.  I do not remember that Mr. Rathbone had
communicated with me since he sent me a plentiful supply of mistletoe
a year ago last Christmas.  The account I received from him was cut
out of "The Sporting Times" of March 5, 1887.  My own knowledge of
the case came from "Kirby's Wonderful Museum," a work presented to me
at least thirty years ago.  I had not looked at the account, spoken
of it, nor thought of it for a long time, when it came to me by a
kind of spontaneous generation, as it seemed, having no connection
with any previous train of thought that I was aware of.  I consider
the evidence of entire independence, apart from possible "telepathic"
causation, completely water-proof, airtight, incombustible, and
unassailable.

I referred, when first reporting this curious case of coincidence,
with suggestive circumstances, to two others, one of which I said was
the most picturesque and the other the most unlikely, as it would
seem, to happen.  This is the first of those two cases:--

Grenville Tudor Phillips was a younger brother of George Phillips, my
college classmate, and of Wendell Phillips, the great orator.  He
lived in Europe a large part of his life, but at last returned, and,
in the year 1863, died at the house of his brother George.  I read
his death in the paper; but, having seen and heard very little of him
during his life, should not have been much impressed by the fact, but
for the following occurrence: between the time of Grenville
Phillips's death and his burial, I was looking in upon my brother,
then living in the house in which we were both born.  Some books
which had been my father's were stored in shelves in the room I used
to occupy when at Cambridge.  Passing my eye over them, an old dark
quarto attracted my attention.  It must be a Bible, I said to myself,
perhaps a rare one,--the "Breeches" Bible or some other interesting
specimen.  I took it from the shelves, and, as I did so, an old slip
of paper fell out and fluttered to the floor.  On lifting it I read
these words:

The name is Grenville Tudor.

What was the meaning of this slip of paper coming to light at this
time, after reposing undisturbed so long?  There was only one way of
explaining its presence in my father's old Bible;--a copy of the
Scriptures which I did not remember ever having handled or looked
into before.  In christening a child the minister is liable to forget
the name, just at the moment when he ought to remember it.  My father
preached occasionally at the Brattle Street Church.  I take this for
granted, for I remember going with him on one occasion when he did
so.  Nothing was more likely than that he should be asked to
officiate at the baptism of the younger son of his wife's first
cousin, Judge Phillips.  This slip was handed him to remind him of
the name: He brought it home, put it in that old Bible, and there it
lay quietly for nearly half a century, when, as if it had just heard
of Mr. Phillips's decease, it flew from its hiding-place and startled
the eyes of those who had just read his name in the daily column of
deaths.  It would be hard to find anything more than a mere
coincidence here; but it seems curious enough to be worth telling.

The second of these two last stories must be told in prosaic detail
to show its whole value as a coincidence.

One evening while I was living in Charles Street, I received a call
from Dr. S., a well-known and highly respected Boston physician, a
particular friend of the late Alexander H. Stephens, vice-president
of the Southern Confederacy.  It was with reference to a work which
Mr. Stephens was about to publish that Dr. S. called upon me.  After
talking that matter over we got conversing on other subjects, among
the rest a family relationship existing between us,--not a very near
one, but one which I think I had seen mentioned in genealogical
accounts.  Mary S. (the last name being the same as that of my
visitant), it appeared, was the great-great-grandmother of Mrs. H.
and myself.  After cordially recognizing our forgotten relationship,
now for the first time called to mind, we parted, my guest leaving me
for his own home.  We had been sitting in my library on the lower
floor.  On going up-stairs where Mrs. H. was sitting alone, just as I
entered the room she pushed a paper across the table towards me,
saying that perhaps it might interest me.  It was one of a number of
old family papers which she had brought from the house of her mother,
recently deceased.

I opened the paper, which was an old-looking document, and found that
it was a copy, perhaps made in this century, of the will of that same
Mary S. about whom we had been talking down-stairs.

If there is such a thing as a purely accidental coincidence this must
be considered an instance of it.

All one can say about it is that it seems very unlikely that such a
coincidence should occur, but it did.

I have not tried to keep my own personality out of these stories.
But after all, how little difference it makes whether or not a writer
appears with a mask on which everybody can take off,--whether he
bolts his door or not, when everybody can look in at his windows, and
all his entrances are at the mercy of the critic's skeleton key and
the jimmy of any ill-disposed assailant!

The company have been silent listeners for the most part; but the
reader will have a chance to become better acquainted with some cf
them by and by.




II

TO THE READER.

I know that it is a hazardous experiment to address myself again to a
public which in days long past has given me a generous welcome.  But
my readers have been, and are, a very faithful constituency.  I think
there are many among them who would rather listen to an old voice
they are used to than to a new one of better quality, even if the
"childish treble" should betray itself now and then in the tones of
the overtired organ.  But there must be others,--I am afraid many
others,--who will exclaim: "He has had his day, and why can't he be
content?  We don't want literary revenants, superfluous veterans,
writers who have worn out their welcome and still insist on being
attended to.  Give us something fresh, something that belongs to our
day and generation.  Your morning draught was well enough, but we
don't care for your evening slip-slop.  You are not in relation with
us, with our time, our ideas, our aims, our aspirations."

Alas, alas! my friend,--my young friend, for your hair is not yet
whitened,--I am afraid you are too nearly right.  No doubt,--no
doubt.  Teacups are not coffee-cups.  They do not hold so much.
Their pallid infusion is but a feeble stimulant compared with the
black decoction served at the morning board.  And so, perhaps, if
wisdom like yours were compatible with years like mine, I should drop
my pen and make no further attempts upon your patience.

But suppose that a writer who has reached and passed the natural
limit of serviceable years feels that he has some things which be
would like to say, and which may have an interest for a limited class
of readers,--is he not right in trying his powers and calmly taking
the risk of failure?  Does it not seem rather lazy and cowardly,
because he cannot "beat his record," or even come up to the level of
what he has done in his prime, to shrink from exerting his talent,
such as it is, now that he has outlived the period of his greatest
vigor?  A singer who is no longer equal to the trials of opera on the
stage may yet please at a chamber concert or in the drawing-room.
There is one gratification an old author can afford a certain class
of critics: that, namely, of comparing him as he is with what he was.
It is a pleasure to mediocrity to have its superiors brought within
range, so to speak; and if the ablest of them will only live long
enough, and keep on writing, there is no pop-gun that cannot reach
him.  But I fear that this is an unamiable reflection, and I am at
this time in a very amiable mood.

I confess that there is something agreeable to me in renewing my
relations with the reading public.  Were it but a single appearance,
it would give me a pleasant glimpse of the time when I was known as a
frequent literary visitor.  Many of my readers--if I can lure any
from the pages of younger writers will prove to be the children, or
the grandchildren, of those whose acquaintance I made something more
than a whole generation ago.  I could depend on a kind welcome from
my contemporaries,--my coevals.  But where are those contemporaries?
Ay de mi! as Carlyle used to exclaim,--Ah, dear me! as our old women
say,--I look round for them, and see only their vacant places.  The
old vine cannot unwind its tendrils.  The branch falls with the decay
of its support, and must cling to the new growths around it, if it
would not lie helpless in the dust.  This paper is a new tendril,
feeling its way, as it best may, to whatever it can wind around.  The
thought of finding here and there an old friend, and making, it may
be, once in a while a new one, is very grateful to me.  The chief
drawback to the pleasure is the feeling that I am submitting to that
inevitable exposure which is the penalty of authorship in every form.
A writer must make up his mind to the possible rough treatment of the
critics, who swarm like bacteria whenever there is any literary
material on which they can feed.  I have had as little to complain of
as most writers, yet I think it is always with reluctance that one
encounters the promiscuous handling which the products of the mind
have to put up with, as much as the fruit and provisions in the
market-stalls.  I had rather be criticised, however, than criticise;
that is, express my opinions in the public prints of other writers'
work, if they are living, and can suffer, as I should often have to
make them.  There are enough, thank Heaven, without me.  We are
literary cannibals, and our writers live on each other and each
other's productions to a fearful extent.  What the mulberry leaf is
to the silk-worm, the author's book, treatise, essay, poem, is to the
critical larva; that feed upon it.  It furnishes them with food and
clothing.  The process may not be agreeable to the mulberry leaf or
to the printed page; but without it the leaf would not have become
the silk that covers the empress's shoulders, and but for the critic
the author's book might never have reached the scholar's table.
Scribblers will feed on each other, and if we insist on being
scribblers we must consent to be fed on.  We must try to endure
philosophically what we cannot help, and ought not, I suppose, to
wish to help.

It is the custom at our table to vary the usual talk, by the reading
of short papers, in prose or verse, by one or more of The Teacups, as
we are in the habit of calling those who make up our company.  Thirty
years ago, one of our present circle--"Teacup Number Two," The
Professor,--read a paper on Old Age, at a certain Breakfast-table,
where he was in the habit of appearing.  That paper was published at
the time, and has since seen the light in other forms.  He did not
know so much about old age then as he does now, and would doubtless
write somewhat differently if he took the subject up again.  But I
found that it was the general wish that another of our company should
let us hear what he had to say about it.  I received a polite note,
requesting me to discourse about old age, inasmuch as I was
particularly well qualified by my experience to write in an
authoritative way concerning it.  The fact is that I,--for it is
myself who am speaking,--have recently arrived at the age of
threescore years and twenty,--fourscore years we may otherwise call
it.  In the arrangement of our table, I am Teacup Number One, and I
may as well say that I am often spoken of as The Dictator.  There is
nothing invidious in this, as I am the oldest of the company, and no
claim is less likely to excite jealousy than that of priority of
birth.

I received congratulations on reaching my eightieth birthday, not
only from our circle of Teacups, but from friends, near and distant,
in large numbers.  I tried to acknowledge these kindly missives with
the aid of a most intelligent secretary; but I fear that there were
gifts not thanked for, and tokens of good-will not recognized.  Let
any neglected correspondent be assured that it was not intentionally
that he or she was slighted.  I was grateful for every such mark of
esteem; even for the telegram from an unknown friend in a distant
land, for which I cheerfully paid the considerable charge which the
sender doubtless knew it would give me pleasure to disburse for such
an expression of friendly feeling.

I will not detain the reader any longer from the essay I have
promised.

This is the paper read to The Teacups.

It is in A Song of Moses that we find the words, made very familiar
to us by the Episcopal Burial Service, which place the natural limit
on life at threescore years and ten, with an extra ten years for some
of a stronger constitution than the average.  Yet we are told that
Moses himself lived to be a hundred and twenty years old, and that
his eye was not dim nor his natural strength abated.  This is hard to
accept literally, but we need not doubt that he was very old, and in
remarkably good condition for a man of his age.  Among his followers
was a stout old captain, Caleb, the son of Jephunneh.  This ancient
warrior speaks of himself in these brave terms: "Lo, I am this day
fourscore and five years old.  As yet, I am as strong this day as I
was in the day that Moses sent me; as my strength was then, even so
is my strength now, for war, both to go out and to come in."  It is
not likely that anybody believed his brag about his being as good a
man for active service at eighty-five as he was at forty, when Moses
sent him out to spy the land of Canaan.  But he was, no doubt, lusty
and vigorous for his years, and ready to smite the Canaanites hip and
thigh, and drive them out, and take possession of their land, as he
did forthwith, when Moses gave him leave.

Grand old men there were, three thousand years ago!  But not all
octogenarians were like Caleb, the son of Jephunneh.  Listen to poor
old Barzillai, and hear him piping: "I am this day fourscore years
old; and can I discern between good and evil?  Can thy servant taste
what I eat or what I drink?  Can I hear any more the voice of
singing men and singing women?  Wherefore, then, should thy servant
be yet a burden unto my lord the king?"  And poor King David was
worse off than this, as you all remember, at the early age of
seventy.

Thirty centuries do not seem to have made any very great difference
in the extreme limits of life.  Without pretending to rival the
alleged cases of life prolonged beyond the middle of its second
century, such as those of Henry Jenkins and Thomas Parr, we can make
a good showing of centenarians and nonagenarians.  I myself remember
Dr. Holyoke, of Salem, son of a president of Harvard College, who
answered a toast proposed in his honor at a dinner given to him on
his hundredth birthday.

"Father Cleveland," our venerated city missionary, was born June 21,
1772, and died June 5, 1872, within a little more than a fortnight of
his hundredth birthday.  Colonel Perkins, of Connecticut, died
recently after celebrating his centennial anniversary.

Among nonagenarians, three whose names are well known to Bostonians,
Lord Lyndhurst, Josiah Quincy, and Sidney Bartlett, were remarkable
for retaining their faculties in their extreme age.  That patriarch
of our American literature, the illustrious historian of his country,
is still with us, his birth dating in 1800.

Ranke, the great German historian, died at the age of ninety-one, and
Chevreul, the eminent chemist, at that of a hundred and two.

Some English sporting characters have furnished striking examples of
robust longevity.  In Gilpin's "Forest Scenery" there is the story of
one of these horseback heroes.  Henry Hastings was the name of this
old gentleman, who lived in the time of Charles the First.  It would
be hard to find a better portrait of a hunting squire than that which
the Earl of Shaftesbury has the credit of having drawn of this very
peculiar personage.  His description ends by saying, "He lived to be
an hundred, and never lost his eyesight nor used spectacles.  He got
on horseback without help, and rode to the death of the stag till he
was past fourscore."

Everything depends on habit.  Old people can do, of course, more or
less well, what they have been doing all their lives; but try to
teach them any new tricks, and the truth of the old adage will very
soon show itself.  Mr. Henry Hastings had done nothing but hunt all
his days, and his record would seem to have been a good deal like
that of Philippus Zaehdarm in that untranslatable epitaph which may
be found in "Sartor Resartus."  Judged by its products, it was a very
short life of a hundred useless twelve months.

It is something to have climbed the white summit, the Mont Blanc of
fourscore.  A small number only of mankind ever see their eightieth
anniversary.  I might go to the statistical tables of the annuity and
life insurance offices for extended and exact information, but I
prefer to take the facts which have impressed themselves upon me in
my own career.

The class of 1829 at Harvard College, of which I am a member,
graduated, according to the triennial, fifty-nine in number.  It is
sixty years, then, since that time; and as they were, on an average,
about twenty years old, those who survive must have reached fourscore
years.  Of the fifty-nine graduates ten only are living, or were at
the last accounts; one in six, very nearly.  In the first ten years
after graduation, our third decade, when we were between twenty and
thirty years old, we lost three members,--about one in twenty;
between the ages of thirty and forty, eight died,--one in seven of
those the decade began with; from forty to fifty, only two,--or one
in twenty-four; from fifty to sixty, eight,--or one in six; from
sixty to seventy, fifteen,--or two out of every five; from seventy to
eighty, twelve,--or one in two.  The greatly increased mortality
which began with our seventh decade went on steadily increasing.  At
sixty we come "within range of the rifle-pits," to borrow an
expression from my friend Weir Mitchell.

Our eminent classmate, the late Professor Benjamin Peirce, showed by
numerical comparison that the men of superior ability outlasted the
average of their fellow-graduates.  He himself lived a little beyond
his threescore and ten years.  James Freeman Clarke almost reached
the age of eighty.  The eighth decade brought the fatal year for
Benjamin Robbins Curtis, the great lawyer, who was one of the judges
of the Supreme Court of the United States; for the very able chief
justice of Massachusetts, George Tyler Bigelow; and for that famous
wit and electric centre of social life, George T. Davis.  At the last
annual dinner every effort was made to bring all the survivors of the
class together.  Six of the ten living members were there, six old
men in the place of the thirty or forty classmates who surrounded the
long, oval table in 1859, when I asked, "Has there any old fellow got
mixed with the boys?"--11 boys whose tongues were as the vibrating
leaves of the forest; whose talk was like the voice of many waters;
whose laugh was as the breaking of mighty waves upon the seashore.
Among the six at our late dinner was our first scholar, the thorough-
bred and accomplished engineer who held the city of Lawrence in his
brain before it spread itself out along the banks of the Merrimac.
There, too, was the poet whose National Hymn, "My Country, 't is of
thee," is known to more millions, and dearer to many of them, than
all the other songs written since the Psalms of David.  Four of our
six were clergymen; the engineer and the present writer completed the
list.  Were we melancholy?  Did we talk of graveyards and epitaphs?
No,--we remembered our dead tenderly, serenely, feeling deeply what
we had lost in those who but a little while ago were with us.  How
could we forget James Freeman Clarke, that man of noble thought and
vigorous action, who pervaded this community with his spirit, and was
felt through all its channels as are the light and the strength that
radiate through the wires which stretch above us?  It was a pride and
a happiness to have such classmates as he was to remember.  We were
not the moping, complaining graybeards that many might suppose we
must have been.  We had been favored with the blessing of long life.
We had seen the drama well into its fifth act.  The sun still warmed
us, the air was still grateful and life-giving.  But there was
another underlying source of our cheerful equanimity, which we could
not conceal from ourselves if we had wished to do it.  Nature's
kindly anodyne is telling upon us more and more with every year.  Our
old doctors used to give an opiate which they called "the black
drop."  It was stronger than laudanum, and, in fact, a dangerously
powerful narcotic.  Something like this is that potent drug in
Nature's pharmacopoeia which she reserves for the time of need,--the
later stages of life.  She commonly begins administering it at about
the time of the "grand climacteric," the ninth septennial period, the
sixty-third year.  More and more freely she gives it, as the years go
on, to her grey-haired children, until, if they last long enough,
every faculty is benumbed, and they drop off quietly into sleep under
its benign influence.

Do you say that old age is unfeeling?  It has not vital energy enough
to supply the waste of the more exhausting emotions.  Old Men's
Tears, which furnished the mournful title to Joshua Scottow's
Lamentations, do not suggest the deepest grief conceivable.  A little
breath of wind brings down the raindrops which have gathered on the
leaves of the tremulous poplars.  A very slight suggestion brings the
tears from Marlborough's eyes, but they are soon over, and he is
smiling again as an allusion carries him back to the days of Blenheim
and Malplaquet.  Envy not the old man the tranquillity of his
existence, nor yet blame him if it sometimes looks like apathy.
Time, the inexorable, does not threaten him with the scythe so often
as with the sand-bag.  He does not cut, but he stuns and stupefies.
One's fellow-mortals can afford to be as considerate and tender with
him as Time and Nature.

There was not much boasting among us of our present or our past, as
we sat together in the little room at the great hotel.  A certain
amount of self-deception is quite possible at threescore years and
ten, but at three score years and twenty Nature has shown most of
those who live to that age that she is earnest, and means to
dismantle and have done with them in a very little while.  As for
boasting of our past, the laudator temporis acti makes but a poor
figure in our time.  Old people used to talk of their youth as if
there were giants in those days.  We knew some tall men when we were
young, but we can see a man taller than any one among them at the
nearest dime museum.  We had handsome women among us, of high local
reputation, but nowadays we have professional beauties who challenge
the world to criticise them as boldly as Phryne ever challenged her
Athenian admirers.  We had fast horses,--did not "Old Blue" trot a
mile in three minutes?  True, but there is a three-year-old colt just
put on the track who has done it in a little more than two thirds of
that time.  It seems as if the material world had been made over
again since we were boys.  It is but a short time since we were
counting up the miracles we had lived to witness.  The list is
familiar enough: the railroad, the ocean steamer, photography, the
spectroscope, the telegraph, telephone, phonograph, anesthetics,
electric illumination,--with such lesser wonders as the friction
match, the sewing machine, and the bicycle.  And now, we said, we
must have come to the end of these unparalleled developments of the
forces of nature.  We must rest on our achievements.  The nineteenth
century is not likely to add to them; we must wait for the twentieth
century.  Many of us, perhaps most of us, felt in that way.  We had
seen our planet furnished by the art of man with a complete nervous
system: a spinal cord beneath the ocean, secondary centres,--
ganglions,--in all the chief places where men are gathered together,
and ramifications extending throughout civilization.  All at once, by
the side of this talking and light-giving apparatus, we see another
wire stretched over our heads, carrying force to a vast metallic
muscular system,--a slender cord conveying the strength of a hundred
men, of a score of horses, of a team of elephants.  The lightning is
tamed and harnessed, the thunderbolt has become a common carrier.  No
more surprises in this century!  A voice whispers, What next?

It will not do for us to boast about our young days and what they had
to show.  It is a great deal better to boast of what they could not
show, and, strange as it may seem, there is a certain satisfaction in
it.  In these days of electric lighting, when you have only to touch
a button and your parlor or bedroom is instantly flooded with light,
it is a pleasure to revert to the era of the tinder-box, the flint
and steel, and the brimstone match.  It gives me an almost proud
satisfaction to tell how we used, when those implements were not at
hand or not employed, to light our whale-oil lamp by blowing a live
coal held against the wick, often swelling our cheeks and reddening
our faces until we were on the verge of apoplexy.  I love to tell of
our stage-coach experiences, of our sailing-packet voyages, of the
semi-barbarous destitution of all modern comforts and conveniences
through which we bravely lived and came out the estimable personages
you find us.

Think of it!  All my boyish shooting was done with a flint-lock gun;
the percussion lock came to me as one of those new-fangled notions
people had just got hold of.  We ancients can make a grand display of
minus quantities in our reminiscences, and the figures look almost as
well as if they had the plus sign before them.

I am afraid that old people found life rather a dull business in the
time of King David and his rich old subject and friend, Barzillai,
who, poor man, could not have read a wicked novel, nor enjoyed a
symphony concert, if they had had those luxuries in his day.  There
were no pleasant firesides, for there were no chimneys.  There were
no daily newspapers for the old man to read, and he could not read
them if there were, with his dimmed eyes, nor hear them read, very
probably, with his dulled ears.  There was no tobacco, a soothing
drug, which in its various forms is a great solace to many old men
and to some old women, Carlyle and his mother used to smoke their
pipes together, you remember.

Old age is infinitely more cheerful, for intelligent people at least,
than it was two or three thousand years ago.  It is our duty, so far
as we can, to keep it so.  There will always be enough about it that
is solemn, and more than enough, alas! that is saddening.  But how
much there is in our times to lighten its burdens!  If they that look
out at the windows be darkened, the optician is happy to supply them
with eye-glasses for use before the public, and spectacles for their
hours of privacy.  If the grinders cease because they are few, they
can be made many again by a third dentition, which brings no
toothache in its train.  By temperance and good Habits of life,
proper clothing, well-warmed, well-drained, and well-ventilated
dwellings, and sufficient, not too much exercise, the old man of our
time may keep his muscular strength in very good condition.  I doubt
if Mr.  Gladstone, who is fast nearing his eightieth birthday, would
boast, in the style of Caleb, that he was as good a man with his axe
as he was when he was forty, but I would back him,--if the match were
possible, for a hundred shekels, against that over-confident old
Israelite, to cut down and chop up a cedar of Lebanon.  I know a most
excellent clergyman, not far from my own time of life, whom I would
pit against any old Hebrew rabbi or Greek philosopher of his years
and weight, if they could return to the flesh, to run a quarter of a
mile on a good, level track.

We must not make too much of such exceptional cases of prolonged
activity.  I often reproached my dear friend and classmate, Tames
Freeman Clarke, that his ceaseless labors made it impossible for his
coevals to enjoy the luxury of that repose which their years
demanded.  A wise old man, the late Dr. James Walker, president of
Harvard University, said that the great privilege of old age was the
getting rid of responsibilities.  These hard-working veterans will
not let one get rid of them until he drops in his harness, and so
gets rid of them and his life together.  How often has many a tired
old man envied the superannuated family cat, stretched upon the rug
before the fire, letting the genial warmth tranquilly diffuse itself
through all her internal arrangements!  No more watching for mice in
dark, damp cellars, no more awaiting the savage gray rat at the mouth
of his den, no more scurrying up trees and lamp-posts to avoid the
neighbor's cur who wishes to make her acquaintance!  It is very grand
to "die in harness," but it is very pleasant to have the tight straps
unbuckled and the heavy collar lifted from the neck and shoulders.

It is natural enough to cling to life.  We are used to atmospheric
existence, and can hardly conceive of ourselves except as breathing
creatures.  We have never tried any other mode of being, or, if we
have, we have forgotten all about it, whatever Wordsworth's grand ode
may tell us we remember.  Heaven itself must be an experiment to
every human soul which shall find itself there.  It may take time for
an earthborn saint to become acclimated to the celestial ether,--that
is, if time can be said to exist for a disembodied spirit.  We are
all sentenced to capital punishment for the crime of living, and
though the condemned cell of our earthly existence is but a narrow
and bare dwelling-place, we have adjusted ourselves to it, and made
it tolerably comfortable for the little while we are to be confined
in it.  The prisoner of Chillon

     "regained [his] freedom with a sigh,"

and a tender-hearted mortal might be pardoned for looking back, like
the poor lady who was driven from her dwelling-place by fire and
brimstone, at the home he was leaving for the "undiscovered country."

On the other hand, a good many persons, not suicidal in their
tendencies, get more of life than they want.  One of our wealthy
citizens said, on hearing that a friend had dropped off from
apoplexy, that it made his mouth water to hear of such a case.  It
was an odd expression, but I have no doubt that the fine old
gentleman to whom it was attributed made use of it.  He had had
enough of his gout and other infirmties.  Swift's account of the
Struldbrugs is not very amusing reading for old people, but some may
find it a consolation to reflect on the probable miseries they escape
in not being doomed to an undying earthly existence.

There are strange diversities in the way in which different old
persons look upon their prospects.  A millionaire whom I well
remember confessed that be should like to live long enough to learn
how much a certain fellow-citizen, a multimillionaire, was worth.
One of the, three nonagenarians before referred to expressed himself
as having a great curiosity about the new sphere of existence to
which he was looking forward.

The feeling must of necessity come to many aged persons that they
have outlived their usefulness; that they are no longer wanted, but
rather in the way, drags on the wheels rather than helping them
forward.  But let them remember the often-quoted line of Milton,

     "They also serve who only stand and wait."

This is peculiarly true of them.  They are helping others without
always being aware of it.  They are the shields, the breakwaters, of
those who come after them.  Every decade is a defence of the one next
behind it.  At thirty the youth has sobered into manhood, but the
strong men of forty rise in almost unbroken rank between him and the
approaches of old age as they show in the men of fifty.  At forty he
looks with a sense of security at the strong men of fifty, and sees
behind them the row of sturdy sexagenarians.  When fifty is reached,
somehow sixty does not look so old as it once used to, and seventy is
still afar off.  After sixty the stern sentence of the burial service
seems to have a meaning that one did not notice in former years.
There begins to be something personal about it.  But if one lives to
seventy he soon gets used to the text with the threescore years and
ten in it, and begins to count himself among those who by reason of
strength are destined to reach fourscore, of whom he can see a number
still in reasonably good condition.  The octogenarian loves to read
about people of ninety and over.  He peers among the asterisks of the
triennial catalogue of the University for the names of graduates who
have been seventy years out of college and remain still unstarred.
He is curious about the biographies of centenarians.  Such escapades
as those of that terrible old sinner and ancestor of great men, the
Reverend Stephen Bachelder, interest him as they never did before.
But he cannot deceive himself much longer.  See him walking on a
level surface, and he steps off almost as well as ever; but watch him
coming down a flight of stairs, and the family record could not tell
his years more faithfully.  He cut you dead, you say?  Did it occur
to you that he could not see you clearly enough to know you from any
other son or daughter of Adam?  He said he was very glad to hear it,
did he, when you told him that your beloved grandmother had just
deceased?  Did you happen to remember that though he does not allow
that he is deaf, he will not deny that he does not hear quite so well
as he used to?  No matter about his failings; the longer he holds on
to life, the longer he makes life seem to all the living who follow
him, and thus he is their constant benefactor.

Every stage of existence has its special trials and its special
consolations.  Habits are the crutches of old age; by the aid of
these we manage to hobble along after the mental joints are stiff and
the muscles rheumatic, to speak metaphorically,--that is to say, when
every act of self-determination costs an effort and a pang.  We
become more and more automatic as we grow older, and if we lived long
enough we should come to be pieces of creaking machinery like
Maelzel's chess player,--or what that seemed to be.

Emerson was sixty-three years old, the year I have referred to as
that of the grand climacteric, when he read to his son the poem he
called "Terminus," beginning:

         "It is time to be old,
          To take in sail.
          The God of bounds,
          Who sets to seas a shore,
          Came to me in his fatal rounds
          And said, 'No more!'"

It was early in life to feel that the productive stage was over, but
he had received warning from within, and did not wish to wait for
outside advices.  There is all the difference in the world in the
mental as in the bodily constitution of different individuals.  Some
must "take in sail" sooner, some later.  We can get a useful lesson
from the American and the English elms on our Common.  The American
elms are quite bare, and have been so for weeks.  They know very well
that they are going to have storms to wrestle with; they have not
forgotten the gales of September and the tempests of the late autumn
and early winter.  It is a hard fight they are going to have, and
they strip their coats off and roll up their shirt-sleeves, and show
themselves bare-armed and ready for the contest.  The English elms
are of a more robust build, and stand defiant, with all their summer
clothing about their sturdy frames.  They may yet have to learn a
lesson of their American cousins, for notwithstanding their compact
and solid structure they go to pieces in the great winds just as ours
do.  We must drop much of our foliage before winter is upon us.  We
must take in sail and throw over cargo, if that is necessary, to keep
us afloat.  We have to decide between our duties and our instinctive
demand of rest.  I can believe that some have welcomed the decay of
their active powers because it furnished them with peremptory reasons
for sparing themselves during the few years that were left them.

Age brings other obvious changes besides the loss of active power.
The sensibilities are less keen, the intelligence is less lively, as
we might expect under the influence of that narcotic which Nature
administers.  But there is another effect of her "black drop" which
is not so commonly recognized.  Old age is like an opium-dream.
Nothing seems real except what is unreal.  I am sure that the
pictures painted by the imagination,--the faded frescos on the walls
of memory,--come out in clearer and brighter colors than belonged to
them many years earlier.  Nature has her special favors for her
children of every age, and this is one which she reserves for our
second childhood.

No man can reach an advanced age without thinking of that great
change to which, in the course of nature, he must be so near.  It has
been remarked that the sterner beliefs of rigid theologians are apt
to soften in their later years.  All reflecting persons, even those
whose minds have been half palsied by the deadly dogmas which have
done all they could to disorganize their thinking powers,--all
reflecting persons, I say, must recognize, in looking back over a
long life, how largely their creeds, their course of life, their
wisdom and unwisdom, their whole characters, were shaped by the
conditions which surrounded them.  Little children they came from the
hands of the Father of all; little children in their helplessness,
their ignorance, they are going back to Him.  They cannot help
feeling that they are to be transferred from the rude embrace of the
boisterous elements to arms that will receive them tenderly.  Poor
planetary foundlings, they have known hard treatment at the hands of
the brute forces of nature, from the control of which they are soon
to be set free.  There are some old pessimists, it is true, who
believe that they and a few others are on a raft, and that the ship
which they have quitted, holding the rest of mankind, is going down
with all on board.  It is no wonder that there should be such when we
remember what have been the teachings of the priesthood through long
series of ignorant centuries.  Every age has to shape the Divine
image it worships over again,--the present age and our own country
are busily engaged in the task at this time.  We unmake Presidents
and make new ones.  This is an apprenticeship for a higher task.  Our
doctrinal teachers are unmaking the Deity of the Westminster
Catechism and trying to model a new one, with more of modern humanity
and less of ancient barbarism in his composition.  If Jonathan
Edwards had lived long enough, I have no doubt his creed would have
softened into a kindly, humanized belief.

Some twenty or thirty years ago, I said to Longfellow that certain
statistical tables I had seen went to show that poets were not a
long-lived race.  He doubted whether there was anything to prove they
were particularly short-lived.  Soon after this, he handed me a list
he had drawn up.  I cannot lay my hand upon it at this moment, but I
remember that Metastasio was the oldest of them all.  He died at the
age of eighty-four.  I have had some tables made out, which I have
every reason to believe are correct so far as they go.  From these,
it appears that twenty English poets lived to the average age of
fifty-six years and a little over.  The eight American poets on the
list averaged seventy-three and a half, nearly, and they are not all
dead yet.  The list including Greek, Latin, Italian, and German
poets, with American and English, gave an average of a little over
sixty-two years.  Our young poets need not be alarmed.  They can
remember that Bryant lived to be eighty-three years old, that
Longfellow reached seventy-five and Halleck seventy-seven, while
Whittier is living at the age of nearly eighty-two.  Tennyson is
still writing at eighty, and Browning reached the age of seventy-
seven.

Shall a man who in his younger days has written poetry, or what
passed for it, continue to attempt it in his later years?  Certainly,
if it amuses or interests him, no one would object to his writing in
verse as much as he likes.  Whether he should continue to write for
the public is another question.  Poetry is a good deal a matter of
heart-beats, and the circulation is more languid in the later period
of life.  The joints are less supple; the arteries are more or less
"ossified."  Something like these changes has taken place in the
mind.  It has lost the flexibility, the plastic docility, which it
had in youth and early manhood, when the gristle had but just become
hardened into bone.  It is the nature of poetry to writhe itself
along through the tangled growths of the vocabulary, as a snake winds
through the grass, in sinuous, complex, and unexpected curves, which
crack every joint that is not supple as india-rubber.

I had a poem that I wanted to print just here.  But after what I have
this moment said, I hesitated, thinking that I might provoke the
obvious remark that I exemplified the unfitness of which I had been
speaking.  I remembered the advice I had given to a poetical aspirant
not long since, which I think deserves a paragraph to itself.

My friend, I said, I hope you will not write in verse.  When you
write in prose you say what you mean.  When you write in rhyme you
say what you must.

Should I send this poem to the publishers, or not?

     "Some said, 'John, print it;' others said, 'Not so.'"

I did not ask "some" or "others."  Perhaps I should have thought it
best to keep my poem to myself and the few friends for whom it was
written.  All at once, my daimon--that other Me over whom I button my
waistcoat when I button it over my own person--put it into my head to
look up the story of Madame Saqui.  She was a famous danseuse, who
danced Napoleon in and out, and several other dynasties besides.  Her
last appearance was at the age of seventy-six, which is rather late
in life for the tight rope, one of her specialties.  Jules Janin
mummified her when she died in 1866, at the age of eighty.  He spiced
her up in his eulogy as if she had been the queen of a modern
Pharaoh.  His foamy and flowery rhetoric put me into such a state of
good-nature that I said, I will print my poem, and let the critical
Gil Blas handle it as he did the archbishop's sermon, or would have
done, if he had been a writer for the "Salamanca Weekly."

It must be premised that a very beautiful loving cup was presented to
me on my recent birthday, by eleven ladies of my acquaintance.  This
was the most costly and notable of all the many tributes I received,
and for which in different forms I expressed my gratitude.


               TO THE ELEVEN LADIES

WHO PRESENTED ME WITH A SILVER LOVING CUP ON THE
     TWENTY-NINTH OF AUGUST, M DCCC LXXXIX.

"Who gave this cup?"  The secret thou wouldst steal
Its brimming flood forbids it to reveal:
No mortal's eye shall read it till he first
Cool the red throat of thirst.

If on the golden floor one draught remain,
Trust me, thy careful search will be in vain;
Not till the bowl is emptied shalt thou know
The names enrolled below.

Deeper than Truth lies buried in her well
Those modest names the graven letters spell
Hide from the sight; but, wait, and thou shalt see
Who the good angels be

Whose bounty glistens in the beauteous gift
That friendly hands to loving lips shall lift:
Turn the fair goblet when its floor is dry,
Their names shall meet thine eye.

Count thou their number on the beads of Heaven,
Alas! the clustered Pleiads are but seven;
Nay, the nine sister Muses are too few,--
The Graces must add two.

"For whom this gift?" For one who all too long
Clings to his bough among the groves of song;
Autumn's last leaf, that spreads its faded wing
To greet a second spring.

Dear friends, kind friends, whate'er the cup may hold,
Bathing its burnished depths, will change to gold
Its last bright drop let thirsty Maenads drain,
Its fragrance will remain.

Better love's perfume in the empty bowl
Than wine's nepenthe for the aching soul
Sweeter than song that ever poet sung,
It makes an old heart young!



III

After the reading of the paper which was reported in the preceding
number of this record, the company fell into talk upon the subject
with which it dealt.

The Mistress.  "I could have wished you had said more about the
religious attitude of old age as such.  Surely the thoughts of aged
persons must be very much taken up with the question of what is to
become of them.  I should like to have The Dictator explain himself a
little more fully on this point."

My dear madam, I said, it is a delicate matter to talk about.  You
remember Mr. Calhoun's response to the advances of an over-zealous
young clergyman who wished to examine him as to his outfit for the
long journey.  I think the relations between man and his Maker grow
more intimate, more confidential, if I may say so, with advancing
years.  The old man is less disposed to argue about special matters
of belief, and more ready to sympathize with spiritually minded
persons without anxious questioning as to the fold to which they
belong.  That kindly judgment which he exercises with regard to
others he will, naturally enough, apply to himself.  The caressing
tone in which the Emperor Hadrian addresses his soul is very much
like that of an old person talking with a grandchild or some other
pet:
    "Animula, vagula, blandula,
     Hospes comesque corporis."

    "Dear little, flitting, pleasing sprite,
     The body's comrade and its guest."

How like the language of Catullus to Lesbia's sparrow!


More and more the old man finds his pleasures in memory, as the
present becomes unreal and dreamlike, and the vista of his earthly
future narrows and closes in upon him.  At last, if he live long
enough, life comes to be little more than a gentle and peaceful
delirium of pleasing recollections.  To say, as Dante says, that
there is no greater grief than to remember past happiness in the hour
of misery is not giving the whole truth.  In the midst of the misery,
as many would call it, of extreme old age, there is often a divine
consolation in recalling the happy moments and days and years of
times long past.  So beautiful are the visions of bygone delight that
one could hardly wish them to become real, lest they should lose
their ineffable charm.  I can almost conceive of a dozing and dreamy
centenarian saying to one he loves, "Go, darling, go!  Spread your
wings and leave me.  So shall you enter that world of memory where
all is lovely.  I shall not hear the sound of your footsteps any
more, but you will float before me, an aerial presence.  I shall not
hear any word from your lips, but I shall have a deeper sense of your
nearness to me than speech can give.  I shall feel, in my still
solitude, as the Ancient Mariner felt when the seraph band gathered
before him:

   "'No voice did they impart
     No voice; but oh! the silence sank
     Like music on my heart.'"

I said that the lenient way in which the old look at the failings of
others naturally leads them to judge themselves more charitably.
They find an apology for their short-comings and wrong-doings in
another consideration.  They know very well that they are not the
same persons as the middle-aged individuals, the young men, the boys,
the children, that bore their names, and whose lives were continuous
with theirs.  Here is an old man who can remember the first time he
was allowed to go shooting.  What a remorseless young destroyer he
was, to be sure!  Wherever he saw a feather, wherever a poor little
squirrel showed his bushy tail, bang! went the old "king's arm," and
the feathers or the fur were set flying like so much chaff.  Now that
same old man,--the mortal that was called by his name and has passed
for the same person for some scores of years,--is considered absurdly
sentimental by kind-hearted women, because he opens the fly-trap and
sets all its captives free,--out-of-doors, of course, but the dear
souls all insisting, meanwhile, that the flies will, every one of
them, be back again in the house before the day is over.  Do you
suppose that venerable sinner expects to be rigorously called to
account for the want of feeling he showed in those early years, when
the instinct of destruction, derived from his forest-roaming
ancestors, led him to acts which he now looks upon with pain and
aversion?

"Senex" has seen three generations grow up, the son repeating the
virtues and the failings of the father, the grandson showing the same
characteristics as the father and grandfather.  He knows that if such
or such a young fellow had lived to the next stage of life he would
very probably have caught up with his mother's virtues, which, like a
graft of a late fruit on an early apple or pear tree, do not ripen in
her children until late in the season.  He has seen the successive
ripening of one quality after another on the boughs of his own life,
and he finds it hard to condemn himself for faults which only needed
time to fall off and be succeeded by better fruitage.  I cannot help
thinking that the recording angel not only drops a tear upon many a
human failing, which blots it out forever, but that he hands many an
old record-book to the imp that does his bidding, and orders him to
throw that into the fire instead of the sinner for whom the little
wretch had kindled it.

"And pitched him in after it, I hope," said Number Seven, who is in
some points as much of an optimist as any one among us, in spite of
the squint in his brain,--or in virtue of it, if you choose to have
it so.

"I like Wordsworth's 'Matthew,'" said Number Five, "as well as any
picture of old age I remember."

"Can you repeat it to us?" asked one of The Teacups.

"I can recall two verses of it," said Number Five, and she recited
the two following ones.  Number Five has a very sweet voice.  The
moment she speaks all the faces turn toward her.  I don't know what
its secret is, but it is a voice that makes friends of everybody.

   "'The sighs which Matthew heaved were sighs
     Of one tired out with fun and madness;
     The tears which came to Matthew's eyes
     Were tears of light, the dew of gladness.

   "'Yet, sometimes, when the secret cup
     Of still and serious thought went round,
     It seemed as if he drank it up,
     He felt with spirit so profound:'

"This was the way in which Wordsworth paid his tribute to a

   "'Soul of God's best earthly mould.'"

The sweet voice left a trance-like silence after it, which may have
lasted twenty heart-beats.  Then I said, We all thank you for your
charming quotation.  How much more wholesome a picture of humanity
than such stuff as the author of the "Night Thoughts" has left us:

    "Heaven's Sovereign saves all beings but Himself
     That hideous sight, a naked human heart."

Or the author of "Don Juan," telling us to look into

    "Man's heart, and view the hell that's there!"

I hope I am quoting correctly, but I am more of a scholar in
Wordsworth than in Byron.  Was Parson Young's own heart such a
hideous spectacle to himself?

If it was, he had better have stripped off his surplice.  No,--it was
nothing but the cant of his calling.  In Byron it was a mood, and he
might have said just the opposite thing the next day, as he did in
his two descriptions of the Venus de' Medici.  That picture of old
Matthew abides in the memory, and makes one think better of his kind.
What nobler tasks has the poet than to exalt the idea of manhood, and
to make the world we live in more beautiful?

We have two or three young people with us who stand a fair chance of
furnishing us the element without which life and tea-tables alike are
wanting in interest.  We are all, of course, watching them, and
curious to know whether we are to have a romance or not.  Here is one
of them; others will show themselves presently.

I cannot say just how old the Tutor is, but I do not detect a gray
hair in his head.  My sight is not so good as it was, however, and he
may have turned the sharp corner of thirty, and even have left it a
year or two behind him.  More probably he is still in the twenties,
--say twenty-eight or twenty-nine.  He seems young, at any rate,
excitable, enthusiastic, imaginative, but at the same time reserved.
I am afraid that he is a poet.  When I say "I am afraid," you wonder
what I mean by the expression.  I may take another opportunity to
explain and justify it; I will only say now that I consider the Muse
the most dangerous of sirens to a young man who has his way to make
in the world.  Now this young man, the Tutor, has, I believe, a
future before him.  He was born for a philosopher,--so I read his
horoscope,--but he has a great liking for poetry and can write well
in verse.  We have had a number of poems offered for our
entertainment, which I have commonly been requested to read.  There
has been some little mystery about their authorship, but it is
evident that they are not all from the same hand.  Poetry is as
contagious as measles, and if a single case of it break out in any
social circle, or in a school, there are certain to be a number of
similar cases, some slight, some serious, and now and then one so
malignant that the subject of it should be put on a spare diet of
stationery, say from two to three penfuls of ink and a half sheet of
notepaper per diem.  If any of our poetical contributions are
presentable, the reader shall have a chance to see them.

It must be understood that our company is not invariably made up of
the same persons.  The Mistress, as we call her, is expected to be
always in her place.  I make it a rule to be present.  The Professor
is almost as sure to be at the table as I am.  We should hardly know
what to do without Number Five.  It takes a good deal of tact to
handle such a little assembly as ours, which is a republic on a small
scale, for all that they give me the title of Dictator, and Number
Five is a great help in every social emergency.  She sees when a
discussion tends to become personal, and heads off the threatening
antagonists.  She knows when a subject has been knocking about long
enough and dexterously shifts the talk to another track.  It is true
that I am the one most frequently appealed to as the highest tribunal
in doubtful cases, but I often care more for Number Five's opinion
than I do for my own.  Who is this Number Five, so fascinating, so
wise, so full of knowledge, and so ready to learn?  She is suspected
of being the anonymous author of a book which produced a sensation
when published, not very long ago, and which those who read are very
apt to read a second time, and to leave on their tables for frequent
reference.  But we have never asked her.  I do not think she wants to
be famous.  How she comes to be unmarried is a mystery to me; it must
be that she has found nobody worth caring enough for.  I wish she
would furnish us with the romance which, as I said, our tea-table
needs to make it interesting.  Perhaps the new-comer will make love
to her,--I should think it possible she might fancy him.

And who is the new-comer?  He is a Counsellor and a Politician.  Has
a good war record.  Is about forty-five years old, I conjecture.  Is
engaged in a great law case just now.  Said to be very eloquent.  Has
an intellectual head, and the bearing of one who has commanded a
regiment or perhaps a brigade.  Altogether an attractive person,
scholarly, refined has some accomplishments not so common as they
might be in the class we call gentlemen, with an accent on the word.

There is also a young Doctor, waiting for his bald spot to come, so
that he may get into practice.

We have two young ladies at the table,--the English girl referred to
in a former number, and an American girl of about her own age.  Both
of them are students in one of those institutions--I am not sure
whether they call it an "annex" or not; but at any rate one of those
schools where they teach the incomprehensible sort of mathematics and
other bewildering branches of knowledge above the common level of
high-school education.  They seem to be good friends, and form a very
pleasing pair when they walk in arm in arm; nearly enough alike to
seem to belong together, different enough to form an agreeable
contrast.

Of course we were bound to have a Musician at our table, and we have
one who sings admirably, and accompanies himself, or one or more of
our ladies, very frequently.

Such is our company when the table is full.  But sometimes only half
a dozen, or it may be only three or four, are present.  At other
times we have a visitor or two, either in the place of one of our
habitual number, or in addition to it.  We have the elements, we
think, of a pleasant social gathering,--different sexes, ages,
pursuits, and tastes,--all that is required for a "symphony concert"
of conversation.  One of the curious questions which might well be
asked by those who had been with us on different occasions would be,
"How many poets are there among you?"  Nobody can answer this
question.  It is a point of etiquette with us not to press our
inquiries about these anonymous poems too sharply, especially if any
of them betray sentiments which would not bear rough handling.

I don't doubt that the different personalities at our table will get
mixed up in the reader's mind if be is not particularly clear-headed.
That happens very often, much oftener than all would be willing to
confess, in reading novels and plays.  I am afraid we should get a
good deal confused even in reading our Shakespeare if we did not look
back now and then at the dramatis personae.  I am sure that I am very
apt to confound the characters in a moderately interesting novel;
indeed, I suspect that the writer is often no better off than the
reader in the dreary middle of the story, when his characters have
all made their appearance, and before they have reached near enough
to the denoument to have fixed their individuality by the position
they have arrived at in the chain of the narrative.

My reader might be a little puzzled when he read that Number Five did
or said such or such a thing, and ask, "Whom do you mean by that
title?  I am not quite sure that I remember." Just associate her with
that line of Emerson,

     "Why nature loves the number five,"

and that will remind you that she is the favorite of our table.

You cannot forget who Number Seven is if I inform you that he
specially prides himself on being a seventh son of a seventh son.
The fact of such a descent is supposed to carry wonderful endowments
with it.  Number Seven passes for a natural healer.  He is looked
upon as a kind of wizard, and is lucky in living in the nineteenth
century instead of the sixteenth or earlier.  How much confidence he
feels in himself as the possessor of half-supernatural gifts I cannot
say.  I think his peculiar birthright gives him a certain confidence
in his whims and fancies which but for that he would hardly feel.
After this explanation, when I speak of Number Five or Number Seven,
you will know to whom I refer.

The company are very frank in their criticisms of each other.  "I did
not like that expression of yours, planetary foundlings," said the
Mistress.  "It seems to me that it is too like atheism for a good
Christian like you to use."

Ah, my dear madam, I answered, I was thinking of the elements and the
natural forces to which man was born an almost helpless subject in
the rudimentary stages of his existence, and from which he has only
partially got free after ages upon ages of warfare with their
tyranny.  Think what hunger forced the caveman to do!  Think of the
surly indifference of the storms that swept the forest and the
waters, the earthquake chasms that engulfed him, the inundations that
drowned him out of his miserable hiding-places, the pestilences that
lay in wait for him, the unequal strife with ferocious animals!
I need not sum up all the wretchedness that goes to constitute the
"martyrdom of man."  When our forefathers came to this wilderness as
it then was, and found everywhere the bones of the poor natives who
had perished in the great plague (which our Doctor there thinks was
probably the small-pox), they considered this destructive malady as a
special mark of providential favor for them.  How about the miserable
Indians?  Were they anything but planetary foundlings?  No!
Civilization is a great foundling hospital, and fortunate are all
those who get safely into the creche before the frost or the malaria
has killed them, the wild beasts or the venomous reptiles worked out
their deadly appetites and instincts upon them.  The very idea of
humanity seems to be that it shall take care of itself and develop
its powers in the "struggle for life."  Whether we approve it or not,
if we can judge by the material record, man was born a foundling, and
fought his way as he best might to that kind of existence which we
call civilized,--one which a considerable part of the inhabitants of
our planet have reached.

If you do not like the expression planetary foundlings, I have no
objection to your considering the race as put out to nurse.  And what
a nurse Nature is!  She gives her charge a hole in the rocks to live
in, ice for his pillow and snow for his blanket, in one part of the
world; the jungle for his bedroom in another, with the tiger for his
watch-dog, and the cobra as his playfellow.

Well, I said, there may be other parts of the universe where there
are no tigers and no cobras.  It is not quite certain that such
realms of creation are better off, on the whole, than this earthly
residence of ours, which has fought its way up to the development of
such centres of civilization as Athens and Rome, to such
personalities as Socrates, as Washington.

"One of our company has been on an excursion among the celestial
bodies of our system, I understand," said the Professor.

Number Five colored.  "Nothing but a dream," she said.  "The truth
is, I had taken ether in the evening for a touch of neuralgia, and it
set my imagination at work in a way quite unusual with me.  I had
been reading a number of books about an ideal condition of society,--
Sir Thomas Mores 'Utopia,' Lord Bacon's 'New Atlantis,' and another
of more recent date.  I went to bed with my brain a good deal
excited, and fell into a deep slumber, in which I passed through some
experiences so singular that, on awaking, I put them down on paper.
I don't know that there is anything very original about the
experiences I have recorded, but I thought them worth preserving.
Perhaps you would not agree with me in that belief."

"If Number Five will give us a chance to form our own judgment about
her dream or vision, I think we shall enjoy it," said the Mistress.
"She knows what will please The Teacups in the way of reading as well
as I do how many lumps of sugar the Professor wants in his tea and
how many I want in mine."

The company was so urgent that Number Five sent up-stairs for her
paper.

Number Five reads the story of her dream.

It cost me a great effort to set down the words of the manuscript
from which I am reading.  My dreams for the most part fade away so
soon after their occurrence that I cannot recall them at all.  But in
this case my ideas held together with remarkable tenacity.  By
keeping my mind steadily upon the work, I gradually unfolded the
narrative which follows, as the famous Italian antiquary opened one
of those fragile carbonized manuscripts found in the ruins of
Herculaneum or Pompeii.

The first thing I remember about it is that I was floating upward,
without any sense of effort on my part.  The feeling was that of
flying, which I have often had in dreams, as have many other persons.
It was the most natural thing in the world,--a semi-materialized
volition, if I may use such an expression.

At the first moment of my new consciousness,--for I seemed to have
just emerged from a deep slumber, I was aware that there was a
companion at my side.  Nothing could be more gracious than the way in
which this being accosted me.  I will speak of it as she, because
there was a delicacy, a sweetness, a divine purity, about its aspect
that recalled my ideal of the loveliest womanhood.

"I am your companion and your guide," this being made me understand,
as she looked at me.  Some faculty of which I had never before been
conscious had awakened in me, and I needed no interpreter to explain
the unspoken language of my celestial attendant.

"You are not yet outside of space and time," she said, "and I am
going with you through some parts of the phenomenal or apparent
universe,--what you call the material world.  We have plenty of what
you call time before us, and we will take our voyage leisurely,
looking at such objects of interest as may attract our attention as
we pass.  The first thing you will naturally wish to look at will be
the earth you have just left.  This is about the right distance," she
said, and we paused in our flight.

The great globe we had left was rolling beneath us.  No eye of one in
the flesh could see it as I saw or seemed to see it.  No ear of any
mortal being could bear the sounds that came from it as I heard or
seemed to hear them.  The broad oceans unrolled themselves before me.
I could recognize the calm Pacific and the stormy Atlantic,--the
ships that dotted them, the white lines where the waves broke on the
shore,--frills on the robes of the continents,--so they looked to
my woman's perception; the--vast South American forests; the
glittering icebergs about the poles; the snowy mountain ranges, here
and there a summit sending up fire and smoke; mighty rivers, dividing
provinces within sight of each other, and making neighbors of realms
thousands of miles apart; cities; light-houses to insure the safety
of sea-going vessels, and war-ships to knock them to pieces and sink
them.  All this, and infinitely more, showed itself to me during a
single revolution of the sphere: twenty-four hours it would have
been, if reckoned by earthly measurements of time.  I have not spoken
of the sounds I heard while the earth was revolving under us.  The
howl of storms, the roar and clash of waves, the crack and crash of
the falling thunderbolt,--these of course made themselves heard as
they do to mortal ears.  But there were other sounds which enchained
my attention more than these voices of nature.  As the skilled leader
of an orchestra hears every single sound from each member of the mob
of stringed and wind instruments, and above all the screech of the
straining soprano, so my sharpened perceptions made what would have
been for common mortals a confused murmur audible to me as compounded
of innumerable easily distinguished sounds.  Above them all arose one
continued, unbroken, agonizing cry.  It was the voice of suffering
womanhood, a sound that goes up day and night, one long chorus of
tortured victims.

"Let us get out of reach of this," I said; and we left our planet,
with its blank, desolate moon staring at it, as if it had turned pale
at the sights and sounds it had to witness.

Presently the gilded dome of the State House, which marked our
starting-point, came into view for the second time, and I knew that
this side-show was over.  I bade farewell to the Common with its
Cogswell fountain, and the Garden with its last awe-inspiring
monument.

"Oh, if I could sometimes revisit these beloved scenes! "I exclaimed.

"There is nothing to hinder that I know of," said my companion.
"Memory and imagination as you know them in the flesh are two winged
creatures with strings tied to their legs, and anchored to a bodily
weight of a hundred and fifty pounds, more or less.  When the string
is cut you can be where you wish to be,--not merely a part of you,
leaving the rest behind, but the whole of you.  Why shouldn't you
want to revisit your old home sometimes?"

I was astonished at the human way in which my guide conversed with
me.  It was always on the basis of my earthly habits, experiences,
and limitations.  "Your solar system," she said, "is a very small
part of the universe, but you naturally feel a curiosity about the
bodies which constitute it and about their inhabitants.  There is
your moon: a bare and desolate-looking place it is, and well it may
be, for it has no respirable atmosphere, and no occasion for one.
The Lunites do not breathe; they live without waste and without
supply.  You look as if you do not understand this.  Yet your people
have, as you well know, what they call incandescent lights
everywhere.  You would have said there can be no lamp without oil or
gas, or other combustible substance, to feed it; and yet you see a
filament which sheds a light like that of noon all around it, and
does not waste at all.  So the Lunites live by influx of divine
energy, just as the incandescent lamp glows,--glows, and is not
consumed; receiving its life, if we may call it so, from the central
power, which wears the unpleasant name of 'dynamo.'"

The Lunites appeared to me as pale phosphorescent figures of ill-
defined outline, lost in their own halos, as it were.  I could not
help thinking of Shelley's

               "maiden
          With white fire laden."

But as the Lunites were after all but provincials, as are the tenants
of all the satellites, I did not care to contemplate them for any
great length of time.

I do not remember much about the two planets that came next to our
own, except the beautiful rosy atmosphere of one and the huge bulk of
the other.  Presently, we found ourselves within hailing distance of
another celestial body, which I recognized at once, by the rings
which girdled it, as the planet Saturn.  A dingy, dull-looking sphere
it was in its appearance.  "We will tie up here for a while," said my
attendant.  The easy, familiar way in which she spoke surprised and
pleased me.

Why, said I,--The Dictator,--what is there to prevent beings of
another order from being as cheerful, as social, as good companions,
as the very liveliest of God's creatures whom we have known in the
flesh?  Is it impossible for an archangel to smile?  Is such a
phenomenon as a laugh never heard except in our little sinful corner
of the universe?  Do you suppose, that when the disciples heard from
the lips of their Master the play of words on the name of Peter,
there was no smile of appreciation on the bearded faces of those holy
men?  From any other lips we should have called this pleasantry a

Number Five shook her head very slightly, and gave me a look that
seemed to say, "Don't frighten the other Teacups.  We don't call
things by the names that belong to them when we deal with celestial
subjects."

We tied up, as my attendant playfully called our resting, so near the
planet that I could know--I will not say see and hear, but apprehend
--all that was going on in that remote sphere; remote, as we who live
in what we have been used to consider the centre of the rational
universe regard it.  What struck me at once was the deadness of
everything I looked upon.  Dead, uniform color of surface and
surrounding atmosphere.  Dead complexion of all the inhabitants.
Dead-looking trees, dead-looking grass, no flowers to be seen
anywhere.

"What is the meaning of all this?" I said to my guide.

She smiled good-naturedly, and replied, "It is a forlorn home for
anything above a lichen or a toadstool; but that is no wonder, when
you know what the air is which they breathe.  It is pure nitrogen."

The Professor spoke up.  "That can't be, madam," he said.  "The
spectroscope shows the atmosphere of Saturn to be--no matter, I have
forgotten what; but it was not pure nitrogen, at any rate."

Number Five is never disconcerted.  "Will you tell me," she said,
"where you have found any account of the bands and lines in the
spectrum of dream-nitrogen?  I should be so pleased to become
acquainted with them."

The Professor winced a little, and asked Delilah, the handmaiden, to
pass a plate of muffins to him.  The dream had carried him away, and
he thought for the moment that he was listening to a scientific
paper.

Of course, my companion went on to say, the bodily constitution of
the Saturnians is wholly different from that of air-breathing, that
is oxygen-breathing, human beings.  They are the dullest, slowest,
most torpid of mortal creatures.

All this is not to be wondered at when you remember the inert
characteristics of nitrogen.  There are in some localities natural
springs which give out slender streams of oxygen.  You will learn by
and by what use the Saturnians make of this dangerous gas, which, as
you recollect, constitutes about one fifth of your own atmosphere.
Saturn has large lead mines, but no other metal is found on this
planet.  The inhabitants have nothing else to make tools of, except
stones and shells.  The mechanical arts have therefore made no great
progress among them.  Chopping down a tree with a leaden axe is
necessarily a slow process.

So far as the Saturnians can be said to have any pride in anything,
it is in the absolute level which characterizes their political and
social order.  They profess to be the only true republicans in the
solar system.  The fundamental articles of their Constitution are
these:

All Saturnians are born equal, live equal, and die equal.

All Saturnians are born free,--free, that is, to obey the rules laid
down for the regulation of their conduct, pursuits, and opinions,
free to be married to the person selected for them by the
physiological section of the government, and free to die at such
proper period of life as may best suit the convenience and general
welfare of the community.


The one great industrial product of Saturn is the bread-root.  The
Saturnians find this wholesome and palatable enough; and it is well
they do, as they have no other vegetable.  It is what I should call a
most uninteresting kind of eatable, but it serves as food and drink,
having juice enough, so that they get along without water.  They have
a tough, dry grass, which, matted together, furnishes them with
clothes sufficiently warm for their cold-blooded constitutions, and
more than sufficiently ugly.

A piece of ground large enough to furnish bread-root for ten persons
is allotted to each head of a household, allowance being made for the
possible increase of families.  This, however, is not a very
important consideration, as the Saturnians are not a prolific race.
The great object of life being the product of the largest possible
quantity of bread-roots, and women not being so capable in the fields
as the stronger sex, females are considered an undesirable addition
to society.  The one thing the Saturnians dread and abhor is
inequality.  The whole object of their laws and customs is to
maintain the strictest equality in everything,--social relations,
property, so far as they can be said to have anything which can be so
called, mode of living, dress, and all other matters.  It is their
boast that nobody ever starved under their government.  Nobody goes
in rags, for the coarse-fibred grass from which they fabricate their
clothes is very durable.  (I confess I wondered how a woman could
live in Saturn.  They have no looking-glasses.  There is no such
article as a ribbon known among them.  All their clothes are of one
pattern.  I noticed that there were no pockets in any of their
garments, and learned that a pocket would be considered prima facie
evidence of theft, as no honest person would have use for such a
secret receptacle.)  Before the revolution which established the
great law of absolute and lifelong equality, the inhabitants used to
feed at their own private tables.  Since the regeneration of society
all meals are taken in common.  The last relic of barbarism was the
use of plates,--one or even more to each individual.  This "odious
relic of an effete civilization," as they called it, has long been
superseded by oblong hollow receptacles, one of which is allotted to
each twelve persons.  A great riot took place when an attempt was
made by some fastidious and exclusive egotists to introduce
partitions which should partially divide one portion of these
receptacles into individual compartments.  The Saturnians boast that
they have no paupers, no thieves, none of those fictitious values
called money,--all which things, they hear, are known in that small
Saturn nearer the sun than the great planet which is their dwelling-
place.

"I suppose that now they have levelled everything they are quiet and
contented.  Have they any of those uneasy people called reformers?"

"Indeed they have," said my attendant.  "There are the
Orthobrachians, who declaim against the shameful abuse of the left
arm and hand, and insist on restoring their perfect equality with the
right.  Then there are Isopodic societies, which insist on bringing
back the original equality of the upper and lower limbs.  If you can
believe it, they actually practise going on all fours,--generally in
a private way, a few of them together, but hoping to bring the world
round to them in the near future."

Here I had to stop and laugh.

"I should think life might be a little dull in Saturn," I said.

"It is liable to that accusation," she answered.  "Do you notice how
many people you meet with their mouths stretched wide open?"

"Yes," I said, "and I do not know what to make of it.  I should think
every fourth or fifth person had his mouth open in that way."

"They are suffering from the endemic disease of their planet,
prolonged and inveterate gaping or yawning, which has ended in
dislocation of the lower jaw.  After a time this becomes fixed, and
requires a difficult surgical operation to restore it to its place."

It struck me that, in spite of their boast that they have no paupers,
no thieves, no money, they were a melancholy-looking set of beings.

"What are their amusements?" I asked.

"Intoxication and suicide are their chief recreations.  They have a
way of mixing the oxygen which issues in small jets from certain
natural springs with their atmospheric nitrogen in the proportion of
about twenty per cent, which makes very nearly the same thing as the
air of your planet.  But to the Saturnians the mixture is highly
intoxicating, and is therefore a relief to the monotony of their
every-day life.  This mixture is greatly sought after, but hard to
obtain, as the sources of oxygen are few and scanty.  It shortens the
lives of those who have recourse to it; but if it takes too long,
they have other ways of escaping from a life which cuts and dries
everything for its miserable subjects, defeats all the natural
instincts, confounds all individual characteristics, and makes
existence such a colossal bore, as your worldly people say, that
self-destruction becomes a luxury."


Number Five stopped here.

Your imaginary wholesale Shakerdom is all very fine, said I.  Your
Utopia, your New Atlantis, and the rest are pretty to look at.  But
your philosophers are treating the world of living souls as if they
were, each of them, playing a game of solitaire,--all the pegs and
all the holes alike.  Life is a very different sort of game.  It is a
game of chess, and not of solitaire, nor even of checkers.  The men
are not all pawns, but you have your knights, bishops, rooks,--yes,
your king and queen,--to be provided for.  Not with these names, of
course, but all looking for their proper places, and having their own
laws and modes of action.  You can play solitaire with the members of
your own family for pegs, if you like, and if none of them rebel.
You can play checkers with a little community of meek, like-minded
people.  But when it comes to the handling of a great state, you will
find that nature has emptied a box of chessmen before you, and you
must play with them so as to give each its proper move, or sweep them
off the board, and come back to the homely game such as I used to see
played with beans and kernels of corn on squares marked upon the back
of the kitchen bellows.

It was curious to see how differently Number Five's narrative was
received by the different listeners in our circle.  Number Five
herself said she supposed she ought to be ashamed of its absurdities,
but she did not know that it was much sillier than dreams often are,
and she thought it might amuse the company.  She was herself always
interested by these ideal pictures of society.  But it seemed to her
that life must be dull in any of them, and with that idea in her head
her dreaming fancy had drawn these pictures.

The Professor was interested in her conception of the existence of
the Lunites without waste, and the death in life of the nitrogen-
breathing Saturnians.  Dream-chemistry was a new subject to him.
Perhaps Number Five would give him some lessons in it.

At this she smiled, and said she was afraid she could not teach him
anything, but if he would answer a few questions in matter-of-fact
chemistry which had puzzled her she would be vastly obliged to him.

"You must come to my laboratory," said the Professor.

"I will come to-morrow," said Number Five.

Oh, yes! Much laboratory work they will do! Play of mutual
affinities.  Amalgamates.  No freezing mixtures, I'll warrant

Why shouldn't we get a romance out of all this, hey?

But Number Five looks as innocent as a lamb, and as brave as a lion.
She does not care a copper for the looks that are going round The
Teacups.

Our Doctor was curious about those cases of anchylosis, as he called
it, of the lower jaw.  He thought it a quite possible occurrence.
Both the young girls thought the dream gave a very hard view of the
optimists, who look forward to a reorganization of society which
shall rid mankind of the terrible evils of over-crowding and
competition.

Number Seven was quite excited about the matter.  He had himself
drawn up a plan for a new social arrangement.  He had shown it to the
legal gentleman who has lately joined us.  This gentleman thought it
well-intended, but that it would take one constable to every three
inhabitants to enforce its provisions.

I said the dream could do no harm; it was too outrageously improbable
to come home to anybody's feelings.  Dreams were like broken
mosaics,--the separated stones might here and there make parts of
pictures.  If one found a caricature of himself made out of the
pieces which had accidentally come together, he would smile at it,
knowing that it was an accidental effect with no malice in it.  If
any of you really believe in a working Utopia, why not join the
Shakers, and convert the world to this mode of life?  Celibacy alone
would cure a great many of the evils you complain of.

I thought this suggestion seemed to act rather unfavorably upon the
ladies of our circle.  The two Annexes looked inquiringly at each
other.  Number Five looked smilingly at them.  She evidently thought
it was time to change the subject of conversation, for she turned to
me and said, "You promised to read us the poem you read before your
old classmates the other evening."

I will fulfill my promise, I said.  We felt that this might probably
be our last meeting as a Class.  The personal reference is to our
greatly beloved and honored classmate, James Freeman Clarke.


AFTER THE CURFEW.

The Play is over.  While the light
Yet lingers in the darkening hall,

I come to say a last Good-night
Before the final Exeunt all.

We gathered once, a joyous throng:
The jovial toasts went gayly round;
With jest, and laugh, and shout, and song
we made the floors and walls resound.

We come with feeble steps and slow,
A little band of four or five,
Left from the wrecks of long ago,
Still pleased to find ourselves alive.

Alive!  How living, too, are they
whose memories it is ours to share!
Spread the long table's full array,
There sits a ghost in every chair!

One breathing form no more, alas!
Amid our slender group we see;
With him we still remained "The Class,"
without his presence what are we?

The hand we ever loved to clasp,
That tireless hand which knew no rest,
Loosed from affection's clinging grasp,
Lies nerveless on the peaceful breast.

The beaming eye, the cheering voice,
That lent to life a generous glow,
whose every meaning said "Rejoice,"
we see, we hear, no more below.

The air seems darkened by his loss,
Earth's shadowed features look less fair,
And heavier weighs the daily cross
His willing shoulders helped as bear.

Why mourn that we, the favored few

Whom grasping Time so long has spared
Life's sweet illusions to pursue,
The common lot of age have shared?

In every pulse of Friendship's heart
There breeds unfelt a throb of pain,
One hour must rend its links apart,
Though years on years have forged the chain.

So ends "The Boys,"--a lifelong play.
We too must hear the Prompter's call
To fairer scenes and brighter day
Farewell! I let the curtain fall.




IV

If the reader thinks that all these talking Teacups came together by
mere accident, as people meet at a boarding-house, I may as well tell
him at once that he is mistaken.  If he thinks I am going to explain
how it is that he finds them thus brought together, whether they form
a secret association, whether they are the editors of this or that
periodical, whether they are connected with some institution, and so
on,--I must disappoint him.  It is enough that he finds them in each
other's company, a very mixed assembly, of different sexes, ages, and
pursuits; and if there is a certain mystery surrounds their meetings,
he must not be surprised.  Does he suppose we want to be known and
talked about in public as "Teacups"?  No; so far as we give to the
community some records of the talks at our table our thoughts become
public property, but the sacred personality of every Teacup must be
properly respected.  If any wonder at the presence of one of our
number, whose eccentricities might seem to render him an undesirable
associate of the company, he should remember that some people may
have relatives whom they feel bound to keep their eye on; besides the
cracked Teacup brings out the ring of the sound ones as nothing else
does.  Remember also that soundest teacup does not always hold the
best tea, or the cracked teacup the worst.

This is a hint to the reader, who is not expected to be too curious
about the individual Teacups constituting our unorganized
association.


The Dictator Discourses.

I have been reading Balzac's Peau de Chagrin.  You have all read the
story, I hope, for it is the first of his wonderful romances which
fixed the eyes of the reading world upon him, and is a most
fascinating if somewhat fantastic tale.  A young man becomes the
possessor of a certain magic skin, the peculiarity of which is that,
while it gratifies every wish formed by its possessor, it shrinks in
all its dimensions each time that a wish is gratified.  The young man
makes every effort to ascertain the cause of its shrinking; invokes
the aid of the physicist, the chemist, the student of natural
history, but all in vain.  He draws a red line around it.  That same
day he indulges a longing for a certain object.  The next morning
there is a little interval between the red line and the skin, close
to which it was traced.  So always, so inevitably.  As he lives on,
satisfying one desire, one passion, after another, the process of
shrinking continues.  A mortal disease sets in, which keeps pace with
the shrinking skin, and his life and his talisman come to an end
together.

One would say that such a piece of integument was hardly a desirable
possession.  And yet, how many of us have at this very moment a peau
de chagrin of our own, diminishing with every costly wish indulged,
and incapable, like the magical one of the story, of being arrested
in its progress

Need I say that I refer to those coupon bonds, issued in the days of
eight and ten per cent interest, and gradually narrowing as they drop
their semiannual slips of paper, which represent wishes to be
realized, as the roses let fall their leaves in July, as the icicles
melt away in the thaw of January?

How beautiful was the coupon bond, arrayed in its golden raiment of
promises to pay at certain stated intervals, for a goodly number of
coming years!  What annual the horticulturist can show will bear
comparison with this product of auricultural industry, which has
flowered in midsummer and midwinter for twenty successive seasons?
And now the last of its blossoms is to be plucked, and the bare stem,
stripped of its ever maturing and always welcome appendages, is
reduced to the narrowest conditions of reproductive existence.  Such
is the fate of the financial peau de chagrin.  Pity the poor
fractional capitalist, who has just managed to live on the eight per
cent of his coupon bonds.  The shears of Atropos were not more fatal
to human life than the long scissors which cut the last coupon to the
lean proprietor, whose slice of dry toast it served to flatter with
oleomargarine.  Do you wonder that my thoughts took the poetical
form, in the contemplation of these changes and their melancholy
consequences?  If the entire poem, of several hundred lines, was
"declined with thanks" by an unfeeling editor, that is no reason why
you should not hear a verse or two of it.


          THE PEAU DE CHAGRIN OF STATE STREET.

               How beauteous is the bond
               In the manifold array
               Of its promises to pay,
               While the eight per cent it gives
               And the rate at which one lives
                    Correspond!

               But at last the bough is bare
               Where the coupons one by one
               Through their ripening days have run,
               And the bond, a beggar now,
               Seeks investment anyhow,
                    Anywhere!

The Mistress commonly contents herself with the general supervision
of the company, only now and then taking an active part in the
conversation.  She started a question the other evening which set
some of us thinking.

"Why is it," she said, "that there is so common and so intense a
desire for poetical reputation?  It seems to me that, if I were a
man, I had rather have done something worth telling of than make
verses about what other people had done."

"You agree with Alexander the Great," said the Professor.  "You would
prefer the fame of Achilles to that of Homer, who told the story of
his wrath and its direful consequences.  I am afraid that I should
hardly agree with you.  Achilles was little better than a Choctaw
brave.  I won't quote Horace's line which characterizes him so
admirably, for I will take it for granted that you all know it.  He
was a gentleman,--so is a first-class Indian,--a very noble gentleman
in point of courage, lofty bearing, courtesy, but an unsoaped, ill-
clad, turbulent, high-tempered young fellow, looked up to by his
crowd very much as the champion of the heavy weights is looked up to
by his gang of blackguards.  Alexander himself was not much better,--
a foolish, fiery young madcap.  How often is he mentioned except as a
warning?  His best record is that he served to point a moral as
'Macedonian's madman.'  He made a figure, it is true, in Dryden's
great Ode, but what kind of a figure?  He got drunk,--in very bad
company, too,--and then turned fire-bug.  He had one redeeming
point,--he did value his Homer, and slept with the Iliad under his
pillow.  A poet like Homer seems to me worth a dozen such fellows as
Achilles and Alexander."

"Homer is all very well far those that can read him," said Number
Seven, "but the fellows that tag verses together nowadays are mostly
fools.  That's my opinion.  I wrote some verses once myself, but I
had been sick and was very weak; hadn't strength enough to write in
prose, I suppose."

This aggressive remark caused a little stir at our tea-table.  For
you must know, if I have not told you already, there are suspicions
that we have more than one "poet" at our table.  I have already
confessed that I do myself indulge in verse now and then, and have
given my readers a specimen of my work in that line.  But there is so
much difference of character in the verses which are produced at our
table, without any signature, that I feel quite sure there are at
least two or three other contributors besides myself.  There is a
tall, old-fashioned silver urn, a sugar-bowl of the period of the
Empire, in which the poems sent to be read are placed by unseen
hands.  When the proper moment arrives, I lift the cover of the urn
and take out any manuscript it may contain.  If conversation is going
on and the company are in a talking mood, I replace the manuscript or
manuscripts, clap on the cover, and wait until there is a moment's
quiet before taking it off again.  I might guess the writers
sometimes by the handwriting, but there is more trouble taken to
disguise the chirography than I choose to take to identify it as that
of any particular member of our company.

The turn the conversation took, especially the slashing onslaught of
Number Seven on the writers of verse, set me thinking and talking
about the matter.  Number Five turned on the stream of my discourse
by a question.

"You receive a good many volumes of verse, do you not?" she said,
with a look which implied that she knew I did.

I certainly do, I answered.  My table aches with them.  My shelves
groan with them.  Think of what a fuss Pope made about his trials,
when he complained that

          "All Bedlam or Parnassus is let out"!

What were the numbers of the

          "Mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease"

to that great multitude of contributors to our magazines, and authors
of little volumes--sometimes, alas! big ones--of verse, which pour
out of the press, not weekly, but daily, and at such a rate of
increase that it seems as if before long every hour would bring a
book, or at least an article which is to grow into a book by and by?

I thanked Heaven, the other day, that I was not a critic.  These
attenuated volumes of poetry in fancy bindings open their covers at
one like so many little unfledged birds, and one does so long to drop
a worm in,--a worm in the shape of a kind word for the poor
fledgling!  But what a desperate business it is to deal with this
army of candidates for immortality!  I have often had something to
say about them, and I may be saying over the same things; but if I do
not remember what I have said, it is not very likely that my reader
will; if he does, he will find, I am very sure, that I say it a
little differently.

What astonishes me is that this enormous mass of commonplace verse,
which burdens the postman who brings it, which it is a serious task
only to get out of its wrappers and open in two or three places, is
on the whole of so good an average quality.  The dead level of
mediocrity is in these days a table-land, a good deal above the old
sea-level of laboring incapacity.  Sixty years ago verses made a
local reputation, which verses, if offered today to any of our first-
class magazines, would go straight into the waste-basket.  To write
"poetry" was an art and mystery in which only a few noted men and a
woman or two were experts.

When "Potter the ventriloquist," the predecessor of the well-
remembered Signor Blitz, went round giving his entertainments, there
was something unexplained, uncanny, almost awful, and beyond dispute
marvellous, in his performances.  Those watches that disappeared and
came back to their owners, those endless supplies of treasures from
empty hats, and especially those crawling eggs that travelled all
over the magician's person, sent many a child home thinking that Mr.
Potter must have ghostly assistants, and raised grave doubts in the
minds of "professors," that is members of the church, whether they
had not compromised their characters by being seen at such an
unhallowed exhibition.  Nowadays, a clever boy who has made a study
of parlor magic can do many of those tricks almost as well as the
great sorcerer himself.  How simple it all seems when we have seen
the mechanism of the deception!

It is just so with writing in verse.  It was not understood that
everybody can learn to make poetry, just as they can learn the more
difficult tricks of juggling.  M. Jourdain's discovery that he had
been speaking and writing prose all his life is nothing to that of
the man who finds out in middle life, or even later, that he might
have been writing poetry all his days, if he had only known how
perfectly easy and simple it is.  Not everybody, it is true, has a
sufficiently good ear, a sufficient knowledge of rhymes and capacity
for handling them, to be what is called a poet.  I doubt whether more
than nine out of ten, in the average, have that combination of gifts
required for the writing of readable verse.

This last expression of opinion created a sensation among The
Teacups.  They looked puzzled for a minute.  One whispered to the
next Teacup, "More than nine out of ten!  I should think that was a
pretty liberal allowance."

Yes, I continued; perhaps ninety-nine in a hundred would come nearer
to the mark.  I have sometimes thought I might consider it worth
while to set up a school for instruction in the art.  "Poetry taught
in twelve lessons."  Congenital idiocy is no disqualification.
Anybody can write "poetry."  It is a most unenviable distinction to
leave published a thin volume of verse, which nobody wanted, nobody
buys, nobody reads, nobody cares for except the author, who cries
over its pathos, poor fellow, and revels in its beauties, which he
has all to himself.  Come! who will be my pupils in a Course,--Poetry
taught in twelve lessons?  That made a laugh, in which most of The
Teacups, myself included, joined heartily.  Through it all I heard
the sweet tones of Number Five's caressing voice; not because it was
more penetrating or louder than the others, for it was low and soft,
but it was so different from the others, there was so much more
life,--the life of sweet womanhood,--dissolved in it.

(Of course he will fall in love with her.  "He?  Who?"  Why, the
newcomer, the Counsellor.  Did I not see his eyes turn toward her as
the silvery notes rippled from her throat?  Did they not follow her
in her movements, as she turned her tread this or that way?

--What nonsense for me to be arranging matters between two people
strangers to each other before to-day!)

"A fellow writes in verse when he has nothing to say, and feels too
dull and silly to say it in prose," said Number Seven.

This made us laugh again, good-naturedly.  I was pleased with a kind
of truth which it seemed to me to wrap up in its rather startling
affirmation.  I gave a piece of advice the other day which I said I
thought deserved a paragraph to itself.  It was from a letter I wrote
not long ago to an unknown young correspondent, who had a longing for
seeing himself in verse but was not hopelessly infatuated with the
idea that he was born a "poet."  "When you write in prose," I said,
"you say what you mean.  When you write in verse you say what you
must."  I was thinking more especially of rhymed verse.  Rhythm alone
is a tether, and not a very long one.  But rhymes are iron fetters;
it is dragging a chain and ball to march under their incumbrance; it
is a clog-dance you are figuring in, when you execute your metrical
pas seul.  Consider under what a disadvantage your thinking powers
are laboring when you are handicapped by the inexorable demands of
our scanty English rhyming vocabulary!  You want to say something
about the heavenly bodies, and you have a beautiful line ending with
the word stars.  Were you writing in prose, your imagination, your
fancy, your rhetoric, your musical ear for the harmonies of language,
would all have full play.  But there is your rhyme fastening you by
the leg, and you must either reject the line which pleases you, or
you must whip your hobbling fancy and all your limping thoughts into
the traces which are hitched to one of three or four or half a dozen
serviceable words.  You cannot make any use of cars, I will suppose;
you have no occasion to talk about scars; "the red planet Mars" has
been used already; Dibdin has said enough about the gallant tars;
what is there left for you but bars?  So you give up your trains of
thought, capitulate to necessity, and manage to lug in some kind of
allusion, in place or out of place, which will allow you to make use
of bars.  Can there be imagined a more certain process for breaking
up all continuity of thought, for taking out all the vigor, all the
virility, which belongs to natural prose as the vehicle of strong,
graceful, spontaneous thought, than this miserable subjugation of
intellect to the-clink of well or ill matched syllables?  I think you
will smile if I tell you of an idea I have had about teaching the art
of writing "poems" to the half-witted children at the Idiot Asylum.
The trick of rhyming cannot be more usefully employed than in
furnishing a pleasant amusement to the poor feeble-minded children.
I should feel that I was well employed in getting up a Primer for the
pupils of the Asylum, and other young persons who are incapable of
serious thought and connected expression.  I would start in the
simplest way; thus:--

          When darkness veils the evening....
          I love to close my weary....

The pupil begins by supplying the missing words, which most children
who are able to keep out of fire and water can accomplish after a
certain number of trials.  When the poet that is to be has got so as
to perform this task easily, a skeleton verse, in which two or three
words of each line are omitted, is given the child to fill up.  By
and by the more difficult forms of metre are outlined, until at
length a feebleminded child can make out a sonnet, completely
equipped with its four pairs of rhymes in the first section and its
three pairs in the second part.

Number Seven interrupted my discourse somewhat abruptly, as is his
wont; for we grant him a license, in virtue of his eccentricity,
which we should hardly expect to be claimed by a perfectly sound
Teacup.

"That's the way,--that 's the way!" exclaimed he.  "It's just the
same thing as my plan for teaching drawing."

Some curiosity was shown among The Teacups to know what the queer
creature had got into his mind, and Number Five asked him, in her
irresistible tones, if he wouldn't oblige us by telling us all about
it.

He looked at her a moment without speaking.  I suppose he has often
been made fun of,--slighted in conversation, taken as a butt for
people who thought themselves witty, made to feel as we may suppose a
cracked piece of china-ware feels when it is clinked in the company
of sound bits of porcelain.  I never saw him when he was carelessly
dealt with in conversation,--for it would sometimes happen, even at
our table,--without recalling some lines of Emerson which always
struck me as of wonderful force and almost terrible truthfulness:--


         "Alas! that one is born in blight,
          Victim of perpetual slight
          When thou lookest in his face
          Thy heart saith, 'Brother, go thy ways
          None shall ask thee what thou doest,
          Or care a rush for what thou knowest,
          Or listen when thou repliest,
          Or remember where thou liest,
          Or how thy supper is sodden;'
          And another is born
          To make the sun forgotten."

Poor fellow!  Number Seven has to bear a good deal in the way of
neglect and ridicule, I do not doubt.  Happily, he is protected by an
amount of belief in himself which shields him from many assailants
who would torture a more sensitive nature.  But the sweet voice of
Number Five and her sincere way of addressing him seemed to touch his
feelings.  That was the meaning of his momentary silence, in which I
saw that his eyes glistened and a faint flush rose on his cheeks.  In
a moment, however, as soon as he was on his hobby, he was all right,
and explained his new and ingenious system as follows:

"A man at a certain distance appears as a dark spot,--nothing more.
Good.  Anybody, man, woman, or child, can make a dot, say a period,
such as we use in writing.  Lesson No. 1.  Make a dot; that is, draw
your man, a mile off, if that is far enough.  Now make him come a
little nearer, a few rods, say.  The dot is an oblong figure now.
Good.  Let your scholar draw the oblong figure.  It is as easy as it
is to make a note of admiration.  Your man comes nearer, and now some
hint of a bulbous enlargement at one end, and perhaps of lateral
appendages and a bifurcation, begins to show itself.  The pupil sets
down with his pencil just what he sees,--no more.  So by degrees the
man who serves as model approaches.  A bright pupil will learn to get
the outline of a human figure in ten lessons, the model coming five
hundred feet nearer each time.  A dull one may require fifty, the
model beginning a mile off, or more, and coming a hundred feet nearer
at each move."

The company were amused by all this, but could not help seeing that
there was a certain practical possibility about the scheme.  Our two
Annexes, as we call then, appeared to be interested in the project,
or fancy, or whim, or whatever the older heads might consider it.
"I guess I'll try it," said the American Annex.  "Quite so," answered
the English Annex.  Why the first girl "guessed" about her own
intentions it is hard to say.  What "quite so" referred to it would
not be easy to determine.  But these two expressions would decide the
nationality of our two young ladies if we met them on the top of the
great Pyramid.

I was very glad that Number Seven had interrupted me.  In fact, it is
a good thing once in a while to break in upon the monotony of a
steady talker at a dinner-table, tea-table, or any other place of
social converse.  The best talker is liable to become the most
formidable of bores.  It is a peculiarity of the bore that he is the
last person to find himself out.  Many a terebrant I have known who,
in that capacity, to borrow a line from Coleridge,

          "Was great, nor knew how great he was."

A line, by the way, which, as I have remarked, has in it a germ like
that famous "He builded better than he knew" of Emerson.

There was a slight lull in the conversation.  The Mistress, who keeps
an eye on the course of things, and feared that one of those panic
silences was impending, in which everybody wants to say something and
does not know just what to say, begged me to go on with my remarks
about the "manufacture" of "poetry."

You use the right term, madam, I said.  The manufacture of that
article has become an extensive and therefore an important branch of
industry.  One must be an editor, which I am not, or a literary
confidant of a wide circle of correspondents, which I am, to have any
idea of the enormous output of verse which is characteristic of our
time.  There are many curious facts connected with this phenomenon.
Educated people--yes, and many who are not educated--have discovered
that rhymes are not the private property of a few noted writers who,
having squatted on that part of the literary domain some twenty or
forty or sixty years ago, have, as it were, fenced it in with their
touchy, barbed-wire reputations, and have come to regard it and cause
it to be regarded as their private property.  The discovery having
been made that rhyme is not a paddock for this or that race-horse,
but a common, where every colt, pony, and donkey can range at will;
a vast irruption into that once-privileged inclosure has taken place.
The study of the great invasion is interesting.

Poetry is commonly thought to he the language of emotion.  On the
contrary, most of what is so called proves the absence of all
passionate excitement.  It is a cold-blooded, haggard, anxious,
worrying hunt after rhymes which can be made serviceable, after
images which will be effective, after phrases which are sonorous; all
this under limitations which restrict the natural movements of fancy
and imagination.  There is a secondary excitement in overcoming the
difficulties of rhythm and rhyme, no doubt, but this is not the
emotional heat excited by the subject of the "poet's" treatment.
True poetry, the best of it, is but the ashes of a burnt-out passion.
The flame was in the eye and in the cheek, the coals may be still
burning in the heart, but when we come to the words it leaves behind
it, a little warmth, a cinder or two just glimmering under the dead
gray ashes,--that is all we can look for.  When it comes to the
manufactured article, one is surprised to find how well the metrical
artisans have learned to imitate the real thing.  They catch all the
phrases of the true poet.  They imitate his metrical forms as a mimic
copies the gait of the person he is representing.

Now I am not going to abuse "these same metre ballad-mongers," for
the obvious reason that, as all The Teacups know, I myself belong to
the fraternity.  I don't think that this reason should hinder my
having my say about the ballad-mongering business.  For the last
thirty years I have been in the habit of receiving a volume of poems
or a poem, printed or manuscript--I will not say daily, though I
sometimes receive more than one in a day, but at very short
intervals.  I have been consulted by hundreds of writers of verse as
to the merit of their performances, and have often advised the
writers to the best of my ability.  Of late I have found it
impossible to attempt to read critically all the literary
productions, in verse and in prose, which have heaped themselves on
every exposed surface of my library, like snowdrifts along the
railroad tracks,--blocking my literary pathway, so that I can hardly
find my daily papers.

What is the meaning of this rush into rhyming of such a multitude of
people, of all ages, from the infant phenomenon to the oldest
inhabitant?

Many of my young correspondents have told me in so many words,
"I want to be famous."  Now it is true that of all the short cuts to
fame, in time of peace, there is none shorter than the road paved
with rhymes.  Byron woke up one morning and found himself famous.
Still more notably did Rouget de l'Isle fill the air of France, nay,
the whole atmosphere of freedom all the world over, with his name
wafted on the wings of the Marseillaise, the work of a single night.
But if by fame the aspirant means having his name brought before and
kept before the public, there is a much cheaper way of acquiring that
kind of notoriety.  Have your portrait taken as a "Wonderful Cure of
a Desperate Disease given up by all the Doctors."  You will get a
fair likeness of yourself and a partial biographical notice, and have
the satisfaction, if not of promoting the welfare of the community,
at least that of advancing the financial interests of the benefactor
whose enterprise has given you your coveted notoriety.  If a man
wants to be famous, he had much better try the advertising doctor
than the terrible editor, whose waste-basket is a maw which is as
insatiable as the temporary stomach of Jack the Giant-killer.

"You must not talk so," said Number Five.  "I know you don't mean any
wrong to the true poets, but you might be thought to hold them cheap,
whereas you value the gift in others,--in yourself too, I rather
think.  There are a great many women,--and some men,--who write in
verse from a natural instinct which leads them to that form of
expression.  If you could peep into the portfolio of all the
cultivated women among your acquaintances, you would be surprised, I
believe, to see how many of them trust their thoughts and feelings to
verse which they never think of publishing, and much of which never
meets any eyes but their own.  Don't be cruel to the sensitive
natures who find a music in the harmonies of rhythm and rhyme which
soothes their own souls, if it reaches no farther."

I was glad that Number Five spoke up as she did.  Her generous
instinct came to the rescue of the poor poets just at the right
moment.  Not that I meant to deal roughly with them, but the "poets"
I have been forced into relation with have impressed me with certain
convictions which are not flattering to the fraternity, and if my
judgments are not accompanied by my own qualifications, distinctions,
and exceptions, they may seem harsh to many readers.


Let me draw a picture which many a young man and woman, and some no
longer young, will recognize as the story of their own experiences.


--He is sitting alone with his own thoughts and memories.  What is
that book he is holding?  Something precious, evidently, for it is
bound in "tree calf," and there is gilding enough about it for a
birthday present.  The reader seems to be deeply absorbed in its
contents, and at times greatly excited by what he reads; for his face
is flushed, his eyes glitter, and--there rolls a large tear down his
cheek.  Listen to him; he is reading aloud in impassioned tones:

     And have I coined my soul in words for naught?
     And must I, with the dim, forgotten throng
     Of silent ghosts that left no earthly trace
     To show they once had breathed this vital air,
     Die out, of mortal memories?

His voice is choked by his emotion.  "How is it possible," he says to
himself, "that any one can read my 'Gaspings for Immortality' without
being impressed by their freshness, their passion, their beauty,
their originality?"  Tears come to his relief freely,--so freely that
be has to push the precious volume out of the range of their
blistering shower.  Six years ago "Gaspings for Immortality" was
published, advertised, praised by the professionals whose business it
is to boost their publishers' authors.  A week and more it was seen
on the counters of the booksellers and at the stalls in the railroad
stations.  Then it disappeared from public view.  A few copies still
kept their place on the shelves of friends,--presentation copies, of
course, as there is no evidence that any were disposed of by sale;
and now, one might as well ask for the lost books of Livy as inquire
at a bookstore for "Gaspings for Immortality."

The authors of these poems are all round us, men and women, and no
one with a fair amount of human sympathy in his disposition would
treat them otherwise than tenderly.  Perhaps they do not need tender
treatment.  How do you know that posterity may not resuscitate these
seemingly dead poems, and give their author the immortality for which
he longed and labored?  It is not every poet who is at once
appreciated.  Some will tell you that the best poets never are.  Who
can say that you, dear unappreciated brother or sister, are not one
of those whom it is left for after times to discover among the wrecks
of the past, and hold up to the admiration of the world?

I have not thought it necessary to put in all the interpellations, as
the French call them, which broke the course of this somewhat
extended series of remarks; but the comments of some of The Teacups
helped me to shape certain additional observations, and may seem to
the reader as of more significance than what I had been saying.

Number Seven saw nothing but the folly and weakness of the "rhyming
cranks," as he called them.  He thought the fellow that I had
described as blubbering over his still-born poems would have been
better occupied in earning his living in some honest way or other.
He knew one chap that published a volume of verses, and let his wife
bring up the wood for the fire by which he was writing.  A fellow
says, "I am a poet!" and he thinks himself different from common
folks.  He ought to be excused from military service.  He might be
killed, and the world would lose the inestimable products of his
genius.  "I believe some of 'em think," said Number Seven, "that they
ought not to be called upon to pay their taxes and their bills for
household expenses, like the rest of us."

"If they would only study and take to heart Horace's 'Ars Poetica,'"
said the Professor, "it would be a great benefit to them and to the
world at large.  I would not advise you to follow him too literally,
of course, for, as you will see, the changes that have taken place
since his time would make some of his precepts useless and some
dangerous, but the spirit of them is always instructive.  This is the
way, somewhat modernized and accompanied by my running commentary, in
which he counsels a young poet:

"'Don't try to write poetry, my boy, when you are not in the mood for
doing it,--when it goes against the grain.  You are a fellow of
sense,--you understand all that.

"'If you have written anything which you think well of, show it to
Mr.______ , the well-known critic; to "the governor," as you call
him,--your honored father; and to me, your friend.'

"To the critic is well enough, if you like to be overhauled and put
out of conceit with yourself,--it may do you good; but I wouldn't go
to 'the governor' with my verses, if I were you.  For either he will
think what you have written is something wonderful, almost as good as
he could have written himself,--in fact, he always did believe in
hereditary genius,--or he will pooh-pooh the whole rhyming nonsense,
and tell you that you had a great deal better stick to your business,
and leave all the word-jingling to Mother Goose and her followers.

"'Show me your verses,' says Horace.  Very good it was in him, and
mighty encouraging the first counsel he gives!  'Keep your poem to
yourself for some eight or ten years; you will have time to look it
over, to correct it and make it fit to present to the public.'

"'Much obliged for your advice,' says the poor poet, thirsting for a
draught of fame, and offered a handful of dust.  And off he hurries
to the printer, to be sure that his poem comes out in the next number
of the magazine he writes for."


"Is not poetry the natural language of lovers?"

It was the Tutor who asked this question, and I thought he looked in
the direction of Number Five, as if she might answer his question.
But Number Five stirred her tea devotedly; there was a lump of sugar,
I suppose, that acted like a piece of marble.  So there was a silence
while the lump was slowly dissolving, and it was anybody's chance who
saw fit to take up the conversation.

The voice that broke the silence was not the sweet, winsome one we
were listening for, but it instantly arrested the attention of the
company.  It was the grave, manly voice of one used to speaking, and
accustomed to be listened to with deference.  This was the first time
that the company as a whole had heard it, for the speaker was the
new-comer who has been repeatedly alluded to,--the one of whom I
spoke as "the Counsellor."

"I think I can tell you something about that," said the Counsellor.
"I suppose you will wonder how a man of my profession can know or
interest himself about a question so remote from his arid pursuits.
And yet there is hardly one man in a thousand who knows from actual
experience a fraction of what I have learned of the lovers'
vocabulary in my professional experience.  I have, I am sorry to say,
had to take an important part in a great number of divorce cases.
These have brought before me scores and hundreds of letters, in which
every shade of the great passion has been represented.  What has most
struck me in these amatory correspondences has been their remarkable
sameness.  It seems as if writing love-letters reduced all sorts of
people to the same level.  I don't remember whether Lord Bacon has
left us anything in that line,--unless, indeed, he wrote Romeo and
Juliet' and the 'Sonnets;' but if he has, I don't believe they differ
so very much from those of his valet or his groom to their respective
lady-loves.  It is always, My darling!  my darling!  The words of
endearment are the only ones the lover wants to employ, and he finds
the vocabulary too limited for his vast desires.  So his letters are
apt to be rather tedious except to the personage to whom they are
addressed.  As to poetry, it is very common to find it in love-
letters, especially in those that have no love in them.  The letters
of bigamists and polygamists are rich in poetical extracts.
Occasionally, an original spurt in rhyme adds variety to an otherwise
monotonous performance.  I don't think there is much passion in men's
poetry addressed to women.  I agree with The Dictator that poetry is
little more than the ashes of passion; still it may show that the
flame has had its sweep where you find it, unless, indeed, it is
shoveled in from another man's fireplace."

"What do you say to the love poetry of women?" asked the Professor.
"Did ever passion heat words to incandescence as it did those of
Sappho?"

The Counsellor turned,--not to Number Five, as he ought to have done,
according to my programme, but to the Mistress.

"Madam," he said, "your sex is adorable in many ways, but in the
abandon of a genuine love-letter it is incomparable.  I have seen a
string of women's love-letters, in which the creature enlaced herself
about the object of her worship as that South American parasite which
clasps the tree to which it has attached itself, begins with a
slender succulent network, feeds on the trunk, spreads its fingers
out to hold firmly to one branch after another, thickens, hardens,
stretches in every direction, following the boughs,--and at length
gets strong enough to hold in its murderous arms, high up in air, the
stump and shaft of the once sturdy growth that was its support and
subsistence."

The Counsellor did not say all this quite so formally as I have set
it down here, but in a much easier way.  In fact, it is impossible to
smooth out a conversation from memory without stiffening it; you
can't have a dress shirt look quite right without starching the
bosom.

Some of us would have liked to hear more about those letters in the
divorce cases, but the Counsellor had to leave the table.  He
promised to show us some pictures he has of the South American
parasite.  I have seen them, and I can assure you they are very
curious.

The following verses were found in the urn, or sugar-bowl.

                    CACOETHES SCRIBENDI.

          If all the trees in all the woods were men,
          And each and every blade of grass a pen;
          If every leaf on every shrub and tree
          Turned to a sheet of foolscap; every sea
          Were changed to ink, and all earth's living tribes
          Had nothing else to do but act as scribes,
          And for ten thousand ages, day and night,
          The human race should write, and write, and write,
          Till all the pens and paper were used up,
          And the huge inkstand was an empty cup,
          Still would the scribblers clustered round its brim
          Call for more pens, more paper, and more ink.




V

"Dolce, ma non troppo dolce," said the Professor to the Mistress, who
was sweetening his tea.  She always sweetens his and mine for us.  He
has been attending a series of concerts, and borrowed the form of the
directions to the orchestra.  "Sweet, but not too sweet," he said,
translating the Italian for the benefit of any of the company who
might not be linguists or musical experts.

"Do you go to those musical hullabaloos?" called out Number Seven.
There was something very much like rudeness in this question and the
tone in which it was asked.  But we are used to the outbursts, and
extravagances, and oddities of Number Seven, and do not take offence
at his rough speeches as we should if any other of the company
uttered them.

"If you mean the concerts that have been going on this season, yes, I
do," said the Professor, in a bland, good-humored way.

"And do you take real pleasure in the din of all those screeching and
banging and growling instruments?"

"Yes," he answered, modestly, "I enjoy the brouhaha, if you choose to
consider it such, of all this quarrelsome menagerie of noise-making
machines, brought into order and harmony by the presiding genius, the
leader, who has made a happy family of these snarling stringed
instruments and whining wind instruments, so that although

          "Linguae centum sent, oraque centum,

"notwithstanding there are a hundred vibrating tongues and a hundred
bellowing mouths, their one grand blended and harmonized uproar sets
all my fibres tingling with a not unpleasing tremor."

"Do you understand it?  Do you take any idea from it?  Do you know
what it all means?" said Number Seven.

The Professor was long-suffering under this series of somewhat
peremptory questions.  He replied very placidly, "I am afraid I have
but a superficial outside acquaintance with the secrets, the
unfathomable mysteries, of music.  I can no more conceive of the
working conditions of the great composer,

         "'Untwisting all the chains that tie
          The hidden soul of harmony,'

"than a child of three years can follow the reasonings of Newton's
'Principia.'  I do not even pretend that I can appreciate the work of
a great master as a born and trained musician does.  Still, I do love
a great crash of harmonies, and the oftener I listen to these musical
tempests the higher my soul seems to ride upon them, as the wild fowl
I see through my window soar more freely and fearlessly the fiercer
the storm with which they battle."

"That's all very well," said Number Seven, "but I wish we could get
the old-time music back again.  You ought to have heard,--no, I won't
mention her, dead, poor girl,--dead and singing with the saints in
heaven,--but the S_____ girls.  If you could have heard them as I did
when I was a boy, you would have cried, as we all used to.  Do you
cry at those great musical smashes?  How can you cry when you don't
know what it is all about?  We used to think the words meant
something,--we fancied that Burns and Moore said some things very
prettily.  I suppose you've outgrown all that."

No one can handle Number Seven in one of his tantrums half so well as
Number Five can do it.  She can pick out what threads of sense may be
wound off from the tangle of his ideas when they are crowded and
confused, as they are apt to be at times.  She can soften the
occasional expression of half-concealed ridicule with which the poor
old fellow's sallies are liable to be welcomed--or unwelcomed.  She
knows that the edge of a broken teacup may be sharper, very possibly,
than that of a philosopher's jackknife.  A mind a little off its
balance, one which has a slightly squinting brain as its organ; will
often prove fertile in suggestions.  Vulgar, cynical, contemptuous
listeners fly at all its weaknesses, and please themselves with
making light of its often futile ingenuities, when a wiser audience
would gladly accept a hint which perhaps could be developed in some
profitable direction, or so interpret an erratic thought that it
should prove good sense in disguise.  That is the way Number Five was
in the habit of dealing with the explosions of Number Seven.  Do you
think she did not see the ridiculous element in a silly speech, or
the absurdity of an outrageously extravagant assertion?  Then you
never heard her laugh when she could give way to her sense of the
ludicrous without wounding the feelings of any other person.  But her
kind heart never would forget itself, and so Number Seven had a
champion who was always ready to see that his flashes of
intelligence, fitful as they were, and liable to be streaked with
half-crazy fancies, always found one willing recipient of what light
there was in them.

Number Five, I have found, is a true lover of music, and has a right
to claim a real knowledge of its higher and deeper mysteries.  But
she accepted very cordially what our light-headed companion said
about the songs he used to listen to.

"There is no doubt," she remarked," that the tears which used to be
shed over 'Oft in the sully night,' or 'Auld Robin Gray,' or 'A place
in thy memory, dearest,' were honest tears, coming from the true
sources of emotion.  There was no affectation about them; those songs
came home to the sensibilities of young people,--of all who had any
sensibilities to be acted upon.  And on the other hand, there is a
great amount of affectation in the apparent enthusiasm of many
persons in admiring and applauding music of which they have not the
least real appreciation.  They do not know whether it is good or bad,
the work of a first-rate or a fifth-rate composer; whether there are
coherent elements in it, or whether it is nothing more than 'a
concourse of sweet sounds' with no organic connections.  One must be
educated, no doubt, to understand the more complex and difficult
kinds of musical composition.  Go to the great concerts where you
know that the music is good, and that you ought to like it whether
you do or not.  Take a music-bath once or twice a week for a few
seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water-bath
is to the body.  I wouldn't trouble myself about the affectations of
people who go to this or that series of concerts chiefly because it
is fashionable.  Some of these people whom we think so silly and hold
so cheap will perhaps find, sooner or later, that they have a dormant
faculty which is at last waking up,--and that they who came because
others came, and began by staring at the audience, are listening with
a newly found delight.  Every one of us has a harp under bodice or
waistcoat, and if it can only once get properly strung and tuned it
will respond to all outside harmonies."

The Professor has some ideas about music, which I believe he has
given to the world in one form or another; but the world is growing
old and forgetful, and needs to be reminded now and then of what one
has formerly told it.

"I have had glimpses," the Professor said, "of the conditions into
which music is capable of bringing a sensitive nature.  Glimpses, I
say, because I cannot pretend that I am capable of sounding all the
depths or reaching all the heights to which music may transport our
mortal consciousness.  Let me remind you of a curious fact with
reference to the seat of the musical sense.  Far down below the great
masses of thinking marrow and its secondary agents, just as the brain
is about to merge in the spinal cord, the roots of the nerve of
hearing spread their white filaments out into the sentient matter,
where they report what the external organs of hearing tell them.
This sentient matter is in remote connection only with the mental
organs, far more remote than the centres of the sense of vision and
that of smell.  In a word, the musical faculty might be said to have
a little brain of its own.  It has a special world and a private
language all to itself.  How can one explain its significance to
those whose musical faculties are in a rudimentary state of
development, or who have never had them trained?  Can you describe in
intelligible language the smell of a rose as compared with that of a
violet?  No,-- music can be translated only by music.  Just so far
as it suggests worded thought, it falls short of its highest office.
Pure emotional movements of the spiritual nature,--that is what I ask
of music.  Music will be the universal language,--the Volapuk of
spiritual being."

"Angels sit down with their harps and play at each other, I suppose,"
said Number Seven.  "Must have an atmosphere up there if they have
harps, or they wouldn't get any music.  Wonder if angels breathe like
mortals?  If they do, they must have lungs and air passages, of
course.  Think of an angel with the influenza, and nothing but a
cloud for a handkerchief!"

--This is a good instance of the way in which Number Seven's
squinting brain works.  You will now and then meet just such brains
in heads you know very well.  Their owners are much given to asking
unanswerable questions.  A physicist may settle it for us whether
there is an atmosphere about a planet or not, but it takes a brain
with an extra fissure in it to ask these unexpected questions,--
questions which the natural philosopher cannot answer, and which the
theologian never thinks of asking.

The company at our table do not keep always in the same places.  The
first thing I noticed, the other evening, was that the Tutor was
sitting between the two Annexes, and the Counsellor was next to
Number Five.  Something ought to come of this arrangement.  One of
those two young ladies must certainly captivate and perhaps capture
the Tutor.  They are just the age to be falling in love and to be
fallen in love with.  The Tutor is good looking, intellectual,
suspected of writing poetry, but a little shy, it appears to me.
I am glad to see him between the two girls.  If there were only one,
she might be shy too, and then there would be less chance for a
romance such as I am on the lookout for; but these young persons lend
courage to each other, and between them, if he does not wake up like
Cymon at the sight of Iphigenia, I shall be disappointed.  As for the
Counsellor and Number Five, they will soon find each other out.  Yes,
it is all pretty clear in my mind,--except that there is always an x
in a problem where sentiments are involved.  No, not so clear about
the Tutor.  Predestined, I venture my guess, to one or the other, but
to which?  I will suspend my opinion for the present.

I have found out that the Counsellor is a childless widower.  I am
told that the Tutor is unmarried, and so far as known not engaged.
There is no use in denying it,--a company without the possibility of
a love-match between two of its circle is like a champagne bottle
with the cork out for some hours as compared to one with its pop yet
in reserve.  However, if there should be any love-making, it need not
break up our conversations.  Most of it will be carried on away from
our tea-table.

Some of us have been attending certain lectures on Egypt and its
antiquities.  I have never been on the Nile.  If in any future state
there shall be vacations in which we may have liberty to revisit our
old home, equipped with a complete brand-new set of mortal senses as
our travelling outfit, I think one of the first places I should go
to, after my birthplace, the old gambrel-roofed house,--the place
where it stood, rather,-- would be that mighty, awe-inspiring river.
I do not suppose we shall ever know half of what we owe to the wise
and wonderful people who confront us with the overpowering monuments
of a past which flows out of the unfathomable darkness as the great
river streams from sources even as yet but imperfectly explored.

I have thought a good deal about Egypt, lately, with reference to our
historical monuments.  How did the great unknown mastery who fixed
the two leading forms of their monumental records arrive at those
admirable and eternal types, the pyramid and the obelisk?  How did
they get their model of the pyramid?

Here is an hour-glass, not inappropriately filled with sand from the
great Egyptian desert.  I turn it, and watch the sand as it
accumulates in the lower half of the glass.  How symmetrically, how
beautifully, how inevitably, the little particles pile up the cone,
which is ever building and unbuilding itself, always aiming at the
stability which is found only at a certain fixed angle!  The Egyptian
children playing in the sand must have noticed this as they let the
grains fall from their hands, and the sloping sides of the miniature
pyramid must have been among the familiar sights to the little boys
and girls for whom the sand furnished their earliest playthings.
Nature taught her children through the working of the laws of
gravitation how to build so that her forces should act in harmony
with art, to preserve the integrity of a structure meant to reach
a far-off posterity.  The pyramid is only the cone in which Nature
arranges her heaped and sliding fragments; the cone with flattened
Surfaces, as it is prefigured in certain well-known crystalline
forms.  The obelisk is from another of Nature's patterns; it is only
a gigantic acicular crystal.

The Egyptians knew what a monument should be, simple, noble, durable.
It seems to me that we Americans might take a lesson from those early
architects.  Our cemeteries are crowded with monuments which are very
far from simple, anything but noble, and stand a small chance of
being permanent.  The pyramid is rarely seen, perhaps because it
takes up so much room; and when built on a small scale seems
insignificant as we think of it, dwarfed by the vast structures of
antiquity.  The obelisk is very common, and when in just proportions
and of respectable dimensions is unobjectionable.

But the gigantic obelisks like that on Bunker Hill, and especially
the Washington monument at the national capital, are open to critical
animadversion.  Let us contrast the last mentioned of these great
piles with the obelisk as the Egyptian conceived and executed it.
The new Pharaoh ordered a memorial of some important personage or
event.  In the first place, a mighty stone was dislodged from its
connections, and lifted, unbroken, from the quarry.  This was a feat
from which our modern stone-workers shrink dismayed.  The Egyptians
appear to have handled these huge monoliths as our artisans handle
hearthstones and doorsteps, for the land actually bristled with such
giant columns.  They were shaped and finished as nicely as if they
were breastpins for the Titans to wear, and on their polished
surfaces were engraved in imperishable characters the records they
were erected to preserve.

Europe and America borrow these noble productions of African art and
power, and find them hard enough to handle after they have succeeded
in transporting them to Rome, or London, or New York.  Their
simplicity, grandeur, imperishability, speaking symbolism, shame all
the pretentious and fragile works of human art around them.  The
obelisk has no joints for the destructive agencies of nature to
attack; the pyramid has no masses hanging in unstable equilibrium,
and threatening to fall by their own weight in the course of a
thousand or two years.

America says the Father of his Country must have a monument worthy of
his exalted place in history.  What shall it be?  A temple such as
Athens might have been proud to rear upon her Acropolis?  An obelisk
such as Thebes might have pointed out with pride to the strangers who
found admission through her hundred gates?  After long meditation and
the rejection of the hybrid monstrosities with which the nation was
menaced, an obelisk is at last decided upon.  How can it be made
grand and dignified enough to be equal to the office assigned it?  We
dare not attempt to carve a single stone from the living rock,--all
our modern appliances fail to make the task as easy to us as it seems
to have been to the early Egyptians.  No artistic skill is required
in giving a four-square tapering figure to a stone column.  If we
cannot shape a solid obelisk of the proper dimensions, we can build
one of separate blocks.  How can we give it the distinction we demand
for it?  The nation which can brag that it has "the biggest show on
earth" cannot boast a great deal in the way of architecture, but it
can do one thing,--it can build an obelisk that shall be taller than
any structure now standing which the hand of man has raised.  Build
an obelisk!  How different the idea of such a structure from that of
the unbroken, unjointed prismatic shaft, one perfect whole, as
complete in itself, as fitly shaped and consolidated to defy the
elements, as the towering palm or the tapering pine!  Well, we had
the satisfaction for a time of claiming the tallest structure in the
world; and now that the new Tower of Babel which has sprung up in
Paris has killed that pretention, I think we shall feel and speak
more modestly about our stone hyperbole, our materialization of the
American love of the superlative.  We have the higher civilization
among us, and we must try to keep down the forth-putting instincts of
the lower.  We do not want to see our national monument placarded as
"the greatest show on earth,"--perhaps it is well that it is taken
down from that bad eminence.

I do not think that this speech of mine was very well received.  It
appeared to jar somewhat on the nerves of the American Annex.  There
was a smile on the lips of the other Annex,--the English girl,--which
she tried to keep quiet, but it was too plain that she enjoyed my
diatribe.

It must be remembered that I and the other Teacups, in common with
the rest of our fellow-citizens, have had our sensibilities greatly
worked upon, our patriotism chilled, our local pride outraged, by the
monstrosities which have been allowed to deform our beautiful public
grounds.  We have to be very careful in conducting a visitor, say
from his marble-fronted hotel to the City Hall.--Keep pretty
straight along after entering the Garden,--you will not care to
inspect the little figure of the military gentleman to your right.--
Yes, the Cochituate water is drinkable, but I think I would not turn
aside to visit that small fabric which makes believe it is a temple,
and is a weak-eyed fountain feebly weeping over its own
insignificance.  About that other stone misfortune, cruelly reminding
us of the "Boston Massacre," we will not discourse; it is not
imposing, and is rarely spoken of.

What a mortification to the inhabitants of a city with some
hereditary and contemporary claims to cultivation; which has noble
edifices, grand libraries, educational institutions of the highest
grade, an art-gallery filled with the finest models and rich in
paintings and statuary,--a stately city that stretches both arms
across the Charles to clasp the hands of Harvard, her twin-sister,
each lending lustre to the other like double stars,--what a pity that
she should be so disfigured by crude attempts to adorn her and
commemorate her past that her most loving children blush for her
artificial deformities amidst the wealth of her natural beauties!
One hardly knows which to groan over most sadly,--the tearing down of
old monuments, the shelling of the Parthenon, the overthrow of the
pillared temples of Rome, and in a humbler way the destruction of the
old Hancock house, or the erection of monuments which are to be a
perpetual eyesore to ourselves and our descendants.

We got talking on the subject of realism, of which so much has been
said of late.

It seems to me, I said, that the great additions which have been made
by realism to the territory of literature consist largely in swampy,
malarious, ill-smelling patches of soil which had previously been
left to reptiles and vermin.  It is perfectly easy to be original by
violating the laws of decency and the canons of good taste.  The
general consent of civilized people was supposed to have banished
certain subjects from the conversation of well-bred people and the
pages of respectable literature.  There is no subject, or hardly any,
which may not be treated of at the proper time, in the proper place,
by the fitting person, for the right kind of listener or reader.  But
when the poet or the story-teller invades the province of the man of
science, he is on dangerous ground.  I need say nothing of the
blunders he is pretty sure to make.  The imaginative writer is after
effects.  The scientific man is after truth.  Science is decent,
modest; does not try to startle, but to instruct.  The same scenes
and objects which outrage every sense of delicacy in the story
teller's highly colored paragraphs can be read without giving offence
in the chaste language of the physiologist or the physician.

There is a very celebrated novel, "Madame Bovary," the work of M.
Flaubert, which is noted for having been the subject of prosecution
as an immoral work.  That it has a serious lesson there is no doubt,
if one will drink down to the bottom of the cup.  But the honey of
sensuous description is spread so deeply over the surface of the
goblet that a large proportion of its readers never think of its
holding anything else.  All the phases of unhallowed passion are
described in full detail.  That is what the book is bought and read
for, by the great majority of its purchasers, as all but simpletons
very well know.  That is what makes it sell and brought it into the
courts of justice.  This book is famous for its realism; in fact, it
is recognized as one of the earliest and most brilliant examples of
that modern style of novel which, beginning where Balzac left off,
attempted to do for literature what the photograph has done for art.
For those who take the trouble to drink out of the cup below the rim
of honey, there is a scene where realism is carried to its extreme,
--surpassed in horror by no writer, unless it be the one whose name
must be looked for at the bottom of the alphabet, as if its natural
place were as low down in the dregs of realism as it could find
itself.  This is the death-bed scene, where Madame Bovary expires in
convulsions.  The author must have visited the hospitals for the
purpose of watching the terrible agonies he was to depict, tramping
from one bed to another until he reached the one where the cries and
contortions were the most frightful.  Such a scene he has reproduced.
No hospital physician would have pictured the straggle in such
colors.  In the same way, that other realist, M. Zola, has painted a
patient suffering from delirium tremens, the disease known to common
speech as "the horrors."  In describing this case he does all that
language can do to make it more horrible than the reality.  He gives
us, not realism, but super-realism, if such a term does not
contradict itself.

In this matter of the literal reproduction of sights and scenes which
our natural instinct and our better informed taste and judgment teach
us to avoid, art has been far in advance of literature.  It is three
hundred years since Joseph Ribera, more commonly known as
Spagnoletto, was born in the province Valencia, in Spain.  We had the
misfortune of seeing a painting of his in a collection belonging to
one of the French princes, and exhibited at the Art Museum.  It was
that of a man performing upon himself the operation known to the
Japanese as hararkiri.  Many persons who looked upon this revolting
picture will never get rid of its remembrance, and will regret the
day when their eyes fell upon it.  I should share the offence of the
painter if I ventured to describe it.  Ribera was fond of depicting
just such odious and frightful subjects.  "Saint Lawrence writhing on
his gridiron, Saint Sebastian full of arrows, were equally a source
of delight to him.  Even in subjects which had no such elements of
horror he finds the materials for the delectation of his ferocious
pencil; he makes up for the defect by rendering with a brutal realism
deformity and ugliness."

The first great mistake made by the ultra-realists; like Flaubert and
Zola, is, as I have said, their ignoring the line of distinction
between imaginative art and science.  We can find realism enough in
books of anatomy, surgery, and medicine.  In studying the human
figure, we want to see it clothed with its natural integuments.  It
is well for the artist to study the ecorche in the dissecting-room,
but we do not want the Apollo or the Venus to leave their skins
behind them when they go into the gallery for exhibition.  Lancisi's
figures show us how the great statues look when divested of their
natural covering.  It is instructive, but useful chiefly as a means
to aid in the true artistic reproduction of nature.  When the,
hospitals are invaded by the novelist, he should learn something from
the physician as well as from the patients.  Science delineates in
monochrome.  She never uses high tints and strontian lights to
astonish lookers-on.  Such scenes as Flaubert and Zola describe would
be reproduced in their essential characters, but not dressed up in
picturesque phrases.  That is the first stumbling-block in the way of
the reader of such realistic stories as those to which I have
referred.  There are subjects which must be investigated by
scientific men which most educated persons would be glad to know
nothing about.  When a realistic writer like Zola surprises his
reader into a kind of knowledge he never thought of wishing for, he
sometimes harms him more than he has any idea of doing.  He wants to
produce a sensation, and he leaves a permanent disgust not to be got
rid of.  Who does not remember odious images that can never be washed
out from the consciousness which they have stained?  A man's
vocabulary is terribly retentive of evil words, and the images they
present cling to his memory and will not loose their hold.  One who
has had the mischance to soil his mind by reading certain poems of
Swift will never cleanse it to its original whiteness.  Expressions
and thoughts of a certain character stain the fibre of the thinking
organ, and in some degree affect the hue of every idea that passes
through the discolored tissues.

This is the gravest accusation to bring against realism, old or
recent, whether in the brutal paintings of Spagnoletto or in the
unclean revelations of Zola.  Leave the description of the drains and
cesspools to the hygienic specialist, the painful facts of disease to
the physician, the details of the laundry to the washerwoman.  If we
are to have realism in its tedious descriptions of unimportant
particulars, let it be of particulars which do not excite disgust.
Such is the description of the vegetables in Zola's "Ventre de
Paris," where, if one wishes to see the apotheosis of turnips, beets,
and cabbages, he can find them glorified as supremely as if they had
been symbols of so many deities; their forms, their colors, their
expression, worked upon until they seem as if they were made to be
looked at and worshipped rather than to be boiled and eaten.

I am pleased to find a French critic of M. Flaubert expressing ideas
with which many of my own entirely coincide.  "The great mistake of
the realists," he says, "is that they profess to tell the truth
because they tell everything.  This puerile hunting after details,
this cold and cynical inventory of all the wretched conditions in the
midst of which poor humanity vegetates, not only do not help us to
understand it better, but, on the contrary, the effect on the
spectators is a kind of dazzled confusion mingled with fatigue and
disgust.  The material truthfulness to which the school of M.
Flaubert more especially pretends misses its aim in going beyond it.
Truth is lost in its own excess."

I return to my thoughts on the relations of imaginative art in all
its forms with science.  The subject which in the hands of the
scientific student is handled decorously,--reverently, we might
almost say,--becomes repulsive, shameful, and debasing in the
unscrupulous manipulations of the low-bred man of letters.

I confess that I am a little jealous of certain tendencies in our own
American literature, which led one of the severest and most outspoken
of our satirical fellow-countrymen, no longer living to be called to
account for it, to say; in a moment of bitterness, that the mission
of America was to vulgarize mankind.  I myself have sometimes
wondered at the pleasure some Old World critics have professed to
find in the most lawless freaks of New World literature.  I have
questioned whether their delight was not like that of the Spartans in
the drunken antics of their Helots.  But I suppose I belong to
another age, and must not attempt to judge the present by my old-
fashioned standards.

The company listened very civilly to these remarks, whether they
agreed with them or not.  I am not sure that I want all the young
people to think just as I do in matters of critical judgment.  New
wine does not go well into old bottles, but if an old cask has held
good wine, it may improve a crude juice to stand awhile upon the lees
of that which once filled it.

I thought the company had had about enough of this disquisition.
They listened very decorously, and the Professor, who agrees very
well with me, as I happen to know, in my views on this business of
realism, thanked me for giving them the benefit of my opinion.

The silence that followed was broken by Number Seven's suddenly
exclaiming,--

"I should like to boss creation for a week!"

This expression was an outbreak suggested by some train of thought
which Number Seven had been following while I was discoursing.  I do
not think one of the company looked as if he or she were shocked by
it as an irreligious or even profane speech.  It is a better way
always, in dealing with one of those squinting brains, to let it
follow out its own thought.  It will keep to it for a while; then it
will quit the rail, so to speak, and run to any side-track which may
present itself.

"What is the first thing you would do?" asked Number Five in a
pleasant, easy way.

"The first thing?  Pick out a few thousand of the best specimens of
the best races, and drown the rest like so many blind puppies."

"Why," said she, "that was tried once, and does not seem to have
worked very well."

"Very likely.  You mean Noah's flood, I suppose.  More people
nowadays, and a better lot to pick from than Noah had."

"Do tell us whom you would take with you," said Number Five.

"You, if you would go," he answered, and I thought I saw a slight
flush on his cheek.  "But I didn't say that I should go aboard the
new ark myself.  I am not sure that I should.  No, I am pretty sure
that I shouldn't.  I don't believe, on the whole, it would pay me to
save myself.  I ain't of much account.  But I could pick out some
that were."

And just now he was saying that he should like to boss the universe!
All this has nothing very wonderful about it.  Every one of us is
subject to alternations of overvaluation and undervaluation of
ourselves.  Do you not remember soliloquies something like this?
"Was there ever such a senseless, stupid creature as I am?  How have
I managed to keep so long out of the idiot asylum?  Undertook to
write a poem, and stuck fast at the first verse.  Had a call from a
friend who had just been round the world.  Did n't ask him one word
about what he had seen or heard, but gave him full details of my
private history, I having never been off my own hearth-rug for more
than an hour or two at a time, while he was circumnavigating and
circumrailroading the globe.  Yes, if anybody can claim the title, I
am certainly the prize idiot."  I am afraid that we all say such
things as this to ourselves at times.  Do we not use more emphatic
words than these in our self-depreciation?  I cannot say how it is
with others, but my vocabulary of self-reproach and humiliation is so
rich in energetic expressions that I should be sorry to have an
interviewer present at an outburst of one of its raging geysers, its
savage soliloquies.  A man is a kind of inverted thermometer, the
bulb uppermost, and the column of self-valuation is all the time
going up and down.  Number Seven is very much like other people in
this respect,--very much like you and me.

This train of reflections must not carry me away from Number Seven.

"If I can't get a chance to boss this planet for a week or so," he
began again, "I think 1 could write its history,--yes, the history of
the world, in less compass than any one who has tried it so far."

"You know Sir Walter Raleigh's 'History of the World,' of course?"
said the Professor.

"More or less,--more or less," said Number Seven prudently.  "But I
don't care who has written it before me.  I will agree to write the
story of two worlds, this and the next, in such a compact way that
you can commit them both to memory in less time than you can learn
the answer to the first question in the Catechism."

What he had got into his head we could not guess, but there was no
little curiosity to discover the particular bee which was buzzing in
his bonnet.  He evidently enjoyed our curiosity, and meant to keep us
waiting awhile before revealing the great secret.

"How many words do you think I shall want?"

It is a formula, I suppose, I said, and I will grant you a hundred
words.

"Twenty," said the Professor.  "That was more than the wise men of
Greece wanted for their grand utterances."

The two Annexes whispered together, and the American Annex gave their
joint result.  One thousand was the number they had fixed on.  They
were used to hearing lectures, and could hardly conceive that any
subject could be treated without taking up a good part of an hour.

"Less than ten," said Number Five.  "If there are to be more than
ten, I don't believe that Number Seven would think the surprise would
be up to our expectations."

"Guess as much as you like," said Number Seven.

"The answer will keep.  I don't mean to say what it is until we are
ready to leave the table." He took a blank card from his pocket-book,
wrote something on it, or appeared, at any rate, to write, and handed
it, face down, to the Mistress.  What was on the card will be found
near the end of this paper.  I wonder if anybody will be curious
enough to look further along to find out what it was before she reads
the next paragraph?

In the mean time there is a train of thought suggested by Number
Seven and his whims.  If you want to know how to account for
yourself, study the characters of your relations.  All of our brains
squint more or less.  There is not one in a hundred, certainly, that
does not sometimes see things distorted by double refraction, out of
plumb or out of focus, or with colors which do not belong to it, or
in some way betraying that the two halves of the brain are not acting
in harmony with each other.  You wonder at the eccentricities of this
or that connection of your own.  Watch yourself, and you will find
impulses which, but for the restraints you put upon them, would make
you do the same foolish things which you laugh at in that cousin of
yours.  I once lived in the same house with the near relative of a
very distinguished person, whose name is still honored and revered
among us.  His brain was an active one, like that of his famous
relative, but it was full of random ideas, unconnected trains of
thought, whims, crotchets, erratic suggestions.  Knowing him, I could
interpret the mental characteristics of the whole family connection
in the light of its exaggerated peculiarities as exhibited in my odd
fellow-boarder.  Squinting brains are a great deal more common than
we should at first sight believe.  Here is a great book, a solid
octavo of five hundred pages, full of the vagaries of this class of
organizations.  I hope to refer to this work hereafter, but just now
I will only say that, after reading till one is tired the strange
fancies of the squarers of the circle, the inventors of perpetual
motion, and the rest of the moonstruck dreamers, most persons will
confess to themselves that they have had notions as wild, conceptions
as extravagant, theories as baseless, as the least rational of those
which are here recorded.

Some day I want to talk about my library.  It is such a curious
collection of old and new books, such a mosaic of learning and
fancies and follies, that a glance over it would interest the
company.  Perhaps I may hereafter give you a talk abut books, but
while I am saying a few passing words upon the subject the greatest
bibliographical event that ever happened in the book-market of the
New World is taking place under our eyes.  Here is Mr. Bernard
Quaritch just come from his well-known habitat, No. 15 Piccadilly,
with such a collection of rare, beautiful, and somewhat expensive
volumes as the Western Continent never saw before on the shelves of a
bibliopole.

We bookworms are all of us now and then betrayed into an
extravagance.  The keen tradesmen who tempt us are like the fishermen
who dangle a minnow, a frog, or a worm before the perch or pickerel
who may be on the lookout for his breakfast.  But Mr. Quaritch comes
among us like that formidable angler of whom it is said,

     His hook he baited with a dragon's tail,
     And sat upon a rock and bobbed for whale.

The two catalogues which herald his coming are themselves interesting
literary documents.  One can go out with a few shillings in his
pocket, and venture among the books of the first of these catalogues
without being ashamed to show himself with no larger furnishing of
the means for indulging his tastes,--he will find books enough at
comparatively modest prices. But if one feels very rich, so rich that
it requires a good deal to frighten him, let him take the other
catalogue and see how many books he proposes to add to his library at
the prices affixed. Here is a Latin Psalter with the Canticles, from
the press of Fust and Schoeffer, the second book issued from their
press, the second book printed with a date, that date being 1459.
There are only eight copies of this work known to exist; you can have
one of them, if so disposed, and if you have change enough in your
pocket.  Twenty-six thousand two hundred and fifty dollars will make
you the happy owner of this precious volume.  If this is more than
you want to pay, you can have the Gold Gospels of Henry VIII., on
purple vellum, for about half the money.  There are pages on pages of
titles of works any one of which would be a snug little property if
turned into money at its catalogue price.

Why will not our multimillionaires look over this catalogue of Mr.
Quaritch, and detain some of its treasures on this side of the
Atlantic for some of our public libraries?  We decant the choicest
wines of Europe into our cellars; we ought to be always decanting the
precious treasures of her libraries and galleries into our own, as we
have opportunity and means.  As to the means, there are so many rich
people who hardly know what to do with their money that it is well to
suggest to them any new useful end to which their superfluity may
contribute.  I am not in alliance with Mr. Quaritch; in fact, I am
afraid of him, for if I stayed a single hour in his library, where I
never was but once, and then for fifteen minutes only, I should leave
it so much poorer than I entered it that I should be reminded of the
picture in the titlepage of Fuller's 'Historie of the Holy Warre,'
"We went out full.  We returned empty."

--After the teacups were all emptied, the card containing Number
Seven's abridged history of two worlds, this and the next, was handed
round.

This was all it held:

After all had looked at it, it was passed back to me.  "Let The
Dictator interpret it," they all said.

This is what I announced as my interpretation:

Two worlds, the higher and the lower, separated by the thinnest of
partitions.  The lower world is that of questions; the upper world is
that of answers.  Endless doubt and unrest here below; wondering,
admiring, adoring certainty above.--Am I not right?

"You are right," answered Number Seven solemnly.  "That is my
revelation."

The following poem was found in the sugar-bowl.

I read it to the company.  There was much whispering and there were
many conjectures as to its authorship, but every Teacup looked
innocent, and we separated each with his or her private conviction.
I had mine, but I will not mention it.


          THE ROSE AND THE FERN.

Lady, life's sweetest lesson wouldst thou learn,
Come thou with me to Love's enchanted bower:
High overhead the trellised roses burn;
Beneath thy feet behold the feathery fern,
A leaf without a flower.

What though the rose leaves fall?  They still are sweet,
And have been lovely in their beauteous prime,
While the bare frond seems ever to repeat,
"For us no bud, no blossom, wakes to greet
The joyous flowering time!"

Heed thou the lesson.  Life has leaves to tread
And flowers to cherish; summer round thee glows;
Wait not till autumn's fading robes are shed,
But while its petals still are burning red
Gather life's full-blown rose!




VI

Of course the reading of the poem at the end of the last paper has
left a deep impression.  I strongly suspect that something very much
like love-making is going on at our table.  A peep under the lid of
the sugar-bowl has shown me that there is another poem ready for the
company.  That receptacle is looked upon with an almost tremulous
excitement by more than one of The Teacups.  The two Annexes turn
towards the mystic urn as if the lots which were to determine their
destiny were shut up in it.  Number Five, quieter, and not betraying
more curiosity than belongs to the sex at all ages, glances at the
sugarbowl now and then; looking so like a clairvoyant, that sometimes
I cannot help thinking she must be one.  There is a sly look about
that young Doctor's eyes, which might imply that he knows something
about what the silver vessel holds, or is going to hold.  The Tutor
naturally falls under suspicion, as he is known to have written and
published poems.  I suppose the Professor and myself have hardly been
suspected of writing love-poems; but there is no telling,--there is
no telling.  Why may not some one of the lady Teacups have played the
part of a masculine lover?  George Sand, George Eliot, Charles Egbert
Craddock, made pretty good men in print.  The authoress of "Jane
Eyre" was taken for a man by many persons.  Can Number Five be
masquerading in verse?  Or is one of the two Annexes the make.
believe lover?  Or did these girls lay their heads together, and send
the poem we had at our last sitting to puzzle the company?  It is
certain that the Mistress did not write the poem.  It is evident that
Number Seven, who is so severe in his talk about rhymesters, would
not, if he could, make such a fool of himself as to set up for a
"poet."  Why should not the Counsellor fall in love and write verses?
A good many lawyers have been "poets."

Perhaps the next poem, which may be looked for in its proper place,
may help us to form a judgment.  We may have several verse-writers
among us, and if so there will be a good opportunity for the exercise
of judgment in distributing their productions among the legitimate
claimants.  In the mean time, we must not let the love-making and the
song-writing interfere with the more serious matters which these
papers are expected to contain.

Number Seven's compendious and comprehensive symbolism proved
suggestive, as his whimsical notions often do.  It always pleases me
to take some hint from anything he says when I can, and carry it out
in a direction not unlike that of his own remark.  I reminded the
company of his enigmatical symbol.

You can divide mankind in the same way, I said.  Two words, each of
two letters, will serve to distinguish two classes of human beings
who constitute the principal divisions of mankind.  Can any of you
tell what those two words are?

"Give me five letters," cried Number Seven, "and I can solve your
problem!  F-o-o-1-s,--those five letters will give you the first and
largest half.  For the other fraction"--

Oh, but, said I, I restrict you absolutely to two letters.  If you
are going to take five, you may as well take twenty or a hundred.

After a few attempts, the company gave it up.  The nearest approach
to the correct answer was Number Five's guess of Oh and Ah: Oh
signifying eternal striving after an ideal, which belongs to one kind
of nature; and Ah the satisfaction of the other kind of nature, which
rests at ease in what it has attained.

Good!  I said to Number Five, but not the answer I am after.  The
great division between human beings is into the Ifs and the Ases.

"Is the last word to be spelt with one or two s's?" asked the young
Doctor.

The company laughed feebly at this question.  I answered it soberly.
With one s.  There are more foolish people among the Ifs than there
are among the Ases.

The company looked puzzled, and asked for an explanation.

This is the meaning of those two words as I interpret them:
If it were,--if it might be,--if it could be,--if it had been.  One
portion of mankind go through life always regretting, always whining,
always imagining.  These are the people whose backbones remain
cartilaginous all their lives long, as do those of certain other
vertebrate animals,--the sturgeons, for instance.  A good many poets
must be classed with this group of vertebrates.

As it is,--this is the way in which the other class of people look at
the conditions in which they find themselves.  They may be optimists
or pessimists, they are very largely optimists,--but, taking things
just as they find them, they adjust the facts to their wishes if they
can; and if they cannot, then they adjust themselves to the facts.  I
venture to say that if one should count the Ifs and the Ases in the
conversation of his acquaintances, he would find the more able and
important persons among them--statesmen, generals, men of business--
among the Ases, and the majority of the conspicuous failures among
the Ifs.  I don't know but this would be as good a test as that of
Gideon,--lapping the water or taking it up in the hand.  I have a
poetical friend whose conversation is starred as thick with ifs as a
boiled ham is with cloves.  But another friend of mine, a business
man, whom I trust in making my investments, would not let me meddle
with a certain stock which I fancied, because, as he said, "there are
too many ifs in it.  As it looks now, I would n't touch it."

I noticed, the other evening, that some private conversation was
going on between the Counsellor and the two Annexes.  There was a
mischievous look about the little group, and I thought they were
hatching some plot among them.  I did not hear what the English Annex
said, but the American girl's voice was sharper, and I overheard what
sounded to me like, "It is time to stir up that young Doctor."  The
Counsellor looked very knowing, and said that he would find a chance
before long.  I was rather amused to see how readily he entered into
the project of the young people.  The fact is, the Counsellor is
young for his time of life; for he already betrays some signs of the
change referred to in that once familiar street song, which my
friend, the great American surgeon, inquired for at the music-shops
under the title, as he got it from the Italian minstrel,

          "Silva tredi mondi goo."

I saw, soon after this, that the Counsellor was watching his chance
to "stir up the young Doctor."

It does not follow, because our young Doctor's bald spot is slower in
coming than he could have wished, that he has not had time to form
many sound conclusions in the calling to which he has devoted himself
Vesalius, the father of modern descriptive anatomy, published his
great work on that subject before he was thirty.  Bichat, the great
anatomist and physiologist, who died near the beginning of this
century, published his treatise, which made a revolution in anatomy
and pathology, at about the same age; dying soon after he had reached
the age of thirty.  So, possibly the Counsellor may find that he has
"stirred up" a young man who, can take care of his own head, in case
of aggressive movements in its direction.

"Well, Doctor," the Counsellor began, "how are stocks in the measles
market about these times?  Any corner in bronchitis?  Any syndicate
in the vaccination business?"  All this playfully.

"I can't say how it is with other people's patients; most of my
families are doing very well without my help, at this time."

"Do tell me, Doctor, how many families you own.  I have heard it said
that some of our fellow-citizens have two distinct families, but you
speak as if you had a dozen."

"I have, but not so large a number as I should like.  I could take
care of fifteen or twenty more without: having to work too hard."

"Why, Doctor, you are as bad as a Mormon.  What do you mean by
calling certain families yours?"

"Don't you speak about my client?  Don't your clients call you their
lawyer?  Does n't your baker, does n't your butcher, speak of the
families he supplies as his families?"

To be sure, yes, of course they do; but I had a notion that a man had
as many doctors as he had organs to be doctored."

"Well, there is some truth in that; but did you think the old-
fashioned family doctor was extinct, a fossil like the megatherium?"

"Why, yes, after the recent experience of a friend of mine, I did
begin to think that there would soon be no such personage left as
that same old-fashioned family doctor.  Shall I tell you what that
experience was?"

The young Doctor said be should be mightily pleased to hear it.  He
was going to be one of those old-fogy practitioners himself.

"I don't know," the Counsellor said, "whether my friend got all the
professional terms of his story correctly, nor whether I have got
them from him without making any mistakes; but if I do make blunders
in some of the queer names, you can correct me.  This is my friend's
story:

"My family doctor,' he said, "was a very sensible man, educated at a
school where they professed to teach all the specialties, but not
confining himself to any one branch of medical practice.  Surgical
practice he did not profess to meddle with, and there were some
classes of patients whom he was willing to leave to the female
physician.  But throughout the range of diseases not requiring
exceptionally skilled manual interference, his education had
authorized him to consider himself, and he did consider himself,
qualified to undertake the treatment of all ordinary cases--It so
happened that my young wife was one of those uneasy persons who are
never long contented with their habitual comforts and blessings, but
always trying to find something a little better, something newer, at
any rate.  I was getting to be near fifty years old, and it happened
to me, as it not rarely does to people at about that time of life,
that my hair began to fall out.  I spoke of it to my doctor, who
smiled, said it was a part of the process of reversed evolution, but
might be retarded a little, and gave me a prescription.  I did not
find any great effect from it, and my wife would have me go to a
noted dermatologist.  The distinguished specialist examined my
denuded scalp with great care.  He looked at it through a strong
magnifier.  He examined the bulb of a fallen hair in a powerful
microscope.  He deliberated for a while, and then said, "This is a
case of alopecia.  It may perhaps be partially remedied.  I will give
you a prescription."  Which he did, and told me to call again in a
fortnight.  At the end of three months I had called six times, and
each time got a new recipe, and detected no difference in the course
of my "alopecia."  After I had got through my treatment, I showed my
recipes to my family physician; and we found that three of them were
the same he had used, familiar, old-fashioned remedies, and the
others were taken from a list of new and little-tried prescriptions
mentioned in one of the last medical journals, which was lying on the
old doctor's table.  I might as well have got no better under his
charge, and should have got off much cheaper.

"The next trouble I had was a little redness of the eyes, for which
my doctor gave me a wash; but my wife would have it that I must see
an oculist.  So I made four visits to an oculist, and at the last
visit the redness was nearly gone,--as it ought to have been by that
time.  The specialist called my complaint conjunctivitis, but that
did not make it feel any better nor get well any quicker.  If I had
had a cataract or any grave disease of the eye, requiring a nice
operation on that delicate organ, of course I should have properly
sought the aid of an expert, whose eye, hand, and judgment were
trained to that special business; but in this case I don't doubt that
my family doctor would have done just as well as the expert.
However, I had to obey orders, and my wife would have it that I
should entrust my precious person only to the most skilful specialist
in each department of medical practice.

"In the course of the year I experienced a variety of slight
indispositions.  For these I was auriscoped by an aurist,
laryngoscoped by a laryngologist, ausculted by a stethoscopist, and
so on, until a complete inventory of my organs was made out, and I
found that if I believed all these searching inquirers professed to
have detected in my unfortunate person, I could repeat with too
literal truth the words of the General Confession, "And there is no
health in us."  I never heard so many hard names in all my life.  I
proved to be the subject of a long catalogue of diseases, and what
maladies I was not manifestly guilty of I was at least suspected of
harboring.  I was handed along all the way from alopecia, which used
to be called baldness, to zoster, which used to be known as shingles.
I was the patient of more than a dozen specialists.  Very pleasant
persons, many of them, but what a fuss they made about my trifling
incommodities!  Please look at that photograph.  See if there is a
minute elevation under one eye.'

"'On which side?' I asked him, for I could not be sure there was
anything different on one side from what I saw on the other.

"'Under the left eye.  I called it a pimple; the specialist called it
acne.  Now look at this photograph.  It was taken after my acne had
been three months under treatment.  It shows a little more distinctly
than in the first photograph, does n't it?'

"'I think it does,' I answered.  'It does n't seem to me that you
gained a great deal by leaving your customary adviser for the
specialist.'

"'Well,' my friend continued, 'following my wife's urgent counsel, I
kept on, as I told you, for a whole year with my specialists, going
from head to foot, and tapering off with a chiropodist.  I got a deal
of amusement out of their contrivances and experiments.  Some of them
lighted up my internal surfaces with electrical or other illuminating
apparatus.  Thermometers, dynamometers, exploring-tubes, little
mirrors that went half-way down to my stomach, tuning-forks,
ophthalmoscopes, percussion-hammers, single and double stethoscopes,
speculums, sphygmometers,--such a battery of detective instruments I
had never imagined.  All useful, I don't doubt; but at the end of the
year I began to question whether I should n't have done about as well
to stick to my long tried practitioner.  When the bills for
"professional services" came in, and the new carpet had to be given
up, and the old bonnet trimmed over again, and the sealskin sack
remained a vision, we both agreed, my wife and I, that we would try
to get along without consulting specialists, except in such cases as
our family physician considered to be beyond his skill.'"

The Counsellor's story of his friend's experiences seemed to please
the young Doctor very much.  It "stirred him up," but in an agreeable
way; for, as he said, he meant to devote himself to family practice,
and not to adopt any limited class of cases as a specialty.  I liked
his views so well that I should have been ready to adopt them as my
own, if they had been challenged.

               The young Doctor discourses.

"I am very glad," he said, "that we have a number of practitioners
among us who confine themselves to the care of single organs and
their functions.  I want to be able to consult an oculist who has
done nothing but attend to eyes long enough to know all that is known
about their diseases and their treatment,--skilful enough to be
trusted with the manipulation of that delicate and most precious
organ.  I want an aurist who knows all about the ear and what can be
done for its disorders.  The maladies of the larynx are very ticklish
things to handle, and nobody should be trusted to go behind the
epiglottis who has not the tactus eruditus.  And so of certain other
particular classes of complaints.  A great city must have a limited
number of experts, each a final authority, to be appealed to in cases
where the family physician finds himself in doubt.  There are
operations which no surgeon should be willing to undertake unless he
has paid a particular, if not an exclusive, attention to the cases
demanding such operations.  All this I willingly grant.

"But it must not be supposed that we can return to the methods of the
old Egyptians--who, if my memory serves me correctly, had a special
physician for every part of the body--without falling into certain
errors and incurring certain liabilities.

"The specialist is much like other people engaged in lucrative
business.  He is apt to magnify his calling, to make much of any
symptom which will bring a patient within range of his battery of
remedies.  I found a case in one of our medical journals, a couple of
years ago, which illustrates what I mean.  Dr. ___________  of
Philadelphia, had a female patient with a crooked nose,--deviated
septum, if our young scholars like that better.  She was suffering
from what the doctor called reflex headache.  She had been to an
oculist, who found that the trouble was in her eyes.  She went from
him to a gynecologist, who considered her headache as owing to causes
for which his specialty had the remedies.  How many more specialists
would have appropriated her, if she had gone the rounds of them all,
I dare not guess; but you remember the old story of the siege, in
which each artisan proposed means of defence which be himself was
ready to furnish.  Then a shoemaker said, 'Hang your walls with new
boots.'

"Human nature is the same with medical specialists as it was with
ancient cordwainers, and it is too possible that a hungry
practitioner may be warped by his interest in fastening on a patient
who, as he persuades himself, comes under his medical jurisdiction.
The specialist has but one fang with which to seize and bold his
prey, but that fang is a fearfully long and sharp canine.  Being
confined to a narrow field of observation and practice, he is apt to
give much of his time to curious study, which may be magnifique, but
is not exactly la guerre against the patient's malady.  He divides
and subdivides, and gets many varieties of diseases, in most respects
similar.  These he equips with new names, and thus we have those
terrific nomenclatures which are enough to frighten the medical
student, to say nothing of the sufferers staggering under this long
catalogue of local infirmities.  The 'old-fogy' doctor, who knows the
family tendencies of his patient, who 'understands his constitution,'
will often treat him better than the famous specialist, who sees him
for the first time, and has to guess at many things 'the old doctor'
knows from his previous experience with the same patient and the
family to which he belongs.

"It is a great luxury to practise as a specialist in almost any class
of diseases.  The special practitioner has his own hours, hardly
needs a night-bell, can have his residence out of the town in which
he exercises his calling, in short, lives like a gentleman; while the
hard-worked general practitioner submits to a servitude more exacting
than that of the man who is employed in his stable or in his kitchen.
That is the kind of life I have made up my mind to."

The teaspoons tinkled all round the table.  This was the usual sign
of approbation, instead of the clapping of hands.

The young Doctor paused, and looked round among The Teacups.  "I beg
your pardon," he said, "for taking up so much of your time with
medicine.  It is a subject that a good many persons, especially
ladies, take an interest in and have a curiosity about, but I have no
right to turn this tea-table into a lecture platform."

"We should like to hear you talk longer about it," said the English
Annex.  "One of us has thought of devoting herself to the practice of
medicine.  Would you lecture to us; if you were a professor in one of
the great medical schools?"

"Lecture to students of your sex?  Why not, I should like to know?  I
don't think it is the calling for which the average woman is
especially adapted, but my teacher got a part of his medical
education from a lady, Madame Lachapelle; and I don't see why, if one
can learn from a woman, he may not teach a woman, if he knows
enough."

"We all like a little medical talk now and then," said Number Five,
"and we are much obliged to you for your discourse.  You are
specialist enough to take care of a sprained ankle, I suppose, are
you not?"

"I hope I should be equal to that emergency," answered the young
Doctor; "but I trust you are not suffering from any such accident?"

"No," said Number Five, "but there is no telling what may happen.  I
might slip, and get a sprain or break a sinew, or something, and I
should like to know that there is a practitioner at hand to take care
of my injury.  I think I would risk myself in your bands, although
you are not a specialist.  Would you venture to take charge of the
case?"

"Ah, my dear lady," he answered gallantly, "the risk would be in the
other direction.  I am afraid it would be safer for your doctor if he
were an older man than I am."

This is the first clearly, indisputably sentimental outbreak which
has happened in conversation at our table.  I tremble to think what
will come of it; for we have several inflammable elements in our
circle, and a spark like this is liable to light on any one or two of
them.

I was not sorry that this medical episode came in to vary the usual
course of talk at our table.  I like to have one--of an intelligent
company, who knows anything thoroughly, hold the floor for a time,
and discourse upon the subject which chiefly engages his daily
thoughts and furnishes his habitual occupation.  It is a privilege to
meet such a person now and then, and let him have his full swing.
But because there are "professionals" to whom we are willing to
listen as oracles, I do not want to see everybody who is not a
"professional" silenced or snubbed, if he ventures into any field of
knowledge which he has not made especially his own.  I like to read
Montaigne's remarks about doctors, though he never took a medical
degree.  I can even enjoy the truth in the sharp satire of Voltaire
on the medical profession.  I frequently prefer the remarks I hear
from the pew after the sermon to those I have just been hearing from
the pulpit.  There are a great many things which I never expect to
comprehend, but which I desire very much to apprehend.  Suppose that
our circle of Teacups were made up of specialists,--experts in
various departments.  I should be very willing that each one should
have his innings at the proper time, when the company were ready for
him.  But the time is coming when everybody will know something about
every thing.  How can one have the illustrated magazines, the
"Popular Science Monthly," the Psychological journals, the
theological periodicals, books on all subjects, forced on his
attention, in their own persons, so to speak, or in the reviews which
analyze and pass judgment upon them, without getting some ideas which
belong to many provinces of human intelligence?  The air we breathe
is made up of four elements, at  least: oxygen, nitrogen, carbonic
acid gas, and knowledge.  There is something quite delightful to
witness in the absorption and devotion of a genuine specialist.
There is a certain sublimity in that picture of the dying scholar in
Browning's "A Grammarian's Funeral:"--

    "So with the throttling hands of death at strife,
          Ground he at grammar;
     Still, through the rattle, parts of speech were rife;
          While he could stammer
     He settled Hoti's business--let it be--
          Properly based Oun
     Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De,
          Dead from the waist down."

A genuine enthusiasm, which will never be satisfied until it has
pumped the well dry at the bottom of which truth is lying, always
excites our interest, if not our admiration.

One of the pleasantest of our American writers, whom we all remember
as Ik Marvel, and greet in his more recent appearance as Donald Grant
Mitchell, speaks of the awkwardness which he feels in offering to the
public a "panoramic view of British writers in these days of
specialists,--when students devote half a lifetime to the analysis of
the works of a single author, and to the proper study of a single
period."

He need not have feared that his connected sketches of "English
Lands, Letters and Kings" would be any less welcome because they do
not pretend to fill up all the details or cover all the incidents
they hint in vivid outline.  How many of us ever read or ever will
read Drayton's "Poly-Olbion?"  Twenty thousand long Alexandrines are
filled with admirable descriptions of scenery, natural productions,
and historical events, but how many of us in these days have time to
read and inwardly digest twenty thousand Alexandrine verses?  I fear
that the specialist is apt to hold his intelligent reader or hearer
too cheap.  So far as I have observed in medical specialties, what he
knows in addition to the knowledge of the well-taught general
practitioner is very largely curious rather than important.  Having
exhausted all that is practical, the specialist is naturally tempted
to amuse himself with the natural history of the organ or function he
deals with; to feel as a writing-master does when he sets a copy,--
not content to shape the letters properly, but he must add flourishes
and fancy figures, to let off his spare energy.

I am beginning to be frightened.  When I began these papers, my idea
was a very simple and innocent one.  Here was a mixed company, of
various conditions, as I have already told my readers, who came
together regularly, and before they were aware of it formed something
like a club or association.  As I was the patriarch among them, they
gave me the name some of you may need to be reminded of; for as these
reports are published at intervals, you may not remember the fact
that I am what The Teacups have seen fit to call The Dictator.

Now, what did I expect when I began these papers, and what is it that
has begun to frighten me?

I expected to report grave conversations and light colloquial
passages of arms among the members of the circle.  I expected to
hear, perhaps to read, a paper now and then.  I expected to have,
from time to time, a poem from some one of The Teacups, for I felt
sure there must be among them one or more poets,--Teacups of the
finer and rarer translucent kind of porcelain, to speak
metaphorically.

Out of these conversations and written contributions I thought I
might make up a readable series of papers; a not wholly unwelcome
string of recollections, anticipations, suggestions, too often
perhaps repetitions, that would be to the twilight what my earlier
series had been to the morning.

I hoped also that I should come into personal relations with my old
constituency, if I may call my nearer friends, and those more distant
ones who belong to my reading parish, by that name.  It is time that
I should.  I received this blessed morning--I am telling the literal
truth--a highly flattering obituary of myself in the shape of an
extract from "Le National" of the 10th of February last.  This is a
bi-weekly newspaper, published in French, in the city of Plattsburg,
Clinton County, New York.  I am occasionally reminded by my unknown
friends that I must hurry up their autograph, or make haste to copy
that poem they wish to have in the author's own handwriting, or it
will be too late; but I have never before been huddled out of the
world in this way.  I take this rather premature obituary as a hint
that, unless I come to some arrangement with my well-meaning but
insatiable correspondents, it would be as well to leave it in type,
for I cannot bear much longer the load they lay upon me.  I will
explain myself on this point after I have told my readers what has
frightened me.

I am beginning to think this room where we take our tea is more like
a tinder-box than a quiet and safe place for "a party in a parlor."
It is true that there are at least two or three incombustibles at our
table, but it looks to me as if the company might pair off before the
season is over, like the crew of Her Majesty's ship the Mantelpiece,
--three or four weddings clear our whole table of all but one or two
of the impregnables.  The poem we found in the sugar-bowl last week
first opened my eyes to the probable state of things.  Now, the idea
of having to tell a love-story,--perhaps two or three love-stories,
--when I set out with the intention of repeating instructive, useful,
or entertaining discussions, naturally alarms me.  It is quite true
that many things which look to me suspicious may be simply playful.
Young people (and we have several such among The Teacups) are fond of
make-believe courting when they cannot have the real thing,--
"flirting," as it used to be practised in the days of Arcadian
innocence, not the more modern and more questionable recreation which
has reached us from the home of the cicisbeo.  Whatever comes of it,
I shall tell what I see, and take the consequences.

But I am at this moment going to talk in my own proper person to my
own particular public, which, as I find by my correspondence, is a
very considerable one, and with which I consider myself in
exceptionally pleasant relations.

I have read recently that Mr. Gladstone receives six hundred letters
a day.  Perhaps he does not receive six hundred letters every day,
but if he gets anything like half that number daily, what can he do
with them?  There was a time when he was said to answer all his
correspondents.  It is understood, I think, that he has given up
doing so in these later days.

I do not pretend that I receive six hundred or even sixty letters a
day, but I do receive a good many, and have told the public of the
fact from time to time, under the pressure of their constantly
increasing exertions.  As it is extremely onerous, and is soon going
to be impossible, for me to keep up the wide range of correspondence
which has become a large part of my occupation, and tends to absorb
all the vital force which is left me, I wish to enter into a final
explanation with the well-meaning but merciless taskmasters who have
now for many years been levying their daily tax upon me.  I have
preserved thousands of their letters, and destroyed a very large
number, after answering most of them.  A few interesting chapters
might be made out of the letters I have kept,--not only such as are
signed by the names of well-known personages, but many from unknown
friends, of whom I had never heard before and have never heard since.
A great deal of the best writing the languages of the world have ever
known has been committed to leaves that withered out of sight before
a second sunlight had fallen upon them.  I have had many letters I
should have liked to give the public, had their nature admitted of
their being offered to the world.  What straggles of young ambition,
finding no place for its energies, or feeling its incapacity to reach
the ideal towards which it was striving!  What longings of
disappointed, defeated fellow-mortals, trying to find a new home for
themselves in the heart of one whom they have amiably idealized!  And
oh, what hopeless efforts of mediocrities and inferiorities,
believing in themselves as superiorities, and stumbling on through
limping disappointments to prostrate failure!  Poverty comes
pleading, not for charity, for the most part, but imploring us to
find a purchaser for its unmarketable wares.  The unreadable author
particularly requests us to make a critical examination of his book,
and report to him whatever may be our verdict,--as if he wanted
anything but our praise, and that very often to be used in his
publisher's advertisements.

But what does not one have to submit to who has become the martyr--
the Saint Sebastian--of a literary correspondence!  I will not dwell
on the possible impression produced on a sensitive nature by reading
one's own premature obituary, as I have told you has been my recent
experience.  I will not stop to think whether the urgent request for
an autograph by return post, in view of the possible contingencies
which might render it the last one was ever to write, is pleasing or
not.  At threescore and twenty one must expect such hints of what is
like to happen before long.  I suppose, if some near friend were to
watch one who was looking over such a pressing letter, he might
possibly see a slight shadow flit over the reader's features, and
some such dialogue might follow as that between Othello and Iago,
after "this honest creature" has been giving breath to his suspicions
about Desdemona:

    "I see this hath a little dash'd your spirits.
     Not a jot, not a jot.
          .............
     "My lord, I see you're moved."

And a little later the reader might, like Othello, complain,

    "I have a pain upon my forehead here."

Nothing more likely.  But, for myself, I have grown callous to all
such allusions.  The repetition of the Scriptural phrase for the
natural term of life is so frequent that it wears out one's
sensibilities.

But how many charming and refreshing letters I have received!  How
often I have felt their encouragement in moments of doubt and
depression, such as the happiest temperaments must sometimes
experience!

If the time comes when to answer all my kind unknown friends, even by
dictation, is impossible, or more than I feel equal to, I wish to
refer any of those who may feel disappointed at not receiving an
answer to the following general acknowledgments:


I.  I am always grateful for any attention which shows me that I am
kindly remembered.--II.  Your pleasant message has been read to me,
and has been thankfully listened to.--III.  Your book (your essay)
(your poem) has reached me safely, and has received all the
respectful attention to which it seemed entitled.  It would take more
than all the time I have at my disposal to read all the printed
matter and all the manuscripts which are sent to me, and you would
not ask me to attempt the impossible.  You will not, therefore,
expect me to express a critical opinion of your work.--IV.  I am
deeply sensible to your expressions of personal attachment to me as
the author of certain writings which have brought me very near to
you, in virtue of some affinity in our ways of thought and moods of
feeling.  Although I cannot keep up correspondences with many of my
readers who seem to be thoroughly congenial with myself, let them be
assured that their letters have been read or heard with peculiar
gratification, and are preserved as precious treasures.


I trust that after this notice no correspondent will be surprised to
find his or her letter thus answered by anticipation; and that if one
of the above formulae is the only answer he receives, the unknown
friend will remember that he or she is one of a great many whose
incessant demands have entirely outrun my power of answering them as
fully as the applicants might wish and perhaps expect.

I could make a very interesting volume of the letters I have received
from correspondents unknown to the world of authorship, but writing
from an instinctive impulse, which many of them say they have long
felt and resisted.  One must not allow himself to be flattered into
an overestimate of his powers because he gets many letters expressing
a peculiar attraction towards his books, and a preference of them to
those with which he would not have dared to compare his own.  Still,
if the homo unius libri--the man of one book--choose to select one of
our own writing as his favorite volume, it means something,--not
much, perhaps; but if one has unlocked the door to the secret
entrance of one heart, it is not unlikely that his key may fit the
locks of others.  What if nature has lent him a master key?  He has
found the wards and slid back the bolt of one lock; perhaps he may
have learned the secret of others.  One success is an encouragement
to try again.  Let the writer of a truly loving letter, such as
greets one from time to time, remember that, though he never hears a
word from it, it may prove one of the best rewards of an anxious and
laborious past, and the stimulus of a still aspiring future.

Among the letters I have recently received, none is more interesting
than the following.  The story of Helen Keller, who wrote it, is told
in the well-known illustrated magazine called "The Wide Awake," in
the number for July, 1888.  For the account of this little girl, now
between nine and ten years old, and other letters of her writing, I
must refer to the article I have mentioned.  It is enough to say that
she is deaf and dumb and totally blind.  She was seven years old when
her teacher, Miss Sullivan, under the direction of Mr. Anagnos, at
the Blind Asylum at South Boston, began her education.  A child
fuller of life and happiness it would be hard to find.  It seems as
if her soul was flooded with light and filled with music that had
found entrance to it through avenues closed to other mortals.  It is
hard to understand how she has learned to deal with abstract ideas,
and so far to supplement the blanks left by the senses of sight and
hearing that one would hardly think of her as wanting in any human
faculty.  Remember Milton's pathetic picture of himself, suffering
from only one of poor little Helen's deprivations:

                         "Not to me returns
     Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn,
     Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose,
     Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
     But cloud instead, and ever-during dark
     Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
     Cut off, and for the book of knowledge fair
     Presented with a universal blank
     Of Nature's works, to me expunged and rased,
     And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out."

Surely for this loving and lovely child does

                    "the celestial Light
          Shine inward."

Anthropologist, metaphysician, most of all theologian, here is a
lesson which can teach you much that you will not find in your
primers and catechisms.  Why should I call her "poor little Helen"?
Where can you find a happier child?


SOUTH BOSTON, MASS., March 1, 1890.

DEAR KIND POET,--I have thought of you many times since that bright
Sunday when I bade you goodbye, and I am going to write you a letter
because I love you.  I am sorry that you have no little children to
play with sometimes, but I think you are very happy with your books,
and your many, many friends.  On Washington's Birthday a great many
people came here to see the little blind children, and I read for
them from your poems, and showed them some beautiful shells which
came from a little island near Palos.  I am reading a very sad story
called "Little Jakey."  Jakey was the sweetest little fellow you can
imagine, but he was poor and blind.  I used to think, when I was
small and before I could read, that everybody was always happy, and
at first it made me very sad to know about pain and great sorrow; but
now I know that we could never learn to be brave and patient, if
there were only joy in the world.  I am studying about insects in
Zoology, and I have learned many things about butterflies.  They do
not make honey for us, like the bees, but many of them are as
beautiful as the flowers they light upon, and they always delight the
hearts of little children.  They live a gay life, flitting from
flower to flower, sipping the drops of honey-dew, without a thought
for the morrow.  They are just like little boys and girls when they
forget books and studies, and run away to the woods and the fields to
gather wild-flowers, or wade in the ponds for fragrant lilies, happy
in the bright sunshine.  If my little sister comes to Boston next
June, will you let me bring her to see you?  She is a lovely baby and
I am sure you will love [her].  Now I must tell my gentle poet good-
bye, for I have a letter to write home before I go to bed.  From your
loving little friend,

HELEN A. KELLER.


The reading of this letter made many eyes glisten, and a dead silence
hushed the whole circle.  All at once Delilah, our pretty table-maid,
forgot her place,--what business had she to be listening to our
conversation and reading?--and began sobbing, just as if she had
been a lady.  She could n't help it, she explained afterwards,--she
had a little blind sister at the asylum, who had told her about
Helen's reading to the children.

It was very awkward, this breaking-down of our pretty Delilah, for
one girl crying will sometimes set off a whole row of others,--it is
as hazardous as lighting one cracker in a bunch.  The two Annexes
hurried out their pocket-handkerchiefs, and I almost expected a semi-
hysteric cataclysm.  At this critical moment Number Five called
Delilah to her, looked into her face with those calm eyes of hers,
and spoke a few soft words.  Was Number Five forgetful, too?  Did she
not remember the difference of their position?  I suppose so.  But
she quieted the poor handmaiden as simply and easily as a nursing
mother quiets her unweaned baby.  Why are we not all in love with
Number Five?  Perhaps we are.  At any rate, I suspect the Professor.
When we all get quiet, I will touch him up about that visit she
promised to make to his laboratory.

I got a chance at last to speak privately with him.

"Did Number Five go to meet you in your laboratory, as she talked of
doing?"

"Oh, yes, of course she did,--why, she said she would!"

"Oh, to be sure.  Do tell me what she wanted in your laboratory."

"She wanted me to burn a diamond for her."

"Burn a diamond!  What was that for?  Because Cleopatra swallowed a
pearl?"

"No, nothing of that kind.  It was a small stone, and had a flaw in
it.  Number Five said she did n't want a diamond with a flaw in it,
and that she did want to see how a diamond would burn."

"Was that all that happened?"

"That was all.  She brought the two Annexes with her, and I gave my
three visitors a lecture on carbon, which they seemed to enjoy very
much."

I looked steadily in the Professor's face during the reading of the
following poem.  I saw no questionable look upon it,--but he has a
remarkable command of his features.  Number Five read it with a
certain archness of expression, as if she saw all its meaning, which
I think some of the company did not quite take in.  They said they
must read it slowly and carefully.  Somehow, "I like you" and "I love
you" got a little mixed, as they heard it.  It was not Number Five's
fault, for she read it beautifully, as we all agreed, and as I knew
she would when I handed it to her.


          I LIKE YOU AND I LOVE YOU.

     I LIKE YOU met I LOVE YOU, face to face;
     The path was narrow, and they could not pass.
     I LIKE YOU smiled; I LOVE YOU cried, Alas!
     And so they halted for a little space.

    "Turn thou and go before," I LOVE YOU said,
`   "Down the green pathway, bright with many a flower
     Deep in the valley, lo!  my bridal bower
     Awaits thee." But I LIKE YOU shook his head.

     Then while they lingered on the span-wide shelf
     That shaped a pathway round the rocky ledge,
     I LIKE YOU bared his icy dagger's edge,
     And first he slew I LOVE YOU,--then himself.




VII

There is no use in burdening my table with those letters of inquiry
as to where our meetings are held, and what are the names of the
persons designated by numbers, or spoken of under the titles of the
Professor, the Tutor, and so forth.  It is enough that you are aware
who I am, and that I am known at the tea-table as The Dictator.
Theatrical "asides" are apt to be whispered in a pretty loud voice,
and the persons who ought not to have any idea of what is said are
expected to be reasonably hard of bearing.  If I named all The
Teacups, some of them might be offended.  If any of my readers happen
to be able to identify any one Teacup by some accidental
circumstance,--say, for instance, Number Five, by the incident of her
burning the diamond,--I hope they will keep quiet about it.  Number
Five does n't want to be pointed out in the street as the extravagant
person who makes use of such expensive fuel, for the story would soon
grow to a statement that she always uses diamonds, instead of cheaper
forms of carbon, to heat her coffee with.  So with other members of
the circle.  The "Cracked Teacup," Number Seven, would not, perhaps,
be pleased to recognize himself under that title.  I repeat it,
therefore, Do not try to identify the individual Teacups.  You will
not get them right; or, if you do, you may too probably make trouble.
How is it possible that I can keep up my freedom of intercourse with
you all if you insist on bellowing my "asides" through a speaking-
trumpet?  Besides, you cannot have failed to see that there are
strong symptoms of the springing up of delicate relations between
some of our number.  I told you how it would be.  It did not require
a prophet to foresee that the saucy intruder who, as Mr. Willis
wrote, and the dear dead girls used to sing, in our young days,

               "Taketh every form of air,
          And every shape of earth,
          And comes unbidden everywhere,
          Like thought's mysterious birth,"

would pop his little curly head up between one or more pairs of
Teacups.  If you will stop these questions, then, I will go on with
my reports of what was said and done at our meetings over the
teacups.

Of all things beautiful in this fair world, there is nothing so
enchanting to look upon, to dream about, as the first opening of the
flower of young love.  How closely the calyx has hidden the glowing
leaves in its quiet green mantle!  Side by side, two buds have been
tossing jauntily in the breeze, often brought very near to each
other, sometimes touching for a moment, with a secret thrill in their
close-folded heart-leaves, it may be, but still the cool green sepals
shutting tight over the burning secret within.  All at once a morning
ray touches one of the two buds, and the point of a blushing petal
betrays the imprisoned and swelling blossom.


--Oh, no, I did not promise a love-story.  There may be a little
sentiment now and then, but these papers are devoted chiefly to the
opinions, prejudices, fancies, whims, of myself, The Dictator, and
others of The Teacups who have talked or written for the general
benefit of the company.

Here are some of the remarks I made the other evening on the subject
of Intellectual Over-Feeding and its consequence, Mental Dyspepsia.
There is something positively appalling in the amount of printed
matter yearly, monthly, weekly, daily, secreted by that great gland
of the civilized organism, the press.  I need not dilate upon this
point, for it is brought home to every one of you who ever looks into
a bookstore or a public library.  So large is the variety of literary
products continually coming forward, forced upon the attention of the
reader by stimulating and suggestive titles, commended to his notice
by famous names, recasting old subjects and developing and
illustrating new ones, that the mind is liable to be urged into a
kind of unnatural hunger, leading to a repletion which is often
followed by disgust and disturbed nervous conditions as its natural
consequence.

It has long been a favorite rule with me, a rule which I have never
lost sight of, however imperfectly I have carried it out: Try to know
enough of a wide range of subjects to profit by the conversation of
intelligent persons of different callings and various intellectual
gifts and acquisitions.  The cynic will paraphrase this into a
shorter formula: Get a smattering in every sort of knowledge.  I must
therefore add a second piece of advice: Learn to hold as of small
account the comments of the cynic.  He is often amusing, sometimes
really witty, occasionally, without meaning it, instructive; but his
talk is to profitable conversation what the stone is to the pulp of
the peach, what the cob is to the kernels on an ear of Indian corn.
Once more: Do not be bullied out of your common sense by the
specialist; two to one, he is a pedant, with all his knowledge and
valuable qualities, and will "cavil on the ninth part of a hair," if
it will give him a chance to show off his idle erudition.

I saw attributed to me, the other day, the saying, "Know something
about everything, and everything about something."  I am afraid it
does not belong to me, but I will treat it as I used to treat a stray
boat which came through my meadow, floating down the Housatonic,--get
hold of it and draw it ashore, and hold on to it until the owner
turns up.  If this precept is used discreetly, it is very
serviceable; but it is as well to recognize the fact that you cannot
know something about everything in days like these of intellectual
activity, of literary and scientific production.  We all feel this.
It makes us nervous to see the shelves of new books, many of which we
feel as if we ought to read, and some among them to study.  We must
adopt some principle of selection among the books outside of any
particular branch which we may have selected for study.  I have often
been asked what books I would recommend for a course of reading.  I
have always answered that I had a great deal rather take advice than
give it.  Fortunately, a number of scholars have furnished lists of
books to which the inquirer may be directed.  But the worst of it is
that each student is in need of a little library specially adapted to
his wants.  Here is a young man writing to me from a Western college,
and wants me to send him a list of the books which I think would be
most useful to him.  He does not send me his intellectual
measurements, and he might as well have sent to a Boston tailor for a
coat, without any hint of his dimensions in length, breadth, and
thickness.

But instead of laying down rules for reading, and furnishing lists of
the books which should be read in order, I will undertake the much
humbler task of giving a little quasi-medical advice to persons,
young or old, suffering from book-hunger, book-surfeit, book-
nervousness, book-indigestion, book-nausea, and all other maladies
which, directly or indirectly, may be traced to books, and to which I
could give Greek or Latin names if I thought it worth while.

I have a picture hanging in my library, a lithograph, of which many
of my readers may have seen copies.  It represents a gray-haired old
book-lover at the top of a long flight of steps.  He finds himself in
clover, so to speak, among rare old editions, books he has longed to
look upon and never seen before, rarities, precious old volumes,
incunabula, cradle-books, printed while the art was in its infancy,--
its glorious infancy, for it was born a giant.  The old bookworm is
so intoxicated with the sight and handling of the priceless treasures
that he cannot bear to put one of the volumes back after he has taken
it from the shelf.  So there he stands,--one book open in his hands,
a volume under each arm, and one or more between his legs,--loaded
with as many as he can possibly hold at the same time.

Now, that is just the way in which the extreme form of book-hunger
shows itself in the reader whose appetite has become over-developed.
He wants to read so many books that he over-crams himself with the
crude materials of knowledge, which become knowledge only when the
mental digestion has time to assimilate them.  I never can go into
that famous "Corner Bookstore" and look over the new books in the row
before me, as I enter the door, without seeing half a dozen which I
want to read, or at least to know something about.  I cannot empty my
purse of its contents, and crowd my bookshelves with all those
volumes.  The titles of many of them interest me.  I look into one or
two, perhaps.  I have sometimes picked up a line or a sentence, in
these momentary glances between the uncut leaves of a new book, which
I have never forgotten.  As a trivial but bona fide example, one day
I opened a book on duelling.  I remember only these words:
"Conservons-la, cette noble institution."  I had never before seen
duelling called a noble institution, and I wish I had taken the name
of the book.  Book-tasting is not necessarily profitless, but it is
very stimulating, and makes one hungry for more than he needs for the
nourishment of his thinking-marrow.  To feed this insatiable hunger,
the abstracts, the reviews, do their best.  But these, again, have
grown so numerous and so crowded with matter that it is hard to find
time to master their contents.  We are accustomed, therefore, to look
for analyses of these periodicals, and at last we have placed before
us a formidable-looking monthly, "The Review of Reviews."  After the
analyses comes the newspaper notice; and there is still room for the
epigram, which sometimes makes short work with all that has gone
before on the same subject.

It is just as well to recognize the fact that if one should read day
and night, confining himself to his own language, he could not
pretend to keep up with the press.  He might as well try to race with
a locomotive.  The first discipline, therefore, is that of despair.
If you could stick to your reading day and night for fifty years,
what a learned idiot you would become long before the half-century
was over!  Well, then, there is no use in gorging one's self with
knowledge, and no need of self-reproach because one is content to
remain more or less ignorant of many things which interest his
fellow-creatures.  We gain a good deal of knowledge through the
atmosphere; we learn a great deal by accidental hearsay, provided we
have the mordant in our own consciousness which makes the wise
remark, the significant fact, the instructive incident, take hold
upon it.  After the stage of despair comes the period of consolation.
We soon find that we are not so much worse off than most of our
neighbors as we supposed.  The fractional value of the wisest shows a
small numerator divided by an infinite denominator of knowledge.

I made some explanations to The Teacups, the other evening, which
they received very intelligently and graciously, as I have no doubt
the readers of these reports of mine will receive them.  If the
reader will turn back to the end of the fourth number of these
papers, he will find certain lines entitled, "Cacoethes Scribendi."
They were said to have been taken from the usual receptacle of the
verses which are contributed by The Teacups, and, though the fact was
not mentioned, were of my own composition.  I found them in
manuscript in my drawer, and as my subject had naturally suggested
the train of thought they carried out into extravagance, I printed
them.  At the same time they sounded very natural, as we say, and I
felt as if I had published them somewhere or other before; but I
could find no evidence of it, and so I ventured to have them put in
type.

And here I wish to take breath for a short, separate paragraph.  I
have often felt, after writing a line which pleased me more than
common, that it was not new, and perhaps was not my own.  I have very
rarely, however, found such a coincidence in ideas or expression as
would be enough to justify an accusation of unconscious plagiarism,--
conscious plagiarism is not my particular failing.  I therefore say
my say, set down my thought, print my line, and do not heed the
suspicion that I may not be as original as I supposed, in the passage
I have been writing.  My experience may be worth something to a
modest young writer, and so I have interrupted what I was about to
say by intercalating this paragraph.

In this instance my telltale suspicion had not been at fault.  I had
printed those same lines, years ago, in "The Contributors' Club," to
which I have rarely sent any of my prose or verse.  Nobody but the
editor has noticed the fact, so far as I know.  This is consoling, or
mortifying, I hardly know which.  I suppose one has a right to
plagiarize from himself, but he does not want to present his work as
fresh from the workshop when it has been long standing in his
neighbor's shop-window.

But I have just received a letter from a brother of the late Henry
Howard Brownell, the poet of the Bay Fight and the River Fight, in
which he quotes a passage from an old book, "A Heroine, Adventures of
Cherubina," which might well have suggested my own lines, if I had
ever seen it.  I have not the slightest recollection of the book or
the passage.  I think its liveliness and "local color" will make it
please the reader, as it pleases me, more than my own more prosaic
extravagances:


LINES TO A PRETTY LITTLE MAID OF MAMMA'S.

"If Black Sea, Red Sea, White Sea, ran
One tide of ink to Ispahan,
If all the geese in Lincoln fens
Produced spontaneous well-made pens,
If Holland old and Holland new
One wondrous sheet of paper grew,
And could I sing but half the grace
Of half a freckle in thy face,
Each syllable I wrote would reach
From Inverness to Bognor's beach,
Each hair-stroke be a river Rhine,
Each verse an equinoctial line!"


"The immediate dismissal of the 'little maid' was the consequence."

I may as well say that our Delilah was not in the room when the last
sentence was read.

Readers must be either very good-natured or very careless.  I have
laid myself open to criticism by more than one piece of negligence,
which has been passed over without invidious comment by the readers
of my papers.  How could I, for instance, have written in my original
"copy" for the printer about the fisherman baiting his hook with a
giant's tail instead of a dragon's?  It is the automatic fellow,--Me-
Number-Two of our dual personality,--who does these things, who
forgets the message Me--Number--One sends down to him from the
cerebral convolutions, and substitutes a wrong word for the right
one.  I suppose Me--Number--Two will "sass back," and swear that
"giant's" was the message which came down from headquarters.  He is
always doing the wrong thing and excusing himself.  Who blows out the
gas instead of shutting it off?  Who puts the key in the desk and
fastens it tight with the spring lock?  Do you mean to say that the
upper Me, the Me of the true thinking-marrow, the convolutions of the
brain, does not know better?  Of course he does, and Me-Number-Two is
a careless servant, who remembers some old direction, and follows
that instead of the one just given.

Number Seven demurred to this, and I am not sure that he is wrong in
so doing.  He maintains that the automatic fellow always does just
what he is told to do.  Number Five is disposed to agree with him.
We will talk over the question.

But come, now, why should not a giant have a tail as well as a
dragon?  Linnaeus admitted the homo caudatus into his anthropological
catalogue.  The human embryo has a very well marked caudal appendage;
that is, the vertebral column appears prolonged, just as it is in a
young quadruped.  During the late session of the Medical Congress at
Washington, my friend Dr. Priestley, a distinguished London
physician, of the highest character and standing, showed me the
photograph of a small boy, some three or four years old, who had a
very respectable little tail, which would have passed muster on a
pig, and would have made a frog or a toad ashamed of himself.  I have
never heard what became of the little boy, nor have I looked in the
books or journals to find out if there are similar cases on record,
but I have no doubt that there are others.  And if boys may have this
additional ornament to their vertebral columns, why not men?  And if
men, why not giants?  So I may not have made a very bad blunder,
after all, and my reader has learned something about the homo
caudatus as spoken of by Linnxus, and as shown me in photograph by
Dr. Priestley.  This child is a candidate for the vacant place of
Missing Link.

In accounting for the blunders, and even gross blunders, which,
sooner or later, one who writes much is pretty sure to commit, I must
not forget the part played by the blind spot or idiotic area in the
brain, which I have already described.

The most knowing persons we meet with are sometimes at fault.  Nova
onania possumus omnes is not a new nor profound axiom, but it is well
to remember it as a counterpoise to that other truly American saying
of the late Mr. Samuel Patch, "Some things can be done as well as
others."  Yes, some things, but not all things.  We all know men and
women who hate to admit their ignorance of anything.  Like Talkative
in "Pilgrim's Progress," they are ready to converse of "things
heavenly or things earthly; things moral or things evangelical;
things sacred or things profane; things past or things to come;
things foreign or things at home; things more essential or things
circumstantial."

Talkative is apt to be a shallow fellow, and to say foolish things
about matters he only half understands, and yet he has his place in
society.  The specialists would grow to be intolerable, were they not
counterpoised to some degree by the people of general intelligence.
The man who knows too much about one particular subject is liable to
become a terrible social infliction.  Some of the worst bores (to use
plain language) we ever meet with are recognized as experts of high
grade in their respective departments.  Beware of making so much as a
pinhole in the dam that holds back their knowledge.  They ride their
hobbies without bit or bridle.  A poet on Pegasus, reciting his own
verses, is hardly more to be dreaded than a mounted specialist.

One of the best offices which women perform for men is that of
tasting books for them.  They may or may not be profound students,--
some of them are; but we do not expect to meet women like Mrs.
Somerville, or Caroline Herschel, or Maria Mitchell at every dinner-
table or afternoon tea.  But give your elect lady a pile of books to
look over for you, and she will tell you what they have for her and
for you in less time than you would have wasted in stupefying
yourself over a single volume.

One of the encouraging signs of the times is the condensed and
abbreviated form in which knowledge is presented to the general
reader.  The short biographies of historic personages, of which
within the past few years many have been published, have been a great
relief to the large class of readers who want to know something, but
not too much, about them.

What refuge is there for the victim who is oppressed with the feeling
that there are a thousand new books he ought to read, while life is
only long enough for him to attempt to read a hundred?  Many readers
remember what old Rogers, the poet,
said:

"When I hear a new book talked about or have it pressed upon me, I
read an old one."

Happy the man who finds his rest in the pages of some favorite
classic!  I know no reader more to be envied than that friend of mine
who for many years has given his days and nights to the loving study
of Horace.  After a certain period in life, it is always with an
effort that we admit a new author into the inner circle of our
intimates.  The Parisian omnibuses, as I remember them half a century
ago,--they may still keep to the same habit, for aught that I know,--
used to put up the sign "Complet" as soon as they were full.  Our
public conveyances are never full until the natural atmospheric
pressure of sixteen pounds to the square inch is doubled, in the
close packing of the human sardines that fill the all-accommodating
vehicles.  A new-comer, however well mannered and well dressed, is
not very welcome under these circumstances.  In the same way, our
tables are full of books half-read and books we feel that we must
read.  And here come in two thick volumes, with uncut leaves, in
small type, with many pages, and many lines to a page,--a book that
must be read and ought to be read at once.  What a relief to hand it
over to the lovely keeper of your literary conscience, who will tell
you all that you will most care to know about it, and leave you free
to plunge into your beloved volume, in which you are ever finding new
beauties, and from which you rise refreshed, as if you had just come
from the cool waters of Hippocrene!  The stream of modern literature
represented by the books and periodicals on the crowded counters is a
turbulent and clamorous torrent, dashing along among the rocks of
criticism, over the pebbles of the world's daily events; trying to
make itself seen and heard amidst the hoarse cries of the politicians
and the rumbling wheels of traffic.  The classic is a still lakelet,
a mountain tarn, fed by springs that never fail, its surface never
ruffled by storms,--always the same, always smiling a welcome to its
visitor.  Such is Horace to my friend.  To his eye "Lydia, dic per
omnes" is as familiar as "Pater noster qui es in caelis" to that of a
pious Catholic.  "Integer vitae," which he has put into manly
English, his Horace opens to as Watt's hymn-book opens to "From all
that dwell below the skies."  The more he reads, the more he studies
his author, the richer are the treasures he finds.  And what Horace
is to him, Homer, or Virgil, or Dante is to many a quiet reader, sick
to death of the unending train of bookmakers.

I have some curious books in my library, a few of which I should like
to say something about to The Teacups, when they have no more
immediately pressing subjects before them.  A library of a few
thousand volumes ought always to have some books in it which the
owner almost never opens, yet with whose backs he is so well
acquainted that he feels as if he knew something of their contents.
They are like those persons whom we meet in our daily walks, with
whose faces and figures, whose summer and winter garments, whose
walking-sticks and umbrellas even, we feel acquainted, and yet whose
names, whose business, whose residences, we know nothing about.  Some
of these books are so formidable in their dimensions, so rusty and
crabbed in their aspect, that it takes a considerable amount of
courage to attack them.

I will ask Delilah to bring down from my library a very thick, stout
volume, bound in parchment, and standing on the lower shelf, next the
fireplace.  The pretty handmaid knows my books almost as if she were
my librarian, and I don't doubt she would have found it if I had
given only the name on the back.

Delilah returned presently, with the heavy quarto in her arms.  It
was a pleasing sight,--the old book in the embrace of the fresh young
damsel.  I felt, on looking at them, as I did when I followed the
slip of a girl who conducted us in the Temple, that ancient building
in the heart of London.  The long-enduring monuments of the dead do
so mock the fleeting presence of the living!

Is n't this book enough to scare any of you?  I said, as Delilah
dumped it down upon the table.  The teacups jumped from their saucers
as it thumped on the board.  Danielis Georgii Morhofii Polyhistor,
Literarius, Philosophicus et Poeticus.  Lubecae MDCCXXXIII.  Perhaps
I should not have ventured to ask you to look at this old volume, if
it had not been for the fact that Dr. Johnson mentions Morohof as the
author to whom he was specially indebted.--more, I think, than to
any other.  It is a grand old encyclopaedic summary of all the author
knew about pretty nearly everything, full of curious interest, but so
strangely mediaeval, so utterly antiquated in most departments of
knowledge, that it is hard to believe the volume came from the press
at a time when persons whom I well remember were living.  Is it
possible that the books which have been for me what Morhof was for
Dr. Johnson can look like that to the student of the year 1990?

Morhof was a believer in magic and the transmutation of metals.
There was always something fascinating to me in the old books of
alchemy.  I have felt that the poetry of science lost its wings when
the last powder of projection had been cast into the crucible, and
the fire of the last transmutation furnace went out.  Perhaps I am
wrong in implying that alchemy is an extinct folly.  It existed in
New England's early days, as we learn from the Winthrop papers, and I
see no reason why gold-making should not have its votaries as well as
other popular delusions.

Among the essays of Morhof is one on the "Paradoxes of the Senses."
That title brought to mind the recollection of another work I have
been meaning to say something about, at some time when you were in
the listening mood.  The book I refer to is "A Budget of Paradoxes,"
by Augustus De Morgan.  De Morgan is well remembered as a very
distinguished mathematician, whose works have kept his name in high
honor to the present time.  The book I am speaking of was published
by his widow, and is largely made up of letters received by him and
his comments upon them.  Few persons ever read it through.  Few
intelligent readers ever took it up and laid it down without taking a
long draught of its singular and interesting contents.  The letters
are mostly from that class of persons whom we call "cranks," in our
familiar language.

At this point Number Seven interrupted me by calling out, "Give us
some of those cranks' letters.  A crank is a man who does his own
thinking.  I had a relation who was called a crank.  I believe I have
been spoken of as one myself.  That is what you have to expect if you
invent anything that puts an old machine out of fashion, or solve a
problem that has puzzled all the world up to your time.  There never
was a religion founded but its Messiah was called a crank.  There
never was an idea started that woke up men out of their stupid
indifference but its originator was spoken of as a crank.  Do you
want to know why that name is given to the men who do most for the
world's progress?  I will tell you.  It is because cranks make all
the wheels in all the machinery of the world go round.  What would a
steam-engine be without a crank?  I suppose the first fool that
looked on the first crank that was ever made asked what that crooked,
queer-looking thing was good for.  When the wheels got moving he
found out.  Tell us something about that book which has so much to
say concerning cranks."

Hereupon I requested Delilah to carry back Morhof, and replace him in
the wide gap he had left in the bookshelf.  She was then to find and
bring down the volume I had been speaking of.

Delilah took the wisdom of the seventeenth century in her arms, and
departed on her errand.  The book she brought down was given me some
years ago by a gentleman who had sagaciously foreseen that it was
just one of those works which I might hesitate about buying, but
should be well pleased to own.  He guessed well; the book has been a
great source of instruction and entertainment to me.  I wonder that
so much time and cost should have been expended upon a work which
might have borne a title like the Encomium Moriae of Erasmus; and yet
it is such a wonderful museum of the productions of the squinting
brains belonging to the class of persons commonly known as cranks
that we could hardly spare one of its five hundred octavo pages.

Those of us who are in the habit of receiving letters from all sorts
of would-be-literary people--letters of inquiry, many of them with
reference to matters we are supposed to understand--can readily see
how it was that Mr. De Morgan, never too busy to be good-natured with
the people who pestered--or amused-him with their queer fancies,
received such a number of letters from persons who thought they had
made great discoveries, from those who felt that they and their
inventions and contrivances had been overlooked, and who sought in
his large charity of disposition and great receptiveness a balm for
their wounded feelings and a ray of hope for their darkened
prospects.

The book before us is made up from papers published in "The
Athenaeum," with additions by the author.  Soon after opening it we
come to names with which we are familiar, the first of these, that of
Cornelius Agrippa, being connected with the occult and mystic
doctrines dealt with by many of De Morgan's correspondents.  But the
name most likely to arrest us is that of Giordano Bruno, the same
philosopher, heretic, and martyr whose statue has recently been
erected in Rome, to the great horror of the Pope and his prelates in
the Old World and in the New.  De Morgan's pithy account of him will
interest the company: "Giordano Bruno was all paradox.  He was, as
has been said, a vorticist before Descartes, an optimist before
Leibnitz, a Copernican before Galileo.  It would be easy to collect a
hundred strange opinions of his.  He was born about 1550, and was
roasted alive at Rome, February 17, 1600, for the maintenance and
defence of the Holy Church, and the rights and liberties of the
same."

Number Seven could not contain himself when the reading had reached
this point.  He rose from his chair, and tinkled his spoon against
the side of his teacup.  It may have been a fancy, but I thought it
returned a sound which Mr. Richard Briggs would have recognized as
implying an organic defect.  But Number Seven did not seem to notice
it, or, if be did, to mind it.

"Why did n't we all have a chance to help erect that statue?" he
cried.  "A murdered heretic at the beginning of the seventeenth
century, a hero of knowledge in the nineteenth,--I drink to the
memory of the roasted crank, Giordano Bruno!"

Number Seven lifted his teacup to his lips, and most of us followed
his example.

After this outburst of emotion and eloquence had subsided, and the
teaspoons lay quietly in their saucers, I went on with my extract
from the book I had in hand.

I think, I said, that the passage which follows will be new and
instructive to most of the company.  De Morgan's interpretation of
the cabalistic sentence, made up as you will find it, is about as
ingenious a piece of fanciful exposition as you will be likely to
meet with anywhere in any book, new or old.  I am the more willing to
mention it as it suggests a puzzle which some of the company may like
to work upon.  Observe the character and position of the two
distinguished philosophers who did not think their time thrown away
in laboring at this seemingly puerile task.

"There is a kind of Cabbala Alphabetica which the investigators of
the numerals in words would do well to take up; it is the formation
of sentences which contain all the letters of the alphabet, and each
only once.  No one has done it with v and j treated as consonants;
but you and I can do it.  Dr. Whewell and I amused ourselves some
years ago with attempts.  He could not make sense, though he joined
words he gave me Phiz, styx, wrong, buck, flame, quiz.

"I gave him the following, which he agreed was 'admirable sense,'--
I certainly think the words would never have come together except in
this way: I quartz pyx who fling muck beds.  I long thought that no
human being could say this under any circumstances.  At last I
happened to be reading a religious writer,--as he thought himself,--
who threw aspersions on his opponents thick and threefold.  Heyday
came into my head; this fellow flings muck beds; he must be a quartz
pyx.  And then I remembered that a pyx is a sacred vessel, and quartz
is a hard stone, as hard as the heart of a religious foe-curser.  So
that the line is the motto of the ferocious sectarian who turns his
religious vessels into mud-holders, for the benefit of those who will
not see what he sees."

"There are several other sentences given, in which all the letters
(except v and j as consonants) are employed, of which the following
is the best: Get nymph; quiz sad brow; fix luck,--which in more sober
English would be, Marry; be cheerful; watch your business.  There is
more edification, more religion, in this than in all the 666
interpretations put together."

There is something very pleasant in the thought of these two sages
playing at jackstraws with the letters of the alphabet.  The task
which De Morgan and Dr. Whewell, "the omniscient," set themselves
would not be unworthy of our own ingenious scholars, and it might be
worth while for some one of our popular periodicals to offer a prize
for the best sentence using up the whole alphabet, under the same
conditions as those submitted to by our two philosophers.

This whole book of De Morgan's seems to me full of instruction.
There is too much of it, no doubt; yet one can put up with the
redundancy for the sake of the multiplicity of shades of credulity
and self-deception it displays in broad daylight.  I suspect many of
us are conscious of a second personality in our complex nature, which
has many traits resembling those found in the writers of the letters
addressed to Mr. De Horgan.

I have not ventured very often nor very deeply into the field of
metaphysics, but if I were disposed to make any claim in that
direction, it would be the recognition of the squinting brain, the
introduction of the term "cerebricity" corresponding to electricity,
the idiotic area in the brain or thinking-marrow, and my studies of
the second member in the partnership of I-My-Self & Co.  I add the
Co. with especial reference to a very interesting article in a late
Scribner, by my friend Mr. William James.  In this article the reader
will find a full exposition of the doctrine of plural personality
illustrated by striking cases.  I have long ago noticed and referred
to the fact of the stratification of the currents of thought in three
layers, one over the other.  I have recognized that where there are
two individuals talking together there are really six personalities
engaged in the conversation.  But the distinct, separable,
independent individualities, taking up conscious life one after the
other, are brought out by Mr. James and the authorities to which he
refers as I have not elsewhere seen them developed.

Whether we shall ever find the exact position of the idiotic centre
or area in the brain (if such a spot exists) is uncertain.  We know
exactly where the blind spot of the eye is situated, and can
demonstrate it anatomically and physiologically.  But we have only
analogy to lead us to infer the possible or even probable existence
of an insensible spot in the thinking-centre.  If there is a focal
point where consciousness is at its highest development, it would not
be strange if near by there should prove to be an anaesthetic
district or limited space where no report from the senses was
intelligently interpreted.  But all this is mere hypothesis.

Notwithstanding the fact that I am nominally the head personage of
the circle of Teacups, I do not pretend or wish to deny that we all
look to Number Five as our chief adviser in all the literary
questions that come before us.  She reads more and better than any of
us.  She is always ready to welcome the first sign of genius, or of
talent which approaches genius.  She makes short work with all the
pretenders whose only excuse for appealing to the public is that they
"want to be famous."  She is one of the very few persons to whom I am
willing to read any one of my own productions while it is yet in
manuscript, unpublished.  I know she is disposed to make more of it
than it deserves; but, on the other hand, there are degrees in her
scale of judgment, and I can distinguish very easily what delights
her from what pleases only, or is, except for her kindly feeling to
the writer, indifferent, or open to severe comment.  What is curious
is that she seems to have no literary aspirations, no desire to be
known as a writer.  Yet Number Five has more esprit, more sparkle,
more sense in her talk, than many a famous authoress from whom we
should expect brilliant conversation.

There are mysteries about Number Five.  I am not going to describe
her personally.  Whether she belongs naturally among the bright young
people, or in the company of the maturer persons, who have had a good
deal of experience of the world, and have reached the wisdom of the
riper decades without losing the graces of the earlier ones, it would
be hard to say.  The men and women, young and old, who throng about
her forget their own ages.  "There is no such thing as time in her
presence," said the Professor, the other day, in speaking of her.
Whether the Professor is in love with her or not is more than I can
say, but I am sure that he goes to her for literary sympathy and
counsel, just as I do.  The reader may remember what Number Five said
about the possibility of her getting a sprained ankle, and her asking
the young Doctor whether he felt equal to taking charge of her if she
did.  I would not for the world insinuate that he wishes she would
slip and twist her foot a little,--just a little, you know, but so
that it would have to be laid on a pillow in a chair, and inspected,
and bandaged, and delicately manipulated.  There was a banana-skin
which she might naturally have trodden on, in her way to the tea-
table.  Nobody can suppose that it was there except by the most
innocent of accidents.  There are people who will suspect everybody.
The idea of the Doctor's putting that banana-skin there!  People love
to talk in that silly way about doctors.

Number Five had promised to read us a narrative which she thought
would interest some of the company.  Who wrote it she did not tell
us, but I inferred from various circumstances that she had known the
writer.  She read the story most effectively in her rich, musical
voice.  I noticed that when it came to the sounds of the striking
clock, the ringing of the notes was so like that which reaches us
from some far-off cathedral tower that we wanted to bow our heads, as
if we had just heard a summons to the Angelus.  This was the short
story that Number Five read to The Teacups:--


I have somewhere read this anecdote.  Louis the Fourteenth was
looking out, one day, from, a window of his palace of Saint-Germain.
It was a beautiful landscape which spread out before him, and the
monarch, exulting in health, strength, and the splendors of his
exalted position, felt his bosom swell with emotions of pride and
happiness: Presently he noticed the towers of a church in the
distance, above the treetops.  "What building is that?" he asked.
"May it please your Majesty, that is the Church of St. Denis, where
your royal ancestors have been buried for many generations."  The
answer did not "please his Royal Majesty."  There, then, was the
place where he too was to lie and moulder in the dust.  He turned,
sick at heart, from the window, and was uneasy until he had built him
another palace, from which he could never be appalled by that fatal
prospect.

Something like the experience of Louis the Fourteenth was that of the
owner of


               THE TERRIBLE CLOCK.

I give the story as transcribed from the original manuscript:--

The clock was bequeathed to me by an old friend who had recently
died.  His mind had been a good deal disordered in the later period
of his life.  This clock, I am told; seemed to have a strange
fascination for him.  His eyes were fastened on it during the last
hours of his life.  He died just at midnight.  The clock struck
twelve, the nurse told me, as he drew his last breath, and then,
without any known cause, stopped, with both hands upon the hour.

It is a complex and costly piece of mechanism.  The escapement is in
front, so that every tooth is seen as it frees itself.  It shows the
phases of the moon, the month of the year, the day of the month, and
the day of the week, as well as the hour and minute of the day.

I had not owned it a week before I began to perceive the same kind of
fascination as that which its former owner had experienced.  This
gradually grew upon me, and presently led to trains of thought which
became at first unwelcome, then worrying, and at last unendurable.  I
began by taking offence at the moon.  I did not like to see that
"something large and smooth and round," so like the skull which
little Peterkin picked up on the field of Blenheim.  "How many
times," I kept saying to myself, "is that wicked old moon coming up
to stare at me?"  I could not stand it.  I stopped a part of the
machinery, and the moon went into permanent eclipse.  By and by the
sounds of the infernal machine began to trouble and pursue me.  They
talked to me; more and more their language became that of
articulately speaking men.  They twitted me with the rapid flight of
time.  They hurried me, as if I had not a moment to lose.  Quick!
Quick! Quick! as each tooth released itself from the escapement.  And
as I looked and listened there could not be any mistake about it.  I
heard Quick! Quick! Quick! as plainly, at least, as I ever heard a
word from the phonograph.  I stood watching the dial one day,--it was
near one o'clock,--and a strange attraction held me fastened to the
spot.  Presently something appeared to trip or stumble inside of the
infernal mechanism.  I waited for the sound I knew was to follow.
How nervous I got!  It seemed to me that it would never strike.  At
last the minute-hand reached the highest point of the dial.  Then
there was a little stir among the works, as there is in a
congregation as it rises to receive the benediction.  It was no form
of blessing which rung out those deep, almost sepulchral tones.  But
the word they uttered could not be mistaken.  I can hear its
prolonged, solemn vibrations as if I were standing before the clock
at this moment.

Gone! Yes, I said to myself, gone,--its record made up to be opened
in eternity.

I stood still, staring vaguely at the dial as in a trance.  And as
the next hour creeps stealthily up, it starts all at once, and cries
aloud, Gone!--Gone!  The sun sinks lower, the hour-hand creeps
downward with it, until I hear the thrice-repeated monosyllable,
Gone!--Gone!--Gone!  Soon through the darkening hours, until at the
dead of night the long roll is called, and with the last Gone! the
latest of the long procession that filled the day follows its ghostly
companions into the stillness and darkness of the past.

I silenced the striking part of the works.  Still, the escapement
kept repeating, Quick!  Quick!  Quick!  Still the long minute-hand,
like the dart in the grasp of Death, as we see it in Roubiliac's
monument to Mrs. Nightingale, among the tombs of Westminster Abbey,
stretched itself out, ready to transfix each hour as it passed, and
make it my last.  I sat by the clock to watch the leap from one day
of the week to the next.  Then would come, in natural order, the long
stride from one month to the following one.

I could endure it no longer.  "Take that clock away!" I said.  They
took it away.  They took me away, too,--they thought I needed country
air.  The sounds and motions still pursued me in imagination.  I was
very nervous when I came here.  The walks are pleasant, but the walls
seem to me unnecessarily high.  The boarders are numerous; a little
miscellaneous, I think.  But we have the Queen, and the President of
the United States, and several other distinguished persons, if we may
trust what they tell about themselves.

After we had listened to Number Five's story, I was requested to read
a couple of verses written by me when the guest of my friends, whose
name is hinted by the title prefixed to my lines.

          LA MAISON D'OR.

           BAR HARBOR.

From this fair home behold on either side
The restful mountains or the restless sea:
So the warm sheltering walls of life divide
Time and its tides from still eternity.

Look on the waves: their stormy voices teach
That not on earth may toil and struggle cease.
Look on the mountains: better far than speech
Their silent promise of eternal peace.




VIII.

I had intended to devote this particular report to an account of my
replies to certain questions which have been addressed to me,--
questions which I have a right to suppose interest the public, and
which, therefore, I was justified in bringing before The Teacups, and
presenting to the readers of these articles.

Some may care for one of these questions, and some for another.  A
good many young people think nothing about life as it presents itself
in the far horizon, bounded by the snowy ridges of threescore and the
dim peaks beyond that remote barrier.  Again, there are numbers of
persons who know nothing at all about the Jews; while, on the other
hand, there are those who can, or think they can, detect the
Israelitish blood in many of their acquaintances who believe
themselves of the purest Japhetic origin, and are full of prejudices
about the Semitic race.

I do not mean to be cheated out of my intentions.  I propose to
answer my questioners on the two points just referred to, but I find
myself so much interested in the personal affairs of The Teacups that
I must deal with them before attacking those less exciting subjects.
There is no use, let me say here, in addressing to me letters marked
"personal," "private," "confidential," and so forth, asking me how I
came to know what happened in certain conversations of which I shall
give a partial account.  If there is a very sensitive phonograph
lying about here and there in unsuspected corners, that might account
for some part of my revelations.  If Delilah, whose hearing is of
almost supernatural delicacy, reports to me what she overhears, it
might explain a part of the mystery.  I do not want to accuse
Delilah, but a young person who assures me she can hear my watch
ticking in my pocket, when I am in the next room, might undoubtedly
tell many secrets, if so disposed.  Number Five is pretty nearly
omniscient, and she and I are on the best terms with each other.
These are all the hints I shall give you at present.

The Teacups of whom the least has been heard at our table are the
Tutor and the Musician.  The Tutor is a modest young man, kept down a
little, I think, by the presence of older persons, like the Professor
and myself.  I have met him several times, of late, walking with
different lady Teacups: once with the American Annex; twice with the
English Annex; once with the two Annexes together; once with Number
Five.

I have mentioned the fact that the Tutor is a poet as among his
claims to our attention.  I must add that I do not think any the
worse of him for expressing his emotions and experiences in verse.
For though rhyming is often a bad sign in a young man, especially if
he is already out of his teens, there are those to whom it is as
natural, one might almost say as necessary, as it is to a young bird
to fly.  One does not care to see barnyard fowls tumbling about in
trying to use their wings.  They have a pair of good, stout
drumsticks, and had better keep to them, for the most part.  But that
feeling does not apply to young eagles, or even to young swallows and
sparrows.  The Tutor is by no means one of those ignorant, silly,
conceited phrase-tinklers, who live on the music of their own
jingling syllables and the flattery of their foolish friends.  I
think Number Five must appreciate him.  He is sincere, warmhearted,--
his poetry shows that,--not in haste to be famous, and he looks to me
as if he only wanted love to steady him.  With one of those two young
girls he ought certainly to be captivated, if he is not already.
Twice walking with the English Annex, I met him, and they were so
deeply absorbed in conversation they hardly noticed me.  He has been
talking over the matter with Number Five, who is just the kind of
person for a confidante.

"I know I feel very lonely," he was saying, "and I only wish I felt
sure that I could make another person happy.  My life would be
transfigured if I could find such a one, whom I could love well
enough to give my life to her,--for her, if that were needful, and
who felt an affinity for me, if any one could."

"And why not your English maiden?" said Number Five.

"What makes you think I care more for her than for her American
friend?" said the Tutor.

"Why, have n't I met you walking with her, and did n't you both seem
greatly interested in the subject you were discussing?  I thought, of
course, it was something more or less sentimental that you were
talking about."

"I was explaining that 'enclitic de' in Browning's Grammarian's
Funeral.  I don't think there was anything very sentimental about
that.  She is an inquisitive creature, that English girl.  She is
very fond of asking me questions,--in fact, both of them are.  There
is one curious difference between them: the English girl settles down
into her answers and is quiet; the American girl is never satisfied
with yesterday's conclusions; she is always reopening old questions
in the light of some new fact or some novel idea.  I suppose that
people bred from childhood to lean their backs against the wall of
the Creed and the church catechism find it hard to sit up straight on
the republican stool, which obliges them to stiffen their own backs.
Which of these two girls would be the safest choice for a young man?
I should really like to hear what answer yon would make if I
consulted you seriously, with a view to my own choice,--on the
supposition that there was a fair chance that either of them might be
won."

"The one you are in love with," answered Number Five.

"But what if it were a case of 'How happy could I be with either'?
Which offers the best chance of happiness,--a marriage between two
persons of the same country, or a marriage where one of the parties
is of foreign birth?  Everything else being equal, which is best for
an American to marry, an American or an English girl?  We need not
confine the question to those two young persons, but put it more
generally."

"There are reasons on both sides," answered Number Five.  "I have
often talked this matter over with The Dictator.  This is the way he
speaks about it.  English blood is apt to tell well on the stock upon
which it is engrafted.  Over and over again he has noticed finely
grown specimens of human beings, and on inquiry has found that one or
both of the parents or grandparents were of British origin.  The
chances are that the descendants of the imported stock will be of a
richer organization, more florid, more muscular, with mellower
voices, than the native whose blood has been unmingled with that of
new emigrants since the earlier colonial times.--So talks The
Dictator.--I myself think the American will find his English wife
concentrates herself more readily and more exclusively on her
husband,--for the obvious reason that she is obliged to live mainly
in him.  I remember hearing an old friend of my early days say,
'A woman does not bear transplanting.'  It does not do to trust these
old sayings, and yet they almost always have some foundation in the
experience of mankind, which has repeated them from generation to
generation.  Happy is the married woman of foreign birth who can say
to her husband, as Andromache said to Hector, after enumerating all
the dear relatives she had lost,

    "'Yet while my hector still survives,
     I see My father, mother, brethren, all in thee!'

"How many a sorrowing wife, exiled from her native country, dreams of
the mother she shall see no more!  How many a widow, in a strange
land, wishes that her poor, worn-out body could be laid among her
kinsfolk, in the little churchyard where she used to gather daisies
in her childhood!  It takes a great deal of love to keep down the
'climbing sorrow' that swells up in a woman's throat when such
memories seize upon her, in her moments of desolation.  But if a
foreign-born woman does willingly give up all for a man, and never
looks backward, like Lot's wife, she is a prize that it is worth
running a risk to gain,--that is, if she has the making of a good
woman in her; and a few years will go far towards naturalizing her."

The Tutor listened to Number Five with much apparent interest.  "And
now," he said, "what do you think of her companion?"

"A charming girl for a man of a quiet, easy temperament.  The great
trouble is with her voice.  It is pitched a full note too high.  It
is aggressive, disturbing, and would wear out a nervous man without
his ever knowing what was the matter with him.  A good many crazy
Northern people would recover their reason if they could live for a
year or two among the blacks of the Southern States.  But the
penetrating, perturbing quality of the voices of many of our Northern
women has a great deal to answer for in the way of determining love
and friendship.  You remember that dear friend of ours who left us
not long since?  If there were more voices like hers, the world would
be a different place to live in.  I do not believe any man or woman
ever came within the range of those sweet, tranquil tones without
being hushed, captivated, entranced I might almost say, by their
calming, soothing influence.  Can you not imagine the tones in which
those words, 'Peace, be still,' were spoken?  Such was the effect of
the voice to which but a few weeks ago we were listening.  It is hard
to believe that it has died out of human consciousness.  Can such a
voice be spared from that world of happiness to which we fondly look
forward, where we love to dream, if we do not believe with assured
conviction, that whatever is loveliest in this our mortal condition
shall be with us again as an undying possession?  Your English friend
has a very agreeable voice, round, mellow, cheery, and her
articulation is charming.  Other things being equal, I think you, who
are, perhaps, oversensitive, would live from two to three years
longer with her than with the other.  I suppose a man who lived
within hearing of a murmuring brook would find his life shortened if
a sawmill were set up within earshot of his dwelling."

"And so you advise me to make love to the English girl, do you?"
asked the Tutor.

Number Five laughed.  It was not a loud laugh, she never laughed
noisily; it was not a very hearty laugh; the idea did not seem to
amuse her much.

"No," she said, "I won't take the responsibility.  Perhaps this is a
case in which the true reading of Gay's line would be

          "How happy could I be with neither.

"There are several young women in the world besides our two Annexes."

I question whether the Tutor had asked those questions very
seriously, and I doubt if Number Five thought he was very much in
earnest.


One of The Teacups reminded me that I had promised to say something
of my answers to certain questions.  So I began at once:

I have given the name of brain-tappers to the literary operatives who
address persons whose names are well known to the public, asking
their opinions or their experiences on subjects which are at the time
of general interest.  They expect a literary man or a scientific
expert to furnish them materials for symposia and similar articles,
to be used by them for their own special purposes.  Sometimes they
expect to pay for the information furnished them; at other times, the
honor of being included in a list of noted personages who have
received similar requests is thought sufficient compensation.  The
object with which the brain-tapper puts his questions may be a purely
benevolent and entirely disinterested one.  Such was the object of
some of those questions which I have received and answered.  There
are other cases, in which the brain-tapper is acting much as those
persons do who stop a physician in the street to talk with him about
their livers or stomachs, or other internal arrangements, instead of
going to his office and consulting him, expecting to pay for his
advice.  Others are more like those busy women who, having the
generous intention of making a handsome present to their pastor, at
as little expense as may be, send to all their neighbors and
acquaintances for scraps of various materials, out of which the
imposing "bedspread" or counterpane is to be elaborated.

That is all very well so long as old pieces of stuff are all they
call for, but it is a different matter to ask for clippings out of
new and uncut rolls of cloth.  So it is one thing to ask an author
for liberty to use extracts from his published writings, and it is a
very different thing to expect him to write expressly for the
editor's or compiler's piece of literary patchwork.

I have received many questions within the last year or two, some of
which I am willing to answer, but prefer to answer at my own time, in
my own way, through my customary channel of communication with the
public.  I hope I shall not be misunderstood as implying any reproach
against the inquirers who, in order to get at facts which ought to be
known, apply to all whom they can reach for information.  Their
inquisitiveness is not always agreeable or welcome, but we ought to
be glad that there are mousing fact-hunters to worry us with queries
to which, for the sake of the public, we are bound to give our
attention.  Let me begin with my brain-tappers.

And first, as the papers have given publicity to the fact that I, The
Dictator of this tea-table, have reached the age of threescore years
and twenty, I am requested to give information as to how I managed to
do it, and to explain just how they can go and do likewise.  I think
I can lay down a few rules that will help them to the desired result.
There is no certainty in these biological problems, but there are
reasonable probabilities upon which it is safe to act.

The first thing to be done is, some years before birth, to advertise
for a couple of parents both belonging to long-lived families.
Especially let the mother come of a race in which octogenarians and
nonagenarians are very common phenomena.  There are practical
difficulties in following out this suggestion, but possibly the
forethought of your progenitors, or that concurrence of circumstances
which we call accident, may have arranged this for you.

Do not think that a robust organization is any warrant of long life,
nor that a frail and slight bodily constitution necessarily means
scanty length of days.  Many a strong-limbed young man and many a
blooming young woman have I seen failing and dropping away in or
before middle life, and many a delicate and slightly constituted
person outliving the athletes and the beauties of their generation.
Whether the excessive development of the muscular system is
compatible with the best condition of general health is, I think,
more than doubtful.  The muscles are great sponges that suck up and
make use of large quantities of blood, and the other organs must be
liable to suffer for want of their share.

One of the Seven Wise Men of Greece boiled his wisdom down into two
words,--NOTHING TOO MUCH.  It is a rule which will apply to food,
exercise, labor, sleep, and, in short, to every part of life.  This
is not so very difficult a matter if one begins in good season and
forms regular habits.  But what if I should lay down the rule, Be
cheerful; take all the troubles and trials of life with perfect
equanimity and a smiling countenance?  Admirable directions!  Your
friend, the curly-haired blonde, with florid complexion, round
cheeks, the best possible digestion and respiration, the stomach of
an ostrich and the lungs of a pearl-diver, finds it perfectly easy to
carry them into practice.  You, of leaden complexion, with black and
lank hair, lean, hollow-eyed, dyspeptic, nervous, find it not so easy
to be always hilarious and happy.  The truth is that the persons of
that buoyant disposition which comes always heralded by a smile, as a
yacht driven by a favoring breeze carries a wreath of sparkling foam
before her, are born with their happiness ready made.  They cannot
help being cheerful any more than their saturnine fellow-mortal can
help seeing everything through the cloud he carries with him.  I give
you the precept, then, Be cheerful, for just what it is worth, as I
would recommend to you to be six feet, or at least five feet ten, in
stature.  You cannot settle that matter for yourself, but you can
stand up straight, and give your five feet five its--full value.
You can help along a little by wearing high-heeled shoes.  So you can
do something to encourage yourself in serenity of aspect and
demeanor, keeping your infirmities and troubles in the background
instead of making them the staple of your conversation.  This piece
of advice, if followed, may be worth from three to five years of the
fourscore which you hope to attain.

If, on the other hand, instead of going about cheerily in society,
making the best of everything and as far as possible forgetting your
troubles, you can make up your mind to economize all your stores of
vital energy, to hoard your life as a miser hoards his money, you
will stand a fair chance of living until you are tired of life,--
fortunate if everybody is not tired of you.

One of my prescriptions for longevity may startle you somewhat.  It
is this: Become the subject of a mortal disease.  Let half a dozen
doctors thump you, and knead you, and test you in every possible way,
and render their verdict that you have an internal complaint; they
don't know exactly what it is, but it will certainly kill you by and
by.  Then bid farewell to the world and shut yourself up for an
invalid.  If you are threescore years old when you begin this mode of
life, you may very probably last twenty years, and there you are,--an
octogenarian.  In the mean time, your friends outside have been
dropping off, one after another, until you find yourself almost
alone, nursing your mortal complaint as if it were your baby, hugging
it and kept alive by it,--if to exist is to live.  Who has not seen
cases like this,--a man or a woman shutting himself or herself up,
visited by a doctor or a succession of doctors (I remember that once,
in my earlier experience, I was the twenty-seventh physician who had
been consulted), always taking medicine, until everybody was reminded
of that impatient speech of a relative of one of these invalid
vampires who live on the blood of tired-out attendants, "I do wish
she would get well--or something"?  Persons who are shut up in that
way, confined to their chambers, sometimes to their beds, have a very
small amount of vital expenditure, and wear out very little of their
living substance.  They are like lamps with half their wicks picked
down, and will continue to burn when other lamps have used up all
their oil.  An insurance office might make money by taking no risks
except on lives of persons suffering from mortal disease.  It is on
this principle of economizing the powers of life that a very eminent
American physician,--Dr. Weir Mitchell, a man of genius,--has
founded his treatment of certain cases of nervous exhaustion.

What have I got to say about temperance, the use of animal food, and
so forth?  These are questions asked me.  Nature has proved a wise
teacher, as I think, in my own case.  The older I grow, the less use
I make of alcoholic stimulants.  In fact, I hardly meddle with them
at all, except a glass or two of champagne occasionally.  I find that
by far the best borne of all drinks containing alcohol.  I do not
suppose my experience can be the foundation of a universal rule.  Dr.
Holyoke, who lived to be a hundred, used habitually, in moderate
quantities, a mixture of cider, water, and rum.  I think, as one
grows older, less food, especially less animal food, is required.
But old people have a right to be epicures, if they can afford it.
The pleasures of the palate are among the last gratifications of the
senses allowed them.  We begin life as little cannibals,--feeding on
the flesh and blood of our mothers.  We range through all the
vegetable and animal products, of nature, and I suppose, if the
second childhood could return to the food of the first, it might
prove a wholesome diet.

What do I say to smoking?  I cannot grudge an old man his pipe, but I
think tobacco often does a good deal of harm to the health,--to the
eyes especially, to the nervous system generally, producing headache,
palpitation, and trembling.  I myself gave it up many years ago.
Philosophically speaking, I think self-narcotization and self-
alcoholization are rather ignoble substitutes for undisturbed self-
consciousness and unfettered self-control.

Here is another of those brain-tapping letters, of similar character,
which I have no objection to answering at my own time and in the
place which best suits me.  As the questions must be supposed to be
asked with a purely scientific and philanthropic purpose, it can make
little difference when and where they are answered.  For myself, I
prefer our own tea-table to the symposia to which I am often invited.
I do not quarrel with those who invite their friends to a banquet to
which many strangers are expected to contribute.  It is a very easy
and pleasant way of giving an entertainment at little cost and with
no responsibility.  Somebody has been writing to me about "Oatmeal
and Literature," and somebody else wants to know whether I have found
character influenced by diet; also whether, in my opinion, oatmeal is
preferable to pie as an American national food.

In answer to these questions, I should say that I have my beliefs and
prejudices; but if I were pressed hard for my proofs of their
correctness, I should make but a poor show in the witness-box.  Most
assuredly I do believe that body and mind are much influenced by the
kind of food habitually depended upon.  I am persuaded that a too
exclusively porcine diet gives a bristly character to the beard and
hair, which is borrowed from the animal whose tissues these stiff-
bearded compatriots of ours have too largely assimilated.  I can
never stray among the village people of our windy capes without now
and then coming upon a human being who looks as if he had been split,
salted, and dried, like the salt-fish which has built up his arid
organism.  If the body is modified by the food which nourishes it,
the mind and character very certainly will be modified by it also.
We know enough of their close connection with each other to be sure
of that, without any statistical observations to prove it.

Do you really want to know "whether oatmeal is preferable to pie as
an American national food"?  I suppose the best answer I can give to
your question is to tell you what is my own practice.  Oatmeal in the
morning, as an architect lays a bed of concrete to form a base for
his superstructure.  Pie when I can get it; that is, of the genuine
sort, for I am not patriotic enough to think very highly of the
article named after the Father of his Country, who was first in war,
first in peace,--not first in pies, according to my standard.

There is a very odd prejudice against pie as an article of diet.  It
is common to hear every form of bodily degeneracy and infirmity
attributed to this particular favorite food.  I see no reason or
sense in it.  Mr.  Emerson believed in pie, and was almost indignant
when a fellow-traveller refused the slice he offered him.  "Why,
Mr.________ ," said be, "what is pie made for!"  If every Green
Mountain boy has not eaten a thousand times his weight in apple,
pumpkin, squash, and mince pie, call me a dumpling.  And Colonel
Ethan Allen was one of them,--Ethan Allen, who, as they used to say,
could wrench off the head of a wrought nail with his teeth.

If you mean to keep as well as possible, the less you think about
your health the better.  You know enough not to eat or drink what you
have found does not agree with you.  You ought to know enough not to
expose yourself needlessly to draughts.  If you take a
"constitutional," walk with the wind when you can, and take a closed
car against it if you can get one.  Walking against the wind is one
of the most dangerous kinds of exposure, if you are sensitive to
cold.  But except a few simple rules such as I have just given, let
your health take care of itself so long as it behaves decently.  If
you want to be sure not to reach threescore and twenty, get a little
box of homoeopathic pellets and a little book of homeopathic
prescriptions.  I had a poor friend who fell into that way, and
became at last a regular Hahnemaniac.  He left a box of his little
jokers, which at last came into my hands.  The poor fellow had
cultivated symptoms as other people cultivate roses or
chrysanthemums.  What a luxury of choice his imagination presented to
him!  When one watches for symptoms, every organ in the body is ready
to put in its claim.  By and by a real illness attacked him, and the
box of little pellets was shut up, to minister to his fancied evils
no longer.

Let me tell you one thing.  I think if patients and physicians were
in the habit of recognizing the fact I am going to mention, both
would be gainers.  The law I refer to must be familiar to all
observing physicians, and to all intelligent persons who have
observed their own bodily and mental conditions.  This is the curve
of health.  It is a mistake to suppose that the normal state of
health is represented by a straight horizontal line.  Independently
of the well-known causes which raise or depress the standard of
vitality, there seems to be,--I think I may venture to say there is,
--a rhythmic undulation in the flow of the vital force.  The "dynamo"
which furnishes the working powers of consciousness and action has
its annual, its monthly, its diurnal waves, even its momentary
ripples, in the current it furnishes.  There are greater and lesser
curves in the movement of every day's life,--a series of ascending
and descending movements, a periodicity depending on the very nature
of the force at work in the living organism.  Thus we have our good
seasons and our bad seasons, our good days and our bad days, life
climbing and descending in long or short undulations, which I have
called the curve of health.

From this fact spring a great proportion of the errors of medical
practice.  On it are based the delusions of the various shadowy
systems which impose themselves on the ignorant and half-learned
public as branches or "schools" of science.  A remedy taken at the
time of the ascent in the curve of health is found successful.  The
same remedy taken while the curve is in its downward movement proves
a failure.

So long as this biological law exists, so long the charlatan will
keep his hold on the ignorant public.  So long as it exists, the
wisest practitioner will be liable to deceive himself about the
effect of what he calls and loves to think are his remedies.  Long-
continued and sagacious observation will to some extent undeceive
him; but were it not for the happy illusion that his useless or even
deleterious drugs were doing good service, many a practitioner would
give up his calling for one in which he could be more certain that he
was really being useful to the subjects of his professional dealings.
For myself, I should prefer a physician of a sanguine temperament,
who had a firm belief in himself and his methods.  I do not wonder at
all that the public support a whole community of pretenders who show
the portraits of the patients they have "cured."  The best physicians
will tell you that, though many patients get well under their
treatment, they rarely cure anybody.  If you are told also that the
best physician has many more patients die on his hands than the worst
of his fellow-practitioners, you may add these two statements to your
bundle of paradoxes, and if they puzzle you I will explain them at
some future time.

[I take this opportunity of correcting a statement now going the
rounds of the medical and probably other periodicals.  In "The
Journal of the American Medical Association," dated April 26,1890,
published at Chicago, I am reported, in quotation marks, as saying,
"Give me opium, wine, and milk, and I will cure all diseases to which
flesh is heir."

In the first place, I never said I will cure, or can cure, or would
or could cure, or had cured any disease.  My venerated instructor,
Dr. James Jackson, taught me never to use that expression.  Curo
means, I take care of, he used to say, and in that sense, if you mean
nothing more, it is properly employed.  So, in the amphitheatre of
the Ecole de Medecine, I used to read the words of Ambroise Pare, "Je
le pansay, Dieu le guarist." (I dressed his wound, and God cured
him.) Next, I am not in the habit of talking about "the diseases to
which flesh is heir."  The expression has become rather too familiar
for repetition, and belongs to the rhetoric of other latitudes.  And,
lastly, I have said some plain things, perhaps some sharp ones, about
the abuse of drugs and the limited number of vitally important
remedies, but I am not so ignorantly presumptuous as to make the
foolish statement falsely attributed to me.]

I paused a minute or two, and as no one spoke out; I put a question
to the Counsellor.

Are you quite sure that you wish to live to be threescore and twenty
years old?

"Most certainly I do.  Don't they say that Theophrastus lived to his
hundred and seventh year, and did n't he complain of the shortness of
life?  At eighty a man has had just about time to get warmly settled
in his nest.  Do you suppose he doesn't enjoy the quiet of that
resting-place?  No more haggard responsibility to keep him awake
nights,--unless he prefers to retain his hold on offices and duties
from which he can be excused if be chooses.  No more goading
ambitions,--he knows he has done his best.  No more jealousies, if he
were weak enough to feel such ignoble stirrings in his more active
season.  An octogenarian with a good record, and free from annoying
or distressing infirmities, ought to be the happiest of men.
Everybody treats him with deference.  Everybody wants to help him.
He is the ward of the generations that have grown up since he was in
the vigor of maturity.  Yes, let me live to be fourscore years, and
then I will tell you whether I should like a few more years or not."

You carry the feelings of middle age, I said, in imagination, over
into the period of senility, and then reason and dream about it as if
its whole mode of being were like that of the earlier period of life.
But how many things there are in old age which you must live into if
you would expect to have any "realizing sense" of their significance!
In the first place, you have no coevals, or next to none.  At fifty,
your vessel is stanch, and you are on deck with the rest, in all
weathers.  At sixty, the vessel still floats, and you are in the
cabin.  At seventy, you, with a few fellow-passengers, are on a raft.
At eighty, you are on a spars to which, possibly, one, or two, or
three friends of about your own age are still clinging.  After that,
you must expect soon to find yourself alone, if you are still
floating, with only a life-preserver to keep your old white-bearded
chin above the water.

Kindness?  Yes, pitying kindness, which is a bitter sweet in which
the amiable ingredient can hardly be said to predominate.  How
pleasant do you think it is to have an arm offered to you when you
are walking on a level surface, where there is no chance to trip?
How agreeable do you suppose it is to have your well-meaning friends
shout and screech at you, as if you were deaf as an adder, instead of
only being, as you insist, somewhat hard of hearing?  I was a little
over twenty years old when I wrote the lines which some of you may
have met with, for they have been often reprinted:

          The mossy marbles rest
          On the lips that he has prest
               In their bloom,
          And the names he loved to hear
          Have been carved for many a year
               On the tomb.

The world was a garden to me then; it is a churchyard now.

"I thought you were one of those who looked upon old age cheerfully,
and welcomed it as a season of peace and contented enjoyment."

I am one of those who so regard it.  Those are not bitter or scalding
tears that fall from my eyes upon "the mossy marbles."  The young who
left my side early in my life's journey are still with me in the
unchanged freshness and beauty of youth.  Those who have long kept
company with me live on after their seeming departure, were it only
by the mere force of habit; their images are all around me, as if
every surface had been a sensitive film that photographed them; their
voices echo about me, as if they had been recorded on those
unforgetting cylinders which bring back to us the tones and accents
that have imprinted them, as the hardened sands show us the tracks of
extinct animals.  The melancholy of old age has a divine tenderness
in it, which only the sad experiences of life can lend a human soul.
But there is a lower level,--that of tranquil contentment and easy
acquiescence in the conditions in which we find ourselves; a lower
level, in which old age trudges patiently when it is not using its
wings.  I say its wings, for no period of life is so imaginative as
that which looks to younger people the most prosaic.  The atmosphere
of memory is one in which imagination flies more easily and feels
itself more at home than in the thinner ether of youthful
anticipation.  I have told you some of the drawbacks of age; I would
not have you forget its privileges.  When it comes down from its
aerial excursions, it has much left to enjoy on the humble plane of
being.  And so you think you would like to become an octogenarian?
"I should," said the Counsellor, now a man in the high noon of bodily
and mental vigor.  "Four more--yes, five more--decades would not be
too much, I think.  And how much I should live to see in that time!
I am glad you have laid down some rules by which a man may reasonably
expect to leap the eight barred gate.  I won't promise to obey them
all, though."

Among the questions addressed to me, as to a large number of other
persons, are the following.  I take them from "The American Hebrew"
of April 4, 1890.  I cannot pretend to answer them all, but I can say
something about one or two of them.

"I.  Can you, of your own personal experience, find any justification
whatever for the entertainment of prejudice towards individuals
solely because they are Jews?

"II.  Is this prejudice not due largely to the religious instruction
that is given by the church acid Sunday-school?  For instance, the
teachings that the Jews crucified Jesus; that they rejected him, and
can only secure salvation by belief in him, and similar matters that
are calculated to excite in the impressionable mind of the child an
aversion, if not a loathing, for members of 'the despised race.'

"III.  Have you observed in the social or business life of the Jew,
so far as your personal experience has gone, any different standard
of conduct than prevails among Christians of the same social status?

"IV.  Can you suggest what should be done to dispel the existing
prejudice?"

As to the first question, I have had very slight acquaintance with
the children of Israel.  I shared more or less the prevailing
prejudices against the persecuted race.  I used to read in my hymn-
book,--I hope I quote correctly,--

              "See what a living stone
               The builders did refuse!
               Yet God has built his church thereon,
               In spite of envious Jews."

I grew up inheriting the traditional idea that they were a race lying
under a curse for their obstinacy in refusing the gospel.  Like other
children of New England birth, I walked in the narrow path of Puritan
exclusiveness.  The great historical church of Christendom was
presented to me as Bunyan depicted it: one of the two giants sitting
at the door of their caves, with the bones, of pilgrims scattered
about them, and grinning at the travellers whom they could no longer
devour.  In the nurseries of old-fashioned Orthodoxy there was one
religion in the world,--one religion, and a multitude of detestable,
literally damnable impositions, believed in by uncounted millions,
who were doomed to perdition for so believing.  The Jews were the
believers in one of these false religions.  It had been true once,
but was now a pernicious and abominable lie.  The principal use of
the Jews seemed to be to lend money, and to fulfil the predictions of
the old prophets of their race.

No doubt the individual sons of Abraham whom we found in our ill-
favored and ill-flavored streets were apt to be unpleasing specimens
of the race.  It was against the most adverse influences of
legislation, of religious feeling, of social repugnance, that the
great names of Jewish origin made themselves illustrious; that the
philosophers, the musicians, the financiers, the statesmen, of the
last centuries forced the world to recognize and accept them.
Benjamin, the son of Isaac, a son of Israel, as his family name makes
obvious, has shown how largely Jewish blood has been represented in
the great men and women of modern days.

There are two virtues which Christians have found it very hard to
exemplify in practice.  These are modesty and civility.  The Founder
of the Christian religion appeared among a people accustomed to look
for a Messiah, a special ambassador from heaven, with an
authoritative message.  They were intimately acquainted with every
expression having reference to this divine messenger.  They had a
religion of their own, about which Christianity agrees with Judaism
in asserting that it was of divine origin.  It is a serious fact, to
which we do not give all the attention it deserves, that this
divinely instructed people were not satisfied with the evidence that
the young Rabbi who came to overthrow their ancient church and found
a new one was a supernatural being.  "We think he was a great
Doctor," said a Jewish companion with whom I was conversing.  He
meant a great Teacher, I presume, though healing the sick was one of
his special offices.  Instead of remembering that they were entitled
to form their own judgment of the new Teacher, as they had judged of
Hillel and other great instructors, Christians, as they called
themselves, have insulted, calumniated, oppressed, abased, outraged,
"the chosen race" during the long succession of centuries since the
Jewish contemporaries of the Founder of Christianity made up their
minds that he did not meet the conditions required by the subject of
the predictions of their Scriptures.  The course of the argument
against them is very briefly and effectively stated by Mr. Emerson:

"This was Jehovah come down out of heaven.  I will kill you if you
say he was a man."

It seems as if there should be certain laws of etiquette regulating
the relation of different religions to each other.  It is not civil
for a follower of Mahomet to call his neighbor of another creed a
"Christian dog."  Still more, there should be something like
politeness in the bearing of Christian sects toward each other, and
of believers in the new dispensation toward those who still adhere to
the old.  We are in the habit of allowing a certain arrogant
assumption to our Roman Catholic brethren.  We have got used to their
pretensions.  They may call us "heretics," if they like.  They may
speak of us as "infidels," if they choose, especially if they say it
in Latin.  So long as there is no inquisition, so long as there is no
auto da fe, we do not mind the hard words much; and we have as good
phrases to give them back: the Man of Sin and the Scarlet Woman will
serve for examples.  But it is better to be civil to each other all
round.  I doubt if a convert to the religion of Mahomet was ever made
by calling a man a Christian dog.  I doubt if a Hebrew ever became a
good Christian if the baptismal rite was performed by spitting on his
Jewish gabardine.  I have often thought of the advance in comity and
true charity shown in the title of my late honored friend James
Freeman Clarke's book, "The Ten Great Religions."  If the creeds of
mankind try to understand each other before attempting mutual
extermination, they will be sure to find a meaning in beliefs which
are different from their own.  The old Calvinistic spirit was almost
savagely exclusive.  While the author of the "Ten Great Religions"
was growing up in Boston under the benignant, large-minded teachings
of the Rev. James Freeman, the famous Dr. John M.  Mason, at New
York, was fiercely attacking the noble humanity of "The Universal
Prayer."  "In preaching," says his biographer, "he once quoted Pope's
lines as to God's being adored alike 'by saint, by savage, and by
sage,' and pronounced it (in his deepest guttural) 'the most damnable
lie.'"

What could the Hebrew expect when a Christian preacher could use such
language about a petition breathing the very soul of humanity?
Happily, the true human spirit is encroaching on that arrogant and
narrow-minded form of selfishness which called itself Christianity.

The golden rule should govern us in dealing with those whom we call
unbelievers, with heathen, and with all who do not accept our
religious views.  The Jews are with us as a perpetual lesson to teach
us modesty and civility.  The religion we profess is not self-
evident.  It did not convince the people to whom it was sent.  We
have no claim to take it for granted that we are all right, and they
are all wrong.  And, therefore, in the midst of all the triumphs of
Christianity, it is well that the stately synagogue should lift its
walls by the side of the aspiring cathedral, a perpetual reminder
that there are many mansions in the Father's earthly house as well as
in the heavenly one; that civilized humanity, longer in time and
broader in space than any historical form of belief, is mightier than
any one institution or organization it includes.

Many years ago I argued with myself the proposition which my Hebrew
correspondent has suggested.  Recognizing the fact that I was born to
a birthright of national and social prejudices against "the chosen
people,"--chosen as the object of contumely and abuse by the rest of
the world,--I pictured my own inherited feelings of aversion in all
their intensity, and the strain of thought under the influence of
which those prejudices gave way to a more human, a more truly
Christian feeling of brotherhood.  I must ask your indulgence while I
quote a few verses from a poem of my own, printed long ago under the
title "At the Pantomime."

I was crowded between two children of Israel, and gave free inward
expression to my feelings.  All at once I happened to look more
closely at one of my neighbors, and saw that the youth was the very
ideal of the Son of Mary.

     A fresh young cheek whose olive hue
     The mantling blood shows faintly through;
     Locks dark as midnight, that divide
     And shade the neck on either side;
     Soft, gentle, loving eyes that gleam
     Clear as a starlit mountain stream;
     So looked that other child of Shem,
     The Maiden's Boy of Bethlehem!

     --And thou couldst scorn the peerless blood
     That flows unmingled from the Flood,
     Thy scutcheon spotted with the stains
     Of Norman thieves and pirate Danes!
     The New World's foundling, in thy pride
     Scowl on the Hebrew at thy side,
     And lo!  the very semblance there
     The Lord of Glory deigned to wear!

     I see that radiant image rise,
     The flowing hair, the pitying eyes,
     The faintly crimsoned cheek that shows
     The blush of Sharon's opening rose,
     Thy hands would clasp his hallowed feet
     Whose brethren soil thy Christian seat,
     Thy lips would press his garment's hem
     That curl in wrathful scorn for them!

     A sudden mist, a watery screen,
     Dropped like a veil before the scene;
     The shadow floated from my soul,
     And to my lips a whisper stole:--
     Thy prophets caught the Spirit's flame,
     From thee the Son of Mary came,
     With thee the Father deigned to dwell,
     Peace be upon thee, Israel!


It is not to be expected that intimate relations will be established
between Jewish and Christian communities until both become so far
rationalized and humanized that their differences are comparatively
unimportant.  But already there is an evident approximation in the
extreme left of what is called liberal Christianity and the
representatives of modern Judaism.  The life of a man like the late
Sir Moses Montefiore reads a lesson from the Old Testament which
might well have been inspired by the noblest teachings of the
Christian Gospels.


          Delilah, and how she got her name.

Est-elle bien gentille, cette petite?  I said one day to Number Five,
as our pretty Delilah put her arm between us with a bunch of those
tender early radishes that so recall the rosy-fingered morning of
Homer.  The little hand which held the radishes would not have shamed
Aurora.  That hand has never known drudgery, I feel sure.

When I spoke those French words our little Delilah gave a slight,
seemingly involuntary start, and her cheeks grew of as bright a red
as her radishes.  Ah, said I to myself; does that young girl
understand French?  It may be worth while to be careful what one says
before her.

There is a mystery about this girl.  She seems to know her place
perfectly,--except, perhaps, when she burst out crying, the other
day, which was against all the rules of table-maiden's etiquette,--
and yet she looks as if she had been born to be waited on, and not to
perform that humble service for others.  We know that once in a while
girls with education and well connected take it into their heads to
go into service for a few weeks or months.  Sometimes it is from
economic motives,--to procure means for their education, or to help
members of their families who need assistance.  At any rate, they
undertake the lighter menial duties of some household where they are
not known, and, having stooped--if stooping it is to be considered--
to lowly offices, no born and bred servants are more faithful to all
their obligations.  You must not suppose she was christened Delilah.
Any of our ministers would hesitate to give such a heathen name to a
Christian child.

The way she came to get it was this: The Professor was going to give
a lecture before an occasional audience, one evening.  When he took
his seat with the other Teacups, the American Annex whispered to the
other Annex, "His hair wants cutting,--it looks like fury."  "Quite
so," said the English Annex.  "I wish you would tell him so,-- I do,
awfully."  "I'll fix it," said the American girl.  So, after the
teacups were emptied and the company had left the table, she went up
to the Professor.  "You read this lecture, don't you, Professor?" she
said.  "I do," he answered.  "I should think that lock of hair which
falls down over your forehead would trouble you," she said.  "It does
sometimes," replied the Professor.  "Let our little maid trim it for
you.  You're equal to that, aren't you?" turning to the handmaiden.
"I always used to cut my father's hair," she answered.  She brought a
pair of glittering shears, and before she would let the Professor go
she had trimmed his hair and beard as they had not been dealt with
for many a day.  Everybody said the Professor looked ten years
younger.  After that our little handmaiden was always called Delilah,
among the talking Teacups.

The Mistress keeps a watchful eye on this young girl.  I should not
be surprised to find that she was carrying out some ideal, some fancy
or whim,--possibly nothing more, but springing from some generous,
youthful impulse.  Perhaps she is working for that little sister at
the Blind Asylum.  Where did she learn French?  She did certainly
blush, and betrayed every sign of understanding the words spoken
about her in that language.  Sometimes she sings while at her work,
and we have all been struck with the pure, musical character of her
voice.  It is just such a voice as ought to come from that round
white throat.  We made a discovery about it the other evening.

The Mistress keeps a piano in her room, and we have sometimes had
music in the evening.  One of The Teacups, to whom I have slightly
referred, is an accomplished pianist, and the two Annexes sing very
sweetly together,--the American girl having a clear soprano voice,
the English girl a mellow contralto.  They had sung several tunes,
when the Mistress rang for Avis,--for that is our Delilah's real
name.  She whispered to the young girl, who blushed and trembled.
"Don't be frightened," said the Mistress encouragingly.  "I have
heard you singing 'Too Young for Love,' and I will get our pianist to
play it.  The young ladies both know it, and you must join in."

The two voices, with the accompaniment, had hardly finished the first
line when a pure, ringing, almost childlike voice joined the vocal
duet.  The sound of her own voice seemed to make her forget her
fears, and she warbled as naturally and freely as any young bird of a
May morning.  Number Five came in while she was singing, and when she
got through caught her in her arms and kissed her, as if she were her
sister, and not Delilah, our table-maid.  Number Five is apt to
forget herself and those social differences to which some of us
attach so much importance.  This is the song in which the little maid
took part:


          TOO YOUNG FOR LOVE.

          Too young for love?
          Ah, say not so!
     Tell reddening rose-buds not to blow!
     Wait not for spring to pass away,--
     Love's summer months begin with May!
          Too young for love?
          Ah, say not so!
          Too young?  Too young?
          Ah, no!  no!  no!

          Too young for love?
          Ah, say not so,
     While daisies bloom and tulips glow!
     June soon will come with lengthened day
     To practise all love learned in May.
          Too young for love?
          Ah, say not so!
          Too young?  Too young?
          Ah, no!  no!  no!




IX

I often wish that our Number Seven could have known and corresponded
with the author of "The Budget of Paradoxes."  I think Mr. De Morgan
would have found some of his vagaries and fancies not undeserving of
a place in his wonderful collection of eccentricities, absurdities,
ingenuities,--mental freaks of all sorts.  But I think he would have
now and then recognized a sound idea, a just comparison, a suggestive
hint, a practical notion, which redeemed a page of extravagances and
crotchety whims.  I confess that I am often pleased with fancies of
his, and should be willing to adopt them as my own.  I think he has,
in the midst of his erratic and tangled conceptions, some perfectly
clear and consistent trains of thought.

So when Number Seven spoke of sending us a paper, I welcomed the
suggestion.  I asked him whether he had any objection to my looking
it over before he read it.  My proposal rather pleased him, I
thought, for, as was observed on a former occasion, he has in
connection with a belief in himself another side,--a curious self-
distrust.  I have no question that he has an obscure sense of some
mental deficiency.  Thus you may expect from him first a dogma, and
presently a doubt.  If you fight his dogma, he will do battle for it
stoutly; if you let him alone, he will very probably explain its
extravagances, if it has any, and tame it into reasonable limits.
Sometimes he is in one mood, sometimes in another.

The first portion of what we listened to shows him at his best; in
the latter part I am afraid you will think he gets a little wild.

I proceed to lay before you the paper which Number Seven read to The
Teacups.  There was something very pleasing in the deference which
was shown him.  We all feel that there is a crack in the teacup, and
are disposed to handle it carefully.  I have left out a few things
which he said, feeling that they might give offence to some of the
company.  There were sentences so involved and obscure that I was
sure they would not be understood, if indeed he understood them
himself.  But there are other passages so entirely sane, and as it
seems to me so just, that if any reader attributes them to me I shall
not think myself wronged by the supposition.  You must remember that
Number Seven has had a fair education, that he has been a wide reader
in many directions, and that he belongs to a family of remarkable
intellectual gifts.  So it was not surprising that he said some
things which pleased the company, as in fact they did.  The reader
will not be startled to see a certain abruptness in the transition
from one subject to another,--it is a characteristic of the squinting
brain wherever you find it.  Another curious mark rarely wanting in
the subjects of mental strabismus is an irregular and often sprawling
and deformed handwriting.  Many and many a time I have said, after
glancing at the back of a letter, "This comes from an insane asylum,
or from an eccentric who might well be a candidate for such an
institution."  Number Seven's manuscript, which showed marks of my
corrections here and there, furnished good examples of the
chirography of persons with ill-mated cerebral hemispheres.  But the
earlier portions of the manuscript are of perfectly normal
appearance.

Conticuere omnes, as Virgil says.  We were all silent as Number Seven
began the reading of his paper.


                    Number Seven reads.

I am the seventh son of a seventh son, as I suppose you all know.  It
is commonly believed that some extraordinary gifts belong to the
fortunate individuals born under these exceptional conditions.
However this may be, a peculiar virtue was supposed to dwell in me
from my earliest years.  My touch was believed to have the influence
formerly attributed to that of the kings and queens of England.  You
may remember that the great Dr. Samuel Johnson, when a child, was
carried to be touched by her Majesty Queen Anne for the "king's
evil," as scrofula used to be called.  Our honored friend The
Dictator will tell you that the brother of one of his Andover
schoolmates was taken to one of these gifted persons, who touched
him, and hung a small bright silver coin, either a "fourpence
ha'penny" or a "ninepence," about his neck, which, strange to say,
after being worn a certain time, became tarnished, and finally
black,--a proof of the poisonous matters which had become eliminated
from the system and gathered upon the coin.  I remember that at one
time I used to carry fourpence ha'pennies with holes bored through
them, which I furnished to children or to their mothers, under
pledges of secrecy,--receiving a piece of silver of larger dimensions
in exchange.  I never felt quite sure about any extraordinary
endowment being a part of my inheritance in virtue of my special
conditions of birth.  A phrenologist, who examined my head when I was
a boy, said the two sides were unlike.  My hatter's measurement told
me the same thing; but in looking over more than a bushel of the
small cardboard hat-patterns which give the exact shape of the head,
I have found this is not uncommon.  The phrenologist made all sorts
of predictions of what I should be and do, which proved about as near
the truth as those recorded in Miss Edith Thomas's charming little
poem, "Augury," which some of us were reading the other day.

I have never been through college, but I had a relative who was
famous as a teacher of rhetoric in one of our universities, and
especially for taking the nonsense out of sophomorical young fellows
who could not say anything without rigging it up in showy and
sounding phrases.  I think I learned from him to express myself in
good old-fashioned English, and without making as much fuss about it
as our Fourth of July orators and political haranguers were in the
habit of making.

I read a good many stories during my boyhood, one of which left a
lasting impression upon me, and which I have always commended to
young people.  It is too late, generally, to try to teach old people,
yet one may profit by it at any period of life before the sight has
become too dim to be of any use.  The story I refer to is in
"Evenings at Home," and is called "Eyes and No Eyes."  I ought to
have it by me, but it is constantly happening that the best old
things get overlaid by the newest trash; and though I have never seen
anything of the kind half so good, my table and shelves are cracking
with the weight of involuntary accessions to my library.

This is the story as I remember it: Two children walk out, and are
questioned when they come home.  One has found nothing to observe,
nothing to admire, nothing to describe, nothing to ask questions
about.  The other has found everywhere objects of curiosity and
interest.  I advise you, if you are a child anywhere under forty-
five, and do not yet wear glasses, to send at once for "Evenings at
Home" and read that story.  For myself, I am always grateful to the
writer of it for calling my attention to common things.  How many
people have been waked to a quicker consciousness of life by
Wordsworth's simple lines about the daffodils, and what he says of
the thoughts suggested to him by "the meanest flower that blows"!

I was driving with a friend, the other day, through a somewhat dreary
stretch of country, where there seemed to be very little to attract
notice or deserve remark.  Still, the old spirit infused by "Eyes and
No Eyes" was upon me, and I looked for something to fasten my thought
upon, and treat as an artist treats a study for a picture.  The first
object to which my eyes were drawn was an old-fashioned well-sweep.
It did not take much imaginative sensibility to be stirred by the
sight of this most useful, most ancient, most picturesque, of
domestic conveniences.  I know something of the shadoof of Egypt,--
the same arrangement by which the sacred waters of the Nile have been
lifted, from the days of the Pharaohs to those of the Khedives.  That
long forefinger pointing to heaven was a symbol which spoke to the
Puritan exile as it spoke of old to the enslaved Israelite.  Was
there ever any such water as that which we used to draw from the
deep, cold well, in "the old oaken bucket"?  What memories gather
about the well in all ages!  What love-matches have been made at its
margin, from the times of Jacob and, Rachel downward!  What fairy
legends hover over it, what fearful mysteries has it hidden!  The
beautiful well-sweep!  It is too rarely that we see it, and as it
dies out and gives place to the odiously convenient pump, with the
last patent on its cast-iron uninterestingness, does it not seem as
if the farmyard aspect had lost half its attraction?  So long as the
dairy farm exists, doubtless there must be every facility for getting
water in abundance; but the loss of the well-sweep cannot be made up
to us even if our milk were diluted to twice its present attenuation.

The well-sweep had served its turn, and my companion and I relapsed
into silence.  After a while we passed another farmyard, with nothing
which seemed deserving of remark except the wreck of an old wagon.

"Look," I said, "if you want to see one of the greatest of all the
triumphs of human ingenuity, one of the most beautiful, as it is one
of the most useful, of all the mechanisms which the intelligence of
successive ages has called into being."

"I see nothing," my companion answered, "but an old broken-down
wagon.  Why they leave such a piece of lumbering trash about their
place, where people can see it as they pass, is more than I can
account for."

"And yet," said I, "there is one of the most extraordinary products
of human genius and skill,--an object which combines the useful and
the beautiful to an extent which hardly any simple form of mechanism
can pretend to rival.  Do you notice how, while everything else has
gone to smash, that wheel remains sound and fit for service?  Look at
it merely for its beauty.

"See the perfect circles, the outer and the inner.  A circle is in
itself a consummate wonder of geometrical symmetry.  It is the line
in which the omnipotent energy delights to move.  There is no fault
in it to be amended.  The first drawn circle and the last both embody
the same complete fulfillment of a perfect design.  Then look at the
rays which pass from the inner to the outer circle.  How beautifully
they bring the greater and lesser circles into connection with each
other!  The flowers know that secret,--the marguerite in the meadow
displays it as clearly as the great sun in heaven.  How beautiful is
this flower of wood and iron, which we were ready to pass by without
wasting a look upon it!  But its beauty is only the beginning of its
wonderful claim upon us for our admiration.  Look at that field of
flowering grass, the triticum vulgare,--see how its waves follow the
breeze in satiny alternations of light and shadow.  You admire it for
its lovely aspect; but when you remember that this flowering grass is
wheat, the finest food of the highest human races, it gains a
dignity, a glory, that its beauty alone could not give it.

"Now look at that exquisite structure lying neglected and disgraced,
but essentially unchanged in its perfection, before you.  That slight
and delicate-looking fabric has stood such a trial as hardly any
slender contrivance, excepting always the valves of the heart, was
ever subjected to.  It has rattled for years over the cobble-stones
of a rough city pavement.  It has climbed over all the accidental
obstructions it met in the highway, and dropped into all the holes
and deep ruts that made the heavy farmer sitting over it use his
Sunday vocabulary in a week-day form of speech.  At one time or
another, almost every part of that old wagon has given way.  It has
had two new pairs of shafts.  Twice the axle has broken off close to
the hub, or nave.  The seat broke when Zekle and Huldy were having
what they called 'a ride' together.  The front was kicked in by a
vicious mare.  The springs gave way and the floor bumped on the axle.
Every portion of the wagon became a prey of its special accident,
except that most fragile looking of all its parts, the wheel.  Who
can help admiring the exact distribution of the power of resistance
at the least possible expenditure of material which is manifested in
this wondrous triumph of human genius and skill?  The spokes are
planted in the solid hub as strongly as the jaw-teeth of a lion in
their deep-sunken sockets.  Each spoke has its own territory in the
circumference, for which it is responsible.  According to the load
the vehicle is expected to carry, they are few or many, stout or
slender, but they share their joint labor with absolute justice,--not
one does more, not one does less, than its just proportion.  The
outer end of the spokes is received into the deep mortise of the
wooden fellies, and the structure appears to be complete.  But how
long would it take to turn that circle into a polygon, unless some
mighty counteracting force should prevent it?  See the iron tire
brought hot from the furnace and laid around the smoking
circumference.  Once in place, the workman cools the hot iron; and as
it shrinks with a force that seems like a hand-grasp of the
Omnipotent, it clasps the fitted fragments of the structure, and
compresses them into a single inseparable whole.

"Was it not worth our while to stop a moment before passing that old
broken wagon, and see whether we could not find as much in it as
Swift found in his 'Meditations on a Broomstick'?  I have been
laughed at for making so much of such a common thing as a wheel.
Idiots!  Solomon's court fool would have scoffed at the thought of
the young Galilean who dared compare the lilies of the field to his
august master.  Nil admirari is very well for a North American Indian
and his degenerate successor, who has grown too grand to admire
anything but himself, and takes a cynical pride in his stolid
indifference to everything worth reverencing or honoring."

After calling my companion's attention to the wheel, and discoursing
upon it until I thought he was getting sleepy, we jogged along until
we came to a running stream.  It was crossed by a stone bridge of a
single arch.  There are very few stone arches over the streams in New
England country towns, and I always delighted in this one.  It was
built in the last century, amidst the doubting predictions of staring
rustics, and stands to-day as strong as ever, and seemingly good for
centuries to come.

"See there!" said I,--"there is another of my 'Eyes and No Eyes'
subjects to meditate upon.  Next to the wheel, the arch is the
noblest of those elementary mechanical composites, corresponding to
the proximate principles of chemistry.  The beauty of the arch
consists first in its curve, commonly a part of the circle, of the
perfection of which I have spoken.  But the mind derives another
distinct pleasure from the admirable manner in which the several
parts, each different from all the others, contribute to a single
harmonious effect.  It is a typical example of the piu nel uno.  An
arch cut out or a single stone would not be so beautiful as one of
which each individual stone was shaped for its exact position.  Its
completion by the locking of the keystone is a delight to witness and
to contemplate.  And how the arch endures, when its lateral thrust is
met by solid masses of resistance!  In one of the great temples of
Baalbec a keystone has slipped, but how rare is that occurrence!  One
will hardly find another such example among all the ruins of
antiquity.  Yes, I never get tired of arches.  They are noble when
shaped of solid marble blocks, each carefully beveled for its
position.  They are beautiful when constructed with the large thin
tiles the Romans were so fond of using.  I noticed some arches built
in this way in the wall of one of the grand houses just going up on
the bank of the river.  They were over the capstones of the windows,-
-to take off the pressure from them, no doubt, for now and then a
capstone will crack under the weight of the superincumbent mass.  How
close they fit, and how striking the effect of their long
radiations!"

The company listened very well up to this point.  When he began the
strain of thoughts which follows, a curious look went round The
Teacups.

What a strange underground life is that which is led by the organisms
we call trees!  These great fluttering masses of leaves, stems,
boughs, trunks, are not the real trees.  They live underground, and
what we see are nothing more nor less than their tails.

The Mistress dropped her teaspoon.  Number Five looked at the Doctor,
whose face was very still and sober.  The two Annexes giggled, or
came very near it.

Yes, a tree is an underground creature, with its tail in the air.
All its intelligence is in its roots.  All the senses it has are in
its roots.  Think what sagacity it shows in its search after food and
drink!  Somehow or other, the rootlets, which are its tentacles, find
out that there is a brook at a moderate distance from the trunk of
the tree, and they make for it with all their might.  They find every
crack in the rocks where there are a few grains of the nourishing
substance they care for, and insinuate themselves into its deepest
recesses.  When spring and summer come, they let their tails grow,
and delight in whisking them about in the wind, or letting them be
whisked about by it; for these tails are poor passive things, with
very little will of their own, and bend in whatever direction the
wind chooses to make them.  The leaves make a deal of noise
whispering.  I have sometimes thought I could understand them, as
they talk with each other, and that they seemed to think they made
the wind as they wagged forward and back.  Remember what I say.  The
next time you see a tree waving in the wind, recollect that it is the
tail of a great underground, many-armed, polypus-like creature, which
is as proud of its caudal appendage, especially in summer-time, as a
peacock of his gorgeous expanse of plumage.

Do you think there is anything so very odd about this idea?  Once get
it well into your heads, and you will find it renders the landscape
wonderfully interesting.  There are as many kinds of tree-tails as
there are of tails to dogs and other quadrupeds.  Study them as Daddy
Gilpin studied them in his "Forest Scenery," but don't forget that
they are only the appendage of the underground vegetable polypus, the
true organism to which they belong.

He paused at this point, and we all drew long breaths, wondering what
was coming next.  There was no denying it, the "cracked Teacup" was
clinking a little false,--so it seemed to the company.  Yet, after
all, the fancy was not delirious,--the mind could follow it well
enough; let him go on.

What do you say to this?  You have heard all sorts of things said in
prose and verse about Niagara.  Ask our young Doctor there what it
reminds him of.  Is n't it a giant putting his tongue out?  How can
you fail to see the resemblance?  The continent is a great giant, and
the northern half holds the head and shoulders.  You can count the
pulse of the giant wherever the tide runs up a creek; but if you want
to look at the giant's tongue, you must go to Niagara.  If there were
such a thing as a cosmic physician, I believe he could tell the state
of the country's health, and the prospects of the mortality for the
coming season, by careful inspection of the great tongue, which
Niagara is putting out for him, and has been showing to mankind ever
since the first flint-shapers chipped their arrow-heads.  You don't
think the idea adds to the sublimity and associations of the
cataract?  I am sorry for that, but I can't help the suggestion.  It
is just as manifestly a tongue put out for inspection as if it had
Nature's own label to that effect hung over it.  I don't know whether
you can see these things as clearly as I do.  There are some people
that never see anything, if it is as plain as a hole in a grindstone,
until it is pointed out to them; and some that can't see it then, and
won't believe there is any hole till they've poked their finger
through it.  I've got a great many things to thank God for, but
perhaps most of all that I can find something to admire, to wonder
at, to set my fancy going, and to wind up my enthusiasm pretty much
everywhere.

Look here!  There are crowds of people whirled through our streets on
these new-fashioned cars, with their witch-broomsticks overhead,--if
they don't come from Salem, they ought to,--and not more than one in
a dozen of these fish-eyed bipeds thinks or cares a nickel's worth
about the miracle which is wrought for their convenience.  They know
that without hands or feet, without horses, without steam, so far as
they can see, they are transported from place to place, and that
there is nothing to account for it except the witch-broomstick and
the iron or copper cobweb which they see stretched above them.  What
do they know or care about this last revelation of the omnipresent
spirit of the material universe?  We ought to go down on our knees
when one of these mighty caravans, car after car, spins by us, under
the mystic impulse which seems to know not whether its train is
loaded or empty.  We are used to force in the muscles of horses, in
the expansive potency of steam, but here we have force stripped stark
naked,--nothing but a filament to cover its nudity,--and yet showing
its might in efforts that would task the working-beam of a ponderous
steam-engine.  I am thankful that in an age of cynicism I have not
lost my reverence.  Perhaps you would wonder to see how some very
common sights impress me.  I always take off my hat if I stop to
speak to a stone-cutter at his work.  "Why?" do you ask me?  Because
I know that his is the only labor that is likely to endure.  A score
of centuries has not effaced the marks of the Greek's or the Roman's
chisel on his block of marble.  And now, before this new
manifestation of that form of cosmic vitality which we call
electricity, I feel like taking the posture of the peasants listening
to the Angelus.  How near the mystic effluence of mechanical energy
brings us to the divine source of all power and motion!  In the old
mythology, the right hand of Jove held and sent forth the lightning.
So, in the record of the Hebrew prophets, did the right hand of
Jehovah cast forth and direct it.  Was Nahum thinking of our far-off
time when he wrote, "The chariots shall rage in the streets, they
shall justle one against another in the broad ways: they shall seem
like torches, they shall run like the lightnings"?

Number Seven had finished reading his paper.  Two bright spots in his
cheeks showed that he had felt a good deal in writing it, and the
flush returned as he listened to his own thoughts.  Poor old fellow!
The "cracked Teacup" of our younger wits,--not yet come to their full
human sensibilities,--the "crank" of vulgar tongues, the eccentric,
the seventh son of a seventh son, too often made the butt of
thoughtless pleasantry, was, after all, a fellow-creature, with flesh
and blood like the rest of us.  The wild freaks of his fancy did not
hurt us, nor did they prevent him from seeing many things justly, and
perhaps sometimes more vividly and acutely than if he were as sound
as the dullest of us.

The teaspoons tinkled loudly all round the table, as he finished
reading.  The Mistress caught her breath.  I was afraid she was going
to sob, but she took it out in vigorous stirring of her tea.  Will
you believe that I saw Number Five, with a sweet, approving smile on
her face all the time, brush her cheek with her hand-kerchief?  There
must have been a tear stealing from beneath its eyelid.  I hope
Number Seven saw it.  He is one of the two men at our table who most
need the tender looks and tones of a woman.  The Professor and I are
hors de combat; the Counsellor is busy with his cases and his
ambitions; the Doctor is probably in love with a microscope, and
flirting with pathological specimens; but Number Seven and the Tutor
are, I fear, both suffering from that worst of all famines, heart-
hunger.

Do you remember that Number Seven said he never wrote a line of
"poetry" in his life, except once when he was suffering from
temporary weakness of body and mind?  That is because he is a poet.
If he had not been one, he would very certainly have taken to
tinkling rhymes.  What should you think of the probable musical
genius of a young man who was particularly fond of jingling a set of
sleigh-bells?  Should you expect him to turn out a Mozart or a
Beethoven?  Now, I think I recognize the poetical instinct in Number
Seven, however imperfect may be its expression, and however he may be
run away with at times by fantastic notions that come into his head.
If fate had allotted him a helpful companion in the shape of a loving
and intelligent wife, he might have been half cured of his
eccentricities, and we should not have had to say, in speaking of
him, "Poor fellow!"  But since this cannot be, I am pleased that he
should have been so kindly treated on the occasion of the reading of
his paper.  If he saw Number Five's tear, he will certainly fall in
love with her.  No matter if he does Number Five is a kind of Circe
who does not turn the victims of her enchantment into swine, but into
lambs.  I want to see Number Seven one of her little flock.  I say
"little."  I suspect it is larger than most of us know.  Anyhow, she
can spare him sympathy and kindness and encouragement enough to keep
him contented with himself and with her, and never miss the pulses of
her loving life she lends him.  It seems to be the errand of some
women to give many people as much happiness as they have any right to
in this world.  If they concentrated their affection on one, they
would give him more than any mortal could claim as his share.  I saw
Number Five watering her flowers, the other day.  The watering-pot
had one of those perforated heads, through which the water runs in
many small streams.  Every plant got its share: the proudest lily
bent beneath the gentle shower; the lowliest daisy held its little
face up for baptism.  All were refreshed, none was flooded.
Presently she took the perforated head, or "rose," from the neck of
the watering-pot, and the full stream poured out in a round, solid
column.  It was almost too much for the poor geranium on which it
fell, and it looked at one minute as if the roots would be laid bare,
and perhaps the whole plant be washed out of the soil in which it was
planted.  What if Number Five should take off the "rose" that
sprinkles her affections on so many, and pour them all on one?  Can
that ever be?  If it can, life is worth living for him on whom her
love may be lavished.

One of my neighbors, a thorough American, is much concerned about the
growth of what he calls the "hard-handed aristocracy." He tells the
following story:--

"I was putting up a fence about my yard, and employed a man of whom I
knew something,--that he was industrious, temperate, and that he had
a wife and children to support,--a worthy man, a native New
Englander.  I engaged him, I say, to dig some post-holes.  My
employee bought a new spade and scoop on purpose, and came to my
place at the appointed time, and began digging.  While he was at
work, two men came over from a drinking-saloon, to which my residence
is nearer than I could desire.  One of them I had known as Mike
Fagan, the other as Hans Schleimer.  They looked at Hiram, my New
Hampshire man, in a contemptuous and threatening way for a minute or
so, when Fagan addressed him:

"'And how much does the man pay yez by the hour?'

"'The gentleman does n't pay me by the hour,' said Hiram.

"'How mosh does he bay you by der veeks?' said Hans.

"'I don' know as that's any of your business,' answered Hiram.

"'Faith, we'll make it our business,' said Mike Fagan.  'We're
Knoights of Labor, we'd have yez to know, and ye can't make yer
bargains jist as ye loikes.  We manes to know how mony hours ye
worrks, and how much ye gets for it.'

"'Knights of Labor!' said I.  'Why, that is a kind of title of
nobility, is n't it?  I thought the laws of our country did n't allow
titles of that kind.  But if you have a right to be called knights, I
suppose I ought to address you as such.  Sir Michael, I congratulate
you on the dignity you have attained.  I hope Lady Fagan is getting
on well with my shirts.  Sir Hans, I pay my respects to your title.
I trust that Lady Schleixner has got through that little difficulty
between her ladyship and yourself in which the police court thought
it necessary to intervene.'

"The two men looked at me.  I weigh about a hundred and eighty
pounds, and am well put together.  Hiram was noted in his village as
a 'rahstler.'  But my face is rather pallid and peaked, and Hiram had
something of the greenhorn look.  The two men, who had been drinking,
hardly knew what ground to take.  They rather liked the sound of Sir
Michael and, Sir Hans.  They did not know very well what to make of
their wives as 'ladies.'  They looked doubtful whether to take what
had been said as a casus belli or not, but they wanted a pretext of
some kind or other.  Presently one of them saw a label on the scoop,
or longhandled, spoon-like shovel, with which Hiram had been working.

"'Arrah, be jabers!' exclaimed Mike Fagan, 'but has n't he been
a-tradin' wid Brown, the hardware fellah, that we boycotted!  Grab
it, Hans, and we'll carry it off and show it to the brotherhood.'

"The men made a move toward the implement.

"'You let that are scoop-shovel alone,' said Hiram.

"I stepped to his side.  The Knights were combative, as their noble
predecessors with the same title always were, and it was necessary to
come to a voie de fait.  My straight blow from the shoulder did for
Sir Michael.  Hiram treated Sir Hans to what is technically known as
a cross-buttock.

"'Naow, Dutchman,' said Hiram, 'if you don't want to be planted in
that are post-hole, y'd better take y'rself out o' this here piece of
private property.  "Dangerous passin'," as the sign-posts say, abaout
these times.'

"Sir Michael went down half stunned by my expressive gesture; Sir
Hans did not know whether his hip was out of joint or he had got a
bad sprain; but they were both out of condition for further
hostilities.  Perhaps it was hardly fair to take advantage of their
misfortunes to inflict a discourse upon them, but they had brought it
on themselves, and we each of us gave them a piece of our mind.

"'I tell you what it is,' said Hiram, 'I'm a free and independent
American citizen, and I an't a-gon' to hev no man tyrannize over me,
if he doos call himself by one o' them noblemen's titles.  Ef I can't
work jes' as I choose, fur folks that wants me to work fur 'em and
that I want to work fur, I might jes' as well go to Sibery and done
with it.  My gran'f'ther fit in Bunker Hill battle.  I guess if our
folks in them days did n't care no great abaout Lord Percy and Sir
William Haowe, we an't a-gon' to be scart by Sir Michael Fagan and
Sir Hans What 's-his-name, nor no other fellahs that undertakes to be
noblemen, and tells us common folks what we shall dew an' what we
sha'n't.  No, sir!'

"I took the opportunity to explain to Sir Michael and Sir Hans what
it was our fathers fought for, and what is the meaning of liberty.
If these noblemen did not like the country, they could go elsewhere.
If they did n't like the laws, they had the ballot-box, and could
choose new legislators.  But as long as the laws existed they must
obey them.  I could not admit that, because they called themselves by
the titles the Old World nobility thought so much of, they had a
right to interfere in the agreements I entered into with my neighbor.
I told Sir Michael that if he would go home and help Lady Fagan to
saw and split the wood for her fire, he would be better employed than
in meddling with my domestic arrangements.  I advised Sir Hans to ask
Lady Schleimer for her bottle of spirits to use as an embrocation for
his lame hip.  And so my two visitors with the aristocratic titles
staggered off, and left us plain, untitled citizens, Hiram and
myself, to set our posts, and consider the question whether we lived
in a free country or under the authority of a self-constituted order
of quasi-nobility."

It is a very curious fact that, with all our boasted "free and equal"
superiority over the communities of the Old World, our people have
the most enormous appetite for Old World titles of distinction.  Sir
Michael and Sir Hans belong to one of the most extended of the
aristocratic orders.  But we have also "Knights and Ladies of Honor,"
and, what is still grander, "Royal Conclave of Knights and Ladies,"
"Royal Arcanum," and "Royal Society of Good Fellows,"  "Supreme
Council,"  "Imperial Court,"  "Grand Protector," and "Grand
Dictator," and so on.  Nothing less than "Grand" and "Supreme" is
good enough for the dignitaries of our associations of citizens.
Where does all this ambition for names without realities come from?
Because a Knight of the Garter wears a golden star, why does the
worthy cordwainer, who mends the shoes of his fellow-citizens, want
to wear a tin star, and take a name that had a meaning as used by the
representatives of ancient families, or the men who had made
themselves illustrious by their achievements?

It appears to be a peculiarly American weakness.  The French
republicans of the earlier period thought the term citizen was good
enough for anybody.  At a later period, "Roi Citoyen"--the citizen
king was a common title given to Louis Philippe.  But nothing is too
grand for the American, in the way of titles.  The proudest of them
all signify absolutely nothing.  They do not stand for ability, for
public service, for social importance, for large possessions; but, on
the contrary, are oftenest found in connection with personalities to
which they are supremely inapplicable.  We can hardly afford to
quarrel with a national habit which, if lightly handled, may involve
us in serious domestic difficulties.  The "Right Worshipful"
functionary whose equipage stops at my back gate, and whose services
are indispensable to the health and comfort of my household, is a
dignitary whom I must not offend.  I must speak with proper deference
to the lady who is scrubbing my floors, when I remember that her
husband, who saws my wood, carries a string of high-sounding titles
which would satisfy a Spanish nobleman.

After all, every people must have its own forms of ostentation,
pretence, and vulgarity.  The ancient Romans had theirs, the English
and the French have theirs as well,--why should not we Americans have
ours?  Educated and refined persons must recognize frequent internal
conflicts between the "Homo sum" of Terence and the "Odi profanum
vulgus" of Horace.  The nobler sentiment should be that of every true
American, and it is in that direction that our best civilization is
constantly tending.

We were waited on by a new girl, the other evening.  Our pretty
maiden had left us for a visit to some relative,--so the Mistress
said.  I do sincerely hope she will soon come back, for we all like
to see her flitting round the table.

I don't know what to make of it.  I had it all laid out in my mind.
With such a company there must be a love-story.  Perhaps there will
be, but there may be new combinations of the elements which are to
make it up, and here is a bud among the full-blown flowers to which I
must devote a little space.


                         Delilah.

I must call her by the name we gave her after she had trimmed the
Samson locks of our Professor.  Delilah is a puzzle to most of us.
A pretty creature, dangerously pretty to be in a station not guarded
by all the protective arrangements which surround the maidens of a
higher social order.  It takes a strong cage to keep in a tiger or a
grizzly bear, but what iron bars, what barbed wires, can keep out the
smooth and subtle enemy that finds out the cage where beauty is
imprisoned?  Our young Doctor is evidently attracted by the charming
maiden who serves him and us so modestly and so gracefully.
Fortunately, the Mistress never loses sight of her.  If she were her
own daughter, she could not be more watchful of all her movements.
And yet I do not believe that Delilah needs all this overlooking.  If
I am not mistaken, she knows how to take care of herself, and could
be trusted anywhere, in any company, without a duenna.  She has a
history,--I feel sure of it.  She has been trained and taught as
young persons of higher position in life are brought up, and does not
belong in the humble station in which we find her.  But inasmuch as
the Mistress says nothing about her antecedents, we do not like to be
too inquisitive.  The two Annexes are, it is plain, very curious
about her.  I cannot wonder.  They are both good-looking girls, but
Delilah is prettier than either of them.  My sight is not so good as
it was, but I can see the way in which the eyes of the young people
follow each other about plainly enough to set me thinking as to what
is going on in the thinking marrow behind them.  The young Doctor's
follow Delilah as she glides round the table,--they look into hers
whenever they get a chance; but the girl's never betray any
consciousness of it, so far as I can see.  There is no mistaking the
interest with which the two, Annexes watch all this.  Why shouldn't
they, I should like to know?  The Doctor is a bright young fellow,
and wants nothing but a bald spot and a wife to find himself in a
comfortable family practice.  One of the Annexes, as I have said,
has had thoughts of becoming a doctress.  I don't think the Doctor
would want his wife to practise medicine, for reasons which I will
not stop to mention.  Such a partnership sometimes works wonderfully
well, as in one well-known instance where husband and wife are both
eminent in the profession; but our young Doctor has said to me that
he had rather see his wife,--if he ever should have one,--at the
piano than at the dissecting-table.  Of course the Annexes know
nothing about this, and they may think, as he professed himself
willing to lecture on medicine to women, he might like to take one of
his pupils as a helpmeet.

If it were not for our Delilah's humble position, I don't see why she
would not be a good match for any young man.  But then it is so hard
to take a young woman from so very lowly a condition as that of a
"waitress" that it would require a deal of courage to venture on such
a step.  If we could only find out that she is a princess in
disguise, so to speak,--that is, a young person of presentable
connections as well as pleasing looks and manners; that she has had
an education of some kind, as we suspected when she blushed on
hearing herself spoken of as a "gentille petite," why, then
everything would be all right, the young Doctor would have plain
sailing,--that is, if be is in love with her, and if she fancies
him,--and I should find my love-story,--the one I expected, but not
between the parties I had thought would be mating with each other.

Dear little Delilah!  Lily of the valley, growing in the shade now,--
perhaps better there until her petals drop; and yet if she is all I
often fancy she is, how her youthful presence would illuminate and
sweeten a household!  There is not one of us who does not feel
interested in her,--not one of us who would not be delighted at some
Cinderella transformation which would show her in the setting Nature
meant for her favorite.

The fancy of Number Seven about the witches' broomsticks suggested to
one of us the following poem:


          THE BROOMSTICK TRAIN;
     OR, THE RETURN OF THE WITCHES.

Lookout!  Look out, boys!  Clear the track!
The witches are here!  They've all come back!
They hanged them high,--No use!  No use!
What cares a witch for a hangman's noose?
They buried them deep, but they would n't lie, still,
For cats and witches are hard to kill;
They swore they shouldn't and wouldn't die,
Books said they did, but they lie!  they lie!

--A couple of hundred years, or so,
They had knocked about in the world below,
When an Essex Deacon dropped in to call,
And a homesick feeling seized them all;
For he came from a place they knew full well,
And many a tale he had to tell.
They long to visit the haunts of men,
To see the old dwellings they knew again,
And ride on their broomsticks all around
Their wide domain of unhallowed ground.

In Essex county there's many a roof
Well known to him of the cloven hoof;
The small square windows are full in view
Which the midnight hags went sailing through,
On their well-trained broomsticks mounted high,
Seen like shadows against the sky;
Crossing the track of owls and bats,
Hugging before them their coal-black cats.

Well did they know, those gray old wives,
The sights we see in our daily drives
Shimmer of lake and shine of sea,
Brown's bare hill with its lonely tree,
(It wasn't then as we see it now,
With one scant scalp-lock to shade its brow;)
Dusky nooks in the Essex woods,
Dark, dim, Dante-like solitudes,
Where the tree-toad watches the sinuous snake
Glide through his forests of fern and brake;
Ipswich River; its old stone bridge;
Far off Andover's Indian Ridge,
And many a scene where history tells
Some shadow of bygone terror dwells,
Of "Norman's Woe" with its tale of dread,
Of the Screeching Woman of Marblehead,
(The fearful story that turns men pale
Don't bid me tell it,--my speech would fail.)

Who would not, will not, if he can,
Bathe in the breezes of fair Cape Ann,
Rest in the bowers her bays enfold,
Loved by the sachems and squaws of old?
Home where the white magnolias bloom,
Sweet with the bayberry's chaste perfume,
Hugged by the woods and kissed by the seal
Where is the Eden like to thee?

For that "couple of hundred years, or so,"
There had been no peace in the world below;
The witches still grumbling, "It is n't fair;
Come, give us a taste of the upper air!
We've had enough of your sulphur springs,
And the evil odor that round them clings;
We long for a drink that is cool and nice,
Great buckets of water with Wenham ice;
We've served you well up-stairs, you know;
You're a good old-fellow--come, let us go!"

I don't feel sure of his being good,
But he happened to be in a pleasant mood,
As fiends with their skins full sometimes are,
(He'd been drinking with "roughs" at a Boston bar.)
So what does he do but up and shout
To a graybeard turnkey, "Let 'em out!"

To mind his orders was all he knew;
The gates swung open, and out they flew.
"Where are our broomsticks?" the beldams cried.
"Here are your broomsticks," an imp replied.
"They've been in--the place you know--so long
They smell of brimstone uncommon strong;
But they've gained by being left alone,
Just look, and you'll see how tall they've grown."
--And where is my cat? "a vixen squalled.
Yes, where are our cats?" the witches bawled,
And began to call them all by name:
As fast as they called the cats, they came
There was bob-tailed Tommy and long-tailed Tim,
And wall-eyed Jacky and green-eyed Jim,
And splay-foot Benny and slim-legged Beau,
And Skinny and Squally, and Jerry and Joe,

And many another that came at call,
It would take too long to count them all.
All black,--one could hardly tell which was which,
But every cat knew his own old witch;
And she knew hers as hers knew her,
Ah, did n't they curl their tails and purr!

No sooner the withered hags were free
Than out they swarmed for a midnight spree;
I could n't tell all they did in rhymes,
But the Essex people had dreadful times.
The Swampscott fishermen still relate
How a strange sea-monster stole thair bait;
How their nets were tangled in loops and knots,
And they found dead crabs in their lobster-pots.
Poor Danvers grieved for her blasted crops,
And Wilmington mourned over mildewed hops.
A blight played havoc with Beverly beans,
It was all the work of those hateful queans!
A dreadful panic began at "Pride's,"
Where the witches stopped in their midnight rides,
And there rose strange rumors and vague alarms
'Mid the peaceful dwellers at Beverly Farms.

Now when the Boss of the Beldams found
That without his leave they were ramping round,
He called,--they could hear him twenty miles,
From Chelsea beach to the Misery Isles;
The deafest old granny knew his tone
Without the trick of the telephone.
"Come here, you witches!  Come here!" says he,--
"At your games of old, without asking me
I'll give you a little job to do
That will keep you stirring, you godless crew!"

They came, of course, at their master's call,
The witches, the broomsticks, the cats, and all;
He led the hags to a railway train
The horses were trying to drag in vain.
"Now, then," says he, "you've had your fun,
And here are the cars you've got to run.

"The driver may just unhitch his team,
We don't want horses, we don't want steam;
You may keep your old black cats to hug,
But the loaded train you've got to lug."

Since then on many a car you'll see
A broomstick plain as plain can be;
On every stick there's a witch astride,
The string you see to her leg is tied.
She will do a mischief if she can,
But the string is held by a careful man,
And whenever the evil-minded witch
Would cut come caper, he gives a twitch.
As for the hag, you can't see her,
But hark! you can hear her black cat's purr,
And now and then, as a car goes by,
You may catch a gleam from her wicked eye.

Often you've looked on a rushing train,
But just what moved it was not so plain.
It couldn't be those wires above,
For they could neither pull nor shove;
Where was the motor that made it go
You couldn't guess, but now you know.

Remember my rhymes when you ride again
On the rattling rail by the broomstick train!




X

In my last report of our talks over the teacups I had something to
say of the fondness of our people for titles.  Where did the anti-
republican, anti-democratic passion for swelling names come from, and
how long has it been naturalized among us?

A striking instance of it occurred at about the end of the last
century.  It was at that time there appeared among us one of the most
original and singular personages to whom America has given birth.
Many of our company,--many of my readers,--all well acquainted with
his name, and not wholly ignorant of his history.  They will not
object to my giving some particulars relating to him, which, if not
new to them, will be new to others into whose hands these pages may
fall.

Timothy Dexter, the first claimant of a title of nobility among the
people of the United States of America, was born in the town of
Malden, near Boston.  He served an apprenticeship as a leather-
dresser, saved some money, got some more with his wife, began trading
and speculating, and became at last rich, for those days.  His most
famous business enterprise was that of sending an invoice of warming-
pans to the West Indies.  A few tons of ice would have seemed to
promise a better return; but in point of fact, he tells us, the
warming-pans were found useful in the manufacture of sugar, and
brought him in a handsome profit.  His ambition rose with his
fortune.  He purchased a large and stately house in Newburyport, and
proceeded to embellish and furnish it according to the dictates of
his taste and fancy.  In the grounds about his house, he caused to be
erected between forty and fifty wooden statues of great men and
allegorical figures, together with four lions and one lamb.  Among
these images were two statues of Dexter himself, one of which held a
label with a characteristic inscription.  His house was ornamented
with minarets, adorned with golden balls, and surmounted by a large
gilt eagle.  He equipped it with costly furniture, with paintings,
and a library.  He went so far as to procure the services of a poet
laureate, whose business it seems to have been to sing his praises.
Surrounded with splendors like these, the plain title of "Mr." Dexter
would have been infinitely too mean and common.  He therefore boldly
took the step of self-ennobling, and gave himself forth--as he said,
obeying "the voice of the people at large"--as "Lord Timothy Dexter,"
by which appellation he has ever since been known to the American
public.

If to be the pioneer in the introduction of Old World titles into
republican America can confer a claim to be remembered by posterity,
Lord Timothy Dexter has a right to historic immortality.  If the true
American spirit shows itself most clearly in boundless self-
assertion, Timothy Dexter is the great original American egotist.  If
to throw off the shackles of Old World pedantry, and defy the paltry
rules and examples of grammarians and rhetoricians, is the special
province and the chartered privilege of the American writer, Timothy
Dexter is the founder of a new school, which tramples under foot the
conventionalities that hampered and subjugated the faculties of the
poets, the dramatists, the historians, essayists, story-tellers,
orators, of the worn-out races which have preceded the great American
people.

The material traces of the first American nobleman's existence have
nearly disappeared.  The house is still standing, but the statues,
the minarets, the arches, and the memory of the great Lord Timothy
Dexter live chiefly in tradition, and in the work which be bequeathed
to posterity, and of which I shall say a few words.  It is
unquestionably a thoroughly original production, and I fear that some
readers may think I am trifling with them when I am quoting it
literally.  I am going to make a strong claim for Lord Timothy as
against other candidates for a certain elevated position.

Thomas Jefferson is commonly recognized as the first to proclaim
before the world the political independence of America.  It is not so
generally agreed upon as to who was the first to announce the
literary emancipation of our country.

One of Mr. Emerson's biographers has claimed that his Phi Beta Kappa
Oration was our Declaration of Literary Independence.  But Mr.
Emerson did not cut himself loose from all the traditions of Old
World scholarship.  He spelled his words correctly, he constructed
his sentences grammatically.  He adhered to the slavish rules of
propriety, and observed the reticences which a traditional delicacy
has considered inviolable in decent society, European and Oriental
alike.  When he wrote poetry, he commonly selected subjects which
seemed adapted to poetical treatment,--apparently thinking that all
things were not equally calculated to inspire the true poet's genius.
Once, indeed, he ventured to refer to "the meal in the firkin, the
milk in the pan," but he chiefly restricted himself to subjects such
as a fastidious conventionalism would approve as having a certain
fitness for poetical treatment.  He was not always so careful as he
might have been in the rhythm and rhyme of his verse, but in the main
he recognized the old established laws which have been accepted as
regulating both.  In short, with all his originality, he worked in
Old World harness, and cannot be considered as the creator of a truly
American, self-governed, self-centred, absolutely independent style
of thinking and writing, knowing no law but its own sovereign will
and pleasure.

A stronger claim might be urged for Mr. Whitman.  He takes into his
hospitable vocabulary words which no English dictionary recognizes as
belonging to the language,--words which will be looked for in vain
outside of his own pages.  He accepts as poetical subjects all things
alike, common and unclean, without discrimination, miscellaneous as
the contents of the great sheet which Peter saw let down from heaven.
He carries the principle of republicanism through the whole world of
created objects.  He will "thread a thread through [his] poems," he
tells us, "that no one thing in the universe is inferior to another
thing."  No man has ever asserted the surpassing dignity and
importance of the American citizen so boldly and freely as Mr.
Whitman.  He calls himself "teacher of the unquenchable creed,
namely, egotism."  He begins one of his chants, "I celebrate myself,"
but he takes us all in as partners in his self-glorification.  He
believes in America as the new Eden.

"A world primal again,--vistas of glory incessant and branching,
A new race dominating previous ones and grander far,
New politics--new literature and religions--new inventions and arts."

Of the new literature be himself has furnished specimens which
certainly have all the originality he can claim for them.  So far as
egotism is concerned, he was clearly anticipated by the titled
personage to whom I have referred, who says of himself, "I am the
first in the East, the first in the West, and the greatest
philosopher in the Western world." But while Mr. Whitman divests
himself of a part of his baptismal name, the distinguished New
Englander thus announces his proud position: "Ime the first Lord in
the younited States of A mercary Now of Newburyport.  it is the voice
of the peopel and I cant Help it."  This extract is from his famous
little book called "A Pickle for the Knowing Ones."  As an inventor
of a new American style he goes far beyond Mr. Whitman, who, to be
sure, cares little for the dictionary, and makes his own rules of
rhythm, so far as there is any rhythm in his sentences.  But Lord
Timothy spells to suit himself, and in place of employing punctuation
as it is commonly used, prints a separate page of periods, colons,
semicolons, commas, notes of interrogation and of admiration, with
which the reader is requested to "peper and soolt" the book as he
pleases.

I am afraid that Mr. Emerson and Mr. Whitman must yield the claim of
declaring American literary independence to Lord Timothy Dexter, who
not only taught his countrymen that they need not go to the Heralds'
College to authenticate their titles of nobility, but also that they
were at perfect liberty to spell just as they liked, and to write
without troubling themselves about stops of any kind.  In writing
what I suppose he intended for poetry, he did not even take the pains
to break up his lines into lengths to make them look like verse, as
may be seen by the following specimen:

               WONDER OF WONDERS!

How great the soul is!  Do not you all wonder and admire to see and
behold and hear?  Can you all believe half the truth, and admire to
hear the wonders how great the soul is--only behold--past finding
out! Only see how large the soul is!  that if a man is drowned in the
sea what a great bubble comes up out of the top of the water...  The
bubble is the soul.

I confess that I am not in sympathy with some of the movements that
accompany the manifestations of American social and literary
independence.  I do not like the assumption of titles of Lords and
Knights by plain citizens of a country which prides itself on
recognizing simple manhood and womanhood as sufficiently entitled to
respect without these unnecessary additions.  I do not like any
better the familiar, and as it seems to me rude, way of speaking of
our fellow-citizens who are entitled to the common courtesies of
civilized society.  I never thought it dignified or even proper for a
President of the United States to call himself, or to be called by
others, "Frank" Pierce.  In the first place I had to look in a
biographical dictionary to find out whether his baptismal name was
Franklin, or Francis, or simply Frank, for I think children are
sometimes christened with this abbreviated name.  But it is too much
in the style of Cowper's unpleasant acquaintance:

         "The man who hails you Tom or Jack,
          And proves by thumping on your back
          How he esteems your merit."

I should not like to hear our past chief magistrates spoken of as
Jack Adams or Jim Madison, and it would have been only as a political
partisan that I should have reconciled myself to "Tom" Jefferson.
So, in spite of "Ben" Jonson, "Tom" Moore, and "Jack" Sheppard, I
prefer to speak of a fellow-citizen already venerable by his years,
entitled to respect by useful services to his country, and recognized
by many as the prophet of a new poetical dispensation, with the
customary title of adults rather than by the free and easy school-boy
abbreviation with which he introduced himself many years ago to the
public.  As for his rhapsodies, Number Seven, our "cracked Teacup,"
says they sound to him like "fugues played on a big organ which has
been struck by lightning."  So far as concerns literary independence,
if we understand by that term the getting rid of our subjection to
British criticism, such as it was in the days when the question was
asked, "Who reads an American book?" we may consider it pretty well
established.  If it means dispensing with punctuation, coining words
at will, self-revelation unrestrained by a sense of what is decorous,
declamations in which everything is glorified without being
idealized, "poetry" in which the reader must make the rhythms which
the poet has not made for him, then I think we had better continue
literary colonists.  I shrink from a lawless independence to which
all the virile energy and trampling audacity of Mr. Whitman fail to
reconcile me.  But there is room for everybody and everything in our
huge hemisphere.  Young America is like a three-year-old colt with
his saddle and bridle just taken off.  The first thing he wants to do
is to roll.  He is a droll object, sprawling in the grass with his
four hoofs in the air; but he likes it, and it won't harm us.  So let
him roll,--let him roll

Of all The Teacups around our table, Number Five is the one who is
the object of the greatest interest.  Everybody wants to be her
friend, and she has room enough in her hospitable nature to find a
place for every one who is worthy of the privilege.  The difficulty
is that it is so hard to be her friend without becoming her lover.  I
have said before that she turns the subjects of her Circe-like
enchantment, not into swine, but into lambs.  The Professor and I
move round among her lambs, the docile and amiable flock that come
and go at her bidding, that follow her footsteps, and are content to
live in the sunshine of her smile and within reach of the music of
her voice.  I like to get her away from their amiable bleatings; I
love to talk with her about life, of which she has seen a great deal,
for she knows what it is to be an idol in society and the centre of
her social circle.  It might be a question whether women or men most
admire and love her.  With her own sex she is always helpful,
sympathizing, tender, charitable, sharing their griefs as well as
taking part in their pleasures.  With men it has seemed to make
little difference whether they were young or old: all have found her
the same sweet, generous, unaffected companion; fresh enough in
feeling for the youngest, deep enough in the wisdom of the heart for
the oldest.  She does not pretend to be youthful, nor does she
trouble herself that she has seen the roses of more Junes than many
of--the younger women who gather round her.  She has not had to say,

          Comme je regrette
          Mon bras si dodu,

for her arm has never lost its roundness, and her face is one of
those that cannot be cheated of their charm even if they live long
enough to look upon the grown up grandchildren of their coevals.

It is a wonder how Number Five can find the time to be so much to so
many friends of both sexes, in spite of the fact that she is one of
the most insatiable of readers.  She not only reads, but she
remembers; she not only remembers, but she records, for her own use
and pleasure, and for the delight and profit of those who are
privileged to look over her note-books.  Number Five, as I think I
have said before, has not the ambition to figure as an authoress.
That she could write most agreeably is certain.  I have seen letters
of hers to friends which prove that clearly enough.  Whether she
would find prose or verse the most natural mode of expression I
cannot say, but I know she is passionately fond of poetry, and I
should not be surprised if, laid away among the pressed pansies and
roses of past summers, there were poems, songs, perhaps, of her own,
which she sings to herself with her fingers touching the piano; for
to that she tells her secrets in tones sweet as the ring-dove's call
to her mate.

I am afraid it may be suggested that I am drawing Number Five's
portrait too nearly after some model who is unconsciously sitting for
it; but have n't I told you that you must not look for flesh and
blood personalities behind or beneath my Teacups?  I am not going to
make these so lifelike that you will be saying, This is Mr. or Miss,
or Mrs. So-and-So.  My readers must remember that there are very many
pretty, sweet, amiable girls and women sitting at their pianos, and
finding chords to the music of their heart-strings.  If I have
pictured Number Five as one of her lambs might do it, I have
succeeded in what I wanted to accomplish.  Why don't I describe her
person?  If I do, some gossip or other will be sure to say, "Oh, he
means her, of course," and find a name to match the pronoun.

It is strange to see how we are all coming to depend upon the
friendly aid of Number Five in our various perplexities.  The
Counsellor asked her opinion in one of those cases where a divorce
was too probable, but a reconciliation was possible.  It takes a
woman to sound a woman's heart, and she found there was still love
enough under the ruffled waters to warrant the hope of peace and
tranquillity.  The young Doctor went to her for counsel in the case
of a hysteric girl possessed with the idea that she was a born
poetess, and covering whole pages of foolscap with senseless
outbursts, which she wrote in paroxysms of wild excitement, and read
with a rapture of self-admiration which there was nothing in her
verses to justify or account for.  How sweetly Number Five dealt with
that poor deluded sister in her talk with the Doctor!  "Yes," she
said to him, "nothing can be fuller of vanity, self-worship, and
self-deception.  But we must be very gentle with her.  I knew a young
girl tormented with aspirations, and possessed by a belief that she
was meant for a higher place than that which fate had assigned her,
who needed wholesome advice, just as this poor young thing does.  She
did not ask for it, and it was not offered.  Alas, alas!  'no man
cared for her soul,'--no man nor woman either.  She was in her early
teens, and the thought of her earthly future, as it stretched out
before her, was more than she could bear, and she sought the presence
of her Maker to ask the meaning of her abortive existence.--We will
talk it over.  I will help you take care of this child."

The Doctor was thankful to have her assistance in a case with which
he would have found it difficult to deal if he had been left to, his
unaided judgment, and between them the young girl was safely piloted
through the perilous straits in which she came near shipwreck.

I know that it is commonly said of her that every male friend of hers
must become her lover unless he is already lassoed by another.  Il
fait passer par l'a.  The young Doctor is, I think, safe, for I am
convinced that he is bewitched with Delilah.  Since she has left us,
he has seemed rather dejected; I feel sure that he misses her.  We
all do, but he more seriously than the rest of us.  I have said that
I cannot tell whether the Counsellor is to be counted as one of
Number Five's lambs or not, but he evidently admires her, and if he
is not fascinated, looks as if he were very near that condition.

It was a more delicate matter about which the Tutor talked with her.
Something which she had pleasantly said to him about the two Annexes
led him to ask her, more or less seriously, it may be remembered,
about the fitness of either of them to be the wife of a young man in
his position.  She talked so sensibly, as it seemed to him, about it
that he continued the conversation, and, shy as he was, became quite
easy and confidential in her company.  The Tutor is not only a poet,
but is a great reader of the poetry of many languages.  It so
happened that Number Five was puzzled, one day, in reading a sonnet
of Petrarch, and had recourse to the Tutor to explain the difficult
passage.  She found him so thoroughly instructed, so clear, so much
interested, so ready to impart knowledge, and so happy in his way of
doing it, that she asked him if he would not allow her the privilege
of reading an Italian author under his guidance, now and then.

The Tutor found Number Five an apt scholar, and something more than
that; for while, as a linguist, he was, of course, her master, her
intelligent comments brought out the beauties of an author in a way
to make the text seem like a different version.  They did not always
confine themselves to the book they were reading.  Number Five showed
some curiosity about the Tutor's relations with the two Annexes.  She
suggested whether it would not be well to ask one or both of them in
to take part in their readings.  The Tutor blushed and hesitated.
"Perhaps you would like to ask one of them," said Number Five.
"Which one shall it be?"  "It makes no difference to me which," he
answered," but I do not see that we need either."  Number Five did
not press the matter further.  So the young Tutor and Number Five
read together pretty regularly, and came to depend upon their meeting
over a book as one of their stated seasons of enjoyment.  He is so
many years younger than she is that I do not suppose he will have to
pass par la, as most of her male friends have done.  I tell her
sometimes that she reminds me of my Alma Mater, always young, always
fresh in her attractions, with her scholars all round her, many of
them graduates, or to graduate sooner or later.

What do I mean by graduates?  Why, that they have made love to her,
and would be entitled to her diploma, if she gave a parchment to each
one of them who had had the courage to face the inevitable.  About
the Counsellor I am, as I have said, in doubt.  Who wrote that
"I Like You and I Love You," which we found in the sugar-bowl the
other day?  Was it a graduate who had felt the "icy dagger," or only
a candidate for graduation who was afraid of it?  So completely does
she subjugate those who come under her influence that I believe she
looks upon it as a matter of course that the fateful question will
certainly come, often after a brief acquaintance.  She confessed as
much to me, who am in her confidence, and not a candidate for
graduation from her academy.  Her graduates--her lambs I called them
--are commonly faithful to her, and though now and then one may have
gone off and sulked in solitude, most of them feel kindly to her, and
to those who have shared the common fate of her suitors.  I do really
believe that some of them would be glad to see her captured by any
one, if such there can be, who is worthy of her.  She is the best of
friends, they say, but can she love anybody, as so many other women
do, or seem to?  Why shouldn't our Musician, who is evidently fond of
her company, and sings and plays duets with her, steal her heart as
Piozzi stole that of the pretty and bright Mrs. Thrale, as so many
music-teachers have run away with their pupils' hearts?  At present
she seems to be getting along very placidly and contentedly with her
young friend the Tutor.  There is something quite charming in their
relations with each other.  He knows many things she does not, for he
is reckoned one of the most learned in his literary specialty of all
the young men of his time; and it can be a question of only a few
years when some first-class professorship will be offered him.  She,
on the other hand, has so much more experience, so much more
practical wisdom, than he has that he consults her on many every-day
questions, as he did, or made believe do, about that of making love
to one of the two Annexes.  I had thought, when we first sat round
the tea-table, that she was good for the bit of romance I wanted; but
since she has undertaken to be a kind of half-maternal friend to the
young Tutor, I am afraid I shall have to give her up as the heroine
of a romantic episode.  It would be a pity if there were nothing to
commend these papers to those who take up this periodical but essays,
more or less significant, on subjects more or less interesting to the
jaded and impatient readers of the numberless stories and
entertaining articles which crowd the magazines of this prolific
period.  A whole year of a tea-table as large as ours without a
single love passage in it would be discreditable to the company.  We
must find one, or make one, before the tea-things are taken away and
the table is no longer spread.


                    The Dictator turns preacher.

We have so many light and playful talks over the teacups that some
readers may be surprised to find us taking up the most serious and
solemn subject which can occupy a human intelligence.  The sudden
appearance among our New England Protestants of the doctrine of
purgatory as a possibility, or even probability, has startled the
descendants of the Puritans.  It has naturally led to a
reconsideration of the doctrine of eternal punishment.  It is on that
subject that Number Five and I have talked together.  I love to
listen to her, for she talks from the promptings of a true woman's
heart.  I love to talk to her, for I learn my own thoughts better in
that way than in any other "L'appetit vient en mangeant," the French
saying has it.  "L'esprit vient en causant;" that is, if one can find
the right persons to talk with.

The subject which has specially interested Number Five and myself, of
late, was suggested to me in the following way.

Some two years ago I received a letter from a clergyman who bears by
inheritance one of the most distinguished names which has done honor
to the American "Orthodox" pulpit.  This letter requested of me "a
contribution to a proposed work which was to present in their own
language the views of 'many men of many minds' on the subject of
future punishment.  It was in my mind to let the public hear not only
from professional theologians, but from other professions, as from
jurists on the alleged but disputed value of the hangman's whip
overhanging the witness-box, and from physicians on the working of
beliefs about the future life in the minds of the dangerously sick.
And I could not help thinking what a good thing it would be to draw
out the present writer upon his favorite borderland between the
spiritual and the material."  The communication came to me, as the
writer reminds me in a recent letter, at a "painfully inopportune
time," and though it was courteously answered, was not made the
subject of a special reply.

This request confers upon me a certain right to express my opinion on
this weighty subject without fear and without reproach even from
those who might be ready to take offence at one of the laity for
meddling with pulpit questions.  It shows also that this is not a
dead issue in our community, as some of the younger generation seem
to think.  There are some, there may be many, who would like to hear
what impressions one has received on the subject referred to, after a
long life in which he has heard and read a great deal about the
matter.  There is a certain gravity in the position of one who is, in
the order of nature very near the undiscovered country.  A man who
has passed his eighth decade feels as if be were already in the
antechamber of the apartments which he may be called to occupy in the
house of many mansions.  His convictions regarding the future of our
race are likely to be serious, and his expressions not lightly
uttered.  The question my correspondent suggests is a tremendous one.
No other interest compares for one moment with that belonging to it.
It is not only ourselves that it concerns, but all whom we love or
ever have loved, all our human brotherhood, as well as our whole idea
of the Being who made us and the relation in which He stands to his
creatures.  In attempting to answer my correspondent's question, I
shall no doubt repeat many things I have said before in different
forms, on different occasions.  This is no more than every clergyman
does habitually, and it would be hard if I could not have the same
license which the professional preacher enjoys so fully.

Number Five and I have occasionally talked on religious questions,
and discovered many points of agreement in our views.  Both of us
grew up under the old "Orthodox" or Calvinistic system of belief.
Both of us accepted it in our early years as a part of our education.
Our experience is a common one.  William Cullen Bryant says of
himself, "The Calvinistic system of divinity I adopted of course, as
I heard nothing else taught from the pulpit, and supposed it to be
the accepted belief of the religious world."  But it was not the
"five points" which remained in the young poet's memory and shaped
his higher life.  It was the influence of his mother that left its
permanent impression after the questions and answers of the
Assembly's Catechism had faded out, or remained in memory only as
fossil survivors of an extinct or fast-disappearing theological
formation.  The important point for him, as for so many other
children of Puritan descent, was not his father's creed, but his
mother's character, precepts, and example.  "She was a person," he
says, "of excellent practical sense, of a quick and sensitive moral
judgment, and had no patience with any form of deceit or duplicity.
Her prompt condemnation of injustice, even in those instances in
which it is tolerated by the world, made a strong impression upon me
in early life; and if, in the discussion of public questions, I have
in my riper age endeavored to keep in view the great rule of right
without much regard to persons, it has been owing in a great degree
to the force of her example, which taught me never to countenance a
wrong because others did."

I have quoted this passage because it was an experience not wholly
unlike my own, and in certain respects like that of Number Five.  To
grow up in a narrow creed and to grow out of it is a tremendous trial
of one's nature.  There is always a bond of fellowship between those
who have been through such an ordeal.

The experiences we have had in common naturally lead us to talk over
the theological questions which at this time are constantly
presenting themselves to the public, not only in the books and papers
expressly devoted to that class of subjects, but in many of the
newspapers and popular periodicals, from the weeklies to the
quarterlies.  The pulpit used to lay down the law to the pews; at the
present time, it is of more consequence what the pews think than what
the minister does, for the obvious reason that the pews can change
their minister, and often do, whereas the minister cannot change the
pews, or can do so only to a very limited extent.  The preacher's
garment is cut according to the pattern of that of the hearers, for
the most part.  Thirty years ago, when I was writing on theological
subjects, I came in for a very pretty share of abuse, such as it was
the fashion of that day, at least in certain quarters, to bestow upon
those who were outside of the high-walled enclosures in which many
persons; not naturally unamiable or exclusive, found themselves
imprisoned.  Since that time what changes have taken place!  Who will
believe that a well-behaved and reputable citizen could have been
denounced as a "moral parricide," because he attacked some of the
doctrines in which he was supposed to have been brought up?  A single
thought should have prevented the masked theologian who abused his
incognito from using such libellous language.

Much, and in many families most, of the religious teaching of
children is committed to the mother.  The experience of William
Cullen Bryant, which I have related in his own words, is that of many
New England children.  Now, the sternest dogmas that ever came from a
soul cramped or palsied by an obsolete creed become wonderfully
softened in passing between the lips of a mother.  The cruel doctrine
at which all but case-hardened "professionals" shudder cones out, as
she teaches and illustrates it, as unlike its original as the milk
which a peasant mother gives her babe is unlike the coarse food which
furnishes her nourishment.  The virus of a cursing creed is rendered
comparatively harmless by the time it reaches the young sinner in the
nursery.  Its effects fall as far short of what might have been
expected from its virulence as the pearly vaccine vesicle falls short
of the terrors of the confluent small-pox.  Controversialists should
therefore be careful (for their own sakes, for they hurt nobody so
much as themselves) how they use such terms as "parricide" as
characterizing those who do not agree in all points with the fathers
whom or whose memory they honor and venerate.  They might with as
much propriety call them matricides, if they did not agree with the
milder teachings of their mothers.  I can imagine Jonathan Edwards in
the nursery with his three-year-old child upon his knee.  The child
looks up to his face and says to him,--"Papa, nurse tells me that you
say God hates me worse than He hates one of those horrid ugly snakes
that crawl all round.  Does God hate me so?"

"Alas!  my child, it is but too true.  So long as you are out of
Christ you are as a viper, and worse than a viper, in his sight."

By and by, Mrs.  Edwards, one of the loveliest of women and sweetest
of mothers, comes into the nursery.  The child is crying.

"What is the matter, my darling?"

" Papa has been telling me that God hates me worse than a snake."

Poor, gentle, poetical, sensitive, spiritual, almost celestial Mrs.
Jonathan Edwards!  On the one hand the terrible sentence conceived,
written down, given to the press, by the child's father; on the other
side the trusting child looking up at her, and all the mother
pleading in her heart against the frightful dogma of her revered
husband.  Do you suppose she left that poison to rankle in the tender
soul of her darling?  Would it have been moral parricide for a son of
the great divine to have repudiated the doctrine which degraded his
blameless infancy to the condition and below the condition of the
reptile?  Was it parricide in the second or third degree when his
descendant struck out that venomous sentence from the page in which
it stood as a monument to what depth Christian heathenism could sink
under the teaching of the great master of logic and spiritual
inhumanity?  It is too late to be angry about the abuse a well--
meaning writer received thirty years ago.  The whole atmosphere has
changed since then.  It is mere childishness to expect men to believe
as their fathers did; that is, if they have any minds of their own.
The world is a whole generation older and wiser than when the father
was of his son's age.

So far as I have observed persons nearing the end of life, the Roman
Catholics understand the business of dying better than Protestants.
They have an expert by them, armed with spiritual specifics, in which
they both, patient and priestly ministrant, place implicit trust.
Confession, the Eucharist, Extreme Unction,--these all inspire a
confidence which without this symbolism is too apt to be wanting in
over-sensitive natures.  They have been peopled in earlier years with
ghastly spectres of avenging fiends, moving in a sleepless world of
devouring flames and smothering exhalations; where nothing lives but
the sinner, the fiends, and the reptiles who help to make life an
unending torture.  It is no wonder that these images sometimes return
to the enfeebled intelligence.  To exorcise them, the old Church of
Christendom has her mystic formulae, of which no rationalistic
prescription can take the place.  If Cowper had been a good Roman
Catholic, instead of having his conscience handled by a Protestant
like John Newton, he would not have died despairing, looking upon
himself as a castaway.  I have seen a good many Roman Catholics on
their dying beds, and it always appeared to me that they accepted the
inevitable with a composure which showed that their belief, whether
or not the best to live by, was a better one to die by than most of
the harder creeds which have replaced it.

In the more intelligent circles of American society one may question
anything and everything, if he will only do it civilly.  We may talk
about eschatology, the science of last things,--or, if you will, the
natural history of the undiscovered country, without offence before
anybody except young children and very old women of both sexes.  In
our New England the great Andover discussion and the heretical
missionary question have benumbed all sensibility on this subject as
entirely, as completely, as the new local anaesthetic, cocaine,
deadens the sensibility of the part to which it is applied, so that
the eye may have its mote or beam plucked out without feeling it,--as
the novels of Zola and Maupassant have hardened the delicate nerve-
centres of the women who have fed their imaginations on the food they
have furnished.

The generally professed belief of the Protestant world as embodied in
their published creeds is that the great mass of mankind are destined
to an eternity of suffering.  That this eternity is to be one of
bodily pain--of "torment "--is the literal teaching of Scripture,
which has been literally interpreted by the theologians, the poets,
and the artists of many long ages which followed the acceptance of
the recorded legends of the church as infallible.  The doctrine has
always been recognized, as it is now, as a very terrible one.  It has
found a support in the story of the fall of man, and the view taken
of the relation of man to his Maker since that event.  The hatred of
God to mankind in virtue of their "first disobedience" and inherited
depravity is at the bottom of it.  The extent to which that idea was
carried is well shown in the expressions I have borrowed from
Jonathan Edwards.  According to his teaching,--and he was a reasoner
who knew what he was talking about, what was involved in the premises
of the faith he accepted,--man inherits the curse of God as his
principal birthright.

What shall we say to the doctrine of the fall of man as the ground of
inflicting endless misery on the human race?  A man to be punished
for what he could not help!  He was expected to be called to account
for Adam's sin.  It is singular to notice that the reasoning of the
wolf with the lamb should be transferred to the dealings of the
Creator with his creatures.  "You stirred the brook up and made my
drinking-place muddy."  "But, please your wolfship, I couldn't do
that, for I stirred the water far down the stream,--below your
drinking-place."  "Well, anyhow, your father troubled it a year or
two ago, and that is the same thing."  So the wolf falls upon the
lamb and makes a meal of him.  That is wolf logic,--and theological
reasoning.

How shall we characterize the doctrine of endless torture as the
destiny of most of those who have lived, and are living, on this
planet?  I prefer to let another writer speak of it.  Mr. John Morley
uses the following words: "The horrors of what is perhaps the most
frightful idea that has ever corroded human character,--the idea of
eternal punishment."  Sismondi, the great historian, heard a sermon
on eternal punishment, and vowed never again to enter another church
holding the same creed.  Romanism he considered a religion of mercy
and peace by the side of what the English call the Reformation.--I
mention these protests because I happen to find them among my notes,
but it would be easy to accumulate examples of the same kind.  When
Cowper, at about the end of the last century, said satirically of the
minister he was attacking,

          "He never mentioned hell to ears polite,"

he was giving unconscious evidence that the sense of the barbarism of
the idea was finding its way into the pulpit.  When Burns, in the
midst of the sulphurous orthodoxy of Scotland, dared to say,

         "The fear o' hell 's a hangman's whip
          To haud the wretch in order,"

he was oily appealing to the common sense and common humanity of his
fellow-countrymen.

All the reasoning in the world, all the proof-texts in old
manuscripts, cannot reconcile this supposition of a world of
sleepless and endless torment with the declaration that "God is
love."

Where did this "frightful idea" come from?  We are surprised, as we
grow older, to find that the legendary hell of the church is nothing
more nor less than the Tartarus of the old heathen world.  It has
every mark of coming from the cruel heart of a barbarous despot.
Some malignant and vindictive Sheik, some brutal Mezentius, must have
sat for many pictures of the Divinity.  It was not enough to kill his
captive enemy, after torturing him as much as ingenuity could
contrive to do it.  He escaped at last by death, but his conqueror
could not give him up so easily, and so his vengeance followed him
into the unseen and unknown world.  How the doctrine got in among,
the legends of the church we are no more bound to show than we are to
account for the intercalation of the "three witnesses" text, or the
false insertion, or false omission, whichever it may be, of the last
twelve verses of the Gospel of St Mark.  We do not hang our
grandmothers now, as our ancestors did theirs, on the strength of the
positive command, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."

The simple truth is that civilization has outgrown witchcraft, and is
outgrowing the Christian Tartarus.  The pulpit no longer troubles
itself about witches and their evil doings.  All the legends in the
world could not arrest the decay of that superstition and all the
edicts that grew out of it.  All the stories that can be found in old
manuscripts will never prevent the going out of the fires of the
legendary Inferno.  It is not much talked about nowadays to ears
polite or impolite.  Humanity is shocked and repelled by it.  The
heart of woman is in unconquerable rebellion against it.  The more
humane sects tear it from their "Bodies of Divinity" as if it were
the flaming shirt of Nessus.  A few doctrines with which it was bound
up have dropped or are dropping away from it: the primal curse;
consequential damages to give infinite extension to every
transgression of the law of God; inverting the natural order of
relative obligations; stretching the smallest of finite offenses to
the proportions of the infinite; making the babe in arms the
responsible being, and not the parent who gave it birth and
determined its conditions of existence.

After a doctrine like "the hangman's whip" has served its purpose,--
if it ever had any useful purpose,--after a doctrine like that of
witchcraft has hanged old women enough, civilization contrives to get
rid of it.  When we say that civilization crowds out the old
superstitious legends, we recognize two chief causes.  The first is
the naked individual protest; the voice of the inspiration which
giveth man understanding.  This shows itself conspicuously in the
modern poets.  Burns in Scotland, Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, in
America, preached a new gospel to the successors of men like Thomas
Boston and Jonathan Edwards.  In due season, the growth of knowledge,
chiefly under the form of that part of knowledge called science, so
changes the views of the universe that many of its long-unchallenged
legends become no more than nursery tales.  The text-books of
astronomy and geology work their way in between the questions and
answers of the time-honored catechisms.  The doctrine of evolution,
so far as it is accepted, changes the whole relations of man to the
creative power.  It substitutes infinite hope in the place of
infinite despair for the vast majority of mankind.  Instead of a
shipwreck, from which a few cabin passengers and others are to be
saved in the long-boat, it gives mankind a vessel built to endure the
tempests, and at last to reach a port where at the worst the
passengers can find rest, and where they may hope for a home better
than any which they ever had in their old country.  It is all very
well to say that men and women had their choice whether they would
reach the safe harbor or not.

         "Go to it grandam, child;
          Give grandam kingdom, and it grandam will
          Give it a plum, a cherry and a fig."

We know what the child will take.  So which course we shall take
depends very much on the way the choice is presented to us, and on
what the chooser is by nature.  What he is by nature is not
determined by himself, but by his parentage.  "They know not what
they do."  In one sense this is true of every human being.  The agent
does not know, never can know, what makes him that which he is.  What
we most want to ask of our Maker is an unfolding of the divine
purpose in putting human beings into conditions in which such numbers
of them would be sure to go wrong.  We want an advocate of helpless
humanity whose task it shall be, in the words of Milton,

          "To justify the ways of God to man."

We have heard Milton's argument, but for the realization of his
vision of the time

         "When Hell itself shall pass away,
          And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day,"

our suffering race must wait in patience.

The greater part of the discourse the reader has had before him was
delivered over the teacups one Sunday afternoon.  The Mistress looked
rather grave, as if doubtful whether she ought not to signify her
disapprobation of what seemed to her dangerous doctrine.

However, as she knew that I was a good church-goer and was on the
best terms with her minister, she said nothing to show that she had
taken the alarm.  Number Five listened approvingly.  We had talked
the question over well, and were perfectly agreed on the main point.
How could it be otherwise?  Do you suppose that any intellectual,
spiritual woman, with a heart under her bodice, can for a moment
seriously believe that the greater number of the high-minded men, the
noble and lovely women, the ingenuous and affectionate children, whom
she knows and honors or loves, are to be handed over to the experts
in a great torture-chamber, in company with the vilest creatures that
have once worn human shape?

"If there is such a world as used to be talked about from the pulpit,
you may depend upon it," she said to me once, "there will soon be
organized a Humane Society in heaven, and a mission established among
'the spirits in prison.'"

Number Five is a regular church-goer, as I am.  I do not believe
either of us would darken the doors of a church if we were likely to
hear any of the "old-fashioned" sermons, such as I used to listen to
in former years from a noted clergyman, whose specialty was the
doctrine of eternal punishment.  But you may go to the churches of
almost any of our Protestant denominations, and hear sermons by which
you can profit, because the ministers are generally good men, whose
moral and spiritual natures are above the average, and who know that
the harsh preaching of two or three generations ago would offend and
alienate a large part of their audience.  So neither Number Five nor
I are hypocrites in attending church or "going to meeting."  I am
afraid it does not make a great deal of difference to either of us
what may be the established creed of the worshipping assembly.  That
is a matter of great interest, perhaps of great importance, to them,
but of much less, comparatively, to us.  Companionship in worship,
and sitting quiet for an hour while a trained speaker, presumably
somewhat better than we are, stirs up our spiritual nature,--these
are reasons enough to Number Five, as to me, for regular attendance
on divine worship.

Number Seven is of a different way of thinking and feeling.  He
insists upon it that the churches keep in their confessions of faith
statements which they do not believe, and that it is notorious that
they are afraid to meddle with them.  The Anglo-American church has
dropped the Athanasian Creed from its service; the English mother
church is afraid to.  There are plenty of Universalists, Number Seven
says, in the Episcopalian and other Protestant churches, but they do
not avow their belief in any frank and candid fashion.  The churches
know very well, he maintains, that the fear of everlasting punishment
more than any or all other motives is the source of their power and
the support of their organizations.  Not only are the fears of
mankind the whip to scourge and the bridle to restrain them, but they
are the basis of an almost incalculable material interest.  "Talk
about giving up the doctrine of endless punishment by fire!"
exclaimed Number Seven; "there is more capital embarked in the
subterranean fire-chambers than in all the iron-furnaces on the face
of the earth.  To think what an army of clerical beggars would be
turned loose on the world, if once those raging flames were allowed
to go out or to calm down!  Who can wonder that the old conservatives
draw back startled and almost frightened at the thought that there
may be a possible escape for some victims whom the Devil was thought
to have secured?  How many more generations will pass before Milton's
alarming prophecy will find itself realized in the belief of
civilized mankind?"

Remember that Number Seven is called a "crank" by many persons, and
take his remarks for just what they are worth, and no more.

Out of the preceding conversation must have originated the following
poem, which was found in the common receptacle of these versified
contributions:


          TARTARUS.

While in my simple gospel creed
That "God is Love" so plain I read,
Shall dreams of heathen birth affright
My pathway through the coming night?
Ah, Lord of life, though spectres pale
Fill with their threats the shadowy vale,
With Thee my faltering steps to aid,
How can I dare to be afraid?

Shall mouldering page or fading scroll
Outface the charter of the soul?
Shall priesthood's palsied arm protect
The wrong our human hearts reject,
And smite the lips whose shuddering cry
Proclaims a cruel creed a lie?
The wizard's rope we disallow
Was justice once,--is murder now!

Is there a world of blank despair,
And dwells the Omnipresent there?
Does He behold with smile serene
The shows of that unending scene,
Where sleepless, hopeless anguish lies,
And, ever dying, never dies?

Say, does He hear the sufferer's groan,
And is that child of wrath his own?
O mortal, wavering in thy trust,
Lift thy pale forehead from the dust
The mists that cloud thy darkened eyes
Fade ere they reach the o'erarching skies!
When the blind heralds of despair
Would bid thee doubt a Father's care,
Look up from earth, and read above
On heaven's blue tablet, GOD IS LOVE!




XI

                    The tea is sweetened.

We have been going on very pleasantly of late, each of us pretty well
occupied with his or her special business.  The Counsellor has been
pleading in a great case, and several of The Teacups were in the
court-room.  I thought, but I will not be certain, that some of his
arguments were addressed to Number Five rather than to the jury,--the
more eloquent passages especially.

Our young Doctor seems to me to be gradually getting known in the
neighborhood and beyond it.  A member of one of the more influential
families, whose regular physician has gone to Europe, has sent for
him to come and see her, and as the patient is a nervous lady, who
has nothing in particular the matter with her, he is probably in for
a good many visits and a long bill by and by.  He has even had a call
at a distance of some miles from home,--at least be has had to hire a
conveyance frequently of late, for he has not yet set up his own
horse and chaise.  We do not like to ask him about who his patient
may be, but he or she is probably a person of some consequence, as he
is absent several hours on these out-of-town visits.  He may get a
good practice before his bald spot makes its appearance, for I have
looked for it many times without as yet seeing a sign of it.  I am
sure he must feel encouraged, for he has been very bright and
cheerful of late; and if he sometimes looks at our new handmaid as if
he wished she were Delilah, I do not think he is breaking his heart
about her absence.  Perhaps he finds consolation in the company of
the two Annexes, or one of them,--but which, I cannot make out.  He
is in consultations occasionally with Number Five, too, but whether
professionally or not I have no means of knowing.  I cannot for the
life of me see what Number Five wants of a doctor for herself, so
perhaps it is another difficult case in which her womanly sagacity is
called upon to help him.

In the mean time she and the Tutor continue their readings.  In fact,
it seems as if these readings were growing more frequent, and lasted
longer than they did at first.  There is a little arbor in the
grounds connected with our place of meeting, and sometimes they have
gone there for their readings.  Some of The Teacups have listened
outside once in a while, for the Tutor reads well, and his clear
voice must be heard in the more emphatic passages, whether one is
expressly listening or not.  But besides the reading there is now and
then some talking, and persons talking in an arbor do not always
remember that latticework, no matter how closely the vines cover it,
is not impenetrable to the sound of the human voice.  There was a
listener one day,--it was not one of The Teacups, I am happy to say,
--who heard and reported some fragments of a conversation which
reached his ear.  Nothing but the profound intimacy which exists
between myself and the individual reader whose eyes are on this page
would induce me to reveal what I was told of this conversation.  The
first words seem to have been in reply to some question.

"Why, my dear friend, how can you think of such a thing?  Do you
know--I am--old enough to be your--[I think she must have been on the
point of saying mother, but that was more than any woman could be
expected to say]--old enough to be your aunt?"

"To be sure you are," answered the Tutor, "and what of it?  I have
two aunts, both younger than I am.  Your years may be more than mine,
but your life is fuller of youthful vitality than mine is.  I never
feel so young as when I have been with you.  I don't believe in
settling affinities by the almanac.  You know what I have told you
more than once; you have n't 'bared the ice-cold dagger's edge' upon
me yet; may I not cherish the"....

What a pity that the listener did not hear the rest of the sentence
and the reply to it, if there was one!  The readings went on the same
as before, but I thought that Number Five was rather more silent and
more pensive than she had been.


I was much pleased when the American Annex came to me one day and
told me that she and the English Annex were meditating an expedition,
in which they wanted the other Teacups to join.  About a dozen miles
from us is an educational institution of the higher grade, where a
large number of young ladies are trained in literature, art, and
science, very much as their brothers are trained in the colleges.
Our two young ladies have already been through courses of this kind
in different schools, and are now busy with those more advanced
studies which are ventured upon by only a limited number of
"graduates."  They have heard a good deal about this institution, but
have never visited it.

Every year, as the successive classes finish their course, there is a
grand reunion of the former students, with an "exhibition," as it is
called, in which the graduates of the year have an opportunity of
showing their proficiency in the various branches taught.  On that
occasion prizes are awarded for excellence in different departments.
It would be hard to find a more interesting ceremony.  These girls,
now recognized as young ladies, are going forth as missionaries of
civilization among our busy people.  They are many of them to be
teachers, and those who have seen what opportunities they have to
learn will understand their fitness for that exalted office.  Many
are to be the wives and mothers of the generation next coming upon
the stage.  Young and beautiful, "youth is always beautiful," said
old Samuel Rogers,--their countenances radiant with developed
intelligence, their complexions, their figures, their movements, all
showing that they have had plenty of outdoor as well as indoor
exercise, and have lived well in all respects, one would like to read
on the wall of the hall where they are assembled,--

          Siste, viator!
          Si uxorem requiris, circumspice!

This proposed expedition was a great event in our comparatively quiet
circle.  The Mistress, who was interested in the school, undertook to
be the matron of the party.  The young Doctor, who knew the roads
better than any of us, was to be our pilot.  He arranged it so that
he should have the two Annexes under his more immediate charge.  We
were all on the lookout to see which of the two was to be the favored
one, for it was pretty well settled among The Teacups that a wife he
must have, whether the bald spot came or not; he was getting into
business, and he could not achieve a complete success as a bachelor.

Number Five and the Tutor seemed to come together as a matter of
course.  I confess that I could not help regretting that our pretty
Delilah was not to be one of the party.  She always looked so young,
so fresh,--she would have enjoyed the excursion so much, that if she
had been still with us I would have told the Mistress that she must
put on her best dress; and if she had n't one nice enough, I would
give her one myself.  I thought, too, that our young Doctor would
have liked to have her with us; but he appeared to be getting along
very well with the Annexes, one of whom it seems likely that he will
annex to himself and his fortunes, if she fancies him, which is not
improbable.

The organizing of this expedition was naturally a cause of great
excitement among The Teacups.  The party had to be arranged in such a
way as to suit all concerned, which was a delicate matter.  It was
finally managed in this way: The Mistress was to go with a bodyguard,
consisting of myself, the Professor, and Number Seven, who was good
company, with all his oddities.  The young Doctor was to take the two
Annexes in a wagon, and the Tutor was to drive Number Five in a good
old-fashioned chaise drawn by a well-conducted family horse.  As for
the Musician, he had gone over early, by special invitation, to take
a part in certain musical exercises which were to have a place in the
exhibition.  This arrangement appeared to be in every respect
satisfactory.  The Doctor was in high spirits, apparently delighted,
and devoting himself with great gallantry to his two fair companions.
The only question which intruded itself was, whether he might not
have preferred the company of one to that of two.  But both looked
very attractive in their best dresses: the English Annex, the rosier
and heartier of the two; the American girl, more delicate in
features, more mobile and excitable, but suggesting the thought that
she would tire out before the other.  Which of these did he most
favor?  It was hard to say.  He seemed to look most at the English
girl, and yet he talked more with the American girl.  In short, he
behaved particularly well, and neither of the young ladies could
complain that she was not attended to.  As to the Tutor and Number
Five, their going together caused no special comment.  Their intimacy
was accepted as an established fact, and nothing but the difference
in their ages prevented the conclusion that it was love, and not mere
friendship, which brought them together.  There was, no doubt, a
strong feeling among many people that Number Five's affections were a
kind of Gibraltar or Ehrenbreitstein, say rather a high table-land in
the region of perpetual, unmelting snow.  It was hard for these
people to believe that any man of mortal mould could find a foothold
in that impregnable fortress,--could climb to that height and find
the flower of love among its glaciers.  The Tutor and Number Five
were both quiet, thoughtful: he, evidently captivated; she, what was
the meaning of her manner to him?  Say that she seemed fond of him,
as she might be were he her nephew,--one for whom she had a special
liking.  If she had a warmer feeling than this, she could hardly know
how to manage it; for she was so used to having love made to her
without returning it that she would naturally be awkward in dealing
with the new experience.

The Doctor drove a lively five-year-old horse, and took the lead.
The Tutor followed with a quiet, steady-going nag; if he had driven
the five-year-old, I would not have answered for the necks of the
pair in the chaise, for he was too much taken up with the subject
they were talking of, to be very careful about his driving.  The
Mistress and her escort brought up the rear,--I holding the reins,
the Professor at my side, and Number Seven sitting with the Mistress.

We arrived at the institution a little later than we had expected to,
and the students were flocking into the hall, where the Commencement
exercises were to take place, and the medal-scholars were to receive
the tokens of their excellence in the various departments.  From our
seats we could see the greater part of the assembly,--not quite all,
however of the pupils.  A pleasing sight it was to look upon, this
array of young ladies dressed in white, with their class badges, and
with the ribbon of the shade of blue affected by the scholars of the
institution.  If Solomon in all his glory was not to be compared to a
lily, a whole bed of lilies could not be compared to this garden-bed
of youthful womanhood.

The performances were very much the same as most of us have seen at
the academies and collegiate schools.  Some of the graduating class
read their "compositions," one of which was a poem,--an echo of the
prevailing American echoes, of course, but prettily worded and
intelligently read.  Then there was a song sung by a choir of the
pupils, led by their instructor, who was assisted by the Musician
whom we count among The Teacups.--There was something in one of the
voices that reminded me of one I had heard before.  Where could it
have been?  I am sure I cannot remember.  There are some good voices
in our village choir, but none so pure and bird-like as this.  A
sudden thought came into my head, but I kept it to myself.  I heard a
tremulous catching of the breath, something like a sob, close by me.
It was the Mistress,--she was crying.  What was she crying for?  It
was impressive, certainly, to listen to these young voices, many of
them blending for the last time,--for the scholars were soon to be
scattered all over the country, and some of them beyond its
boundaries,--but why the Mistress was so carried away, I did not
know.  She must be more impressible than most of us; yet I thought
Number Five also looked as if she were having a struggle with herself
to keep down some rebellious signs of emotion.

The exercises went on very pleasingly until they came to the awarding
of the gold medal of the year and the valedictory, which was to be
delivered by the young lady to whom it was to be presented.  The name
was called; it was one not unfamiliar to our ears, and the bearer of
it--the Delilah of our tea-table, Avis as she was known in the school
and elsewhere--rose in her place and came forward, so that for the
first time on that day, we looked upon her.  It was a sensation for
The Teacups.  Our modest, quiet waiting-girl was the best scholar of
her year.  We had talked French before her, and we learned that she
was the best French scholar the teacher had ever had in the school.
We had never thought of her except as a pleasing and well-trained
handmaiden, and here she was an accomplished young lady.

Avis went through her part very naturally and gracefully, and when it
was finished, and she stood before us with the medal glittering on
her breast, we did not know whether to smile or to cry,--some of us
did one, and some the other.--We all had an opportunity to see her
and congratulate her before we left the institution.  The mystery of
her six weeks' serving at our table was easily solved.  She had been
studying too hard and too long, and required some change of scene and
occupation.  She had a fancy for trying to see if she could support
herself as so many young women are obliged to, and found a place with
us, the Mistress only knowing her secret.

"She is to be our young Doctor's wife!" the Mistress whispered to me,
and did some more crying, not for grief, certainly.

Whether our young Doctor's long visits to a neighboring town had
anything to do with the fact that Avis was at that institution,
whether she was the patient he visited or not, may be left in doubt.
At all events, he had always driven off in the direction which would
carry him to the place where she was at school.

I have attended a large number of celebrations, commencements,
banquets, soirees, and so forth, and done my best to help on a good
many of them.  In fact, I have become rather too well known in
connection with "occasions," and it has cost me no little trouble.
I believe there is no kind of occurrence for which I have not been
requested to contribute something in prose or verse.  It is sometimes
very hard to say no to the requests.  If one is in the right mood
when he or she writes an occasional poem, it seems as if nothing
could have been easier.  "Why, that piece run off jest like ile.
I don't bullieve," the unlettered applicant says to himself, "I don't
bullieve it took him ten minutes to write them verses."  The good
people have no suspicion of how much a single line, a single
expression, may cost its author.  The wits used to say that Ropers,--
the poet once before referred to, old Samuel Ropers, author of the
Pleasures of Memory and giver of famous breakfasts,--was accustomed
to have straw laid before the house whenever he had just given birth
to a couplet.  It is not quite so bad as that with most of us who are
called upon to furnish a poem, a song, a hymn, an ode for some grand
meeting, but it is safe to say that many a trifling performance has
had more good honest work put into it than the minister's sermon of
that week had cost him.  If a vessel glides off the ways smoothly and
easily at her launching, it does not mean that no great pains have
been taken to secure the result.  Because a poem is an "occasional"
one, it does not follow that it has not taken as much time and skill
as if it had been written without immediate, accidental, temporary
motive.  Pindar's great odes were occasional poems, just as much as
our Commencement and Phi Beta Kappa poems are, and yet they have come
down among the most precious bequests of antiquity to modern times.

The mystery of the young Doctor's long visits to the neighboring town
was satisfactorily explained by what we saw and heard of his
relations with our charming "Delilah,"--for Delilah we could hardly
help calling her.  Our little handmaid, the Cinderella of the
teacups, now the princess, or, what was better, the pride of the
school to which she had belonged, fit for any position to which she
might be called, was to be the wife of our young Doctor.  It would
not have been the right thing to proclaim the fact while she was a
pupil, but now that she had finished her course of instruction there
was no need of making a secret of the engagement.

So we have got our romance, our love-story out of our Teacups, as I
hoped and expected that we should, but not exactly in the quarter
where it might have been looked for.

What did our two Annexes say to this unexpected turn of events?  They
were good-hearted girls as ever lived, but they were human, like the
rest of us, and women, like some of the rest of us.  They behaved
perfectly.  They congratulated the Doctor, and hoped he would bring
the young lady to the tea-table where she had played her part so
becomingly.  It is safe to say that each of the Annexes world have
liked to be asked the lover's last question by the very nice young
man who had been a pleasant companion at the table and elsewhere to
each of them.  That same question is the highest compliment a man can
pay a woman, and a woman does not mind having a dozen or more such
compliments to string on the rosary of her remembrances.  Whether
either of them was glad, on the whole, that he had not offered
himself to the other in preference to herself would be a mean, shabby
question, and I think altogether too well of you who are reading this
paper to suppose that you would entertain the idea of asking it.

It was a very pleasant occasion when the Doctor brought Avis over to
sit with us at the table where she used to stand and wait upon us.
We wondered how we could for a moment have questioned that she was
one to be waited upon, and not made for the humble office which
nevertheless she performed so cheerfully and so well.


     Commencements and other Celebrations, American and English.

The social habits of our people have undergone an immense change
within the past half century, largely in consequence of the vast
development of the means of intercourse between different
neighborhoods.

Commencements, college gatherings of all kinds, church assemblages,
school anniversaries, town centennials,--all possible occasions for
getting crowds together are made the most of.  "'T is sixty years
since,"--and a good many years over,--the time to which my memory
extends.  The great days of the year were, Election,--General
Election on Wednesday, and Artillery Election on the Monday
following, at which time lilacs were in bloom and 'lection buns were
in order; Fourth of July, when strawberries were just going out; and
Commencement, a grand time of feasting, fiddling, dancing, jollity,
not to mention drunkenness and fighting, on the classic green of
Cambridge.  This was the season of melons and peaches.  That is the
way our boyhood chronicles events.  It was odd that the literary
festival should be turned into a Donnybrook fair, but so it was when
I was a boy, and the tents and the shows and the crowds on the Common
were to the promiscuous many the essential parts of the great
occasion.  They had been so for generations, and it was only
gradually that the Cambridge Saturnalia were replaced by the
decencies and solemnities of the present sober anniversary.

Nowadays our celebrations smack of the Sunday-school more than of the
dancing-hall.  The aroma of the punch-bowl has given way to the
milder flavor of lemonade and the cooling virtues of ice-cream.
A strawberry festival is about as far as the dissipation of our
social gatherings ventures.  There was much that was objectionable in
those swearing, drinking, fighting times, but they had a certain
excitement for us boys of the years when the century was in its
teens, which comes back to us not without its fascinations.  The days
of total abstinence are a great improvement over those of unlicensed
license, but there was a picturesque element about the rowdyism of
our old Commencement days, which had a charm for the eye of boyhood.
My dear old friend,--book-friend, I mean,--whom I always called Daddy
Gilpin (as I find Fitzgerald called Wordsworth, Daddy Wordsworth),--
my old friend Gilpin, I say, considered the donkey more picturesque
in a landscape than the horse.  So a village fete as depicted by
Teniers is more picturesque than a teetotal picnic or a Sabbath-
school strawberry festival.  Let us be thankful that the vicious
picturesque is only a remembrance, and the virtuous commonplace a
reality of to-day.

What put all this into my head is something which the English Annex
has been showing me.  Most of my readers are somewhat acquainted with
our own church and village celebrations.  They know how they are
organized; the women always being the chief motors, and the machinery
very much the same in one case as in another.  Perhaps they would
like to hear how such things are managed in England; and that is just
what they may learn from the pamphlet which was shown me by the
English Annex, and of which I will give them a brief account.

Some of us remember the Rev. Mr. Haweis, his lectures and his violin,
which interested and amused us here in Boston a few years ago.  Now
Mr. Haweis, assisted by his intelligent and spirited wife, has charge
of the parish of St. James, Westmoreland Street, Marylebone, London.
On entering upon the twenty-fifth year of his incumbency in
Marylebone, and the twenty-eighth of his ministry in the diocese of
London, it was thought a good idea to have an "Evening Conversazione
and Fete."  We can imagine just how such a meeting would be organized
in one of our towns.  Ministers, deacons, perhaps a member of
Congress, possibly a Senator, and even, conceivably, his Excellency
the Governor, and a long list of ladies lend their names to give
lustre to the occasion.  It is all very pleasant, unpretending,
unceremonious, cheerful, well ordered, commendable, but not imposing.

Now look at our Marylebone parish celebration, and hold your breath
while the procession of great names passes before you.  You learn at
the outset that it is held UNDER ROYAL PATRONAGE, and read the names
of two royal highnesses, one highness, a prince, and a princess.
Then comes a list before which if you do not turn pale, you must
certainly be in the habit of rouging: three earls, seven lords, three
bishops, two generals (one of them Lord Wolseley), one admiral, four
baronets, nine knights, a crowd of right honorable and honorable
ladies (many of them peeresses), and a mob of other personages, among
whom I find Mr. Howells, Bret Harte, and myself.

Perhaps we are disposed to smile at seeing so much made of titles;
but after what we have learned of Lord Timothy Dexter and the high-
sounding names appropriated by many of our own compatriots, who have
no more claim to them than we plain Misters and Misseses, we may feel
to them something as our late friend Mr.  Appleton felt to the real
green turtle soup set before him, when he said that it was almost as
good as mock.

The entertainment on this occasion was of the most varied character.
The programme makes the following announcement:

               Friday, 4 July, 18-.

          At 8 P. M. the Doors will Open.
          Mr. Haweis will receive his Friends.
          The Royal Handbell Ringers will Ring.
          The Fish-pond will be Fished.
          The Stalls will be Visited.
          The Phonograph will Utter.

Refreshments will be called for, and they will come,--Tea, Coffee,
and Cooling Drinks.  Spirits will not be called for, from the Vasty
Deep or anywhere else,--nor would they come if they were.

At 9.30 Mrs. Haweis will join the assembly.

I am particularly delighted with this last feature in the preliminary
announcement.  It is a proof of the high regard in which the
estimable and gifted lady who shares her husband's labors is held by
the people of their congregation, and the friends who share in their
feelings.  It is such a master stroke of policy, too, to keep back
the principal attraction until the guests must have grown eager for
her appearance: I can well imagine how great a saving it must have
been to the good lady's nerves, which were probably pretty well tried
already by the fatigues and responsibilities of the busy evening.  I
have a right to say this, for I myself had the honor of attending a
meeting at Mr. Haweis's house, where I was a principal guest, as I
suppose, from the fact of the great number of persons who were
presented to me.  The minister must be very popular, for the meeting
was a regular jam,--not quite so tremendous as that greater one,
where but for the aid of Mr. Smalley, who kept open a breathing-space
round us, my companion and myself thought we should have been
asphyxiated.

The company was interested, as some of my readers maybe, to know what
were the attractions offered to the visitors besides that of meeting
the courteous entertainers and their distinguished guests.  I cannot
give these at length, for each part of the show is introduced in the
programme with apt quotations and pleasantries, which enlivened the
catalogue.  There were eleven stalls, "conducted on the cooperative
principle of division of profits and interest; they retain the
profits, and you take a good deal of interest, we hope, in their
success."

Stall No. 1.  Edisoniana, or the Phonograph.  Alluded to by
the Roman Poet as Vox, et praeterea nihil.

Stall No. 2.  Money-changing.

Stall No. 3.  Programmes and General Enquiries.

Stall No. 4.  Roses.

A rose by any other name, etc.  Get one.  You can't expect to smell
one without buying it, but you may buy one without smelling it.

Stall No.  5.  Lasenby Liberty Stall.
(I cannot explain this.  Probably articles from Liberty's famous
establishment.)

Stall No.  6.  Historical Costumes and Ceramics.

Stall No.  7.  The Fish-pond.

Stall No.  8.  Varieties.

Stall No.  9.  Bookstall.
(Books) "highly recommended for insomnia; friends we never speak to,
and always cut if we want to know them well."

Stall No.  10.  Icelandic.

Stall No.  11.  Call Office.
"Mrs. Magnusson, who is devoted to the North Pole and all its works,
will thaw your sympathies, enlighten your minds," etc., etc.

All you buy may be left at the stalls, ticketed.  A duplicate ticket
will be handed to you on leaving.  Present your duplicate at the Call
Office.

At 9.45, First Concert.

At 10.45, An Address of Welcome by Rev. H. R. Haweis.

At 11 P. M., Bird-warbling Interlude by Miss Mabel Stephenson,
U. S. A.

At 11.20, Second Concert.

          NOTICE!

Three Great Pictures.

LORD TENNYSON.    G. F. Watts, R. A.
JOHN STUART MILL  G. F. Watts, R. A.
JOSEPH GARIBALDI  Sig. Rondi.

          NOTICE!

A Famous Violin.

A world-famed Stradivarius Violin, for which Mr. Hill, of Bond
Street, gave L 1000, etc., etc.

          REFRESHMENTS.

Tickets for Tea, Coffee, Sandwiches, Iced Drinks, or Ices, Sixpence
each, etc., etc.

I hope my American reader is pleased and interested by this glimpse
of the way in which they do these things in London.

There is something very pleasant about all this, but what specially
strikes me is a curious flavor of city provincialism.  There are
little centres in the heart of great cities, just as there are small
fresh-water ponds in great islands with the salt sea roaring all
round them, and bays and creeks penetrating them as briny as the
ocean itself.  Irving has given a charming picture of such a quasi-
provincial centre in one of his papers in the Sketch-Book,--the one
with the title "Little Britain."  London is a nation of itself, and
contains provinces, districts, foreign communities, villages,
parishes,--innumerable lesser centres, with their own distinguishing
characteristics, habits, pursuit, languages, social laws, as much
isolated from each other as if "mountains interposed" made the
separation between them.  One of these lesser centres is that over
which my friend Mr. Haweis presides as spiritual director.  Chelsea
has been made famous as the home of many authors and artists,--above
all, as the residence of Carlyle during the greater part of his life.
Its population, like that of most respectable suburbs, must belong
mainly to the kind of citizens which resembles in many ways the
better class,--as we sometimes dare to call it,--of one of our
thriving New England towns.  How many John Gilpins there must be in
this population,--citizens of "famous London town," but living with
the simplicity of the inhabitants of our inland villages!  In the
mighty metropolis where the wealth of the world displays itself they
practise their snug economies, enjoy their simple pleasures, and look
upon ice-cream as a luxury, just as if they were living on the banks
of the Connecticut or the Housatonic, in regions where the summer
locusts of the great cities have not yet settled on the verdure of
the native inhabitants.  It is delightful to realize the fact that
while the West End of London is flaunting its splendors and the East
End in struggling with its miseries, these great middle-class
communities are living as comfortable, unpretending lives as if they
were in one of our thriving townships in the huckleberry-districts.
Human beings are wonderfully alike when they are placed in similar
conditions.

We were sitting together in a very quiet way over our teacups.  The
young Doctor, who was in the best of spirits, had been laughing and
chatting with the two Annexes.  The Tutor, who always sits next to
Number Five of late, had been conversing with her in rather low
tones.  The rest of us had been soberly sipping our tea, and when the
Doctor and the Annexes stopped talking there was one of those dead
silences which are sometimes so hard to break in upon, and so awkward
while they last.  All at once Number Seven exploded in a loud laugh,
which startled everybody at the table.

What is it that sets you laughing so?  said I.

"I was thinking," Number Seven replied, "of what you said the other
day of poetry being only the ashes of emotion.  I believe that some
people are disposed to dispute the proposition.  I have been putting
your doctrine to the test.  In doing it I made some rhymes,--the
first and only ones I ever made.  I will suppose a case of very
exciting emotion, and see whether it would probably take the form of
poetry or prose.  You are suddenly informed that your house is on
fire, and have to scramble out of it, without stopping to tie your
neck-cloth neatly or to put a flower in your buttonhole.  Do you
think a poet turning out in his night-dress, and looking on while the
flames were swallowing his home and all its contents, would express
himself in this style?


                   "My house is on fire!
                    Bring me my lyre!
     Like the flames that rise heavenward my song shall aspire!

"He would n't do any such thing, and you know he wouldn't.  He would
yell Fire! Fire! with all his might.  Not much rhyming for him just
yet!  Wait until the fire is put out, and he has had time to look at
the charred timbers and the ashes of his home, and in the course of a
week he may possibly spin a few rhymes about it.  Or suppose he was
making an offer of his hand and heart, do you think he would declaim
a versified proposal to his Amanda, or perhaps write an impromptu on
the back of his hat while he knelt before her?

              "My beloved, to you
               I will always be true.
     Oh, pray make me happy, my love, do! do! do!

"What would Amanda think of a suitor who courted her with a rhyming
dictionary in his pocket to help him make love?"

You are right, said I,--there's nothing in the world like rhymes to
cool off a man's passion.  You look at a blacksmith working on a bit
of iron or steel.  Bright enough it looked while it was on the
hearth, in the midst of the sea-coal, the great bellows blowing away,
and the rod or the horse-shoe as red or as white as the burning
coals.  How it fizzes as it goes into the trough of water, and how
suddenly all the glow is gone!  It looks black and cold enough now.
Just so with your passionate incandescence.  It is all well while it
burns and scintillates in your emotional centres, without articulate
and connected expression; but the minute you plunge it into the
rhyme-trough it cools down, and becomes as dead and dull as the cold
horse-shoe.  It is true that if you lay it cold on the anvil and
hammer away on it for a while it warms up somewhat.  Just so with the
rhyming fellow,--he pounds away on his verses and they warm up a
little.  But don't let him think that this afterglow of composition
is the same thing as the original passion.  That found expression in
a few oh, oh's, eheu's, helas, helas's, and when the passion had
burned itself out you got the rhymed verses, which, as I have said,
are its ashes.

I thanked Number Seven for his poetical illustration of my thesis.
There is great good to be got out of a squinting brain, if one only
knows how to profit by it.  We see only one side of the moon, you
know, but a fellow with a squinting brain seems now and then to get a
peep at the other side.  I speak metaphorically.  He takes new and
startling views of things we have always looked at in one particular
aspect.  There is a rule invariably to be observed with one of this
class of intelligences: Never contradict a man with a squinting
brain.  I say a man, because I do not think that squinting brains are
nearly so common in women as they are in men.  The "eccentrics" are,
I think, for the most part of the male sex.

That leads me to say that persons with a strong instinctive tendency
to contradiction are apt to become unprofitable companions.  Our
thoughts are plants that never flourish in inhospitable soils or
chilling atmospheres.  They are all started under glass, so to speak;
that is, sheltered and fostered in our own warm and sunny
consciousness.  They must expect some rough treatment when we lift
the sash from the frame and let the outside elements in upon them.
They can bear the rain and the breezes, and be all the better for
them; but perpetual contradiction is a pelting hailstorm, which
spoils their growth and tends to kill them out altogether.

Now stop and consider a moment.  Are not almost all brains a little
wanting in bilateral symmetry?  Do you not find in persons whom you
love, whom you esteem, and even admire, some marks of obliquity in
mental vision?  Are there not some subjects in looking at which it
seems to you impossible that they should ever see straight?  Are
there not moods in which it seems to you that they are disposed to
see all things out of plumb and in false relations with each other?
If you answer these questions in the affirmative, then you will be
glad of a hint as to the method of dealing with your friends who have
a touch of cerebral strabismus, or are liable to occasional paroxysms
of perversity.  Let them have their head.  Get them talking on
subjects that interest them.  As a rule, nothing is more likely to
serve this purpose than letting them talk about themselves; if
authors, about their writings; if artists, about their pictures or
statues; and generally on whatever they have most pride in and think
most of their own relations with.

Perhaps you will not at first sight agree with me in thinking that
slight mental obliquity is as common as I suppose.  An analogy may
have some influence on your belief in this matter.  Will you take the
trouble to ask your tailor how many persons have their two shoulders
of the same height?  I think be will tell you that the majority of
his customers show a distinct difference of height on the two sides.
Will you ask a portrait-painter how many of those who sit to hint
have both sides of their faces exactly alike?  I believe he will tell
you that one side is always a little better than the other.  What
will your hatter say about the two sides of the head?  Do you see
equally well with both eyes, and hear equally well with both ears?
Few persons past middle age will pretend that they do.  Why should
the two halves of a brain not show a natural difference, leading to
confusion of thought, and very possibly to that instinct of
contradiction of which I was speaking?  A great deal of time is lost
in profitless conversation, and a good deal of ill temper frequently
caused, by not considering these organic and practically insuperable
conditions.  In dealing with them, acquiescence is the best of
palliations and silence the sovereign specific.

I have been the reporter, as you have seen, of my own conversation
and that of the other Teacups.  I have told some of the circumstances
of their personal history, and interested, as I hope, here and there
a reader in the fate of different members of our company.  Here are
our pretty Delilah and our Doctor provided for.  We may take it for
granted that it will not be very long that the young couple will have
to wait; for, as I have told you all, the Doctor is certainly getting
into business, and bids fair to have a thriving practice before he
saddles his nose with an eyeglass and begins to think of a pair of
spectacles.  So that part of our little domestic drama is over, and
we can only wish the pair that is to be all manner of blessings
consistent with a reasonable amount of health in the community on
whose ailings must depend their prosperity.

All our thoughts are now concentrated on the relation existing betwen
Number Five and the Tutor.  That there is some profound instinctive
impulse which is drawing them closer together no one who watches them
can for a moment doubt.  There are two principles of attraction which
bring different natures together: that in which the two natures
closely resemble each other, and that in which one is complementary
of the other.  In the first case, they coalesce, as do two drops of
water or of mercury, and become intimately blended as soon as they
touch; in the other, they rush together as an acid and an alkali
unite, predestined from eternity to find all they most needed in each
other.  What is the condition of things in the growing intimacy of
Number Five and the Tutor?  He is many years her junior, as we know.
Both of them look that fact squarely in the face.  The presumption is
against the union of two persons under these circumstances.
Presumptions are strong obstacles against any result we wish to
attain, but half our work in life is to overcome them.  A great many
results look in the distance like six-foot walls, and when we get
nearer prove to be only five-foot hurdles, to be leaped over or
knocked down.  Twenty years from now she may be a vigorous and active
old woman, and he a middle-aged, half-worn-out invalid, like so many
overworked scholars.  Everything depends on the number of drops of
the elixir vitae which Nature mingled in the nourishment she
administered to the embryo before it tasted its mother's milk.  Think
of Cleopatra, the bewitching old mischief-maker; think of Ninon de
L'Enclos, whose own son fell desperately in love with her, not
knowing the relation in which she stood to him; think of Dr.
Johnson's friend, Mrs. Thrale, afterward Mrs. Piozzi, who at the age
of eighty was full enough of life to be making love ardently and
persistently to Conway, the handsome young actor.  I can readily
believe that Number Five will outlive the Tutor, even if he is
fortunate enough rather in winning his way into the fortress through
gates that open to him of their own accord.  If he fails in his
siege, I do really believe he will die early; not of a broken heart,
exactly, but of a heart starved, with the food it was craving close
to it, but unattainable.  I have, therefore, a deep interest in
knowing how Number Five and the Tutor are getting along together.  Is
there any danger of one or the other growing tired of the intimacy,
and becoming willing to get rid of it, like a garment which has
shrunk and grown too tight?  Is it likely that some other attraction
may come into disturb the existing relation?  The problem is to my
mind not only interesting, but exceptionally curious.  You remember
the story of Cymon and Iphigenia as Dryden tells it.  The poor youth
has the capacity of loving, but it lies hidden in his undeveloped
nature.  All at once he comes upon the sleeping beauty, and is
awakened by her charms to a hitherto unfelt consciousness.  With the
advent of the new passion all his dormant faculties start into life,
and the seeming simpleton becomes the bright and intelligent lover.
The case of Number Five is as different from that of Cymon as it
could well be.  All her faculties are wide awake, but one emotional
side of her nature has never been called into active exercise.  Why
has she never been in love with any one of her suitors?  Because she
liked too many of them.  Do you happen to remember a poem printed
among these papers, entitled "I Like You and I Love You"

No one of the poems which have been placed in the urn,--that is, in
the silver sugar-bowl,--has had any name attached to it; but you
could guess pretty nearly who was the author of some of them,
certainly of the one just, referred to.  Number Five was attracted to
the Tutor from the first time he spoke to her.  She dreamed about him
that night, and nothing idealizes and renders fascinating one in whom
we have already an interest like dreaming of him or of her.  Many a
calm suitor has been made passionate by a dream; many a passionate
lover has been made wild and half beside himself by a dream; and now
and then an infatuated but hapless lover, waking from a dream of
bliss to a cold reality of wretchedness, has helped himself to
eternity before he was summoned to the table.

Since Number Five had dreamed about the Tutor, he had been more in
her waking thoughts than she was willing to acknowledge.  These
thoughts were vague, it is true,--emotions, perhaps, rather than
worded trains of ideas; but she was conscious of a pleasing
excitement as his name or his image floated across her consciousness;
she sometimes sighed as she looked over the last passage they had
read from the same book, and sometimes when they were together they
were silent too long,--too long!  What were they thinking of?

And so it was all as plain sailing for Number Five and the young
Tutor as it had been for Delilah and the young Doctor, was it?  Do
you think so?  Then you do not understand Number Five.  Many a woman
has as many atmospheric rings about her as the planet Saturn.  Three
are easily to be recognized.  First, there is the wide ring of
attraction which draws into itself all that once cross its outer
border.  These revolve about her without ever coming any nearer.
Next is the inner ring of attraction.  Those who come within its
irresistible influence are drawn so close that it seems as if they
must become one with her sooner or later.  But within this ring is
another,--an atmospheric girdle, one of repulsion, which love, no
matter how enterprising, no matter how prevailing or how insinuating,
has never passed, and, if we judge of what is to be by what has been,
never will.  Perhaps Nature loved Number Five so well that she
grudged her to any mortal man, and gave her this inner girdle of
repulsion to guard her from all who would know her too nearly and
love her too well.  Sometimes two vessels at sea keep each other
company for a long distance, it may be daring a whole voyage.  Very
pleasant it is to each to have a companion to exchange signals with
from time to time; to came near enough, when the winds are light, to
hold converse in ordinary tones from deck to deck; to know that, in
case of need, there's help at hand.  It is good for them to be near
each other, but not good to be too near.  Woe is to them if they
touch!  The wreck of one or both is likely to be the consequence.
And so two well-equipped and heavily freighted natures may be the
best of companions to each other, and yet must never attempt to come
into closer union.  Is this the condition of affairs between Number
Five and the Tutor?  I hope not, for I want them to be joined
together in that dearest of intimacies, which, if founded in true
affinity, is the nearest approach to happiness to be looked for in
our mortal, experience.  We mast wait.  The Teacups will meet once
more before the circle is broken, and we may, perhaps, find the
solution of the question we have raised.

In the mean time, our young Doctor is playing truant oftener than
ever.  He has brought Avis,--if we must call her so, and not
Delilah,--several times to take tea with us.  It means something, in
these days, to graduate from one of our first-class academies or
collegiate schools.  I shall never forget my first visit to one of
these institutions.  How much its pupils know, I said, which I was
never taught, and have never learned!  I was fairly frightened to see
what a teaching apparatus was provided for them.  I should think the
first thing to be done with most of the husbands, they are likely to
get would be to put them through a course of instruction.  The young
wives must find their lords wofully ignorant, in a large proportion
of cases.  When the wife has educated the husband to such a point
that she can invite him to work out a problem in the higher
mathematics or to perform a difficult chemical analysis with her as
his collaborator, as less instructed dames ask their husbands to play
a game of checkers or backgammon, they can have delightful and
instructive evenings together.  I hope our young Doctor will take
kindly to his wife's (that is to be) teachings.

When the following verses were taken out of the urn, the Mistress
asked me to hand the manuscript to the young Doctor to read.  I
noticed that he did not keep his eyes very closely fixed on the
paper.  It seemed as if he could have recited the lines without
referring to the manuscript at all.


          AT THE TURN OF THE ROAD.

The glory has passed from the goldenrod's plume,
The purple-hued asters still linger in bloom;
The birch is bright yellow, the sumachs are red,
The maples like torches aflame overhead.

But what if the joy of the summer is past,
And winter's wild herald is blowing his blast?
For me dull November is sweeter than May,
For my love is its sunshine,--she meets me to-day!

Will she come?  Will the ring-dove return to her nest?
Will the needle swing back from the east or the west?
At the stroke of the hour she will be at her gate;
A friend may prove laggard,--love never comes late.

Do I see her afar in the distance?  Not yet.
Too early! Too early!  She could not forget!
When I cross the old bridge where the brook overflowed,
She will flash full in sight at the turn of the road.

I pass the low wall where the ivy entwines;
I tread the brown pathway that leads through the pines;
I haste by the boulder that lies in the field,
Where her promise at parting was lovingly sealed.

Will she come by the hillside or round through the wood?
Will she wear her brown dress or her mantle and hood?
The minute draws near,--but her watch may go wrong;
My heart will be asking, What keeps her so long?

Why doubt for a moment?  More shame if I do!
Why question?  Why tremble?  Are angels more true?
She would come to the lover who calls her his own
Though she trod in the track of a whirling cyclone!

--I crossed the old bridge ere the minute had passed.
I looked: lo! my Love stood before me at last.
Her eyes, how they sparkled, her cheeks, how they glowed,
As we met, face to face, at the turn of the road!




XII

There was a great tinkling of teaspoons the other evening, when I
took my seat at the table, where ail The Teacups were gathered before
my entrance.  The whole company arose, and the Mistress, speaking for
them, expressed the usual sentiment appropriate to such occasions.
"Many happy returns" is the customary formula.  No matter if the
object of this kind wish is a centenarian, it is quite safe to assume
that he is ready and very willing to accept as many more years as the
disposing powers may see fit to allow him.

The meaning of it all was that this was my birthday.  My friends,
near and distant, had seen fit to remember it, and to let me know in
various pleasant ways that they had not forgotten it.  The tables
were adorned with flowers.  Gifts of pretty and pleasing objects were
displayed on a side table.  A great green wreath, which must have
cost the parent oak a large fraction of its foliage, was an object of
special admiration.  Baskets of flowers which had half unpeopled
greenhouses, large bouquets of roses, fragrant bunches of pinks, and
many beautiful blossoms I am not botanist enough to name had been
coming in upon me all day long.  Many of these offerings were brought
by the givers in person; many came with notes as fragrant with good
wishes as the flowers they accompanied with their natural perfumes.

How old was I, The Dictator, once known by another equally audacious
title,--I, the recipient of all these favors and honors?  I had
cleared the eight-barred gate, which few come in sight of, and fewer,
far fewer, go over, a year before.  I was a trespasser on the domain
belonging to another generation.  The children of my coevals were
fast getting gray and bald, and their children beginning to look upon
the world as belonging to them, and not to their sires and
grandsires.  After that leap over the tall barrier, it looks like a
kind of impropriety to keep on as if one were still of a reasonable
age.  Sometimes it seems to me almost of the nature of a misdemeanor
to be wandering about in the preserve which the fleshless gamekeeper
guards so jealously.  But, on the other hand, I remember that men of
science have maintained that the natural life of man is nearer
fivescore than threescore years and ten.  I always think of a
familiar experience which I bring from the French cafes, well known
to me in my early manhood.  One of the illustrated papers of my
Parisian days tells it pleasantly enough.

A guest of the establishment is sitting at his little table.  He has
just had his coffee, and the waiter is serving him with his petit
verre.  Most of my readers know very well what a petit verre is, but
there may be here and there a virtuous abstainer from alcoholic
fluids, living among the bayberries and the sweet ferns, who is not
aware that the words, as commonly used, signify a small glass--a very
small glass--of spirit, commonly brandy, taken as a chasse-cafe, or
coffee-chaser.  This drinking of brandy, "neat," I may remark by the
way, is not quite so bad as it looks.  Whiskey or rum taken unmixed
from a tumbler is a knock-down blow to temperance, but the little
thimbleful of brandy, or Chartreuse, or Maraschino, is only, as it
were, tweaking the nose of teetotalism.

Well,--to go back behind our brackets,--the guest is calling to the
waiter, "Garcon! et le bain de pieds!  "Waiter! and the foot-bath!
--The little glass stands in a small tin saucer or shallow dish, and
the custom is to more than fill the glass, so that some extra brandy
rung over into this tin saucer or cup-plate, to the manifest gain of
the consumer.

Life is a petit verre of a very peculiar kind of spirit.  At seventy
years it used to be said that the little glass was full.  We should
be more apt to put it at eighty in our day, while Gladstone and
Tennyson and our own Whittier are breathing, moving, thinking,
writing, speaking, in the green preserve belonging to their children
and grandchildren, and Bancroft is keeping watch of the gamekeeper in
the distance.  But, returning resolutely to the petit verre, I am
willing to concede that all after fourscore is the bain de pieds,
--the slopping over, so to speak, of the full measure of life.  I
remember that one who was very near and dear to me, and who lived to
a great age, so that the ten-barred gate of the century did not look
very far off, would sometimes apologize in a very sweet, natural way
for lingering so long to be a care and perhaps a burden to her
children, themselves getting well into years.  It is not hard to
understand the feeling, never less called for than it was in the case
of that beloved nonagenarian.  I have known few persons, young or
old, more sincerely and justly regretted than the gentle lady whose
memory comes up before me as I write.

Oh, if we could all go out of flower as gracefully, as pleasingly, as
we come into blossom!  I always think of the morning-glory as the
loveliest example of a graceful yielding to the inevitable.  It is
beautiful before its twisted corolla opens; it is comely as it folds
its petals inward, when its brief hours of perfection are over.
Women find it easier than men to grow old in a becoming way.  A very
old lady who has kept something, it may be a great deal, of her
youthful feelings, who is daintily cared for, who is grateful for the
attentions bestowed upon her, and enters into the spirit of the young
lives that surround her, is as precious to those who love her as a
gem in an antique setting, the fashion of which has long gone by, but
which leaves the jewel the color and brightness which are its
inalienable qualities.  With old men it is too often different.  They
do not belong so much indoors as women do.  They have no pretty
little manual occupations.  The old lady knits or stitches so long as
her eyes and fingers will let her.  The old man smokes his pipe, but
does not know what to do with his fingers, unless he plays upon some
instrument, or has a mechanical turn which finds business for them.

But the old writer, I said to The Teacups, as I say to you, my
readers, labors under one special difficulty, which I am thinking of
and exemplifying at this moment.  He is constantly tending to reflect
upon and discourse about his own particular stage of life.  He feels
that he must apologize for his intrusion upon the time and thoughts
of a generation which he naturally supposes must be tired of him, if
they ever had any considerable regard for him.  Now, if the world of
readers hates anything it sees in print, it is apology.  If what one
has to say is worth saying, he need not beg pardon fur saying it.  If
it is not worth saying I will not finish the sentence.  But it is so
hard to resist the temptation, notwithstanding that the terrible line
beginning "Superfluous lags the veteran" is always repeating itself
in his dull ear!

What kind of audience or reading parish is a man who secured his
constituency in middle life, or before that period, to expect when he
has reached the age of threescore and twenty?  His coevals have
dropped away by scores and tens, and he sees only a few units
scattered about here and there, like the few beads above the water
after a ship has gone to pieces.  Does he write and publish for those
of his own time of life?  He need not print a large edition.  Does he
hope to secure a hearing from those who have come into the reading
world since his coevals?  They have found fresher fields and greener
pastures.  Their interests are in the out-door, active world.  Some
of them are circumnavigating the planet while he is hitching his
rocking chair about his hearth-rug.  Some are gazing upon the
pyramids while he is staring at his andirons.  Some are settling the
tariff and fixing the laws of suffrage and taxation while he is
dozing over the weather bulletin, and going to sleep over the
obituaries in his morning or evening paper.

Nature is wiser than we give her credit for being; never wiser than
in her dealings with the old.  She has no idea of mortifying them by
sudden and wholly unexpected failure of the chief servants of
consciousness.  The sight, for instance, begins to lose something of
its perfection long before its deficiency calls the owner's special
attention to it.  Very probably, the first hint we have of the change
is that a friend makes the pleasing remark that we are "playing the
trombone," as he calls it; that is, moving a book we are holding
backward and forward, to get the right focal distance.  Or it may be
we find fault with the lamp or the gas-burner for not giving so much
light as it used to.  At last, somewhere between forty and fifty, we
begin to dangle a jaunty pair of eye-glasses, half plaything and half
necessity.  In due time a pair of sober, business-like spectacles
bestrides the nose.  Old age leaps upon it as his saddle, and rides
triumphant, unchallenged, until the darkness comes which no glasses
can penetrate.  Nature is pitiless in carrying out the universal
sentence, but very pitiful in her mode of dealing with the condemned
on his way to the final scene.  The man who is to be hanged always
has a good breakfast provided for him.

Do not think that the old look upon themselves as the helpless,
hopeless, forlorn creatures which they seem to young people.  Do
these young folks suppose that all vanity dies out of the natures of
old men and old women?  A dentist of olden time told me that a good-
looking young man once said to him, "Keep that incisor presentable,
if you can, till I am fifty, and then I sha'n't care how I look."  I
venture to say that that gentleman was as particular about his
personal appearance and as proud of his good looks at fifty, and many
years after fifty, as he was in the twenties, when he made that
speech to the dentist.

My dear friends around the teacups, and at that wider board where I
am now entertaining, or trying to entertain, my company, is it not as
plain to you as it is to me that I had better leave such tasks as
that which I am just finishing to those who live in a more
interesting period of life than one which, in the order of nature, is
next door to decrepitude?  Ought I not to regret having undertaken to
report the doings and sayings of the members of the circle which you
have known as The Teacups?

Dear, faithful reader, whose patient eyes have followed my reports
through these long months, you and I are about parting company.
Perhaps you are one of those who have known me under another name, in
those far-off days separated from these by the red sea of the great
national conflict.  When you first heard the tinkle of the teaspoons,
as the table was being made ready for its guests, you trembled for
me, in the kindness of your hearts.  I do not wonder that you did,--I
trembled for myself.  But I remembered the story of Sir Cloudesley
Shovel, who was seen all of a tremor just as he was going into
action.  "How is this?" said a brother officer to him.  "Surely you
are not afraid?"  "No," he answered, "but my flesh trembles at the
thought of the dangers into which my intrepid spirit will carry me."
I knew the risk of undertaking to carry through a series of connected
papers.  And yet I thought it was better to run that risk, more
manly, more sensible, than to give way to the fears which made my
flesh tremble as did Sir Cloudesley Shovel's.  For myself the labor
has been a distraction, and one which came at a time when it was
needed.  Sometimes, as in one of those poems recently published,--the
reader will easily guess which,--the youthful spirit has come over me
with such a rush that it made me feel just as I did when I wrote the
history of the "One-hoss Shay" thirty years ago.  To repeat one of my
comparisons, it was as if an early fruit had ripened on a graft upon
an old, steady-going tree, to the astonishment of all its later-
maturing products.  I should hardly dare to say so much as this if I
had not heard a similar opinion expressed by others.

Once committed to my undertaking, there was no turning back.  It is
true that I had said I might stop at any moment, but after one or two
numbers it seemed as if there were an informal pledge to carry the
series on, as in former cases, until I had completed my dozen
instalments.

Writers and speakers have their idiosyncrasies, their habits, their
tricks, if you had rather call them so, as to their ways of writing
and speaking.  There is a very old and familiar story, accompanied by
a feeble jest, which most of my readers may probably enough have met
with in Joe Miller or elsewhere.  It is that of a lawyer who could
never make an argument without having a piece of thread to work upon
with his fingers while he was pleading.  Some one stole it from him
one day, and he could not get on at all with his speech,--he had lost
the thread of his discourse, as the story had it.  Now this is what I
myself once saw.  It was at a meeting where certain grave matters
were debated in an assembly of professional men.  A speaker, whom I
never heard before or since, got up and made a long and forcible
argument.  I do not think he was a lawyer, but he spoke as if he had
been trained to talk to juries.  He held a long string in one hand,
which he drew through the other band incessantly, as he spoke, just
as a shoe maker performs the motion of waxing his thread.  He
appeared to be dependent on this motion.  The physiological
significance of the fact I suppose to be that the flow of what we
call the nervous current from the thinking centre to the organs of
speech was rendered freer and easier by the establishment of a
simultaneous collateral nervous current to the set of muscles
concerned in the action I have described.

I do not use a string to help me write or speak, but I must have its
equivalent.  I must have my paper and pen or pencil before me to set
my thoughts flowing in such form that they can be written
continuously.  There have been lawyers who could think out their
whole argument in connected order without a single note.  There are
authors,--and I think there are many,--who can compose and finish off
a poem or a story without writing a word of it until, when the proper
time comes, they copy what they carry in their heads.  I have been
told that Sir Edwin Arnold thought out his beautiful "Light of Asia"
in this way.

I find the great charm of writing consists in its surprises.  When
one is in the receptive attitude of mind, the thoughts which are
sprung upon him, the images which flash through his--consciousness,
are a delight and an excitement.  I am impatient of every hindrance
in setting down my thoughts,--of a pen that will not write, of ink
that will not flow, of paper that will not receive the ink.  And here
let me pay the tribute which I owe to one of the humblest but most
serviceable of my assistants, especially in poetical composition.
Nothing seems more prosaic than the stylographic pen.  It deprives
the handwriting of its beauty, and to some extent of its individual
character.  The brutal communism of the letters it forms covers the
page it fills with the most uniformly uninteresting characters.  But,
abuse it as much as you choose, there is nothing like it for the
poet, for the imaginative writer.  Many a fine flow of thought has
been checked, perhaps arrested, by the ill behavior of a goose-quill.
Many an idea has escaped while the author was dipping his pen in the
inkstand.  But with the stylographic pen, in the hands of one who
knows how to care for it and how to use it, unbroken rhythms and
harmonious cadences are the natural products of the unimpeded flow of
the fluid which is the vehicle of the author's thoughts and fancies.
So much for my debt of gratitude to the humble stylographic pen.  It
does not furnish the proper medium for the correspondence of
intimates, who wish to see as much of their friends' personality as
their handwriting can hold,--still less for the impassioned
interchange of sentiments between lovers; but in writing for the
press its use is open to no objection.  Its movement over the paper
is like the flight of a swallow, while the quill pen and the steel
pen and the gold pen are all taking short, laborious journeys, and
stopping to drink every few minutes.

A chief pleasure which the author of novels and stories experiences
is that of becoming acquainted with the characters be draws.  It is
perfectly true that his characters must, in the nature of things,
have more or less of himself in their composition.  If I should seek
an exemplification of this in the person of any of my Teacups, I
should find it most readily in the one whom I have called Number
Seven, the one with the squinting brain.  I think that not only I,
the writer, but many of my readers, recognize in our own mental
constitution an occasional obliquity of perception, not always
detected at the time, but plain enough when looked back upon.  What
extravagant fancies you and I have seriously entertained at one time
or another!  What superstitious notions have got into our heads and
taken possession of its empty chambers,--or, in the language of
science, seized on the groups of nerve-cells in some of the idle
cerebral convolutions!


The writer, I say, becomes acquainted with his characters as be goes
on.  They are at first mere embryos, outlines of distinct
personalities.  By and by, if they have any organic cohesion, they
begin to assert themselves.  They can say and do such and such
things; such and such other things they cannot and must not say or
do.  The story-writer's and play-writer's danger is that they will
get their characters mixed, and make A say what B ought to have said.
The stronger his imaginative faculty, the less liable will the writer
be to this fault; but not even Shakespeare's power of throwing
himself into his characters prevents many of his different personages
from talking philosophy in the same strain and in a style common to
them all.

You will often observe that authors fall in love with the imaginary
persons they describe, and that they bestow affectionate epithets
upon them which it may happen the reader does not consider in any way
called for.  This is a pleasure to which they have a right.  Every
author of a story is surrounded by a little family of ideal children,
as dear to him, it may be, as are flesh-and-blood children to their
parents.  You may forget all about the circle of Teacups to which I
have introduced you,--on the supposition that you have followed me
with some degree of interest; but do you suppose that Number Five
does not continue as a presence with me, and that my pretty Delilah
has left me forever because she is going to be married?

No, my dear friend, our circle will break apart, and its different
members will soon be to you as if they had never been.  But do you
think that I can forget them?  Do you suppose that I shall cease to
follow the love (or the loves; which do you think is the true word,
the singular or the plural?) of Number Five and the young Tutor who
is so constantly found in her company?  Do you suppose that I do not
continue my relations with the "Cracked Teacup,"--the poor old fellow
with whom I have so much in common, whose counterpart, perhaps, you
may find in your own complex personality?

I take from the top shelf of the hospital department of my library-
the section devoted to literary cripples, imbeciles, failures,
foolish rhymesters, and silly eccentrics--one of the least
conspicuous and most hopelessly feeble of the weak-minded population
of that intellectual almshouse.  I open it and look through its
pages.  It is a story.  I have looked into it once before,--on its
first reception as a gift from the author.  I try to recall some of
the names I see there: they mean nothing to me, but I venture to say
the author cherishes them all, and cries over them as he did when he
was writing their history.  I put the book back among its dusty
companions, and, sitting down in my reflective rocking-chair, think
how others must forget, and how I shall remember, the company that
gathered about this table.

Shall I ever meet any one of them again, in these pages or in any
other?  Will the cracked Teacup hold together, or will he go to
pieces, and find himself in that retreat where the owner of the
terrible clock which drove him crazy is walking under the shelter of
the high walls?  Has the young Doctor's crown yet received the seal
which is Nature's warrant of wisdom and proof of professional
competency?  And Number Five and her young friend the Tutor,--have
they kept on in their dangerous intimacy?  Did they get through the
tutto tremante passage, reading from the same old large edition of
Dante which the Tutor recommended as the best, and in reading from
which their heads were necessarily brought perilously near to each
other?

It would be very pleasant if I could, consistently with the present
state of affairs, bring these two young people together.  I say two
young people, for the one who counts most years seems to me to be
really the younger of the pair.  That Number Five foresaw from the
first that any tenderer feeling than that of friendship would intrude
itself between them I do not believe.  As for the Tutor, he soon
found where he was drifting.  It was his first experience in matters
concerning the heart, and absorbed his whole nature as a thing of
course.  Did he tell her he loved her?  Perhaps he did, fifty times;
perhaps he never had the courage to say so outright.  But sometimes
they looked each other straight in the eyes, and strange messages
seemed to pass from one consciousness to the other.  Will the Tutor
ask Number Five to be his wife; and if he does, will she yield to the
dictates of nature, and lower the flag of that fortress so long
thought impregnable?  Will be go on writing such poems to her as "The
Rose and the Fern" or "I Like You and I Love You," and be content
with the pursuit of that which he never can attain?  That is all very
well, on the "Grecian Urn" of Keats,--beautiful, but not love such as
mortals demand.  Still, that may be all, for aught that we have yet
seen.


"Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold lover, never, never, canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal,--yet do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

          .........................

"More happy love! more happy, happy love!
Forever warm, and still to be enjoyed,
Forever panting and forever young!"


And so, good-bye, young people, whom we part with here.  Shadows you
have been and are to my readers; very real you have been and are to
me,--as real as the memories of many friends whom I shall see no
more.

As I am not in the habit of indulging in late suppers, the reader
need not think that I shall spread another board and invite him to
listen to the conversations which take place around it.  If, from
time to time, he finds a slight refection awaiting him on the
sideboard, I hope he may welcome it as pleasantly as he has accepted
what I have offered him from the board now just being cleared.



               ..........................



It is a good rule for the actor who manages the popular street drama
of Punch not to let the audience or spectators see his legs.  It is
very hard for the writer of papers like these, which are now coming
to their conclusion, to keep his personality from showing itself too
conspicuously through the thin disguises of his various characters.
As the show is now over, as the curtain has fallen, I appear before
it in my proper person, to address a few words to the friends who
have assisted, as the French say, by their presence, and as we use
the word, by the kind way in which they have received my attempts at
their entertainment.

This series of papers is the fourth of its kind which I have offered
to my readers.  I may be allowed to look back upon the succession of
serial articles which was commenced more than thirty years ago, in
1857.  "The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table" was the first of the
series.  It was begun without the least idea what was to be its
course and its outcome.  Its characters shaped themselves gradually
as the manuscript grew under my hand.  I jotted down on the sheet of
blotting paper before me the thoughts and fancies which came into my
head.  A very odd-looking object was this page of memoranda.  Many of
the hints were worked up into formal shape, many were rejected.
Sometimes I recorded a story, a jest, or a pun for consideration, and
made use of it or let it alone as my second thought decided.  I
remember a curious coincidence, which, if I have ever told in print,
--I am not sure whether I have or not,--I will tell over again.  I
mention it, not for the pun, which I rejected as not very edifying
and perhaps not new, though I did not recollect having seen it.

Mulier, Latin for woman; why apply that name to one of the gentle but
occasionally obstinate sex?  The answer was that a woman is
(sometimes) more mulish than a mule.  Please observe that I did not
like the poor pun very well, and thought it rather rude and
inelegant.  So I left it on the blotter, where it was standing when
one of the next numbers of "Punch" came out and contained that very
same pun, which must have been hit upon by some English contributor
at just about the same time I fell upon it on this side of the
Atlantic.  This fact may be added to the chapter of coincidences
which belongs to the first number of this series of papers.

The "Autocrat" had the attraction of novelty, which of course was
wanting in the succeeding papers of similar character.  The
criticisms upon the successive numbers as they came out were various,
but generally encouraging.  Some were more than encouraging; very
high-colored in their phrases of commendation.  When the papers were
brought together in a volume their success was beyond my
expectations.  Up to the present time the "Autocrat" has maintained
its position.  An immortality of a whole generation is more than most
writers are entitled to expect.  I venture to think, from the letters
I receive from the children and grandchildren of my first set of
readers, that for some little time longer, at least, it will continue
to be read, and even to be a favorite with some of its readers.  Non
omnis moriar is a pleasant thought to one who has loved his poor
little planet, and will, I trust, retain kindly recollections of it
through whatever wilderness of worlds he may be called to wander in
his future pilgrimages.  I say "poor little planet."  Ever since I
had a ten cent look at the transit of Venus, a few years ago, through
the telescope in the Mall, the earth has been wholly different to me
from what it used to be.  I knew from books what a speck it is in the
universe, but nothing ever brought the fact home like the sight of
the sister planet sailing across the sun's disk, about large enough
for a buckshot, not large enough for a full-sized bullet.  Yes, I
love the little globule where I have spent more than fourscore years,
and I like to think that some of my thoughts and some of my emotions
may live themselves over again when I am sleeping.  I cannot thank
all the kind readers of the "Autocrat" who are constantly sending me
their acknowledgments.  If they see this printed page, let them be
assured that a writer is always rendered happier by being told that
he has made a fellow-being wiser or better, or even contributed to
his harmless entertainment.  This a correspondent may take for
granted, even if his letter of grateful recognition receives no
reply.  It becomes more and more difficult for me to keep up with my
correspondents, and I must soon give it up as impossible.

"The Professor at the Breakfast Table" followed immediately on the
heels of the "Autocrat."  The Professor was the alter ego of the
first personage.  In the earlier series he had played a secondary
part, and in this second series no great effort was made to create a
character wholly unlike the first.  The Professor was more outspoken,
however, on religious subjects, and brought down a good deal of hard
language on himself and the author to whom he owed his existence.  I
suppose he may have used some irritating expressions, unconsciously,
but not unconscientiously, I am sure.  There is nothing harder to
forgive than the sting of an epigram.  Some of the old doctors, I
fear, never pardoned me for saying that if a ship, loaded with an
assorted cargo of the drugs which used to be considered the natural
food of sick people, went to the bottom of the sea, it would be "all
the better for mankind and all the worse for the fishes."  If I had
not put that snapper on the end of my whip-lash, I might have got off
without the ill temper which my antithesis provoked.  Thirty years
set that all right, and the same thirty years have so changed the
theological atmosphere that such abusive words as "heretic" and
"infidel," applied to persons who differ from the old standards of
faith, are chiefly interesting as a test of breeding, being seldom
used by any people above the social half-caste line.  I am speaking
of Protestants; how it may be among Roman Catholics I do not know,
but I suspect that with them also it is a good deal a matter of
breeding.  There were not wanting some who liked the Professor better
than the Autocrat.  I confess that I prefer my champagne in its first
burst of gaseous enthusiasm; but if my guest likes it better after it
has stood awhile, I am pleased to accommodate him.  The first of my
series came from my mind almost with an explosion, like the champagne
cork; it startled me a little to see what I had written, and to hear
what people said about it.  After that first explosion the flow was
more sober, and I looked upon the product of my wine-press more
coolly.  Continuations almost always sag a little.  I will not say
that of my own second effort, but if others said it, I should not be
disposed to wonder at or to dispute them.

"The Poet at the Breakfast Table" came some years later.  This series
of papers was not so much a continuation as a resurrection.  It was a
doubly hazardous attempt, made without any extravagant expectations,
and was received as well as I had any right to anticipate.  It
differed from the other two series in containing a poem of
considerable length, published in successive portions.  This poem
holds a good deal of self-communing, and gave me the opportunity of
expressing some thoughts and feelings not to be found elsewhere in my
writings.  I had occasion to read the whole volume, not long since,
in preparation for a new edition, and was rather more pleased with it
than I had expected to be.  An old author is constantly rediscoving
himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier
years.  It is a long time since I have read the "Autocrat," but I
take it up now and then and read in it for a few minutes, not always
without some degree of edification.

These three series of papers, "Autocrat," "Professor,"  "Poet," are
all studies of life from somewhat different points of view.  They are
largely made up of sober reflections, and appeared to me to require
some lively human interest to save them from wearisome didactic
dulness.  What could be more natural than that love should find its
way among the young people who helped to make up the circle gathered
around the table?  Nothing is older than the story of young love.
Nothing is newer than that same old story.  A bit of gilding here and
there has a wonderful effect in enlivening a landscape or an
apartment.  Napoleon consoled the Parisians in their year of defeat
by gilding the dome of the Invalides.  Boston has glorified her State
House and herself at the expense of a few sheets of gold leaf laid on
the dome, which shines like a sun in the eyes of her citizens, and
like a star in those of the approaching traveller.  I think the
gilding of a love-story helped all three of these earlier papers.
The same need I felt in the series of papers just closed.  The slight
incident of Delilah's appearance and disappearance served my purpose
to some extent.  But what should I do with Number Five?  The reader
must follow out her career for himself.  For myself, I think that she
and the Tutor have both utterly forgotten the difference of their
years in the fascination of intimate intercourse.  I do not believe
that a nature so large, so rich in affection, as Number Five's is
going to fall defeated of its best inheritance of life, like a vine
which finds no support for its tendrils to twine around, and so
creeps along the ground from which nature meant that love should lift
it.  I feel as if I ought to follow these two personages of my
sermonizing story until they come together or separate, to fade, to
wither,--perhaps to die, at last, of something like what the doctors
call heart-failure, but which might more truly be called heart-
starvation.  When I say die, I do not mean necessarily the death that
goes into the obituary column.  It may come to that, in one or both;
but I think that, if they are never united, Number Five will outlive
the Tutor, who will fall into melancholy ways, and pine and waste,
while she lives along, feeling all the time that she has cheated
herself of happiness.  I hope that is not going to be their fortune,
or misfortune.  Vieille fille fait jeune mariee.  What a youthful
bride Number Five would be, if she could only make up her mind to
matrimony!  In the mean time she must be left with her lambs all
around her.  May heaven temper the winds to them, for they have been
shorn very close, every one of them, of their golden fleece of
aspirations and anticipations.

I must avail myself of this opportunity to say a few words to my
distant friends who take interest enough in my writings, early or
recent, to wish to enter into communication with me by letter, or to
keep up a communication already begun.  I have given notice in print
that the letters, books, and manuscripts which I receive by mail are
so numerous that if I undertook to read and answer them all I should
have little time for anything else.  I have for some years depended
on the assistance of a secretary, but our joint efforts have proved
unable, of late, to keep down the accumulations which come in with
every mail.  So many of the letters I receive are of a pleasant
character that it is hard to let them go unacknowledged.  The extreme
friendliness which pervades many of them gives them a value which I
rate very highly.  When large numbers of strangers insist on claiming
one as a friend, on the strength of what he has written, it tends to
make him think of himself somewhat indulgently.  It is the most
natural thing in the world to want to give expression to the feeling
the loving messages from far-off unknown friends must excite.  Many a
day has had its best working hours broken into, spoiled for all
literary work, by the labor of answering correspondents whose good
opinion it is gratifying to have called forth, but who were
unconsciously laying a new burden on shoulders already aching.  I
know too well that what I say will not reach the eyes of many who
might possibly take a hint from it.  Still I must keep repeating it
before breaking off suddenly and leaving whole piles of letters
unanswered.  I have been very heavily handicapped for many years.  It
is partly my own fault.  From what my correspondents tell me, I must
infer that I have established a dangerous reputation for willingness
to answer all sorts of letters.  They come with such insinuating
humility,--they cannot bear to intrude upon my time, they know that
I have a great many calls upon it,--and incontinently proceed to lay
their additional weight on the load which is breaking my back.

The hypocrisy of kind-hearted people is one of the most painful
exhibitions of human weakness.  It has occurred to me that it might
be profitable to reproduce some of my unwritten answers to
correspondents.  If those which were actually written and sent were
to be printed in parallel columns with those mentally formed but not
written out responses and comments, the reader would get some idea of
the internal conflicts an honest and not unamiable person has to go
through, when he finds himself driven to the wall by a correspondence
which is draining his vocabulary to find expressions that sound as
agreeably, and signify as little, as the phrases used by a
diplomatist in closing an official communication.

No.  1.  Want my autograph, do you?  And don't know how to spell my
name.  An a for an e in my middle name.  Leave out the l in my last
name.  Do you know how people hate to have their names misspelled?
What do you suppose are the sentiments entertained by the Thompsons
with a p towards those who address them in writing as Thomson?

No.  2.  Think the lines you mention are by far the best I ever
wrote, hey?  Well, I didn't write those lines.  What is more, I think
they are as detestable a string of rhymes as I could wish my worst
enemy had written.  A very pleasant frame of mind I am in for writing
a letter, after reading yours!

No.  3.  I am glad to hear that my namesake, whom I never saw and
never expect to see, has cut another tooth; but why write four pages
on the strength of that domestic occurrence?

No.  4.  You wish to correct an error in my Broomstick poem, do you?
You give me to understand that Wilmington is not in Essex County, but
in Middlesex.  Very well; but are they separated by running water?
Because if they are not, what could hinder a witch from crossing the
line that separates Wilmington from Andover, I should like to know?
I never meant to imply that the witches made no excursions beyond the
district which was more especially their seat of operations.


As I come towards the end of this task which I had set myself, I
wish, of course, that I could have performed it more to my own
satisfaction and that of my readers.  This is a feeling which almost
every one must have at the conclusion of any work he has undertaken.
A common and very simple reason for this disappointment is that most
of us overrate our capacity.  We expect more of ourselves than we
have any right to, in virtue of our endowments.  The figurative
descriptions of the last Grand Assize must no more be taken literally
than the golden crowns, which we do not expect or want to wear on our
heads, or the golden harps, which we do not want or expect to hold in
our hands.  Is it not too true that many religious sectaries think of
the last tribunal complacently, as the scene in which they are to
have the satisfaction of saying to the believers of a creed different
from their own, "I told you so"?  Are not others oppressed with the
thought of the great returns which will be expected of them as the
product of their great gifts, the very limited amount of which they
do not suspect, and will be very glad to learn, even at the expense
of their self-love, when they are called to their account?  If the
ways of the Supreme Being are ever really to be "justified to men,"
to use Milton's expression, every human being may expect an
exhaustive explanation of himself.  No man is capable of being his
own counsel, and I cannot help hoping that the ablest of the,
archangels will be retained for the defence of the worst of sinners.
He himself is unconscious of the agencies which made him what he is.
Self-determining he may be, if you will, but who determines the self
which is the proximate source of the determination?  Why was the A
self like his good uncle in bodily aspect and mental and moral
qualities, and the B self like the bad uncle in look and character?
Has not a man a right to ask this question in the here or in the
hereafter,--in this world or in any world in which he may find
himself?  If the All-wise wishes to satisfy his reasonable and
reasoning creatures, it will not be by a display of elemental
convulsions, but by the still small voice, which treats with him as a
dependent entitled to know the meaning of his existence, and if there
was anything wrong in his adjustment to the moral and spiritual
conditions of the world around him to have full allowance made for
it.  No melodramatic display of warring elements, such as the white-
robed Second Adventist imagines, can meet the need of the human
heart.  The thunders and lightnings of Sinai terrified and impressed
the more timid souls of the idolatrous and rebellious caravan which
the great leader was conducting, but a far nobler manifestation of
divinity was that when "the Lord spake unto Moses face to face, as a
man speaketh unto his friend."


I find the burden and restrictions of rhyme more and more troublesome
as I grow older.  There are times when it seems natural enough to
employ that form of expression, but it is only occasionally; and the
use of it as the vehicle of the commonplace is so prevalent that one
is not much tempted to select it as the medium for his thoughts and
emotions.  The art of rhyming has almost become a part of a high-
school education, and its practice is far from being an evidence of
intellectual distinction.  Mediocrity is as much forbidden to the
poet in our days as it was in those of Horace, and the immense
majority of the verses written are stamped with hopeless mediocrity.

When one of the ancient poets found he was trying to grind out verses
which came unwillingly, he said he was writing

          INVITA MINERVA.

Vex not the Muse with idle prayers,--
She will not hear thy call;
She steals upon thee unawares,
Or seeks thee not at all.

Soft as the moonbeams when they sought
Endymion's fragrant bower,
She parts the whispering leaves of thought
To show her full-blown flower.

For thee her wooing hour has passed,
The singing birds have flown,
And winter comes with icy blast
To chill thy buds unblown.

Yet, though the woods no longer thrill
As once their arches rung,
Sweet echoes hover round thee still
Of songs thy summer sung.

Live in thy past; await no more
The rush of heaven-sent wings;
Earth still has music left in store
While Memory sighs and sings.


I hope my special Minerva may not always be unwilling, but she must
not be called upon as she has been in times past.  Now that the
teacups have left the table, an occasional evening call is all that
my readers must look for.  Thanking them for their kind
companionship, and hoping that I may yet meet them in the now and
then in the future, I bid them goodbye for the immediate present.





End of Project Gutenberg Etext of Over the Teacups, by Oliver W. Holmes






ELSIE VENNER

By Oliver Wendell Holmes




PREFACE.

This tale was published in successive parts in the "Atlantic
Monthly," under the name of "The Professor's Story," the first number
having appeared in the third week of December, 1859.  The critic who
is curious in coincidences must refer to the Magazine for the date of
publication of the chapter he is examining.

In calling this narrative a "romance," the Author wishes to make sure
of being indulged in the common privileges of the poetic license.
Through all the disguise of fiction a grave scientific doctrine may
be detected lying beneath some of the delineations of character.  He
has used this doctrine as a part of the machinery of his story
without pledging his absolute belief in it to the extent to which it
is asserted or implied.  It was adopted as a convenient medium of
truth rather than as an accepted scientific conclusion.  The reader
must judge for himself what is the value of various stories cited
from old authors.  He must decide how much of what has been told he
can accept either as having actually happened, or as possible and
more or less probable.  The Author must be permitted, however, to say
here, in his personal character, and as responsible to the students
of the human mind and body, that since this story has been in
progress he has received the most startling confirmation of the
possibility of the existence of a character like that which he had
drawn as a purely imaginary conception in Elsie Venner.

BOSTON, January, 1861.




A SECOND PREFACE.

This is the story which a dear old lady, my very good friend, spoke
of as "a medicated novel," and quite properly refused to read.  I was
always pleased with her discriminating criticism.  It is a medicated
novel, and if she wished to read for mere amusement and helpful
recreation there was no need of troubling herself with a story
written with a different end in view.

This story has called forth so many curious inquiries that it seems
worth while to answer the more important questions which have
occurred to its readers.

In the first place, it is not based on any well-ascertained
physiological fact.  There are old fables about patients who have
barked like dogs or crowed like cocks, after being bitten or wounded
by those animals.  There is nothing impossible in the idea that
Romulus and Remus may have imbibed wolfish traits of character from
the wet nurse the legend assigned them, but the legend is not sound
history, and the supposition is nothing more than a speculative
fancy.  Still, there is a limbo of curious evidence bearing on the
subject of pre-natal influences sufficient to form the starting-point
of an imaginative composition.

The real aim, of the story was to test the doctrine of "original sin"
and human responsibility for the disordered volition coming under
that technical denomination.  Was Elsie Venner, poisoned by the venom
of a crotalus before she was born, morally responsible for the
"volitional" aberrations, which translated into acts become what is
known as sin, and, it may be, what is punished as crime?  If, on
presentation of the evidence, she becomes by the verdict of the human
conscience a proper object of divine pity and not of divine wrath, as
a subject of moral poisoning, wherein lies the difference between her
position at the bar of judgment, human or divine, and that of the
unfortunate victim who received a moral poison from a remote ancestor
before he drew his first breath?

It might be supposed that the character of Elsie Veneer was suggested
by some of the fabulous personages of classical or mediaeval story.
I remember that a French critic spoke of her as cette pauvre
Melusine.  I ought to have been ashamed, perhaps, but I had, not the
slightest idea who Melusina was until I hunted up the story, and
found that she was a fairy, who for some offence was changed every
Saturday to a serpent from her waist downward.  I was of course
familiar with Keats's Lamia, another imaginary being, the subject of
magical transformation into a serpent.  My story was well advanced
before Hawthorne's wonderful "Marble Faun," which might be thought to
have furnished me with the hint of a mixed nature,--human, with an
alien element,--was published or known to me.  So that my poor
heroine found her origin, not in fable or romance, but in a
physiological conception fertilized by a theological dogma.

I had the dissatisfaction of enjoying from a quiet corner a well-
meant effort to dramatize "Elsie Veneer."  Unfortunately, a
physiological romance, as I knew beforehand, is hardly adapted for
the melodramatic efforts of stage representation.  I can therefore
say, with perfect truth, that I was not disappointed.  It is to the
mind, and not to the senses, that such a story must appeal, and all
attempts to render the character and events objective on the stage,
or to make them real by artistic illustrations, are almost of
necessity failures.  The story has won the attention and enjoyed the
favor of a limited class of readers, and if it still continues to
interest others of the same tastes and habits of thought I can ask
nothing more of it.

January 23, 1883.






PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION.

I have nothing of importance to add to the two preceding Prefaces.
The continued call for this story, which was not written for
popularity, but with a very serious purpose, has somewhat surprised
and, I need not add, gratified me.  I can only restate the motive
idea of the tale in a little different language.  Believing, as I do,
that our prevailing theologies are founded upon an utterly false view
of the relation of man to his Creator, I attempted to illustrate the
doctrine of inherited moral responsibility for other people's
misbehavior.  I tried to make out a case for my poor Elsie, whom the
most hardened theologian would find it hard to blame for her
inherited ophidian tastes and tendencies.  How, then, is he to blame
mankind for inheriting "sinfulness" from their first parents?  May
not the serpent have bitten Eve before the birth of Cain, her first-
born?  That would have made an excuse for Cain's children, as Elsie's
ante-natal misfortune made an excuse for her.  But what difference
does it make in the child's responsibility whether his inherited
tendencies come from a snake-bite or some other source which he knew
nothing about and could not have prevented from acting?  All this is
plain enough, and the only use of the story is to bring the dogma of
inherited guilt and its consequences into a clearer point of view.

But, after all, the tale must have proved readable as a story to
account for the large number of editions which it has reached.

Some readers have been curious about the locality the writer was
thought to have in view.  No particular place was intended.  Some of
the characters may have been thought to have been drawn from life;
but the personages mentioned are mostly composites, like Mr. Galton's
compound photographic likenesses, and are not calculated to provoke
scandal or suits for libel.

O.  W.  H.

BEVERLY FARMS, MASS., August 3, 1891.







ELSIE VENNER.




CHAPTER I.

THE BRAHMIN CASTE OF NEW ENGLAND.

There is nothing in New England corresponding at all to the feudal
aristocracies of the Old World.  Whether it be owing to the stock
from which we were derived, or to the practical working of our
institutions, or to the abrogation of the technical "law of honor,"
which draws a sharp line between the personally responsible class of
"gentlemen" and the unnamed multitude of those who are not expected
to risk their lives for an abstraction,--whatever be the cause, we
have no such aristocracy here as that which grew up out of the
military systems of the Middle Ages.

What we mean by "aristocracy" is merely the richer part of the
community, that live in the tallest houses, drive real carriages,
(not "kerridges,") kidglove their hands, and French-bonnet their
ladies' heads, give parties where the persons who call them by the
above title are not invited, and have a provokingly easy way of
dressing, walking, talking, and nodding to people, as if they felt
entirely at home, and would not be embarrassed in the least, if they
met the Governor, or even the President of the United States, face to
face.  Some of these great folks are really well-bred, some of them
are only purse-proud and assuming,--but they form a class, and are
named as above in the common speech.

It is in the nature of large fortunes to diminish rapidly, when
subdivided and distributed.  A million is the unit of wealth, now and
here in America.  It splits into four handsome properties; each of
these into four good inheritances; these, again, into scanty
competences for four ancient maidens,--with whom it is best the
family should die out, unless it can begin again as its great-
grandfather did.  Now a million is a kind of golden cheese, which
represents in a compendious form the summer's growth of a fat meadow
of craft or commerce; and as this kind of meadow rarely bears more
than one crop, it is pretty certain that sons and grandsons will not
get another golden cheese out of it, whether they milk the same cows
or turn in new ones.  In other words, the millionocracy, considered
in a large way, is not at all an affair of persons and families, but
a perpetual fact of money with a variable human element, which a
philosopher might leave out of consideration without falling into
serious error.  Of course, this trivial and, fugitive fact of
personal wealth does not create a permanent class, unless some
special means are taken to arrest the process of disintegration in
the third generation.  This is so rarely done, at least successfully,
that one need not live a very long life to see most of the rich
families he knew in childhood more or less reduced, and the millions
shifted into the hands of the country-boys who were sweeping stores
and carrying parcels when the now decayed gentry were driving their
chariots, eating their venison over silver chafing-dishes, drinking
Madeira chilled in embossed coolers, wearing their hair in powder,
and casing their legs in long boots with silken tassels.

There is, however, in New England, an aristocracy, if you choose to
call it so, which has a far greater character of permanence.  It has
grown to be a caste,--not in any odious sense;--but, by the
repetition of the same influences, generation after generation, it
has acquired a distinct organization and physiognomy, which not to
recognize is mere stupidity, and not to be willing to describe would
show a distrust of the good-nature and intelligence of our readers,
who like to have us see all we can and tell all we see.

If you will look carefully at any class of students in one of our
colleges, you will have no difficulty in selecting specimens of two
different aspects of youthful manhood.  Of course I shall choose
extreme cases to illustrate the contrast between them.  In the first,
the figure is perhaps robust, but often otherwise,--inelegant, partly
from careless attitudes, partly from ill-dressing,--the face is
uncouth in feature, or at least common,--the mouth coarse and
unformed,--the eye unsympathetic, even if bright,--the movements of
the face are clumsy, like those of the limbs,--the voice is
unmusical,--and the enunciation as if the words were coarse castings,
instead of fine carvings.  The youth of the other aspect is commonly
slender, his face is smooth, and apt to be pallid,--his features are
regular and of a certain delicacy,--his eye is bright and quick,--his
lips play over the thought he utters as a pianist's fingers dance
over their music, and his whole air, though it may be timid, and even
awkward, has nothing clownish.  If you are a teacher, you know what
to expect from each of these young men.  With equal willingness, the
first will be slow at learning; the second will take to his books as
a pointer or a setter to his field-work.

The first youth is the common country-boy, whose race has been bred
to bodily labor.  Nature has adapted the family organization to the
kind of life it has lived.  The hands and feet by constant use have
got more than their share of development,--the organs of thought and
expression less than their share.  The finer instincts are latent and
must be developed.  A youth of this kind is raw material in its first
stage of elaboration.  You must not expect too much of any such.
Many of them have force of will and character, and become
distinguished in practical life; but very few of them ever become
great scholars.  A scholar is, in a large proportion of cases, the
son of scholars or scholarly persons.

That is exactly what the other young man is.  He comes of the Brahmin
caste of New England.  This is the harmless, inoffensive, untitled
aristocracy referred to, and which many readers will at once
acknowledge.  There are races of scholars among us, in which aptitude
for learning, and all these marks of it I have spoken of, are
congenital and hereditary.  Their names are always on some college
catalogue or other.  They break out every generation or two in some
learned labor which calls them up after they seem to have died out.
At last some newer name takes their place, it maybe,--but you inquire
a little and you find it is the blood of the Edwardses or the
Chauncys or the Ellerys or some of the old historic scholars,
disguised under the altered name of a female descendant.

There probably is not an experienced instructor anywhere in our
Northern States who will not recognize at once the truth of this
general distinction.  But the reader who has never been a teacher
will very probably object, that some of our most illustrious public
men have come direct from the homespun-clad class of the people,--and
he may, perhaps, even find a noted scholar or two whose parents were
masters of the English alphabet, but of no other.

It is not fair to pit a few chosen families against the great
multitude of those who are continually working their way up into the
intellectual classes.  The results which are habitually reached by
hereditary training are occasionally brought about without it.  There
are natural filters as well as artificial ones; and though the great
rivers are commonly more or less turbid, if you will look long
enough, you may find a spring that sparkles as no water does which
drips through your apparatus of sands and sponges.  So there are
families which refine themselves into intellectual aptitude without
having had much opportunity for intellectual acquirements.  A series
of felicitous crosses develops an improved strain of blood, and
reaches its maximum perfection at last in the large uncombed youth
who goes to college and startles the hereditary class-leaders by
striding past them all.  That is Nature's republicanism; thank God
for it, but do not let it make you illogical.  The race of the
hereditary scholar has exchanged a certain portion of its animal
vigor for its new instincts, and it is hard to lead men without a
good deal of animal vigor.  The scholar who comes by Nature's special
grace from an unworn stock of broad-chested sires and deep-bosomed
mothers must always overmatch an equal intelligence with a
compromised and lowered vitality.  A man's breathing and digestive
apparatus (one is tempted to add muscular) are just as important to
him on the floor of the Senate as his thinking organs.  You broke
down in your great speech, did you?  Yes, your grandfather had an
attack of dyspepsia in '82, after working too hard on his famous
Election Sermon.  All this does not touch the main fact: our scholars
come chiefly from a privileged order, just as our best fruits come
from well-known grafts, though now and then a seedling apple, like
the Northern Spy, or a seedling pear, like the Seckel, springs from a
nameless ancestry and grows to be the pride of all the gardens in the
land.

Let me introduce you to a young man who belongs to the Brahmin caste
of New England.




CHAPTER II.

THE STUDENT AND HIS CERTIFICATE.

Bernard C. Langdon, a young man attending Medical Lectures at the
school connected with one of our principal colleges, remained after
the Lecture one day and wished to speak with the Professor.  He was a
student of mark,--first favorite of his year, as they say of the
Derby colts.  There are in every class half a dozen bright faces to
which the teacher naturally, directs his discourse, and by the
intermediation of whose attention he seems to hold that of the mass
of listeners.  Among these some one is pretty sure to take the lead,
by virtue of a personal magnetism, or some peculiarity of expression,
which places the face in quick sympathetic relations with the
lecturer.  This was a young man with such a face; and I found,--for
you have guessed that I was the "Professor" above-mentioned,--that,
when there was anything difficult to be explained, or when I was
bringing out some favorite illustration of a nice point, (as, for
instance; when I compared the cell-growth, by which Nature builds up
a plant or an animal, to the glassblower's similar mode of
beginning,--always with a hollow sphere, or vesicle, whatever he is
going to make,) I naturally looked in his face and gauged my success
by its expression.

It was a handsome face,--a little too pale, perhaps, and would have
borne something more of fulness without becoming heavy.  I put the
organization to which it belongs in Section B of Class 1 of my Anglo-
American Anthropology (unpublished).  The jaw in this section is but
slightly narrowed,--just enough to make the width of the forehead
tell more decidedly.  The moustache often grows vigorously, but the
whiskers are thin.  The skin is like that of Jacob, rather than like
Esau's.  One string of the animal nature has been taken away, but
this gives only a greater predominance to the intellectual chords.
To see just how the vital energy has been toned down, you must
contrast one of this section with a specimen of Section A of the same
class,--say, for instance, one of the old-fashioned, full-whiskered,
red-faced, roaring, big Commodores of the last generation, whom you
remember, at least by their portraits, in ruffled shirts, looking as
hearty as butchers and as plucky as bull-terriers, with their hair
combed straight up from their foreheads, which were not commonly very
high or broad.  The special form of physical life I have been
describing gives you a right to expect more delicate perceptions and
a more reflective, nature than you commonly find in shaggy-throated
men, clad in heavy suits of muscles.

The student lingered in the lecture-room, looking all the time as if
he wanted to say something in private, and waiting for two or three
others, who were still hanging about, to be gone.

Something is wrong!---I said to myself, when I noticed his
expression.--Well, Mr.  Langdon,--I said to him, when we were
alone,--can I do anything for you to-day?

You can, Sir,--he said.---I am going to leave the class, for the
present, and keep school.

Why, that 's a pity, and you so near graduating!  You'd better stay
and finish this course and take your degree in the spring, rather
than break up your whole plan of study.

I can't help myself, Sir,--the young man answered.---There 's trouble
at home, and they cannot keep me here as they have done.  So I must
look out for myself for a while.  It's what I've done before, and am
ready to do again.  I came to ask you for a certificate of my fitness
to teach a common school, or a high school, if you think I am up to
that.  Are you willing to give it to me?

Willing?  Yes, to be sure,--but I don't want you to go.  Stay; we'll
make it easy for you.  There's a fund will do something for you,
perhaps.  Then you can take both the annual prizes, if you like,--and
claim them in money, if you want that more than medals.

I have thought it all over,--he answered,--and have pretty much made
up my mind to go.

A perfectly gentlemanly young man, of courteous address and mild
utterance, but means at least as much as he says.  There are some
people whose rhetoric consists of a slight habitual under-statement.
I often tell Mrs. Professor that one of her "I think it's sos" is
worth the Bible-oath of all the rest of the household that they "know
it's so."  When you find a person a little better than his word, a
little more liberal than his promise, a little more than borne out in
his statement by his facts, a little larger in deed than in speech,
you recognize a kind of eloquence in that person's utterance not laid
down in Blair or Campbell.

This was a proud fellow, self-trusting, sensitive, with family-
recollections that made him unwilling to accept the kind of aid which
many students would have thankfully welcomed.  I knew him too well to
urge him, after the few words which implied that he was determined to
go.  Besides, I have great confidence in young men who believe in
themselves, and are accustomed to rely on their own resources from an
early period.  When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great
bully, the World, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often
surprised to find it come off in his hand, and that it was only tied
on to scare away timid adventurers.  I have seen young men more than
once, who came to a great city without a single friend, support
themselves and pay for their education, lay up money in a few years,
grow rich enough to travel, and establish themselves in life, without
ever asking a dollar of any person which they had not earned.  But
these are exceptional cases.  There are horse-tamers, born so,--as we
all know; there are woman-tamers, who bewitch the sex as the pied
piper bedeviled the children of Hamelin; and there are world-tamers,
who can make any community, even a Yankee one, get down and let them
jump on its back as easily as Mr. Rarey saddled Cruiser.

Whether Langdon was of this sort or not I could not say positively;
but he had spirit, and, as I have said, a family-pride which would
not let him be dependent.  The New England Brahmin caste often gets
blended with connections of political influence or commercial
distinction.  It is a charming thing for the scholar, when his
fortune carries him in this way into some of the "old families" who
have fine old houses, and city-lots that have risen in the market,
and names written in all the stock-books of all the dividend-paying
companies.  His narrow study expands into a stately library, his
books are counted by thousands instead of hundreds, and his favorites
are dressed in gilded calf in place of plebeian sheepskin or its
pauper substitutes of cloth and paper.

The Reverend Jedediah Langdon, grandfather of our young gentleman,
had made an advantageous alliance of this kind.  Miss Dorothea
Wentworth had read one of his sermons which had been printed "by
request," and became deeply interested in the young author, whom she
had never seen.  Out of this circumstance grew a correspondence, an
interview, a declaration, a matrimonial alliance, and a family of
half a dozen children.  Wentworth Langdon, Esquire, was the oldest of
these, and lived in the old family-mansion.  Unfortunately, that
principle of the diminution of estates by division, to which I have
referred, rendered it somewhat difficult to maintain the
establishment upon the fractional income which the proprietor
received from his share of the property.  Wentworth Langdon, Esq.,
represented a certain intermediate condition of life not at all
infrequent in our old families.  He was the connecting link between
the generation which lived in ease, and even a kind of state, upon
its own resources, and the new brood, which must live mainly by its
wits or industry, and make itself rich, or shabbily subside into that
lower stratum known to social geologists by a deposit of
Kidderminster carpets and the peculiar aspect of the fossils
constituting the family furniture and wardrobe.  This slack-water
period of a race, which comes before the rapid ebb of its prosperity,
is familiar to all who live in cities.  There are no more quiet,
inoffensive people than these children of rich families, just above
the necessity of active employment, yet not in a condition to place
their own children advantageously, if they happen to have families.
Many of them are content to live unmarried.  Some mend their broken
fortunes by prudent alliances, and some leave a numerous progeny to
pass into the obscurity from which their ancestors emerged; so that
you may see on handcarts and cobblers' stalls names which, a few
generations back, were upon parchments with broad seals, and
tombstones with armorial bearings.

In a large city, this class of citizens is familiar to us in the
streets.  They are very courteous in their salutations; they have
time enough to bow and take their hats off,--which, of course, no
businessman can afford to do.  Their beavers are smoothly brushed,
and their boots well polished; all their appointments are tidy; they
look the respectable walking gentleman to perfection.  They are prone
to habits,--they frequent reading-rooms,--insurance-offices,--they
walk the same streets at the same hours,--so that one becomes
familiar with their faces and persons, as a part of the street-
furniture.

There is one curious circumstance, that all city-people must have
noticed, which is often illustrated in our experience of the slack-
water gentry.  We shall know a certain person by his looks,
familiarly, for years, but never have learned his name.  About this
person we shall have accumulated no little circumstantial knowledge;
--thus, his face, figure, gait, his mode of dressing, of saluting,
perhaps even of speaking, may be familiar to us; yet who he is we
know not.  In another department of our consciousness, there is a
very familiar name, which we have never found the person to match.
We have heard it so often, that it has idealized itself, and become
one of that multitude of permanent shapes which walk the chambers of
the brain in velvet slippers in the company of Falstaff and Hamlet
and General Washington and Mr. Pickwick.  Sometimes the person dies,
but the name lives on indefinitely.  But now and then it happens,
perhaps after years of this independent existence of the name and its
shadowy image in the brain, on the one part, and the person and all
its real attributes, as we see them daily, on the other, that some
accident reveals their relation, and we find the name we have carried
so long in our memory belongs to the person we have known so long as
a fellow-citizen.  Now the slack--water gentry are among the persons
most likely to be the subjects of this curious divorce of title and
reality,--for the reason, that, playing no important part in the
community, there is nothing to tie the floating name to the actual
individual, as is the case with the men who belong in any way to the
public, while yet their names have a certain historical currency, and
we cannot help meeting them, either in their haunts, or going to and
from them.

To this class belonged Wentworth Langdon, Esq.  He had been "dead-
headed" into the world some fifty years ago, and had sat with his
hands in his pockets staring at the show ever since.  I shall not
tell you, for reasons before hinted, the whole name of the place in
which he lived.  I will only point you in the right direction, by
saying that there are three towns lying in a line with each other, as
you go "down East," each of them with a Port in its name, and each of
them having a peculiar interest which gives it individuality, in
addition to the Oriental character they have in common.  I need not
tell you that these towns are Newburyport, Portsmouth, and Portland.
The Oriental character they have in common consists in their large,
square, palatial mansions, with sunny gardens round them.  The two
first have seen better days.  They are in perfect harmony with the
condition of weakened, but not impoverished, gentility.  Each of them
is a "paradise of demi-fortunes."  Each of them is of that
intermediate size between a village and a city which any place has
outgrown when the presence of a well-dressed stranger walking up and
down the main street ceases to be a matter of public curiosity and
private speculation, as frequently happens, during the busier months
of the year, in considerable commercial centres like Salem.  They
both have grand old recollections to fall back upon,--times when they
looked forward to commercial greatness, and when the portly gentlemen
in cocked hats, who built their now decaying wharves and sent out
their ships all over the world, dreamed that their fast-growing port
was to be the Tyre or the Carthage of the rich British Colony.  Great
houses, like that once lived in by Lord Timothy Dexter, in
Newburyport, remain as evidence of the fortunes amassed in these
places of old.  Other mansions--like the Rockingham House in
Portsmouth (look at the white horse's tail before you mount the broad
staircase)--show that there was not only wealth, but style and state,
in these quiet old towns during the last century.  It is not with any
thought of pity or depreciation that we speak of them as in a certain
sense decayed towns; they did not fulfil their early promise of
expansion, but they remain incomparably the most interesting places
of their size in any of the three northernmost New England States.
They have even now prosperity enough to keep them in good condition,
and offer the most attractive residences for quiet families, which,
if they had been English, would have lived in a palazzo at Genoa or
Pisa, or some other Continental Newburyport or Portsmouth.

As for the last of the three Ports, or Portland, it is getting too
prosperous to be as attractive as its less northerly neighbors.
Meant for a fine old town, to ripen like a Cheshire cheese within its
walls of ancient rind, burrowed by crooked alleys and mottled with
venerable mould, it seems likely to sacrifice its mellow future to a
vulgar material prosperity.  Still it remains invested with many of
its old charms, as yet, and will forfeit its place among this
admirable trio only when it gets a hotel with unequivocal marks of
having been built and organized in the present century.

--It was one of the old square palaces of the North, in which Bernard
Langdon, the son of Wentworth, was born.  If he had had the luck to
be an only child, he might have lived as his father had done, letting
his meagre competence smoulder on almost without consuming, like the
fuel in an air-tight stove.  But after Master Bernard came Miss
Dorothea Elizabeth Wentworth Langdon, and then Master William
Pepperell Langdon, and others, equally well named,--a string of them,
looking, when they stood in a row in prayer-time, as if they would
fit a set of Pandean pipes, of from three feet upward in dimensions.
The door of the air-tight stove has to be opened, under such
circumstances, you may well suppose!  So it happened that our young
man had been obliged, from an early period, to do something to
support himself, and found himself stopped short in his studies by
the inability of the good people at home to furnish him the present
means of support as a student.

You will understand now why the young man wanted me to give him a
certificate of his fitness to teach, and why I did not choose to urge
him to accept the aid which a meek country-boy from a family without
ante-Revolutionary recollections would have thankfully received.  Go
he must,--that was plain enough.  He would not be content otherwise.
He was not, however, to give up his studies; and as it is customary
to allow half-time to students engaged in school-keeping,--that is,
to count a year, so employed, if the student also keep on with his
professional studies, as equal to six months of the three years he is
expected to be under an instructor before applying for his degree,--
he would not necessarily lose more than a few months of time.  He had
a small library of professional books, which he could take with him.

So he left my teaching and that of my estimable colleagues, carrying
with him my certificate, that Mr. Bernard C. Langdon was a young
gentleman of excellent moral character, of high intelligence and good
education, and that his services would be of great value in any
school, academy, or other institution, where young persons of-either
sex were to be instructed.

I confess, that expression, "either sex," ran a little thick, as I
may say, from my pen.  For, although the young man bore a very fair
character, and there was no special cause for doubting his
discretion, I considered him altogether too good-looking, in the
first place, to be let loose in a roomful of young girls.  I didn't
want him to fall in love just then--and if half a dozen girls fell in
love with him, as they most assuredly would, if brought into too near
relations with him, why, there was no telling what gratitude and
natural sensibility might bring about.

Certificates are, for the most part, like ostrich-eggs; the giver
never knows what is hatched out of them.  But once in a thousand
times they act as curses are said to,--come home to roost.  Give them
often enough, until it gets to be a mechanical business, and, some
day or other, you will get caught warranting somebody's ice not to
melt in any climate, or somebody's razors to be safe in the hands of
the youngest children.

I had an uneasy feeling, after giving this certificate.  It might be
all right enough; but if it happened to end badly, I should always
reproach myself.  There was a chance, certainly, that it would lead
him or others into danger or wretchedness.  Any one who looked at
this young man could not fail to see that he was capable of
fascinating and being fascinated.  Those large, dark eyes of his
would sink into the white soul of a young girl as the black cloth
sunk into the snow in Franklin's famous experiment.  Or, on the other
hand, if the rays of a passionate nature should ever be concentrated
on them, they would be absorbed into the very depths of his nature,
and then his blood would turn to flame and burn his life out of him,
until his cheeks grew as white as the ashes that cover a burning
coal.

I wish I had not said either sex in my certificate.  An academy for
young gentlemen, now; that sounds cool and unimaginative.  A boys'
school, that would be a very good place for him;--some of them are
pretty rough, but there is nerve enough in that old Wentworth strain
of blood; he can give any country fellow, of the common stock, twenty
pounds, and hit him out of time in ten minutes.  But to send such a
young fellow as that out a girl's-nesting! to give this falcon a free
pass into all the dove-cotes!  I was a fool,--that's all.

I brooded over the mischief which might come out of these two words
until it seemed to me that they were charged with destiny.  I could
hardly sleep for thinking what a train I might have been laying,
which might take a spark any day, and blow up nobody knows whose
peace or prospects.  What I dreaded most was one of those miserable
matrimonial misalliances where a young fellow who does not know
himself as yet flings his magnificent future into the checked apron-
lap of some fresh-faced, half-bred country-girl, no more fit to be
mated with him than her father's horse to go in double harness with
Flora Temple.  To think of the eagle's wings, being clipped so that
he shall never lift himself over the farm-yard fence!  Such things
happen, and always must,--because, as one of us said awhile ago, a
man always loves, a woman, and a woman a man, unless some good reason
exists to the contrary.  You think yourself a very fastidious young
man, my friend; but there are probably at least five-thousand young
women in these United States, any one of whom you would certainly
marry, if you were thrown much into her company, and nobody more
attractive were near, and she had no objection.  And you, my dear
young lady, justly pride yourself on your discerning delicacy; but if
I should say that there are twenty thousand young men, any one of
whom, if he offered his hand and heart under favorable circumstances,
you would

          "First endure, then pity, then embrace,"

I should be much more imprudent than I mean to be, and you would, no
doubt, throw down a story in which I hope to interest you.

I had settled it in my mind that this young fellow had a career
marked out for him.  He should begin in the natural way, by taking
care of poor patients in one of the public charities, and work his
way up to a better kind of practice,--better, that is, in the vulgar,
worldly sense.  The great and good Boerhaave used to say, as I
remember very well, that the poor were his best patients; for God was
their paymaster.  But everybody is not as patient as Boerhaave, nor
as deserving; so that the rich, though not, perhaps, the best
patients, are good enough for common practitioners.  I suppose
Boerhaave put up with them when he could not get poor ones, as he
left his daughter two millions of florins when he died.

Now if this young man once got into the wide streets, he would sweep
them clear of his rivals of the same standing; and as I was getting
indifferent to business, and old Dr. Kilham was growing careless, and
had once or twice prescribed morphine when he meant quinine, there
would soon be an opening into the Doctor's Paradise,--the streets
with only one side to them.  Then I would have him strike a bold
stroke,--set up a nice little coach, and be driven round like a
first-class London doctor, instead of coasting about in a shabby one-
horse concern and casting anchor opposite his patients' doors like a
Cape Ann fishing-smack.  By the time he was thirty, he would have
knocked the social pawns out of his way, and be ready to challenge a
wife from the row of great pieces in the background.  I would not
have a man marry above his level, so as to become the appendage of a
powerful family-connection; but I would not have him marry until he
knew his level,--that is, again, looking at the matter in a purely
worldly point of view, and not taking the sentiments at all into
consideration.  But remember, that a young man, using large
endowments wisely and fortunately, may put himself on a level with
the highest in the land in ten brilliant years of spirited,
unflagging labor.  And to stand at the very top of your calling in a
great city is something in itself,--that is, if you like money, and
influence, and a seat on the platform at public lectures, and
gratuitous tickets to all sorts of places where you don't want to go,
and, what is a good deal better than any of these things, a sense of
power, limited, it may be, but absolute in its range, so that all the
Caesars and Napoleons would have to stand aside, if they came between
you and the exercise of your special vocation.

That is what I thought this young fellow might have come to; and now
I have let him go off into the country with my certificate, that he
is fit to teach in a school for either sex!  Ten to one he will run
like a moth into a candle, right into one of those girls'-nests, and
get tangled up in some sentimental folly or other, and there will be
the end of him.  Oh, yes!  country doctor,--half a dollar a visit,--
drive, drive, drive all day,--get up at night and harness your own
horse,--drive again ten miles in a snow-storm, shake powders out of
two phials, (pulv.  glycyrrhiz., pulv.  gum.  acac.  as partes
equates,)--drive back again, if you don't happen to get stuck in a
drift, no home, no peace, no continuous meals, no unbroken sleep, no
Sunday, no holiday, no social intercourse, but one eternal jog, jog,
jog, in a sulky, until you feel like the mummy of an Indian who had
been buried in the sitting posture, and was dug up a hundred years
afterwards!  Why did n't I warn him about love and all that nonsense?
Why didn't I tell him he had nothing to do with it, yet awhile?  Why
did n't I hold up to him those awful examples I could have cited,
where poor young fellows who could just keep themselves afloat have
hung a matrimonial millstone round their necks, taking it for a life-
preserver?  All this of two words in a certificate!




CHAPTER III.

MR. BERNARD TRIES HIS HAND.

Whether the Student advertised for a school, or whether he fell in
with the advertisement of a school-committee, is not certain.  At any
rate, it was not long before he found himself the head of a large
district, or, as it was called by the inhabitants, "deestric"
school, in the flourishing inland village of Pequawkett, or, as it is
commonly spelt, Pigwacket Centre.  The natives of this place would be
surprised, if they should hear that any of the readers of a work
published in Boston were unacquainted with so remarkable a locality.
As, however, some copies of it may be read at a distance from this
distinguished metropolis, it may be well to give a few particulars
respecting the place, taken from the Universal Gazetteer.

"PIGWACKET, sometimes spelt Pequawkett.  A post-village and township
in _________ Co., State of _________,situated in a fine agricultural
region, 2 thriving villages, Pigwacket Centre and Smithville, 3
churches, several school houses, and many handsome private
residences.  Mink River runs through the town, navigable for small
boats after heavy rains.  Muddy Pond at N. E.  section, well stocked
with horn pouts, eels, and shiners.  Products, beef, pork, butter,
cheese.  Manufactures, shoe-pegs, clothes-pins, and tin-ware.  Pop.
1373."

The reader may think there is nothing very remarkable implied in this
description.  If, however he had read the town-history, by the Rev.
Jabez Grubb, he would have learned, that, like the celebrated Little
Pedlington, it was distinguished by many very remarkable advantages.
Thus:

"The situation of Pigwacket is eminently beautiful, looking down the
lovely valley of Mink River, a tributary of the Musquash.  The air is
salubrious, and many of the inhabitants have attained great age,
several having passed the allotted period of 'three-score years and
ten' before succumbing to any of the various 'ills that flesh is heir
to.' Widow Comfort Leevins died in 1836 AEt.  LXXXVII.  years.
Venus, an African, died in 1841, supposed to be C. years old.  The
people are distinguished for intelligence, as has been frequently
remarked by eminent lyceum-lecturers, who have invariably spoken in
the highest terms of a Pigwacket audience.  There is a public
library, containing nearly a hundred volumes, free to all
subscribers.  The preached word is well attended, there is a
flourishing temperance society, and the schools are excellent.  It is
a residence admirably adapted to refined families who relish the
beauties of Nature and the charms of society.  The Honorable John
Smith, formerly a member of the State Senate, was a native of this
town."

That is the way they all talk.  After all, it is probably pretty much
like other inland New England towns in point of "salubrity,"--that
is, gives people their choice of dysentery or fever every autumn,
with a season-ticket for consumption, good all the year round.  And
so of the other pretences.  "Pigwacket audience," forsooth!  Was
there ever an audience anywhere, though there wasn't a pair of eyes
in it brighter than pickled oysters, that did n't think it was
"distinguished for intelligence"?--"The preached word"!  That means
the Rev. Jabez Grubb's sermons.  "Temperance society"!  "Excellent
schools"!  Ah, that is just what we were talking about.

The truth was, that District No. 1, Pigwacket Centre, had had a good
deal of trouble of late with its schoolmasters.  The committee had
done their best, but there were a number of well-grown and pretty
rough young fellows who had got the upper-hand of the masters, and
meant to keep it.  Two dynasties had fallen before the uprising of
this fierce democracy.  This was a thing that used to be not very
uncommon; but in so "intelligent" a community as that of Pigwacket
Centre, in an era of public libraries and lyceum-lectures, it was
portentous and alarming.

The rebellion began under the ferule of Master Weeks, a slender youth
from a country college, underfed, thin-blooded, sloping-shouldered,
knock-kneed, straight-haired, weak-bearded, pale-eyed, wide-pupilled,
half-colored; a common type enough in in-door races, not rich enough
to pick and choose in their alliances.  Nature kills off a good many
of this sort in the first teething-time, a few in later childhood, a
good many again in early adolescence; but every now and then one runs
the gauntlet of her various diseases, or rather forms of one disease,
and grows up, as Master Weeks had done.

It was a very foolish thing for him to try to inflict personal
punishment on such a lusty young fellow as Abner Briggs, Junior, one
of the "hardest customers" in the way of a rough-and-tumble fight
that there were anywhere round.  No doubt he had been insolent, but
it would have been better to overlook it.  It pains me to report the
events which took place when the master made his rash attempt to
maintain his authority.  Abner Briggs, Junior, was a great, hulking
fellow, who had been bred to butchering, but urged by his parents to
attend school, in order to learn the elegant accomplishments of
reading and writing, in which he was sadly deficient.  He was in the
habit of talking and laughing pretty loud in school-hours, of
throwing wads of paper reduced to a pulp by a natural and easy
process, of occasional insolence and general negligence.  One of the
soft, but unpleasant missiles just alluded to flew by the master's
head one morning, and flattened itself against the wall, where it
adhered in the form of a convex mass in alto rilievo.  The master
looked round and saw the young butcher's arm in an attitude which
pointed to it unequivocally as the source from which the projectile
had taken its flight.

Master Weeks turned pale.  He must "lick" Abner Briggs, Junior, or
abdicate.  So he determined to lick Abner Briggs, Junior.

"Come here, Sir!" he said; "you have insulted me and outraged the
decency of the schoolroom often enough!  Hold out your hand!"

The young fellow grinned and held it out.  The master struck at it
with his black ruler, with a will in the blow and a snapping of the
eyes, as much as to say that he meant to make him smart this time.
The young fellow pulled his hand back as the ruler came down, and the
master hit himself a vicious blow with it on the right knee.  There
are things no man can stand.  The master caught the refractory youth
by the collar and began shaking him, or rather shaking himself
against him.

"Le' go o' that are coat, naow," said the fellow, "or I 'll make ye!
'T 'll take tew on yet' handle me, I tell ye, 'n' then ye caant dew
it!"--and the young pupil returned the master's attention by catching
hold of his collar.

When it comes to that, the best man, not exactly in the moral sense,
but rather in the material, and more especially the muscular point of
view, is very apt to have the best of it, irrespectively of the
merits of the case.  So it happened now.  The unfortunate
schoolmaster found himself taking the measure of the sanded floor,
amidst the general uproar of the school.  From that moment his ferule
was broken, and the school-committee very soon had a vacancy to fill.

Master Pigeon, the successor of Master Weeks, was of better stature,
but loosely put together, and slender-limbed.  A dreadfully nervous
kind of man he was, walked on tiptoe, started at sudden noises, was
distressed when he heard a whisper, had a quick, suspicious look, and
was always saying, "Hush?" and putting his hands to his ears.  The
boys were not long in finding out this nervous weakness, of course.
In less than a week a regular system of torments was inaugurated,
full of the most diabolical malice and ingenuity.  The exercises of
the conspirators varied from day to day, but consisted mainly of
foot-scraping, solos on the slate-pencil, (making it screech on the
slate,) falling of heavy books, attacks of coughing, banging of desk-
lids, boot-creaking, with sounds as of drawing a cork from time to
time, followed by suppressed chuckles.

Master Pigeon grew worse and worse under these inflictions.  The
rascally boys always had an excuse for any one trick they were caught
at.  "Could n' help coughin', Sir."  "Slipped out o' m' han', Sir."
"Did n' go to, Sir."  "Did n' dew't o' purpose, Sir."  And so on,--
always the best of reasons for the most outrageous of behavior.  The
master weighed himself at the grocer's on a platform balance, some
ten days after he began keeping the school.  At the end of a week he
weighed himself again.  He had lost two pounds.  At the end of
another week he had lost five.  He made a little calculation, based
on these data, from which he learned that in a certain number of
months, going on at this rate, he should come to weigh precisely
nothing at all; and as this was a sum in subtraction he did not care
to work out in practice, Master Pigeon took to himself wings and left
the school-committee in possession of a letter of resignation and a
vacant place to fill once more.

This was the school to which Mr. Bernard Langdon found himself
appointed as master.  He accepted the place conditionally, with the
understanding that he should leave it at the end of a month, if he
were tired of it.

The advent of Master Langdon to Pigwacket Centre created a much more
lively sensation than had attended that of either of his
predecessors.  Looks go a good way all the world over, and though
there were several good-looking people in the place, and Major Bush
was what the natives of the town called a "hahnsome mahn," that is,
big, fat, and red, yet the sight of a really elegant young fellow,
with the natural air which grows up with carefully-bred young
persons, was a novelty.  The Brahmin blood which came from his
grandfather as well as from his mother, a direct descendant of the
old Flynt family, well known by the famous tutor, Henry Flynt, (see
Cat.  Harv.  Anno 1693,) had been enlivened and enriched by that of
the Wentworths, which had had a good deal of ripe old Madeira and
other generous elements mingled with it, so that it ran to gout
sometimes in the old folks and to high spirit, warm complexion, and
curly hair in some of the younger ones.  The soft curling hair Mr.
Bernard had inherited,--something, perhaps, of the high spirit; but
that we shall have a chance of finding out by and by.  But the long
sermons and the frugal board of his Brahmin ancestry, with his own
habits of study, had told upon his color, which was subdued to
something more of delicacy than one would care to see in a young
fellow with rough work before him.  This, however, made him look more
interesting, or, as the young ladies at Major Bush's said,
"interestin'."

When Mr. Bernard showed himself at meeting, on the first Sunday after
his arrival, it may be supposed that a good many eyes were turned
upon the young schoolmaster.  There was something heroic in his
coming forward so readily to take a place which called for a strong
hand, and a prompt, steady will to guide it.  In fact, his position
was that of a military chieftain on the eve of a battle.  Everybody
knew everything in Pigwacket Centre; and it was an understood thing
that the young rebels meant to put down the new master, if they
could.  It was natural that the two prettiest girls in the village,
called in the local dialect, as nearly as our limited alphabet will
represent it, Alminy Cutterr, and Arvilly Braowne, should feel and
express an interest in the good-looking stranger, and that, when
their flattering comments were repeated in the hearing of their
indigenous admirers, among whom were some of the older "boys" of the
school, it should not add to the amiable dispositions of the
turbulent youth.

Monday came, and the new schoolmaster was in his chair at the upper
end of the schoolhouse, on the raised platform.  The rustics looked
at his handsome face, thoughtful, peaceful, pleasant, cheerful, but
sharply cut round the lips and proudly lighted about the eyes.  The
ringleader of the mischief-makers, the young butcher who has before
figured in this narrative, looked at him stealthily, whenever he got
a chance to study him unobserved; for the truth was, he felt
uncomfortable, whenever he found the large, dark eyes fixed on his
own little, sharp, deep-set, gray ones.  But he managed to study him
pretty well,--first his face, then his neck and shoulders, the set of
his arms, the narrowing at the loins, the make of his legs, and the
way he moved.  In short, he examined him as he would have examined a
steer, to see what he could do and how he would cut up.  If he could
only have gone to him and felt of his muscles, he would have been
entirely satisfied.  He was not a very wise youth, but he did know
well enough, that, though big arms and legs are very good things,
there is something besides size that goes to make a man; and he had
heard stories of a fighting-man, called "The Spider," from his
attenuated proportions, who was yet a terrible hitter in the ring,
and had whipped many a big-limbed fellow, in and out of the roped
arena.

Nothing could be smoother than the way in which everything went on
for the first day or two.  The new master was so kind and courteous,
he seemed to take everything in such a natural, easy way, that there
was no chance to pick a quarrel with him.  He in the mean time
thought it best to watch the boys and young men for a day or two with
as little show of authority as possible.  It was easy enough to see
that he would have occasion for it before long.

The schoolhouse was a grim, old, red, one-story building, perched on
a bare rock at the top of a hill,--partly because this was a
conspicuous site for the temple of learning, and partly because land
is cheap where there is no chance even for rye or buckwheat, and the
very sheep find nothing to nibble.  About the little porch were
carved initials and dates, at various heights, from the stature of
nine to that of eighteen.  Inside were old unpainted desks,--
unpainted, but browned with the umber of human contact,--and hacked
by innumerable jack-knives.  It was long since the walls had been
whitewashed, as might be conjectured by the various traces left upon
them, wherever idle hands or sleepy heads could reach them.  A
curious appearance was noticeable on various higher parts of the
wall: namely, a wart-like eruption, as one would be tempted to call
it, being in reality a crop of the soft missiles before mentioned,
which, adhering in considerable numbers, and hardening after the
usual fashion of papier-mache, formed at last permanent ornaments of
the edifice.

The young master's quick eye soon noticed that a particular part of
the wall was most favored with these ornamental appendages.  Their
position pointed sufficiently clearly to the part of the room they
came from.  In fact, there was a nest of young mutineers just there,
which must be broken up by a coup d'etat.  This was easily effected
by redistributing the seats and arranging the scholars according to
classes, so that a mischievous fellow, charged full of the rebellious
imponderable, should find himself between two non-conductors, in the
shape of small boys of studious habits.  It was managed quietly
enough, in such a plausible sort of way that its motive was not
thought of.  But its effects were soon felt; and then began a system
of correspondence by signs, and the throwing of little scrawls done
up in pellets, and announced by preliminary a'h'ms! to call the
attention of the distant youth addressed.  Some of these were
incendiary documents, devoting the schoolmaster to the lower
divinities, as "a stuck-up dandy," as "a purse-proud aristocrat," as
"a sight too big for his, etc.," and holding him up in a variety of
equally forcible phrases to the indignation of the youthful community
of School District No. 1, Pigwacket Centre.

Presently the draughtsman of the school set a caricature in
circulation, labelled, to prevent mistakes, with the schoolmaster's
name.  An immense bell-crowned hat, and a long, pointed, swallow-
tailed coat showed that the artist had in his mind the conventional
dandy, as shown in prints of thirty or forty years ago, rather than
any actual human aspect of the time.  But it was passed round among
the boys and made its laugh, helping of course to undermine the
master's authority, as "Punch" or the "Charivari" takes the dignity
out of an obnoxious minister.  One morning, on going to the
schoolroom, Master Langdon found an enlarged copy of this sketch,
with its label, pinned on the door.  He took it down, smiled a
little, put it into his pocket, and entered the schoolroom.  An
insidious silence prevailed, which looked as if some plot were
brewing.  The boys were ripe for mischief, but afraid.  They had
really no fault to find with the master, except that he was dressed
like a gentleman, which a certain class of fellows always consider a
personal insult to themselves.  But the older ones were evidently
plotting, and more than once the warning a'h'm! was heard, and a
dirty little scrap of paper rolled into a wad shot from one seat to
another.  One of these happened to strike the stove-funnel, and
lodged on the master's desk.  He was cool enough not to seem to
notice it.  He secured it, however, and found an opportunity to look
at it, without being observed by the boys.  It required no immediate
notice.

He who should have enjoyed the privilege of looking upon Mr. Bernard
Langdon the next morning, when his toilet was about half finished,
would have had a very pleasant gratuitous exhibition.  First he
buckled the strap of his trousers pretty tightly.  Then he took up a
pair of heavy dumb-bells, and swung them for a few minutes; then two
great "Indian clubs," with which he enacted all sorts of impossible-
looking feats.  His limbs were not very large, nor his shoulders
remarkably broad; but if you knew as much of the muscles as all
persons who look at statues and pictures with a critical eye ought to
have learned,--if you knew the trapezius, lying diamond-shaped over
the back and shoulders like a monk's cowl,--or the deltoid, which
caps the shoulder like an epaulette,--or the triceps, which furnishes
the calf of the upper arm,--or the hard-knotted biceps,--any of the
great sculptural landmarks, in fact,--you would have said there was a
pretty show of them, beneath the white satiny skin of Mr. Bernard
Langdon.  And if you had seen him, when he had laid down the Indian
clubs, catch hold of a leather strap that hung from the beam of the
old-fashioned ceiling,--and lift and lower himself over and over
again by his left hand alone, you might have thought it a very simple
and easy thing to do, until you tried to do it yourself.  Mr. Bernard
looked at himself with the eye of an expert.  "Pretty well!" he
said;--"not so much fallen off as I expected."  Then he set up his
bolster in a very knowing sort of way, and delivered two or three
blows straight as rulers and swift as winks.  "That will do," he
said.  Then, as if determined to make a certainty of his condition,
he took a dynamometer from one of the drawers in his old veneered
bureau.  First he squeezed it with his two hands.  Then he placed it
on the floor and lifted, steadily, strongly.  The springs creaked and
cracked; the index swept with a great stride far up into the high
figures of the scale; it was a good lift.  He was satisfied.  He sat
down on the edge of his bed and looked at his cleanly-shaped arms.
"If I strike one of those boobies, I am afraid I shall spoil him," he
said.  Yet this young man, when weighed with his class at the
college, could barely turn one hundred and forty-two pounds in the
scale,--not a heavy weight, surely; but some of the middle weights,
as the present English champion, for instance, seem to be of a far
finer quality of muscle than the bulkier fellows.

The master took his breakfast with a good appetite that morning, but
was perhaps rather more quiet than usual.  After breakfast he went
up-stairs and put, on a light loose frock, instead of that which he
commonly wore, which was a close-fitting and rather stylish one.  On
his way to school he met Alminy Cutterr, who happened to be walking
in the other direction.  "Good-morning, Miss Cutter," he said; for
she and another young lady had been introduced to him, on a former
occasion, in the usual phrase of polite society in presenting ladies
to gentlemen,--"Mr. Langdon, let me make y' acquainted with Miss
Cutterr;--let me make y' acquainted with Miss Braowne."  So he said,
"Good-morning"; to which she replied, "Good-mornin', Mr. Langdon.
Haow's your haalth?"  The answer to this question ought naturally to
have been the end of the talk; but Alminy Cutterr lingered and looked
as if she had something more on her mind.

A young fellow does not require a great experience to read a simple
country-girl's face as if it were a sign-board.  Alminy was a good
soul, with red cheeks and bright eyes, kind-hearted as she could be,
and it was out of the question for her to hide her thoughts or
feelings like a fine lady.  Her bright eyes were moist and her red
cheeks paler than their wont, as she said, with her lips quivering,
"Oh, Mr. Langdon, them boys 'll be the death of ye, if ye don't take
caar!"

"Why, what's the matter, my dear?"  said Mr. Bernard.---Don't think
there was anything very odd in that "my dear," at the second
interview with a village belle;--some of these woman-tamers call a
girl "My dear," after five minutes' acquaintance, and it sounds all
right as they say it.  But you had better not try it at a venture.

It sounded all right to Alminy, as Mr. Bernard said it.---"I 'll tell
ye what's the mahtterr," she said, in a frightened voice.  "Ahbner 's
go'n' to car' his dog, 'n' he'll set him on ye'z sure 'z y' 'r'
alive.  'T's the same cretur that haaf eat up Eben Squires's little
Jo, a year come nex' Faast day."

Now this last statement was undoubtedly overcolored; as little Jo
Squires was running about the village,--with an ugly scar on his arm,
it is true, where the beast had caught him with his teeth, on the
occasion of the child's taking liberties with him, as he had been
accustomed to do with a good-tempered Newfoundland dog, who seemed to
like being pulled and hauled round by children.  After this the
creature was commonly muzzled, and, as he was fed on raw meat
chiefly, was always ready for a fight, which he was occasionally
indulged in, when anything stout enough to match him could be found
in any of the neighboring villages.

Tiger, or, more briefly, Tige, the property of Abner Briggs, Junior,
belonged to a species not distinctly named in scientific books, but
well known to our country-folks under the name "Yallah dog."  They do
not use this expression as they would say black dog or white dog, but
with almost as definite a meaning as when they speak of a terrier or
a spaniel.  A "yallah dog" is a large canine brute, of a dingy old-
flannel color, of no particular breed except his own, who hangs round
a tavern or a butcher's shop, or trots alongside of a team, looking
as if he were disgusted with the world, and the world with him.  Our
inland population, while they tolerate him, speak of him with
contempt.  Old ______ , of Meredith Bridge, used to twit the sun for
not shining on cloudy days, swearing, that, if he hung up his "yallah
dog," he would make a better show of daylight.  A country fellow,
abusing a horse of his neighbor's, vowed, that, "if he had such a
hoss, he'd swap him for a `yallah dog,'--and then shoot the dog."

Tige was an ill-conditioned brute by nature, and art had not improved
him by cropping his ears and tail and investing him with a spiked
collar.  He bore on his person, also, various not ornamental scars,
marks of old battles; for Tige had fight in him, as was said before,
and as might be guessed by a certain bluntness about the muzzle, with
a projection of the lower jaw, which looked as if there might be a
bull-dog stripe among the numerous bar-sinisters of his lineage.

It was hardly fair, however, to leave Alminy Cutterr waiting while
this piece of natural history was telling.--As she spoke of little
Jo, who had been "haaf eat up" by Tige, she could not contain her
sympathies, and began to cry.

"Why, my dear little soul," said Mr. Bernard, "what are you worried
about?  I used to play with a bear when I was a boy; and the bear
used to hug me, and I used to kiss him,--so!"

It was too bad of Mr. Bernard, only the second time he had seen
Alminy; but her kind feelings had touched him, and that seemed the
most natural way of expressing his gratitude.  Ahniny looked round to
see if anybody was near; she saw nobody, so of course it would do no
good to "holler."  She saw nobody; but a stout young fellow, leading
a yellow dog, muzzled, saw her through a crack in a picket fence, not
a great way off the road.  Many a year he had been "hangin' 'raoun'"
Alminy, and never did he see any encouraging look, or hear any
"Behave, naow!" or "Come, naow, a'n't ye 'shamed?" or other
forbidding phrase of acquiescence, such as village belles under stand
as well as ever did the nymph who fled to the willows in the eclogue
we all remember.

No wonder he was furious, when he saw the school master, who had
never seen the girl until within a week, touching with his lips those
rosy cheeks which he had never dared to approach.  But that was all;
it was a sudden impulse; and the master turned away from the young
girl, laughing, and telling her not to fret herself about him,--he
would take care of himself.

So Master Langdon walked on toward his school-house, not displeased,
perhaps, with his little adventure, nor immensely elated by it; for
he was one of the natural class of the sex-subduers, and had had many
a smile without asking, which had been denied to the feeble youth who
try to win favor by pleading their passion in rhyme, and even to the
more formidable approaches of young officers in volunteer companies,
considered by many to be quite irresistible to the fair who have once
beheld them from their windows in the epaulettes and plumes and
sashes of the "Pigwacket Invincibles," or the "Hackmatack Rangers."

Master Langdon took his seat and began the exercises of his school.
The smaller boys recited their lessons well enough, but some of the
larger ones were negligent and surly.  He noticed one or two of them
looking toward the door, as if expecting somebody or something in
that direction.  At half past nine o'clock, Abner Briggs, Junior, who
had not yet shown himself, made his appearance.  He was followed by
his "yallah dog," without his muzzle, who squatted down very grimly
near the door, and gave a wolfish look round the room, as if he were
considering which was the plumpest boy to begin with.  The young
butcher, meanwhile, went to his seat, looking somewhat flushed,
except round the lips, which were hardly as red as common, and set
pretty sharply.

"Put out that dog, Abner Briggs!"--The master spoke as the captain
speaks to the helmsman, when there are rocks foaming at the lips,
right under his lee.

Abner Briggs answered as the helmsman answers, when he knows he has a
mutinous crew round him that mean to run the ship on the reef, and is
one of the mutineers himself.  "Put him aout y'rself, 'f ye a'n't
afeard on him!"

The master stepped into the aisle: The great cur showed his teeth,--
and the devilish instincts of his old wolf-ancestry looked out of his
eyes, and flashed from his sharp tusks, and yawned in his wide mouth
and deep red gullet.

The movements of animals are so much quicker than those of human
beings commonly are, that they avoid blows as easily as one of us
steps out of the way of an ox-cart.  It must be a very stupid dog
that lets himself be run over by a fast driver in his gig; he can
jump out of the wheel's way after the tire has already touched him.
So, while one is lifting a stick to strike or drawing back his foot
to kick, the beast makes his spring, and the blow or the kick comes
too late.

It was not so this time.  The master was a fencer, and something of a
boxer; he had played at singlestick, and was used to watching an
adversary's eye and coming down on him without any of those
premonitory symptoms by which unpractised persons show long
beforehand what mischief they meditate.

"Out with you!" he said, fiercely,--and explained what he meant by a
sudden flash of his foot that clashed the yellow dog's white teeth
together like the springing of a bear-trap.  The cur knew he had
found his master at the first word and glance, as low animals on four
legs, or a smaller number, always do; and the blow took him so by
surprise, that it curled him up in an instant, and he went bundling
out of the open schoolhouse-door with a most pitiable yelp, and his
stump of a tail shut down as close as his owner ever shut the short,
stubbed blade of his jack-knife.

It was time for the other cur to find who his master.

"Follow your dog, Abner Briggs!" said Master Langdon.

The stout butcher-youth looked round, but the rebels were all cowed
and sat still.

"I'll go when I'm ready," he said,--"'n' I guess I won't go afore I'm
ready."

"You're ready now," said Master Langdon, turning up his cuffs so that
the little boys noticed the yellow gleam of a pair of gold sleeve-
buttons, once worn by Colonel Percy Wentworth, famous in the Old
French War.

Abner Briggs, Junior, did not apparently think he was ready, at any
rate; for he rose up in his place, and stood with clenched fists,
defiant, as the master strode towards him.  The master knew the
fellow was really frightened, for all his looks, and that he must
have no time to rally.  So he caught him suddenly by the collar, and,
with one great pull, had him out over his desk and on the open floor.
He gave him a sharp fling backwards and stood looking at him.

The rough-and-tumble fighters all clinch, as everybody knows; and
Abner Briggs, Junior, was one of that kind.  He remembered how he had
floored Master Weeks, and he had just "spunk" enough left in him to
try to repeat his former successful experiment an the new master.  He
sprang at him, open-handed, to clutch him.  So the master had to
strike,--once, but very hard, and just in the place to tell.  No
doubt, the authority that doth hedge a schoolmaster added to the
effect of the blow; but the blow was itself a neat one, and did not
require to be repeated.

"Now go home," said the master, "and don't let me see you or your dog
here again."  And he turned his cuffs down over the gold sleeve-
buttons.

This finished the great Pigwacket Centre School rebellion.  What
could be done with a master who was so pleasant as long as the boys
behaved decently, and such a terrible fellow when he got "riled," as
they called it?  In a week's time everything was reduced to order,
and the school-committee were delighted.  The master, however, had
received a proposition so much more agreeable and advantageous, that
he informed the committee he should leave at the end of his month,
having in his eye a sensible and energetic young college-graduate who
would be willing and fully competent to take his place.

So, at the expiration of the appointed time, Bernard Langdon, late
master of the School District No. 1, Pigwacket Centre, took his
departure from that place for another locality, whither we shall
follow him, carrying with him the regrets of the committee, of most
of the scholars, and of several young ladies; also two locks of hair,
sent unbeknown to payrents, one dark and one warmish auburn,
inscribed with the respective initials of Alminy Cutterr and Arvilly
Braowne.




CHAPTER IV

THE MOTH FLIES INTO THE CANDLE.

The invitation which Mr. Bernard Langdon had accepted came from the
Board of Trustees of the "Apollinean Female Institute," a school for
the education of young ladies, situated in the flourishing town of
Rockland.  This was an establishment on a considerable scale, in
which a hundred scholars or thereabouts were taught the ordinary
English branches, several of the modern languages, something of
Latin, if desired, with a little natural philosophy, metaphysics, and
rhetoric, to finish off with in the last year, and music at any time
when they would pay for it.  At the close of their career in the
Institute, they were submitted to a grand public examination, and
received diplomas tied in blue ribbons, which proclaimed them with a
great flourish of capitals to be graduates of the Apollinean Female
Institute.

Rockland was a town of no inconsiderable pretensions.  It was
ennobled by lying at the foot of a mountain,--called by the working-
folks of the place "the Maounting,"--which sufficiently showed that
it was the principal high land of the district in which it was
situated.  It lay to the south of this, and basked in the sunshine as
Italy stretches herself before the Alps.  To pass from the town of
Tamarack on the north of the mountain to Rockland on the south was
like crossing from Coire to Chiavenna.

There is nothing gives glory and grandeur and romance and mystery to
a place like the impending presence of a high mountain.  Our
beautiful Northampton with its fair meadows and noble stream is
lovely enough, but owes its surpassing attraction to those twin
summits which brood over it like living presences, looking down into
its streets as if they were its tutelary divinities, dressing and
undressing their green shrines, robing themselves in jubilant
sunshine or in sorrowing clouds, and doing penance in the snowy
shroud of winter, as if they had living hearts under their rocky ribs
and changed their mood like the children of the soil at their feet,
who grow up under their almost parental smiles and frowns.  Happy is
the child whose first dreams of heaven are blended with the evening
glories of Mount Holyoke, when the sun is firing its treetops, and
gilding the white walls that mark its one human dwelling!  If the
other and the wilder of the two summits has a scowl of terror in its
overhanging brows, yet is it a pleasing fear to look upon its savage
solitudes through the barred nursery-windows in the heart of the
sweet, companionable village.---And how the mountains love their
children!  The sea is of a facile virtue, and will run to kiss the
first comer in any port he visits; but the chaste mountains sit
apart, and show their faces only in the midst of their own families.

The Mountain which kept watch to the north of Rockland lay waste and
almost inviolate through much of its domain.  The catamount still
glared from the branches of its old hemlocks on the lesser beasts
that strayed beneath him.  It was not long since a wolf had wandered
down, famished in the winter's dearth, and left a few bones and some
tufts of wool of what had been a lamb in the morning.  Nay, there
were broad-footed tracks in the snow only two years previously, which
could not be mistaken;--the black bear alone could have set that
plantigrade seal, and little children must come home early from
school and play, for he is an indiscriminate feeder when he is
hungry, and a little child would not come amiss when other game was
wanting.

But these occasional visitors may have been mere wanderers, which,
straying along in the woods by day, and perhaps stalking through the
streets of still villages by night, had worked their way along down
from the ragged mountain-spurs of higher latitudes.  The one feature
of The Mountain that shed the brownest horror on its woods was the
existence of the terrible region known as Rattlesnake Ledge, and
still tenanted by those damnable reptiles, which distil a fiercer
venom under our cold northern sky than the cobra himself in the land
of tropical spices and poisons.

From the earliest settlement of the place, this fact had been, next
to the Indians, the reigning nightmare of the inhabitants.  It was
easy enough, after a time, to drive away the savages; for
"a screeching Indian Divell," as our fathers called him, could not
crawl into the crack of a rock to escape from his pursuers.  But the
venomous population of Rattlesnake Ledge had a Gibraltar for their
fortress that might have defied the siege-train dragged to the walls
of Sebastopol.  In its deep embrasures and its impregnable easemates
they reared their families, they met in love or wrath, they twined
together in family knots, they hissed defiance in hostile clans, they
fed, slept, hibernated, and in due time died in peace.  Many a foray
had the towns-people made, and many a stuffed skin was shown as a
trophy,--nay, there were families where the children's first toy was
made from the warning appendage that once vibrated to the wrath of
one of these "cruel serpents."  Sometimes one of them, coaxed out by
a warm sun, would writhe himself down the hillside into the roads, up
the walks that led to houses,--worse than this, into the long grass,
where the barefooted mowers would soon pass with their swinging
scythes,--more rarely into houses, and on one memorable occasion,
early in the last century, into the meeting-house, where he took a
position on the pulpit-stairs,--as is narrated in the "Account of
Some Remarkable Providences," etc., where it is suggested that a
strong tendency of the Rev. Didymus Bean, the Minister at that time,
towards the Arminian Heresy may have had something to do with it, and
that the Serpent supposed to have been killed on the Pulpit-Stairs
was a false show of the Daemon's Contrivance, he having come in to
listen to a Discourse which was a sweet Savour in his Nostrils, and,
of course, not being capable of being killed Himself.  Others said,
however, that, though there was good Reason to think it was a Damon,
yet he did come with Intent to bite the Heel of that faithful
Servant,--etc.

One Gilson is said to have died of the bite of a rattlesnake in this
town early in the present century.  After this there was a great
snake-hunt, in which very many of these venomous beasts were killed,
--one in particular, said to have been as big round as a stout man's
arm, and to have had no less than forty joints to his rattle,--
indicating, according to some, that he had lived forty years, but, if
we might put any faith in the Indian tradition, that he had killed
forty human beings,--an idle fancy, clearly.  This hunt, however, had
no permanent effect in keeping down the serpent population.
Viviparous, creatures are a kind of specie-paying lot, but oviparous
ones only give their notes, as it were, for a future brood,--an egg
being, so to speak, a promise to pay a young one by and by, if
nothing happen.  Now the domestic habits of the rattlesnake are not
studied very closely, for obvious reasons; but it is, no doubt, to
all intents and purposes oviparous.  Consequently it has large
families, and is not easy to kill out.

In the year 184-, a melancholy proof was afforded to the inhabitants
of Rockland, that the brood which infested The Mountain was not
extirpated.  A very interesting young married woman, detained at home
at the time by the state of her health, was bitten in the entry of
her own house by a rattlesnake which had found its way down from The
Mountain.  Owing to the almost instant employment of powerful
remedies, the bite did not prove immediately fatal; but she died
within a few months of the time when she was bitten.

All this seemed to throw a lurid kind of shadow over The Mountain.
Yet, as many years passed without any accident, people grew
comparatively careless, and it might rather be said to add a fearful
kind of interest to the romantic hillside, that the banded reptiles,
which had been the terror of the red men for nobody knows how many
thousand years, were there still, with the same poison-bags and
spring-teeth at the white men's service, if they meddled with them.

The other natural features of Rockland were such as many of our
pleasant country-towns can boast of.  A brook came tumbling down the
mountain-side and skirted the most thickly settled portion of the
village.  In the parts of its course where it ran through the woods,
the water looked almost as brown as coffee flowing from its urn,--to
say like smoky quartz would perhaps give a better idea,--but in the
open plain it sparkled over the pebbles white as a queen's diamonds.
There were huckleberry-pastures on the lower flanks of The Mountain,
with plenty of the sweet-scented bayberry mingled with the other
bushes.  In other fields grew great store of high-bush blackberries.
Along the roadside were bayberry-bushes, hung all over with bright
red coral pendants in autumn and far into the winter.  Then there
were swamps set thick with dingy alders, where the three-leaved arum
and the skunk's-cabbage grew broad and succulent, shelving down into
black boggy pools here and there at the edge of which the green frog,
stupidest of his tribe, sat waiting to be victimized by boy or
snapping-turtle long after the shy and agile leopard-frog had taken
the six-foot spring that plumped him into the middle of the pool.
And on the neighboring banks the maiden-hair spread its flat disk of
embroidered fronds on the wire-like stem that glistened polished and
brown as the darkest tortoise-shell, and pale violets, cheated by the
cold skies of their hues and perfume, sunned themselves like white-
cheeked invalids.  Over these rose the old forest-trees,--the maple,
scarred with the wounds which had drained away its sweet life-blood,
--the beech, its smooth gray bark mottled so as to look like the body
of one of those great snakes of old that used to frighten armies,
always the mark of lovers' knives, as in the days of Musidora and her
swain,--the yellow birch, rough as the breast of Silenus in old
marbles,--the wild cherry, its little bitter fruit lying unheeded at
its foot,--and, soaring over all, the huge, coarse-barked, splintery-
limbed, dark-mantled hemlock, in the depth of whose aerial solitudes
the crow brooded on her nest unscared, and the gray squirrel lived
unharmed till his incisors grew to look like ram's-horns.

Rockland would have been but half a town without its pond; Guinnepeg
Pond was the name of it, but the young ladies of the Apollinean
Institute were very anxious that it should be called Crystalline
Lake.  It was here that the young folks used to sail in summer and
skate in winter; here, too, those queer, old, rum-scented good-for-
nothing, lazy, story-telling, half-vagabonds, who sawed a little wood
or dug a few potatoes now and then under the pretence of working for
their living, used to go and fish through the ice for pickerel every
winter.  And here those three young people were drowned, a few
summers ago, by the upsetting of a sail-boat in a sudden flaw of
wind.  There is not one of these smiling ponds which has not devoured
more youths and maidens than any of those monsters the ancients used
to tell such lies about.  But it was a pretty pond, and never looked
more innocent--so the native "bard" of Rockland said in his elegy--
than on the morning when they found Sarah Jane and Ellen Maria
floating among the lily-pads.

The Apollinean Institute, or Institoot, as it was more commonly
called, was, in the language of its Prospectus, a "first-class
Educational Establishment."  It employed a considerable corps of
instructors to rough out and finish the hundred young lady scholars
it sheltered beneath its roof.  First, Mr. and Mrs. Peckham, the
Principal and the Matron of the school.  Silas Peckham was a thorough
Yankee, born on a windy part of the coast, and reared chiefly on
salt-fish.  Everybody knows the type of Yankee produced by this
climate and diet: thin, as if he had been split and dried; with an
ashen kind of complexion, like the tint of the food he is made of;
and about as sharp, tough, juiceless, and biting to deal with as the
other is to the taste.  Silas Peckham kept a young ladies' school
exactly as he would have kept a hundred head of cattle,--for the
simple, unadorned purpose of making just as much money in just as few
years as could be safely done.  Mr. Peckham gave very little personal
attention to the department of instruction, but was always busy with
contracts for flour and potatoes, beef and pork, and other nutritive
staples, the amount of which required for such an establishment was
enough to frighten a quartermaster.  Mrs. Peckham was from the West,
raised on Indian corn and pork, which give a fuller outline and a
more humid temperament, but may perhaps be thought to render people a
little coarse-fibred.  Her specialty was to look after the
feathering, cackling, roosting, rising, and general behavior of these
hundred chicks.  An honest, ignorant woman, she could not have passed
an examination in the youngest class.  So this distinguished
institution was under the charge of a commissary and a housekeeper,
and its real business was making money by taking young girls in as
boarders.

Connected with this, however, was the incidental fact, which the
public took for the principal one, namely, the business of
instruction.  Mr. Peckham knew well enough that it was just as well
to have good instructors as bad ones, so far as cost was concerned,
and a great deal better for the reputation of his feeding-
establishment.  He tried to get the best he could without paying too
much, and, having got them, to screw all the work out of them that
could possibly be extracted.

There was a master for the English branches, with a young lady
assistant.  There was another young lady who taught French, of the
ahvaung and baundahng style, which does not exactly smack of the
asphalt of the Boulevards.  There was also a German teacher of music,
who sometimes helped in French of the ahfaung and bauntaung style,--
so that, between the two, the young ladies could hardly have been
mistaken for Parisians, by a Committee of the French Academy.  The
German teacher also taught a Latin class after his fashion,--benna, a
ben, gahboot, ahead, and so forth.

The master for the English branches had lately left the school for
private reasons, which need not be here mentioned,--but he had gone,
at any rate, and it was his place which had been offered to Mr.
Bernard Langdon.  The offer came just in season,--as, for various
causes, he was willing to leave the place where he had begun his new
experience.

It was on a fine morning that Mr. Bernard, ushered in by Mr. Peckham,
made his appearance in the great schoolroom of the Apollinean
Institute.  A general rustle ran all round the seats when the
handsome young man was introduced.  The principal carried him to the
desk of the young lady English assistant, Miss Darley by name, and
introduced him to her.

There was not a great deal of study done that day.  The young lady
assistant had to point out to the new master the whole routine in
which the classes were engaged when their late teacher left, and
which had gone on as well as it could since.  Then Master Langdon had
a great many questions to ask, some relating to his new duties, and
some, perhaps, implying a degree of curiosity not very unnatural
under the circumstances.  The truth is, the general effect of the
schoolroom, with its scores of young girls, all their eyes naturally
centring on him with fixed or furtive glances, was enough to bewilder
and confuse a young man like Master Langdon, though he was not
destitute of self-possession, as we have already seen.

You cannot get together a hundred girls, taking them as they come,
from the comfortable and affluent classes, probably anywhere,
certainly not in New England, without seeing a good deal of beauty.
In fact, we very commonly mean by beauty the way young girls look
when there is nothing to hinder their looking as Nature meant them
to.  And the great schoolroom of the Apollinean Institute did really
make so pretty a show on the morning when Master Langdon entered it,
that he might be pardoned for asking Miss Darley more questions about
his scholars than about their lessons.

There were girls of all ages: little creatures, some pallid and
delicate-looking, the offspring of invalid parents,--much given to
books, not much to mischief, commonly spoken of as particularly good
children, and contrasted with another sort, girls of more vigorous
organization, who were disposed to laughing and play, and required a
strong hand to manage them; then young growing misses of every shade
of Saxon complexion, and here and there one of more Southern hue:
blondes, some of them so translucent-looking that it seemed as if you
could see the souls in their bodies, like bubbles in glass, if souls
were objects of sight; brunettes, some with rose-red colors, and some
with that swarthy hue which often carries with it a heavily-shaded
lip, and which, with pure outlines and outspoken reliefs, gives us
some of our handsomest women,--the women whom ornaments of plain gold
adorn more than any other parures; and again, but only here and
there, one with dark hair and gray or blue eyes, a Celtic type,
perhaps, but found in our native stock occasionally; rarest of all, a
light-haired girl with dark eyes, hazel, brown, or of the color of
that mountain-brook spoken of in this chapter, where it ran through
shadowy woodlands.  With these were to be seen at intervals some of
maturer years, full-blown flowers among the opening buds, with that
conscious look upon their faces which so many women wear during the
period when they never meet a single man without having his
monosyllable ready for him,--tied as they are, poor things! on the
rock of expectation, each of them an Andromeda waiting for her
Perseus.

"Who is that girl in ringlets,--the fourth in the third row on the
right?" said Master Langdon.

"Charlotte Ann Wood," said Miss Darley; "writes very pretty poems."

"Oh!--And the pink one, three seats from her?  Looks bright; anything
in her?"

"Emma Dean,--day-scholar,--Squire Dean's daughter,--nice girl,--
second medal last year."

The master asked these two questions in a careless kind of way, and
did not seem to pay any too much attention to the answers.

"And who and what is that," he said,--"sitting a little apart
there,--that strange, wild-looking girl?"

This time he put the real question he wanted answered;--the other two
were asked at random, as masks for the third.

The lady-teacher's face changed;--one would have said she was
frightened or troubled.  She looked at the girl doubtfully, as if she
might hear the master's question and its answer.  But the girl did
not look up;--she was winding a gold chain about her wrist, and then
uncoiling it, as if in a kind of reverie.

Miss Darley drew close to the master and placed her hand so as to
hide her lips.  "Don't look at her as if we were talking about her,"
she whispered softly; "that is Elsie Venner."




CHAPTER V.

AN OLD-FASHIONED DESCRIPTIVE CHAPTER.

It was a comfort to get to a place with something like society, with
residences which had pretensions to elegance, with people of some
breeding, with a newspaper, and "stores" to advertise in it, and with
two or three churches to keep each other alive by wholesome
agitation.  Rockland was such a place.

Some of the natural features of the town have been described already.
The Mountain, of course, was what gave it its character, and redeemed
it from wearing the commonplace expression which belongs to ordinary
country-villages.  Beautiful, wild, invested with the mystery which
belongs to untrodden spaces, and with enough of terror to give it
dignity, it had yet closer relations with the town over which it
brooded than the passing stranger knew of.  Thus, it made a local
climate by cutting off the northern winds and holding the sun's heat
like a garden-wall.  Peachtrees, which, on the northern side of the
mountain, hardly ever came to fruit, ripened abundant crops in
Rockland.

But there was still another relation between the mountain and the
town at its foot, which strangers were not likely to hear alluded to,
and which was oftener thought of than spoken of by its inhabitants.
Those high-impending forests,--"hangers," as White of Selborne would
have called them,--sloping far upward and backward into the distance,
had always an air of menace blended with their wild beauty.  It
seemed as if some heaven-scaling Titan had thrown his shaggy robe
over the bare, precipitous flanks of the rocky summit, and it might
at any moment slide like a garment flung carelessly on the nearest
chance-support, and, so sliding, crush the village out of being, as
the Rossberg when it tumbled over on the valley of Goldau.

Persons have been known to remove from the place, after a short
residence in it, because they were haunted day and night by the
thought of this awful green wall, piled up into the air over their
heads.  They would lie awake of nights, thinking they heard the
muffed snapping of roots, as if a thousand acres of the mountain-side
were tugging to break away, like the snow from a house-roof, and a
hundred thousand trees were clinging with all their fibres to hold
back the soil just ready to peel away and crash down with all its
rocks and forest-growths.  And yet, by one of those strange
contradictions we are constantly finding in human nature, there were
natives of the town who would come back thirty or forty years after
leaving it, just to nestle under this same threatening mountainside,
as old men sun themselves against southward-facing walls.  The old
dreams and legends of danger added to the attraction.  If the
mountain should ever slide, they had a kind of feeling as if they
ought to be there.  It was a fascination like that which the
rattlesnake is said to exert.

This comparison naturally suggests the recollection of that other
source of danger which was an element in the every-day life of the
Rockland people.  The folks in some of the neighboring towns had a
joke against them, that a Rocklander could n't hear a beanpod rattle
without saying, "The Lord have mercy on us!  "It is very true, that
many a nervous old lady has had a terrible start, caused by some
mischievous young rogue's giving a sudden shake to one of these noisy
vegetable products in her immediate vicinity.  Yet, strangely enough,
many persons missed the excitement of the possibility of a fatal bite
in other regions, where there were nothing but black and green and
striped snakes, mean ophidians, having the spite of the nobler
serpent without his venom,--poor crawling creatures, whom Nature
would not trust with a poison-bag.  Many natives of Rockland did
unquestionably experience a certain gratification in this
infinitesimal sense of danger.  It was noted that the old people
retained their hearing longer than in other places.  Some said it was
the softened climate, but others believed it was owing to the habit
of keeping their ears open whenever they were walking through the
grass or in the woods.  At any rate, a slight sense of danger is
often an agreeable stimulus.  People sip their creme de noyau with a
peculiar tremulous pleasure, because there is a bare possibility that
it may contain prussic acid enough to knock them over; in which case
they will lie as dead as if a thunder-cloud had emptied itself into
the earth through their brain and marrow.

But Rockland had other features which helped to give it a special
character.  First of all, there was one grand street which was its
chief glory.  Elm Street it was called, naturally enough, for its
elms made a long, pointed-arched gallery of it through most of its
extent.  No natural Gothic arch compares, for a moment, with that
formed by two American elms, where their lofty jets of foliage shoot
across each other's ascending curves, to intermingle their showery
flakes of green.  When one looks through a long double row of these,
as in that lovely avenue which the poets of Yale remember so well,

"Oh, could the vista of my life but now as bright appear
As when I first through Temple Street looked down thine espalier!"

he beholds a temple not built with hands, fairer than any minster,
with all its clustered stems and flowering capitals, that ever grew
in stone.

Nobody knows New England who is not on terms of intimacy with one of
its elms.  The elm comes nearer to having a soul than any other
vegetable creature among us.  It loves man as man loves it.  It is
modest and patient.  It has a small flake of a seed which blows in
everywhere and makes arrangements for coming up by and by.  So, in
spring, one finds a crop of baby-elms among his carrots and parsnips,
very weak and small compared to those succulent vegetables.  The
baby-elms die, most of them, slain, unrecognized or unheeded, by hand
or hoe, as meekly as Herod's innocents.  One of them gets overlooked,
perhaps, until it has established a kind of right to stay.  Three
generations of carrot and parsnip consumers have passed away,
yourself among them, and now let your great-grandson look for the
baby-elm.  Twenty-two feet of clean girth, three hundred and sixty
feet in the line that bounds its leafy circle, it covers the boy with
such a canopy as neither glossy-leafed oak nor insect-haunted linden
ever lifted into the summer skies.

Elm Street was the pride of Rockland, but not only on account of its
Gothic-arched vista.  In this street  were most of the great houses,
or "mansion-houses," as it was usual to call them.  Along this
street, also, the more nicely kept and neatly painted dwellings were
chiefly congregated.  It was the correct thing for a Rockland
dignitary to have a house in Elm Street.  A New England "mansion-
house" is naturally square, with dormer windows projecting from the
roof, which has a balustrade with turned posts round it.  It shows a
good breadth of front-yard before its door, as its owner shows a
respectable expanse of a clean shirt-front.  It has a lateral margin
beyond its stables and offices, as its master wears his white wrist
bands showing beyond his coat-cuffs.  It may not have what can
properly be called grounds, but it must have elbow-room, at any rate.
Without it, it is like a man who is always tight-buttoned for want of
any linen to show.  The mansion-house which has had to "button itself
up tight in fences, for want of green or gravel margin," will be
advertising for boarders presently.  The old English pattern of the
New England mansion-house, only on a somewhat grander scale, is Sir
Thomas Abney's place, where dear, good Dr. Watts said prayers for the
family, and wrote those blessed hymns of his that sing us into
consciousness in our cradles, and come back to us in sweet, single
verses, between the moments of wandering and of stupor, when we lie
dying, and sound over us when we can no longer hear them, bringing
grateful tears to the hot, aching eyes beneath the thick, black
veils, and carrying the holy calm with them which filled the good
man's heart, as he prayed and sung under the shelter of the old
English mansion-house.  Next to the mansion-houses, came the two-
story trim, white-painted, "genteel" houses, which, being more
gossipy and less nicely bred, crowded close up to the street, instead
of standing back from it with arms akimbo, like the mansion-houses.
Their little front-yards were very commonly full of lilac and syringa
and other bushes, which were allowed to smother the lower story
almost to the exclusion of light and airy so that, what with small
windows and small windowpanes, and the darkness made by these choking
growths of shrubbery, the front parlors of some of these houses were
the most tomb-like, melancholy places that could be found anywhere
among the abodes of the living.  Their garnishing was apt to assist
this impression.  Large-patterned carpets, which always look
discontented in little rooms, haircloth furniture, black and shiny as
beetles' wing cases, and centre-tables, with a sullen oil-lamp of the
kind called astral by our imaginative ancestors, in the centre,--
these things were inevitable.  In set piles round the lamp was ranged
the current literature of the day, in the form of Temperance
Documents, unbound numbers of one of the Unknown Public's Magazines
with worn-out steel engravings and high-colored fashion-plates, the
Poems of a distinguished British author whom it is unnecessary to
mention, a volume of sermons, or a novel or two, or both, according
to the tastes of the family, and the Good Book, which is always
Itself in the cheapest and commonest company.  The father of the
family with his hand in the breast of his coat, the mother of the
same in a wide-bordered cap, sometimes a print of the Last Supper, by
no means Morghen's, or the Father of his Country, or the old General,
or the Defender of the Constitution, or an unknown clergyman with an
open book before him,--these were the usual ornaments of the walls,
the first two a matter of rigor, the others according to politics and
other tendencies.

This intermediate class of houses, wherever one finds them in New
England towns, are very apt to be cheerless and unsatisfactory.  They
have neither the luxury of the mansion-house nor the comfort of the
farm-house.  They are rarely kept at an agreeable temperature.  The
mansion-house has large fireplaces and generous chimneys, and is open
to the sunshine.  The farm-house makes no pretensions, but it has a
good warm kitchen, at any rate, and one can be comfortable there with
the rest of the family, without fear and without reproach.  These
lesser country-houses of genteel aspirations are much given to patent
subterfuges of one kind and another to get heat without combustion.
The chilly parlor and the slippery hair-cloth seat take the life out
of the warmest welcome.  If one would make these places wholesome,
happy, and cheerful, the first precept would be,--The dearest fuel,
plenty of it, and let half the heat go up the chimney.  If you can't
afford this, don't try to live in a "genteel" fashion, but stick to
the ways of the honest farm-house.

There were a good many comfortable farm-houses scattered about
Rockland.  The best of them were something of the following pattern,
which is too often superseded of late by a more pretentious, but
infinitely less pleasing kind of rustic architecture.  A little back
from the road, seated directly on the green sod, rose a plain wooden
building, two stories in front, with a long roof sloping backwards to
within a few feet of the ground.  This, like the "mansion-house," is
copied from an old English pattern.  Cottages of this model may be
seen in Lancashire, for instance, always with the same honest, homely
look, as if their roofs acknowledged their relationship to the soil
out of which they sprung.  The walls were unpainted, but turned by
the slow action of sun and air and rain to a quiet dove or slate
color.  An old broken millstone at the door,--a well-sweep pointing
like a finger to the heavens, which the shining round of water
beneath looked up at like a dark unsleeping eye,--a single large elm
a little at one side,--a barn twice as big as the house,--a cattle-
yard, with

     "The white horns tossing above the wall,"--

some fields, in pasture or in crops, with low stone walls round
them,--a row of beehives,--a gardenpatch, with roots, and currant-
bushes, and many-hued hollyhocks, and swollen-stemmed, globe-headed,
seedling onions, and marigolds and flower-de-luces, and lady's-
delights, and peonies, crowding in together, with southernwood in the
borders, and woodbine and hops and morning-glories climbing as they
got a chance,--these were the features by which the Rockland-born
children remembered the farm-house, when they had grown to be men.
Such are the recollections that come over poor sailor-boys crawling
out on reeling yards to reef topsails as their vessels stagger round
the stormy Cape; and such are the flitting images that make the eyes
of old country-born merchants look dim and dreamy, as they sit in
their city palaces, warm with the after-dinner flush of the red wave
out of which Memory arises, as Aphrodite arose from the green waves
of the ocean.

Two meeting-houses stood on two eminences, facing each other, and
looking like a couple of fighting-cocks with their necks straight up
in the air,--as if they would flap their roofs, the next thing, and
crow out of their upstretched steeples, and peck at each other's
glass eyes with their sharp-pointed weathercocks.

The first was a good pattern of the real old-fashioned New England
meeting-house.  It was a large barn with windows, fronted by a square
tower crowned with a kind of wooden bell inverted and raised on legs,
out of which rose a slender spire with the sharp-billed weathercock
at its summit.  Inside, tall, square pews with flapping seats, and a
gallery running round three sides of the building.  On the fourth
side the pulpit, with a huge, dusty sounding-board hanging over it.
Here preached the Reverend Pierrepont Honeywood, D. D., successor,
after a number of generations, to the office and the parsonage of the
Reverend Didymus Bean, before mentioned, but not suspected of any of
his alleged heresies.  He held to the old faith of the Puritans, and
occasionally delivered a discourse which was considered by the hard-
headed theologians of his parish to have settled the whole matter
fully and finally, so that now there was a good logical basis laid
down for the Millennium, which might begin at once upon the platform
of his demonstrations.  Yet the Reverend Dr. Honeywood was fonder of
preaching plain, practical sermons about the duties of life, and
showing his Christianity in abundant good works among his people.  It
was noticed by some few of his flock, not without comment, that the
great majority of his texts came from the Gospels, and this more and
more as he became interested in various benevolent enterprises which
brought him into relations with-ministers and kindhearted laymen of
other denominations.  He was in fact a man of a very warm, open, and
exceedingly human disposition, and, although bred by a clerical
father, whose motto was "Sit anima mea cum Puritanis," he exercised
his human faculties in the harness of his ancient faith with such
freedom that the straps of it got so loose they did not interfere
greatly with the circulation of the warm blood through his system.
Once in a while he seemed to think it necessary to come out with a
grand doctrinal sermon, and them he would lapse away for a while into
preaching on men's duties to each other and to society, and hit hard,
perhaps, at some of the actual vices of the time and place, and
insist with such tenderness and eloquence on the great depth and
breadth of true Christian love and charity, that his oldest deacon
shook his head, and wished he had shown as much interest when he was
preaching, three Sabbaths back, on Predestinaticn, or in his
discourse against the Sabellians.  But he was sound in the faith; no
doubt of that.  Did he not preside at the council held in the town of
Tamarack, on the other side of the mountain, which expelled its
clergyman for maintaining heretical doctrines?  As presiding officer,
he did not vote, of course, but there was no doubt that he was all
right; he had some of the Edwards blood in him, and that couldn't
very well let him go wrong.

The meeting-house on the other and opposite summit was of a more
modern style, considered by many a great improvement on the old New
England model, so that it is not uncommon for a country parish to
pull down its old meeting-house, which has been preached in for a
hundred years or so, and put up one of these more elegant edifices.
The new building was in what may be called the florid shingle-Gothic
manner.  Its pinnacles and crockets and other ornaments were, like
the body of the building, all of pine wood,--an admirable material,
as it is very soft and easily worked, and can be painted of any color
desired.  Inside, the walls were stuccoed in imitation of stone,--
first a dark brown square, then two light brown squares, then another
dark brown square, and so on, to represent the accidental differences
of shade always noticeable in the real stones of which walls are
built.  To be sure, the architect could not help getting his party-
colored squares in almost as regular rhythmical order as those of a
chess-board; but nobody can avoid doing things in a systematic and
serial way; indeed, people who wish to plant trees in natural chimps
know very well that they cannot keep from making regular lines and
symmetrical figures, unless by some trick or other, as that one of
throwing a peck of potatoes up into the air and sticking in a tree
wherever a potato happens to fall.  The pews of this meeting-house
were the usual oblong ones, where people sit close together, with a
ledge before them to support their hymn-books, liable only to
occasional contact with the back of the next pew's heads or bonnets,
and a place running under the seat of that pew where hats could be
deposited,--always at the risk of the owner, in case of injury by
boots or crickets.

In this meeting-house preached the Reverend Chauncy Fairweather, a
divine of the "Liberal" school, as it is commonly called, bred at
that famous college which used to be thought, twenty or thirty years
ago, to have the monopoly of training young men in the milder forms
of heresy.  His ministrations were attended with decency, but not
followed with enthusiasm.  "The beauty of virtue" got to be an old
story at last.  "The moral dignity of human nature" ceased to excite
a thrill of satisfaction, after some hundred repetitions.  It grew to
be a dull business, this preaching against stealing and intemperance,
while he knew very well that the thieves were prowling round orchards
and empty houses, instead of being there to hear the sermon, and that
the drunkards, being rarely church-goers, get little good by the
statistics and eloquent appeals of the preacher.  Every now and then,
however, the Reverend Mr. Fairweather let off a polemic discourse
against his neighbor opposite, which waked his people up a little;
but it was a languid congregation, at best,--very apt to stay away
from meeting in the afternoon, and not at all given to extra evening
services.  The minister, unlike his rival of the other side of the
way, was a down-hearted and timid kind of man.  He went on preaching
as he had been taught to preach, but he had misgivings at times.
There was a little Roman Catholic church at the foot of the hill
where his own was placed, which he always had to pass on Sundays.  He
could never look on the thronging multitudes that crowded its pews
and aisles or knelt bare-headed on its steps, without a longing to
get in among them and go down on his knees and enjoy that luxury of
devotional contact which makes a worshipping throng as different from
the same numbers praying apart as a bed of coals is from a trail of
scattered cinders.

"Oh, if I could but huddle in with those poor laborers and working-
women!  "he would say to himself.  "If I could but breathe that
atmosphere, stifling though it be, yet made holy by ancient litanies,
and cloudy with the smoke of hallowed incense, for one hour, instead
of droning over these moral precepts to my half-sleeping
congregation!"  The intellectual isolation of his sect preyed upon
him; for, of all terrible things to natures like his, the most
terrible is to belong to a minority.  No person that looked at his
thin and sallow cheek, his sunken and sad eye, his tremulous lip, his
contracted forehead, or who heard his querulous, though not unmusical
voice, could fail to see that his life was an uneasy one, that he was
engaged in some inward conflict.  His dark, melancholic aspect
contrasted with his seemingly cheerful creed, and was all the more
striking, as the worthy Dr. Honeywood, professing a belief which made
him a passenger on board a shipwrecked planet, was yet a most good-
humored and companionable gentleman, whose laugh on week-days did one
as much good to listen to as the best sermon he ever delivered on a
Sunday.

A mile or two from the centre of Rockland was a pretty little
Episcopal church, with a roof like a wedge of cheese, a square tower,
a stained window, and a trained rector, who read the service with
such ventral depth of utterance and rrreduplication of the rrresonant
letter, that his own mother would not have known him for her son, if
the good woman had not ironed his surplice and put it on with her own
hands.

There were two public-houses in the place: one dignified with the
name of the Mountain House, somewhat frequented by city people in the
summer months, large-fronted, three-storied, balconied, boasting a
distinct ladies'-drawing-room, and spreading a table d'hote of some
pretensions; the other, "Pollard's Tahvern," in the common speech,--a
two-story building, with a bar-room, once famous, where there was a
great smell of hay and boots and pipes and all other bucolic-flavored
elements,--where games of checkers were played on the back of the
bellows with red and white kernels of corn, or with beans and coffee,
where a man slept in a box-settle at night, to wake up early
passengers,--where teamsters came in, with wooden-handled whips and
coarse frocks, reinforcing the bucolic flavor of the atmosphere, and
middle-aged male gossips, sometimes including the squire of the
neighboring law-office, gathered to exchange a question or two about
the news, and then fall into that solemn state of suspended animation
which the temperance bar-rooms of modern days produce in human
beings, as the Grotta del Cane does in dogs in the well-known
experiments related by travellers.  This bar-room used to be famous
for drinking and storytelling, and sometimes fighting, in old times.
That was when there were rows of decanters on the shelf behind the
bar, and a hissing vessel of hot water ready, to make punch, and
three or four loggerheads (long irons clubbed at the end) were always
lying in the fire in the cold season, waiting to be plunged into
sputtering and foaming mugs of flip,--a goodly compound; speaking
according to the flesh, made with beer and sugar, and a certain
suspicion of strong waters, over which a little nutmeg being grated,
and in it the hot iron being then allowed to sizzle, there results a
peculiar singed aroma, which the wise regard as a warning to remove
themselves at once out of the reach of temptation.

But the bar of Pollard's Tahvern no longer presented its old
attractions, and the loggerheads had long disappeared from the fire.
In place of the decanters, were boxes containing "lozengers," as they
were commonly called, sticks of candy in jars, cigars in tumblers, a
few lemons, grown hard-skinned and marvellously shrunken by long
exposure, but still feebly suggestive of possible lemonade,--the
whole ornamented by festoons of yellow and blue cut flypaper.  On the
front shelf of the bar stood a large German-silver pitcher of water,
and scattered about were ill-conditioned lamps, with wicks that
always wanted picking, which burned red and smoked a good deal, and
were apt to go out without any obvious cause, leaving strong
reminiscences of the whale-fishery in the circumambient air.

The common schoolhouses of Rockland were dwarfed by the grandeur of
the Apollinean Institute.  The master passed one of them, in a walk
he was taking, soon after his arrival at Rockland.  He looked in at

the rows of desks, and recalled his late experiences.  He could not
help laughing, as he thought how neatly he had knocked the young
butcher off his pins.

"A little science is a dangerous thing,' as well as a little
'learning,'"  he said to himself; "only it's dangerous to the fellow
you' try it on."  And he cut him a good stick, and began climbing the
side of The Mountain to get a look at that famous Rattlesnake Ledge.




CHAPTER VI.

THE SUNBEAM AND THE SHADOW.

The virtue of the world is not mainly in its leaders.  In the midst
of the multitude which follows there is often something better than
in the one that goes before.  Old generals wanted to take Toulon, but
one of their young colonels showed them how.  The junior counsel has
been known not unfrequently to make a better argument than his senior
fellow,--if, indeed, he did not make both their arguments.  Good
ministers will tell you they have parishioners who beat them in the
practice of the virtues.  A great establishment, got up on commercial
principles, like the Apollinean Institute, might yet be well carried
on, if it happened to get good teachers.  And when Master Langdon
came to see its management, he recognized that there must be fidelity
and intelligence somewhere among the instructors.  It was only
necessary to look for a moment at the fair, open forehead, the still,
tranquil eye of gentle, habitual authority, the sweet gravity that
lay upon the lips, to hear the clear answers to the pupils'
questions, to notice how every request had the force without the form
of a command, and the young man could not doubt that the good genius
of the school stood before him in the person of Helen barley.

It was the old story.  A poor country-clergyman dies, and leaves a
widow and a daughter.  In Old England the daughter would have eaten
the bitter bread of a governess in some rich family.  In New England
she must keep a school.  So, rising from one sphere to another, she
at length finds herself the prima donna in the department of
instruction in Mr. Silas Peckham's educational establishment.

What a miserable thing it is to be poor.  She was dependent, frail,
sensitive, conscientious.  She was in the power of a hard, grasping,
thin-blooded, tough-fibred, trading educator, who neither knew nor
cared for a tender woman's sensibilities, but who paid her and meant
to have his money's worth out of her brains, and as much more than
his money's worth as he could get.  She was consequently, in plain
English, overworked, and an overworked woman is always a sad sight,--
sadder a great deal than an overworked man, because she is so much
more fertile in capacities of suffering than a man.  She has so many
varieties of headache,--sometimes as if Jael were driving the nail
that killed Sisera into her temples,--sometimes letting her work with
half her brain while the other half throbs as if it would go to
pieces,--sometimes tightening round the brows as if her cap-band were
a ring of iron,--and then her neuralgias, and her backaches, and her
fits of depression, in which she thinks she is nothing and less than
nothing, and those paroxysms which men speak slightingly of as
hysterical,--convulsions, that is all, only not commonly fatal ones,
--so many trials which belong to her fine and mobile structure,--that
she is always entitled to pity, when she is placed in conditions
which develop her nervous tendencies.

The poor young lady's work had, of course, been doubled since the
departure of Master Langdon's predecessor.  Nobody knows what the
weariness of instruction is, as soon as the teacher's faculties begin
to be overtasked, but those who have tried it.  The relays of fresh
pupils, each new set with its exhausting powers in full action,
coming one after another, take out all the reserved forces and
faculties of resistance from the subject of their draining process.

The day's work was over, and it was late in the evening, when she sat
down, tired and faint, with a great bundle of girls' themes or
compositions to read over before she could rest her weary head on the
pillow of her narrow trundle-bed, and forget for a while the
treadmill stair of labor she was daily climbing.

How she dreaded this most forlorn of all a teacher's tasks!  She was
conscientious in her duties, and would insist on reading every
sentence,--there was no saying where she might find faults of grammar
or bad spelling.  There might have been twenty or thirty of these
themes in the bundle before her.  Of course she knew pretty well the
leading sentiments they could contain: that beauty was subject to the
accidents of time; that wealth was inconstant, and existence
uncertain; that virtue was its own reward; that youth exhaled, like
the dewdrop from the flower, ere the sun had reached its meridian;
that life was o'ershadowed with trials; that the lessons of virtue
instilled by our beloved teachers were to be our guides through all
our future career.  The imagery employed consisted principally of
roses, lilies, birds, clouds, and brooks, with the celebrated
comparison of wayward genius to meteor.  Who does not know the small,
slanted, Italian hand of these girls'-compositions, their stringing
together of the good old traditional copy-book phrases; their
occasional gushes of sentiment, their profound estimates of the
world, sounding to the old folks that read them as the experience of
a bantam pullet's last-hatched young one with the chips of its shell
on its head would sound to a Mother Cary's chicken, who knew the
great ocean with all its typhoons and tornadoes?  Yet every now and
then one is liable to be surprised with strange clairvoyant flashes,
that can hardly be explained, except by the mysterious inspiration
which every now and then seizes a young girl and exalts her
intelligence, just as hysteria in other instances exalts the
sensibility,--a little something of that which made Joan of Arc, and
the Burney girl who prophesied "Evelina," and the Davidson sisters.
In the midst of these commonplace exercises which Miss Darley read
over so carefully were two or three that had something of individual
flavor about them, and here and there there was an image or an
epithet which showed the footprint of a passionate nature, as a
fallen scarlet feather marks the path the wild flamingo has trodden.

The young lady-teacher read them with a certain indifference of
manner, as one reads proofs--noting defects of detail, but not
commonly arrested by the matters treated of.  Even Miss Charlotte Ann
Wood's poem, beginning

          "How sweet at evening's balmy hour,"

did not excite her.  She marked the inevitable false rhyme of Cockney
and Yankee beginners, morn and dawn, and tossed the verses on the
pile of papers she had finished.  She was looking over some of the
last of them in a rather listless way,--for the poor thing was
getting sleepy in spite of herself,--when she came to one which
seemed to rouse her attention, and lifted her drooping lids.  She
looked at it a moment before she would touch it.  Then she took hold
of it by one corner and slid it off from the rest.  One would have
said she was afraid of it, or had some undefined antipathy which made
it hateful to her.  Such odd fancies are common enough in young
persons in her nervous state.  Many of these young people will jump
up twenty times a day and run to dabble the tips of their fingers in
water, after touching the most inoffensive objects.

This composition was written in a singular, sharp-pointed, long,
slender hand, on a kind of wavy, ribbed paper.  There was something
strangely suggestive about the look of it, but exactly of what, Miss
barley either could not or did not try to think.  The subject of the
paper was The Mountain,--the composition being a sort of descriptive
rhapsody.  It showed a startling familiarity with some of the savage
scenery of the region.  One would have said that the writer must have
threaded its wildest solitudes by the light of the moon and stars as
well as by day.  As the teacher read on, her color changed, and a
kind of tremulous agitation came over her.  There were hints in this
strange paper she did not know what to make of.  There was something
in its descriptions and imagery that recalled,--Miss Darley could not
say what,--but it made her frightfully nervous.  Still she could not
help reading, till she came to one passage which so agitated her,
that the tired and over-wearied girl's self-control left her
entirely.  She sobbed once or twice, then laughed convulsively; and
flung herself on the bed, where she worked out a set hysteric spasm
as she best might, without anybody to rub her hands and see that she
did not hurt herself.

By and by she got quiet, rose and went to her bookcase, took down a
volume of Coleridge, and read a short time, and so to bed, to sleep
and wake from time to time with a sudden start out of uneasy dreams.

Perhaps it is of no great consequence what it was in the composition
which set her off into this nervous paroxysm.  She was in such a
state that almost any slight agitation would have brought on the
attack, and it was the accident of her transient excitability, very
probably, which made a trifling cause the seeming occasion of so much
disturbance.  The theme was signed, in the same peculiar, sharp,
slender hand, E. Venner, and was, of course, written by that wild-
looking girl who had excited the master's curiosity and prompted his
question, as before mentioned.  The next morning the lady-teacher
looked pale and wearied, naturally enough, but she was in her place
at the usual hour, and Master Langdon in his own.

The girls had not yet entered the school room.

"You have been ill, I am afraid," said Mr. Bernard.

"I was not well yesterday," she, answered.  "I had a worry and a kind
of fright.  It is so dreadful to have the charge of all these young
souls and bodies.  Every young girl ought to walk locked close, arm
in arm, between two guardian angels.  Sometimes I faint almost with
the thought of all that I ought to do, and of my own weakness and
wants.--Tell me, are there not natures born so out of parallel with
the lines of natural law that nothing short of a miracle can bring
them right?"

Mr. Bernard had speculated somewhat, as all thoughtful persons of his
profession are forced to do, on the innate organic tendencies with
which individuals, families, and races are born.  He replied,
therefore, with a smile, as one to whom the question suggested a very
familiar class of facts.

"Why, of course.  Each of us is only the footing-up of a double
column of figures that goes back to the first pair.  Every unit
tells,--and some of them are plus, and some minus.  If the columns
don't add up right, it is commonly because we can't make out all the
figures.  I don't mean to say that something may not be added by
Nature to make up for losses and keep the race to its average, but we
are mainly nothing but the answer to a long sum in addition and
subtraction.  No doubt there are people born with impulses at every
possible angle to the parallels of Nature, as you call them.  If they
happen to cut these at right angles, of course they are beyond the
reach of common influences.  Slight obliquities are what we have most
to do with in education.  Penitentiaries and insane asylums take care
of most of the right-angle cases.--I am afraid I have put it too
much like a professor, and I am only a student, you know.  Pray, what
set you to asking me this?  Any strange cases among the scholars?"

The meek teacher's blue eyes met the luminous glance that came with
the question.  She, too, was of gentle blood,--not meaning by that
that she was of any noted lineage, but that she came of a cultivated
stock, never rich, but long trained to intellectual callings.  A
thousand decencies, amenities, reticences, graces, which no one
thinks of until he misses them, are the traditional right of those
who spring from such families.  And when two persons of this
exceptional breeding meet in the midst of the common multitude, they
seek each other's company at once by the natural law of elective
affinity.  It is wonderful how men and women know their peers.  If
two stranger queens, sole survivors of two shipwrecked vessels, were
cast, half-naked, on a rock together, each would at once address the
other as "Our Royal Sister."

Helen Darley looked into the dark eyes of Bernard Langdon glittering
with the light which flashed from them with his question.  Not as
those foolish, innocent country-girls of the small village did she
look into them, to be fascinated and bewildered, but to sound them
with a calm, steadfast purpose.  "A gentleman," she said to herself,
as she read his expression and his features with a woman's rapid, but
exhausting glance.  "A lady," he said to himself, as he met her
questioning look,--so brief, so quiet, yet so assured, as of one whom
necessity had taught to read faces quickly without offence, as
children read the faces of parents, as wives read the faces of hard-
souled husbands.  All this was but a few seconds' work, and yet the
main point was settled.  If there had been any vulgar curiosity or
coarseness of any kind lurking in his expression, she would have
detected it.  If she had not lifted her eyes to his face so softly
and kept them there so calmly and withdrawn them so quietly, he would
not have said to himself, "She is a LADY," for that word meant a good
deal to the descendant of the courtly Wentworths and the scholarly
Langdons.

"There are strange people everywhere, Mr. Langdon," she said, "and I
don't think our schoolroom is an exception.  I am glad you believe in
the force of transmitted tendencies.  It would break my heart, if I
did not think that there are faults beyond the reach of everything
but God's special grace.  I should die, if I thought that my
negligence or incapacity was alone responsible for the errors and
sins of those I have charge of.  Yet there are mysteries I do not
know how to account for."  She looked all round the schoolroom, and
then said, in a whisper, "Mr. Langdon, we had a girl that stole, in
the school, not long ago.  Worse than that, we had a girl who tried
to set us on fire.  Children of good people, both of them.  And we
have a girl now that frightens me so"--

The door opened, and three misses came in to take their seats: three
types, as it happened, of certain classes, into which it would not
have been difficult to distribute the greater number of the girls in
the school.---Hannah Martin.  Fourteen years and three months old.
Short-necked, thick-waisted, round-cheeked, smooth, vacant forehead,
large, dull eyes.  Looks good-natured, with little other expression.
Three buns in her bag, and a large apple.  Has a habit of attacking
her provisions in school-hours.--Rosa Milburn.  Sixteen.  Brunette,
with a rare-ripe flush in her cheeks.  Color comes and goes easily.
Eyes wandering, apt to be downcast.  Moody at times.  Said to be
passionate, if irritated.  Finished in high relief.  Carries
shoulders well back and walks well, as if proud of her woman's life,
with a slight rocking movement, being one of the wide-flanged
pattern, but seems restless,--a hard girl to look after.  Has a
romance in her pocket, which she means to read in school-time.
--Charlotte Ann Wood.  Fifteen.  The poetess before mentioned.  Long,
light ringlets, pallid complexion, blue eyes.  Delicate child, half
unfolded.  Gentle, but languid and despondent.  Does not go much with
the other girls, but reads a good deal, especially poetry,
underscoring favorite passages.  Writes a great many verses, very
fast, not very correctly; full of the usual human sentiments,
expressed in the accustomed phrases.  Under-vitalized.  Sensibilities
not covered with their normal integuments.  A negative condition,
often confounded with genius, and sometimes running into it.  Young
people who fall out of line through weakness of the active faculties
are often confounded with those who step out of it through strength
of the intellectual ones.

The girls kept coming in, one after another, or in pairs or groups,
until the schoolroom was nearly full.  Then there was a little pause,
and a light step was heard in the passage.  The lady-teacher's eyes
turned to the door, and the master's followed them in the same
direction.

A girl of about seventeen entered.  She was tall and slender, but
rounded, with a peculiar undulation of movement, such as one
sometimes sees in perfectly untutored country-girls, whom Nature, the
queen of graces, has taken in hand, but more commonly in connection
with the very highest breeding of the most thoroughly trained
society.  She was a splendid scowling beauty, black-browed, with a
flash of white teeth which was always like a surprise when her lips
parted.  She wore a checkered dress, of a curious pattern, and a
camel's-hair scarf twisted a little fantastically about her.  She
went to her seat, which she had moved a short distance apart from the
rest, and, sitting down, began playing listlessly with her gold
chain, as was a common habit with her, coiling it and uncoiling it
about her slender wrist, and braiding it in with her long, delicate
fingers.  Presently she looked up.  Black, piercing eyes, not large,
--a low forehead, as low as that of Clytie in the Townley bust,--
black hair, twisted in heavy braids,--a face that one could not help
looking at for its beauty, yet that one wanted to look away from for
something in its expression, and could not for those diamond eyes.
They were fixed on the lady-teacher now.  The latter turned her own
away, and let them wander over the other scholars. But they could
not help coming back again for a single glance at the wild beauty.
The diamond eyes were on her still.  She turned the leaves of several
of her books, as if in search of some passage, and, when she thought
she had waited long enough to be safe, once more stole a quick look
at the dark girl. The diamond eyes were still upon her.  She put her
kerchief to her forehead, which had grown slightly moist; she sighed
once, almost shivered, for she felt cold; then, following some ill-
defined impulse, which she could not resist, she left her place and
went to the young girl's desk.

"What do you want of me, Elsie Venner?"  It was a strange question to
put, for the girl had not signified that she wished the teacher to
come to her.

"Nothing," she said.  "I thought I could make you come."  The girl
spoke in a low tone, a kind of half-whisper.  She did not lisp, yet
her articulation of one or two consonants was not absolutely perfect.

"Where did you get that flower, Elsie?" said Miss Darley.  It was a
rare alpine flower, which was found only in one spot among the rocks
of The Mountain.

"Where it grew," said Elsie Veneer.  "Take it."  The teacher could not
refuse her.  The girl's finger tips touched hers as she took it.  How
cold they were for a girl of such an organization!

The teacher went back to her seat.  She made an excuse for quitting
the schoolroom soon afterwards.  The first thing she did was to fling
the flower into her fireplace and rake the ashes over it.  The second
was to wash the tips of her fingers, as if she had been another Lady
Macbeth.  A poor, over-tasked, nervous creature,--we must not think
too much of her fancies.

After school was done, she finished the talk with the master which
had been so suddenly interrupted.  There were things spoken of which
may prove interesting by and by, but there are other matters we must
first attend to.




CHAPTER VII.

THE EVENT OF THE SEASON.

"Mr. and Mrs. Colonel Sprowle's compliments to Mr. Langdon and
requests the pleasure of his company at a social entertainment on
Wednesday evening next.

" Elm St. Monday."


On paper of a pinkish color and musky smell, with a large "S" at the
top, and an embossed border.  Envelop adherent, not sealed.
Addressed

          LANGDON ESQ.
          Present.

Brought by H. Frederic Sprowle, youngest son of the Colonel,--the H.
of course standing for the paternal Hezekiah, put in to please the
father, and reduced to its initial to please the mother, she having a
marked preference for Frederic.  Boy directed to wait for an answer.

"Mr. Langdon has the pleasure of accepting Mr. and Mrs. Colonel
Sprowle's polite invitation for Wednesday evening."

On plain paper, sealed with an initial.

In walking along the main street, Mr. Bernard had noticed a large
house of some pretensions to architectural display, namely,
unnecessarily projecting eaves, giving it a mushroomy aspect, wooden
mouldings at various available points, and a grandiose arched
portico.  It looked a little swaggering by the side of one or two of
the mansion-houses that were not far from it, was painted too bright
for Mr. Bernard's taste, had rather too fanciful a fence before it,
and had some fruit-trees planted in the front-yard, which to this
fastidious young gentleman implied a defective sense of the fitness
of things, not promising in people who lived in so large a house,
with a mushroom roof and a triumphal arch for its entrance.

This place was known as "Colonel Sprowle's villa," (genteel
friends,)--as "the elegant residence of our distinguished fellow-
citizen, Colonel Sprowle," (Rockland Weekly Universe,)--as "the neew
haouse," (old settlers,)--as "Spraowle's Folly, "(disaffected and
possibly envious neighbors,)--and in common discourse, as "the
Colonel's."

Hezekiah Sprowle, Esquire, Colonel Sprowle of the Commonwealth's
Militia, was a retired "merchant."  An India merchant he might,
perhaps, have been properly called; for he used to deal in West India
goods, such as coffee, sugar, and molasses, not to speak of rum,--
also in tea, salt fish, butter and cheese, oil and candles, dried
fruit, agricultural "p'doose" generally, industrial products, such
as boots and shoes, and various kinds of iron and wooden ware, and at
one end of the establishment in calicoes and other stuffs,--to say
nothing of miscellaneous objects of the most varied nature, from
sticks of candy, which tempted in the smaller youth with coppers in
their fists, up to ornamental articles of apparel, pocket-books,
breast-pins, gilt-edged Bibles, stationery, in short, everything
which was like to prove seductive to the rural population.  The
Colonel had made money in trade, and also by matrimony.  He had
married Sarah, daughter and heiress of the late Tekel Jordan, Esq.,
an old miser, who gave the town-clock, which carries his name to
posterity in large gilt letters as a generous benefactor of his
native place.  In due time the Colonel reaped the reward of well-
placed affections.  When his wife's inheritance fell in, he thought
he had money enough to give up trade, and therefore sold out his
"store," called in some dialects of the English language shop, and
his business.

Life became pretty hard work to him, of course, as soon as he had
nothing particular to do.  Country people with money enough not to
have to work are in much more danger than city people in the same
condition.  They get a specific look and character, which are the
same in all the villages where one studies them.  They very commonly
fall into a routine, the basis of which is going to some lounging-
place or other, a bar-room, a reading-room, or something of the kind.
They grow slovenly in dress, and wear the same hat forever.  They
have a feeble curiosity for news perhaps, which they take daily as a
man takes his bitters, and then fall silent and think they are
thinking.  But the mind goes out under this regimen, like a fire
without a draught; and it is not very strange, if the instinct of
mental self-preservation drives them to brandy-and-water, which makes
the hoarse whisper of memory musical for a few brief moments, and
puts a weak leer of promise on the features of the hollow-eyed
future.  The Colonel was kept pretty well in hand as yet by his wife,
and though it had happened to him once or twice to come home rather
late at night with a curious tendency to say the same thing twice and
even three times over, it had always been in very cold weather,--and
everybody knows that no one is safe to drink a couple of glasses of
wine in a warm room and go suddenly out into the cold air.

Miss Matilda Sprowle, sole daughter of the house, had reached the age
at which young ladies are supposed in technical language to have come
out, and thereafter are considered to be in company.

"There's one piece o' goods," said the Colonel to his wife, "that we
ha'n't disposed of, nor got a customer for yet.  That 's Matildy.  I
don't mean to set HER up at vaandoo.  I guess she can have her pick
of a dozen."

"She 's never seen anybody yet," said Mrs. Sprowle, who had had a
certain project for some time, but had kept quiet about it.  "Let's
have a party, and give her a chance to show herself and see some of
the young folks."

The Colonel was not very clear-headed, and he thought, naturally
enough, that the party was his own suggestion, because his remark led
to the first starting of the idea.  He entered into the plan,
therefore, with a feeling of pride as well as pleasure, and the great
project was resolved upon in a family council without a dissentient
voice.  This was the party, then, to which Mr. Bernard was going.
The town had been full of it for a week.  "Everybody was asked."  So
everybody said that was invited.  But how in respect of those who
were not asked?  If it had been one of the old mansion-houses that
was giving a party, the boundary between the favored and the slighted
families would have been known pretty well beforehand, and there
would have been no great amount of grumbling.  But the Colonel, for
all his title, had a forest of poor relations and a brushwood swamp
of shabby friends, for he had scrambled up to fortune, and now the
time was come when he must define his new social position.

This is always an awkward business in town or country.  An exclusive
alliance between two powers is often the same thing as a declaration
of war against a third.  Rockland was soon split into a triumphant
minority, invited to Mrs. Sprowle's party, and a great majority,
uninvited, of which the fraction just on the border line between
recognized "gentility" and the level of the ungloved masses was in an
active state of excitement and indignation.

"Who is she, I should like to know?"  said Mrs. Saymore, the tailor's
wife.  "There was plenty of folks in Rockland as good as ever Sally
Jordan was, if she had managed to pick up a merchant.  Other folks
could have married merchants, if their families was n't as wealthy as
them old skinflints that willed her their money," etc., etc.  Mrs.
Saymore expressed the feeling of many beside herself.  She had,
however, a special right to be proud of the name she bore.  Her
husband was own cousin to the Saymores of Freestone Avenue (who write
the name Seymour, and claim to be of the Duke of Somerset's family,
showing a clear descent from the Protector to Edward Seymour,
(1630,)--then a jump that would break a herald's neck to one Seth
Saymore,(1783,)--from whom to the head of the present family the line
is clear again).  Mrs. Saymore, the tailor's wife, was not invited,
because her husband mended clothes.  If he had confined himself
strictly to making them, it would have put a different face upon the
matter.

The landlord of the Mountain House and his lady were invited to Mrs.
Sprowle's party.  Not so the landlord of Pollard's Tahvern and his
lady.  Whereupon the latter vowed that they would have a party at
their house too, and made arrangements for a dance of twenty or
thirty couples, to be followed by an entertainment.  Tickets to this
"Social Ball" were soon circulated, and, being accessible to all at a
moderate price, admission to the "Elegant Supper" included, this
second festival promised to be as merry, if not as select, as the
great party.

Wednesday came.  Such doings had never been heard of in Rockland as
went on that day at the "villa."  The carpet had been taken up in the
long room, so that the young folks might have a dance.  Miss
Matilda's piano had been moved in, and two fiddlers and a clarionet-
player engaged to make music.  All kinds of lamps had been put in
requisition, and even colored wax-candles figured on the mantel-
pieces.  The costumes of the family had been tried on the day before:
the Colonel's black suit fitted exceedingly well; his lady's velvet
dress displayed her contours to advantage; Miss Matilda's flowered
silk was considered superb; the eldest son of the family, Mr. T.
Jordan Sprowle, called affectionately and elegantly "Geordie," voted
himself "stunnin'"; and even the small youth who had borne Mr.
Bernard's invitation was effective in a new jacket and trousers,
buttony in front, and baggy in the reverse aspect, as is wont to be
the case with the home-made garments of inland youngsters.

Great preparations had been made for the refection which was to be
part of the entertainment.  There was much clinking of borrowed
spoons, which were to be carefully counted, and much clicking of
borrowed china, which was to be tenderly handled, for nobody in the
country keeps those vast closets full of such things which one may
see in rich city-houses.  Not a great deal could be done in the way
of flowers, for there were no greenhouses, and few plants were out as
yet; but there were paper ornaments for the candlesticks, and colored
mats for the lamps, and all the tassels of the curtains and bells
were taken out of those brown linen bags, in which, for reasons
hitherto undiscovered, they are habitually concealed in some
households.  In the remoter apartments every imaginable operation was
going on at once,--roasting, boiling, baking, beating, rolling,
pounding in mortars, frying, freezing; for there was to be ice-cream
to-night of domestic manufacture;--and in the midst of all these
labors, Mrs. Sprowle and Miss Matilda were moving about, directing
and helping as they best might, all day long.  When the evening came,
it might be feared they would not be in just the state of mind and
body to entertain company.

--One would like to give a party now and then, if one could be a
billionnaire.--"Antoine, I am going to have twenty people to dine to-
day."  "Biens, Madame."  Not a word or thought more about it, but get
home in season to dress, and come down to your own table, one of your
own guests.--"Giuseppe, we are to have a party a week from to-night,
--five hundred invitations--there is the list."  The day comes.
"Madam, do you remember you have your party tonight?"  "Why, so I
have!  Everything right?  supper and all?"  "All as it should be,
Madam."

"Send up Victorine."  "Victorine, full toilet for this evening,--
pink, diamonds, and emeralds.  Coiffeur at seven.  Allez."--
Billionism, or even millionism, must be a blessed kind of state, with
health and clear conscience and youth and good looks,--but most
blessed is this, that it takes off all the mean cares which give
people the three wrinkles between the eyebrows, and leaves them free
to have a good time and make others have a good time, all the way
along from the charity that tips up unexpected loads of wood before
widows' houses, and leaves foundling turkeys upon poor men's door-
steps, and sets lean clergymen crying at the sight of anonymous
fifty-dollar bills, to the taste which orders a perfect banquet in
such sweet accord with every sense that everybody's nature flowers
out full--blown in its golden--glowing, fragrant atmosphere.

--A great party given by the smaller gentry of the interior is a kind
of solemnity, so to speak.  It involves so much labor and anxiety,--
its spasmodic splendors are so violently contrasted with the
homeliness of every-day family-life,--it is such a formidable matter
to break in the raw subordinates to the manege of the cloak-room and
the table,--there is such a terrible uncertainty in the results of
unfamiliar culinary operations,--so many feuds are involved in
drawing that fatal line which divides the invited from the uninvited
fraction of the local universe,--that, if the notes requested the
pleasure of the guests' company on "this solemn occasion," they would
pretty nearly express the true state of things.

The Colonel himself had been pressed into the service.  He had
pounded something in the great mortar.  He had agitated a quantity of
sweetened and thickened milk in what was called a cream-freezer.  At
eleven o'clock, A. M., he retired for a space.  On returning, his
color was noted to be somewhat heightened, and he showed a
disposition to be jocular with the female help,--which tendency,
displaying itself in livelier demonstrations than were approved at
head-quarters, led to his being detailed to out-of-door duties, such
as raking gravel, arranging places for horses to be hitched to, and
assisting in the construction of an arch of wintergreen at the porch
of the mansion.

A whiff from Mr. Geordie's cigar refreshed the toiling females from
time to time; for the windows had to be opened occasionally, while
all these operations were going on, and the youth amused himself with
inspecting the interior, encouraging the operatives now and then in
the phrases commonly employed by genteel young men,--for he had
perused an odd volume of "Verdant Green," and was acquainted with a
Sophomore from one of the fresh-water colleges.  "Go it on the feed!"
exclaimed this spirited young man.  "Nothin' like a good spread.
Grub enough and good liquor, that's the ticket.  Guv'nor'll do the
heavy polite, and let me alone for polishin' off the young charmers."
And Mr. Geordie looked expressively at a handmaid who was rolling
gingerbread, as if he were rehearsing for "Don Giovanni."

Evening came at last, and the ladies were forced to leave the scene
of their labors to array themselves for the coming festivities.  The
tables had been set in a back room, the meats were ready, the pickles
were displayed, the cake was baked, the blanc-mange had stiffened,
and the ice-cream had frozen.

At half past seven o'clock, the Colonel, in costume, came into the
front parlor, and proceeded to light the lamps.  Some were good-
humored enough and took the hint of a lighted match at once.  Others
were as vicious as they could be,--would not light on any terms, any
more than if they were filled with water, or lighted and smoked one
side of the chimney, or spattered a few sparks and sulked themselves
out, or kept up a faint show of burning, so that their ground glasses
looked as feebly phosphorescent as so many invalid fireflies.  With
much coaxing and screwing and pricking, a tolerable illumination was
at last achieved.  At eight there was a grand rustling of silks, and
Mrs. and Miss Sprowle descended from their respective bowers or
boudoirs.  Of course they were pretty well tired by this time, and
very glad to sit down,--having the prospect before them of being
obliged to stand for hours.  The Colonel walked about the parlor,
inspecting his regiment of lamps.  By and by Mr. Geordie entered.

"Mph! mph!"  he sniffed, as he came in.  "You smell of lamp-smoke
here."

That always galls people,--to have a new-comer accuse them of smoke
or close air, which they have got used to and do not perceive.  The
Colonel raged at the thought of his lamps' smoking, and tongued a few
anathemas inside of his shut teeth, but turned down two or three
wicks that burned higher than the rest.

Master H. Frederic next made his appearance, with questionable marks
upon his fingers and countenance.  Had been tampering with something
brown and sticky.  His elder brother grew playful, and caught him by
the baggy reverse of his more essential garment.

"Hush!" said Mrs. Sprowle,--"there 's the bell!"

Everybody took position at once, and began to look very smiling and
altogether at ease.--False alarm.  Only a parcel of spoons,--
"loaned," as the inland folks say when they mean lent, by a neighbor.

"Better late than never!" said the Colonel, "let me heft them
spoons."

Mrs. Sprowle came down into her chair again as if all her bones had
been bewitched out of her.

"I'm pretty nigh beat out a'ready," said she, "before any of the
folks has come."

They sat silent awhile, waiting for the first arrival.  How nervous
they got! and how their senses were sharpened!

"Hark!"  said Miss Matilda,--"what 's that rumblin'?"

It was a cart going over a bridge more than a mile off, which at any
other time they would not have heard.  After this there was a lull,
and poor Mrs. Sprowle's head nodded once or twice.  Presently a
crackling and grinding of gravel;--how much that means, when we are
waiting for those whom we long or dread to see!  Then a change in the
tone of the gravel-crackling.

"Yes, they have turned in at our gate.  They're comin'!  Mother!
mother!"

Everybody in position, smiling and at ease.  Bell rings.  Enter the
first set of visitors.  The Event of the Season has begun.

"Law! it's nothin' but the Cranes' folks!  I do believe Mahala 's
come in that old green de-laine she wore at the Surprise Party!"

Miss Matilda had peeped through a crack of the door and made this
observation and the remark founded thereon.  Continuing her attitude
of attention, she overheard Mrs. Crane and her two daughters
conversing in the attiring-room, up one flight.

"How fine everything is in the great house!"  said Mrs. Crane,--"jest
look at the picters!"

"Matildy Sprowle's drawin's," said Ada Azuba, the eldest daughter.

"I should think so," said Mahala Crane, her younger sister,--a wide-
awake girl, who had n't been to school for nothing, and performed a
little on the lead pencil herself.  "I should like to know whether
that's a hay-cock or a mountain!"

Miss Matilda winced; for this must refer to her favorite monochrome,
executed by laying on heavy shadows and stumping them down into
mellow harmony,--the style of drawing which is taught in six lessons,
and the kind of specimen which is executed in something less than one
hour.  Parents and other very near relatives are sometimes gratified
with these productions, and cause them to be framed and hung up, as
in the present instance.

"I guess we won't go down jest yet," said Mrs. Crane, "as folks don't
seem to have come."

So she began a systematic inspection of the dressing-room and its
conveniences.

"Mahogany four-poster;--come from the Jordans', I cal'la,te.
Marseilles quilt.  Ruffles all round the piller.  Chintz curtings,--
jest put up,--o' purpose for the party, I'll lay ye a dollar.---What
a nice washbowl!" (Taps it with a white knuckle belonging to a red
finger.) "Stone chaney.--Here's a bran'-new brush and comb,--and
here's a scent-bottle.  Come here, girls, and fix yourselves in the
glass, and scent your pocket-handkerchers."

And Mrs. Crane bedewed her own kerchief with some of the eau de
Cologne of native manufacture,--said on its label to be much superior
to the German article.

It was a relief to Mrs. and the Miss Cranes when the bell rang and
the next guests were admitted.  Deacon and Mrs. Soper,--Deacon Soper
of the Rev. Mr. Fairweather's church, and his lady.  Mrs. Deacon
Soper was directed, of course, to the ladies' dressing-room, and her
husband to the other apartment, where gentlemen were to leave their
outside coats and hats.  Then came Mr. and Mrs. Briggs, and then the
three Miss Spinneys, then Silas Peckham, Head of the Apollinean
Institute, and Mrs. Peckham, and more after them, until at last the
ladies' dressing-room got so full that one might have thought it was
a trap none of them could get out of.  In truth, they all felt a
little awkwardly.  Nobody wanted to be first to venture down-stairs.
At last Mr. Silas Peckham thought it was time to make a move for the
parlor, and for this purpose presented himself at the door of the
ladies' dressing-room.

"Lorindy, my dear!"  he exclaimed to Mrs. Peckham,--"I think there
can be no impropriety in our joining the family down-stairs."

Mrs. Peckham laid her large, flaccid arm in the sharp angle made by
the black sleeve which held the bony limb her husband offered, and
the two took the stair and struck out for the parlor.  The ice was
broken, and the dressing-room began to empty itself into the
spacious, lighted apartments below.

Mr. Silas Peckham slid into the room with Mrs. Peckham alongside,
like a shad convoying a jelly-fish.

"Good-evenin', Mrs. Sprowle!  I hope I see you well this evenin'.
How 's your haalth, Colonel Sprowle?"

"Very well, much obleeged to you.  Hope you and your good lady are
well.  Much pleased to see you.  Hope you'll enjoy yourselves.  We've
laid out to have everything in good shape,--spared no trouble nor
ex"---

"pence,"--said Silas Peckham.

Mrs. Colonel Sprowle, who, you remember, was a Jordan, had nipped the
Colonel's statement in the middle of the word Mr. Peckham finished,
with a look that jerked him like one of those sharp twitches women
keep giving a horse when they get a chance to drive one.

Mr. and Mrs. Crane, Miss Ada Azuba, and Miss Mahala Crane made their
entrance.  There had been a discussion about the necessity and
propriety of inviting this family, the head of which kept a small
shop for hats and boots and shoes.  The Colonel's casting vote had
carried it in the affirmative.--How terribly the poor old green
de-laine did cut up in the blaze of so many lamps and candles.

--Deluded little wretch, male or female, in town or country, going to
your first great party, how little you know the nature of the
ceremony in which you are to bear the part of victim!  What! are not
these garlands and gauzy mists and many-colored streamers which adorn
you, is not this music which welcomes you, this radiance that glows
about you, meant solely for your enjoyment, young miss of seventeen
or eighteen summers, now for the first time swimming unto the frothy,
chatoyant, sparkling, undulating sea of laces and silks and satins,
and white-armed, flower-crowned maidens struggling in their waves
beneath the lustres that make the false summer of the drawing-room?

Stop at the threshold!  This is a hall of judgment you are entering;
the court is in session; and if you move five steps forward, you will
be at its bar.

There was a tribunal once in France, as you may remember, called the
Chambre Ardente, the Burning Chamber.  It was hung all round with
lamps, and hence its name.  The burning chamber for the trial of
young maidens is the blazing ball-room.  What have they full-dressed
you, or rather half-dressed you for, do you think?  To make you look
pretty, of course!  Why have they hung a chandelier above you,
flickering all over with flames, so that it searches you like the
noonday sun, and your deepest dimple cannot hold a shadow?  To give
brilliancy to the gay scene, no doubt!--No, my clear!  Society is
inspecting you, and it finds undisguised surfaces and strong lights a
convenience in the process.  The dance answers the purpose of the
revolving pedestal upon which the "White Captive" turns, to show us
the soft, kneaded marble, which looks as if it had never been hard,
in all its manifold aspects of living loveliness.  No mercy for you,
my love!  Justice, strict justice, you shall certainly have,--neither
more nor less.  For, look you, there are dozens, scores, hundreds,
with whom you must be weighed in the balance; and you have got to
learn that the "struggle for life" Mr. Charles Darwin talks about
reaches to vertebrates clad in crinoline, as well as to mollusks in
shells, or articulates in jointed scales, or anything that fights for
breathing-room and food and love in any coat of fur or feather!
Happy they who can flash defiance from bright eyes and snowy
shoulders back into the pendants of the insolent lustres!

--Miss Mahala Crane did not have these reflections; and no young girl
ever did, or ever will, thank Heaven!  Her keen eyes sparkled under
her plainly parted hair and the green de-laine moulded itself in
those unmistakable lines of natural symmetry in which Nature indulges
a small shopkeeper's daughter occasionally as well as a wholesale
dealer's young ladies.  She would have liked a new dress as much as
any other girl, but she meant to go and have a good time at any rate.

The guests were now arriving in the drawing-room pretty fast, and the
Colonel's hand began to burn a good deal with the sharp squeezes
which many of the visitors gave it.  Conversation, which had begun
like a summer-shower, in scattering drops, was fast becoming
continuous, and occasionally rising into gusty swells, with now and
then a broad-chested laugh from some Captain or Major or other
military personage,--for it may be noted that all large and loud men
in the unpaved districts bear military titles.

Deacon Soper came up presently, and entered into conversation with
Colonel Sprowle.

"I hope to see our pastor present this evenin'," said the Deacon.

"I don't feel quite sure," the Colonel answered.  "His dyspepsy has
been bad on him lately.  He wrote to say, that, Providence
permittin', it would be agreeable to him to take a part in the
exercises of the evenin'; but I mistrusted he did n't mean to come.
To tell the truth, Deacon Soper, I rather guess he don't like the
idee of dancin', and some of the other little arrangements."

"Well," said the Deacon, "I know there's some condemns dancin'.  I've
heerd a good deal of talk about it among the folks round.  Some have
it that it never brings a blessin' on a house to have dancin' in it.
Judge Tileston died, you remember, within a month after he had his
great ball, twelve year ago, and some thought it was in the natur' of
a judgment.  I don't believe in any of them notions.  If a man
happened to be struck dead the night after he'd been givin' a ball,"
(the Colonel loosened his black stock a little, and winked and
swallowed two or three times,) "I should n't call it a judgment,--I
should call it a coincidence.  But I 'm a little afraid our pastor
won't come.  Somethin' or other's the matter with Mr. Fairweather.  I
should sooner expect to see the old Doctor come over out of the
Orthodox parsonage-house."

"I've asked him," said the Colonel.

"Well?"  said Deacon Soper.

"He said he should like to come, but he did n't know what his people
would say.  For his part, he loved to see young folks havin' their
sports together, and very often felt as if he should like to be one
of 'em himself.  'But,' says I, 'Doctor, I don't say there won't be a
little dancin'.'  'Don't!' says he, 'for I want Letty to go,' (she's
his granddaughter that's been stayin' with him,) 'and Letty 's mighty
fond of dancin'.  You know,' says the Doctor, 'it is n't my business
to settle whether other people's children should dance or not.'  And
the Doctor looked as if he should like to rigadoon and sashy across
as well as the young one he was talkin' about.  He 's got blood in
him, the old Doctor has.  I wish our little man and him would swop
pulpits."

Deacon Soper started and looked up into the Colonel's face, as if to
see whether he was in earnest.

Mr. Silas Peckham and his lady joined the group.

"Is this to be a Temperance Celebration, Mrs. Sprowle?" asked Mr.
Silas Peckham.

Mrs. Sprowle replied, "that there would be lemonade and srub for
those that preferred such drinks, but that the Colonel had given
folks to understand that he did n't mean to set in judgment on the
marriage in Canaan, and that those that didn't like srub and such
things would find somethin' that would suit them better."

Deacon Soper's countenance assumed a certain air of restrained
cheerfulness.  The conversation rose into one of its gusty paroxysms
just then.  Master H. Frederic got behind a door and began performing
the experiment of stopping and unstopping his ears in rapid
alternation, greatly rejoicing in the singular effect of mixed
conversation chopped very small, like the contents of a mince-pie, or
meat-pie, as it is more forcibly called in the deep-rutted villages
lying along the unsalted streams.  All at once it grew silent just
round the door, where it had been loudest,--and the silence spread
itself like a stain, till it hushed everything but a few corner-
duets.  A dark, sad-looking, middle-aged gentleman entered the
parlor, with a young lady on his arm,--his daughter, as it seemed,
for she was not wholly unlike him in feature, and of the same dark
complexion.

"Dudley Venner," exclaimed a dozen people, in startled, but half-
suppressed tones.

"What can have brought Dudley out to-night?" said Jefferson Buck, a
young fellow, who had been interrupted in one of the corner-duets
which he was executing in concert with Miss Susy Pettingill.

"How do I know, Jeff?"  was Miss Susy's answer.  Then, after a
pause,--"Elsie made him come, I guess.  Go ask Dr. Kittredge; he
knows all about 'em both, they say."

Dr. Kittredge, the leading physician of Rockland, was a shrewd old
man, who looked pretty keenly into his patients through his
spectacles, and pretty widely at men, women, and things in general
over them.  Sixty-three years old,--just the year of the grand
climacteric.  A bald crown, as every doctor should have.  A
consulting practitioner's mouth; that is, movable round the corners
while the case is under examination, but both corners well drawn down
and kept so when the final opinion is made up.  In fact, the Doctor
was often sent for to act as "caounsel," all over the county, and
beyond it.  He kept three or four horses, sometimes riding in the
saddle, commonly driving in a sulky, pretty fast, and looking
straight before him, so that people got out of the way of bowing to
him as he passed on the road.  There was some talk about his not
being so long-sighted as other folks, but his old patients laughed
and looked knowing when this was spoken of.

The Doctor knew a good many things besides how to drop tinctures and
shake out powders.  Thus, he knew a horse, and, what is harder to
understand, a horse-dealer, and was a match for him.  He knew what a
nervous woman is, and how to manage her.  He could tell at a glance
when she is in that condition of unstable equilibrium in which a
rough word is like a blow to her, and the touch of unmagnetized
fingers reverses all her nervous currents.  It is not everybody that
enters into the soul of Mozart's or Beethoven's harmonies; and there
are vital symphonies in B flat, and other low, sad keys, which a
doctor may know as little of as a hurdy-gurdy player of the essence
of those divine musical mysteries.  The Doctor knew the difference
between what men say and what they mean as well as most people.  When
he was listening to common talk, he was in the habit of looking over
his spectacles; if he lifted his head so as to look through them at
the person talking, he was busier with that person's thoughts than
with his words.

Jefferson Buck was not bold enough to confront the Doctor with Miss
Susy's question, for he did not look as if he were in the mood to
answer queries put by curious young people.  His eyes were fixed
steadily on the dark girl, every movement of whom he seemed to
follow.

She was, indeed, an apparition of wild beauty, so unlike the girls
about her that it seemed nothing more than natural, that, when she
moved, the groups should part to let her pass through them, and that
she should carry the centre of all looks and thoughts with her.  She
was dressed to please her own fancy, evidently, with small regard to
the modes declared correct by the Rockland milliners and mantua-
makers.  Her heavy black hair lay in a braided coil, with a long gold
pin shat through it like a javelin.  Round her neck was a golden
torque, a round, cord-like chain, such as the Gaols used to wear; the
"Dying Gladiator" has it.  Her dress was a grayish watered silk; her
collar was pinned with a flashing diamond brooch, the stones looking
as fresh as morning dew-drops, but the silver setting of the past
generation; her arms were bare, round, but slender rather than large,
in keeping with her lithe round figure.  On her wrists she wore
bracelets: one was a circlet of enamelled scales; the other looked as
if it might have been Cleopatra's asp, with its body turned to gold
and its, eyes to emeralds.

Her father--for Dudley Venner was her father--looked like a man of
culture and breeding, but melancholy and with a distracted air, as
one whose life had met some fatal cross or blight.  He saluted hardly
anybody except his entertainers and the Doctor.  One would have said,
to look at him, that he was not at the party by choice; and it was
natural enough to think, with Susy Pettingill, that it must have been
a freak of the dark girl's which brought him there, for he had the
air of a shy and sad-hearted recluse.

It was hard to say what could have brought Elsie Venner to the party.
Hardly anybody seemed to know her, and she seemed not at all disposed
to make acquaintances.  Here and there was one of the older girls
from the Institute, but she appeared to have nothing in common with
them.  Even in the schoolroom, it may be remembered, she sat apart by
her own choice, and now in the midst of the crowd she made a circle
of isolation round herself.  Drawing her arm out of her father's, she
stood against the wall, and looked, with a strange, cold glitter in
her eyes, at the crowd which moved and babbled before her.

The old Doctor came up to her by and by.

"Well, Elsie, I am quite surprised to find you here.  Do tell me how
you happened to do such a good-natured thing as to let us see you at
such a great party."

"It's been dull at the mansion-house," she said, "and I wanted to get
out of it.  It's too lonely there,--there's nobody to hate since
Dick's gone."

The Doctor laughed good-naturedly, as if this were an amusing bit of
pleasantry,--but he lifted his head and dropped his eyes a little, so
as to see her through his spectacles.  She narrowed her lids
slightly, as one often sees a sleepy cat narrow hers,--somewhat as
you may remember our famous Margaret used to, if you remember her at
all,--so that her eyes looked very small, but bright as the diamonds
on her breast.  The old Doctor felt very oddly as she looked at him;
be did not like the feeling, so he dropped his head and lifted his
eyes and looked at her over his spectacles again.

"And how have you all been at the mansion house?" said the Doctor.

"Oh, well enough.  But Dick's gone, and there's nobody left but
Dudley and I and the people.  I'm tired of it.  What kills anybody
quickest, Doctor?"  Then, in a whisper, "I ran away again the other
day, you know."

"Where did you go?"  The Doctor spoke in a low, serious tone.

"Oh, to the old place.  Here, I brought this for you."

The Doctor started as she handed him a flower of the Atragene
Americana, for he knew that there was only one spot where it grew,
and that not one where any rash foot, least of all a thin-shod
woman's foot, should venture.

"How long were you gone?" said the Doctor.

"Only one night.  You should have heard the horns blowing and the
guns firing.  Dudley was frightened out of his wits.  Old Sophy told
him she'd had a dream, and that I should be found in Dead-Man's
Hollow, with a great rock lying on me.  They hunted all over it, but
they did n't find me,--I was farther up."

Doctor Kittredge looked cloudy and worried while she was speaking,
but forced a pleasant professional smile, as he said cheerily, and as
if wishing to change the subject,

"Have a good dance this evening, Elsie.  The fiddlers are tuning up.
Where 's the young master? has he come yet? or is he going to be
late, with the other great folks?"

The girl turned away without answering, and looked toward the door.

The "great folks," meaning the mansion-house gentry, were just
beginning to come; Dudley Venner and his daughter had been the first
of them.  Judge Thornton, white-headed, fresh-faced, as good at sixty
as he was at forty, with a youngish second wife, and one noble
daughter, Arabella, who, they said, knew as much law as her father, a
stately, Portia like girl, fit for a premier's wife, not like to find
her match even in the great cities she sometimes visited; the
Trecothicks, the family of a merchant, (in the larger sense,) who,
having made himself rich enough by the time he had reached middle
life, threw down his ledger as Sylla did his dagger, and retired to
make a little paradise around him in one of the stateliest residences
of the town, a family inheritance; the Vaughans, an old Rockland
race, descended from its first settlers, Toryish in tendency in
Revolutionary times, and barely escaping confiscation or worse; the
Dunhams, a new family, dating its gentility only as far back as the
Honorable Washington Dunham, M. C., but turning out a clever boy or
two that went to college; and some showy girls with white necks and
fat arms who had picked up professional husbands: these were the
principal mansion-house people.  All of them had made it a point to
come; and as each of them entered, it seemed to Colonel and Mrs.
Sprowle that the lamps burned up with a more cheerful light, and that
the fiddles which sounded from the uncarpeted room were all half a
tone higher and half a beat quicker.

Mr. Bernard came in later than any of them; he had been busy with his
new duties.  He looked well and that is saying a good deal; for
nothing but a gentleman is endurable in full dress.  Hair that masses
well, a head set on with an air, a neckerchief tied cleverly by an
easy, practised hand, close-fitting gloves, feet well shaped and well
covered,---these advantages can make us forgive the odious sable
broadcloth suit, which appears to have been adopted by society on the
same principle that condemned all the Venetian gondolas to perpetual
and uniform blackness.  Mr. Bernard, introduced by Mr. Geordie, made
his bow to the Colonel and his lady and to Miss Matilda, from whom he
got a particularly gracious curtsy, and then began looking about him
for acquaintances.  He found two or three faces he knew,--many more
strangers.  There was Silas Peckham,--there was no mistaking him;
there was the inelastic amplitude of Mrs. Peckham; few of the
Apollinean girls, of course, they not being recognized members of
society,--but there is one with the flame in her cheeks and the fire
in her eyes, the girl of vigorous tints and emphatic outlines, whom
we saw entering the schoolroom the other day.  Old Judge Thornton has
his eyes on her, and the Colonel steals a look every now and then at
the red brooch which lifts itself so superbly into the light, as if
he thought it a wonderfully becoming ornament.  Mr. Bernard himself
was not displeased with the general effect of the rich-blooded
schoolgirl, as she stood under the bright lamps, fanning herself in
the warm, languid air, fixed in a kind of passionate surprise at the
new life which seemed to be flowering out in her consciousness.
Perhaps he looked at her somewhat steadily, as some others had done;
at any rate, she seemed to feel that she was looked at, as people
often do, and, turning her eyes suddenly on him, caught his own on
her face, gave him a half-bashful smile, and threw in a blush
involuntarily which made it more charming.

"What can I do better," he said to himself, "than have a dance with
Rosa Milburn?  "So he carried his handsome pupil into the next room
and took his place with her in a cotillon.  Whether the breath of the
Goddess of Love could intoxicate like the cup of Circe,--whether a
woman is ever phosphorescent with the luminous vapor of life that she
exhales,--these and other questions which relate to occult influences
exercised by certain women we will not now discuss.  It is enough
that Mr. Bernard was sensible of a strange fascination, not wholly
new to him, nor unprecedented in the history of human experience, but
always a revelation when it comes over us for the first or the
hundredth time, so pale is the most recent memory by the side of the
passing moment with the flush of any new-born passion on its cheek.
Remember that Nature makes every man love all women, and trusts the
trivial matter of special choice to the commonest accident.

If Mr. Bernard had had nothing to distract his attention, he might
have thought too much about his handsome partner, and then gone home
and dreamed about her, which is always dangerous, and waked up
thinking of her still, and then begun to be deeply interested in her
studies, and so on, through the whole syllogism which ends in
Nature's supreme quod erat demonstrandum.  What was there to distract
him or disturb him?  He did not know,--but there was something.  This
sumptuous creature, this Eve just within the gate of an untried
Paradise, untutored in the ways of the world, but on tiptoe to reach
the fruit of the tree of knowledge,--alive to the moist vitality of
that warm atmosphere palpitating with voices and music, as the flower
of some dioecious plant which has grown in a lone corner and suddenly
unfolding its corolla on some hot-breathing June evening, feels that
the air is perfumed with strange odors and loaded with golden dust
wafted from those other blossoms with which its double life is
shared,--this almost over-womanized woman might well have bewitched
him, but that he had a vague sense of a counter-charm.  It was,
perhaps, only the same consciousness that some one was looking at him
which he himself had just given occasion to in his partner.
Presently, in one of the turns of the dance, he felt his eyes drawn
to a figure he had not distinctly recognized, though he had dimly
felt its presence, and saw that Elsie Venner was looking at him as if
she saw nothing else but him.  He was not a nervous person, like the
poor lady-teacher, yet the glitter of the diamond eyes affected him
strangely.  It seemed to disenchant the air, so full a moment before
of strange attractions.  He became silent, and dreamy, as it were.
The round-limbed beauty at his side crushed her gauzy draperies
against him, as they trod the figure of the dance together, but it
was no more to him than if an old nurse had laid her hand on his
sleeve.  The young girl chafed at his seeming neglect, and her
imperious blood mounted into her cheeks; but he appeared unconscious
of it.

"There is one of our young ladies I must speak to," he said,--and was
just leaving his partner's side.

"Four hands all round?" shouted the first violin,--and Mr. Bernard
found himself seized and whirled in a circle out of which he could
not escape, and then forced to "cross over," and then to "dozy do,"
as the maestro had it,--and when, on getting back to his place, he
looked for Elsie Venner, she was gone.

The dancing went on briskly.  Some of the old folks looked on, others
conversed in groups and pairs, and so the evening wore along, until a
little after ten o'clock.  About this time there was noticed an
increased bustle in the passages, with a considerable opening and
shutting of doors.  Presently it began to be whispered about that
they were going to have supper.  Many, who had never been to any
large party before, held their breath for a moment at this
announcement.  It was rather with a tremulous interest than with open
hilarity that the rumor was generally received.

One point the Colonel had entirely forgotten to settle.  It was a
point involving not merely propriety, but perhaps principle also, or
at least the good report of the house,--and he had never thought to
arrange it.  He took Judge Thornton aside and whispered the important
question to him,--in his distress of mind, mistaking pockets and
taking out his bandanna instead of his white handkerchief to wipe his
forehead.

"Judge," he said, "do you think, that, before we commence refreshing
ourselves at the tables, it would be the proper thing to--crave a--to
request Deacon Soper or some other elderly person--to ask a
blessing?"

The Judge looked as grave as if he were about giving the opinion of
the Court in the great India-rubber case.

"On the whole," he answered, after a pause, "I should think it might,
perhaps, be dispensed with on this occasion.  Young folks are noisy,
and it is awkward to have talking and laughing going on while
blessing is being asked.  Unless a clergyman is present and makes a
point of it, I think it will hardly be expected."

The Colonel was infinitely relieved.  "Judge, will you take Mrs.
Sprowle in to supper?  "And the Colonel returned the compliment by
offering his arm to Mrs. Judge Thornton.

The door of the supper-room was now open, and the company, following
the lead of the host and hostess, began to stream into it, until it
was pretty well filled.

There was an awful kind of pause.  Many were beginning to drop their
heads and shut their eyes, in anticipation of the usual petition
before a meal; some expected the music to strike up,--others, that an
oration would now be delivered by the Colonel.

"Make yourselves at home, ladies and gentlemen," said the Colonel;
"good things were made to eat, and you're welcome to all you see
before you."

So saying he attacked a huge turkey which stood at the head of the
table; and his example being followed first by the bold, then by the
doubtful, and lastly by the timid, the clatter soon made the circuit
of the tables.  Some were shocked, however, as the Colonel had feared
they would be, at the want of the customary invocation.  Widow Leech,
a kind of relation, who had to be invited, and who came with her old,
back-country-looking string of gold beads round her neck, seemed to
feel very serious about it.

"If she'd ha' known that folks would begrutch cravin' a blessin' over
sech a heap o' provisions, she'd rather ha' staid t' home.  It was a
bad sign, when folks was n't grateful for the baounties of
Providence."

The elder Miss Spinney, to whom she made this remark, assented to it,
at the same time ogling a piece of frosted cake, which she presently
appropriated with great refinement of manner,--taking it between her
thumb and forefinger, keeping the others well spread and the little
finger in extreme divergence, with a graceful undulation of the neck,
and a queer little sound in her throat, as of an M that wanted to get
out and perished in the attempt.

The tables now presented an animated spectacle.  Young fellows of the
more dashing sort, with high stand-up collars and voluminous bows to
their neckerchiefs, distinguished themselves by cutting up fowls and
offering portions thereof to the buxom girls these knowing ones had
commonly selected.

"A bit of the wing, Roxy, or of the--under limb?"

The first laugh broke out at this, but it was premature, a sporadic
laugh, as Dr. Kittredge would have said, which did not become
epidemic.  People were very solemn as yet, many of them being new to
such splendid scenes, and crushed, as it were, in the presence of so
much crockery and so many silver spoons, and such a variety of
unusual viands and beverages.  When the laugh rose around Roxy and
her saucy beau, several looked in that direction with an anxious
expression, as if something had happened, a lady fainted, for
instance, or a couple of lively fellows come to high words.

"Young folks will be young folks," said Deacon Soper.  "No harm done.
Least said soonest mended."

"Have some of these shell-oysters?"  said the Colonel to Mrs.
Trecothick.

A delicate emphasis on the word shell implied that the Colonel knew
what was what.  To the New England inland native, beyond the reach of
the east winds, the oyster unconditioned, the oyster absolute,
without a qualifying adjective, is the pickled oyster.  Mrs.
Trecothick, who knew very well that an oyster long out of his shell
(as is apt to be the case with the rural bivalve) gets homesick and
loses his sprightliness, replied, with the pleasantest smile in the
world, that the chicken she had been helped to was too delicate to be
given up even for the greater rarity.  But the word "shell-oysters"
had been overheard; and there was a perceptible crowding movement
towards their newly discovered habitat, a large soup-tureen.

Silas Peckham had meantime fallen upon another locality of these
recent mollusks.  He said nothing, but helped himself freely, and
made a sign to Mrs. Peckham.

"Lorindy," he whispered, "shell-oysters"

And ladled them out to her largely, without betraying any emotion,
just as if they had been the natural inland or pickled article.

After the more solid portion of the banquet had been duly honored,
the cakes and sweet preparations of various kinds began to get their
share of attention.  There were great cakes and little cakes, cakes
with raisins in them, cakes with currants, and cakes without either;
there were brown cakes and yellow cakes, frosted cakes, glazed cakes,
hearts and rounds, and jumbles, which playful youth slip over the
forefinger before spoiling their annular outline.  There were mounds
of blo'monje, of the arrowroot variety,--that being undistinguishable
from such as is made with Russia isinglass.  There were jellies,
which had been shaking, all the time the young folks were dancing in
the next room, as if they were balancing to partners.  There were
built-up fabrics, called Charlottes, caky externally, pulpy within;
there were also marangs, and likewise custards,--some of the
indolent-fluid sort, others firm, in which every stroke of the
teaspoon left a smooth, conchoidal surface like the fracture of
chalcedony, with here and there a little eye like what one sees in
cheeses.  Nor was that most wonderful object of domestic art called
trifle wanting, with its charming confusion of cream and cake and
almonds and jam and jelly and wine and cinnamon and froth; nor yet
the marvellous floating-island,---name suggestive of all that is
romantic in the imaginations of youthful palates.

"It must have cost you a sight of work, to say nothin' of money, to
get all this beautiful confectionery made for the party," said Mrs.
Crane to Mrs. Sprowle.

"Well, it cost some consid'able labor, no doubt," said Mrs. Sprowle.
"Matilda and our girls and I made 'most all the cake with our own
hands, and we all feel some tired; but if folks get what suits 'em,
we don't begrudge the time nor the work.  But I do feel thirsty,"
said the poor lady, "and I think a glass of srub would do my throat
good; it's dreadful dry.  Mr. Peckham, would you be so polite as to
pass me a glass of srub?"

Silas Peckham bowed with great alacrity, and took from the table a
small glass cup, containing a fluid reddish in hue and subacid in
taste.  This was srub, a beverage in local repute, of questionable
nature, but suspected of owing its tint and sharpness to some kind of
syrup derived from the maroon-colored fruit of the sumac.  There were
similar small cups on the table filled with lemonade, and here and
there a decanter of Madeira wine, of the Marsala kind, which some
prefer to, and many more cannot distinguish from, that which comes
from the Atlantic island.

"Take a glass of wine, Judge," said, the Colonel; "here is an article
that I rather think 'll suit you."

The Judge knew something of wines, and could tell all the famous old
Madeiras from each other, "Eclipse," "Juno," the almost fabulously
scarce and precious "White-top," and the rest.  He struck the
nativity of the Mediterranean Madeira before it had fairly moistened
his lip.

"A sound wine, Colonel, and I should think of a genuine vintage.
Your very good health."

"Deacon Soper," said the Colonel, "here is some Madary Judge Thornton
recommends.  Let me fill you a glass of it."

The Deacon's eyes glistened.  He was one of those consistent
Christians who stick firmly by the first miracle and Paul's advice to
Timothy.

"A little good wine won't hurt anybody," said the Deacon.  "Plenty,--
plenty,--plenty.  There!"  He had not withdrawn his glass, while the
Colonel was pouring, for fear it should spill, and now it was running
over.

--It is very odd how all a man's philosophy and theology are at the
mercy of a few drops of a fluid which the chemists say consists of
nothing but C4, O2, H6.  The Deacon's theology fell off several points
towards latitudinarianism in the course of the next ten minutes.  He
had a deep inward sense that everything was as it should be, human
nature included.  The little accidents of humanity, known
collectively to moralists as sin, looked very venial to his growing
sense of universal brotherhood and benevolence.

"It will all come right," the Deacon said to himself,--"I feel a
joyful conviction that everything is for the best.  I am favored with
a blessed peace of mind, and a very precious season of good feelin'
toward my fellow-creturs."

A lusty young fellow happened to make a quick step backward just at
that instant, and put his heel, with his weight on top of it, upon
the Deacon's toes.

"Aigh!  What the d' d' didos are y' abaout with them great huffs o'
yourn?" said the Deacon, with an expression upon his features not
exactly that of peace and good-will to men.  The lusty young fellow
apologized; but the Deacon's face did not come right, and his
theology backed round several points in the direction of total
depravity.

Some of the dashing young men in stand-up collars and extensive
neckties, encouraged by Mr. Geordie, made quite free with the
"Ma,dary," and even induced some of the more stylish girls--not of
the mansion-house set, but of the tip-top two-story families--to
taste a little.  Most of these young ladies made faces at it, and
declared it was "perfectly horrid," with that aspect of veracity
peculiar to their age and sex.

About this time a movement was made on the part of some of the
mansion-house people to leave the supper-table.  Miss Jane Trecothick
had quietly hinted to her mother that she had had enough of it.  Miss
Arabella Thornton had whispered to her father that he had better
adjourn this court to the next room.  There were signs of migration,
--a loosening of people in their places,--a looking about for arms to
hitch on to.

"Stop!"  said the Colonel.  "There's something coming yet.
--Ice-cream!"

The great folks saw that the play was not over yet, and that it was
only polite to stay and see it out.  The word "ice-cream" was no
sooner whispered than it passed from one to another all down the
tables.  The effect was what might have been anticipated.  Many of
the guests had never seen this celebrated product of human skill, and
to all the two-story population of Rockland it was the last
expression of the art of pleasing and astonishing the human palate.
Its appearance had been deferred for several reasons: first, because
everybody would have attacked it, if it had come in with the other
luxuries; secondly, because undue apprehensions were entertained
(owing to want of experience) of its tendency to deliquesce and
resolve itself with alarming rapidity into puddles of creamy fluid;
and, thirdly, because the surprise would make a grand climax to
finish off the banquet.

There is something so audacious in the conception of ice-cream, that
it is not strange that a population undebauched by the luxury of
great cities looks upon it with a kind of awe and speaks of it with a
certain emotion.  This defiance of the seasons, forcing Nature to do
her work of congelation in the face of her sultriest noon, might well
inspire a timid mind with fear lest human art were revolting against
the Higher Powers, and raise the same scruples which resisted the use
of ether and chloroform in certain contingencies.  Whatever may be
the cause, it is well known that the announcement at any private
rural entertainment that there is to be ice-cream produces an
immediate and profound impression.  It may be remarked, as aiding
this impression, that exaggerated ideas are entertained as to the
dangerous effects this congealed food may produce on persons not in
the most robust health.

There was silence as the pyramids of ice were placed on the table,
everybody looking on in admiration.  The Colonel took a knife and
assailed the one at the head of the table.  When he tried to cut off
a slice, it didn't seem to understand it, however, and only tipped,
as if it wanted to upset.  The Colonel attacked it on the other side,
and it tipped just as badly the other way.  It was awkward for the
Colonel.  "Permit me," said the Judge,--and he took the knife and
struck a sharp slanting stroke which sliced off a piece just of the
right size, and offered it to Mrs. Sprowle.  This act of dexterity
was much admired by the company.

The tables were all alive again.

"Lorindy, here's a plate of ice-cream," said Silas Peckham.

"Come, Mahaly," said a fresh-looking young-fellow with a saucerful in
each hand, "here's your ice-cream;--let's go in the corner and have a
celebration, us two."  And the old green de-lame, with the young
curves under it to make it sit well, moved off as pleased apparently
as if it had been silk velvet with thousand-dollar laces over it.

"Oh, now, Miss Green! do you think it's safe to put that cold stuff
into your stomick?" said the Widow Leech to a young married lady,
who, finding the air rather warm, thought a little ice would cool her
down very nicely.  "It's jest like eatin' snowballs.  You don't look
very rugged; and I should be dreadful afeard, if I was you."

"Carrie," said old Dr. Kittredge, who had overheard this,--"how well
you're looking this evening!  But you must be tired and heated;--sit
down here, and let me give you a good slice of ice-cream.  How you
young folks do grow up, to be sure!  I don't feel quite certain
whether it's you or your older sister, but I know it 's somebody I
call Carrie, and that I 've known ever since."

A sound something between a howl and an oath startled the company and
broke off the Doctor's sentence.  Everybody's eyes turned in the
direction from which it came.  A group instantly gathered round the
person who had uttered it, who was no other than Deacon Soper.

"He's chokin'! he's chokin'!" was the first exclamation,--"slap him
on the back!"

Several heavy fists beat such a tattoo on his spine that the Deacon
felt as if at least one of his vertebrae would come up.

"He's black in the face," said Widow Leech, "he 's swallered
somethin' the wrong way.  Where's the Doctor?--let the Doctor get to
him, can't ye?"

"If you will move, my good lady, perhaps I can," said Doctor
Kittredge, in a calm tone of voice.  "He's not choking, my friends,"
the Doctor added immediately, when he got sight of him.

"It 's apoplexy,--I told you so,--don't you see how red he is in the
face?" said old Mrs. Peake, a famous woman for "nussin" sick folks,
--determined to be a little ahead of the Doctor.

"It's not apoplexy," said Dr. Kittredge.

"What is it, Doctor? what is it?  Will he die?  Is he dead?--Here's
his poor wife, the Widow Soper that is to be, if she a'n't a'ready"

"Do be quiet, my good woman," said Dr. Kittredge.--"Nothing serious,
I think, Mrs. Soper.  Deacon!"

The sudden attack of Deacon Soper had begun with the extraordinary
sound mentioned above.  His features had immediately assumed an
expression of intense pain, his eyes staring wildly, and, clapping
his hands to his face, he had rocked his head backward and forward in
speechless agony.

At the Doctor's sharp appeal the Deacon lifted his head.

"It's all right," said the Doctor, as soon as he saw his face.  "The
Deacon had a smart attack of neuralgic pain.  That 's all.  Very
severe, but not at all dangerous."

The Doctor kept his countenance, but his diaphragm was shaking the
change in iris waistcoat-pockets with subterranean laughter.  He had
looked through his spectacles and seen at once what had happened.
The Deacon, not being in the habit of taking his nourishment in the
congealed state, had treated the ice-cream as a pudding of a rare
species, and, to make sure of doing himself justice in its
distribution, had taken a large mouthful of it without the least
precaution.  The consequence was a sensation as if a dentist were
killing the nerves of twenty-five teeth at once with hot irons, or
cold ones, which would hurt rather worse.

The Deacon swallowed something with a spasmodic effort, and recovered
pretty soon and received the congratulations of his friends.  There
were different versions of the expressions he had used at the onset
of his complaint,--some of the reported exclamations involving a
breach of propriety, to say the least,--but it was agreed that a man
in an attack of neuralgy wasn't to be judged of by the rules that
applied to other folks.

The company soon after this retired from the supper-room.  The
mansion-house gentry took their leave, and the two-story people soon
followed.  Mr. Bernard had stayed an hour or two, and left soon after
he found that Elsie Venner and her father had disappeared.  As he
passed by the dormitory of the Institute, he saw a light glimmering
from one of its upper rooms, where the lady-teacher was still waking.
His heart ached, when he remembered, that, through all these hours of
gayety, or what was meant for it, the patient girl had been at work
in her little chamber; and he looked up at the silent stars, as if to
see that they were watching over her.  The planet Mars was burning
like a red coal; the northern constellation was slanting downward
about its central point of flame; and while he looked, a falling star
slid from the zenith and was lost.

He reached his chamber and was soon dreaming over the Event of the
Season.




CHAPTER VIII.

THE MORNING AFTER.

Colonel Sprowle's family arose late the next morning.  The fatigues
and excitements of the evening and the preparation for it were
followed by a natural collapse, of which somnolence was a leading
symptom.  The sun shone into the window at a pretty well opened angle
when the Colonel first found himself sufficiently awake to address
his yet slumbering spouse.

"Sally!"  said the Colonel, in a voice that was a little husky,--for
he had finished off the evening with an extra glass or two of
"Madary," and had a somewhat rusty and headachy sense of renewed
existence, on greeting the rather advanced dawn,--"Sally!"

"Take care o' them custard-cups!  There they go!"

Poor Mrs. Sprowle was fighting the party over in her dream; and as
the visionary custard-cups crashed down through one lobe of her brain
into another, she gave a start as if an inch of lightning from a
quart Leyden jar had jumped into one of her knuckles with its sudden
and lively poonk!

"Sally!" said the Colonel,--"wake up, wake up.  What 'r' y' dreamin'
abaout?"

Mrs. Sprowle raised herself, by a sort of spasm, sur son seant, as
they say in France,--up on end, as we have it in New England.  She
looked first to the left, then to the right, then straight before
her, apparently without seeing anything, and at last slowly settled
down, with her two eyes, blank of any particular meaning, directed
upon the Colonel.

"What time is 't?"  she said.

"Ten o'clock.  What y' been dreamin' abaout?  Y' giv a jump like a
hopper-grass.  Wake up, wake UP!  Th' party 's over, and y' been
asleep all the mornin'.  The party's over, I tell ye!  Wake up!"

"Over!"  said Mrs. Sprowle, who began to define her position at
last,--"over!  I should think 't was time 't was over!  It's lasted a
hundud year.  I've been workin' for that party longer 'n Methuselah's
lifetime, sence I been asleep.  The pies would n' bake, and the
blo'monje would n' set, and the ice-cream would n' freeze, and all
the folks kep' comin' 'n' comin' 'n' comin',--everybody I ever knew
in all my life,--some of 'em 's been dead this twenty year 'n' more,
--'n' nothin' for 'em to eat nor drink.  The fire would n' burn to
cook anything, all we could do.  We blowed with the belluses, 'n' we
stuffed in paper 'n' pitch-pine kindlin's, but nothin' could make
that fire burn; 'n' all the time the folks kep' comin', as if they'd
never stop,--'n' nothin' for 'em but empty dishes, 'n' all the
borrowed chaney slippin' round on the waiters 'n' chippin' 'n'
crackin',--I would n' go through what I been through t'-night for all
th' money in th' Bank,--I do believe it's harder t' have a party than
t'"---

Mrs. Sprowle stated the case strongly.

The Colonel said he did n't know how that might be.  She was a better
judge than he was.  It was bother enough, anyhow, and he was glad
that it was over.  After this, the worthy pair commenced preparations
for rejoining the waking world, and in due time proceeded downstairs.

Everybody was late that morning, and nothing had got put to rights.
The house looked as if a small army had been quartered in it over
night.  The tables were of course in huge disorder, after the
protracted assault they had undergone.  There had been a great battle
evidently, and it had gone against the provisions.  Some points had
been stormed, and all their defences annihilated, but here and there
were centres of resistance which had held out against all attacks,--
large rounds of beef, and solid loaves of cake, against which the
inexperienced had wasted their energies in the enthusiasm of youth or
uninformed maturity, while the longer-headed guests were making
discoveries of "shell-oysters" and "patridges" and similar
delicacies.

The breakfast was naturally of a somewhat fragmentary character.  A
chicken that had lost his legs in the service of the preceding
campaign was once more put on duty.  A great ham stuck with cloves,
as Saint Sebastian was with arrows, was again offered for martyrdom.
It would have been a pleasant sight for a medical man of a
speculative turn to have seen the prospect before the Colonel's
family of the next week's breakfasts, dinners, and suppers.  The
trail that one of these great rural parties leaves after it is one of
its most formidable considerations.  Every door-handle in the house
is suggestive of sweetmeats for the next week, at least.  The most
unnatural articles of diet displace the frugal but nutritious food of
unconvulsed periods of existence.  If there is a walking infant about
the house, it will certainly have a more or less fatal fit from
overmuch of some indigestible delicacy.  Before the week is out,
everybody will be tired to death of sugary forms of nourishment and
long to see the last of the remnants of the festival.

The family had not yet arrived at this condition.  On the contrary,
the first inspection of the tables suggested the prospect of days of
unstinted luxury; and the younger portion of the household,
especially, were in a state of great excitement as the account of
stock was taken with reference to future internal investments.  Some
curious facts came to light during these researches.

"Where's all the oranges gone to?"  said Mrs. Sprowle.  "I expected
there'd be ever so many of 'em left.  I did n't see many of the folks
eatin' oranges.  Where's the skins of 'em?  There ought to be six
dozen orange-skins round on the plates, and there a'n't one dozen.
And all the small cakes, too, and all the sugar things that was stuck
on the big cakes.  Has anybody counted the spoons?  Some of 'em got
swallered, perhaps.  I hope they was plated ones, if they did!"

The failure of the morning's orange-crop and the deficit in other
expected residual delicacies were not very difficult to account for.
In many of the two-story Rockland families, and in those favored
households of the neighboring villages whose members had been invited
to the great party, there was a very general excitement among the
younger people on the morning after the great event.  "Did y' bring
home somethin' from the party?  What is it?  What is it?  Is it frut-
cake?  Is it nuts and oranges and apples?  Give me some!  Give me
some!"  Such a concert of treble voices uttering accents like these
had not been heard since the great Temperance Festival with the
celebrated "colation" in the open air under the trees of the
Parnassian Grove,--as the place was christened by the young ladies of
the Institute.  The cry of the children was not in vain.  From the
pockets of demure fathers, from the bags of sharp-eyed spinsters,
from the folded handkerchiefs of light-fingered sisters, from the
tall hats of sly-winking brothers, there was a resurrection of the
missing oranges and cakes and sugar-things in many a rejoicing
family-circle, enough to astonish the most hardened "caterer" that
ever contracted to feed a thousand people under canvas.

The tender recollections of those dear little ones whom extreme youth
or other pressing considerations detain from scenes of festivity--a
trait of affection by no means uncommon among our thoughtful people--
dignifies those social meetings where it is manifested, and sheds a
ray of sunshine on our common nature.  It is "an oasis in the
desert,"--to use the striking expression of the last year's
"Valedictorian" of the Apollinean Institute.  In the midst of so much
that is purely selfish, it is delightful to meet such disinterested
care for others.  When a large family of children are expecting a
parent's return from an entertainment, it will often require great
exertions on his part to freight himself so as to meet their
reasonable expectations.  A few rules are worth remembering by all
who attend anniversary dinners in Faneuil Hall or elsewhere.  Thus:
Lobsters' claws are always acceptable to children of all ages.
Oranges and apples are to be taken one at a time, until the coat-
pockets begin to become inconveniently heavy.  Cakes are injured by
sitting upon them; it is, therefore, well to carry a stout tin box of
a size to hold as many pieces as there are children in the domestic
circle.  A very pleasant amusement, at the close of one of these
banquets, is grabbing for the flowers with which the table is
embellished.  These will please the ladies at home very greatly, and,
if the children are at the same time abundantly supplied with fruits,
nuts, cakes, and any little ornamental articles of confectionery
which are of a nature to be unostentatiously removed, the kind-
hearted parent will make a whole household happy, without any
additional expense beyond the outlay for his ticket.

There were fragmentary delicacies enough left, of one kind and
another, at any rate, to make all the Colonel's family uncomfortable
for the next week.  It bid fair to take as long to get rid of the
remains of the great party as it had taken to make ready for it.

In the mean time Mr. Bernard had been dreaming, as young men dream,
of gliding shapes with bright eyes and burning cheeks, strangely
blended with red planets and hissing meteors, and, shining over all,
the white, un-wandering star of the North, girt with its tethered
constellations.

After breakfast he walked into the parlor, where he found Miss
Darley.  She was alone, and, holding a school-book in her hand, was
at work with one of the morning's lessons.  She hardly noticed him as
he entered, being very busy with her book,--and he paused a moment
before speaking, and looked at her with a kind of reverence.  It
would not have been strictly true to call her beautiful.  For years,
--since her earliest womanhood,--those slender hands had taken the
bread which repaid the toil of heart and brain from the coarse palms
which offered it in the world's rude market.  It was not for herself
alone that she had bartered away the life of her youth, that she had
breathed the hot air of schoolrooms, that she had forced her
intelligence to posture before her will, as the exigencies of her
place required,--waking to mental labor,--sleeping to dream of
problems,--rolling up the stone of education for an endless
twelvemonth's term, to find it at the bottom of the hill again when
another year called her to its renewed duties, schooling her temper
in unending inward and outward conflicts, until neither dulness nor
obstinacy nor ingratitude nor insolence could reach her serene self-
possession.  Not for herself alone.  Poorly as her prodigal labors
were repaid in proportion to the waste of life they cost, her value
was too well established to leave her without what, under other
circumstances, would have been a more than sufficient compensation.
But there were others who looked to her in their need, and so the
modest fountain which might have been filled to its brim was
continually drained through silent-flowing, hidden sluices.

Out of such a life, inherited from a race which had lived in
conditions not unlike her own, beauty, in the common sense of the
term, could hardly find leisure to develop and shape itself.  For it
must be remembered, that symmetry and elegance of features and
figure, like perfectly formed crystals in the mineral world, are
reached only by insuring a certain necessary repose to individuals
and to generations.  Human beauty is an agricultural product in the
country, growing up in men and women as in corn and cattle, where the
soil is good.  It is a luxury almost monopolized by the rich in
cities, bred under glass like their forced pine-apples and peaches.
Both in city and country, the evolution of the physical harmonies
which make music to our eyes requires a combination of favorable
circumstances, of which alternations of unburdened tranquillity with
intervals of varied excitement of mind and body are among the most
important.  Where sufficient excitement is wanting, as often happens
in the country, the features, however rich in red and white, get
heavy, and the movements sluggish; where excitement is furnished in
excess, as is frequently the case in cities, the contours and colors
are impoverished, and the nerves begin to make their existence known
to the consciousness, as the face very soon informs us.

Helen Darley could not, in the nature of things, have possessed the
kind of beauty which pleases the common taste.  Her eye was calm,
sad-looking, her features very still, except when her pleasant smile
changed them for a moment, all her outlines were delicate, her voice
was very gentle, but somewhat subdued by years of thoughtful labor,
and on her smooth forehead one little hinted line whispered already
that Care was beginning to mark the trace which Time sooner or later
would make a furrow.  She could not be a beauty; if she had been, it
would have been much harder for many persons to be interested in her.
For, although in the abstract we all love beauty, and although, if we
were sent naked souls into some ultramundane warehouse of soulless
bodies and told to select one to our liking, we should each choose a
handsome one, and never think of the consequences,--it is quite
certain that beauty carries an atmosphere of repulsion as well as of
attraction with it, alike in both sexes.  We may be well assured that
there are many persons who no more think of specializing their love
of the other sex upon one endowed with signal beauty, than they think
of wanting great diamonds or thousand-dollar horses.  No man or woman
can appropriate beauty without paying for it,--in endowments, in
fortune, in position, in self-surrender, or other valuable stock; and
there are a great many who are too poor, too ordinary, too humble,
too busy, too proud, to pay any of these prices for it.  So the
unbeautiful get many more lovers than the beauties; only, as there
are more of them, their lovers are spread thinner and do not make so
much show.

The young master stood looking at Helen Darley with a kind of tender
admiration.  She was such a picture of the martyr by the slow social
combustive process, that it almost seemed to him he could see a pale
lambent nimbus round her head.

"I did not see you at the great party last evening," he said,
presently.

She looked up and answered, "No.  I have not much taste for such
large companies.  Besides, I do not feel as if my time belonged to me
after it has been paid for.  There is always something to do, some
lesson or exercise,--and it so happened, I was very busy last night
with the new problems in geometry.  I hope you had a good time."

"Very.  Two or three of our girls were there.  Rosa Milburn.  What a
beauty she is!  I wonder what she feeds on!  Wine and musk and
chloroform and coals of fire, I believe; I didn't think there was
such color and flavor in a woman outside the tropics."

Miss Darley smiled rather faintly; the imagery was not just to her
taste: femineity often finds it very hard to accept the fact of
muliebrity.

"Was"--?

She stopped short; but her question had asked itself.


"Elsie there?  She was, for an hour or so.  She looked frightfully
handsome.  I meant to have spoken to her, but she slipped away before
I knew it."

"I thought she meant to go to the party," said Miss Darley.  "Did she
look at you?"

"She did.  Why?"

"And you did not speak to her?"

"No.  I should have spoken to her, but she was gone when I looked for
her.  A strange creature!  Is n't there an odd sort of fascination
about her?  You have not explained all the mystery about the girl.
What does she come to this school for?  She seems to do pretty much
as she likes about studying."

Miss Darley answered in very low tones.  "It was a fancy of hers to
come, and they let her have her way.  I don't know what there is
about her, except that she seems to take my life out of me when she
looks at me.  I don't like to ask other people about our girls.  She
says very little to anybody, and studies, or makes believe to study,
almost what she likes.  I don't know what she is," (Miss Darley laid
her hand, trembling, on the young master's sleeve,) "but I can tell
when she is in the room without seeing or hearing her.  Oh, Mr.
Langdon, I am weak and nervous, and no doubt foolish,--but--if there
were women now, as in the days of our Saviour, possessed of devils, I
should think there was something not human looking out of Elsie
Venner's eyes!"

The poor girl's breast rose and fell tumultuously as she spoke, and
her voice labored, as if some obstruction were rising in her throat.

A scene might possibly have come of it, but the door opened.  Mr.
Silas Peckham.  Miss Darley got away as soon as she well could.

"Why did not Miss Darley go to the party last evening?" said Mr.
Bernard.

"Well, the fact is," answered Mr. Silas Peckham, "Miss Darley, she's
pooty much took up with the school.  She's an industris young.
woman,--yis, she is industris,--but perhaps she a'n't quite so spry
a worker as some.  Maybe, considerin' she's paid for her time, she is
n't fur out o' the way in occoopyin' herself evenin's,--that--is, if
so be she a'n't smart enough to finish up all her work in the
daytime.  Edoocation is the great business of the Institoot.
Amoosements are objec's of a secondary natur', accordin' to my v'oo."
[The unspellable pronunciation of this word is the touchstone of New
England Brahminism.]

Mr. Bernard drew a deep breath, his thin nostrils dilating, as if the
air did not rush in fast enough to cool his blood, while Silas
Peckham was speaking.  The Head of the Apollinean Institute delivered
himself of these judicious sentiments in that peculiar acid,
penetrating tone, thickened with a nasal twang, which not rarely
becomes hereditary after three or four generations raised upon east
winds, salt fish, and large, white-bellied, pickled cucumbers.  He
spoke deliberately, as if weighing his words well, so that, during
his few remarks, Mr. Bernard had time for a mental accompaniment with
variations, accented by certain bodily changes, which escaped Mr.
Peckham's observation.  First there was a feeling of disgust and
shame at hearing Helen Darley spoken of like a dumb working animal.
That sent the blood up into his cheeks.  Then the slur upon her
probable want of force--her incapacity, who made the character of the
school and left this man to pocket its profits--sent a thrill of the
old Wentworth fire through him, so that his muscles hardened, his
hands closed, and he took the measure of Mr. Silas Peckham, to see if
his head would strike the wall in case he went over backwards all of
a sudden.  This would not do, of course, and so the thrill passed off
and the muscles softened again.  Then came that state of tenderness
in the heart, overlying wrath in the stomach, in which the eyes grow
moist like a woman's, and there is also a great boiling-up of
objectionable terms out of the deep-water vocabulary, so that
Prudence and Propriety and all the other pious P's have to jump upon
the lid of speech to keep them from boiling over into fierce
articulation.  All this was internal, chiefly, and of course not
recognized by Mr. Silas Peckham.  The idea, that any full-grown,
sensible man should have any other notion than that of getting the
most work for the least money out of his assistants, had never
suggested itself to him.

Mr. Bernard had gone through this paroxysm, and cooled down, in the
period while Mr. Peckham was uttering these words in his thin,
shallow whine, twanging up into the frontal sinuses.  What was the
use of losing his temper and throwing away his place, and so, among
the consequences which would necessarily follow, leaving the poor
lady-teacher without a friend to stand by her ready to lay his hand
on the grand-inquisitor before the windlass of his rack had taken one
turn too many?

"No doubt, Mr. Peckham," he said, in a grave, calm voice, "there is a
great deal of work to be done in the school; but perhaps we can
distribute the duties a little more evenly after a time.  I shall
look over the girls' themes myself, after this week.  Perhaps there
will be some other parts of her labor that I can take on myself.  We
can arrange a new programme of studies and recitations."

"We can do that," said Mr. Silas Peckham.  "But I don't propose
mater'lly alterin' Miss Darley's dooties.  I don't think she works to
hurt herself.  Some of the Trustees have proposed interdoosin' new
branches of study, and I expect you will be pooty much occoopied with
the dooties that belong to your place.  On the Sahbath you will be
able to attend divine service three times, which is expected of our
teachers.  I shall continoo myself to give Sahbath Scriptur' readin's
to the young ladies.  That is a solemn dooty I can't make up my mind
to commit to other people.  My teachers enjoy the Lord's day as a day
of rest.  In it they do no manner of work, except in cases of
necessity or mercy, such as fillin' out diplomas, or when we git
crowded jest at the end of a term, or when there is an extry number
of p'oopils, or other Providential call to dispense with the
ordinance."

Mr. Bernard had a fine glow in his cheeks by this time,--doubtless
kindled by the thought of the kind consideration Mr. Peckham showed
for his subordinates in allowing them the between meeting-time on
Sundays except for some special reason.  But the morning was wearing
away; so he went to the schoolroom, taking leave very properly of his
respected principal, who soon took his hat and departed.

Mr. Peckham visited certain "stores" or shops, where he made
inquiries after various articles in the provision-line, and effected
a purchase or two.  Two or three barrels of potatoes, which had
sprouted in a promising way, he secured at a bargain.  A side of
feminine beef was also obtained at a low figure.  He was entirely
satisfied with a couple of barrels of flour, which, being invoiced
"slightly damaged," were to be had at a reasonable price.

After this, Silas Peckham felt in good spirits.  He had done a pretty
stroke of business.  It came into his head whether he might not
follow it up with a still more brilliant speculation.  So he turned
his steps in the direction of Colonel Sprowle's.

It was now eleven o'clock, and the battle-field of last evening was
as we left it.  Mr. Peckham's visit was unexpected, perhaps not very
well timed, but the Colonel received him civilly.

"Beautifully lighted,--these rooms last night!" said Mr. Peckham.
"Winter-strained?"

The Colonel nodded.

"How much do you pay for your winter-strained?"

The Colonel told him the price.

"Very hahnsome supper,--very hahnsome.  Nothin' ever seen like it in
Rockland.  Must have been a great heap of things leftover."

The compliment was not ungrateful, and the Colonel acknowledged it by
smiling and saying, "I should think the' was a trifle?  Come and
look."

When Silas Peckham saw how many delicacies had survived the evening's
conflict, his commercial spirit rose at once to the point of a
proposal.

"Colonel Sprowle," said he, "there's 'meat and cakes and pies and
pickles enough on that table to spread a hahnsome colation.  If you'd
like to trade reasonable, I think perhaps I should be willin' to take
'em off your hands.  There's been a talk about our havin' a
celebration in the Parnassian Grove, and I think I could work in what
your folks don't want and make myself whole by chargin' a small sum
for tickets.  Broken meats, of course, a'n't of the same valoo as
fresh provisions; so I think you might be willin' to trade
reasonable."

Mr. Peckham paused and rested on his proposal.  It would not,
perhaps, have been very extraordinary, if Colonel Sprowle had
entertained the proposition.  There is no telling beforehand how such
things will strike people.  It didn't happen to strike the Colonel
favorably.  He had a little red-blooded manhood in him.

"Sell you them things to make a colation out of?" the Colonel
replied.  "Walk up to that table, Mr. Peckham, and help yourself!
Fill your pockets; Mr. Peckham!  Fetch a basket, and our hired folks
shall fill it full for ye!  Send a cart, if y' like, 'n' carry off
them leavin's to make a celebration for your pupils with!  Only let
me tell ye this:--as sure 's my name's Hezekiah Spraowle, you 'll be
known through the taown 'n' through the caounty, from that day
forrard, as the Principal of the Broken-Victuals Institoot!"

Even provincial human-nature sometimes has a touch of sublimity about
it.  Mr. Silas Peckham had gone a little deeper than he meant, and
come upon the "hard pan," as the well-diggers call it, of the
Colonel's character, before he thought of it.  A militia-colonel
standing on his sentiments is not to be despised.  That was shown
pretty well in New England two or three generations ago.  There were
a good many plain officers that talked about their "rigiment" and
their "caounty" who knew very well how to say "Make ready!"  "Take
aim!"  "Fire!"--in the face of a line of grenadiers with bullets in
their guns and bayonets on them.  And though a rustic uniform is not
always unexceptionable in its cut and trimmings, yet there was many
an ill-made coat in those old times that was good enough to be shown
to the enemy's front rank too often to be left on the field with a
round hole in its left lapel that matched another going right through
the brave heart of the plain country captain or major or colonel who
was buried in it under the crimson turf.

Mr. Silas Peckham said little or nothing.  His sensibilities were not
acute, but he perceived that he had made a miscalculation.  He hoped
that there was no offence,--thought it might have been mutooally
agreeable, conclooded he would give up the idee of a colation, and
backed himself out as if unwilling to expose the less guarded aspect
of his person to the risk of accelerating impulses.

The Colonel shut the door,--cast his eye on the toe of his right
boot, as if it had had a strong temptation,--looked at his watch,
then round the room, and, going to a cupboard, swallowed a glass of
deep-red brandy and water to compose his feelings.




CHAPTER IX.

THE DOCTOR ORDERS THE BEST SULKY.
(With a Digression on "Hired Help.")

"ABEL!  Slip Cassia into the new sulky, and fetch her round."

Abel was Dr. Kittredge's hired man.  He was born in New Hampshire, a
queer sort of State, with fat streaks of soil and population where
they breed giants in mind and body, and lean streaks which export
imperfectly nourished young men with promising but neglected
appetites, who may be found in great numbers in all the large towns,
or could be until of late years, when they have been half driven out
of their favorite basement-stories by foreigners, and half coaxed
away from them by California.  New Hampshire is in more than one
sense the Switzerland of New England.  The "Granite State" being
naturally enough deficient in pudding-stone, its children are apt to
wander southward in search of that deposit,--in the unpetrified
condition.

Abel Stebbins was a good specimen of that extraordinary hybrid or
mule between democracy and chrysocracy, a native-born New-England
serving-man.  The Old World has nothing at all like him.  He is at
once an emperor and a subordinate.  In one hand he holds one five-
millionth part (be the same more or less) of the power that sways the
destinies of the Great Republic.  His other hand is in your boot,
which he is about to polish.  It is impossible to turn a fellow
citizen whose vote may make his master--say, rather, employer--
Governor or President, or who may be one or both himself, into a
flunky.  That article must be imported ready-made from other centres
of civilization.  When a New Englander has lost his self-respect as a
citizen and as a man, he is demoralized, and cannot be trusted with
the money to pay for a dinner.

It may be supposed, therefore, that this fractional emperor, this
continent-shaper, finds his position awkward when he goes into
service, and that his employer is apt to find it still more
embarrassing.  It is always under protest that the hired man does his
duty.  Every act of service is subject to the drawback, "I am as good
as you are."  This is so common, at least, as almost to be the rule,
and partly accounts for the rapid disappearance of the indigenous
"domestic" from the basements above mentioned.  Paleontologists will
by and by be examining the floors of our kitchens for tracks of the
extinct native species of serving-man.  The female of the same race
is fast dying out; indeed, the time is not far distant when all the
varieties of young woman will have vanished from New England, as the
dodo has perished in the Mauritius.  The young lady is all that we
shall have left, and the mop and duster of the last Ahnira or Loizy
will be stared at by generations of Bridgets and Noras as that famous
head and foot of the lost bird are stared at in the Ashmolean Museum.

Abel Stebbins, the Doctor's man, took the true American view of his
difficult position.  He sold his time to the Doctor, and, having sold
it, he took care to fulfil his half of the bargain.  The Doctor, on
his part, treated him, not like a gentleman, because one does not
order a gentleman to bring up his horse or run his errands, but he
treated him like a man.  Every order was given in courteous terms.
His reasonable privileges were respected as much as if they had been
guaranteed under hand and seal.  The Doctor lent him books from his
own library, and gave him all friendly counsel, as if he were a son
or a younger brother.

Abel had Revolutionary blood in his veins, and though he saw fit to
"hire out," he could never stand the word "servant," or consider
himself the inferior one of the two high contracting parties.  When
he came to live with the Doctor, he made up his mind he would dismiss
the old gentleman, if he did not behave according to his notions of
propriety.  But he soon found that the Doctor was one of the right
sort, and so determined to keep him.  The Doctor soon found, on his
side, that he had a trustworthy, intelligent fellow, who would be
invaluable to him, if he only let him have his own way of doing what
was to be done.

The Doctor's hired man had not the manners of a French valet.  He was
grave and taciturn for the most part, he never bowed and rarely
smiled, but was always at work in the daytime, and always reading in
the evening.  He was hostler, and did all the housework that a man
could properly do, would go to the door or "tend table," bought the
provisions for the family,--in short, did almost everything for them
but get their clothing.  There was no office in a perfectly appointed
household, from that of steward down to that of stable-boy, which he
did not cheerfully assume.  His round of work not consuming all his
energies, he must needs cultivate the Doctor's garden, which he kept
in one perpetual bloom, from the blowing of the first crocus to the
fading of the last dahlia.

This garden was Abel's poem.  Its half-dozen beds were so many
cantos.  Nature crowded them for him with imagery such as no Laureate
could copy in the cold mosaic of language.  The rhythm of alternating
dawn and sunset, the strophe and antistrophe still perceptible
through all the sudden shifts of our dithyrambic seasons and echoed
in corresponding floral harmonies, made melody in the soul of Abel,
the plain serving-man.  It softened his whole otherwise rigid aspect.
He worshipped God according to the strict way of his fathers; but a
florist's Puritanism is always colored by the petals of his flowers,
--and Nature never shows him a black corolla.

He may or may not figure again in this narrative; but as there must
be some who confound the New England hired man, native-born, with the
servant of foreign birth, and as there is the difference of two
continents and two civilizations between them, it did not seem fair
to let Abel bring round the Doctor's mare and sulky without touching
his features in half-shadow into our background.

The Doctor's mare, Cassia, was so called by her master from her
cinnamon color, cassia being one of the professional names for that
spice or drug.  She was of the shade we call sorrel, or, as an
Englishman would perhaps say, chestnut,--a genuine "Morgan" mare,
with a low forehand, as is common in this breed, but with strong
quarters and flat hocks, well ribbed up, with a good eye and a pair
of lively ears,--a first-rate doctor's beast, would stand until her
harness dropped off her back at the door of a tedious case, and trot
over hill and dale thirty miles in three hours, if there was a child
in the next county with a bean in its windpipe and the Doctor gave
her a hint of the fact.  Cassia was not large, but she had a good
deal of action, and was the Doctor's show-horse.  There were two.
other animals in his stable: Quassia or Quashy, the black horse, and
Caustic, the old bay, with whom he jogged round the village.

"A long ride to-day?" said Abel, as he brought up the equipage.

"Just out of the village,--that 's all.---There 's a kink in her
mane,--pull it out, will you?"

"Goin' to visit some of the great folks," Abel said to himself."
Wonder who it is."--Then to the Doctor,--"Anybody get sick at
Sprowles's?  They say Deacon Soper had a fit, after eatin' some o'
their frozen victuals."

The Doctor smiled.  He guessed the Deacon would do well enough.  He
was only going to ride over to the Dudley mansion-house.




CHAPTER X.

THE DOCTOR CALLS ON ELSIE VENNER.

If that primitive physician, Chiron, M. D., appears as a Centaur, as
we look at him through the lapse of thirty centuries, the modern
country-doctor, if he could be seen about thirty miles off, could not
be distinguished from a wheel-animalcule.  He inhabits a wheel-
carriage.  He thinks of stationary dwellings as Long Tom Coffin did
of land in general; a house may be well enough for incidental
purposes, but for a "stiddy" residence give him a "kerridge."  If he
is classified in the Linnaean scale, he must be set down thus: Genus
Homo; Species Rotifer infusorius, the wheel-animal of infusions.

The Dudley mansion was not a mile from the Doctor's; but it never
occurred to him to think of walking to see any of his patients'
families, if he had any professional object in his visit.  Whenever
the narrow sulky turned in at a gate, the rustic who was digging
potatoes, or hoeing corn, or swishing through the grass with his
scythe, in wave-like crescents, or stepping short behind a loaded
wheelbarrow, or trudging lazily by the side of the swinging, loose-
throated, short-legged oxen, rocking along the road as if they had
just been landed after a three-months' voyage, the toiling native,
whatever he was doing, stopped and looked up at the house the Doctor
was visiting.

"Somebody sick over there t' Haynes's.  Guess th' old man's ailin'
ag'in.  Winder's half-way open in the chamber,--should n' wonder 'f
he was dead and laid aout.  Docterin' a'n't no use, when y' see th'
winders open like that.  Wahl, money a'n't much to speak of to th'
old man naow!  He don' want but tew cents,--'n' old Widah Peake, she
knows what he wants them for!"

Or again,--

"Measles raound pooty thick.  Briggs's folks buried two children with
'em lass' week.  Th' of Doctor, he'd h' ker'd 'em threugh.  Struck in
'n' p'dooced mo't'f'cation,--so they say."

This is only meant as a sample of the kind of way they used to think
or talk, when the narrow sulky turned in at the gate of some house
where there was a visit to be made.

Oh, that narrow sulky!  What hopes, what fears, what comfort, what
anguish, what despair, in the roll of its coming or its parting
wheels!  In the spring, when the old people get the coughs which give
them a few shakes and their lives drop in pieces like the ashes of a
burned thread which have kept the threadlike shape until they were
stirred,--in the hot summer noons, when the strong man comes in from
the fields, like the son of the Shunamite, crying, "My head, my
head,"--in the dying autumn days, when youth and maiden lie fever-
stricken in many a household, still-faced, dull-eyed, dark-flushed,
dry-lipped, low-muttering in their daylight dreams, their fingers
moving singly like those of slumbering harpers,--in the dead winter,
when the white plague of the North has caged its wasted victims,
shuddering as they think of the frozen soil which must be quarried
like rock to receive them, if their perpetual convalescence should
happen to be interfered with by any untoward accident,--at every
season, the narrow sulky rolled round freighted with unmeasured
burdens of joy and woe.

The Doctor drove along the southern foot of The Mountain.  The
"Dudley Mansion" was near the eastern edge of this declivity, where
it rose steepest, with baldest cliffs and densest patches of
overhanging wood.  It seemed almost too steep to climb, but a
practised eye could see from a distance the zigzag lines of the
sheep-paths which scaled it like miniature Alpine roads.  A few
hundred feet up The Mountain's side was a dark deep dell, unwooded,
save for a few spindling, crazy-looking hackmatacks or native
larches, with pallid green tufts sticking out fantastically all over
them.  It shelved so deeply, that, while the hemlock-tassels were
swinging on the trees around its border, all would be still at its
springy bottom, save that perhaps a single fern would wave slowly
backward and forward like a sabre with a twist as of a feathered
oar,--and this when not a breath could be felt, and every other stem
and blade were motionless.  There was an old story of one having
perished here in the winter of '86, and his body having been found in
the spring,--whence its common name of "Dead-Man's Hollow."  Higher
up there were huge cliffs with chasms, and, it was thought, concealed
caves, where in old times they said that Tories lay hid,--some hinted
not without occasional aid and comfort from the Dudleys then living
in the mansion-house.  Still higher and farther west lay the accursed
ledge,--shunned by all, unless it were now and then a daring youth,
or a wandering naturalist who ventured to its edge in the hope of
securing some infantile Crotalus durissus, who had not yet cut his
poison teeth.

Long, long ago, in old Colonial times, the Honorable Thomas Dudley,
Esquire, a man of note and name and great resources, allied by
descent to the family of "Tom Dudley," as the early Governor is
sometimes irreverently called by our most venerable, but still
youthful antiquary,--and to the other public Dudleys, of course,--of
all of whom he made small account, as being himself an English
gentleman, with little taste for the splendors of provincial office,
early in the last century, Thomas Dudley had built this mansion.  For
several generations it had been dwelt in by descendants of the same
name, but soon after the Revolution it passed by marriage into the
hands of the Venners, by whom it had ever since been held and
tenanted.

As the doctor turned an angle in the road, all at once the stately
old house rose before him.  It was a skilfully managed effect, as it
well might be, for it was no vulgar English architect who had planned
the mansion and arranged its position and approach.  The old house
rose before the Doctor, crowning a terraced garden, flanked at the
left by an avenue of tall elms.  The flower-beds were edged with box,
which diffused around it that dreamy balsamic odor, full of ante-
natal reminiscences of a lost Paradise, dimly fragrant as might be
the bdellium of ancient Havilah, the land compassed by the river
Pison that went out of Eden.  The garden was somewhat neglected, but
not in disgrace,--and in the time of tulips and hyacinths, of roses,
of "snowballs," of honeysuckles, of lilacs, of syringas, it was rich
with blossoms.

From the front-windows of the mansion the eye reached a far blue
mountain-summit,--no rounded heap, such as often shuts in a village-
landscape, but a sharp peak, clean-angled as Ascutney from the
Dartmouth green.  A wide gap through miles of woods had opened this
distant view, and showed more, perhaps, than all the labors of the
architect and the landscape-gardener the large style of the early
Dudleys.

The great stone-chimney of the mansion-house was the centre from
which all the artificial features of the scene appeared to flow.  The
roofs, the gables, the dormer-windows, the porches, the clustered
offices in the rear, all seemed to crowd about the great chimney.  To
this central pillar the paths all converged.  The single poplar
behind the house,--Nature is jealous of proud chimneys, and always
loves to put a poplar near one, so that it may fling a leaf or two
down its black throat every autumn,--the one tall poplar behind the
house seemed to nod and whisper to the grave square column, the elms
to sway their branches towards it.  And when the blue smoke rose from
its summit, it seemed to be wafted away to join the azure haze which
hung around the peak in the far distance, so that both should bathe
in a common atmosphere.

Behind the house were clumps of lilacs with a century's growth upon
them, and looking more like trees than like shrubs.  Shaded by a
group of these was the ancient well, of huge circuit, and with a low
arch opening out of its wall about ten feet below the surface,--
whether the door of a crypt for the concealment of treasure, or of a
subterranean passage, or merely of a vault for keeping provisions
cool in hot weather, opinions differed.

On looking at the house, it was plain that it was built with Old-
World notions of strength and durability, and, so far as might be,
with Old-World materials.  The hinges of the doors stretched out like
arms, instead of like hands, as we make them.  The bolts were massive
enough for a donjon-keep.  The small window-panes were actually
inclosed in the wood of the sashes instead of being stuck to them
with putty, as in our modern windows.  The broad staircase was of
easy ascent, and was guarded by quaintly turned and twisted
balusters.  The ceilings of the two rooms of state were moulded with
medallion-portraits and rustic figures, such as may have been seen by
many readers in the famous old Philipse house,--Washington's head-
quarters,--in the town of Yorkers.  The fire-places, worthy of the
wide-throated central chimney, were bordered by pictured tiles, some
of them with Scripture stories, some with Watteau-like figures,--tall
damsels in slim waists and with spread enough of skirt for a modern
ballroom, with bowing, reclining, or musical swains of what everybody
calls the "conventional" sort,--that is, the swain adapted to genteel
society rather than to a literal sheep-compelling existence.

The house was furnished, soon after it was completed, with many heavy
articles made in London from a rare wood just then come into fashion,
not so rare now, and commonly known as mahogany.  Time had turned it
very dark, and the stately bedsteads and tall cabinets and claw-
footed chairs and tables were in keeping with the sober dignity of
the ancient mansion.  The old "hangings" were yet preserved in the
chambers, faded, but still showing their rich patterns,--properly
entitled to their name, for they were literally hung upon flat wooden
frames like trellis-work, which again were secured to the naked
partitions.

There were portraits of different date on the walls of the various
apartments, old painted coats-of-arms, bevel-edged mirrors, and in
one sleeping-room a glass case of wax-work flowers and spangly
symbols, with a legend signifying that E. M. (supposed to be
Elizabeth Mascarene) wished not to be "forgot"

         "When I am dead and lay'd in dust
          And all my bones are"---

Poor E. M.!  Poor everybody that sighs for earthly remembrance in a
planet with a core of fire and a crust of fossils!

Such was the Dudley mansion-house,--for it kept its ancient name in
spite of the change in the line of descent.  Its spacious apartments
looked dreary and desolate; for here Dudley Venner and his daughter
dwelt by themselves, with such servants only as their quiet mode of
life required.  He almost lived in his library, the western room on
the ground-floor.  Its window looked upon a small plat of green, in
the midst of which was a single grave marked by a plain marble slab.
Except this room, and the chamber where he slept, and the servants'
wing, the rest of the house was all Elsie's.  She was always a
restless, wandering child from her early years, and would have her
little bed moved from one chamber to another,--flitting round as the
fancy took her.  Sometimes she would drag a mat and a pillow into one
of the great empty rooms, and, wrapping herself in a shawl, coil up
and go to sleep in a corner.  Nothing frightened her; the "haunted"
chamber, with the torn hangings that flapped like wings when there
was air stirring, was one of her favorite retreats.  She had been a
very hard creature to manage.  Her father could influence, but not
govern her.  Old Sophy, born of a slave mother in the house, could do
more with her than anybody, knowing her by long instinctive study.
The other servants were afraid of her.  Her father had sent for
governesses, but none of them ever stayed long.  She made them
nervous; one of them had a strange fit of sickness; not one of them
ever came back to the house to see her.  A young Spanish woman who
taught her dancing succeeded best with her, for she had a passion for
that exercise, and had mastered some of the most difficult dances.
Long before this period, she had manifested some most extraordinary
singularities of taste or instinct.  The extreme sensitiveness of her
father on this point prevented any allusion to them; but there were
stories floating round, some of them even getting into the papers,--
without her name, of course,--which were of a kind to excite intense
curiosity, if not more anxious feelings.  This thing was certain,
that at the age of twelve she was missed one night, and was found
sleeping in the open air under a tree, like a wild creature.  Very
often she would wander off by day, always without a companion,
bringing home with her a nest, a flower, or even a more questionable
trophy of her ramble, such as showed that there was no place where
she was afraid to venture.  Once in a while she had stayed out over
night, in which case the alarm was spread, and men went in search of
her, but never successfully,--so--that some said she hid herself in
trees, and others that she had found one of the old Tory caves.

Some, of course, said she was a crazy girl, and ought to be sent to
an Asylum.  But old Dr. Kittredge had shaken his head, and told them
to bear with her, and let her have her way as much as they could, but
watch her, as far as possible, without making her suspicious of them.
He visited her now and then, under the pretext of seeing her father
on business, or of only making a friendly call.

The Doctor fastened his horse outside the gate, and walked up the
garden-alley.  He stopped suddenly with a start.  A strange sound
had jarred upon his ear.  It was a sharp prolonged rattle,
continuous, but rising and falling as if in rhythmical cadence.  He
moved softly towards the open window from which the sound seemed to
proceed.

Elsie was alone in the room, dancing one of those wild Moorish
fandangos, such as a matador hot from the Plaza de Toros of Seville
or Madrid might love to lie and gaze at.  She was a figure to look
upon in silence.  The dancing frenzy must have seized upon her while
she was dressing; for she was in her bodice, bare-armed, her hair
floating unbound far below the waist of her barred or banded skirt.
She had caught up her castanets, and rattled them as she danced with
a kind of passionate fierceness, her lithe body undulating with
flexuous grace, her diamond eyes glittering, her round arms wreathing
and unwinding, alive and vibrant to the tips of the slender fingers.
Some passion seemed to exhaust itself in this dancing paroxysm; for
all at once she reeled from the middle of the floor, and flung
herself, as it were in a careless coil, upon a great tiger's-skin
which was spread out in one corner of the apartment.

The old Doctor stood motionless, looking at her as she lay panting on
the tawny, black-lined robe of the dead monster which stretched out
beneath her, its rude flattened outline recalling the Terror of the
Jungle as he crouched for his fatal spring.  In a few moments her
head drooped upon her arm, and her glittering eyes closed,--she was
sleeping.  He stood looking at her still, steadily, thoughtfully,
tenderly.  Presently he lifted his hand to his forehead, as if
recalling some fading remembrance of other years.

"Poor Catalina!"

This was all he said.  He shook his head,--implying that his visit
would be in vain to-day,--returned to his sulky, and rode away, as if
in a dream.




CHAPTER XI.

COUSIN RICHARD'S VISIT.

The Doctor was roused from his revery by the clatter of approaching
hoofs.  He looked forward and saw a young fellow galloping rapidly
towards him.

A common New-England rider with his toes turned out, his elbows
jerking and the daylight showing under him at every step, bestriding
a cantering beast of the plebeian breed, thick at every point where
he should be thin, and thin at every point where he should be thick,
is not one of those noble objects that bewitch the world.  The best
horsemen outside of the cities are the unshod countryboys, who ride
"bareback," with only a halter round the horse's neck, digging their
brown heels into his ribs, and slanting over backwards, but sticking
on like leeches, and taking the hardest trot as if they loved it.---
This was a different sight on which the Doctor was looking.  The
streaming mane and tail of the unshorn, savage-looking, black horse,
the dashing grace with which the young fellow in the shadowy
sombrero, and armed with the huge spurs, sat in his high-peaked
saddle, could belong only to the mustang of the Pampas and his
master.  This bold rider was a young man whose sudden apparition in
the quiet inland town had reminded some of the good people of a
bright, curly-haired boy they had known some eight or ten years
before as little Dick Venner.

This boy had passed several of his early years at the Dudley mansion,
the playmate of Elsie, being her cousin, two or three years older
than herself, the son of Captain Richard Venner, a South American
trader, who, as he changed his residence often, was glad to leave the
boy in his brother's charge.  The Captain's wife, this boy's mother,
was a lady of Buenos Ayres, of Spanish descent, and had died while
the child was in his cradle.  These two motherless children were as
strange a pair as one roof could well cover.  Both handsome, wild,
impetuous, unmanageable, they played and fought together like two
young leopards, beautiful, but dangerous, their lawless instincts
showing through all their graceful movements.

The boy was little else than a young Gaucho when he first came to
Rockland; for he had learned to ride almost as soon as to walk, and
could jump on his pony and trip up a runaway pig with the bolas or
noose him with his miniature lasso at an age when some city-children
would hardly be trusted out of sight of a nursery-maid.  It makes men
imperious to sit a horse; no man governs his fellows so well as from
this living throne.  And so, from Marcus Aurelius in Roman bronze,
down to the "man on horseback" in General Cushing's prophetic speech,
the saddle has always been the true seat of empire.  The absolute
tyranny of the human will over a noble and powerful beast develops
the instinct of personal prevalence and dominion; so that horse-
subduer and hero were almost synonymous in simpler times, and are
closely related still.  An ancestry of wild riders naturally enough
bequeaths also those other tendencies which we see in the Tartars,
the Cossacks, and our own Indian Centaurs, and as well, perhaps, in
the old-fashioned fox-hunting squire as in any of these.  Sharp
alternations of violent action and self-indulgent repose; a hard run,
and a long revel after it; this is what over-much horse tends to
animalize a man into.  Such antecedents may have helped to make
little Dick Venner a self-willed, capricious boy, and a rough
playmate for Elsie.

Elsie was the wilder of the two.  Old Sophy, who used to watch them
with those quick, animal-looking eyes of hers,--she was said to be
the granddaughter of a cannibal chief, and inherited the keen senses
belonging to all creatures which are hunted as game, Old Sophy, who
watched them in their play and their quarrels, always seemed to be
more afraid for the boy than the girl.  "Masse Dick!  Masse Dick!
don' you be too rough wi' dat gal!  She scratch you las' week, 'n'
some day she bite you; 'n' if she bite you, Masse Dick!  "Old Sophy
nodded her head ominously, as if she could say a great deal more;
while, in grateful acknowledgment of her caution, Master Dick put his
two little fingers in the angles of his mouth, and his forefingers on
his lower eyelids, drawing upon these features until his expression
reminded her of something she vaguely recollected in her infancy,--
the face of a favorite deity executed in wood by an African artist
for her grandfather, brought over by her mother, and burned when she
became a Christian.

These two wild children had much in common.  They loved to ramble
together, to build huts, to climb trees for nests, to ride the colts,
to dance, to race, and to play at boys' rude games as if both were
boys.  But wherever two natures have a great deal in common, the
conditions of a first-rate quarrel are furnished ready-made.
Relations are very apt to hate each other just because they are too
much alike.  It is so frightful to be in an atmosphere of family
idiosyncrasies; to see all the hereditary uncomeliness or infirmity
of body, all the defects of speech, all the failings of temper,
intensified by concentration, so that every fault of our own finds
itself multiplied by reflections, like our images in a saloon lined.
with mirrors!  Nature knows what she is about.  The centrifugal
principle which grows out of the antipathy of like to like is only
the repetition in character of the arrangement we see expressed
materially in certain seed-capsules, which burst and throw the seed
to all points of the compass.  A house is a large pod with a human
germ or two in each of its cells or chambers; it opens by dehiscence
of the front-door by and by, and projects one of its germs to Kansas,
another to San Francisco, another to Chicago, and so on; and this
that Smith may not be Smithed to death and Brown may not be Browned
into a mad-house, but mix in with the world again and struggle back
to average humanity.

Elsie's father, whose fault was to indulge her in everything, found
that it would never do to let these children grow up together.  They
would either love each other as they got older, and pair like wild
creatures, or take some fierce antipathy, which might end nobody
could tell where.  It was not safe to try.  The boy must be sent
away.  A sharper quarrel than common decided this point.  Master Dick
forgot Old Sophy's caution, and vexed the girl into a paroxysm of
wrath, in which she sprang at him and bit his arm.  Perhaps they made
too much of it; for they sent for the old Doctor, who came at once
when he heard what had happened.  He had a good deal to say about the
danger there was from the teeth of animals or human beings when
enraged; and as he emphasized his remarks by the application of a
pencil of lunar caustic to each of the marks left by the sharp white
teeth, they were like to be remembered by at least one of his
hearers.

So Master Dick went off on his travels, which led him into strange
places and stranger company.  Elsie was half pleased and half sorry
to have him go; the children had a kind of mingled liking and hate
for each other, just such as is very common among relations.  Whether
the girl had most satisfaction in the plays they shared, or in
teasing him, or taking her small revenge upon him for teasing her, it
would have been hard to say.  At any rate, she was lonely without
him.  She had more fondness for the old black woman than anybody; but
Sophy could not follow her far beyond her own old rocking-chair.  As
for her father, she had made him afraid of her, not for his sake, but
for her own.  Sometimes she would seem to be fond of him, and the
parent's heart would yearn within him as she twined her supple arms
about him; and then some look she gave him, some half-articulated
expression, would turn his cheek pale and almost make him shiver, and
he would say kindly, "Now go, Elsie, dear,"  and smile upon her as
she went, and close and lock the door softly after her.  Then his
forehead would knot and furrow itself, and the drops of anguish stand
thick upon it.  He would go to the western window of his study and
look at the solitary mound with the marble slab for its head-stone.
After his grief had had its way, he would kneel down and pray for his
child as one who has no hope save in that special grace which can
bring the most rebellious spirit into sweet subjection.  All this
might seem like weakness in a parent having the charge of one sole
daughter of his house and heart; but he had tried authority and
tenderness by turns so long without any good effect, that he had
become sore perplexed, and, surrounding her with cautious
watchfulness as he best might, left her in the main to her own
guidance and the merciful influences which Heaven might send down to
direct her footsteps.

Meantime the boy grew up to youth and early manhood through a strange
succession of adventures.  He had been at school at Buenos Ayres,--
had quarrelled with his mother's relatives,--had run off to the
Pampas, and lived with the Gauchos;--had made friends with the
Indians, and ridden with them, it was rumored, in some of their
savage forays,--had returned and made up his quarrel,--had got money
by inheritance or otherwise,--had troubled the peace of certain
magistrates,--had found it convenient to leave the City of Wholesome
Breezes for a time, and had galloped off on a fast horse of his, (so
it was said,) with some officers riding after him, who took good care
(but this was only the popular story) not to catch him.  A few days
after this he was taking his ice on the Alameda of Mendoza, and a
week or two later sailed from Valparaiso for New York, carrying with
him the horse with which he had scampered over the Plains, a trunk or
two with his newly purchased outfit of, clothing and other
conveniences, and a belt heavy with gold and with a few Brazilian
diamonds sewed in it, enough in value to serve him for a long
journey.

Dick Venner had seen life enough to wear out the earlier
sensibilities of adolescence.  He was tired of worshipping or
tyrannizing over the bistred or umbered beauties of mingled blood
among whom he had been living.  Even that piquant exhibition which
the Rio de Mendoza presents to the amateur of breathing sculpture
failed to interest him.  He was thinking of a far-off village on the
other side of the equator, and of the wild girl with whom he used to
play and quarrel, a creature of a different race from these
degenerate mongrels.

"A game little devil she was, sure enough!"--And as Dick spoke, he
bared his wrist to look for the marks she had left on it: two small
white scars, where the two small sharp upper teeth had struck when
she flashed at him with her eyes sparkling as bright as those
glittering stones sewed up in the belt he wore.  "That's a filly
worth noosing!" said Dick to himself, as he looked in admiration at
the sign of her spirit and passion.  "I wonder if she will bite at
eighteen as she did at eight!  She shall have a chance to try, at any
rate!"

Such was the self-sacrificing disposition with which Richard Venner,
Esq., a passenger by the Condor from Valparaiso, set foot upon his
native shore, and turned his face in the direction of Rockland, The
Mountain, and the mansion-house.  He had heard something, from time
to time, of his New-England relatives, and knew that they were living
together as he left them.  And so he heralded himself to "My dear
Uncle" by a letter signed "Your loving nephew, Richard Venner," in
which letter he told a very frank story of travel and mercantile
adventure, expressed much gratitude for the excellent counsel and
example which had helped to form his character and preserve him in
the midst of temptation, inquired affectionately after his uncle's
health, was much interested to know whether his lively cousin who
used to be his playmate had grown up as handsome as she promised to
be, and announced his intention of paying his respects to them both
at Rockland.  Not long after this came the trunks marked R. V. which
he had sent before him, forerunners of his advent: he was not going
to wait for a reply or an invitation.

What a sound that is,--the banging down of the preliminary trunk,
without its claimant to give it the life which is borrowed by all
personal appendages, so long as the owner's hand or eye is on them!
If it announce the coming of one loved and longed for, how we delight
to look at it, to sit down on it, to caress it in our fancies, as a
lone exile walking out on a windy pier yearns towards the merchantman
lying alongside, with the colors of his own native land at her peak,
and the name of the port he sailed from long ago upon her stern!  But
if it tell the near approach of the undesired, inevitable guest, what
sound short of the muffled noises made by the undertakers as they
turn the corners in the dim-lighted house, with low shuffle of feet
and whispered cautions, carries such a sense of knocking-kneed
collapse with it as the thumping down in the front entry of the heavy
portmanteau, rammed with the changes of uncounted coming weeks?

Whether the R. V. portmanteaus brought one or the other of these
emotions to the tenants of the Dudley mansion, it might not be easy
to settle.  Elsie professed to be pleased with the thought of having
an adventurous young stranger, with stories to tell, an inmate of
their quiet, not to say dull, family.  Under almost any other
circumstances, her father would have been unwilling to take a young
fellow of whom he knew so little under his roof; but this was his
nephew, and anything that seemed like to amuse or please Elsie was
agreeable to him.  He had grown almost desperate, and felt as if any
change in the current of her life and feelings might save her from
some strange paroxysm of dangerous mental exaltation or sullen
perversion of disposition, from which some fearful calamity might
come to herself or others.

Dick had been several weeks at the Dudley mansion.  A few days
before, he had made a sudden dash for the nearest large city,--and
when the Doctor met him, he was just returning from his visit.

It had been a curious meeting between the two young persons, who had
parted so young and after such strange relations with each other.
When Dick first presented himself at the mansion, not one in the
house would have known him for the boy who had left them all so
suddenly years ago.  He was so dark, partly from his descent, partly
from long habits of exposure, that Elsie looked almost fair beside
him.  He had something of the family beauty which belonged to his
cousin, but his eye had a fierce passion in it, very unlike the cold
glitter of Elsie's.  Like many people of strong and imperious temper,
he was soft-voiced and very gentle in his address, when he had no
special reason for being otherwise.  He soon found reasons enough to
be as amiable as he could force himself to be with his uncle and his
cousin.  Elsie was to his fancy.  She had a strange attraction for
him, quite unlike anything he had ever known in other women.  There
was something, too, in early associations: when those who parted as
children meet as man and woman, there is always a renewal of that
early experience which followed the taste of the forbidden fruit,--a
natural blush of consciousness, not without its charm.

Nothing could be more becoming than the behavior of "Richard Venner,
Esquire, the guest of Dudley Venner, Esquire, at his noble mansion,"
as he was announced in the Court column of the "Rockland Weekly
Universe."  He was pleased to find himself treated with kindness and
attention as a relative.  He made himself very agreeable by abundant
details concerning the religious, political, social, commercial, and
educational progress of the South American cities and states.  He was
himself much interested in everything that was going on about the
Dudley mansion, walked all over it, noticed its valuable wood-lots
with special approbation, was delighted with the grand old house and
its furniture, and would not be easy until he had seen all the family
silver and heard its history.  In return, he had much to tell of his
father, now dead,--the only one of the Venners, beside themselves, in
whose fate his uncle was interested.  With Elsie, he was subdued and
almost tender in his manner; with the few visitors whom they saw, shy
and silent,--perhaps a little watchful, if any young man happened to
be among them.

Young fellows placed on their good behavior are apt to get restless
and nervous, all ready to fly off into some mischief or other.  Dick
Venner had his half-tamed horse with him to work off his suppressed
life with.  When the savage passion of his young blood came over him,
he would fetch out the mustang, screaming and kicking as these
amiable beasts are wont to do, strap the Spanish saddle tight to his
back, vault into it, and, after getting away from the village, strike
the long spurs into his sides and whirl away in a wild gallop, until
the black horse was flecked with white foam, and the cruel steel
points were red with his blood.  When horse and rider were alike
fired, he would fling the bridle on his neck and saunter homeward,
always contriving to get to the stable in a quiet way, and coming
into the house as calm as a bishop after a sober trot on his steady-
going cob.

After a few weeks of this kind of life, he began to want some more
fierce excitement.  He had tried making downright love to Elsie, with
no great success as yet, in his own opinion.  The girl was capricious
in her treatment of him, sometimes scowling and repellent, sometimes
familiar, very often, as she used to be of old, teasing and
malicious.  All this, perhaps, made her more interesting to a young
man who was tired of easy conquests.  There was a strange fascination
in her eyes, too, which at times was quite irresistible, so that he
would feel himself drawn to her by a power which seemed to take away
his will for the moment.  It may have been nothing but the common
charm of bright eyes; but he had never before experienced the same
kind of attraction.

Perhaps she was not so very different from what she had been as a
child, after all.  At any rate, so it seemed to Dick Venner, who, as
was said before, had tried making love to her.  They were sitting
alone in the study one day; Elsie had round her neck that somewhat
peculiar ornament, the golden torque, which she had worn to the great
party.  Youth is adventurous and very curious about necklaces,
brooches, chains, and other such adornments, so long as they are worn
by young persons of the female sex.  Dick was seized with a great
passion for examining this curious chain, and, after some preliminary
questions, was rash enough to lean towards her and put out his hand
toward the neck that lay in the golden coil.

She threw her head back, her eyes narrowing and her forehead drawing
down so that Dick thought her head actually flattened itself.  He
started involuntarily; for she looked so like the little girl who had
struck him with those sharp flashing teeth, that the whole scene came
back, and he felt the stroke again as if it had just been given, and
the two white scars began to sting as they did after the old Doctor
had burned them with that stick of gray caustic, which looked so like
a slate pencil, and felt so much like the end of a red-hot poker.

It took something more than a gallop to set him right after this.
The next day he mentioned having received a letter from a mercantile
agent with whom he had dealings.  What his business was is, perhaps,
none of our business.  At any rate, it required him to go at once to
the city where his correspondent resided.

Independently of this "business" which called him, there may have
been other motives, such as have been hinted at.  People who have
been living for a long time in dreary country-places, without any
emotion beyond such as are occasioned by a trivial pleasure or
annoyance, often get crazy at last for a vital paroxysm of some kind
or other.  In this state they rush to the great cities for a plunge
into their turbid life-baths, with a frantic thirst for every
exciting pleasure, which makes them the willing and easy victims of
all those who sell the Devil's wares on commission.  The less
intelligent and instructed class of unfortunates, who venture with
their ignorance and their instincts into what is sometimes called the
"life" of great cities, are put through a rapid course of instruction
which entitles them very commonly to a diploma from the police court.
But they only illustrate the working of the same tendency in mankind
at large which has been occasionally noticed in the sons of ministers
and other eminently worthy people, by many ascribed to that intense
congenital hatred for goodness which distinguishes human nature from
that of the brute, but perhaps as readily accounted for by
considering it as the yawning and stretching of a young soul cramped
too long in one moral posture.

Richard Veneer was a young man of remarkable experience for his
years.  He ran less risk, therefore, in exposing himself to the
temptations and dangers of a great city than many older men, who,
seeking the livelier scenes of excitement to be found in large towns
as a relaxation after the monotonous routine of family life, are too
often taken advantage of and made the victims of their sentiments or
their generous confidence in their fellow-creatures.  Such was not
his destiny.  There was something about him which looked as if he
would not take bullying kindly.  He had also the advantage of being
acquainted with most of those ingenious devices by which the
proverbial inconstancy of fortune is steadied to something more
nearly approaching fixed laws, and the dangerous risks which have so
often led young men to ruin and suicide are practically reduced to
somewhat less than nothing.  So that Mr. Richard Veneer worked off
his nervous energies without any troublesome adventure, and was ready
to return to Rockland in less than a week, without having lightened
the money-belt he wore round his body, or tarnished the long
glittering knife he carried in his boot.

Dick had sent his trunk to the nearest town through which the
railroad leading to the city passed.  He rode off on his black horse
and left him at the place where he took the cars.  On arriving at the
city station, he took a coach and drove to one of the great hotels.
Thither drove also a sagacious-looking, middle-aged man, who entered
his name as "W. Thompson" in the book at the office immediately
after that of "R. Venner."  Mr. "Thompson" kept a carelessly
observant eye upon Mr. Venner during his stay at the hotel, and
followed him to the cars when he left, looking over his shoulder when
he bought his ticket at the station, and seeing him fairly off
without obtruding himself in any offensive way upon his attention.
Mr. Thompson, known in other quarters as Detective Policeman Terry,
got very little by his trouble.  Richard Venner did not turn out to
be the wife-poisoner, the defaulting cashier, the river-pirate, or
the great counterfeiter.  He paid his hotel-bill as a gentleman
should always do, if he has the money and can spare it.  The
detective had probably overrated his own sagacity when he ventured to
suspect Mr. Venner.  He reported to his chief that there was a
knowing-looking fellow he had been round after, but he rather guessed
he was nothing more than "one o' them Southern sportsmen."

The poor fellows at the stable where Dick had left his horse had had
trouble enough with him.  One of the ostlers was limping about with a
lame leg, and another had lost a mouthful of his coat, which came
very near carrying a piece of his shoulder with it.  When Mr. Venner
came back for his beast, he was as wild as if he had just been
lassoed, screaming, kicking, rolling over to get rid of his saddle,
and when his rider was at last mounted, jumping about in a way to
dislodge any common horseman.  To all this Dick replied by sticking
his long spurs deeper and deeper into his flanks, until the creature
found he was mastered, and dashed off as if all the thistles of the
Pampas were pricking him.

"One more gallop, Juan?"  This was in the last mile of the road
before he came to the town which brought him in sight of the mansion-
house.  It was in this last gallop that the fiery mustang and his
rider flashed by the old Doctor.  Cassia pointed her sharp ears and
shied to let them pass.  The Doctor turned and looked through the
little round glass in the back of his sulky.

"Dick Turpin, there, will find more than his match!" said the Doctor.




CHAPTER XII.

THE APOLLINEAN INSTITUTE.
(With Extracts from the "Report of the committee.")

The readers of this narrative will hardly expect any elaborate
details of the educational management of the Apollinean Institute.
They cannot be supposed to take the same interest in its affairs as
was shown by the Annual Committees who reported upon its condition
and prospects.  As these Committees were, however, an important part
of the mechanism of the establishment, some general account of their
organization and a few extracts from the Report of the one last
appointed may not be out of place.

Whether Mr. Silas Peckham had some contrivance for packing his
Committees, whether they happened always to be made up of optimists
by nature, whether they were cajoled into good-humor by polite
attentions, or whether they were always really delighted with the
wonderful acquirements of the pupils and the admirable order of the
school, it is certain that their Annual Reports were couched in
language which might warm the heart of the most cold-blooded and
calculating father that ever had a family of daughters to educate.
In fact, these Annual Reports were considered by Mr. Peckham as his
most effective advertisements.

The first thing, therefore, was to see that the Committee was made up
of persons known to the public.

Some worn-out politician, in that leisurely and amiable transition-
state which comes between official extinction and the paralysis which
will finish him as soon as his brain gets a little softer, made an
admirable Chairman for Mr. Peckham, when he had the luck to pick up
such an article.  Old reputations, like old fashions, are more prized
in the grassy than in the stony districts.  An effete celebrity, who
would never be heard of again in the great places until the funeral
sermon waked up his memory for one parting spasm, finds himself in
full flavor of renown a little farther back from the changing winds
of the sea-coast.  If such a public character was not to be had, so
that there was no chance of heading the Report with the name of the
Honorable Mr. Somebody, the next best thing was to get the Reverend
Dr. Somebody to take that conspicuous position.  Then would follow
two or three local worthies with Esquire after their names.  If any
stray literary personage from one of the great cities happened to be
within reach, he was pounced upon by Mr. Silas Peckham.  It was a
hard case for the poor man, who had travelled a hundred miles or two
to the outside suburbs after peace and unwatered milk, to be pumped
for a speech in this unexpected way.  It was harder still, if he had
been induced to venture a few tremulous remarks, to be obliged to
write them out for the "Rockland Weekly Universe," with the chance of
seeing them used as an advertising certificate as long as he lived,
if he lived as long as the late Dr. Waterhouse did after giving his
certificate in favor of Whitwell's celebrated Cephalic Snuff.

The Report of the last Committee had been signed by the Honorable,
___________late __________ of ____________, as Chairman. (It is with
reluctance that the name and titles are left in blank; but our public
characters are so familiarly known to the whole community that this
reserve becomes necessary.)  The other members of the Committee were
the Reverend Mr. Butters, of a neighboring town, who was to make the
prayer before the Exercises of the Exhibition, and two or three
notabilities of Rockland, with geoponic eyes, and glabrous, bumpless
foreheads.  A few extracts from the Report are subjoined:


"The Committee have great pleasure in recording their unanimous
opinion, that the Institution was never in so flourishing a
condition....

"The health of the pupils is excellent; the admirable quality of food
supplied shows itself in their appearance; their blooming aspect
excited the admiration of the Committee, and bears testimony to the
assiduity of the excellent Matron.

"......moral and religious condition most encouraging, which they
cannot but attribute to the personal efforts and instruction of the
faithful Principal, who considers religious instruction a solemn duty
which he cannot commit to other people.

"......great progress in their studies, under the intelligent
superintendence of the accomplished Principal, assisted by Mr.
Badger, [Mr. Langdon's predecessor,] Miss Darley, the lady who
superintends the English branches, Miss Crabs, her assistant and
teacher of Modern Languages, and Mr. Schneider, teacher of French,
German, Latin, and Music....

"Education is the great business of the Institute.  Amusements are
objects of a secondary nature; but these are by no means
neglected....

"......English compositions of great originality and beauty,
creditable alike to the head and heart of their accomplished
authors.... several poems of a very high order of merit, which would
do honor to the literature of any age or country.... life-like
drawings, showing great proficiency....  Many converse fluently in
various modern languages....  perform the most difficult airs with
the skill of professional musicians....

"......advantages unsurpassed, if equalled by those of any
Institution in the country, and reflecting the highest honor on the
distinguished Head of the Establishment, SILAS PECKHAM, Esquire, and
his admirable Lady, the MATRON, with their worthy assistants...."


The perusal of this Report did Mr. Bernard more good than a week's
vacation would have done: It gave him such a laugh as he had not had
for a month.  The way in which Silas Peckham had made his Committee
say what he wanted them to--for he recognized a number of expressions
in the Report as coming directly from the lips of his principal, and
could not help thinking how cleverly he had forced his phrases, as
jugglers do the particular card they wish their dupe to take--struck
him as particularly neat and pleasing.

He had passed through the sympathetic and emotional stages in his new
experience, and had arrived at the philosophical and practical state,
which takes things coolly, and goes to work to set them right.  He
had breadth enough of view to see that there was nothing so very
exceptional in this educational trader's dealings with his
subordinates, but he had also manly feeling enough to attack the
particular individual instance of wrong before him.  There are plenty
of dealer's in morals, as in ordinary traffic, who confine themselves
to wholesale business.  They leave the small necessity of their next-
door neighbor to the retailers, who are poorer in statistics and
general facts, but richer in the every-day charities.  Mr. Bernard
felt, at first, as one does who sees a gray rat steal out of a drain
and begin gnawing at the bark of some tree loaded with fruit or
blossoms, which he will soon girdle, if he is let alone.  The first
impulse is to murder him with the nearest ragged stone.  Then one
remembers that he is a rodent, acting after the law of his kind, and
cools down and is contented to drive him off and guard the tree
against his teeth for the future.  As soon as this is done, one can
watch his attempts at mischief with a certain amusement.

This was the kind of process Mr. Bernard had gone through.  First,
the indignant surprise of a generous nature, when it comes
unexpectedly into relations with a mean one.  Then the impulse of
extermination,--a divine instinct, intended to keep down vermin of
all classes to their working averages in the economy of Nature.  Then
a return of cheerful tolerance,--a feeling, that, if the Deity could
bear with rats and sharpers, he could; with a confident trust, that,
in the long run, terriers and honest men would have the upperhand,
and a grateful consciousness that he had been sent just at the right
time to come between a patient victim and the master who held her in
peonage.

Having once made up his mind what to do, Mr. Bernard was as good-
natured and hopeful as ever.  He had the great advantage, from his
professional training, of knowing how to recognize and deal with
the nervous disturbances to which overtasked women are so liable.  He
saw well enough that Helen Darley would certainly kill herself or
lose her wits, if he could not lighten her labors and lift off a
large part of her weight of cares.  The worst of it was, that she was
one of those women who naturally overwork themselves, like those
horses who will go at the top of their pace until they drop.  Such
women are dreadfully unmanageable.  It is as hard reasoning with them
as it would have been reasoning with Io, when she was flying over
land and sea, driven by the sting of the never-sleeping gadfly.

This was a delicate, interesting game that he played.  Under one
innocent pretext or another, he invaded this or that special province
she had made her own.  He would collect the themes and have them all
read and marked, answer all the puzzling questions in mathematics,
make the other teachers come to him for directions, and in this way
gradually took upon himself not only all the general superintendence
that belonged to his office, but stole away so many of the special
duties which might fairly have belonged to his assistant, that,
before she knew it, she was looking better and feeling more cheerful
than for many and many a month before.

When the nervous energy is depressed by any bodily cause, or
exhausted by overworking, there follow effects which have often been
misinterpreted by moralists, and especially by theologians.  The
conscience itself becomes neuralgic, sometimes actually inflamed, so
that the least touch is agony.  Of all liars and false accusers, a
sick conscience is the most inventive and indefatigable.  The devoted
daughter, wife, mother, whose life has been given to unselfish
labors, who has filled a place which it seems to others only an angel
would make good, reproaches herself with incompetence and neglect of
duty.  The humble Christian, who has been a model to others, calls
himself a worm of the dust on one page of his diary, and arraigns
himself on the next for coming short of the perfection of an
archangel.

Conscience itself requires a conscience, or nothing can be more
unscrupulous.  It told Saul that he did well in persecuting the
Christians.  It has goaded countless multitudes of various creeds to
endless forms of self-torture.  The cities of India are full of
cripples it has made.  The hill-sides of Syria are riddled with
holes, where miserable hermits, whose lives it had palsied, lived and
died like the vermin they harbored.  Our libraries are crammed with
books written by spiritual hypochondriacs, who inspected all their
moral secretions a dozen times a day.  They are full of interest, but
they should be transferred from the shelf of the theologian to that
of the medical man who makes a study of insanity.

This was the state into which too much work and too much
responsibility were bringing Helen Darley, when the new master came
and lifted so much of the burden that was crushing her as must be
removed before she could have a chance to recover her natural
elasticity and buoyancy.  Many of the noblest women, suffering like
her, but less fortunate in being relieved at the right moment, die
worried out of life by the perpetual teasing of this inflamed,
neuralgic conscience.  So subtile is the line which separates the
true and almost angelic sensibility of a healthy, but exalted nature,
from the soreness of a soul which is sympathizing with a morbid state
of the body that it is no wonder they are often confounded.  And thus
many good women are suffered to perish by that form of spontaneous
combustion in which the victim goes on toiling day and night with the
hidden fire consuming her, until all at once her cheek whitens, and,
as we look upon her, she drops away, a heap of ashes.  The more they
overwork themselves, the more exacting becomes the sense of duty,--as
the draught of the locomotive's furnace blows stronger and makes the
fire burn more fiercely, the faster it spins along the track.

It is not very likely, as was said at the beginning of this chapter,
that we shall trouble ourselves a great deal about the internal
affairs of the Apollinean Institute.  These schools are, in the
nature of things, not so very unlike each other as to require a
minute description for each particular one among them.  They have all
very much the same general features, pleasing and displeasing.  All
feeding-establishments have something odious about them,--from the
wretched country-houses where paupers are farmed out to the lowest
bidder, up to the commons-tables at colleges and even the fashionable
boarding-house.  A person's appetite should be at war with no other
purse than his own.  Young people, especially, who have a bone-
factory at work in them, and have to feed the living looms of
innumerable growing tissues, should be provided for, if possible, by
those who love them like their own flesh and blood.  Elsewhere their
appetites will be sure to make them enemies, or, what are almost as
bad, friends whose interests are at variance with the claims of their
exacting necessities and demands.

Besides, all commercial transactions in regard to the most sacred
interests of life are hateful even to those who profit by them.  The
clergyman, the physician, the teacher, must be paid; but each of
them, if his duty be performed in the true spirit, can hardly help a
shiver of disgust when money is counted out to him for administering
the consolations of religion, for saving some precious life, for
sowing the seeds of Christian civilization in young ingenuous souls.

And yet all these schools, with their provincial French and their
mechanical accomplishments, with their cheap parade of diplomas and
commencements and other public honors, have an ever fresh interest to
all who see the task they are performing in our new social order.
These girls are not being educated for governesses, or to be
exported, with other manufactured articles, to colonies where there
happens to be a surplus of males.  Most of them will be wives, and
every American-born husband is a possible President of these United
States.  Any one of these girls may be a four-years' queen.  There is
no sphere of human activity so exalted that she may not be called
upon to fill it.

But there is another consideration of far higher interest.  The
education of our community to all that is beautiful is flowing in
mainly through its women, and that to a considerable extent by the
aid of these large establishments, the least perfect of which do
something to stimulate the higher tastes and partially instruct them.
Sometimes there is, perhaps, reason to fear that girls will be too
highly educated for their own happiness, if they are lifted by their
culture out of the range of the practical and every-day working youth
by whom they are surrounded.  But this is a risk we must take.  Our
young men come into active life so early, that, if our girls were not
educated to something beyond mere practical duties, our material
prosperity would outstrip our culture; as it often does in large
places where money is made too rapidly.  This is the meaning,
therefore, of that somewhat ambitious programme common to most of
these large institutions, at which we sometimes smile, perhaps
unwisely or uncharitably.

We shall take it for granted that the routine of instruction went on
at the Apollinean Institute much as it does in other schools of the
same class.  People, young or old, are wonderfully different, if we
contrast extremes in pairs.  They approach much nearer, if we take
them in groups of twenty.  Take two separate hundreds as they come,
without choosing, and you get the gamut of human character in both so
completely that you can strike many chords in each which shall be in
perfect unison with corresponding ones in the other.  If we go a step
farther, and compare the population of two villages of the same race
and region, there is such a regularly graduated distribution and
parallelism of character, that it seems as if Nature must turn out
human beings in sets like chessmen.

It must be confessed that the position in which Mr. Bernard now found
himself had a pleasing danger about it which might well justify all
the fears entertained on his account by more experienced friends,
when they learned that he was engaged in a Young Ladies' Seminary.
The school never went on more smoothly than during the first period
of his administration, after he had arranged its duties, and taken
his share, and even more than his share, upon himself.  But human
nature does not wait for the diploma of the Apollinean Institute to
claim the exercise of it, instincts and faculties.  These young girls
saw but little of the youth of the neighborhood.  The mansion-house
young men were off at college or in the cities, or making love to
each other's sisters, or at any rate unavailable for some reason or
other.  There were a few "clerks,"--that is, young men who attended
shops, commonly called "stores,"--who were fond of walking by the
Institute, when they were off duty, for the sake of exchanging a word
or a glance with any one of the young ladies they might happen to
know, if any such were stirring abroad: crude young men, mostly, with
a great many "Sirs" and "Ma'ams" in their speech, and with that style
of address sometimes acquired in the retail business, as if the
salesman were recommending himself to a customer, "First-rate family
article, Ma'am; warranted to wear a lifetime; just one yard and three
quarters in this pattern, Ma'am; sha'n't I have the pleasure?" and so
forth.  If there had been ever so many of them, and if they had been
ever so fascinating, the quarantine of the Institute was too rigorous
to allow any romantic infection to be introduced from without.

Anybody might see what would happen, with a good-looking, well-
dressed, well-bred young man, who had the authority of a master, it
is true, but the manners of a friend and equal, moving about among
these young girls day after day, his eyes meeting theirs, his breath
mingling with theirs, his voice growing familiar to them, never in
any harsh tones, often soothing, encouraging, always sympathetic,
with its male depth and breadth of sound among the chorus of trebles,
as if it were a river in which a hundred of these little piping
streamlets-might lose themselves; anybody might see what would
happen.  Young girls wrote home to their parents that they enjoyed
themselves much, this term, at the Institute, and thought they were
making rapid progress in their studies.  There was a great enthusiasm
for the young master's reading-classes in English poetry.  Some of
the poor little things began to adorn themselves with an extra
ribbon, or a bit of such jewelry as they had before kept for great
occasions.  Dear souls! they only half knew what they were doing it
for.  Does the bird know why its feathers grow more brilliant and its
voice becomes musical in the pairing season?

And so, in the midst of this quiet inland town, where a mere accident
had placed Mr. Bernard Langdon, there was a concentration of
explosive materials which might at any time change its Arcadian and
academic repose into a scene of dangerous commotion.  What said Helen
Darley, when she saw with her woman's glance that more than one girl,
when she should be looking at her book, was looking over it toward
the master's desk?  Was her own heart warmed by any livelier feeling
than gratitude, as its life began to flow with fuller pulses, and the
morning sky again looked bright and the flowers recovered their lost
fragrance?  Was there any strange, mysterious affinity between the
master and the dark girl who sat by herself?  Could she call him at
will by looking at him?  Could it be that--?  It made her shiver to
think of it.---And who was that strange horseman who passed Mr.
Bernard at dusk the other evening, looking so like Mephistopheles
galloping hard to be in season at the witches' Sabbath-gathering?
That must be the cousin of Elsie's who wants to marry her, they say.
A dangerous-looking fellow for a rival, if one took a fancy to the
dark girl!  And who is she, and what?---by what demon is she haunted,
by what taint is she blighted, by what curse is she followed, by what
destiny is she marked, that her strange beauty has such a terror in
it, and that hardly one shall dare to love her, and her eye glitters
always, but warms for none?

Some of these questions are ours.  Some were Helen Darley's.  Some of
them mingled with the dreams of Bernard Langdon, as he slept the
night after meeting the strange horseman.  In the morning he happened
to be a little late in entering the schoolroom.  There was something
between the leaves of the Virgil which lay upon his desk.  He opened
it and saw a freshly gathered mountain-flower.  He looked at Elsie,
instinctively, involuntarily.  She had another such flower on her
breast.

A young girl's graceful compliment,--that is all,--no doubt,--no
doubt.  It was odd that the flower should have happened to be laid
between the leaves of the Fourth Book of the "AEneid," and at this
line,

          "Incipit effari, mediaque in voce resistit."

A remembrance of an ancient superstition flashed through the master's
mind, and he determined to try the Sortes Virgilianae.  He shut the
volume, and opened it again at a venture.---The story of Laocoon!

He read with a strange feeling of unwilling fascination, from
"Horresco referees" to "Bis medium amplexi," and flung the book from
him, as if its leaves had been steeped in the subtle poisons that
princes die of.




CHAPTER XIII.

CURIOSITY.

People will talk.  'Ciascun lo dice' is a tune that is played oftener
than the national air of this country or any other.

"That 's what they say.  Means to marry her, if she is his cousin.
Got money himself,--that 's the story,--but wants to come and live in
the old place, and get the Dudley property by and by."  "Mother's
folks was wealthy."--"Twenty-three to twenty-five year old."--"He
a'n't more 'n twenty, or twenty-one at the outside."--"Looks as if
he knew too much to be only twenty year old."--"Guess he's been
through the mill,--don't look so green, anyhow, hey?  Did y' ever
mind that cut over his left eyebrow?"

So they gossiped in Rockland.  The young fellows could make nothing
of Dick Venner.  He was shy and proud with the few who made advances
to him.  The young ladies called him handsome and romantic, but he
looked at them like a many-tailed pacha who was in the habit of,
ordering his wives by the dozen.

"What do you think of the young man over there at the Veneers'?" said
Miss Arabella Thornton to her father.

"Handsome," said the Judge, "but dangerous-looking.  His face is
indictable at common law.  Do you know, my dear, I think there is a
blank at the Sheriff's office, with a place for his name in it?"

The Judge paused and looked grave, as if he had just listened to the
verdict of the jury and was going to pronounce sentence.

"Have you heard anything against him?"  said the Judge's daughter.

"Nothing.  But I don't like these mixed bloods and half-told stories.
Besides, I have seen a good many desperate fellows at the bar, and I
have a fancy they all have a look belonging to them.  The worst one I
ever sentenced looked a good deal like this fellow.  A wicked mouth.
All our other features are made for us; but a man makes his own
mouth."

"Who was the person you sentenced?"

"He was a young fellow that undertook to garrote a man who had won
his money at cards.  The same slender shape, the same cunning, fierce
look, smoothed over with a plausible air.  Depend upon it, there is
an expression in all the sort of people who live by their wits when
they can, and by worse weapons when their wits fail them, that we old
law-doctors know just as well as the medical counsellors know the
marks of disease in a man's face.  Dr. Kittredge looks at a man and
says he is going to die; I look at another man and say he is going to
be hanged, if nothing happens.  I don't say so of this one, but I
don't like his looks.  I wonder Dudley Veneer takes to him so
kindly."

"It's all for Elsie's sake," said Miss Thornton.  "I feel quite sure
of that.  He never does anything that is not meant for her in some
way.  I suppose it amuses her to have her cousin about the house.
She rides a good deal since he has been here.  Have you seen them
galloping about together?  He looks like my idea of a Spanish bandit
on that wild horse of his."

"Possibly he has been one,--or is one," said the Judge,--smiling as
men smile whose lips have often been freighted with the life and
death of their fellow-creatures.  "I met them riding the other day.
Perhaps Dudley is right, if it pleases her to have a companion.  What
will happen, though, if he makes love to her?  Will Elsie be easily
taken with such a fellow?  You young folks are supposed to know more
about these matters than we middle-aged people."

"Nobody can tell.  Elsie is not like anybody else.  The girls who
have seen most of her think she hates men, all but 'Dudley,' as she
calls her father.  Some of them doubt whether she loves him.  They
doubt whether she can love anything human, except perhaps the old
black woman who has taken care of her since she was a baby.  The
village people have the strangest stories about her; you know what
they call her?"

She whispered three words in her father's ear.  The Judge changed
color as she spoke, sighed deeply, and was silent as if lost in
thought for a moment.

"I remember her mother," he said, "so well!  A sweeter creature never
lived.  Elsie has something of her in her look, but those are not her
mother's eyes.  They were dark, but soft, as in all I ever saw of her
race.  Her father's are dark too, but mild, and even tender, I should
say.  I don't know what there is about Elsie's,--but do you know, my
dear, I find myself curiously influenced by them?  I have had to face
a good many sharp eyes and hard ones,--murderers' eyes and pirates',
--men who had to be watched in the bar, where they stood on trial,
for fear they should spring on the prosecuting officers like tigers,
--but I never saw such eyes as Elsie's; and yet they have a kind of
drawing virtue or power about them,--I don't know what else to call
it: have you never observed this?"

His daughter smiled in her turn.

"Never observed it?  Why, of course, nobody could be with Elsie
Venner and not observe it.  There are a good many other strange
things about her: did you ever notice how she dresses?"

"Why, handsomely enough, I should think," the Judge answered.  "I
suppose she dresses as she likes, and sends to the city for what she
wants.  What do you mean in particular?  We men notice effects in
dress, but not much in detail."

"You never noticed the colors and patterns of her dresses?  You never
remarked anything curious about her ornaments?  Well!  I don't
believe you men know, half the time, whether a lady wears a nine-
penny collar or a thread-lace cape worth a thousand dollars.  I don't
believe you know a silk dress from a bombazine one.  I don't believe
you can tell whether a woman is in black or in colors, unless you
happen to know she is a widow.  Elsie Venner has a strange taste in
dress, let me tell you.  She sends for the oddest patterns of stuffs,
and picks out the most curious things at the jeweller's, whenever she
goes to town with her father.  They say the old Doctor tells him to
let her have her way about such matters.  Afraid of her mind, if she
is contradicted, I suppose.  You've heard about her going to school
at that place,--the 'Institoot,' as those people call it?  They say
she's bright enough in her way,--has studied at home, you know, with
her father a good deal, knows some modern languages and Latin, I
believe: at any rate, she would have it so,--she must go to the
'Institoot.'  They have a very good female teacher there, I hear; and
the new master, that young Mr. Langdon, looks and talks like a well-
educated young man.  I wonder what they 'll make of Elsie, between
them!"

So they talked at the Judge's, in the calm, judicial-looking mansion-
house, in the grave, still library, with the troops of wan-hued law-
books staring blindly out of their titles at them as they talked,
like the ghosts of dead attorneys fixed motionless and speechless,
each with a thin, golden film over his unwinking eyes.

In the mean time, everything went on quietly enough after Cousin
Richard's return.  A man of sense,--that is, a man who knows
perfectly well that a cool head is worth a dozen warm hearts in
carrying the fortress of a woman's affections, (not yours, "Astarte,"
nor yours, "Viola,")--who knows that men are rejected by women every
day because they, the men, love them, and are accepted every day
because they do not, and therefore can study the arts of pleasing,--a
man of sense, when he finds he has established his second parallel
too soon, retires quietly to his first, and begins working on his
covered ways again.  The whole art of love may be read in any
Encyclopaedia under the title Fortification, where the terms just
used are explained.  After the little adventure of the necklace, Dick
retreated at once to his first parallel.  Elsie loved riding,--and
would go off with him on a gallop now and then.  He was a master of
all those strange Indian horseback-feats which shame the tricks of
the circus-riders, and used to astonish and almost amuse her
sometimes by disappearing from his saddle, like a phantom horseman
lying flat against the side of the bounding creature that bore him,
as if he were a hunting leopard with his claws in the horse's flank
and flattening himself out against his heaving ribs.  Elsie knew a
little Spanish too, which she had learned from the young person who
had taught her dancing, and Dick enlarged her vocabulary with a few
soft phrases, and would sing her a song sometimes, touching the air
upon an ancient-looking guitar they had found with the ghostly things
in the garret,--a quaint old instrument, marked E. M. on the back,
and supposed to have belonged to a certain Elizabeth Mascarene,
before mentioned in connection with a work of art,--a fair, dowerless
lady, who smiled and sung and faded away, unwedded, a hundred years
ago, as dowerless ladies, not a few, are smiling and singing and
fading now,--God grant each of them His love,--and one human heart as
its interpreter!

As for school, Elsie went or stayed away as she liked.  Sometimes,
when they thought she was at her desk in the great schoolroom, she
would be on The Mountain,--alone always.  Dick wanted to go with her,
but she would never let him.  Once, when she had followed the zigzag
path a little way up, she looked back and caught a glimpse of him
following her.  She turned and passed him without a word, but giving
him a look which seemed to make the scars on his wrist tingle, went
to her room, where she locked herself up, and did not come out again
till evening, Old Sophy having brought her food, and set it down, not
speaking, but looking into her eyes inquiringly, like a dumb beast
trying to feel out his master's will in his face.  The evening was
clear and the moon shining.  As Dick sat at his chamber-window,
looking at the mountain-side, he saw a gray-dressed figure flit
between the trees and steal along the narrow path which led upward.
Elsie's pillow was unpressed that night, but she had not been missed
by the household,--for Dick knew enough to keep his own counsel.  The
next morning she avoided him and went off early to school.  It was
the same morning that the young master found the flower between the
leaves of his Virgil.

The girl got over her angry fit, and was pleasant enough with her
cousin for a few days after this; but she shunned rather than sought
him.  She had taken a new interest in her books, and especially in
certain poetical readings which the master conducted with the elder
scholars.  This gave Master Langdon a good chance to study her ways
when her eye was on her book, to notice the inflections of her voice,
to watch for any expression of her sentiments; for, to tell the
truth, he had a kind of fear that the girl had taken a fancy to him,
and, though she interested him, he did not wish to study her heart
from the inside.

The more he saw her, the more the sadness of her beauty wrought upon
him.  She looked as if she might hate, but could not love.  She
hardly smiled at anything, spoke rarely, but seemed to feel that her
natural power of expression lay all in her bright eyes, the force of
which so many had felt, but none perhaps had tried to explain to
themselves.  A person accustomed to watch the faces of those who were
ailing in body or mind, and to search in every line and tint for some
underlying source of disorder, could hardly help analyzing the
impression such a face produced upon him.  The light of those
beautiful eyes was like the lustre of ice; in all her features there
was nothing of that human warmth which shows that sympathy has
reached the soul beneath the mask of flesh it wears.  The look was
that of remoteness, of utter isolation.  There was in its stony
apathy, it seemed to him, the pathos which we find in the blind who
show no film or speck over the organs of sight; for Nature had meant
her to be lovely, and left out nothing but love.  And yet the master
could not help feeling that some instinct was working in this girl
which was in some way leading her to seek his presence.  She did not
lift her glittering eyes upon him as at first.  It seemed strange
that she did not, for they were surely her natural weapons of
conquest.  Her color did not come and go like that of young girls
under excitement.  She had a clear brunette complexion, a little sun-
touched, it may be,--for the master noticed once, when her necklace
was slightly displaced, that a faint ring or band of a little lighter
shade than the rest of the surface encircled her neck.  What was the
slight peculiarity of her enunciation, when she read?  Not a lisp,
certainly, but the least possible imperfection in articulating some
of the lingual sounds,--just enough to be noticed at first, and quite
forgotten after being a few times heard.

Not a word about the flower on either side.  It was not uncommon for
the schoolgirls to leave a rose or pink or wild flower on the
teacher's desk.  Finding it in the Virgil was nothing, after all; it
was a little delicate flower, which looked as if it were made to
press, and it was probably shut in by accident at the particular
place where he found it.  He took it into his head to examine it in a
botanical point of view.  He found it was not common,--that it grew
only in certain localities,--and that one of these was among the
rocks of the eastern spur of The Mountain.

It happened to come into his head how the Swiss youth climb the sides
of the Alps to find the flower called the Edelweiss for the maidens
whom they wish to please.  It is a pretty fancy, that of scaling some
dangerous height before the dawn, so as to gather the flower in its
freshness, that the favored maiden may wear it to church on Sunday
morning, a proof at once of her lover's devotion and his courage.
Mr. Bernard determined to explore the region where this flower was
said to grow, that he might see where the wild girl sought the
blossoms of which Nature was so jealous.

It was on a warm, fair Saturday afternoon that he undertook his land-
voyage of discovery.  He had more curiosity, it may be, than he would
have owned; for he had heard of the girl's wandering habits, and the
guesses about her sylvan haunts, and was thinking what the chances
were that he should meet her in some strange place, or come upon
traces of her which would tell secrets she would not care to have
known.

The woods are all alive to one who walks through them with his mind
in an excited state, and his eyes and ears wide open.  The trees are
always talking, not merely whispering with their leaves, (for every
tree talks to itself in that way, even when it stands alone in the
middle of a pasture,) but grating their boughs against each other, as
old horn-handed farmers press their dry, rustling palms together,
dropping a nut or a leaf or a twig, clicking to the tap of a
woodpecker, or rustling as a squirrel flashes along a branch.  It was
now the season of singing-birds, and the woods were haunted with
mysterious, tender music.  The voices of the birds which love the
deeper shades of the forest are sadder than those of the open fields:
these are the nuns who have taken the veil, the hermits that have
hidden themselves away from the world and tell their griefs to the
infinite listening Silences of the wilderness,--for the one deep
inner silence that Nature breaks with her fitful superficial sounds
becomes multiplied as the image of a star in ruffled waters.
Strange!  The woods at first convey the impression of profound
repose, and yet, if you watch their ways with open ear, you find the
life which is in them is restless and nervous as that of a woman: the
little twigs are crossing and twining and separating like slender
fingers that cannot be still; the stray leaf is to be flattened into
its place like a truant curl; the limbs sway and twist, impatient of
their constrained attitude; and the rounded masses of foliage swell
upward and subside from time to time with long soft sighs, and, it
may be, the falling of a few rain-drops which had lain hidden among
the deeper shadows.  I pray you, notice, in the sweet summer days
which will soon see you among the mountains, this inward tranquillity
that belongs to the heart of the woodland, with this nervousness, for
I do not know what else to call it, of outer movement.  One would
say, that Nature, like untrained persons, could not sit still without
nestling about or doing something with her limbs or features, and
that high breeding was only to be looked for in trim gardens, where
the soul of the trees is ill at ease perhaps, but their manners are
unexceptionable, and a rustling branch or leaf falling out of season
is an indecorum.  The real forest is hardly still except in the
Indian summer; then there is death in the house, and they are waiting
for the sharp shrunken months to come with white raiment for the
summer's burial.

There were many hemlocks in this neighborhood, the grandest and most
solemn of all the forest-trees in the mountain regions.  Up to a
certain period of growth they are eminently beautiful, their boughs
disposed in the most graceful pagoda-like series of close terraces,
thick and dark with green crystalline leaflets.  In spring the tender
shoots come out of a paler green, finger-like, as if they were
pointing to the violets at their feet.  But when the trees have grown
old, and their rough boles measure a yard and more through their
diameter, they are no longer beautiful, but they have a sad solemnity
all their own, too full of meaning to require the heart's comment to
be framed in words.  Below, all their earthward-looking branches are
sapless and shattered, splintered by the weight of many winters'
snows; above, they are still green and full of life, but their
summits overtop all the deciduous trees around them, and in their
companionship with heaven they are alone.  On these the lightning
loves to fall.  One such Mr. Bernard saw,--or rather, what had been
one such; for the bolt had torn the tree like an explosion from
within, and the ground was strewed all around the broken stump with
flakes of rough bark and strips and chips of shivered wood, into
which the old tree had been rent by the bursting rocket from the
thunder-cloud.

--The master had struck up The Mountain obliquely from the western
side of the Dudley mansion-house.  In this way he ascended until he
reached a point many hundred feet above the level of the plain, and
commanding all the country beneath and around.  Almost at his feet he
saw the mansion-house, the chimney standing out of the middle of the
roof, or rather, like a black square hole in it,--the trees almost
directly over their stems, the fences as lines, the whole nearly as
an architect would draw a ground-plan of the house and the inclosures
round it.  It frightened him to see how the huge masses of rock and
old forest-growths hung over the home below.  As he descended a
little and drew near the ledge of evil name, he was struck with the
appearance of a long narrow fissure that ran parallel with it and
above it for many rods, not seemingly of very old standing,--for
there were many fibres of roots which had evidently been snapped
asunder when the rent took place, and some of which were still
succulent in both separated portions.

Mr. Bernard had made up his mind, when he set forth, not to come back
before he had examined the dreaded ledge. He had half persuaded
himself that it was scientific curiosity. He wished to examine the
rocks, to see what flowers grew there, and perhaps to pick up an
adventure in the zoological line; for he had on a pair of high, stout
boots, and he carried a stick in his hand, which was forked at one
extremity, so as to be very convenient to hold down a crotalus with,
if he should happen to encounter one.  He knew the aspect of the
ledge from a distance; for its bald and leprous-looking declivities
stood out in their nakedness from the wooded sides of The Mountain,
when this was viewed from certain points of the village.  But the
nearer aspect of the blasted region had something frightful in it.
The cliffs were water-worn, as if they had been gnawed for thousands
of years by hungry waves.  In some places they overhung their base so
as to look like leaning towers which might topple over at any minute.
In other parts they were scooped into niches or caverns.  Here and
there they were cracked in deep fissures, some of them of such width
that one might enter them, if he cared to run the risk of meeting the
regular tenants, who might treat him as an intruder.

Parts of the ledge were cloven perpendicularly, with nothing but
cracks or slightly projecting edges in which or on which a foot could
find hold.  High up on one of these precipitous walls of rock he saw
some tufts of flowers, and knew them at once for the same that he had
found between the leaves of his Virgil.  Not there, surely!  No woman
would have clung against that steep, rough parapet to gather an idle
blossom.  And yet the master looked round everywhere, and even up the
side of that rock, to see if there were no signs of a woman's
footstep. He peered about curiously, as if his eye might fall on some
of those fragments of dress which women leave after them, whenever
they run against each other or against anything else,--in crowded
ballrooms, in the brushwood after picnics, on the fences after
rambles, scattered round over every place which has witnessed an act
of violence, where rude hands have been laid upon them.  Nothing--
Stop, though, one moment.  That stone is smooth and polished, as if
it had been somewhat worn by the pressure of human feet.  There is
one twig broken among the stems of that clump of shrubs.  He put his
foot upon the stone and took hold of the close-clinging shrub.  In
this way he turned a sharp angle of the rock and found himself on a
natural platform, which lay in front of one of the wider fissures,--
whether the mouth of a cavern or not he could not yet tell.  A flat
stone made an easy seat, upon which he sat down, as he was very glad
to do, and looked mechanically about him.  A small fragment
splintered from the rock was at his feet.  He took it and threw it
down the declivity a little below where he sat.  He looked about for
a stem or a straw of some kind to bite upon,--a country-instinct,--
relic, no doubt, of the old vegetable-feeding habits of Eden.  Is
that a stem or a straw?  He picked it up.  It was a hair-pin.

To say that Mr. Langdon had a strange sort of thrill shoot through
him at the sight of this harmless little implement would be a
statement not at variance with the fact of the case.  That smooth
stone had been often trodden, and by what foot he could not doubt.
He rose up from his seat to look round for other signs of a woman's
visits.  What if there is a cavern here, where she has a retreat,
fitted up, perhaps, as anchorites fitted their cells,--nay, it may
be, carpeted and mirrored, and with one of those tiger-skins for a
couch, such as they, say the girl loves to lie on?  Let us look, at
any rate.

Mr. Bernard walked to the mouth of the cavern or fissure and looked
into it.  His look was met by the glitter of two diamond eyes, small,
sharp, cold, shining out of the darkness, but gliding with a smooth,
steady motion towards the light, and himself.  He stood fixed, struck
dumb, staring back into them with dilating pupils and sudden numbness
of fear that cannot move, as in the terror of dreams.  The two sparks
of light came forward until they grew to circles of flame, and all at
once lifted themselves up as if in angry surprise.  Then for the
first time thrilled in Mr. Bernard's ears the dreadful sound that
nothing which breathes, be it man or brute, can hear unmoved,--the
long, loud, stinging whirr, as the huge, thick bodied reptile shook
his many-jointed rattle and adjusted his loops for the fatal stroke.
His eyes were drawn as with magnets toward the circles of flame.  His
ears rung as in the overture to the swooning dream of chloroform.
Nature was before man with her anaesthetics: the cat's first shake
stupefies the mouse; the lion's first shake deadens the man's fear
and feeling; and the crotalus paralyzes before he strikes.  He waited
as in a trance,--waited as one that longs to have the blow fall, and
all over, as the man who shall be in two pieces in a second waits for
the axe to drop.  But while he looked straight into the flaming eyes,
it seemed to him that they were losing their light and terror, that
they were growing tame and dull; the charm was dissolving, the
numbness was passing away, he could move once more.  He heard a light
breathing close to his ear, and, half turning, saw the face of Elsie
Venner, looking motionless into the reptile's eyes, which had shrunk
and faded under the stronger enchantment of her own.




CHAPTER XIV.

FAMILY SECRETS.

It was commonly understood in the town of Rockland that Dudley Venner
had had a great deal of trouble with that daughter of his, so
handsome, yet so peculiar, about whom there were so many strange
stories.  There was no end to the tales which were told of her
extraordinary doings.  Yet her name was never coupled with that of
any youth or man, until this cousin had provoked remark by his visit;
and even then it was oftener in the shape of wondering conjectures
whether he would dare to make love to her, than in any pretended
knowledge of their relations to each other, that the public tongue
exercised its village-prerogative of tattle.

The more common version of the trouble at the mansion-house was this:
Elsie was not exactly in her right mind.  Her temper was singular,
her tastes were anomalous, her habits were lawless, her antipathies
were many and intense, and she was liable to explosions of
ungovernable anger.  Some said that was not the worst of it.  At
nearly fifteen years old, when she was growing fast, and in an
irritable state of mind and body, she had had a governess placed over
her for whom she had conceived an aversion.  It was whispered among a
few who knew more of the family secrets than others, that, worried
and exasperated by the presence and jealous oversight of this person,
Elsie had attempted to get finally rid of her by unlawful means, such
as young girls have been known to employ in their straits, and to
which the sex at all ages has a certain instinctive tendency, in
preference to more palpable instruments for the righting of its
wrongs.  At any rate, this governess had been taken suddenly ill, and
the Doctor had been sent for at midnight.  Old Sophy had taken her
master into a room apart, and said a few words to him which turned
him as white as a sheet.  As soon as he recovered himself, he sent
Sophy out, called in the old Doctor, and gave him some few hints, on
which he acted at once, and had the satisfaction of seeing his
patient out of danger before he left in the morning.  It is proper to
say, that, during the following days, the most thorough search was
made in every nook and cranny of those parts of the house which Elsie
chiefly haunted, but nothing was found which might be accused of
having been the intentional cause of the probably accidental sudden
illness of the governess.  From this time forward her father was
never easy.  Should he keep her apart, or shut her up, for fear of
risk to others, and so lose every chance of restoring her mind to its
healthy tone by kindly influences and intercourse with wholesome
natures?  There was no proof, only presumption, as to the agency of
Elsie in the matter referred to.  But the doubt was worse, perhaps,
than certainty would have been,--for then he would have known what to
do.

He took the old Doctor as his adviser.  The shrewd old man listened
to the father's story, his explanations of possibilities, of
probabilities, of dangers, of hopes.  When he had got through, the
Doctor looked him in the face steadily, as if he were saying, Is that
all?

The father's eyes fell.  This was not all.  There was something at
the bottom of his soul which he could not bear to speak of,--nay,
which, as often as it reared itself through the dark waves of
unworded consciousness into the breathing air of thought, he trod
down as the ruined angels tread down a lost soul, trying to come up
out of the seething sea of torture.  Only this one daughter!  No!
God never would have ordained such a thing.  There was nothing ever
heard of like it; it could not be; she was ill,--she would outgrow
all these singularities; he had had an aunt who was peculiar; he had
heard that hysteric girls showed the strangest forms of moral
obliquity for a time, but came right at last.  She would change all
at once, when her health got more firmly settled in the course of her
growth.  Are there not rough buds that open into sweet flowers?  Are
there not fruits, which, while unripe, are not to be tasted or
endured, which mature into the richest taste and fragrance?  In God's
good time she would come to her true nature; her eyes would lose that
frightful, cold glitter; her lips would not feel so cold when she
pressed them against his cheek; and that faint birth-mark, her mother
swooned when she first saw, would fade wholly out,--it was less
marked, surely, now than it used to be!

So Dudley Venner felt, and would have thought, if he had let his
thoughts breathe the air of his soul.  But the Doctor read through
words and thoughts and all into the father's consciousness.  There
are states of mind which may be shared by two persons in presence of
each other, which remain not only unworded, but unthoughted, if such
a word may be coined for our special need.  Such a mutually
interpenetrative consciousness there was between the father and the
old physician.  By a common impulse, both of them rose in a
mechanical way and went to the western window, where each started, as
he saw the other's look directed towards the white stone which stood
in the midst of the small plot of green turf.

The Doctor had, for a moment, forgotten himself but he looked up at
the clouds, which were angry, and said, as if speaking of the
weather, "It is dark now, but we hope it will clear up by and by.
There are a great many more clouds than rains, and more rains than
strokes of lightning, and more strokes of lightning than there are
people killed.  We must let this girl of ours have her way, as far as
it is safe.  Send away this woman she hates, quietly.  Get her a
foreigner for a governess, if you can,--one that can dance and sing
and will teach her.  In the house old Sophy will watch her best.  Out
of it you must trust her, I am afraid,--for she will not be followed
round, and she is in less danger than you think.  If she wanders at
night, find her, if you can; the woods are not absolutely safe.  If
she will be friendly with any young people, have them to see her,--
young men especially.  She will not love any one easily, perhaps not
at all; yet love would be more like to bring her right than anything
else.  If any young person seems in danger of falling in love with
her, send him to me for counsel."

Dry, hard advice, but given from a kind hewn, with a moist eye, and
in tones which tried to be cheerful and were full of sympathy.  This
advice was the key to the more than indulgent treatment which, as we
have seen, the girl had received from her father and all about her.
The old Doctor often came in, in the kindest, most natural sort of
way, got into pleasant relations with Elsie by always treating her in
the same easy manner as at the great party, encouraging all her
harmless fancies, and rarely reminding her that he was a professional
adviser, except when she came out of her own accord, as in the talk
they had at the party, telling him of some wild trick she had been
playing.

"Let her go to the girls' school, by all means," said the Doctor,
when she had begun to talk about it.  "Possibly she may take to some
of the girls or of the teachers.  Anything to interest her.
Friendship, love, religion, whatever will set her nature at work.  We
must have headway on, or there will be no piloting her.  Action first
of all, and then we will see what to do with it."

So, when Cousin Richard came along, the Doctor, though he did not
like his looks any too well, told her father to encourage his staying
for a time.  If she liked him, it was good; if she only tolerated
him, it was better than nothing.

"You know something about that nephew of yours, during these last
years, I suppose?" the Doctor said.  "Looks as if he had seen life.
Has a scar that was made by a sword-cut, and a white spot on the side
of his neck that looks like a bullet-mark.  I think he has been what
folks call a 'hard customer.'"

Dudley Venner owned that he had heard little or nothing of him of
late years.  He had invited himself, and of course it would not be
decent not to receive him as a relative.  He thought Elsie rather
liked having him about the house for a while.  She was very
capricious,--acted as if she fancied him one day and disliked him the
next.  He did not know,--but sometimes thought that this nephew of
his might take a serious liking to Elsie.  What should he do about
it, if it turned out so?

The Doctor lifted his eyebrows a little.  He thought there was no
fear.  Elsie was naturally what they call a man-hater, and there was
very little danger of any sudden passion springing up between two
such young persons.  Let him stay awhile; it gives her something to
think about.  So he stayed awhile, as we have seen.

The more Mr. Richard became acquainted with the family,--that is,
with the two persons of whom it consisted,--the more favorably the
idea of a permanent residence in the mansion-house seemed to impress
him.  The estate was large,--hundreds of acres, with woodlands and
meadows of great value.  The father and daughter had been living
quietly, and there could not be a doubt that the property which came
through the Dudleys must have largely increased of late years.  It
was evident enough that they had an abundant income, from the way in
which Elsie's caprices were indulged.  She had horses and carriages
to suit herself; she sent to the great city for everything she wanted
in the way of dress.  Even her diamonds--and the young man knew
something about these gems--must be of considerable value; and yet
she wore them carelessly, as it pleased her fancy.  She had precious
old laces, too, almost worth their weight in diamonds; laces which
had been snatched from altars in ancient Spanish cathedrals during
the wars, and which it would not be safe to leave a duchess alone
with for ten minutes.  The old house was fat with the deposits of
rich generations which had gone before.  The famous "golden" fire-set
was a purchase of one of the family who had been in France during the
Revolution, and must have come from a princely palace, if not from
one of the royal residences.  As for silver, the iron closet which
had been made in the dining-room wall was running over with it: tea-
kettles, coffee-pots, heavy-lidded tankards, chafing-dishes, punch-
bowls, all that all the Dudleys had ever used, from the caudle-cup
which used to be handed round the young mother's chamber, and the
porringer from which children scooped their bread-and-milk with
spoons as solid as ingots, to that ominous vessel, on the upper
shelf, far back in the dark, with a spout like a slender italic S,
out of which the sick and dying, all along the last century, and
since, had taken the last drops that passed their lips.  Without
being much of a scholar, Dick could see well enough, too, that the
books in the library had been ordered from the great London houses,
whose imprint they bore, by persons who knew what was best and meant
to have it.  A man does not require much learning to feel pretty
sure, when he takes one of those solid, smooth, velvet-leaved
quartos, say a Baskerville Addison, for instance, bound in red
morocco, with a margin of gold as rich as the embroidery of a
prince's collar, as Vandyck drew it,--he need not know much to feel
pretty sure that a score or two of shelves full of such books mean
that it took a long purse, as well as a literary taste, to bring them
together.

To all these attractions the mind of this thoughtful young gentleman
may be said to have been fully open.  He did not disguise from
himself, however, that there were a number of drawbacks in the way of
his becoming established as the heir of the Dudley mansion-house and
fortune.  In the first place, Cousin Elsie was, unquestionably, very
piquant, very handsome, game as a hawk, and hard to please, which
made her worth trying for.  But then there was something about Cousin
Elsie,--(the small, white scars began stinging, as he said this to
himself, and he pushed his sleeve up to look at them)--there was
something about Cousin Elsie he couldn't make out.  What was the
matter with her eyes, that they sucked your life out of you in that
strange way?  What did she always wear a necklace for?  Had she some
such love-token on her neck as the old Don's revolver had left on
his?  How safe would anybody feel to live with her?  Besides, her
father would last forever, if he was left to himself.  And he may
take it into his head to marry again.  That would be pleasant!

So talked Cousin Richard to himself, in the calm of the night and in
the tranquillity of his own soul.  There was much to be said on both
sides.  It was a balance to be struck after the two columns were
added up.  He struck the balance, and came to the conclusion that he
would fall in love with Elsie Venner.

The intelligent reader will not confound this matured and serious
intention of falling in love with the young lady with that mere
impulse of the moment before mentioned as an instance of making love.
On the contrary, the moment Mr. Richard had made up his mind that he
should fall in love with Elsie, he began to be more reserved with
her, and to try to make friends in other quarters.  Sensible men, you
know, care very little what a girl's present fancy is.  The question
is: Who manages her, and how can you get at that person or those
persons?  Her foolish little sentiments are all very well in their
way; but business is business, and we can't stop for such trifles.
The old political wire-pullers never go near the man they want to
gain, if they can help it; they find out who his intimates and
managers are, and work through them.  Always handle any positively
electrical body, whether it is charged with passion or power, with
some non-conductor between you and it, not with your naked hands.---
The above were some of the young gentleman's working axioms; and he
proceeded to act in accordance with them.

He began by paying his court more assiduously to his uncle.  It was
not very hard to ingratiate himself in that quarter; for his manners
were insinuating, and his precocious experience of life made him
entertaining.  The old neglected billiard--room was soon put in
order, and Dick, who was a magnificent player, had a series of games
with his uncle, in which, singularly enough, he was beaten, though
his antagonist had been out of play for years.  He evinced a profound
interest in the family history, insisted on having the details of its
early alliances, and professed a great pride in it, which he had
inherited from his father, who, though he had allied himself with the
daughter of an alien race, had yet chosen one with the real azure
blood in her veins, as proud as if she had Castile and Aragon for her
dower and the Cid for her grand-papa.  He also asked a great deal of
advice, such as inexperienced young persons are in need of, and
listened to it with due reverence.

It is not very strange that uncle Dudley took a kinder view of his
nephew than the Judge, who thought he could read a questionable
history in his face,--or the old Doctor, who knew men's temperaments
and organizations pretty well, and had his prejudices about races,
and could tell an old sword-cut and a ballet-mark in two seconds from
a scar got by falling against the fender, or a mark left by king's
evil.  He could not be expected to share our own prejudices; for he
had heard nothing of the wild youth's adventures, or his scamper over
the Pampas at short notice.  So, then, "Richard Venner, Esquire,
guest of Dudley Venner, Esquire, at his elegant mansion," prolonged
his visit until his presence became something like a matter of habit,
and the neighbors began to think that the fine old house would be
illuminated before long for a grand marriage.

He had done pretty well with the father: the next thing was to gain
over the nurse.  Old Sophy was as cunning as a red fox or a gray
woodchuck.  She had nothing in the world to do but to watch Elsie;
she had nothing to care for but this girl and her father.  She had
never liked Dick too well; for he used to make faces at her and tease
her when he was a boy, and now he was a man there was something about
him.---she could not tell what--that made her suspicious of him.  It
was no small matter to get her over to his side.

The jet-black Africans know that gold never looks so well as on the
foil of their dark skins.  Dick found in his trunk a string of gold
beads, such as are manufactured in some of our cities, which he had
brought from the gold region of Chili,--so he said,--for the express
purpose of giving them to old Sophy.  These Africans, too, have a
perfect passion for gay-colored clothing; being condemned by Nature,
as it were, to a perpetual mourning-suit, they love to enliven it
with all sorts of variegated stuffs of sprightly patterns, aflame
with red and yellow.  The considerate young man had remembered this,
too, and brought home for Sophy some handkerchiefs of rainbow hues,
which had been strangely overlooked till now, at the bottom of one of
his trunks.  Old Sophy took his gifts, but kept her black eyes open
and watched every movement of the young people all the more closely.
It was through her that the father had always known most of the
actions and tendencies of his daughter.

In the mean time the strange adventure on The Mountain had brought
the young master into new relations with Elsie.  She had led him out
of, danger; perhaps saved him from death by the strange power she
exerted.  He was grateful, and yet shuddered at the recollection of
the whole scene.  In his dreams he was pursued by the glare of cold
glittering eyes, whether they were in the head of a woman or of a
reptile he could not always tell, the images had so run together.
But he could not help seeing that the eyes of the young girl had been
often, very often, turned upon him when he had been looking away, and
fell as his own glance met them.  Helen Darley told him very plainly
that this girl was thinking about him more than about her book.  Dick
Venner found she was getting more constant in her attendance at
school.  He learned, on inquiry, that there was a new master, a
handsome young man.  The handsome young man would not have liked the
look that, came over Dick's face when he heard this fact mentioned.

In short, everything was getting tangled up together, and there would
be no chance of disentangling the threads in this chapter.




CHAPTER XV.

PHYSIOLOGICAL.

If Master Bernard felt a natural gratitude to his young pupil for
saving him from an imminent peril, he was in a state of infinite
perplexity to know why he should have needed such aid.  He, an
active, muscular, courageous, adventurous young fellow, with--a stick
in his hand, ready to hold down the Old Serpent himself, if he had
come in his way, to stand still, staring into those two eyes, until
they came up close to him, and the strange, terrible sound seemed to
freeze him stiff where he stood,--what was the meaning of it?  Again,
what was the influence this girl had seemingly exerted, under which
the venomous creature had collapsed in such a sudden way?  Whether he
had been awake or dreaming he did not feel quite sure.  He knew he
had gone up The Mountain, at any rate; he knew he had come down The
Mountain with the girl walking just before him;--there was no
forgetting her figure, as she walked on in silence, her braided locks
falling a little, for want of the lost hairpin, perhaps, and looking
like a wreathing coil of--Shame on such fancies!--to wrong that
supreme crowning gift of abounding Nature, a rush of shining black
hair, which, shaken loose, would cloud her all round, like Godiva,
from brow to instep!  He was sure he had sat down before the fissure
or cave.  He was sure that he was led softly away from the place, and
that it was Elsie who had led him.  There was the hair-pin to show
that so far it was not a dream.  But between these recollections came
a strange confusion; and the more the master thought, the more he was
perplexed to know whether she had waked him, sleeping, as he sat on
the stone, from some frightful dream, such as may come in a very
brief slumber, or whether she had bewitched him into a trance with
those strange eyes of hers, or whether it was all true, and he must
solve its problem as he best might.

There was another recollection connected with this mountain
adventure.  As they approached the mansion-house, they met a young
man, whom Mr. Bernard remembered having seen once at least before,
and whom he had heard of as a cousin of the young girl.  As Cousin
Richard Venner, the person in question, passed them, he took the
measure, so to speak, of Mr. Bernard, with a look so piercing, so
exhausting, so practised, so profoundly suspicious, that the young
master felt in an instant that he had an enemy in this handsome
youth,--an enemy, too, who was like to be subtle and dangerous.

Mr. Bernard had made up his mind, that, come what might, enemy or no
enemy, live or die, he would solve the mystery of Elsie Venner,
sooner or later.  He was not a man to be frightened out of his
resolution by a scowl, or a stiletto, or any unknown means of
mischief, of which a whole armory was hinted at in that passing look
Dick Venner had given him.  Indeed, like most adventurous young
persons, he found a kind of charm in feeling that there might be some
dangers in the way of his investigations.  Some rumors which had
reached him about the supposed suitor of Elsie Venner, who was
thought to be a desperate kind of fellow, and whom some believed to
be an unscrupulous adventurer, added a curious, romantic kind of
interest to the course of physiological and psychological inquiries
he was about instituting.

The afternoon on The Mountain was still upper-most in his mind.  Of
course he knew the common stories--about fascination.  He had once
been himself an eyewitness of the charming of a small bird by one of
our common harmless serpents.  Whether a human being could be reached
by this subtile agency, he had been skeptical, notwithstanding the
mysterious relation generally felt to exist between man and this
creature, "cursed above all cattle and above every beast of the
field,"--a relation which some interpret as the fruit of the curse,
and others hold to be so instinctive that this animal has been for
that reason adopted as the natural symbol of evil.  There was another
solution, however, supplied him by his professional reading.  The
curious work of Mr. Braid of Manchester had made him familiar with
the phenomena of a state allied to that produced by animal magnetism,
and called by that writer by the name of hypnotism.  He found, by
referring to his note-book, the statement was, that, by fixing the
eyes on a bright object so placed as to produce a strain upon the
eyes and eyelids, and to maintain a steady fixed stare, there comes
on in a few seconds a very singular condition, characterized by
muscular rigidity and inability to move, with a strange exaltation of
most of the senses, and generally a closure of the eyelids,--this
condition being followed by torpor.

Now this statement of Mr. Braid's, well known to the scientific
world, and the truth of which had been confirmed by Mr. Bernard in
certain experiments he had instituted, as it has been by many other
experimenters, went far to explain the strange impressions, of which,
waking or dreaming, he had certainly been the subject.  His nervous
system had been in a high state of exaltation at the time.  He
remembered how the little noises that made rings of sound in the
silence of the woods, like pebbles dropped in still waters, had
reached his inner consciousness.  He remembered that singular
sensation in the roots of the hair, when he came on the traces of the
girl's presence, reminding him of a line in a certain poem which he
had read lately with a new and peculiar interest.  He even recalled a
curious evidence of exalted sensibility and irritability, in the
twitching of the minute muscles of the internal ear at every
unexpected sound, producing an odd little snap in the middle of the
head, which proved to him that he was getting very nervous.

The next thing was to find out whether it were possible that the
venomous creature's eyes should have served the purpose of Mr.
Braid's "bright object" held very close to the person experimented
on, or whether they had any special power which could be made the
subject of exact observation.

For this purpose Mr. Bernard considered it necessary to get a live
crotalus or two into his possession, if this were possible.  On
inquiry, he found that there was a certain family living far up the
mountainside, not a mile from the ledge, the members of which were
said to have taken these creatures occasionally, and not to be in any
danger, or at least in any fear, of being injured by them.  He
applied to these people, and offered a reward sufficient to set them
at work to capture some of these animals, if such a thing were
possible.

A few days after this, a dark, gypsy-looking woman presented herself
at his door.  She held up her apron as if it contained something
precious in the bag she made with it.

"Y' wanted some rattlers," said the woman.  "Here they be."

She opened her apron and showed a coil of rattlesnakes lying very
peaceably in its fold.  They lifted their heads up, as if they wanted
to see what was going on, but showed no sign of anger.

"Are you crazy?"  said Mr. Bernard.  "You're dead in an hour, if one
of those creatures strikes you!"

He drew back a little, as he spoke; it might be simple disgust; it
might be fear; it might be what we call antipathy, which is different
from either, and which will sometimes show itself in paleness, and
even faintness, produced by objects perfectly harmless and not in
themselves offensive to any sense.

"Lord bless you," said the woman, "rattlers never touches our folks.
I'd jest 'z lieves handle them creaturs as so many striped snakes."

So saying, she put their heads down with her hand, and packed them
together in her apron as if they had been bits of cart-rope.

Mr. Bernard had never heard of the power, or, at least, the belief in
the possession of a power by certain persons, which enables them to
handle these frightful reptiles with perfect impunity.  The fact,
however, is well known to others, and more especially to a very
distinguished Professor in one of the leading institutions of the
great city of the land, whose experiences in the neighborhood of
Graylock, as he will doubtless inform the curious, were very much
like those of the young master.

Mr. Bernard had a wired cage ready for his formidable captives, and
studied their habits and expression with a strange sort of interest.
What did the Creator mean to signify, when he made such shapes of
horror, and, as if he had doubly cursed this envenomed wretch, had
set a mark upon him and sent him forth the Cain of the brotherhood of
serpents?  It was a very curious fact that the first train of
thoughts Mr. Bernard's small menagerie suggested to him was the
grave, though somewhat worn, subject of the origin of evil.  There is
now to be seen in a tall glass jar, in the Museum of Comparative
Anatomy at Cantabridge in the territory of the Massachusetts, a huge
crotalus, of a species which grows to more frightful dimensions than
our own, under the hotter skies of South America.  Look at it, ye who
would know what is the tolerance, the freedom from prejudice, which
can suffer such an incarnation of all that is devilish to lie
unharmed in the cradle of Nature!  Learn, too, that there are many
things in this world which we are warned to shun, and are even
suffered to slay, if need be, but which we must not hate, unless we
would hate what God loves and cares for.

Whatever fascination the creature might exercise in his native
haunts, Mr. Bernard found himself not in the least nervous or
affected in any way while looking at his caged reptiles.  When their
cage was shaken, they would lift their heads and spring their
rattles; but the sound was by no means so formidable to listen to as
when it reverberated among the chasms of the echoing rocks.  The
expression of the creatures was watchful, still, grave, passionless,
fate-like, suggesting a cold malignity which seemed to be waiting for
its opportunity.  Their awful, deep-cut mouths were sternly closed
over the long hollow fangs which rested their roots against the
swollen poison-gland, where the venom had been hoarding up ever since
the last stroke had emptied it.  They never winked, for ophidians
have no movable eyelids, but kept up that awful fixed stare which
made the two unwinking gladiators the survivors of twenty pairs
matched by one of the Roman Emperors, as Pliny tells us, in his
"Natural History."  Their eyes did not flash, but shone with a cold
still light.  They were of a pale-golden or straw color, horrible to
look into, with their stony calmness, their pitiless indifference,
hardly enlivened by the almost imperceptible vertical slit of the
pupil, through which Death seemed to be looking out like the archer
behind the long narrow loop-hole in a blank turret-wall.  On the
whole, the caged reptiles, horrid as they were, hardly matched his
recollections of what he had seen or dreamed he save at the cavern.
These looked dangerous enough, but yet quiet.  A treacherous
stillness, however,--as the unfortunate New York physician found,
when he put his foot out to wake up the torpid creature, and
instantly the fang flashed through his boot, carrying the poison into
his blood, and death with it.

Mr. Bernard kept these strange creatures, and watched all their
habits with a natural curiosity.  In any collection of animals the
venomous beasts are looked at with the greatest interest, just as the
greatest villains are most run after by the unknown public.  Nobody
troubles himself for a common striped snake or a petty thief, but a
cobra or a wife-killer is a centre of attraction to all eyes.  These
captives did very little to earn their living, but, on the other
hand, their living was not expensive, their diet being nothing but
air, au naturel.  Months and months these creatures will live and
seem to thrive well enough, as any showman who has then in his
menagerie will testify, though they never touch anything to eat or
drink.

In the mean time Mr. Bernard had become very curious about a class of
subjects not treated of in any detail in those text-books accessible
in most country-towns, to the exclusion of the more special
treatises, and especially of the rare and ancient works found on the
shelves of the larger city-libraries.  He was on a visit to old Dr.
Kittredge one day, having been asked by him to call in for a few
moments as soon as convenient.  The Doctor smiled good-humoredly when
he asked him if he had an extensive collection of medical works.

"Why, no," said the old Doctor, "I haven't got a great many printed
books; and what I have I don't read quite as often as I might, I'm
afraid.  I read and studied in the time of it, when I was in the
midst of the young men who were all at work with their books; but
it's a mighty hard matter, when you go off alone into the country, to
keep up with all that's going on in the Societies and the Colleges.
I'll tell you, though, Mr. Langdon, when a man that's once started
right lives among sick folks for five-and-thirty years, as I've done,
if he has n't got a library of five-and-thirty volumes bound up in
his head at the end of that time, he'd better stop driving round and
sell his horse and sulky.  I know the bigger part of the families
within a dozen miles' ride.  I know the families that have a way of
living through everything, and I know the other set that have the
trick of dying without any kind of reason for it.  I know the years
when the fevers and dysenteries are in earnest, and when they're only
making believe.  I know the folks that think they're dying as soon as
they're sick, and the folks that never find out they 're sick till
they're dead.  I don't want to undervalue your science, Mr. Langdon.
There are things I never learned, because they came in after my day,
and I am very glad to send my patients to those that do know them,
when I am at fault; but I know these people about here, fathers and
mothers, and children and grandchildren, so as all the science in the
world can't know them, without it takes time about it, and sees them
grow up and grow old, and how the wear and tear of life comes to
them.  You can't tell a horse by driving him once, Mr. Langdon, nor a
patient by talking half an hour with him."

"Do you know much about the Veneer family?"  said Mr. Bernard, in a
natural way enough, the Doctor's talk having suggested the question.

The Doctor lifted his head with his accustomed movement, so as to
command the young man through his spectacles.

"I know all the families of this place and its neighborhood," he
answered.

"We have the young lady studying with us at the Institute," said Mr.
Bernard.

"I know it," the Doctor answered.  "Is she a good scholar?"

All this time the Doctor's eyes were fixed steadily on Mr. Bernard,
looking through the glasses.

"She is a good scholar enough, but I don't know what to make of her.
Sometimes I think she is a little out of her head.  Her father,
I believe, is sensible enough;--what sort of a woman was her mother,
Doctor?---I suppose, of course, you remember all about her?"

"Yes, I knew her mother.  She was a very lovely young woman."--The
Doctor put his hand to his forehead and drew a long breath.--"What
is there you notice out of the way about Elsie Venner?"

"A good many things," the master answered.  "She shuns all the other
girls.  She is getting a strange influence over my fellow-teacher, a
young lady,--you know Miss Helen Darley, perhaps?  I am afraid this
girl will kill her.  I never saw or heard of anything like it, in
prose at least;--do you remember much of Coleridge's Poems, Doctor?"

The good old Doctor had to plead a negative.

"Well, no matter.  Elsie would have been burned for a witch in old
times.  I have seen the girl look at Miss Darley when she had not the
least idea of it, and all at once I would see her grow pale and
moist, and sigh, and move round uneasily, and turn towards Elsie, and
perhaps get up and go to her, or else have slight spasmodic movements
that looked like hysterics;--do you believe in the evil eye, Doctor?"

"Mr. Langdon," the Doctor said, solemnly, "there are strange things
about Elsie Veneer,--very strange things.  This was what I wanted to
speak to you about.  Let me advise you all to be very patient with
the girl, but also very careful.  Her love is not to be desired, and
"--he spoke in a lower tone--"her hate is to be dreaded.  Do you
think she has any special fancy for anybody else in the school
besides Miss Darley?"

Mr. Bernard could not stand the old Doctor's spectacled eyes without
betraying a little of the feeling natural to a young man to whom a
home question involving a possible sentiment is put suddenly.

"I have suspected," he said,--"I have had a kind of feeling--that
she--Well, come, Doctor,--I don't know that there 's any use in
disguising the matter,--I have thought Elsie Veneer had rather a
fancy for somebody else,--I mean myself."

There was something so becoming in the blush with which the young man
made this confession, and so manly, too, in the tone with which he
spoke, so remote from any shallow vanity, such as young men who are
incapable of love are apt to feel, when some loose tendril of a
woman's fancy which a chance wind has blown against them twines about
them for the want of anything better, that the old Doctor looked at
him admiringly, and could not help thinking that it was no wonder any
young girl should be pleased with him.

"You are a man of nerve, Mr. Langdon?" said the Doctor.

"I thought so till very lately," he replied.  "I am not easily
frightened, but I don't know but I might be bewitched or magnetized,
or whatever it is when one is tied up and cannot move.  I think I can
find nerve enough, however, if there is any special use you want to
put it to."

"Let me ask you one more question, Mr. Langdon.  Do you find yourself
disposed to take a special interest in Elsie,--to fall in love with
her, in a word?  Pardon me, for I do not ask from curiosity, but a
much more serious motive."

"Elsie interests me," said the young man, "interests me strangely.
She has a wild flavor in her character which is wholly different from
that of any human creature I ever saw.  She has marks of genius,
poetic or dramatic,--I hardly know which.  She read a passage from
Keats's 'Lamia' the other day, in the schoolroom, in such a way that
I declare to you I thought some of the girls would faint or go into
fits.  Miss Darley got up and left the room, trembling all over.
Then, I pity her, she is so lonely.  The girls are afraid of her, and
she seems to have either a dislike or a fear of them.  They have all
sorts of painful stories about her.  They give her a name which no
human creature ought to bear.  They say she hides a mark on her neck
by always wearing a necklace.  She is very graceful, you know, and
they will have it that she can twist herself into all sorts of
shapes, or tie herself in a knot, if she wants to.  There is not one
of them that will look her in the eyes.  I pity the poor girl; but,
Doctor, I do not love her.  I would risk my life for her, if it would
do her any good, but it would be in cold blood.  If her hand touches
mine, it is not a thrill of passion I feel running through me, but a
very different emotion.  Oh, Doctor! there must be something in that
creature's blood which has killed the humanity in her.  God only
knows the cause that has blighted such a soul in so beautiful a body!
No, Doctor, I do not love the girl."

"Mr. Langdon," said the Doctor, "you are young, and I am old.  Let me
talk to you with an old man's privilege, as an adviser.  You have
come to this country-town without suspicion, and you are moving in
the midst of perils.  There are things which I must not tell you now;
but I may warn you.  Keep your eyes open and your heart shut.  If,
through pitying that girl, you ever come to love her, you are lost.
If you deal carelessly with her, beware!  This is not all.  There are
other eyes on you beside Elsie Venner's.  Do you go armed?"

"I do!" said Mr. Bernard,--and he "put his hands up" in the shape of
fists, in such a way as to show that he was master of the natural
weapons at any rate.

The Doctor could not help smiling.  But his face fell in an instant.

"You may want something more than those tools to work with.  Come
with me into my sanctum."

The Doctor led Mr. Bernard into a small room opening out of the
study.  It was a place such as anybody but a medical man would shiver
to enter.  There was the usual tall box with its bleached, rattling
tenant; there were jars in rows where "interesting cases" outlived
the grief of widows and heirs in alcoholic immortality,--for your
"preparation-jar" is the true "monumentum aere perennius;" there were
various semi-possibilities of minute dimensions and unpromising
developments; there were shining instruments of evil aspect, and grim
plates on the walls, and on one shelf by itself, accursed and apart,
coiled in a long cylinder of spirit, a huge crotalus, rough-scaled,
flatheaded, variegated with dull bands, one of which partially
encircled the neck like a collar,--an awful wretch to look upon, with
murder written all over him in horrid hieroglyphics.  Mr. Bernard's
look was riveted on this creature,--not fascinated certainly, for its
eyes looked like white beads, being clouded by the action of the
spirits in which it had been long kept,--but fixed by some indefinite
sense of the renewal of a previous impression;--everybody knows the
feeling, with its suggestion of some past state of existence.  There
was a scrap of paper on the jar, with something written on it.  He
was reaching up to read it when the Doctor touched him lightly.

"Look here, Mr. Langdon!" he said, with a certain vivacity of manner,
as if wishing to call away his attention,--"this is my armory."

The Doctor threw open the door of a small cabinet, where were
disposed in artistic patterns various weapons of offence and
defence,--for he was a virtuoso in his way, and by the side of the
implements of the art of healing had pleased himself with displaying
a collection of those other instruments, the use of which renders the
first necessary.

"See which of these weapons you would like best to carry about you,"
said the Doctor.

Mr. Bernard laughed, and looked at the Doctor as if he half doubted
whether he was in earnest.

"This looks dangerous enough," he said,--"for the man who carries it,
at least."

He took down one of the prohibited Spanish daggers or knives which a
traveller may, occasionally get hold of and smuggle out of the
country.  The blade was broad, trowel-like, but the point drawn out
several inches, so as to look like a skewer.

"This must be a jealous bull-fighter's weapon," he said, and put it
back in its place.

Then he took down an ancient-looking broad-bladed dagger, with a
complex aspect about it, as if it had some kind of mechanism
connected with it.

"Take care!" said the Doctor; "there is a trick to that dagger."

He took it and touched a spring.  The dagger split suddenly into
three blades, as when one separates the forefinger and the ring-
finger from the middle one.  The outside blades were sharp on their
outer edge.  The stab was to be made with the dagger shut, then the
spring touched and the split blades withdrawn.

Mr. Bernard replaced it, saying, that it would have served for side-
arm to old Suwarrow, who told his men to work their bayonets back and
forward when they pinned a Turk, but to wriggle them about in the
wound when they stabbed a Frenchman.

"Here," said the Doctor, "this is the thing you want."

He took down a much more modern and familiar implement,--a small,
beautifully finished revolver.

"I want you to carry this," he said; "and more than that, I want you
to practise with it often, as for amusement, but so that it maybe
seen and understood that you are apt to have a pistol about you.
Pistol-shooting is pleasant sport enough, and there is no reason why
you should not practise it like other young fellows.  And now," the
Doctor said, "I have one other, weapon to give you."

He took a small piece of parchment and shook a white powder into it
from one of his medicine-jars.  The jar was marked with the name of a
mineral salt, of a nature to have been serviceable in case of sudden
illness in the time of the Borgias.  The Doctor folded the parchment
carefully, and marked the Latin name of the powder upon it.

"Here," he said, handing it to Mr. Bernard, "you see what it is, and
you know what service it can render.  Keep these two protectors about
your person day and night; they will not harm you, and you may want
one or the other or both before you think of it."

Mr. Bernard thought it was very odd, and not very old-gentlemanlike,
to be fitting him out for treason, stratagem, and spoils, in this
way.  There was no harm, however, in carrying a doctor's powder in
his pocket, or in amusing himself with shooting at a mark, as he had
often done before.  If the old gentleman had these fancies, it was as
well to humor him.

So he thanked old Doctor Kittredge, and shook his hand warmly as he
left him.

"The fellow's hand did not tremble, nor his color change," the Doctor
said, as he watched him walking away.  "He is one of the right sort."




CHAPTER XVI

EPISTOLARY.

Mr. Langdon to the Professor.

MY DEAR PROFESSOR,
You were kind enough to promise me that you would assist me in any
professional or scientific investigations in which I might become
engaged.  I have of late become deeply interested in a class of
subjects which present peculiar difficulty, and I must exercise the
privilege of questioning you on some points upon which I desire
information I cannot otherwise obtain.  I would not trouble you, if I
could find any person or books competent to enlighten me on some of
these singular matters which have so excited me.  The leading doctor
here is a shrewd, sensible man, but not versed in the curiosities of
medical literature.

I proceed, with your leave, to ask a considerable number of
questions,--hoping to get answers to some of them, at least.

Is there any evidence that human beings can be infected or wrought
upon by poisons, or otherwise, so that they shall manifest any of the
peculiarities belonging to beings of a lower nature?  Can such
peculiarities--be transmitted by inheritance?  Is there anything to
countenance the stories, long and widely current, about the "evil
eye"? or is it a mere fancy that such a power belongs to any human
being?  Have you any personal experience as to the power of
fascination said to be exercised by certain animals?  What can you
make of those circumstantial statements we have seen in the papers,
of children forming mysterious friendships with ophidians of
different species, sharing their food with them, and seeming to be
under some subtile influence exercised by those creatures?  Have you
read, critically, Coleridge's poem of "Christabel," and Keats's
"Lamia"?--If so, can you understand them, or find any physiological
foundation for the story of either?

There is another set of questions of a different nature I should like
to ask, but it is hardly fair to put so many on a single sheet.
There is one, however, you must answer.  Do you think there may be
predispositions, inherited or ingrafted, but at any rate
constitutional, which shall take out certain apparently voluntary
determinations from the control of the will, and leave them as free
from moral responsibility as the instincts of the lower animals?  Do
you not think there may be a crime which is not a sin?

Pardon me, my dear Sir, for troubling you with such a list of notes
of interrogation.  There are some very strange things going on here
in this place, country-town as it is.  Country-life is apt to be
dull; but when it once gets going, it beats the city hollow, because
it gives its whole mind to what it is about.  These rural sinners
make terrible work with the middle of the Decalogue, when they get
started.  However, I hope I shall live through my year's school-
keeping without catastrophes, though there are queer doings about me
which puzzle me and might scare some people.  If anything should
happen, you will be one of the first to hear of it, no doubt.  But I
trust not to help out the editors of the "Rockland Weekly Universe"
with an obituary of the late lamented, who signed himself in life

Your friend and pupil,

BERNARD C.  LANGDON.



The Professor to Mr. Langdon.

MY DEAR MR. LANGDON,
I do not wonder that you find no answer from your country friends to
the curious questions you put.  They belong to that middle region
between science and poetry which sensible men, as they are called,
are very shy of meddling with.  Some people think that truth and gold
are always to be washed for; but the wiser sort are of opinion, that,
unless there are so many grains to the peck of sand or nonsense
respectively, it does not pay to wash for either, so long as one can
find anything else to do.  I don't doubt there is some truth in the
phenomena of animal magnetism, for instance; but when you ask me to
cradle for it, I tell you that the hysteric girls cheat so, and the
professionals are such a set of pickpockets, that I can do something
better than hunt for the grains of truth among their tricks and lies.
Do you remember what I used to say in my lectures?---or were you
asleep just then, or cutting your initials on the rail?  (You see I
can ask questions, my young friend.) Leverage is everything,--was
what I used to say;--don't begin to pry till you have got the long
arm on your side.

To please you, and satisfy your doubts as far as possible, I have
looked into the old books,--into Schenckius and Turner and Kenelm.
Digby and the rest, where I have found plenty of curious stories
which you must take for what they are worth.

Your first question I can answer in the affirmative upon pretty good
authority.  Mizaldus tells, in his "Memorabilia," the well-known
story of the girl fed on poisons, who was sent by the king of the
Indies to Alexander the Great.  "When Aristotle saw her eyes
sparkling and snapping like those of serpents, he said, 'Look out for
yourself, Alexander!  this is a dangerous companion for you!'"--and
sure enough, the young lady proved to be a very unsafe person to her
friends.  Cardanus gets a story from Avicenna, of a certain man bit
by a serpent, who recovered of his bite, the snake dying therefrom.
This man afterwards had a daughter whom venomous serpents could not
harm, though she had a fatal power over them.

I suppose you may remember the statements of old authors about
Zycanthropy, the disease in which men took on the nature and aspect
of wolves.  Actius and Paulus, both men of authority, describe it.
Altomaris gives a horrid case; and Fincelius mentions one occurring
as late as 1541, the subject of which was captured, still insisting
that he was a wolf, only that the hair of his hide was turned in!
Versipelles, it may be remembered, was the Latin name for these
"were-wolves."

As for the cases where rabid persons have barked and bit like dogs,
there are plenty of such on record.

More singular, or at least more rare, is the account given by Andreas
Baccius, of a man who was struck in the hand by a cock, with his
beak, and who died on the third day thereafter, looking for all the
world like a fighting-cock, to the great horror of the spectators.

As to impressions transmitted at a very early period of existence,
every one knows the story of King James's fear of a naked sword, and
the way it is accounted for.  Sir Kenelm Digby says,--"I remember
when he dubbed me Knight, in the ceremony of putting the point of a
naked sword upon my shoulder, he could not endure to look upon it,
but turned his face another way, insomuch, that, in lieu of touching
my shoulder, he had almost thrust the point into my eyes, had not the
Duke of Buckingham guided his hand aright."  It is he, too, who tells
the story of the mulberry mark upon the neck of a certain lady of
high condition, which "every year, to mulberry season, did swell,
grow big, and itch."  And Gaffarel mentions the case of a girl born
with the figure of a fish on one of her limbs, of which the wonder
was, that, when the girl did eat fish, this mark put her to sensible
pain.  But there is no end to cases of this kind, and I could give
some of recent date, if necessary, lending a certain plausibility at
least to the doctrine of transmitted impressions.

I never saw a distinct case of evil eye, though I have seen eyes so
bad that they might produce strange effects on very sensitive
natures.  But the belief in it under various names, fascination,
jettcztura, etc., is so permanent and universal, from Egypt to Italy,
and from the days of Solomon to those of Ferdinand of Naples, that
there must be some peculiarity, to say the least, on which the
opinion is based.  There is very strong evidence that some such power
is exercised by certain of the lower animals.  Thus, it is stated on
good authority that "almost every animal becomes panic-struck at the
sight of the rattlesnake, and seems at once deprived of the power of
motion, or the exercise of its usual instinct of self-preservation."
Other serpents seem to share this power of fascination, as the Cobra
and the Buccephalus Capensis.

Some think that it is nothing but fright; others attribute it to the

               "strange powers that lie
          Within the magic circle of the eye,"--

as Churchill said, speaking of Garrick.

You ask me about those mysterious and frightful intimacies between
children and serpents, of which so many instances have been recorded.
I am sure I cannot tell what to make of them.  I have seen several
such accounts in recent papers, but here is one published in the
seventeenth century, which is as striking as any of the more modern
ones:

"Mr. Herbert Tones of Monmouth, when he was a little Boy, was used to
eat his Milk in a Garden in the Morning, and was no sooner there, but
a large Snake always came, and eat out of the Dish with him, and did
so for a considerable time, till one Morning, he striking the Snake
on the Head, it hissed at him.  Upon which he told his Mother that
the Baby (for so he call'd it) cry'd Hiss at him.  His Mother had it
kill'd, which occasioned him a great Fit of Sickness, and 'twas
thought would have dy'd, but did recover."

There was likewise one "William Writtle, condemned at Maidston
Assizes for a double murder, told a Minister that was with him after
he was condemned, that his mother told him, that when he was a Child,
there crept always to him a Snake, wherever she laid him.  Sometimes
she would convey him up Stairs, and leave him never so little, she
should be sure to find a Snake in the Cradle with him, but never
perceived it did him any harm."

One of the most striking alleged facts connected with the mysterious
relation existing between the serpent and-the human species is the
influence which the poison of the Crotulus, taken internally, seemed
to produce over the moral faculties, in the experiments instituted by
Dr. Hering at Surinam.  There is something frightful in the
disposition of certain ophidians, as the whipsnake, which darts at
the eyes of cattle without any apparent provocation or other motive.
It is natural enough that the evil principle should have been
represented in the form of a serpent, but it is strange to think of
introducing it into a human being like cow-pox by vaccination.

You know all about the Psylli, or ancient serpent tamers, I suppose.
Savary gives an account of the modern serpent-tamers in his "Letters
on Egypt."  These modern jugglers are in the habit of making the
venomous Naja counterfeit death, lying out straight and stiff,
changing it into a rod, as the ancient magicians did with their
serpents, (probably the same animal,) in the time of Moses.

I am afraid I cannot throw much light on "Christabel" or "Lamia " by
any criticism I can offer.  Geraldine, in the former, seems to be
simply a malignant witch-woman with the evil eye, but with no
absolute ophidian relationship.  Lamia is a serpent transformed by
magic into a woman.  The idea of both is mythological, and not in any
sense physiological.  Some women unquestionably suggest the image of
serpents; men rarely or never.   I have been struck, like many
others, with the ophidian head and eye of the famous Rachel.

Your question about inherited predispositions, as limiting the sphere
of the will, and, consequently, of moral accountability, opens a very
wide range of speculation.  I can give you only a brief abstract of
my own opinions on this delicate and difficult subject.  Crime and
sin, being the preserves of two great organized interests, have been
guarded against all reforming poachers with as great jealousy as the
Royal Forests.  It is so easy to hang a troublesome fellow!  It is so
much simpler to consign a soul to perdition, or say masses, for
money, to save it, than to take the blame on ourselves for letting it
grow up in neglect and run to ruin for want of humanizing influences!
They hung poor, crazy Bellingham for shooting Mr. Perceval.  The
ordinary of Newgate preached to women who were to swing at Tyburn for
a petty theft as if they were worse than other people,--just as
though he would not have been a pickpocket or shoplifter, himself, if
he had been born in a den of thieves and bred up to steal or starve!
The English law never began to get hold of the idea that a crime was
not necessarily a sin, till Hadfield, who thought he was the Saviour
of mankind, was tried for shooting at George the Third;--lucky for
him that he did not hit his Majesty!

It is very singular that we recognize all the bodily defects that
unfit a man for military service, and all the intellectual ones that
limit his range of thought, but always talk at him as if all his
moral powers were perfect.  I suppose we must punish evil-doers as we
extirpate vermin; but I don't know that we have any more right to
judge them than we have to judge rats and mice, which are just as
good as cats and weasels, though we think it necessary to treat them
as criminals.

The limitations of human responsibility have never been properly
studied, unless it be by the phrenologists. You know from my lectures
that I consider phrenology, as taught, a pseudo-science, and not a
branch of positive knowledge; but, for all that, we owe it an immense
debt.  It has melted the world's conscience in its crucible, and cast
it in a new mould, with features less like those of Moloch and more
like those of humanity.  If it has failed to demonstrate its system
of special correspondences, it has proved that there are fixed
relations between organization and mind and character.  It has
brought out that great doctrine of moral insanity, which has done
more to make men charitable and soften legal and theological
barbarism than any one doctrine that I can think of since the message
of peace and good-will to men.

Automatic action in the moral world; the reflex movement which seems
to be self-determination, and has been hanged and howled at as such
(metaphorically) for nobody knows how many centuries: until somebody
shall study this as Marshall Hall has studied reflex nervous action
in the bodily system, I would not give much for men's judgments of
each others' characters.  Shut up the robber and the defaulter, we
must.  But what if your oldest boy had been stolen from his cradle
and bred in a North-Street cellar?  What if you are drinking a little
too much wine and smoking a little too much tobacco, and your son
takes after you, and so your poor grandson's brain being a little
injured in physical texture, he loses the fine moral sense on which
you pride yourself, and doesn't see the difference between signing
another man's name to a draft and his own?

I suppose the study of automatic action in the moral world (you see
what I mean through the apparent contradiction of terms) may be a
dangerous one in the view of many people.  It is liable to abuse, no
doubt.  People are always glad to, get hold of anything which limits
their responsibility.  But remember that our moral estimates come
down to us from ancestors who hanged children for stealing forty
shillings' worth, and sent their souls to perdition for the sin of
being born,--who punished the unfortunate families of suicides, and
in their eagerness for justice executed one innocent person every
three years, on the average, as Sir James Mackintosh tells us.

I do not know in what shape the practical question may present itself
to you; but I will tell you my rule in life, and I think you will
find it a good one.  Treat bad men exactly as if they were insane.
They are in-sane, out of health, morally.  Reason, which is food to
sound minds, is not tolerated, still less assimilated, unless
administered with the greatest caution; perhaps, not at all.  Avoid
collision with them, so far as you honorably can; keep your temper,
if you can,--for one angry man is as good as another; restrain them
from violence, promptly, completely, and with the least possible
injury, just as in the case of maniacs,--and when you have got rid of
them, or got them tied hand and foot so that they can do no mischief,
sit down and contemplate them charitably, remembering that nine
tenths of their' perversity comes from outside influences, drunken
ancestors, abuse in childhood, bad company, from which you have
happily been preserved, and for some of which you, as a member of
society, may be fractionally responsible.  I think also that there
are special influences which work in the brood lake ferments, and I
have a suspicion that some of those curious old stories I cited may
have more recent parallels.  Have you ever met with any cases which
admitted of a solution like that which I have mentioned?

Yours very truly,

_____________   _____________



               Bernard Langdon to Philip Staples.

MY DEAR PHILIP,--

I have been for some months established in this place, turning the
main crank of the machinery for the manufactory of accomplishments
superintended by, or rather worked to the profit of, a certain Mr.
Silas Peckham.  He is a poor wretch, with a little thin fishy blood
in his body, lean and flat, long-armed and large-handed, thick-
jointed and thin-muscled,--you know those unwholesome, weak-eyed,
half-fed creatures, that look not fit to be round among live folks,
and yet not quite dead enough to bury.  If you ever hear of my being
in court to answer to a charge of assault and battery, you may guess
that I have been giving him a thrashing to settle off old scores; for
he is a tyrant, and has come pretty near killing his principal lady-
assistant with overworking her and keeping her out of all decent
privileges.

Helen Darley is this lady's name,--twenty two or three years old, I
should think,--a very sweet, pale woman,--daughter of the usual
country-clergyman,--thrown on her own resources from an early age,
and the rest: a common story, but an uncommon person,--very.  All
conscience and sensibility, I should say,--a cruel worker,--no kind
of regard for herself, seems as fragile and supple as a young willow-
shoot, but try her and you find she has the spring in her of a steel
cross-bow.  I am glad I happened to come to this place, if it were
only for her sake.  I have saved that girl's life; I am as sure of it
as if I had pulled her out of the fire or water.

Of course I'm in love with her, you say,--we always love those whom
we have benefited; "saved her life,--her love was the reward of his
devotion," etc., etc., as in a regular set novel.  In love, Philip?
Well, about that,--I love Helen Darley--very much: there is hardly
anybody I love so well.  What a noble creature she is!  One of those
that just go right on, do their own work and everybody else's,
killing themselves inch by inch without ever thinking about it,--
singing and dancing at their toil when they begin, worn and saddened
after a while, but pressing steadily on, tottering by and by, and
catching at the rail by the way-side to help them lift one foot
before the other, and at last falling, face down, arms stretched
forward

Philip, my boy, do you know I am the sort of man that locks his door
sometimes and cries his heart out of his eyes,--that can sob like a
woman and not be ashamed of it?  I come of fighting-blood on one
side, you know; I think I could be savage on occasion.  But I am
tender,--more and more tender as I come into my fulness of manhood.
I don't like to strike a man, (laugh, if you like,--I know I hit hard
when I do strike,)--but what I can't stand is the sight of these
poor, patient, toiling women, who never find out in this life how
good they are, and never know what it is to be told they are angels
while they still wear the pleasing incumbrances of humanity.  I don't
know what to make of these cases.  To think that a woman is never to
be a woman again, whatever she may come to as an unsexed angel,--and
that she should die unloved!  Why does not somebody come and carry
off this noble woman, waiting here all ready to make a man happy?
Philip, do you know the pathos there is in the eyes of unsought
women, oppressed with the burden of an inner life unshared?  I can
see into them now as I could not in those 'earlier days.  I sometimes
think their pupils dilate on purpose to let my consciousness glide
through them; indeed, I dread them, I come so close to the nerve of
the soul itself in these momentary intimacies.  You used to tell me I
was a Turk,--that my heart was full of pigeon-holes, with
accommodations inside for a whole flock of doves.  I don't know but I
am still as Youngish as ever in my ways,--Brigham-Youngish, I mean;
at any rate, T. always want to give a little love to all the poor
things that cannot have a whole man to themselves.  If they would
only be contented with a little!

Here now are two girls in this school where I am teaching.  One of
them, Rosa M., is not more than sixteen years old, I think they say;
but Nature has forced her into a tropical luxuriance of beauty, as if
it were July with her, instead of May.  I suppose it is all natural
enough that this girl should like a young man's attention, even if he
were a grave schoolmaster; but the eloquence of this young thing's
look is unmistakable,--and yet she does not know the language it is
talking,--they none of them do; and there is where a good many poor
creatures of our good-for-nothing sex are mistaken.  There is no
danger of my being rash, but I think this girl will cost somebody his
life yet.  She is one of those women men make a quarrel about and
fight to the death for,--the old feral instinct, you know.

Pray, don't think I am lost in conceit, but there is another girl
here who I begin to think looks with a certain kindness on me.  Her
name is Elsie V., and she is the only daughter and heiress of an old
family in this place.  She is a portentous and almost fearful
creature.  If I should tell you all I know and half of what I fancy
about her, you would tell me to get my life insured at once.  Yet she
is the most painfully interesting being,--so handsome!  so lonely!---
for she has no friends among the girls, and sits apart from them,--
with black hair like the flow of a mountain-brook after a thaw, with
a low-browed, scowling beauty of face, and such eyes as were never
seen before, I really believe, in any human creature.

Philip, I don't know what to say about this Elsie.  There is
something about her I have not fathomed.  I have conjectures which I
could not utter to any living soul.  I dare not even hint the
possibilities which have suggested themselves to me.  This I will
say, that I do take the most intense interest in this young person,
an interest much more like pity than love in its common sense.  If
what I guess at is true, of all the tragedies of existence I ever
knew this is the saddest, and yet so full of meaning!  Do not ask me
any questions,--I have said more than I meant to already; but I am
involved in strange doubts and perplexities,--in dangers too, very
possibly,--and it is a relief just to speak ever so guardedly of them
to an early and faithful friend.

Yours ever, BERNARD.

P. S.  I remember you had a copy of Fortunius Licetus' "De Monstris"
among your old books.  Can't you lend it to me for a while?  I am
curious, and it will amuse me.




CHAPTER XVII.

OLD SOPHY CALLS ON THE REVEREND DOCTOR.

The two meeting-houses which faced each other like a pair of
fighting-cocks had not flapped their wings or crowed at each other
for a considerable time.  The Reverend Mr. Fairweather had been
dyspeptic and low-spirited of late, and was too languid for
controversy.  The Reverend Doctor Honeywood had been very busy with
his benevolent associations, and had discoursed chiefly on practical
matters, to the neglect of special doctrinal subjects.  His senior
deacon ventured to say to him that some of his people required to be
reminded of the great fundamental doctrine of the worthlessness of
all human efforts and motives.  Some of them were altogether too much
pleased with the success of the Temperance Society and the
Association for the Relief of the Poor.  There was a pestilent heresy
about, concerning the satisfaction to be derived from a good
conscience, as if, anybody ever did anything which was not to be
hated, loathed, despised, and condemned.

The old minister listened gravely, with an inward smile, and told his
deacon that he would attend to his suggestion.  After the deacon had
gone, he tumbled over his manuscripts, until at length he came upon
his first-rate old sermon on "Human Nature."  He had read a great
deal of hard theology, and had at last reached that curious state
which is so common in good ministers,--that, namely, in which they
contrive to switch off their logical faculties on the narrow
sidetrack of their technical dogmas, while the great freight-train of
their substantial human qualities keeps in the main highway of
common-sense, in which kindly souls are always found by all who
approach them by their human side.

The Doctor read his sermon with a pleasant, paternal interest: it was
well argued from his premises.  Here and there he dashed his pen
through a harsh expression.  Now and then he added an explanation or
qualified abroad statement.  But his mind was on the logical side-
track, and he followed the chain of reasoning without fairly
perceiving where it would lead him, if he carried it into real life.

He was just touching up the final proposition, when his
granddaughter, Letty, once before referred to, came into the room
with her smiling face and lively movement.  Miss Letty or Letitia
Forrester was a city-bred girl of some fifteen or sixteen years old,
who was passing the summer with her grandfather for the sake of
country air and quiet.  It was a sensible arrangement; for, having
the promise of figuring as a belle by and by, and being a little
given to dancing, and having a voice which drew a pretty dense circle
around the piano when she sat down to play and sing, it was hard to
keep her from being carried into society before her time, by the mere
force of mutual attraction.  Fortunately, she had some quiet as well
as some social tastes, and was willing enough to pass two or three of
the summer months in the country, where she was much better bestowed
than she would have been at one of those watering-places where so
many half-formed girls get prematurely hardened in the vice of self-
consciousness.

Miss Letty was altogether too wholesome, hearty, and high-strung a
young girl to be a model, according to the flat-chested and cachectic
pattern which is the classical type of certain excellent young
females, often the subjects of biographical memoirs.  But the old
minister was proud of his granddaughter for all that.  She was so
full of life, so graceful, so generous, so vivacious, so ready always
to do all she could for him and for everybody, so perfectly frank in
her avowed delight in the pleasures which this miserable world
offered her in the shape of natural beauty, of poetry, of music, of
companionship, of books, of cheerful cooperation in the tasks of
those about her, that the Reverend Doctor could not find it in his
heart to condemn her because she was deficient in those particular
graces and that signal other-worldliness he had sometimes noticed in
feeble young persons suffering from various chronic diseases which
impaired their vivacity and removed them from the range of
temptation.

When Letty, therefore, came bounding into the old minister's study,
he glanced up from his manuscript, and, as his eye fell upon her, it
flashed across him that there was nothing so very monstrous and
unnatural about the specimen of congenital perversion he was looking
at, with his features opening into their pleasantest sunshine.
Technically, according to the fifth proposition of the sermon on
Human Nature, very bad, no doubt.  Practically, according to the fact
before him, a very pretty piece of the Creator's handiwork, body and
soul.  Was it not a conceivable thing that the divine grace might
show itself in different forms in a fresh young girl like Letitia,
and in that poor thing he had visited yesterday, half-grown, half-
colored, in bed for the last year with hip-disease?

Was it to be supposed that this healthy young girl, with life
throbbing all over her, could, without a miracle, be good according
to the invalid pattern and formula?

And yet there were mysteries in human nature which pointed to some
tremendous perversion of its tendencies,--to some profound, radical
vice of moral constitution, native or transmitted, as you will have
it, but positive, at any rate, as the leprosy, breaking out in the
blood of races, guard them ever so carefully.  Did he not know the
case of a young lady in Rockland, daughter of one of the first
families in the place, a very beautiful and noble creature to look
at, for whose bringing up nothing had been spared,--a girl who had
had governesses to teach her at the house, who had been indulged
almost too kindly,--a girl whose father had given himself, up to her,
he being himself a pure and high-souled man?--and yet this girl was
accused in whispers of having been on the very verge of committing a
fatal crime; she was an object of fear to all who knew the dark hints
which had been let fall about her, and there were some that believed
--Why, what was this but an instance of the total obliquity and
degeneration of the moral principle? and to what could it be owing,
but to an innate organic tendency?

"Busy, grandpapa?" said Letty, and without waiting for an answer
kissed his cheek with a pair of lips made on purpose for that little
function,--fine, but richly turned out, the corners tucked in with a
finish of pretty dimples, the rose-bud lips of girlhood's June.

The old gentleman looked at his granddaughter.  Nature swelled up
from his heart in a wave that sent a glow to his cheek and a sparkle
to his eye.  But it is very hard to be interrupted just as we are
winding up a string of propositions with the grand conclusion which
is the statement in brief of all that has gone before: our own
starting-point, into which we have been trying to back our reader or
listener as one backs a, horse into the shafts.

"Video meliora, proboque,--I see the better, and approve it;
deteriora sequor, I follow after the worse; 't is that natural
dislike to what is good, pure, holy, and true, that inrooted
selfishness, totally insensible to the claims of"---

Here the worthy man was interrupted by Miss Letty.

"Do come, if you can, grandpapa," said the young girl; "here is a
poor old black woman wants to see you so much!"

The good minister was as kind-hearted as if he had never groped in
the dust and ashes of those cruel old abstractions which have killed
out so much of the world's life and happiness.  "With the heart man
believeth unto righteousness;" a man's love is the measure of his
fitness for good or bad company here or elsewhere.  Men are tattooed
with their special beliefs like so many South-Sea Islanders; but a
real human heart, with Divine love in it, beats with the same glow
under all, the patterns of all earth's thousand tribes!

The Doctor sighed, and folded the sermon, and laid the Quarto Cruden
on it.  He rose from his desk, and, looking once more at the young
girl's face, forgot his logical conclusions, and said to himself that
she was a little angel,--which was in violent contradiction to the
leading doctrine of his sermon on Human Nature.  And so he followed
her out of the study into the wide entry of the old-fashioned
country-house.

An old black woman sat on the plain oaken settle which humble
visitors waiting to see the minister were wont to occupy.  She was
old, but how old it would be very hard to guess.  She might be
seventy.  She might be ninety.  One could not swear she was not a
hundred.  Black women remain at a stationary age (to the eyes of
white people, at least) for thirty years.  They do not appear to
change during this period any more than so many Trenton trilobites.
Bent up, wrinkled, yellow-eyed, with long upper-lip, projecting jaws,
retreating chin, still meek features, long arms, large flat hands
with uncolored palms and slightly webbed fingers, it was impossible
not to see in this old creature a hint of the gradations by which
life climbs up through the lower natures to the highest human
developments.  We cannot tell such old women's ages because we do not
understand the physiognomy of a race so unlike our own.  No doubt
they see a great deal in each other's faces that we cannot,--changes
of color and expression as real as our own, blushes and sudden
betrayals of feeling,--just as these two canaries know what their
single notes and short sentences and full song with this or that
variation mean, though it is a mystery to us unplumed mortals.

This particular old black woman was a striking specimen of her class.
Old as she looked, her eye was bright and knowing.  She wore a red-
and-yellow turban, which set off her complexion well, and hoops of
gold in her ears, and beads of gold about her neck, and an old
funeral ring upon her finger.  She had that touching stillness about
her which belongs to animals that wait to be spoken to and then look
up with a kind of sad humility.

"Why, Sophy!"  said the good minister, "is this you?"

She looked up with the still expression on her face.  "It's ol'
Sophy," she said.

"Why," said the Doctor, "I did not believe you could walk so far as
this to save the Union.  Bring Sophy a glass of wine, Letty.  Wine's
good for old folks like Sophy and me, after walking a good way, or
preaching a good while."

The young girl stepped into the back-parlor, where she found the
great pewter flagon in which the wine that was left after each
communion-service was brought to the minister's house.  With much
toil she managed to tip it so as to get a couple of glasses filled.
The minister tasted his, and made old Sophy finish hers.

"I wan' to see you 'n' talk wi' you all alone," she said presently.

The minister got up and led the way towards his study.  "To be sure,"
he said; he had only waited for her to rest a moment before he asked
her into the library.  The young girl took her gently by the arm, and
helped her feeble steps along the passage.  When they reached the
study, she smoothed the cushion of a rocking-chair, and made the old
woman sit down in it.  Then she tripped lightly away, and left her
alone with the minister.

Old Sophy was a member of the Reverend Doctor Honeywood's church.
She had been put through the necessary confessions in a tolerably
satisfactory manner.  To be sure, as her grandfather had been a
cannibal chief, according to the common story, and, at any rate, a
terrible wild savage, and as her mother retained to the last some of
the prejudices of her early education, there was a heathen flavor in
her Christianity which had often scandalized the elder of the
minister's two deacons.  But, the good minister had smoothed matters
over: had explained that allowances were to be made for those who had
been long sitting without the gate of Zion,--that, no doubt, a part
of the curse which descended to the children of Ham consisted in
"having the understanding darkened," as well as the skin,--and so had
brought his suspicious senior deacon to tolerate old Sophy as one of
the communion of fellow-sinners.

--Poor things!  How little we know the simple notions with which
these rudiments of souls are nourished by the Divine Goodness!  Did
not Mrs. Professor come home this very blessed morning with a story
of one of her old black women?

"And how do you feel to-day, Mrs. Robinson?"

"Oh, my dear, I have this singing in my head all the time."  (What
doctors call tinnitus aurium.)

"She 's got a cold in the head," said old Mrs. Rider.

"Oh, no, my dear!  Whatever I'm thinking about, it's all this
singing, this music.  When I'm thinking of the dear Redeemer, it all
turns into this singing and music.  When the clark came to see me, I
asked him if he couldn't cure me, and he said, No,--it was the Holy
Spirit in me, singing to me; and all the time I hear this beautiful
music, and it's the Holy Spirit a-singing to me."


The good man waited for Sophy to speak; but she did not open her lips
as yet.

"I hope you are not troubled in mind or body," he said to her at
length, finding she did not speak.

The poor old woman took out a white handkerchief, and lifted it--to
her black face.  She could not say a word for her tears and sobs.

The minister would have consoled her; he was used to tears, and could
in most cases withstand their contagion manfully; but something
choked his voice suddenly, and when he called upon it, he got no
answer, but a tremulous movement of the muscles, which was worse than
silence.

At last she spoke.

"Oh, no, no, no!  It's my poor girl, my darling, my beauty, my baby,
that 's grown up to be a woman; she will come to a bad end; she will
do something that will make them kill her or shut her up all her
life.  Or, Doctor, Doctor, save her, pray for her!  It a'n't her
fault.  It a'n't her fault.  If they knew all that I know, they would
n' blame that poor child.  I must tell you, Doctor: if I should die,
perhaps nobody else would tell you.  Massa Veneer can't talk about
it.  Doctor Kittredge won't talk about it.  Nobody but old Sophy to
tell you, Doctor; and old Sophy can't die without telling you."

The kind minister soothed the poor old soul with those gentle,
quieting tones which had carried peace and comfort to so many
chambers of sickness and sorrow, to so many hearts overburdened by
the trials laid upon them.

Old Sophy became quiet in a few minutes, and proceeded to tell her
story.  She told it in the low half-whisper which is the natural
voice of lips oppressed wish grief and fears; with quick glances
around the apartment from time to time, as if she dreaded lest the
dim portraits on the walls and the dark folios on the shelves might
overhear her words.

It was not one of those conversations which a third person can report
minutely, unless by that miracle of clairvoyance known to the readers
of stories made out of authors' brains.  Yet its main character can
be imparted in a much briefer space than the old black woman took to
give all its details.

She went far back to the time when Dudley Venner was born,--she being
then a middle-aged woman.  The heir and hope of a family which had
been narrowing down as if doomed to extinction, he had been
surrounded with every care and trained by the best education he could
have in New England.  He had left college, and was studying the
profession which gentlemen of leisure most affect, when he fell in
love with a young girl left in the world almost alone, as he was.
The old woman told the story of his young love and his joyous bridal
with a tenderness which had something more, even, than her family
sympathies to account for it.  Had she not hanging over her bed a
paper-cutting of a profile,--jet black, but not blacker than the face
it represented--of one who would have been her own husband in the
small years of this century, if the vessel in which he went to sea,
like Jamie in the ballad, had not sailed away and never come back to
land?  Had she not her bits of furniture stowed away which had been
got ready for her own wedding,--two rocking-chairs, one worn with
long use, one kept for him so long that it had grown a superstition
with her never to sit in it,--and might he not come back yet, after
all?  Had she not her chest of linen ready for her humble house-
keeping with store of serviceable huckaback and piles of neatly
folded kerchiefs, wherefrom this one that showed so white against her
black face was taken, for that she knew her eyes would betray her in
"the presence"?

All the first part of the story the old woman told tenderly, and yet
dwelling upon every incident with a loving pleasure.  How happy this
young couple had been, what plans and projects of improvement they
had formed, how they lived in each other, always together, so young
and fresh and beautiful as she remembered them in that one early
summer when they walked arm in arm through the wilderness of roses
that ran riot in the garden,--she told of this as loath to leave it
and come to the woe that lay beneath.

She told the whole story;-shall I repeat it?  Not now.  If, in the
course of relating the incidents I have undertaken to report, it
tells itself, perhaps this will be better than to run the risk of
producing a painful impression on some of those susceptible readers
whom it would be ill-advised to disturb or excite, when they rather
require to be amused and soothed.  In our pictures of life, we must
show the flowering-out of terrible growths which have their roots
deep, deep underground.  Just how far we shall lay bare the unseemly
roots themselves is a matter of discretion and taste, and which none
of us are infallible.

The old woman told the whole story of Elsie, of her birth, of her
peculiarities of person and disposition, of the passionate fears and
hopes with which her father had watched the course of her
development.  She recounted all her strange ways, from the hour when
she first tried to crawl across the carpet, and her father's look as
she worked her way towards him.  With the memory of Juliet's nurse
she told the story of her teething, and how, the woman to whose
breast she had clung dying suddenly about that time, they had to
struggle hard with the child before she would learn the
accomplishment of feeding with a spoon.  And so of her fierce plays
and fiercer disputes with that boy who had been her companion, and
the whole scene of the quarrel when she struck him with those sharp
white teeth, frightening her, old Sophy, almost to death; for, as she
said, the boy would have died, if it hadn't been for the old Doctor's
galloping over as fast as he could gallop and burning the places
right out of his arm.  Then came the story of that other incident,
sufficiently alluded to already, which had produced such an ecstasy
of fright and left such a nightmare of apprehension in the household.
And so the old woman came down to this present time.  That boy she
never loved nor trusted was grown to a dark, dangerous-looking man,
and he was under their roof.  He wanted to marry our poor Elsie, and
Elsie hated him, and sometimes she would look at him over her
shoulder just as she used to look at that woman she hated; and she,
old Sophy, couldn't sleep for thinking she should hear a scream from
the white chamber some night and find him in spasms such as that
woman came so near dying with.  And then there was something about
Elsie she did not know what to make of: she would sit and hang her
head sometimes, and look as if she were dreaming; and she brought
home books they said a young gentleman up at the great school lent
her; and once she heard her whisper in her sleep, and she talked as
young girls do to themselves when they're thinking about somebody
they have a liking for and think nobody knows it.

She finished her long story at last.  The minister had listened to it
in perfect silence.  He sat still even when she had done speaking,--
still, and lost in thought.  It was a very awkward matter for him to
have a hand in.  Old Sophy was his parishioner, but the Veneers had a
pew in the Reverend Mr. Fairweather's meeting-house.  It would seem
that he, Mr. Fairweather, was the natural adviser of the parties most
interested.  Had he sense and spirit enough to deal with such people?
Was there enough capital of humanity in his somewhat limited nature
to furnish sympathy and unshrinking service for his friends in an
emergency? or was he too busy with his own attacks of spiritual
neuralgia, and too much occupied with taking account of stock of his
own thin-blooded offences, to forget himself and his personal
interests on the small scale and the large, and run a risk of his
life, if need were, at any rate give himself up without reserve to
the dangerous task of guiding and counselling these distressed and
imperilled fellow-creatures?

The good minister thought the best thing to do would be to call and
talk over some of these matters with Brother Fairweather,--for so he
would call him at times, especially if his senior deacon were not
within earshot.  Having settled this point, he comforted Sophy with a
few words of counsel and a promise of coming to see her very soon.
He then called his man to put the old white horse into the chaise and
drive Sophy back to the mansion-house.

When the Doctor sat down to his sermon again, it looked very
differently from the way it had looked at the moment he left it.
When he came to think of it, he did not feel quite so sure
practically about that matter of the utter natural selfishness of
everybody.  There was Letty, now, seemed to take a very unselfish
interest in that old black woman, and indeed in poor people
generally; perhaps it would not be too much to say that she was
always thinking of other people.  He thought he had seen other young
persons naturally unselfish, thoughtful for others; it seemed to be a
family trait in some he had known.

But most of all he was exercised about this poor girl whose story
Sophy had been telling.  If what the old woman believed was true,--
and it had too much semblance of probability,--what became of his
theory of ingrained moral obliquity applied to such a case?  If by
the visitation of God a person receives any injury which impairs the
intellect or the moral perceptions, is it not monstrous to judge such
a person by our common working standards of right and wrong?
Certainly, everybody will answer, in cases where there is a palpable
organic change brought about, as when a blow on the head produces
insanity.  Fools!  How long will it be before we shall learn that for
every wound which betrays itself to the sight by a scar, there are a
thousand unseen mutilations that cripple, each of them, some one or
more of our highest faculties?  If what Sophy told and believed was
the real truth, what prayers could be agonizing enough, what
tenderness could be deep enough, for this poor, lost, blighted,
hapless, blameless child of misfortune, struck by such a doom as
perhaps no living creature in all the sisterhood of humanity shared
with her?

The minister thought these matters over until his mind was bewildered
with doubts and tossed to and fro on that stormy deep of thought
heaving forever beneath the conflict of windy dogmas.  He laid by his
old sermon.  He put back a pile of old commentators with their eyes
and mouths and hearts full of the dust of the schools.  Then he
opened the book of Genesis at the eighteenth chapter and read that
remarkable argument of Abraham's with his Maker in which he boldly
appeals to first principles.  He took as his text, "Shall not the
Judge of all the earth do right?" and began to write his sermon,
afterwards so famous, "On the Obligations of an Infinite Creator to a
Finite Creature."

It astonished the good people, who had been accustomed so long to
repeat mechanically their Oriental hyperboles of self-abasement, to
hear their worthy minister maintaining that the dignified attitude of
the old Patriarch, insisting on what was reasonable and fair with
reference to his fellow-creatures, was really much more respectful to
his Maker, and a great deal manlier and more to his credit, than if
he had yielded the whole matter, and pretended that men had not
rights as well as duties.  The same logic which had carried him to
certain conclusions with reference to human nature, this same
irresistible logic carried him straight on from his text until he
arrived at those other results, which not only astonished his people,
as was said, but surprised himself.  He went so far in defence of the
rights of man, that he put his foot into several heresies, for which
men had been burned so often, it was time, if ever it could be, to
acknowledge the demonstration of the argumentum ad ignem.  He did not
believe in the responsibility of idiots.  He did not believe a new-
born infant was morally answerable for other people's acts.  He
thought a man with a crooked spine would never be called to account
for not walking erect.  He thought if the crook was in his brain,
instead of his back, he could not fairly be blamed for any
consequence of this natural defect, whatever lawyers or divines might
call it.  He argued, that, if a person inherited a perfect mind,
body, and disposition, and had perfect teaching from infancy, that
person could do nothing more than keep the moral law perfectly.  But
supposing that the Creator allows a person to be born with an
hereditary or ingrafted organic tendency, and then puts this person
into the hands of teachers incompetent or positively bad, is not what
is called sin or transgression of the law necessarily involved in the
premises?  Is not a Creator bound to guard his children against the
ruin which inherited ignorance might entail on them?  Would it be
fair for a parent to put into a child's hands the title-deeds to all
its future possessions, and a bunch of matches?  And are not men
children, nay, babes, in the eye of Omniscience?--The minister grew
bold in his questions.  Had not he as good right to ask questions as
Abraham?

This was the dangerous vein of speculation in which the Reverend
Doctor Honeywood found himself involved, as a consequence of the
suggestions forced upon him by old Sophy's communication.  The truth
was, the good man had got so humanized by mixing up with other people
in various benevolent schemes, that, the very moment he could escape
from his old scholastic abstractions, he took the side of humanity
instinctively, just as the Father of the Faithful did,--all honor be
to the noble old Patriarch for insisting on the worth of an honest
man, and making the best terms he could for a very ill-conditioned
metropolis, which might possibly, however, have contained ten
righteous people, for whose sake it should be spared!

The consequence of all this was, that he was in a singular and
seemingly self-contradictory state of mind when he took his hat and
cane and went forth to call on his heretical brother.  The old
minister took it for granted that the Reverend Mr. Fairweather knew
the private history of his parishioner's family.  He did not reflect
that there are griefs men never put into words,--that there are fears
which must not be spoken,--intimate matters of consciousness which
must be carried, as bullets which have been driven deep into the
living tissues are sometimes carried, for a whole lifetime,--encysted
griefs, if we may borrow the chirurgeon's term, never to be reached,
never to be seen, never to be thrown out, but to go into the dust
with the frame that bore them about with it, during long years of
anguish, known only to the sufferer and his Maker.  Dudley Venner had
talked with his minister about this child of his.  But he had talked
cautiously, feeling his way for sympathy, looking out for those
indications of tact and judgment which would warrant him in some
partial communication, at least, of the origin of his doubts and
fears, and never finding them.

There was something about the Reverend Mr. Fairweather which
repressed all attempts at confidential intercourse.  What this
something was, Dudley Venner could hardly say; but he felt it
distinctly, and it sealed his lips.  He never got beyond certain
generalities connected with education and religious instruction.  The
minister could not help discovering, however, that there were
difficulties connected with this girl's management, and he heard
enough outside of the family to convince him that she had manifested
tendencies, from an early age, at variance with the theoretical
opinions he was in the habit of preaching, and in a dim way of
holding for truth, as to the natural dispositions of the human being.

About this terrible fact of congenital obliquity his new beliefs
began to cluster as a centre, and to take form as a crystal around
its nucleus.  Still, he might perhaps have struggled against them,
had it not been for the little Roman Catholic chapel he passed every
Sunday, on his way to the meeting-house.  Such a crowd of
worshippers, swarming into the pews like bees, filling all the
aisles, running over at the door like berries heaped too full in the
measure,--some kneeling on the steps, some standing on the sidewalk,
hats off, heads down, lips moving, some looking on devoutly from the
other side of the street!  Oh, could he have followed his own
Bridget, maid of all work, into the heart of that steaming throng,
and bowed his head while the priests intoned their Latin prayers!
could he have snuffed up the cloud of frankincense, and felt that he
was in the great ark which holds the better half of the Christian
world, while all around it are wretched creatures, some struggling
against the waves in leaky boats, and some on ill-connected rafts,
and some with their heads just above water, thinking to ride out the
flood which is to sweep the earth clean of sinners, upon their own
private, individual life-preservers!

Such was the present state of mind of the Reverend Chauncy
Fairweather, when his clerical brother called upon him to talk over
the questions to which old Sophy had called his attention.




CHAPTER VIII.

THE REVEREND DOCTOR CALLS ON BROTHER FAIRWEATHER.

For the last few months, while all these various matters were going
on in Rockland, the Reverend Chauncy Fairweather had been busy with
the records of ancient councils and the writings of the early
fathers.  The more he read, the more discontented he became with the
platform upon which he and his people were standing.  They and he
were clearly in a minority, and his deep inward longing to be with
the majority was growing into an engrossing passion.  He yearned
especially towards the good old unquestioning, authoritative Mother
Church, with her articles of faith which took away the necessity for
private judgment, with her traditional forms and ceremonies, and her
whole apparatus of stimulants and anodynes.

About this time he procured a breviary and kept it in his desk under
the loose papers.  He sent to a Catholic bookstore and obtained a
small crucifix suspended from a string of beads.  He ordered his new
coat to be cut very narrow in the collar and to be made single-
breasted.  He began an informal series of religious conversations
with Miss O'Brien, the young person of Irish extraction already
referred to as Bridget, maid of all work.  These not proving very
satisfactory, he managed to fall in with Father McShane, the Catholic
priest of the Rockland church.

Father McShane encouraged his nibble very scientifically.  It would
be such a fine thing to bring over one of those Protestant heretics,
and a "liberal" one too!---not that there was any real difference
between them, but it sounded better, to say that one of these
rationalizing free-and-equal religionists had been made a convert
than any of those half-way Protestants who were the slaves of
catechisms instead of councils, and of commentators instead of popes.
The subtle priest played his disciple with his finest tackle.  It was
hardly necessary: when anything or anybody wishes to be caught, a
bare hook and a coarse line are all that is needed.

If a man has a genuine, sincere, hearty wish to get rid of his
liberty, if he is really bent upon becoming a slave, nothing can stop
him.  And the temptation is to some natures a very great one.
Liberty is often a heavy burden on a man.  It involves that necessity
for perpetual choice which is the kind of labor men have always
dreaded.  In common life we shirk it by forming habits, which take
the place of self-determination.  In politics party-organization
saves us the pains of much thinking before deciding how to cast our
vote.  In religious matters there are great multitudes watching us
perpetually, each propagandist ready with his bundle of finalities,
which having accepted we may be at peace.  The more absolute the
submission demanded, the stronger the temptation becomes to those who
have been long tossed among doubts and conflicts.

So it is that in all the quiet bays which indent the shores of the
great ocean of thought, at every sinking wharf, we see moored the
hulks and the razees of enslaved or half-enslaved intelligences.
They rock peacefully as children in their cradles on the subdued
swell which comes feebly in over the bar at the harbor's mouth,
slowly crusting with barnacles, pulling at their iron cables as if
they really wanted to be free; but better contented to remain bound
as they are.  For these no more the round unwalled horizon of the
open sea, the joyous breeze aloft, the furrow, the foam, the sparkle,
that track the rushing keel!  They have escaped the dangers of the
wave, and lie still henceforth, evermore.  Happiest of souls, if
lethargy is bliss, and palsy the chief beatitude!

America owes its political freedom to religious Protestantism.  But
political freedom is reacting on religious prescription with still
mightier force.  We wonder, therefore, when we find a soul which was
born to a full sense of individual liberty, an unchallenged right of
self-determination on every new alleged truth offered to its
intelligence, voluntarily surrendering any portion of its liberty to
a spiritual dictatorship which always proves to rest, in the last
analysis, on a majority vote, nothing more nor less, commonly an old
one, passed in those barbarous times when men cursed and murdered
each other for differences of opinion, and of course were not in a
condition to settle the beliefs of a comparatively civilized
community.

In our disgust, we are liable to be intolerant.  We forget that
weakness is not in itself a sin.  We forget that even cowardice may
call for our most lenient judgment, if it spring from innate
infirmity, Who of us does not look with great tenderness on the young
chieftain in the "Fair Maid of Perth," when he confesses his want of
courage?  All of us love companionship and sympathy; some of us may
love them too much.  All of us are more or less imaginative in our
theology.

Some of us may find the aid of material symbols a comfort, if not a
necessity.  The boldest thinker may have his moments of languor and
discouragement, when he feels as if he could willingly exchange
faiths with the old beldame crossing herself at the cathedral-door,--
nay, that, if he could drop all coherent thought, and lie in the
flowery meadow with the brown-eyed solemnly unthinking cattle,
looking up to the sky, and all their simple consciousness staining
itself blue, then down to the grass, and life turning to a mere
greenness, blended with confused scents of herbs,--no individual
mind-movement such as men are teased with, but the great calm cattle-
sense of all time and all places that know the milky smell of herds,
--if he could be like these, he would be content to be driven home by
the cow-boy, and share the grassy banquet of the king of ancient
Babylon.  Let us be very generous, then, in our judgment of those who
leave the front ranks of thought for the company of the meek non-
combatants who follow with the baggage and provisions.  Age, illness,
too much wear and tear, a half-formed paralysis, may bring any of us
to this pass.  But while we can think and maintain the rights of our
own individuality against every human combination, let us not forget
to caution all who are disposed to waver that there is a cowardice
which is criminal, and a longing for rest which it is baseness to
indulge.  God help him, over whose dead soul in his living body must
be uttered the sad supplication, Requiescat in pace!

A knock at the Reverend Mr. Fairweather's study door called his eyes
from the book on which they were intent.  He looked up, as if
expecting a welcome guest.

The Reverend Pierrepont Honeywood, D. D., entered the study of the
Reverend Chauncy Fairweather.  He was not the expected guest.  Mr.
Fairweather slipped the book he was reading into a half-open drawer,
and pushed in the drawer.  He slid something which rattled under a
paper lying on the table.  He rose with a slight change of color, and
welcomed, a little awkwardly, his unusual visitor.

"Good-evening, Brother Fairweather!" said the Reverend Doctor, in a
very cordial, good-humored way.  "I hope I am not spoiling one of
those eloquent sermons I never have a chance to hear."

"Not at all, not at all," the younger clergyman answered, in a
languid tone, with a kind of habitual half-querulousness which
belonged to it,--the vocal expression which we meet with now and
then, and which says as plainly as so many words could say it, "I am
a suffering individual.  I am persistently undervalued, wronged, and
imposed upon by mankind and the powers of the universe generally.
But I endure all.  I endure you.  Speak.  I listen.  It is a burden
to me, but I even approve.  I sacrifice myself.  Behold this movement
of my lips!  It is a smile."

The Reverend Doctor knew this forlorn way of Mr. Fairweather's, and
was not troubled by it.  He proceeded to relate the circumstances of
his visit from the old black woman, and the fear she was in about the
young girl, who being a parishioner of Mr. Fairweather's, he had
thought it best to come over and speak to him about old Sophy's fears
and fancies.

In telling the old woman's story, he alluded only vaguely to those
peculiar circumstances to which she had attributed so much
importance, taking it for granted that the other minister must be
familiar with the whole series of incidents she had related.  The old
minister was mistaken, as we have before seen.  Mr. Fairweather had
been settled in the place only about ten years, and, if he had heard
a strange hint now and then about Elsie, had never considered it as
anything more than idle and ignorant, if not malicious, village-
gossip.  All that he fully understood was that this had been a
perverse and unmanageable child, and that the extraordinary care
which had been bestowed on her had been so far thrown away that she
was a dangerous, self-willed girl, whom all feared and almost all
shunned, as if she carried with her some malignant influence.

He replied, therefore, after hearing the story, that Elsie had always
given trouble.  There seemed to be a kind of natural obliquity about
her.  Perfectly unaccountable.  A very dark case.  Never amenable to
good influences.  Had sent her good books from the Sunday-school
library.  Remembered that she tore out the frontispiece of one of
them, and kept it, and flung the book out of the window.  It was a
picture of Eve's temptation; and he recollected her saying that Eve
was a good woman,--and she'd have done just so, if she'd been there.
A very sad child, very sad; bad from infancy.  He had talked himself
bold, and said all at once,  "Doctor, do you know I am almost ready
to accept your doctrine of the congenital sinfulness of human nature?
I am afraid that is the only thing which goes to the bottom of the
difficulty."

The old minister's face did not open so approvingly as Mr.
Fairweather had expected.

"Why, yes,--well,--many find comfort in it,--I believe;--there is
much to be said,--there are many bad people,--and bad children,
--I can't be so sure about bad babies,--though they cry very
malignantly at times,--especially if they have the stomach-ache.
But I really don't know how to condemn this poor Elsie; she may have
impulses that act in her like instincts in the lower animals, and so
not come under the bearing of our ordinary rules of judgment."

"But this depraved tendency, Doctor,--this unaccountable
perverseness.  My dear Sir, I am afraid your school is in the right
about human nature.  Oh, those words of the Psalmist, 'shapen in
iniquity,' and the rest!  What are we to do with them,--we who teach
that the soul of a child is an unstained white tablet?"

"King David was very subject to fits of humility, and much given to
self-reproaches," said the Doctor, in a rather dry way.  "We owe you
and your friends a good deal for calling attention to the natural
graces, which, after all, may, perhaps, be considered as another form
of manifestation of the divine influence.  Some of our writers have
pressed rather too hard on the tendencies of the human soul toward
evil as such.  It maybe questioned whether these views have not
interfered with the sound training of certain young persons, sons of
clergymen and others.  I am nearer of your mind about the possibility
of educating children so that they shall become good Christians
without any violent transition.  That is what I should hope for from
bringing them up 'in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.'"

The younger minister looked puzzled, but presently answered,
"Possibly we may have called attention to some neglected truths; but,
after all, I fear we must go to the old school, if we want to get at
the root of the matter.  I know there is an outward amiability about
many young persons, some young girls especially, that seems like
genuine goodness; but I have been disposed of late to lean toward
your view, that these human affections, as we see them in our
children,--ours, I say, though I have not the fearful responsibility
of training any of my own,--are only a kind of disguised and sinful
selfishness."

The old minister groaned in spirit.  His heart had been softened by
the sweet influences of children and grandchildren.  He thought of a
half-sized grave in the burial-ground, and the fine, brave, noble-
hearted boy he laid in it thirty years before,--the sweet, cheerful
child who had made his home all sunshine until the day when he was
brought into it, his long curls dripping, his fresh lips purpled in
death,--foolish dear little blessed creature to throw himself into
the deep water to save the drowning boy, who clung about him and
carried him under!  Disguised selfishness!  And his granddaughter
too, whose disguised selfishness was the light of his household!

"Don't call it my view!" he said.  "Abstractly, perhaps, all natures
may be considered vitiated; but practically, as I see it in life, the
divine grace keeps pace with the perverted instincts from infancy in
many natures.  Besides, this perversion itself may often be disease,
bad habits transmitted, like drunkenness, or some hereditary
misfortune, as with this Elsie we were talking about."

The younger minister was completely mystified. At every step he made
towards the Doctor's recognized theological position, the Doctor took
just one step towards his.  They would cross each other soon at this
rate, and might as well exchange pulpits,--as Colonel Sprowle once
wished they would, it may be remembered.

The Doctor, though a much clearer-headed man, was almost equally
puzzled.  He turned the conversation again upon Elsie, and endeavored
to make her minister feel the importance of bringing every friendly
influence to bear upon her at this critical period of her life.  His
sympathies did not seem so lively as the Doctor could have wished.
Perhaps he had vastly more important objects of solicitude in his own
spiritual interests.

A knock at the door interrupted them.  The Reverend Mr. Fairweather
rose and went towards it.  As he passed the table, his coat caught
something, which came rattling to the floor.  It was a crucifix with
a string of beads attached.  As he opened the door, the Milesian
features of Father McShane presented themselves, and from their
centre proceeded the clerical benediction in Irish-sounding Latin,
Pax vobiscum!

The Reverend Doctor Honeywood rose and left the priest and his
disciple together.




CHAPTER XIX.

THE SPIDER ON HIS THREAD.

There was nobody, then, to counsel poor Elsie, except her father, who
had learned to let her have her own way so as not to disturb such
relations as they had together, and the old black woman, who had a
real, though limited influence over the girl.  Perhaps she did not
need counsel.  To look upon her, one might well suppose that she was
competent to defend herself against any enemy she was like to have.
That glittering, piercing eye was not to be softened by a few smooth
words spoken in low tones, charged with the common sentiments which
win their way to maidens' hearts.  That round, lithe, sinuous figure
was as full of dangerous life as ever lay under the slender flanks
and clean-shaped limbs of a panther.

There were particular times when Elsie was in such a mood that it
must have been a bold person who would have intruded upon her with
reproof or counsel.  "This is one of her days," old Sophy would say
quietly to her father, and he would, as far as possible, leave her to
herself.  These days were more frequent, as old Sophy's keen,
concentrated watchfulness had taught her, at certain periods of the
year.  It was in the heats of summer that they were most common and
most strongly characterized.  In winter, on the other hand, she was
less excitable, and even at times heavy and as if chilled and dulled
in her sensibilities.  It was a strange, paroxysmal kind of life that
belonged to her.  It seemed to come and go with the sunlight.  All
winter long she would be comparatively quiet, easy to manage,
listless, slow in her motions; her eye would lose something of its
strange lustre; and the old nurse would feel so little anxiety, that
her whole expression and aspect would show the change, and people
would say to her, "Why, Sophy, how young you're looking!"

As the spring came on, Elsie would leave the fireside, have her
tiger-skin spread in the empty southern chamber next the wall, and
lie there basking for whole hours in the sunshine.  As the season
warmed, the light would kindle afresh in her eyes, and the old
woman's sleep would grow restless again,--for she knew, that, so long
as the glitter was fierce in the girl's eyes, there was no trusting
her impulses or movements.

At last, when the veins of the summer were hot and swollen, and the
juices of all the poison-plants and the blood of all the creatures
that feed upon them had grown thick and strong,--about the time when
the second mowing was in hand, and the brown, wet-faced men were
following up the scythes as they chased the falling waves of grass,
(falling as the waves fall on sickle-curved beaches; the foam-flowers
dropping as the grass-flowers drop,--with sharp semivowel consonantal
sounds,--frsh,--for that is the way the sea talks, and leaves all
pure vowel-sounds for the winds to breathe over it, and all mutes to
the unyielding earth,)--about this time of over-ripe midsummer, the
life of Elsie seemed fullest of its malign and restless instincts.
This was the period of the year when the Rockland people were most
cautious of wandering in the leafier coverts which skirted the base
of The Mountain, and the farmers liked to wear thick, long boots,
whenever they went into the bushes.  But Elsie was never so much
given to roaming over The Mountain as at this season; and as she had
grown more absolute and uncontrollable, she was as like to take the
night as the day for her rambles.

At this season, too, all her peculiar tastes in dress and ornament
came out in a more striking way than at other times.  She was never
so superb as then, and never so threatening in her scowling beauty.
The barred skirts she always fancied showed sharply beneath her
diaphanous muslins; the diamonds often glittered on her breast as if
for her own pleasure rather than to dazzle others; the asp-like
bracelet hardly left her arm.  She was never seen without some
necklace,--either the golden cord she wore at the great party, or a
chain of mosaics, or simply a ring of golden scales.  Some said that
Elsie always slept in a necklace, and that when she died she was to
be buried in one.  It was a fancy of hers,--but many thought there
was a reason for it.

Nobody watched Elsie with a more searching eye than her cousin, Dick
Venner.  He had kept more out of her way of late, it is true, but
there was not a movement she made which he did not carefully observe
just so far as he could without exciting her suspicion.  It was plain
enough to him that the road to fortune was before him, and that the
first thing was to marry Elsie.  What course he should take with her,
or with others interested, after marrying her, need not be decided in
a hurry.

He had now done all he could expect to do at present in the way of
conciliating the other members of the household.  The girl's father
tolerated him, if he did not even like him.  Whether he suspected his
project or not Dick did not feel sure; but it was something to have
got a foothold in the house, and to have overcome any prepossession
against him which his uncle might have entertained.  To be a good
listener and a bad billiard-player was not a very great sacrifice to
effect this object.  Then old Sophy could hardly help feeling
well-disposed towards him, after the gifts he had bestowed on her and
the court he had paid her.  These were the only persons on the place
of much importance to gain over.  The people employed about the house
and farm-lands had little to do with Elsie, except to obey her
without questioning her commands.

Mr. Richard began to think of reopening his second parallel.  But he
had lost something of the coolness with which he had begun his system
of operations.  The more he had reflected upon the matter, the more
he had convinced himself that this was his one great chance in life.
If he suffered this girl to escape him, such an opportunity could
hardly, in the nature of things, present itself a second time.  Only
one life between Elsie and her fortune,--and lives are so uncertain!
The girl might not suit him as a wife.  Possibly.  Time enough to
find out after he had got her.  In short, he must have the property,
and Elsie Venner, as she was to go with it,--and then, if he found it
convenient and agreeable to, lead a virtuous life, he would settle
down and raise children and vegetables; but if he found it
inconvenient and disagreeable, so much the worse for those who made
it so.  Like many other persons, he was not principled against
virtue, provided virtue were a better investment than its opposite;
but he knew that there might be contingencies in which the property
would be better without its incumbrances, and he contemplated this
conceivable problem in the light of all its possible solutions.

One thing Mr. Richard could not conceal from himself: Elsie had some
new cause of indifference, at least, if not of aversion to him.  With
the acuteness which persons who make a sole business of their own
interest gain by practice, so that fortune-hunters are often shrewd
where real lovers are terribly simple, he fixed at once on the young
man up at the school where the girl had been going of late, as
probably at the bottom of it.

"Cousin Elsie in love!"  so he communed with himself upon his lonely
pillow.  "In love with a Yankee schoolmaster!  What else can it be?
Let him look out for himself!  He'll stand but a bad chance between
us.  What makes you think she's in love with him?  Met her walking
with him.  Don't like her looks and ways;--she's thinking about
something, anyhow.  Where does she get those books she is reading so
often?  Not out of our library, that 's certain.  If I could have ten
minutes' peep into her chamber now, I would find out where she got
them, and what mischief she was up to."

At that instant, as if some tributary demon had heard his wish, a
shape which could be none but Elsie's flitted through a gleam of
moonlight into the shadow of the trees.  She was setting out on one
of her midnight rambles.

Dick felt his heart stir in its place, and presently his cheeks
flushed with the old longing for an adventure.  It was not much to
invade a young girl's deserted chamber, but it would amuse a wakeful
hour, and tell him some little matters he wanted to know.  The
chamber he slept in was over the room which Elsie chiefly occupied at
this season.  There was no great risk of his being seen or heard, if
he ventured down-stairs to her apartment.

Mr. Richard Venner, in the pursuit of his interesting project, arose
and lighted a lamp.  He wrapped himself in a dressing-gown and thrust
his feet into a pair of cloth slippers.  He stole carefully down the
stair, and arrived safely at the door of Elsie's room.

The young lady had taken the natural precaution to leave it fastened,
carrying the key with her, no doubt,--unless; indeed, she had got out
by the window, which was not far from the ground.  Dick could get in
at this window easily enough, but he did not like the idea of leaving
his footprints in the flower-bed just under it.  He returned to his
own chamber, and held a council of war with himself.

He put his head out of his own window and looked at that beneath.  It
was open.  He then went to one of his trunks, which he unlocked, and
began carefully removing its contents.  What these were we need not
stop to mention,--only remarking that there were dresses of various
patterns, which might afford an agreeable series of changes, and in
certain contingencies prove eminently useful.  After removing a few
of these, he thrust his hand to the very bottom of the remaining pile
and drew out a coiled strip of leather many yards in length, ending
in a noose,--a tough, well-seasoned lasso, looking as if it had seen
service and was none the worse for it.  He uncoiled a few yards of
this and fastened it to the knob of a door.  Then he threw the loose
end out of the window so that it should hang by the open casement of
Elsie's room.  By this he let himself down opposite her window, and
with a slight effort swung himself inside the room.  He lighted a
match, found a candle, and, having lighted that, looked curiously
about him, as Clodius might have done when he smuggled himself in
among the Vestals.

Elsie's room was almost as peculiar as her dress and ornaments.  It
was a kind of museum of objects, such as the woods are full of to
those who have eyes to see them, but many of them such as only few
could hope to reach, even if they knew where to look for them.
Crows' nests, which are never found but in the tall trees, commonly
enough in the forks of ancient hemlocks, eggs of rare birds, which
must have taken a quick eye and a hard climb to find and get hold of,
mosses and ferns of unusual aspect, and quaint monstrosities of
vegetable growth, such as Nature delights in, showed that Elsie had
her tastes and fancies like any naturalist or poet.

Nature, when left to her own freaks in the forest, is grotesque and
fanciful to the verge of license, and beyond it.  The foliage of
trees does not always require clipping to make it look like an image
of life.  From those windows at Canoe Meadow, among the mountains, we
could see all summer long a lion rampant, a Shanghai chicken, and
General Jackson on horseback, done by Nature in green leaves, each
with a single tree.  But to Nature's tricks with boughs and roots and
smaller vegetable growths there is no end.  Her fancy is infinite,
and her humor not always refined.  There is a perpetual reminiscence
of animal life in her rude caricatures, which sometimes actually
reach the point of imitating the complete human figure, as in that
extraordinary specimen which nobody will believe to be genuine,
except the men of science, and of which the discreet reader may have
a glimpse by application in the proper quarter.

Elsie had gathered so many of these sculpture-like monstrosities,
that one might have thought she had robbed old Sophy's grandfather of
his fetishes.  They helped to give her room a kind of enchanted look,
as if a witch had her home in it.  Over the fireplace was a long,
staff-like branch, strangled in the spiral coils of one of those
vines which strain the smaller trees in their clinging embraces,
sinking into the bark until the parasite becomes almost identified
with its support.  With these sylvan curiosities were blended objects
of art, some of them not less singular, but others showing a love for
the beautiful in form and color, such as a girl of fine organization
and nice culture might naturally be expected to feel and to indulge,
in adorning her apartment.

All these objects, pictures, bronzes, vases, and the rest, did not
detain Mr. Richard Veneer very long, whatever may have been his
sensibilities to art.  He was more curious about books and papers.  A
copy of Keats lay on the table.  He opened it and read the name of
Bernard C. Langdon on the blank leaf.  An envelope was on the table
with Elsie's name written in a similar hand; but the envelope was
empty, and he could not find the note it contained.  Her desk was
locked, and it would not be safe to tamper with it.  He had seen
enough; the girl received books and notes from this fellow up at the
school, this usher, this Yankee quill-driver;--he was aspiring to
become the lord of the Dudley domain, then, was he?

Elsie had been reasonably careful.  She had locked up her papers,
whatever they might be.  There was little else that promised to
reward his curiosity, but he cast his eye on everything.  There was a
clasp-Bible among her books.  Dick wondered if she ever unclasped it.
There was a book of hymns; it had her name in it, and looked as if it
might have been often read;--what the diablo had Elsie to do with
hymns?

Mr. Richard Venner was in an observing and analytical state of mind,
it will be noticed, or he might perhaps have been touched with the
innocent betrayals of the poor girl's chamber.  Had she, after all,
some human tenderness in her heart?  That was not the way he put the
question,--but whether she would take seriously to this schoolmaster,
and if she did, what would be the neatest and surest and quickest way
of putting a stop to all that nonsense.  All this, however, he could
think over more safely in his own quarters.  So he stole softly to
the window, and, catching the end of the leathern thong, regained his
own chamber and drew in the lasso.

It needs only a little jealousy to set a man on who is doubtful in
love or wooing, or to make him take hold of his courting in earnest.
As soon as Dick had satisfied himself that the young schoolmaster was
his rival in Elsie's good graces, his whole thoughts concentrated
themselves more than ever on accomplishing his great design of
securing her for himself.  There was no time to be lost.  He must
come into closer relations with her, so as to withdraw her thoughts
from this fellow, and to find out more exactly what was the state of
her affections, if she had any.  So he began to court her company
again, to propose riding with her, to sing to her, to join her
whenever she was strolling about the grounds, to make himself
agreeable, according to the ordinary understanding of that phrase, in
every way which seemed to promise a chance for succeeding in that
amiable effort.

The girl treated him more capriciously than ever.  She would be
sullen and silent, or she would draw back fiercely at some harmless
word or gesture, or she would look at him with her eyes narrowed in
such a strange way and with such a wicked light in them that Dick
swore to himself they were too much for him, and would leave her for
the moment.  Yet she tolerated him, almost as a matter of necessity,
and sometimes seemed to take a kind of pleasure in trying her power
upon him.  This he soon found out, and humored her in the fancy that
she could exercise a kind of fascination over him, though there were
times in which he actually felt an influence he could not understand,
an effect of some peculiar expression about her, perhaps, but still
centring in those diamond eyes of hers which it made one feel so
curiously to look into.

Whether Elsie saw into his object or not was more than he could tell.
His idea was, after having conciliated the good-will of all about her
as far as possible, to make himself first a habit and then a
necessity with the girl,--not to spring any trap of a declaration
upon her until tolerance had grown into such a degree of inclination
as her nature was like to admit.  He had succeeded in the first part
of his plan.  He was at liberty to prolong his visit at his own
pleasure.  This was not strange; these three persons, Dudley Venner,
his daughter, and his nephew, represented all that remained of an old
and honorable family.  Had Elsie been like other girls, her father
might have been less willing to entertain a young fellow like Dick as
an inmate; but he had long outgrown all the slighter apprehensions
which he might have had in common with all parents, and followed
rather than led the imperious instincts of his daughter.  It was not
a question of sentiment, but of life and death, or more than that,--
some dark ending, perhaps, which would close the history of his race
with disaster and evil report upon the lips of all coming
generations.

As to the thought of his nephew's making love to his daughter, it had
almost passed from his mind.  He had been so long in the habit of
looking at Elsie as outside of all common influences and exceptional
in the law of her nature, that it was difficult for him to think of
her as a girl to be fallen in love with.  Many persons are surprised,
when others court their female relatives; they know them as good
young or old women enough,--aunts, sisters, nieces, daughters,
whatever they may be,--but never think of anybody's falling in love
with them, any more than of their being struck by lightning.  But in
this case there were special reasons, in addition to the common
family delusion,--reasons which seemed to make it impossible that she
should attract a suitor.  Who would dare to marry Elsie?  No, let her
have the pleasure, if it was one, at any rate the wholesome
excitement, of companionship; it might save her from lapsing into
melancholy or a worse form of madness.  Dudley Venner had a kind of
superstition, too, that, if Elsie could only outlive three
septenaries, twenty-one years, so that, according to the prevalent
idea, her whole frame would have been thrice made over, counting from
her birth, she would revert to the natural standard of health of mind
and feelings from which she had been so long perverted.  The thought
of any other motive than love being sufficient to induce Richard to
become her suitor had not occurred to him.  He had married early, at
that happy period when interested motives are least apt to influence
the choice; and his single idea of marriage was, that it was the
union of persons naturally drawn towards each other by some mutual
attraction.  Very simple, perhaps; but he had lived lonely for many
years since his wife's death, and judged the hearts of others, most
of all of his brother's son, by his own.  He had often thought
whether, in case of Elsie's dying or being necessarily doomed to
seclusion, he might not adopt this nephew and make him his heir; but
it had not occurred to him that Richard might wish to become his son-
in-law for the sake of his property.

It is very easy to criticise other people's modes of dealing with
their children.  Outside observers see results; parents see
processes.  They notice the trivial movements and accents which
betray the blood of this or that ancestor; they can detect the
irrepressible movement of hereditary impulse in looks and acts which
mean nothing to the common observer.  To be a parent is almost to be
a fatalist.  This boy sits with legs crossed, just as his uncle used
to whom he never saw; his grandfathers both died before he was born,
but he has the movement of the eyebrows which we remember in one of
them, and the gusty temper of three different generations, can tell
pretty nearly the range of possibilities and the limitations of a
child, actual or potential, of a given stock,--errors excepted
always, because children of the same stock are not bred just alike,
because the traits of some less known ancestor are liable to break
out at any time, and because each human being has, after all, a small
fraction of individuality about him which gives him a flavor, so that
he is distinguishable from others by his friends or in a court of
justice, and which occasionally makes a genius or a saint or a
criminal of him.  It is well that young persons cannot read these
fatal oracles of Nature.  Blind impulse is her highest wisdom, after
all.  We make our great jump, and then she takes the bandage off our
eyes.  That is the way the broad sea-level of average is maintained,
and the physiological democracy is enabled to fight against the
principle of selection which would disinherit all the weaker
children.  The magnificent constituency of mediocrities of which the
world is made up,--the people without biographies, whose lives have
made a clear solution in the fluid menstruum of time, instead of
being precipitated in the opaque sediment of history

But this is a narrative, and not a disquisition.




CHAPTER XX.

FROM WITHOUT AND FROM WITHIN.

There were not wanting people who accused Dudley VENNER of weakness
and bad judgment in his treatment of his daughter.  Some were of
opinion that the great mistake was in not "breaking her will" when
she was a little child.  There was nothing the matter with her, they
said, but that she had been spoiled by indulgence.  If they had had
the charge of her, they'd have brought her down.  She'd got the
upperhand of her father now; but if he'd only taken hold of her in
season!  There are people who think that everything may be done, if
the doer, be he educator or physician, be only called "in season."
No doubt,--but in season would often be a hundred or two years before
the child was born; and people never send so early as that.

The father of Elsie Veneer knew his duties and his difficulties too
well to trouble himself about anything others might think or say.  So
soon as he found that he could not govern his child, he gave his life
up to following her and protecting her as far as he could.  It was a
stern and terrible trial for a man of acute sensibility, and not
without force of intellect and will, and the manly ambition for
himself and his family-name which belonged to his endowments and his
position.  Passive endurance is the hardest trial to persons of such
a nature.

What made it still more a long martyrdom was the necessity for
bearing his cross in utter loneliness.  He could not tell his griefs.
He could not talk of them even with those who knew their secret
spring.  His minister had the unsympathetic nature which is common in
the meaner sort of devotees,--persons who mistake spiritual
selfishness for sanctity, and grab at the infinite prize of the great
Future and Elsewhere with the egotism they excommunicate in its
hardly more odious forms of avarice and self-indulgence.  How could
he speak with the old physician and the old black woman about a
sorrow and a terror which but to name was to strike dumb the lips of
Consolation?

In the dawn of his manhood he had found that second consciousness for
which young men and young women go about looking into each other's
faces, with their sweet, artless aim playing in every feature, and
making them beautiful to each other, as to all of us.  He had found
his other self early, before he had grown weary in the search and
wasted his freshness in vain longings: the lot of many, perhaps we
may say of most, who infringe the patent of our social order by
intruding themselves into a life already upon half allowance of the
necessary luxuries of existence.  The life he had led for a brief
space was not only beautiful in outward circumstance, as old Sophy
had described it to the Reverend Doctor.  It was that delicious
process of the tuning of two souls to each other, string by string,
not without little half-pleasing discords now and then when some
chord in one or the other proves to be overstrained or over-lax, but
always approaching nearer and nearer to harmony, until they become at
last as two instruments with a single voice.  Something more than a
year of this blissful doubled consciousness had passed over him when
he found himself once more alone,--alone, save for the little
diamond-eyed child lying in the old black woman's arms, with the
coral necklace round--her throat and the rattle in her hand.

He would not die by his own act.  It was not the way in his family.
There may have been other, perhaps better reasons, but this was
enough; he did not come of suicidal stock.  He must live for this
child's sake, at any rate; and yet,--oh, yet, who could tell with
what thoughts he looked upon her?  Sometimes her little features
would look placid, and something like a smile would steal over them;
then all his tender feelings would rush up, into his eyes, and he
would put his arms out to take her from the old woman,--but all at
once her eyes would narrow and she would throw her head back, and a
shudder would seize him as he stooped over his child,--he could not
look upon her,--he could not touch his lips to her cheek; nay, there
would sometimes come into his soul such frightful suggestions that he
would hurry from the room lest the hinted thought should become a
momentary madness and he should lift his hand against the hapless
infant which owed him life.

In those miserable days he used to wander all over The Mountain in
his restless endeavor to seek some relief for inward suffering in
outward action.  He had no thought of throwing himself from the
summit of any of the broken cliffs, but he clambered over them
recklessly, as having no particular care for his life.  Sometimes he
would go into the accursed district where the venomous reptiles were
always to be dreaded, and court their worst haunts, and kill all he
could come near with a kind of blind fury which was strange in a
person of his gentle nature.

One overhanging cliff was a favorite haunt of his.  It frowned upon
his home beneath in a very menacing way; he noticed slight seams and
fissures that looked ominous;--what would happen, if it broke off
some time or other and came crashing down on the fields and roofs
below?  He thought of such a possible catastrophe with a singular
indifference, in fact with a feeling almost like pleasure.  It would
be such a swift and thorough solution of this great problem of life
he was working out in ever-recurring daily anguish!  The remote
possibility of such a catastrophe had frightened some timid dwellers
beneath The Mountain to other places of residence; here the danger
was most imminent, and yet he loved to dwell upon the chances of its
occurrence.  Danger is often the best counterirritant in cases of
mental suffering; he found a solace in careless exposure of his life,
and learned to endure the trials of each day better by dwelling in
imagination on the possibility that it might be the last for him and
the home that was his.

Time, the great consoler, helped these influences, and he gradually
fell into more easy and less dangerous habits of life.  He ceased
from his more perilous rambles.  He thought less of the danger from
the great overhanging rocks and forests; they had hung there for
centuries; it was not very likely they would crash or slide in his
time.  He became accustomed to all Elsie's strange looks and ways.
Old Sophy dressed her with ruffles round her neck, and hunted up the
red coral branch with silver bells which the little toothless Dudleys
had bitten upon for a hundred years.  By an infinite effort, her
father forced himself to become the companion of this child, for whom
he had such a mingled feeling, but whose presence was always a trial
to him, and often a terror.

At a cost which no human being could estimate, he had done his duty,
and in some degree reaped his reward.  Elsie grew up with a kind of
filial feeling for him, such as her nature was capable of.  She never
would obey him; that was not to be looked for.  Commands, threats,
punishments, were out of the question with her; the mere physical
effects of crossing her will betrayed themselves in such changes of
expression and manner that it would have been senseless to attempt to
govern her in any such way.  Leaving her mainly to herself, she could
be to some extent indirectly influenced,--not otherwise.  She called
her father "Dudley," as if he had been her brother.  She ordered
everybody and would be ordered by none.

Who could know all these things, except the few people of the
household?  What wonder, therefore, that ignorant and shallow persons
laid the blame on her father of those peculiarities which were freely
talked about,--of those darker tendencies which were hinted of in
whispers?  To all this talk, so far as it reached him, he was
supremely indifferent, not only with the indifference which all
gentlemen feel to the gossip of their inferiors, but with a
charitable calmness which did not wonder or blame.  He knew that his
position was not simply a difficult, but an impossible one, and
schooled himself to bear his destiny as well as he might, and report
himself only at Headquarters.

He had grown gentle under this discipline.  His hair was just
beginning to be touched with silver, and his expression was that of
habitual sadness and anxiety.  He had no counsellor, as we have seen,
to turn to, who did not know either too much or too little.  He had
no heart to rest upon and into which he might unburden himself of the
secrets and the sorrows that were aching in his own breast.  Yet he
had not allowed himself to run to waste in the long time since he was
left alone to his trials and fears.  He had resisted the seductions
which always beset solitary men with restless brains overwrought by
depressing agencies.  He disguised no misery to himself with the
lying delusion of wine.  He sought no sleep from narcotics, though he
lay with throbbing, wide-open eyes through all the weary hours of the
night.

It was understood between Dudley Veneer and old Doctor Kittredge that
Elsie was a subject of occasional medical observation, on account of
certain mental peculiarities which might end in a permanent affection
of her reason.  Beyond this nothing was said, whatever may have been
in the mind of either.  But Dudley Veneer had studied Elsie's case in
the light of all the books he could find which might do anything
towards explaining it.  As in all cases where men meddle with medical
science for a special purpose, having no previous acquaintance with
it, his imagination found what it wanted in the books he read, and
adjusted it to the facts before him.  So it was he came to cherish
those two fancies before alluded to that the ominous birthmark she
had carried from infancy might fade and become obliterated, and that
the age of complete maturity might be signalized by an entire change
in her physical and mental state.  He held these vague hopes as all
of us nurse our only half-believed illusions.  Not for the world
would he have questioned his sagacious old medical friend as to the
probability or possibility of their being true.  We are very shy of
asking questions of those who know enough to destroy with one word
the hopes we live on.

In this life of comparative seclusion to which the father had doomed
himself for the sake of his child, he had found time for large and
varied reading.  The learned Judge Thornton confessed himself
surprised at the extent of Dudley Veneer's information.  Doctor
Kittredge found that he was in advance of him in the knowledge of
recent physiological discoveries.  He had taken pains to become
acquainted with agricultural chemistry; and the neighboring farmers
owed him some useful hints about the management of their land.  He
renewed his old acquaintance with the classic authors.  He loved to
warm his pulses with Homer and calm them down with Horace.  He
received all manner of new books and periodicals, and gradually
gained an interest in the events of the passing time.  Yet he
remained almost a hermit, not absolutely refusing to see his
neighbors, nor even churlish towards them, but on the other hand not
cultivating any intimate relations with them.

He had retired from the world a young man, little more than a youth,
indeed, with sentiments and aspirations all of them suddenly
extinguished.  The first had bequeathed him a single huge sorrow, the
second a single trying duty.  In due time the anguish had lost
something of its poignancy, the light of earlier and happier memories
had begun to struggle with and to soften its thick darkness, and even
that duty which he had confronted with such an effort had become an
endurable habit.

At a period of life when many have been living on the capital of
their acquired knowledge and their youthful stock of sensibilities
until their intellects are really shallower and their hearts emptier
than they were at twenty, Dudley Veneer was stronger in thought and
tenderer in soul than in the first freshness of his youth, when he
counted but half his present years.  He had entered that period which
marks the decline of men who have ceased growing in knowledge and
strength: from forty to fifty a man must move upward, or the natural
falling off in the vigor of life will carry him rapidly downward.  At
this time his inward: nature was richer and deeper than in any
earlier period of his life.  If he could only be summoned to action,
he was capable of noble service.  If his sympathies could only find
an outlet, he was never so capable of love as now; for his natural
affections had been gathering in the course of all these years, and
the traces of that ineffaceable calamity of his life were softened
and partially hidden by new growths of thought and feeling, as the
wreck left by a mountainslide is covered over by the gentle intrusion
of the soft-stemmed herbs which will prepare it for the stronger
vegetation that will bring it once more into harmony with the
peaceful slopes around it.

Perhaps Dudley Veneer had not gained so much in worldly wisdom as if
he had been more in society and less in his study.  The indulgence
with which he treated his nephew was, no doubt, imprudent.  A man
more in the habit of dealing with men would have been more guarded
with a person with Dick's questionable story and unquestionable
physiognomy.  But he was singularly unsuspicious, and his natural
kindness was an additional motive to the wish for introducing some
variety into the routine of Elsie's life.

If Dudley Veneer did not know just what he wanted at this period of
his life, there were a great many people in the town of Rockland who
thought they did know.  He had been a widower long enough, "--nigh
twenty year, wa'n't it?  He'd been aout to Spraowles's party,--there
wa'n't anything to hender him why he shouldn't stir raound l'k other
folks.  What was the reason he did n't go abaout to taown-meetin's
'n' Sahbath-meetin's, 'n' lyceums, 'n' school 'xaminations, 'n'
s'prise-parties, 'n' funerals,--and other entertainments where the
still-faced two-story folks were in the habit of looking round to see
if any of the mansion-house gentry were present?---Fac' was, he was
livin' too lonesome daown there at the mansion-haouse.  Why shouldn't
he make up to the Jedge's daughter?  She was genteel enough for him,
and--let's see, haow old was she?  Seven-'n'itwenty,--no, six-'n'-
twenty,--born the same year we buried our little Anny Marl".

There was no possible objection to this arrangement, if the parties
interested had seen fit to make it or even to think of it.  But
"Portia," as some of the mansion-house people called her, did not
happen to awaken the elective affinities of the lonely widower.  He
met her once in a while, and said to himself that she was a good
specimen of the grand style of woman; and then the image came back to
him of a woman not quite so large, not quite so imperial in her port,
not quite so incisive in her speech, not quite so judicial in her
opinions, but with two or three more joints in her frame, and two or
three soft inflections in her voice, which for some absurd reason or
other drew him to her side and so bewitched him that he told her half
his secrets and looked into her eyes all that he could not tell, in
less time than it would have takes him to discuss the champion paper
of the last Quarterly with the admirable "Portia."  Heu, quanto
minus!  How much more was that lost image to him than all it left on
earth!

The study of love is very much like that of meteorology.  We know
that just about so much rain will fall in a season; but on what
particular day it will shower is more than we can tell.  We know that
just about so much love will be made every year in a given
population; but who will rain his young affections upon the heart of
whom is not known except to the astrologers and fortune-tellers.  And
why rain falls as it does and why love is made just as it is are
equally puzzling questions.

The woman a man loves is always his own daughter, far more his
daughter than the female children born to him by the common law of
life.  It is not the outside woman, who takes his name, that he
loves: before her image has reached the centre of his consciousness,
it has passed through fifty many-layered nerve-strainers, been
churned over by ten thousand pulse-beats, and reacted upon by
millions of lateral impulses which bandy it about through the mental
spaces as a reflection is sent back and forward in a saloon lined
with mirrors.  With this altered image of the woman before him, his
preexisting ideal becomes blended.  The object of his love is in part
the offspring of her legal parents, but more of her lover's brain.
The difference between the real and the ideal objects of love must
not exceed a fixed maximum.  The heart's vision cannot unite them
stereoscopically into a single image, if the divergence passes
certain limits.  A formidable analogy, much in the nature of a proof,
with very serious consequences, which moralists and match-makers
would do well to remember!  Double vision with the eyes of the heart
is a dangerous physiological state, and may lead to missteps and
serious falls.

Whether Dudley Veneer would ever find a breathing image near enough
to his ideal one, to fill the desolate chamber of his heart, or not,
was very doubtful.  Some gracious and gentle woman, whose influence
would steal upon him as the first low words of prayer after that
interval of silent mental supplication known to one of our simpler
forms of public worship, gliding into his consciousness without
hurting its old griefs, herself knowing the chastening of sorrow, and
subdued into sweet acquiescence with the Divine will,--some such
woman as this, if Heaven should send him such, might call him back to
the world of happiness, from which he seemed forever exiled.  He
could never again be the young lover who walked through the garden-
alleys all red with roses in the old dead and buried June of long
ago.  He could never forget the bride of his youth, whose image,
growing phantomlike with the lapse of years, hovered over him like a
dream while waking and like a reality in dreams.  But if it might be
in God's good providence that this desolate life should come under
the influence of human affections once more, what an ecstasy of
renewed existence was in store for him!  His life had not all been
buried under that narrow ridge of turf with the white stone at its
head.  It seemed so for a while; but it was not and could not and
ought not to be so.  His first passion had been a true and pure one;
there was no spot or stain upon it.  With all his grief there blended
no cruel recollection of any word or look he would have wished to
forget.  All those little differences, such as young married people
with any individual flavor in their characters must have, if they are
tolerably mated, had only added to the music of existence, as the
lesser discords admitted into some perfect symphony, fitly resolved,
add richness and strength to the whole harmonious movement.  It was a
deep wound that Fate had inflicted on him; nay, it seemed like a
mortal one; but the weapon was clean, and its edge was smooth.  Such
wounds must heal with time in healthy natures, whatever a false
sentiment may say, by the wise and beneficent law of our being.  The
recollection of a deep and true affection is rather a divine
nourishment for a life to grow strong upon than a poison to destroy
it.

Dudley Venner's habitual sadness could not be laid wholly to his
early bereavement.  It was partly the result of the long struggle
between natural affection and duty, on one side, and the involuntary
tendencies these had to overcome, on the other,--between hope and
fear, so long in conflict that despair itself would have been like an
anodyne, and he would have slept upon some final catastrophe with the
heavy sleep of a bankrupt after his failure is proclaimed.  Alas!
some new affection might perhaps rekindle the fires of youth in his
heart; but what power could calm that haggard terror of the parent
which rose with every morning's sun and watched with every evening
star,--what power save alone that of him who comes bearing the
inverted torch, and leaving after him only the ashes printed with his
footsteps?




CHAPTER XXI.

THE WIDOW ROWENS GIVES A TEA-PARTY.

There was a good deal of interest felt, as has been said, in the
lonely condition of Dudley Venner in that fine mansion-house of his,
and with that strange daughter, who would never be married, as many
people thought, in spite of all the stories.  The feelings expressed
by the good folks who dated from the time when they "buried aour
little Anny Mari'," and others of that homespun stripe, were founded
in reason, after all.  And so it was natural enough that they should
be shared by various ladies, who, having conjugated the verb to live
as far as the preterpluperfect tense, were ready to change one of its
vowels and begin with it in the present indicative.  Unfortunately,
there was very little chance of showing sympathy in its active form
for a gentleman who kept himself so much out of the way as the master
of the Dudley Mansion.

Various attempts had been made, from time to time, of late years, to
get him out of his study, which had, for the most part, proved
failures.  It was a surprise, therefore, when he was seen at the
Great Party at the Colonel's.  But it was an encouragement to try him
again, and the consequence had been that he had received a number of
notes inviting him to various smaller entertainments, which, as
neither he nor Elsie had any fancy for them, he had politely
declined.

Such was the state of things when he received an invitation to take
tea sociably, with a few friends, at Hyacinth Cottage, the residence
of the Widow Rowens, relict of the late Beeri Rowens, Esquire, better
known as Major Rowens.  Major Rowens was at the time of his decease a
promising officer in the militia, in the direct line of promotion, as
his waistband was getting tighter every year; and, as all the world
knows, the militia-officer who splits off most buttons and fills the
largest sword-belt stands the best chance of rising, or, perhaps we
might say, spreading, to be General.

Major Rowens united in his person certain other traits which help a
man to eminence in the branch of public service referred to.  He ran
to high colors, to wide whiskers, to open pores; he had the saddle-
leather skin common in Englishmen, rarer in Americans,--never found
in the Brahmin caste, oftener in the military and the commodores:
observing people know what is meant; blow the seed-arrows from the
white-kid-looking button which holds them on a dandelion-stalk, and
the pricked-pincushion surface shows you what to look for.  He had
the loud gruff voice which implies the right to command.  He had the
thick hand, stubbed fingers, with bristled pads between their joints,
square, broad thumb-nails, and sturdy limbs, which mark a
constitution made to use in rough out-door work.  He had the never-
failing predilection for showy switch-tailed horses that step high,
and sidle about, and act as if they were going to do something
fearful the next minute, in the face of awed and admiring multitudes
gathered at mighty musters or imposing cattle-shows.  He had no
objection, either, to holding the reins in a wagon behind another
kind of horse,--a slouching, listless beast, with a strong slant to
his shoulder; and a notable depth to his quarter and an emphatic
angle at the hock, who commonly walked or lounged along in a lazy
trot of five or six miles an hour; but, if a lively colt happened to
come rattling up alongside, or a brandy-faced old horse-jockey took
the road to show off a fast nag, and threw his dust into the Major's
face, would pick his legs up all at once, and straighten his body
out, and swing off into a three-minute gait, in a way that "Old Blue"
himself need not have been ashamed of.

For some reason which must be left to the next generation of
professors to find out, the men who are knowing in horse-flesh have
an eye also for, let a long dash separate the brute creation from the
angelic being now to be named,--for lovely woman.  Of this fact there
can be no possible doubt; and therefore you shall notice, that, if a
fast horse trots before two, one of the twain is apt to be a pretty
bit of muliebrity, with shapes to her, and eyes flying about in all
directions.

Major Rowens, at that time Lieutenant of the Rockland Fusileers, had
driven and "traded" horses not a few before he turned his acquired
skill as a judge of physical advantages in another direction.  He
knew a neat, snug hoof, a delicate pastern, a broad haunch, a deep
chest, a close ribbed-up barrel, as well as any other man in the
town.  He was not to be taken in by your thick-jointed, heavy-headed
cattle, without any go to them, that suit a country-parson, nor yet
by the "gaanted-up," long-legged animals, with all their
constitutions bred out of them, such as rich greenhorns buy and cover
up with their plated trappings.

Whether his equine experience was of any use to him in the selection
of the mate with whom he was to go in double harness so long as they
both should live, we need not stop to question.  At any rate, nobody
could find fault with the points of Miss Marilla Van Deusen, to whom
he offered the privilege of becoming Mrs. Rowens.  The Van must have
been crossed out of her blood, for she was an out-and-out brunette,
with hair and eyes black enough for a Mohawk's daughter.  A fine
style of woman, with very striking tints and outlines,--an excellent
match for the Lieutenant, except for one thing.  She was marked by
Nature for a widow.  She was evidently got up for mourning, and never
looked so well as in deep black, with jet ornaments.

The man who should dare to marry her would doom himself; for how
could she become the widow she was bound to be, unless he could
retire and give her a chance?  The Lieutenant lived, however, as we
have seen, to become Captain and then Major, with prospects of
further advancement.  But Mrs. Rowens often said she should never
look well in colors.  At last her destiny fulfilled itself, and the
justice of Nature was vindicated.  Major Rowens got overheated
galloping about the field on the day of the Great Muster, and had a
rush of blood to the head, according to the common report,--at any
rate, something which stopped him short in his career of expansion
and promotion, and established Mrs. Rowens in her normal condition of
widowhood.

The Widow Rowens was now in the full bloom of ornamental sorrow.  A
very shallow crape bonnet, frilled and froth-like, allowed the parted
raven hair to show its glossy smoothness.  A jet pin heaved upon her
bosom with every sigh of memory, or emotion of unknown origin.  Jet
bracelets shone with every movement of her slender hands, cased in
close-fitting black gloves.  Her sable dress was ridged with manifold
flounces, from beneath which a small foot showed itself from time to
time, clad in the same hue of mourning.  Everything about her was
dark, except the whites of her eyes and the enamel of her teeth.  The
effect was complete.  Gray's Elegy was not a more perfect
composition.

Much as the Widow was pleased with the costume belonging to her
condition, she did not disguise from herself that under certain
circumstances she might be willing to change her name again.  Thus,
for instance, if a gentleman not too far gone in maturity, of
dignified exterior, with an ample fortune, and of unexceptionable
character, should happen to set his heart upon her, and the only way
to make him happy was to give up her weeds and go into those
unbecoming colors again for his sake,--why, she felt that it was in
her nature to make the sacrifice.  By a singular coincidence it
happened that a gentleman was now living in Rockland who united in
himself all these advantages.  Who he was, the sagacious reader may
very probably have divined.  Just to see how it looked, one day,
having bolted her door, and drawn the curtains close, and glanced
under the sofa, and listened at the keyhole to be sure there was
nobody in the entry,--just to see how it looked, she had taken out an
envelope and written on the back of it Mrs. Manilla Veneer.  It made
her head swim and her knees tremble.  What if she should faint, or
die, or have a stroke of palsy, and they should break into the room
and find that name written!  How she caught it up and tore it into
little shreds, and then could not be easy until she had burned the
small heap of pieces

But these are things which every honorable reader will consider
imparted in strict confidence.

The Widow Rowens, though not of the mansion house set, was among the
most genteel of the two-story circle, and was in the habit of
visiting some of the great people.  In one of these visits she met a
dashing young fellow with an olive complexion at the house of a
professional gentleman who had married one of the white necks and
pairs of fat arms from a distinguished family before referred to.
The professional gentleman himself was out, but the lady introduced
the olive-complexioned young man as Mr. Richard Venner.

The Widow was particularly pleased with this accidental meeting.  Had
heard Mr. Venner's name frequently mentioned.  Hoped his uncle was
well, and his charming cousin,--was she as original as ever?  Had
often admired that charming creature he rode: we had had some fine
horses.  Had never got over her taste for riding, but could find
nobody that liked a good long gallop since--well--she could n't help
wishing she was alongside of him, the other day, when she saw him
dashing by, just at twilight.

The Widow paused; lifted a flimsy handkerchief with a very deep black
border so as to play the jet bracelet; pushed the tip of her slender
foot beyond the lowest of her black flounces; looked up; looked down;
looked at Mr. Richard, the very picture of artless simplicity,--as
represented in well-played genteel comedy.

"A good bit of stuff," Dick said to himself, "and something of it
left yet; caramba!  "The Major had not studied points for nothing,
and the Widow was one of the right sort.  The young man had been a
little restless of late, and was willing to vary his routine by
picking up an acquaintance here and there.  So he took the Widow's
hint.  He should like to have a scamper of half a dozen miles with
her some fine morning.

The Widow was infinitely obliged; was not sure that she could find
any horse in the village to suit her; but it was so kind in him!
Would he not call at Hyacinth Cottage, and let her thank him again
there?

Thus began an acquaintance which the Widow made the most of, and on
the strength of which she determined to give a tea-party and invite a
number of persons of whom we know something already.  She took a
half-sheet of note-paper and made out her list as carefully as a
country "merchant's clerk" adds up two and threepence (New-England
nomenclature) and twelve and a half cents, figure by figure, and
fraction by fraction, before he can be sure they will make half a
dollar, without cheating somebody.  After much consideration the list
reduced itself to the following names: Mr. Richard Venner and Mrs.
Blanche Creamer, the lady at whose house she had met him,--mansion-
house breed,--but will come,--soft on Dick; Dudley Venner,--take care
of him herself; Elsie,--Dick will see to her,--won't it fidget the
Creamer woman to see him round her?  the old Doctor,--he 's always
handy; and there's that young master there, up at the school,--know
him well enough to ask him,--oh, yes, he'll come.  One, two, three,
four, five, six,--seven; not room enough, without the leaf in the
table; one place empty, if the leaf's in.  Let's see,--Helen Darley,
--she 'll do well enough to fill it up,--why, yes, just the thing,--
light brown hair, blue eyes,--won't my pattern show off well against
her?  Put her down,--she 's worth her tea and toast ten times over,--
nobody knows what a "thunder-and-lightning woman," as poor Major used
to have it, is, till she gets alongside of one of those old-maidish
girls, with hair the color of brown sugar, and eyes like the blue of
a teacup.

The Widow smiled with a feeling of triumph at having overcome her
difficulties and arranged her party,--arose and stood before her
glass, three-quarters front, one-quarter profile, so as to show the
whites of the eyes and the down of the upper lip.  "Splendid!" said
the Widow--and to tell the truth, she was not far out of the way, and
with Helen Darley as a foil anybody would know she must be foudroyant
and pyramidal,--if these French adjectives may be naturalized for
this one particular exigency.

So the Widow sent out her notes.  The black grief which had filled
her heart and had overflowed in surges of crape around her person had
left a deposit half an inch wide at the margin of her note-paper.
Her seal was a small youth with an inverted torch, the same on which
Mrs. Blanche Creamer made her spiteful remark, that she expected to
see that boy of the Widow's standing on his head yet; meaning, as
Dick supposed, that she would get the torch right-side up as soon as
she had a chance.  That was after Dick had made the Widow's
acquaintance, and Mrs. Creamer had got it into her foolish head that
she would marry that young fellow, if she could catch him.  How could
he ever come to fancy such a quadroon-looking thing as that, she
should like to know?

It is easy enough to ask seven people to a party; but whether they
will come or not is an open question, as it was in the case of the
spirits of the vasty deep.  If the note issues from a three-story
mansion-house, and goes to two-story acquaintances, they will all be
in an excellent state of health, and have much pleasure in accepting
this very polite invitation.  If the note is from the lady of a two-
story family to three-story ones, the former highly respectable
person will very probably find that an endemic complaint is
prevalent, not represented in the weekly bills of mortality, which
occasions numerous regrets in the bosoms of eminently desirable
parties that they cannot have the pleasure of and-so-forthing.

In this case there was room for doubt,--mainly as to whether Elsie
would take a fancy to come or not.  If she should come, her father
would certainly be with her.  Dick had promised, and thought he could
bring Elsie.  Of course the young schoolmaster will come, and that
poor tired-out looking Helen, if only to get out of sight of those
horrid Peckham wretches.  They don't get such invitations every day.
The others she felt sure of,--all but the old Doctor,--he might have
some horrid patient or other to visit; tell him Elsie Venner's going
to be there,--he always likes to have an eye on her, they say,--oh,
he'd come fast enough, without any more coaxing.

She wanted the Doctor, particularly.  It was odd, but she was afraid
of Elsie.  She felt as if she should be safe enough, if the old
Doctor were there to see to the girl; and then she should have
leisure to devote herself more freely to the young lady's father, for
whom all her sympathies were in a state of lively excitement.

It was a long time since the Widow had seen so many persons round her
table as she had now invited.  Better have the plates set and see how
they will fill it up with the leaf in.--A little too scattering with
only eight plates set: if she could find two more people, now, that
would bring the chairs a little closer,--snug, you know,--which makes
the company sociable.  The Widow thought over her acquaintances.  Why
how stupid! there was her good minister, the same who had married
her, and might--might--bury her for aught she anew, and his
granddaughter staying with him,--nice little girl, pretty, and not
old enough to be dangerous;--for the Widow had no notion of making a
tea-party and asking people to it that would be like to stand between
her and any little project she might happen to have on anybody's
heart,--not she!  It was all right now; Blanche was married and so
forth; Letty was a child; Elsie was his daughter; Helen Darley was a
nice, worthy drudge,--poor thing!--faded, faded,--colors wouldn't
wash, just what she wanted to show off against.  Now, if the Dudley
mansion-house people would only come,--that was the great point.

"Here's a note for us, Elsie," said her father, as they sat round the
breakfast-table.  "Mrs. Rowens wants us all to come to tea."

It was one of "Elsie's days," as old Sophy called them.  The light in
her eyes was still, but very bright.  She looked up so full of
perverse and wilful impulses, that Dick knew he could make her go
with him and her father.  He had his own motives for bringing her to
this determination,--and his own way of setting about it.

"I don't want to go," he said.  "What do you say, uncle?"

"To tell the truth, Richard, I don't mach fancy the Major's widow.  I
don't like to see her weeds flowering out quite so strong.  I suppose
you don't care about going, Elsie?"

Elsie looked up in her father's face with an expression which he knew
but too well.  She was just in the state which the plain sort of
people call "contrary," when they have to deal with it in animals.
She would insist on going to that tea-party; he knew it just as well
before she spoke as after she had spoken.  If Dick had said he wanted
to go and her father had seconded his wishes, she would have insisted
on staying at home.  It was no great matter, her father said to
himself, after all; very likely it would amuse her; the Widow was a
lively woman enough,--perhaps a little comme il ne faut pas socially,
compared with the Thorntons and some other families; but what did he
care for these petty village distinctions?

Elsie spoke.

"I mean to go.  You must go with me, Dudley.  You may do as you like,
Dick."

That settled the Dudley-mansion business, of course.  They all three
accepted, as fortunately did all the others who had been invited.

Hyacinth Cottage was a pretty place enough, a little too much choked
round with bushes, and too much overrun with climbing-roses, which,
in the season of slugs and rose-bugs, were apt to show so brown about
the leaves and so coleopterous about the flowers, that it might be
questioned whether their buds and blossoms made up for these
unpleasant animal combinations,--especially as the smell of whale-oil
soap was very commonly in the ascendant over that of the roses.  It
had its patch of grass called "the lawn," and its glazed closet known
as "the conservatory," according to that system of harmless fictions
characteristic of the rural imagination and shown in the names
applied to many familiar objects.  The interior of the cottage was
more tasteful and ambitious than that of the ordinary two-story
dwellings.  In place of the prevailing hair-cloth covered furniture,
the visitor had the satisfaction of seating himself upon a chair
covered with some of the Widow's embroidery, or a sofa luxurious with
soft caressing plush.  The sporting tastes of the late Major showed
in various prints on the wall: Herring's "Plenipotentiary," the "red
bullock" of the '34 Derby; "Cadland" and "The Colonel;" "Crucifix;"
"West-Australian," fastest of modern racers; and among native
celebrities, ugly, game old "Boston," with his straight neck and
ragged hips; and gray "Lady Suffolk," queen, in her day, not of the
turf but of the track, "extending" herself till she measured a rod,
more or less, skimming along within a yard of the ground, her legs
opening and shutting under her with a snap, like the four blades of a
compound jack-knife.

These pictures were much more refreshing than those dreary fancy
death-bed scenes, common in two-story country-houses, in which
Washington and other distinguished personages are represented as
obligingly devoting their last moments to taking a prominent part in
a tableau, in which weeping relatives, attached servants,
professional assistants, and celebrated personages who might by a
stretch of imagination be supposed present, are grouped in the most
approved style of arrangement about the chief actor's pillow.

A single glazed bookcase held the family library, which was hidden
from vulgar eyes by green silk curtains behind the glass.  It would
have been instructive to get a look at it, as it always is to peep
into one's neighbor's book-shelves.  From other sources and
opportunities a partial idea of it has been obtained.  The Widow had
inherited some books from her mother, who was something of a reader:
Young's "Night-Thoughts;" "The Preceptor;" "The Task, a Poem," by
William Cowper; Hervey's "Meditations;" "Alonzo and Melissa;"
"Buccaneers of America;" "The Triumphs of Temper;" "La Belle
Assemblee;" Thomson's "Seasons;" and a few others.  The Major had
brought in "Tom Jones" and "Peregrine Pickle;" various works by Mr.
Pierce Egan; "Boxiana," "The Racing Calendar;" and a "Book of Lively
Songs and Jests."  The Widow had added the Poems of Lord Byron and
T. Moore; "Eugene Aram;" "The Tower of London," by Harrison
Ainsworth; some of Scott's Novels; "The Pickwick Papers;" a volume of
Plays, by W. Shakespeare; "Proverbial Philosophy;" "Pilgrim's
Progress;" "The Whole Duty of Man" (a present when she was married);
with two celebrated religious works, one by William Law and the other
by Philip Doddridge, which were sent her after her husband's death,
and which she had tried to read, but found that they did not agree
with her.  Of course the bookcase held a few school manuals and
compendiums, and one of Mr. Webster's Dictionaries.  But the gilt-
edged Bible always lay on the centre-table, next to the magazine with
the fashion-plates and the scrap-book with pictures from old annuals
and illustrated papers.

The reader need not apprehend the recital, at full length, of such
formidable preparations for the Widow's tea-party as were required in
the case of Colonel Sprowle's Social Entertainment.  A tea-party,
even in the country, is a comparatively simple and economical piece
of business.  As soon as the Widow found that all her company were
coming, she set to work, with the aid of her "smart" maid-servant and
a daughter of her own, who was beginning to stretch and spread at a
fearful rate, but whom she treated as a small child, to make the
necessary preparations.  The silver had to be rubbed; also the grand
plated urn,--her mother's before hers,--style of the Empire,--looking
as if it might have been made to hold the Major's ashes.  Then came
the making and baking of cake and gingerbread, the smell whereof
reached even as far as the sidewalk in front of the cottage, so that
small boys returning from school snuffed it in the breeze, and
discoursed with each other on its suggestions; so that the Widow
Leech, who happened to pass, remembered she had n't called on Marilly
Raowens for a consid'ble spell, and turned in at the gate and rang
three times with long intervals,--but all in vain, the inside Widow
having "spotted" the outside one through the blinds, and whispered to
her aides-de-camp to let the old thing ring away till she pulled the
bell out by the roots, but not to stir to open the door.

Widow Rowens was what they called a real smart, capable woman, not
very great on books, perhaps, but knew what was what and who was who
as well as another,--knew how to make the little cottage look pretty,
how to set out a tea-table, and, what a good many women never can
find out, knew her own style and "got herself up tip-top," as our
young friend Master Geordie, Colonel Sprowle's heir-apparent,
remarked to his friend from one of the fresh-water colleges.  Flowers
were abundant now, and she had dressed her rooms tastefully with
them.  The centre-table had two or three gilt-edged books lying
carelessly about on it, and some prints and a stereoscope with
stereographs to match, chiefly groups of picnics, weddings, etc., in
which the same somewhat fatigued looking ladies of fashion and brides
received the attentions of the same unpleasant-looking young men,
easily identified under their different disguises, consisting of
fashionable raiment such as gentlemen are supposed to wear
habitually.  With these, however, were some pretty English scenes,--
pretty except for the old fellow with the hanging under-lip who
infests every one of that interesting series; and a statue or two,
especially that famous one commonly called the Lahcoon, so as to
rhyme with moon and spoon, and representing an old man with his two
sons in the embraces of two monstrous serpents.

There is no denying that it was a very dashing achievement of the
Widow's to bring together so considerable a number of desirable
guests.  She felt proud of her feat; but as to the triumph of getting
Dudley Venner to come out for a visit to Hyacinth Cottage, she was
surprised and almost frightened at her own success.  So much might
depend on the impressions of that evening!

The next thing was to be sure that everybody should be in the right
place at the tea-table, and this the Widow thought she could manage
by a few words to the older guests and a little shuffling about and
shifting when they got to the table.  To settle everything the Widow
made out a diagram, which the reader should have a chance of
inspecting in an authentic copy, if these pages were allowed under
any circumstances to be the vehicle of illustrations.  If, however,
he or she really wishes to see the way the pieces stood as they were
placed at the beginning of the game, (the Widow's gambit,) he or she
had better at once take a sheet of paper, draw an oval, and arrange
the characters according to the following schedule.

At the head of the table, the Hostess, Widow Marilla Rowens.
Opposite her, at the other end, Rev.  Dr. Honeywood.  At the right of
the Hostess, Dudley Veneer, next him Helen Darley, next her Dr.
Kittredge, next him Mrs. Blanche Creamer, then the Reverend Doctor.
At the left of the Hostess, Bernard Langdon, next him Letty
Forrester, next Letty Mr. Richard Veneer, next him Elsie, and so to
the Reverend Doctor again.

The company came together a little before the early hour at which it
was customary to take tea in Rockland.  The Widow knew everybody, of
course: who was there in Rockland she did not know?  But some of them
had to be introduced: Mr. Richard Veneer to Mr. Bernard, Mr. Bernard
to Miss Letty, Dudley Veneer to Miss Helen Darley, and so on.  The
two young men looked each other straight in the eyes, both full of
youthful life, but one of frank and fearless aspect, the other with a
dangerous feline beauty alien to the New England half of his blood.

The guests talked, turned over the prints, looked at the flowers,
opened the "Proverbial Philosophy" with gilt edges, and the volume of
Plays by W.  Shakespeare, examined the horse-pictures on the walls,
and so passed away the time until tea was announced, when they paired
off for the room where it was in readiness.  The Widow had managed it
well; everything was just as she wanted it.  Dudley Veneer was
between herself and the poor tired-looking schoolmistress with her
faded colors.  Blanche Creamer, a lax, tumble-to-pieces, Greuze-ish
looking blonde, whom the Widow hated because the men took to her, was
purgatoried between the two old Doctors, and could see all the looks
that passed between Dick Venner and his cousin.  The young
schoolmaster could talk to Miss Letty: it was his business to know
how to talk to schoolgirls.  Dick would amuse himself with his cousin
Elsie.  The old Doctors only wanted to be well fed and they would do
well enough.

It would be very pleasant to describe the tea-table; but in reality,
it did not pretend to offer a plethoric banquet to the guests.  The
Widow had not visited the mansion-houses for nothing, and she had
learned there that an overloaded tea-table may do well enough for
farm-hands when they come in at evening from their work and sit down
unwashed in their shirtsleeves, but that for decently bred people
such an insult to the memory of a dinner not yet half-assimilated is
wholly inadmissible.  Everything was delicate, and almost everything
of fair complexion: white bread and biscuits, frosted and sponge
cake, cream, honey, straw-colored butter; only a shadow here and
there, where the fire had crisped and browned the surfaces of a stack
of dry toast, or where a preserve had brought away some of the red
sunshine of the last year's summer.  The Widow shall have the credit
of her well-ordered tea-table, also of her bountiful cream-pitchers;
for it is well known that city-people find cream a very scarce luxury
in a good many country-houses of more pretensions than Hyacinth
Cottage.  There are no better maims for ladies who give tea-parties
than these:

Cream is thicker than water.
Large heart never loved little cream pot.

There is a common feeling in genteel families that the third meal of
the day is not so essential a part of the daily bread as to require
any especial acknowledgment to the Providence which bestows it.  Very
devout people, who would never sit down to a breakfast or a dinner
without the grace before meat which honors the Giver of it, feel as
if they thanked Heaven enough for their tea and toast by partaking of
them cheerfully without audible petition or ascription.  But the
Widow was not exactly mansion-house-bred, and so thought it necessary
to give the Reverend Doctor a peculiar look which he understood at
once as inviting his professional services.  He, therefore, uttered a
few simple words of gratitude, very quietly,--much to the
satisfaction of some of the guests, who had expected one of those
elaborate effusions, with rolling up of the eyes and rhetorical
accents, so frequent with eloquent divines when they address their
Maker in genteel company.

Everybody began talking with the person sitting next at hand.  Mr.
Bernard naturally enough turned his attention first to the Widow; but
somehow or other the right side of the Widow seemed to be more wide
awake than the left side, next him, and he resigned her to the
courtesies of Mr. Dudley Venner, directing himself, not very
unwillingly, to the young girl next him on the other side.  Miss
Letty Forrester, the granddaughter of the Reverend Doctor, was city-
bred, as anybody might see, and city-dressed, as any woman would know
at sight; a man might only feel the general effect of clear, well-
matched colors, of harmonious proportions, of the cut which makes
everything cling like a bather's sleeve where a natural outline is to
be kept, and ruffle itself up like the hackle of a pitted fighting-
cock where art has a right to luxuriate in silken exuberance.  How
this citybred and city-dressed girl came to be in Rockland Mr.
Bernard did not know, but he knew at any rate that she was his next
neighbor and entitled to his courtesies.  She was handsome, too, when
he came to look, very handsome when he came to look again,--endowed
with that city beauty which is like the beauty of wall-fruit,
something finer in certain respects than can be reared off the
pavement.

The miserable routinists who keep repeating invidiously Cowper's

"God made the country and man made the town,"

as if the town were a place to kill out the race in, do not know what
they are talking about.  Where could they raise such Saint-Michael
pears, such Saint-Germains, such Brown-Beurres, as we had until
within a few years growing within the walls of our old city-gardens?
Is the dark and damp cavern where a ragged beggar hides himself
better than a town-mansion which fronts the sunshine and backs on its
own cool shadow, with gas and water and all appliances to suit all
needs?  God made the cavern and man made the house!  What then?

There is no doubt that the pavement keeps a deal of mischief from
coming up out of the earth, and, with a dash off of it in summer,
just to cool the soles of the feet when it gets too hot, is the best
place for many constitutions, as some few practical people have
already discovered.  And just so these beauties that grow and ripen
against the city-walls, these young fellows with cheeks like peaches
and young girls with cheeks like nectarines, show that the most
perfect forms of artificial life can do as much for the human product
as garden-culture for strawberries and blackberries.

If Mr. Bernard had philosophized or prosed in this way, with so
pretty, nay, so lovely a neighbor as Miss Letty Forrester waiting for
him to speak to her, he would have to be dropped from this narrative
as a person unworthy of his good-fortune, and not deserving the kind
reader's further notice.  On the contrary, he no sooner set his eyes
fairly on her than he said to himself that she was charming, and that
he wished she were one of his scholars at the Institute.  So he began
talking with her in an easy way; for he knew something of young girls
by this time, and, of course, could adapt himself to a young lady who
looked as if she might be not more than fifteen or sixteen years old,
and therefore could hardly be a match in intellectual resources for
the seventeen and eighteen year-old first-class scholars of the
Apollinean Institute.  But city-wall-fruit ripens early, and he soon
found that this girl's training had so sharpened her wits and stored
her memory, that he need not be at the trouble to stoop painfully in
order to come down to her level.

The beauty of good-breeding is that it adjusts itself to all
relations without effort, true to itself always however the manners
of those around it may change.  Self-respect and respect for others,
--the sensitive consciousness poises itself in these as the compass
in the ship's binnacle balances itself and maintains its true level
within the two concentric rings which suspend it on their pivots.
This thorough-bred school-girl quite enchanted Mr. Bernard.  He could
not understand where she got her style, her way of dress, her
enunciation, her easy manners.  The minister was a most worthy
gentleman, but this was not the Rockland native-born manner; some new
element had come in between the good, plain, worthy man and this
young girl, fit to be a Crown Prince's partner where there were a
thousand to choose from.

He looked across to Helen Darley, for he knew she would understand
the glance of admiration with which he called her attention to the
young beauty at his side; and Helen knew what a young girl could be,
as compared with what too many a one is, as well as anybody.

This poor, dear Helen of ours!  How admirable the contrast between
her and the Widow on the other side of Dudley Venner!  But, what was
very odd, that gentleman apparently thought the contrast was to the
advantage of this poor, dear Helen.  At any rate, instead of devoting
himself solely to the Widow, he happened to be just at that moment
talking in a very interested and, apparently, not uninteresting way
to his right-hand neighbor, who, on her part, never looked more
charmingly,--as Mr. Bernard could not help saying to himself,--but,
to be sure, he had just been looking at the young girl next him, so
that his eyes were brimful of beauty, and may have spilled some of it
on the first comer: for you know M. Becquerel has been showing us
lately how everything is phosphorescent; that it soaks itself with
light in an instant's exposure, so that it is wet with liquid
sunbeams, or, if you will, tremulous with luminous vibrations, when
first plunged into the negative bath of darkness, and betrays itself
by the light which escapes from its surface.

Whatever were the reason, this poor, dear Helen never looked so
sweetly.  Her plainly parted brown hair, her meek, blue eyes, her
cheek just a little tinged with color, the almost sad simplicity of
her dress, and that look he knew so well,--so full of cheerful
patience, so sincere, that he had trusted her from the first moment
as the believers of the larger half of Christendom trust the Blessed
Virgin,--Mr. Bernard took this all in at a glance, and felt as
pleased as if it had been his own sister Dorothea Elizabeth that he
was looking at.  As for Dudley Veneer, Mr. Bernard could not help
being struck by the animated expression of his countenance.  It
certainly showed great kindness, on his part, to pay so much
attention to this quiet girl, when he had the thunder-and-lightning
Widow on the other side of him.

Mrs. Marilla Rowens did not know what to make of it.  She had made
her tea-party expressly for Mr. Dudley Veneer.  She had placed him
just as she wanted, between herself and a meek, delicate woman who
dressed in gray, wore a plain breastpin with hair in it, who taught a
pack of girls up there at the school, and looked as if she were born
for a teacher,--the very best foil that she could have chosen; and
here was this man, polite enough to herself, to be sure, but turning
round to that very undistinguished young person as if he rather
preferred her conversation of the two!

The truth was that Dudley Veneer and Helen Darley met as two
travellers might meet in the desert, wearied, both of them, with
their long journey, one having food, but no water, the other water,
but no food.  Each saw that the other had been in long conflict with
some trial; for their voices were low and tender, as patiently borne
sorrow and humbly uttered prayers make every human voice.  Through
these tones, more than by what they said, they came into natural
sympathetic relations with each other.  Nothing could be more
unstudied.  As for Dudley Venner, no beauty in all the world could
have so soothed and magnetized him as the very repose and subdued
gentleness which the Widow had thought would make the best possible
background for her own more salient and effective attractions.  No
doubt, Helen, on her side, was almost too readily pleased with the
confidence this new acquaintance she was making seemed to show her
from the very first.  She knew so few men of any condition!  Mr.
Silas Peckham: he was her employer, and she ought to think of him as
well as she could; but every time she thought of him it was with a
shiver of disgust.  Mr. Bernard Langdon: a noble young man, a true
friend, like a brother to her,--God bless him, and send him some
young heart as fresh as his own!  But this gentleman produced a new
impression upon her, quite different from any to which she was
accustomed.  His rich, low tones had the strangest significance to
her; she felt sure he must have lived through long experiences,
sorrowful like her own.  Elsie's father!  She looked into his dark
eyes, as she listened to him, to see if they had any glimmer of that
peculiar light, diamond-bright, but cold and still, which she knew so
well in Elsie's.  Anything but that!  Never was there more
tenderness, it seemed to her, than in the whole look and expression
of Elsie's father.  She must have been a great trial to him; yet his
face was that of one who had been saddened, not soured, by his
discipline.  Knowing what Elsie must be to him, how hard she must
make any parent's life, Helen could not but be struck with the
interest Mr. Dudley Venner showed in her as his daughter's
instructress.  He was too kind to her; again and again she meekly
turned from him, so as to leave him free to talk to the showy lady at
his other side, who was looking all the while

                         "like the night
          Of cloudless realms and starry skies;"

but still Mr. Dudley Venner, after a few courteous words, came back
to the blue eyes and brown hair; still he kept his look fixed upon
her, and his tones grew sweeter and lower as he became more
interested in talk, until this poor, dear Helen, what with surprise,
and the bashfulness natural to one who had seen little of the gay
world, and the stirring of deep, confused sympathies with this
suffering father, whose heart seemed so full of kindness, felt her
cheeks glowing with unwonted flame, and betrayed the pleasing trouble
of her situation by looking so sweetly as to arrest Mr. Bernard's eye
for a moment, when he looked away from the young beauty sitting next
him.

Elsie meantime had been silent, with that singular, still, watchful
look which those who knew her well had learned to fear.  Her head
just a little inclined on one side, perfectly motionless for whole
minutes, her eyes seeming to, grow small and bright, as always when
she was under her evil influence, she was looking obliquely at the
young girl on the other side of her cousin Dick and next to Bernard
Langdon.  As for Dick himself, she seemed to be paying very little
attention to him.  Sometimes her eyes would wander off to Mr.
Bernard, and their expression, as old Dr. Kittredge, who watched her
for a while pretty keenly, noticed, would change perceptibly.  One
would have said that she looked with a kind of dull hatred at the
girl, but with a half-relenting reproachful anger at Mr. Bernard.

Miss Letty Forrester, at whom Elsie had been looking from time to
time in this fixed way, was conscious meanwhile of some unusual
influence.  First it was a feeling of constraint,--then, as it were,
a diminished power over the muscles, as if an invisible elastic
cobweb were spinning round her,--then a tendency to turn away from
Mr. Bernard, who was making himself very agreeable, and look straight
into those eyes which would not leave her, and which seemed to be
drawing her towards them, while at the same time they chilled the
blood in all her veins.

Mr. Bernard saw this influence coming over her.  All at once he
noticed that she sighed, and that some little points of moisture
began to glisten on her forehead.  But she did not grow pale
perceptibly; she had no involuntary or hysteric movements; she still
listened to him and smiled naturally enough.  Perhaps she was only
nervous at being stared at.  At any rate, she was coming under some
unpleasant influence or other, and Mr. Bernard had seen enough of the
strange impression Elsie sometimes produced to wish this young girl
to be relieved from it, whatever it was.  He turned toward Elsie and
looked at her in such a way as to draw her eyes upon him.  Then he
looked steadily and calmly into them.  It was a great effort, for
some perfectly inexplicable reason.  At one instant he thought he
could not sit where he was; he must go and speak to Elsie.  Then he
wanted to take his eyes away from hers; there was something
intolerable in the light that came from them.  But he was determined
to look her down, and he believed he could do it, for he had seen her
countenance change more than once when he had caught her gaze
steadily fixed on him.  All this took not minutes, but seconds.
Presently she changed color slightly,--lifted her head, which was
inclined a little to one side,--shut and opened her eyes two or three
times, as if they had been pained or wearied,--and turned away
baffled, and shamed, as it would seem, and shorn for the time of her
singular and formidable or at least evil-natured power of swaying the
impulses of those around her.

It takes too long to describe these scenes where a good deal of life
is concentrated into a few silent seconds.  Mr. Richard Veneer had
sat quietly through it all, although this short pantomime had taken
place literally before his face.  He saw what was going on well
enough, and understood it all perfectly well.  Of course the
schoolmaster had been trying to make Elsie jealous, and had
succeeded.  The little schoolgirl was a decoy-duck,--that was all.
Estates like the Dudley property were not to be had every day, and no
doubt the Yankee usher was willing to take some pains to make sure of
Elsie.  Does n't Elsie look savage?  Dick involuntarily moved his
chair a little away from her, and thought he felt a pricking in the
small white scars on his wrist.  A dare-devil fellow, but somehow or
other this girl had taken strange hold of his imagination, and he
often swore to himself, that, when he married her, he would carry a
loaded revolver with him to his bridal chamber.

Mrs. Blanche Creamer raged inwardly at first to find herself between
the two old gentlemen of the party.  It very soon gave her great
comfort, however, to see that Marilla, Rowens had just missed it in
her calculations, and she chuckled immensely to find Dudley Veneer
devoting himself chiefly to Helen Darley.  If the Rowens woman should
hook Dudley, she felt as if she should gnaw all her nails off for
spite.  To think of seeing her barouching about Rockland behind a
pair of long-tailed bays and a coachman with a band on his hat, while
she, Blanche Creamer, was driving herself about in a one-horse
"carriage"!  Recovering her spirits by degrees, she began playing her
surfaces off at the two old Doctors, just by way of practice.  First
she heaved up a glaring white shoulder, the right one, so that the
Reverend Doctor should be stunned by it, if such a thing might be.
The Reverend Doctor was human, as the Apostle was not ashamed to
confess himself.  Half-devoutly and half-mischievously he repeated
inwardly, "Resist the Devil and he will flee from you."  As the
Reverend Doctor did not show any lively susceptibility, she thought
she would try the left shoulder on old Dr. Kittredge.  That worthy
and experienced student of science was not at all displeased with the
manoeuvre, and lifted his head so as to command the exhibition
through his glasses.  "Blanche is good for half a dozen years or so,
if she is careful," the Doctor said to himself, "and then she must
take to her prayer-book."  After this spasmodic failure of Mrs.
Blanche Creamer's to stir up the old Doctors, she returned again to
the pleasing task of watching the Widow in her evident discomfiture.
But dark as the Widow looked in her half-concealed pet, she was but
as a pale shadow, compared to Elsie in her silent concentration of
shame and anger.

"Well, there is one good thing," said Mrs. Blanche Creamer; "Dick
doesn't get much out of that cousin of his this evening!  Does n't he
look handsome, though?"

So Mrs. Blanche, being now a good deal taken up with her observations
of those friends of hers and ours, began to be rather careless of her
two old Doctors, who naturally enough fell into conversation with
each other across the white surfaces of that lady, perhaps not very
politely, but, under the, circumstances, almost as a matter of
necessity.

When a minister and a doctor get talking together, they always have a
great deal to say; and so it happened that the company left the table
just as the two Doctors were beginning to get at each other's ideas
about various interesting matters.  If we follow them into the other
parlor, we can, perhaps, pick up something of their conversation.




CHAPTER XXII.

WHY DOCTORS DIFFER.

The company rearranged itself with some changes after leaving the
tea-table.  Dudley Veneer was very polite to the Widow; but that lady
having been called off for a few moments for some domestic
arrangement, he slid back to the side of Helen Darley, his daughter's
faithful teacher.  Elsie had got away by herself, and was taken up in
studying the stereoscopic Laocoon.  Dick, being thus set free, had
been seized upon by Mrs. Blanche Creamer, who had diffused herself
over three-quarters of a sofa and beckoned him to the remaining
fourth.  Mr. Bernard and Miss Letty were having a snug fete-'a-fete
in the recess of a bay-window.  The two Doctors had taken two arm-
chairs and sat squared off against each other.  Their conversation is
perhaps as well worth reporting as that of the rest of the company,
and, as it was carried on in a louder tone, was of course more easy
to gather and put on record.

It was a curious sight enough to see those two representatives of two
great professions brought face to face to talk over the subjects they
had been looking at all their lives from such different points of
view.  Both were old; old enough to have been moulded by their habits
of thought and life; old enough to have all their beliefs "fretted
in," as vintners say,--thoroughly worked up with their characters.
Each of them looked his calling.  The Reverend Doctor had lived a
good deal among books in his study; the Doctor, as we will call the
medical gentleman, had been riding about the country for between
thirty and forty years.  His face looked tough and weather-worn;
while the Reverend Doctor's, hearty as it appeared, was of finer
texture.  The Doctor's was the graver of the two; there was something
of grimness about it, partly owing to the northeasters he had faced
for so many years, partly to long companionship with that stern
personage who never deals in sentiment or pleasantry.  His speech was
apt to be brief and peremptory; it was a way he had got by ordering
patients; but he could discourse somewhat, on occasion, as the reader
may find out.  The Reverend Doctor had an open, smiling expression, a
cheery voice, a hearty laugh, and a cordial way with him which some
thought too lively for his cloth, but which children, who are good
judges of such matters, delighted in, so that he was the favorite of
all the little rogues about town.  But he had the clerical art of
sobering down in a moment, when asked to say grace while somebody was
in the middle of some particularly funny story; and though his voice
was so cheery in common talk, in the pulpit, like almost all
preachers, he had a wholly different and peculiar way of speaking,
supposed to be more acceptable to the Creator than the natural
manner.  In point of fact, most of our anti-papal and anti-prelatical
clergymen do really intone their prayers, without suspecting in the
least that they have fallen into such a Romish practice.

This is the way the conversation between the Doctor of Divinity and
the Doctor of Medicine was going on at the point where these notes
take it up.

"Obi tres medici, duo athei, you know, Doctor.  Your profession has
always had the credit of being lax in doctrine,--though pretty
stringent in practice, ha!  ha!"

"Some priest said that," the Doctor answered, dryly.  "They always
talked Latin when they had a bigger lie than common to get rid of."

"Good!"  said the Reverend Doctor; "I'm afraid they would lie a
little sometimes.  But isn't there some truth in it, Doctor?  Don't
you think your profession is apt to see 'Nature' in the place of the
God of Nature,--to lose sight of the great First Cause in their daily
study of secondary causes?"

"I've thought about that," the Doctor answered, "and I've talked
about it and read about it, and I've come to the conclusion that
nobody believes in God and trusts in God quite so much as the
doctors; only it is n't just the sort of Deity that some of your
profession have wanted them to take up with.  There was a student of
mine wrote a dissertation on the Natural Theology of Health and
Disease, and took that old lying proverb for his motto.  He knew a
good deal more about books than ever I did, and had studied in other
countries.  I'll tell you what he said about it.  He said the old
Heathen Doctor, Galen, praised God for his handiwork in the human
body, just as if he had been a Christian, or the Psalmist himself.
He said they had this sentence set up in large letters in the great
lecture-room in Paris where he attended: I dressed his wound and God
healed him.  That was an old surgeon's saying.  And he gave a long
list of doctors who were not only Christians, but famous ones.  I
grant you, though, ministers and doctors are very apt to see
differently in spiritual matters."

"That's it," said the Reverend Doctor; "you are apt to see 'Nature'
where we see God, and appeal to 'Science' where we are contented with
Revelation."

"We don't separate God and Nature, perhaps, as you do," the Doctor
answered.  "When we say that God is omnipresent and omnipotent and
omniscient, we are a little more apt to mean it than your folks are.
We think, when a wound heals, that God's presence and power and
knowledge are there, healing it, just as that old surgeon did.  We
think a good many theologians, working among their books, don't see
the facts of the world they live in.  When we tell 'em of these
facts, they are apt to call us materialists and atheists and
infidels, and all that.  We can't help seeing the facts, and we don't
think it's wicked to mention 'em."

"Do tell me," the Reverend Doctor said, "some of these facts we are
in the habit of overlooking, and which your profession thinks it can
see and understand."

"That's very easy," the Doctor replied.  "For instance: you don't
understand or don't allow for idiosyncrasies as we learn to.  We know
that food and physic act differently with different people; but you
think the same kind of truth is going to suit, or ought to suit, all
minds.  We don't fight with a patient because he can't take magnesia
or opium; but you are all the time quarrelling over your beliefs, as
if belief did not depend very much on race and constitution, to say
nothing of early training."

"Do you mean to say that every man is not absolutely free to choose
his beliefs?"

"The men you write about in your studies are, but not the men we see
in the real world.  There is some apparently congenital defect in the
Indians, for instance, that keeps them from choosing civilization and
Christianity.  So with the Gypsies, very likely.  Everybody knows
that Catholicism or Protestantism is a good deal a matter of race.
Constitution has more to do with belief than people think for.  I
went to a Universalist church, when I was in the city one day, to
hear a famous man whom all the world knows, and I never saw such
pews-full of broad shoulders and florid faces, and substantial,
wholesome-looking persons, male and female, in all my life.  Why, it
was astonishing.  Either their creed made them healthy, or they chose
it because they were healthy.  Your folks have never got the hang of
human nature."

"I am afraid this would be considered a degrading and dangerous view
of human beliefs and responsibility for them," the Reverend Doctor
replied.  "Prove to a man that his will is governed by something
outside of himself, and you have lost all hold on his moral and
religious nature.  There is nothing bad men want to believe so much
as that they are governed by necessity.  Now that which is at once
degrading and dangerous cannot be true."

"No doubt," the Doctor replied, "all large views of mankind limit our
estimate of the absolute freedom of the will.  But I don't think it
degrades or endangers us, for this reason, that, while it makes us
charitable to the rest of mankind, our own sense of freedom, whatever
it is, is never affected by argument.  Conscience won't be reasoned
with.  We feel that we can practically do this of that, and if we
choose the wrong, we know we are responsible; but observation teaches
us that this or that other race or individual has not the same
practical freedom of choice.  I don't see how we can avoid this
conclusion in the instance of the American Indians.  The science of
Ethnology has upset a good many theoretical notions about human
nature."

"Science!"  said the Reverend Doctor, "science!  that was a word the
Apostle Paul did not seem to think much of, if we may judge by the
Epistle to Timothy: 'Oppositions of science falsely so called.'
I own that I am jealous of that word and the pretensions that go with
it.  Science has seemed to me to be very often only the handmaid of
skepticism."

"Doctor!" the physician said, emphatically, "science is knowledge.
Nothing that is not known properly belongs to science.  Whenever
knowledge obliges us to doubt, we are always safe in doubting.
Astronomers foretell eclipses, say how long comets are to stay with
us, point out where a new planet is to be found.  We see they know
what they assert, and the poor old Roman Catholic Church has at last
to knock under.  So Geology proves a certain succession of events,
and the best Christian in the world must make the earth's history
square with it.  Besides, I don't think you remember what great
revelations of himself the Creator has made in the minds of the men
who have built up science.  You seem to me to hold his human
masterpieces very cheap.  Don't you think the 'inspiration of the
Almighty' gave Newton and Cuvier 'understanding'?"

The Reverend Doctor was not arguing for victory.  In fact, what he
wanted was to call out the opinions of the old physician by a show of
opposition, being already predisposed to agree with many of them.  He
was rather trying the common arguments, as one tries tricks of fence
merely to learn the way of parrying.  But just here he saw a tempting
opening, and could not resist giving a home-thrust.

"Yes; but you surely would not consider it inspiration of the same
kind as that of the writers of the Old Testament?"

That cornered the Doctor, and he paused a moment before he replied.
Then he raised his head, so as to command the Reverend Doctor's face
through his spectacles, and said,

"I did not say that.  You are clear, I suppose, that the Omniscient
spoke through Solomon, but that Shakespeare wrote without his help?"

The Reverend Doctor looked very grave.  It was a bold, blunt way of
putting the question.  He turned it aside with the remark, that
Shakespeare seemed to him at times to come as near inspiration as any
human being not included among the sacred writers.

"Doctor," the physician began, as from a sudden suggestion, "you
won't quarrel with me, if I tell you some of my real thoughts, will
you?"

"Say on, my dear Sir, say on," the minister answered, with his most
genial smile; "your real thoughts are just what I want to get at.  A
man's real thoughts are a great rarity.  If I don't agree with you, I
shall like to hear you."

The Doctor began; and in order to give his thoughts more connectedly,
we will omit the conversational breaks, the questions and comments of
the clergyman, and all accidental interruptions.

"When the old ecclesiastics said that where there were three doctors
there were two atheists, they lied, of course.  They called everybody
who differed from them atheists, until they found out that not
believing in God was n't nearly so ugly a crime as not believing in
some particular dogma; then they called them heretics, until so many
good people had been burned under that name that it began to smell
too strong of roasting flesh,--and after that infidels, which
properly means people without faith, of whom there are not a great
many in any place or time.  But then, of course, there was some
reason why doctors shouldn't think about religion exactly as
ministers did, or they never would have made that proverb.  It 's
very likely that something of the same kind is true now; whether it
is so or not, I am going to tell you the reasons why it would not be
strange, if doctors should take rather different views from clergymen
about some matters of belief.  I don't, of course, mean all doctors
nor all clergymen.  Some doctors go as far as any old New England
divine, and some clergymen agree very well with the doctors that
think least according to rule.

"To begin with their ideas of the Creator himself.  They always see
him trying to help his creatures out of their troubles.  A man no
sooner gets a cut, than the Great Physician, whose agency we often
call Nature, goes to work, first to stop the blood, and then to heal
the wound, and then to make the scar as small as possible.  If a
man's pain exceeds a certain amount, he faints, and so gets relief.
If it lasts too long, habit comes in to make it tolerable.  If it is
altogether too bad, he dies.  That is the best thing to be done under
the circumstances.  So you see, the doctor is constantly in presence
of a benevolent agency working against a settled order of things, of
which pain and disease are the accidents, so to speak.  Well, no
doubt they find it harder than clergymen to believe that there can be
any world or state from which this benevolent agency is wholly
excluded.  This may be very wrong; but it is not unnatural.

"They can hardly conceive of a permanent state of being in which cuts
would never try to heal, nor habit render suffering endurable.  This
is one effect of their training.

"Then, again, their attention is very much called to human
limitations.  Ministers work out the machinery of responsibility in
an abstract kind of way; they have a sort of algebra of human nature,
in which friction and strength (or weakness) of material are left
out.  You see, a doctor is in the way of studying children from the
moment of birth upwards.  For the first year or so he sees that they
are just as much pupils of their Maker as the young of any other
animals.  Well, their Maker trains them to pure selfishness.  Why?
In order that they may be sure to take care of themselves.  So you
see, when a child comes to be, we will say a year and a day old, and
makes his first choice between right and wrong, he is at a
disadvantage; for he, has that vis a tergo, as we doctors call it,
that force from behind, of a whole year's life of selfishness, for
which he is no more to blame than a calf is to blame for having lived
in the same way, purely to gratify his natural appetites.  Then we
see that baby grow up to a child, and, if he is fat and stout and red
and lively, we expect to find him troublesome and noisy, and,
perhaps, sometimes disobedient more or less; that's the way each new
generation breaks its egg-shell; but if he is very weak and thin, and
is one of the kind that may be expected to die early, he will very
likely sit in the house all day and read good books about other
little sharp-faced children just like himself, who died early, having
always been perfectly indifferent to all the out-door amusements of
the wicked little red-cheeked children.

"Some of the little folks we watch grow up to be young women, and
occasionally one of them gets nervous, what we call hysterical, and
then that girl will begin to play all sorts of pranks,--to lie and
cheat, perhaps, in the most unaccountable way, so that she might seem
to a minister a good example of total depravity.  We don't see her in
that light.  We give her iron and valerian, and get her on horseback,
if we can, and so expect to make her will come all right again.  By
and by we are called in to see an old baby, threescore years and ten
or more old.  We find this old baby has never got rid of that first
year's teaching which led him to fill his stomach with all he could.
pump into it, and his hands with everything he could grab.  People
call him a miser.  We are sorry for him; but we can't help
remembering his first year's training, and the natural effect of
money on the great majority of those that have it.  So while the
ministers say he 'shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven,' we
like to remind them that 'with God all things are possible.'

"Once more, we see all kinds of monomania and insanity.  We learn
from them to recognize all sorts of queer tendencies in minds
supposed to be sane, so that we have nothing but compassion for a
large class of persons condemned as sinners by theologians, but
considered by us as invalids.  We have constant reasons for noticing
the transmission of qualities from parents to offspring, and we find
it hard to hold a child accountable in any moral point of view for
inherited bad temper or tendency to drunkenness,--as hard as we
should to blame him for inheriting gout or asthma.  I suppose we are
more lenient with human nature than theologians generally are.  We
know that the spirits of men and their views of the present and the
future go up and down with the barometer, and that a permanent
depression of one inch in the mercurial column would affect the whole
theology of Christendom.

"Ministers talk about the human will as if it stood on a high look-
out, with plenty of light, and elbowroom reaching to the horizon.
Doctors are constantly noticing how it is tied up and darkened by
inferior organization, by disease, and all sorts of crowding
interferences, until they get to look upon Hottentots and Indians--
and a good many of their own race as a kind of self-conscious blood-
clocks with very limited power of self-determination.  That's the
tendency, I say, of a doctor's experience.  But the people to whom
they address their statements of the results of their observation
belong to the thinking class of the highest races, and they are
conscious of a great deal of liberty of will.  So in the face of the
fact that civilization with all it offers has proved a dead failure
with the aboriginal races of this country,--on the whole, I say, a
dead failure,--they talk as if they knew from their own will all
about that of a Digger Indian!  We are more apt to go by observation
of the facts in the case.  We are constantly seeing weakness where
you see depravity.  I don't say we're right; I only tell what you
must often find to be the fact, right or wrong, in talking with
doctors.  You see, too, our notions of bodily and moral disease, or
sin, are apt to go together.  We used to be as hard on sickness as
you were on sin.  We know better now.  We don't look at sickness as
we used to, and try to poison it with everything that is offensive,
burnt toads and earth-worms and viper-broth, and worse things than
these.  We know that disease has something back of it which the body
isn't to blame for, at least in most cases, and which very often it
is trying to get rid of.  Just so with sin.  I will agree to take a
hundred new-born babes of a certain stock and return seventy-five of
them in a dozen years true and honest, if not 'pious' children.  And
I will take another hundred, of a different stock, and put them in
the hands of certain Ann-Street or Five-Points teachers, and seventy-
five of them will be thieves and liars at the end of the same dozen
years.  I have heard of an old character, Colonel Jaques, I believe
it was, a famous cattle-breeder, who used to say he could breed to
pretty much any pattern he wanted to.  Well, we doctors see so much
of families, how the tricks of the blood keep breaking out, just as
much in character as they do in looks, that we can't help feeling as
if a great many people hadn't a fair chance to be what is called
'good,' and that there isn't a text in the Bible better worth keeping
always in mind than that one, 'Judge not, that ye be not judged.'

"As for our getting any quarter at the hands of theologians, we don't
expect it, and have no right to.  You don't give each other any
quarter.  I have had two religious books sent me by friends within a
week or two.  One is Mr. Brownson's; he is as fair and square as
Euclid; a real honest, strong thinker, and one that knows what he is
talking about,--for he has tried all sorts of religions, pretty much.
He tells us that the Roman Catholic Church is the one 'through which
alone we can hope for heaven.' The other is by a worthy Episcopal
rector, who appears to write as if he were in earnest, and he calls
the Papacy the 'Devil's Masterpiece,' and talks about the 'Satanic
scheme' of that very Church 'through which alone,' as Mr. Brownson
tells us, 'we can hope for heaven'

"What's the use in our caring about hard words after this,--
'atheists,' heretics, infidels, and the like?  They're, after all,
only the cinders picked up out of those heaps of ashes round the
stumps of the old stakes where they used to burn men, women, and
children for not thinking just like other folks.  They 'll 'crock'
your fingers, but they can't burn us.

"Doctors are the best-natured people in the world, except when they
get fighting with each other.  And they have some advantages over
you.  You inherit your notions from a set of priests that had no
wives and no children, or none to speak of, and so let their humanity
die out of them.  It did n't seem much to them to condemn a few
thousand millions of people to purgatory or worse for a mistake of
judgment.  They didn't know what it was to have a child look up in
their faces and say 'Father!' It will take you a hundred or two more
years to get decently humanized, after so many centuries of de-
humanizing celibacy.

"Besides, though our libraries are, perhaps, not commonly quite so
big as yours, God opens one book to physicians that a good many of
you don't know much about,--the Book of Life.  That is none of your
dusty folios with black letters between pasteboard and leather, but
it is printed in bright red type, and the binding of it is warm and
tender to every touch.  They reverence that book as one of the
Almighty's infallible revelations.  They will insist on reading you
lessons out of it, whether you call them names or not.  These will
always be lessons of charity.  No doubt, nothing can be more
provoking to listen to.  But do beg your folks to remember that the
Smithfield fires are all out, and that the cinders are very dirty and
not in the least dangerous.  They'd a great deal better be civil, and
not be throwing old proverbs in the doctors' faces, when they say
that the man of the old monkish notions is one thing and the man they
watch from his cradle to his coffin is something very different."

It has cost a good deal of trouble to work the Doctor's talk up into
this formal shape.  Some of his sentences have been rounded off for
him, and the whole brought into a more rhetorical form than it could
have pretended to, if taken as it fell from his lips.  But the exact
course of his remarks has been followed, and as far as possible his
expressions have been retained.  Though given in the form of a
discourse, it must be remembered that this was a conversation, much
more fragmentary and colloquial than it seems as just read.

The Reverend Doctor was very far from taking offence at the old
physician's freedom of speech.  He knew him to be honest, kind,
charitable, self-denying, wherever any sorrow was to be alleviated,
always reverential, with a cheerful trust in the great Father of all
mankind.  To be sure, his senior deacon, old Deacon Shearer,--who
seemed to have got his Scripture-teachings out of the "Vinegar
Bible," (the one where Vineyard is misprinted Vinegar; which a good
many people seem to have adopted as the true reading,)--his senior
deacon had called Dr. Kittredge an "infidel."  But the Reverend
Doctor could not help feeling, that, unless the text, "By their
fruits ye shall know them," were an interpolation, the Doctor was the
better Christian of the two.  Whatever his senior deacon might think
about it, he said to himself that he shouldn't be surprised if he met
the Doctor in heaven yet, inquiring anxiously after old Deacon
Shearer.

He was on the point of expressing himself very frankly to the Doctor,
with that benevolent smile on his face which had sometimes come near
giving offence to the readers of the "Vinegar" edition, but he saw
that the physician's attention had been arrested by Elsie.  He looked
in the same direction himself, and could not help being struck by her
attitude and expression.  There was something singularly graceful in
the curves of her neck and the rest of her figure, but she was so
perfectly still that it seemed as if she were hardly breathing.  Her
eyes were fixed on the young girl with whom Mr. Bernard was talking.
He had often noticed their brilliancy, but now it seemed to him that
they appeared dull, and the look on her features was as of some
passion which had missed its stroke.  Mr. Bernard's companion seemed
unconscious that she was the object of this attention, and was
listening to the young master as if he had succeeded in making
himself very agreeable.

Of course Dick Veneer had not mistaken the game that was going on.
The schoolmaster meant to make Elsie jealous,--and he had done it.
That 's it: get her savage first, and then come wheedling round her,
--a sure trick, if he isn't headed off somehow.  But Dick saw well
enough that he had better let Elsie alone just now, and thought the
best way of killing the evening would be to amuse himself in a little
lively talk with Mrs. Blanche Creamer, and incidentally to show Elsie
that he could make himself acceptable to other women, if not to
herself.

The Doctor presently went up to Elsie, determined to engage her in
conversation and get her out of her thoughts, which he saw, by her
look, were dangerous.  Her father had been on the point of leaving
Helen Darley to go to her, but felt easy enough when he saw the old
Doctor at her side, and so went on talking.  The Reverend Doctor,
being now left alone, engaged the Widow Rowens, who put the best face
on her vexation she could, but was devoting herself to all the
underground deities for having been such a fool as to ask that pale-
faced thing from the Institute to fill up her party.

There is no space left to report the rest of the conversation.  If
there was anything of any significance in it, it will turn up by and
by, no doubt.  At ten o'clock the Reverend Doctor called Miss Letty,
who had no idea it was so late; Mr. Bernard gave his arm to Helen;
Mr. Richard saw to Mrs. Blanche Creamer; the Doctor gave Elsie a
cautioning look, and went off alone, thoughtful; Dudley Venner and
his daughter got into their carriage and were whirled away.  The
Widow's gambit was played, and she had not won the game.




CHAPTER XXIII.

THE WILD HUNTSMAN.

The young master had not forgotten the old Doctor's cautions.
Without attributing any great importance to the warning he had given
him, Mr. Bernard had so far complied with his advice that he was
becoming a pretty good shot with the pistol.  It was an amusement as
good as many others to practise, and he had taken a fancy to it after
the first few days.

The popping of a pistol at odd hours in the backyard of the Institute
was a phenomenon more than sufficiently remarkable to be talked about
in Rockland.  The viscous intelligence of a country-village is not
easily stirred by the winds which ripple the fluent thought of great
cities, but it holds every straw and entangles every insect that
lights upon it.  It soon became rumored in the town that the young
master was a wonderful shot with the pistol.  Some said he could hit
a fo'pence-ha'penny at three rod; some, that he had shot a swallow,
flying, with a single ball; some, that he snuffed a candle five times
out of six at ten paces, and that he could hit any button in a man's
coat he wanted to.  In other words, as in all such cases, all the
common feats were ascribed to him, as the current jokes of the day
are laid at the door of any noted wit, however innocent he may be of
them.

In the natural course of things, Mr. Richard Venner, who had by this
time made some acquaintances, as we have seen, among that class of
the population least likely to allow a live cinder of gossip to go
out for want of air, had heard incidentally that the master up there
at the Institute was all the time practising with a pistol, that they
say he can snuff a candle at ten rods, (that was Mrs. Blanche
Creamer's version,) and that he could hit anybody he wanted to right
in the eye, as far as he could see the white of it.

Dick did not like the sound of all this any too well.  Without
believing more than half of it, there was enough to make the Yankee
schoolmaster too unsafe to be trifled with.  However, shooting at a
mark was pleasant work enough; he had no particular objection to it
himself.  Only he did not care so much for those little popgun
affairs that a man carries in his pocket, and with which you could
n't shoot a fellow,--a robber, say,--without getting the muzzle under
his nose.  Pistols for boys; long-range rifles for men.  There was
such a gun lying in a closet with the fowling-pieces.  He would go
out into the fields and see what he could do as a marksman.

The nature of the mark which Dick chose for experimenting upon was
singular.  He had found some panes of glass which had been removed
from an old sash, and he placed these successively before his target,
arranging them at different angles.  He found that a bullet would go
through the glass without glancing or having its force materially
abated.  It was an interesting fact in physics, and might prove of
some practical significance hereafter.  Nobody knows what may turn up
to render these out-of-the-way facts useful.  All this was done in a
quiet way in one of the bare spots high up the side of The Mountain.
He was very thoughtful in taking the precaution to get so far away;
rifle-bullets are apt to glance and come whizzing about people's
ears, if they are fired in the neighborhood of houses.  Dick
satisfied himself that he could be tolerably sure of hitting a pane
of glass at a distance of thirty rods, more or less, and that, if
there happened to be anything behind it, the glass would not
materially alter the force or direction of the bullet.

About this time it occurred to him also that there was an old
accomplishment of his which he would be in danger of losing for want
of practice, if he did not take some opportunity to try his hand and
regain its cunning, if it had begun to be diminished by disuse.  For
his first trial, he chose an evening when the moon was shining, and
after the hour when the Rockland people were like to be stirring
abroad.  He was so far established now that he could do much as he
pleased without exciting remark.

The prairie horse he rode, the mustang of the Pampas, wild as he was,
had been trained to take part in at least one exercise.  This was the
accomplishment in which Mr. Richard now proposed to try himself.  For
this purpose he sought the implement of which, as it may be
remembered, he had once made an incidental use,--the lasso, or long
strip of hide with a slip-noose at the end of it.  He had been
accustomed to playing with such a thong from his boyhood, and had
become expert in its use in capturing wild cattle in the course of
his adventures.  Unfortunately, there were no wild bulls likely to be
met with in the neighborhood, to become the subjects of his skill.  A
stray cow in the road, an ox or a horse in a pasture, must serve his
turn,--dull beasts, but moving marks to aim at, at any rate.

Never, since he had galloped in the chase over the Pampas, had Dick
Venner felt such a sense of life and power as when he struck the long
spurs into his wild horse's flanks, and dashed along the road with
the lasso lying like a coiled snake at the saddle-bow.  In skilful
hands, the silent, bloodless noose, flying like an arrow, but not
like that leaving a wound behind it,--sudden as a pistol-shot, but
without the telltale explosion,--is one of the most fearful and
mysterious weapons that arm the hand of man.  The old Romans knew how
formidable, even in contest with a gladiator equipped with sword,
helmet, and shield, was the almost naked retiarius, with his net in
one hand and his three-pronged javelin in the other.  Once get a net
over a man's head, or a cord round his neck, or, what is more
frequently done nowadays, bonnet him by knocking his hat down over
his eyes, and he is at the mercy of his opponent.  Our soldiers who
served against the Mexicans found this out too well.  Many a poor
fellow has been lassoed by the fierce riders from the plains, and
fallen an easy victim to the captor who had snared him in the fatal
noose.

But, imposing as the sight of the wild huntsmen of the Pampas might
have been, Dick could not help laughing at the mock sublimity of his
situation, as he tried his first experiment on an unhappy milky
mother who had strayed from her herd and was wandering disconsolately
along the road, laying the dust, as slue went, with thready streams
from her swollen, swinging udders.  "Here goes the Don at the
windmill!" said Dick, and tilted full speed at her, whirling the
lasso round his head as he rode.  The creature swerved to one side of
the way, as the wild horse and his rider came rushing down upon her,
and presently turned and ran, as only cows and it would n't be safe
to say it--can run.  Just before he passed,--at twenty or thirty feet
from her,--the lasso shot from his hand, uncoiling as it flew, and in
an instant its loop was round her horns.  "Well cast!" said Dick, as
he galloped up to her side and dexterously disengaged the lasso.
"Now for a horse on the run!"

He had the good luck to find one, presently, grazing in a pasture at
the road-side.  Taking down the rails of the fence at one point, he
drove the horse into the road and gave chase.  It was a lively young
animal enough, and was easily roused to a pretty fast pace.  As his
gallop grew more and more rapid, Dick gave the reins to the mustang,
until the two horses stretched themselves out in their longest
strides.  If the first feat looked like play, the one he was now to
attempt had a good deal the appearance of real work.  He touched the
mustang with the spur, and in a few fierce leaps found himself nearly
abreast of the frightened animal he was chasing.  Once more he
whirled the lasso round and round over his head, and then shot it
forth, as the rattlesnake shoots his head from the loops against
which it rests.  The noose was round the horse's neck, and in another
instant was tightened so as almost to stop his breath.  The prairie
horse knew the trick of the cord, and leaned away from the captive,
so as to keep the thong tensely stretched between his neck and the
peak of the saddle to which it was fastened.  Struggling was of no
use with a halter round his windpipe, and he very soon began to
tremble and stagger,--blind, no doubt, and with a roaring in his ears
as of a thousand battle-trumpets,--at any rate, subdued and helpless.
That was enough.  Dick loosened his lasso, wound it up again, laid it
like a pet snake in a coil at his saddle-bow, turned his horse, and
rode slowly along towards the mansion-house.

The place had never looked more stately and beautiful to him than as
he now saw it in the moonlight.  The undulations of the land,--the
grand mountain screen which sheltered the mansion from the northern
blasts, rising with all its hanging forests and parapets of naked
rock high towards the heavens,--the ancient mansion, with its square
chimneys, and bodyguard of old trees, and cincture of low walls with
marble-pillared gateways,--the fields, with their various coverings,
--the beds of flowers,--the plots of turf, one with a gray column in
its centre bearing a sundial on which the rays of the moon were idly
shining, another with a white stone and a narrow ridge of turf,--over
all these objects, harmonized with all their infinite details into
one fair whole by the moonlight, the prospective heir, as he deemed
himself, looked with admiring eyes.

But while he looked, the thought rose up in his mind like waters from
a poisoned fountain, that there was a deep plot laid to cheat him of
the inheritance which by a double claim he meant to call his own.
Every day this ice-cold beauty, this dangerous, handsome cousin of
his, went up to that place,--that usher's girl-trap.  Everyday,--
regularly now,--it used to be different.  Did she go only to get out
of his, her cousin's, reach?  Was she not rather becoming more and
more involved in the toils of this plotting Yankee?

If Mr. Bernard had shown himself at that moment a few rods in
advance, the chances are that in less than one minute he would have
found himself with a noose round his neck, at the heels of a mounted
horseman.  Providence spared him for the present.  Mr. Richard rode
his horse quietly round to the stable, put him up, and proceeded
towards the house.  He got to his bed without disturbing the family,
but could not sleep.  The idea had fully taken possession of his mind
that a deep intrigue was going on which would end by bringing Elsie
and the schoolmaster into relations fatal to all his own hopes.  With
that ingenuity which always accompanies jealousy, he tortured every
circumstance of the last few weeks so as to make it square with this
belief.  From this vein of thought he naturally passed to a
consideration of every possible method by which the issue he feared
might be avoided.

Mr. Richard talked very plain language with himself in all these
inward colloquies.  Supposing it came to the worst, what could be
done then?  First, an accident might happen to the schoolmaster which
should put a complete and final check upon his projects and
contrivances.  The particular accident which might interrupt his
career must, evidently, be determined by circumstances; but it must
be of a nature to explain itself without the necessity of any
particular person's becoming involved in the matter.  It would be
unpleasant to go into particulars; but everybody knows well enough
that men sometimes get in the way of a stray bullet, and that young
persons occasionally do violence to themselves in various modes,--by
firearms, suspension, and other means,--in consequence of
disappointment in love, perhaps, oftener than from other motives.
There was still another kind of accident which might serve his
purpose.  If anything should happen to Elsie, it would be the most
natural thing in the world that his uncle should adopt him, his
nephew and only near relation, as his heir.  Unless, indeed, uncle
Dudley should take it into his head to marry again.  In that case,
where would he, Dick, be?  This was the most detestable complication
which he could conceive of.  And yet he had noticed--he could not
help noticing--that his uncle had been very attentive to, and, as it
seemed, very much pleased with, that young woman from the school.
What did that mean?  Was it possible that he was going to take a
fancy to her?

It made him wild to think of all the several contingencies which
might defraud him of that good-fortune which seemed but just now
within his grasp.  He glared in the darkness at imaginary faces:
sometimes at that of the handsome, treacherous schoolmaster;
sometimes at that of the meek-looking, but no doubt, scheming, lady-
teacher; sometimes at that of the dark girl whom he was ready to make
his wife; sometimes at that of his much respected uncle, who, of
course, could not be allowed to peril the fortunes of his relatives
by forming a new connection.  It was a frightful perplexity in which
he found himself, because there was no one single life an accident to
which would be sufficient to insure the fitting and natural course of
descent to the great Dudley property.  If it had been a simple
question of helping forward a casualty to any one person, there was
nothing in Dick's habits of thought and living to make that a serious
difficulty.  He had been so much with lawless people, that a life
between his wish and his object seemed only as an obstacle to be
removed, provided the object were worth the risk and trouble.  But if
there were two or three lives in the way, manifestly that altered the
case.

His Southern blood was getting impatient.  There was enough of the
New-Englander about him to make him calculate his chances before he
struck; but his plans were liable to be defeated at any moment by a
passionate impulse such as the dark-hued races of Southern Europe and
their descendants are liable to.  He lay in his bed, sometimes
arranging plans to meet the various difficulties already mentioned,
sometimes getting into a paroxysm of blind rage in the perplexity of
considering what object he should select as the one most clearly in
his way.  On the whole, there could be no doubt where the most
threatening of all his embarrassments lay.  It was in the probable
growing relation between Elsie and the schoolmaster.  If it should
prove, as it seemed likely, that there was springing up a serious
attachment tending to a union between them, he knew what he should
do, if he was not quite so sure how he should do it.

There was one thing at least which might favor his projects, and
which, at any rate, would serve to amuse him.  He could, by a little
quiet observation, find out what were the schoolmaster's habits of
life: whether he had any routine which could be calculated upon; and
under what circumstances a strictly private interview of a few
minutes with him might be reckoned on, in case it should be
desirable.  He could also very probably learn some facts about Elsie.
whether the young man was in the habit of attending her on her way
home from school; whether she stayed about the schoolroom after the
other girls had gone; and any incidental matters of interest which
might present themselves.

He was getting more and more restless for want of some excitement.  A
mad gallop, a visit to Mrs. Blanche Creamer, who had taken such a
fancy to him, or a chat with the Widow Rowens, who was very lively in
her talk, for all her sombre colors, and reminded him a good deal
of same of his earlier friends, the senoritas,--all these were
distractions, to be sure, but not enough to keep his fiery spirit
from fretting itself in longings for more dangerous excitements.  The
thought of getting a knowledge of all Mr. Bernard's ways, so that he
would be in his power at any moment, was a happy one.

For some days after this he followed Elsie at a long distance behind,
to watch her until she got to the schoolhouse.  One day he saw Mr.
Bernard join her: a mere accident, very probably, for it was only
once this happened.  She came on her homeward way alone,--quite apart
from the groups of girls who strolled out of the schoolhouse yard in
company.  Sometimes she was behind them all,--which was suggestive.
Could she have stayed to meet the schoolmaster?

If he could have smuggled himself into the school, he would have
liked to watch her there, and see if there was not some understanding
between her and the master which betrayed itself by look or word.
But this was beyond the limits of his audacity, and he had to content
himself with such cautious observations as could be made at a
distance.  With the aid of a pocket-glass he could make out persons
without the risk of being observed himself.

Mr. Silos Peckham's corps of instructors was not expected to be off
duty or to stand at ease for any considerable length of time.
Sometimes Mr. Bernard, who had more freedom than the rest, would go
out for a ramble in the daytime, but more frequently it would be in
the evening, after the hour of "retiring," as bedtime was elegantly
termed by the young ladies of the Apollinean Institute.  He would
then not unfrequently walk out alone in the common roads, or climb up
the sides of The Mountain, which seemed to be one of his favorite
resorts.  Here, of course, it was impossible to follow him with the
eye at a distance.  Dick had a hideous, gnawing suspicion that
somewhere in these deep shades the schoolmaster might meet Elsie,
whose evening wanderings he knew so well.  But of this he was not
able to assure himself.  Secrecy was necessary to his present plans,
and he could not compromise himself by over-eager curiosity.  One
thing he learned with certainty.  The master returned, after his walk
one evening, and entered the building where his room was situated.
Presently a light betrayed the window of his apartment.  From a
wooded bank, some thirty or forty rods from this building, Dick
Venner could see the interior of the chamber, and watch the master as
he sat at his desk, the light falling strongly upon his face, intent
upon the book or manuscript before him.  Dick contemplated him very
long in this attitude.  The sense of watching his every motion,
himself meanwhile utterly unseen, was delicious.  How little the
master was thinking what eyes were on him!

Well,--there were two things quite certain.  One was, that, if he
chose, he could meet the schoolmaster alone, either in the road or in
a more solitary place, if he preferred to watch his chance for an
evening or two.  The other was, that he commanded his position, as he
sat at his desk in the evening, in such a way that there would be
very little difficulty,--so far as that went; of course, however,
silence is always preferable to noise, and there is a great
difference in the marks left by different casualties.  Very likely
nothing would come of all this espionage; but, at any rate, the first
thing to be done with a man you want to have in your power is to
learn his habits.

Since the tea-party at the Widow Rowens's, Elsie had been more fitful
and moody than ever.  Dick understood all this well enough, you know.
It was the working of her jealousy against that young schoolgirl to
whom the master had devoted himself for the sake of piquing the
heiress of the Dudley mansion.  Was it possible, in any way, to
exasperate her irritable nature against him, and in this way to
render her more accessible to his own advances?  It was difficult to
influence her at all.  She endured his company without seeming to
enjoy it.  She watched him with that strange look of hers, sometimes
as if she were on her guard against him, sometimes as if she would
like to strike at him as in that fit of childish passion.  She
ordered him about with a haughty indifference which reminded him of
his own way with the dark-eyed women whom he had known so well of
old.  All this added a secret pleasure to the other motives he had
for worrying her with jealous suspicions.  He knew she brooded
silently on any grief that poisoned her comfort,--that she fed on it,
as it were, until it ran with every drop of blood in her veins,--and
that, except in some paroxysm of rage, of which he himself was not
likely the second time to be the object, or in some deadly vengeance
wrought secretly, against which he would keep a sharp lookout, so far
as he was concerned, she had no outlet for her dangerous, smouldering
passions.

Beware of the woman who cannot find free utterance for all her stormy
inner life either in words or song!  So long as a woman can talk,
there is nothing she cannot bear.  If she cannot have a companion to
listen to her woes, and has no musical utterance, vocal or
instrumental,--then, if she is of the real woman sort, and has a few
heartfuls of wild blood in her, and you have done her a wrong,--
double-bolt the door which she may enter on noiseless slipper at
midnight,--look twice before you taste of any cup whose draught the
shadow of her hand may have darkened!

But let her talk, and, above all, cry, or, if she is one of the
coarser-grained tribe, give her the run of all the red-hot expletives
in the language, and let her blister her lips with them until she is
tired, she will sleep like a lamb after it, and you may take a cup of
coffee from her without stirring it up to look for its sediment.

So, if she can sing, or play on any musical instrument, all her
wickedness will run off through her throat or the tips of her
fingers.  How many tragedies find their peaceful catastrophe in
fierce roulades and strenuous bravuras!  How many murders are
executed in double-quick time upon the keys which stab the air with
their dagger-strokes of sound!  What would our civilization be
without the piano?  Are not Erard and Broadwood and Chickering the
true humanizers of our time?  Therefore do I love to hear the all-
pervading tum tum jarring the walls of little parlors in houses with
double door-plates on their portals, looking out on streets and
courts which to know is to be unknown, and where to exist is not to
live, according to any true definition of living.  Therefore complain
I not of modern degeneracy, when, even from the open window of the
small unlovely farmhouse, tenanted by the hard-handed man of bovine
flavors and the flat-patterned woman of broken-down countenance,
issue the same familiar sounds.  For who knows that Almira, but for
these keys, which throb away her wild impulses in harmless discords
would not have been floating, dead, in the brown stream which slides
through the meadows by her father's door,--or living, with that other
current which runs beneath the gas-lights over the slimy pavement,
choking with wretched weeds that were once in spotless flower?

Poor Elsie!  She never sang nor played.  She never shaped her inner
life in words: such utterance was as much denied to her nature as
common articulate speech to the deaf mute.  Her only language must be
in action.  Watch her well by day and by night, old Sophy! watch her
well! or the long line of her honored name may close in shame, and
the stately mansion of the Dudleys remain a hissing and a reproach
till its roof is buried in its cellar!




CHAPTER XXIV.

ON HIS TRACKS.

"Able!"  said the old Doctor, one morning, "after you've harnessed
Caustic, come into the study a few minutes, will you?"

Abel nodded.  He was a man of few words, and he knew that the "will
you" did not require an answer, being the true New-England way of
rounding the corners of an employer's order,--a tribute to the
personal independence of an American citizen.

The hired man came into the study in the course of a few minutes.
His face was perfectly still, and he waited to be spoken to; but the
Doctor's eye detected a certain meaning in his expression, which
looked as if he had something to communicate.

"Well?" said the Doctor.

"He's up to mischief o' some kind, I guess," said Abel.  "I jest
happened daown by the mansion-haouse last night, 'n' he come aout o'
the gate on that queer-lookin' creator' o' his.  I watched him, 'n'
he rid, very slow, all raoun' by the Institoot, 'n' acted as ef he
was spyin' abaout.  He looks to me like a man that's calc'latin' to
do some kind of ill-turn to somebody.  I should n't like to have him
raoun' me, 'f there wa'n't a pitchfork or an eel-spear or some sech
weep'n within reach.  He may be all right; but I don't like his
looks, 'n' I don't see what he's lurkin' raoun' the Institoot for,
after folks is abed."

"Have you watched him pretty close for the last few days?" said the
Doctor.

"W'll, yes,--I've had my eye on him consid'ble o' the time.  I haf to
be pooty shy abaout it, or he'll find aout th't I'm on his tracks.  I
don' want him to get a spite ag'inst me, 'f I c'n help it; he looks
to me like one o' them kind that kerries what they call slung-shot,
'n' hits ye on the side o' th' head with 'em so suddin y' never know
what hurts ye."

"Why," said the Doctor, sharply,--"have you ever seen him with any
such weapon about him?"

"W'll, no,--I caan't say that I hev," Abel answered.  "On'y he looks
kin' o' dangerous.  Maybe he's all jest 'z he ought to be,--I caan't
say that he a'n't,--but he's aout late nights, 'n' lurkin' raonn'
jest 'z ef he was spyin' somebody, 'n' somehaow I caan't help
mistrustin' them Portagee-lookin' fellahs.  I caan't keep the run o'
this chap all the time; but I've a notion that old black woman daown
't the mansion-haouse knows 'z much abaout him 'z anybody."

The Doctor paused a moment, after hearing this report from his
private detective, and then got into his chaise, and turned Caustic's
head in the direction of the Dudley mansion.  He had been suspicious
of Dick from the first.  He did not like his mixed blood, nor his
looks, nor his ways.  He had formed a conjecture about his projects
early.  He had made a shrewd guess as to the probable jealousy Dick
would feel of the schoolmaster, had found out something of his
movements, and had cautioned Mr. Bernard,--as we have seen.  He felt
an interest in the young man,--a student of his own profession, an
intelligent and ingenuously unsuspecting young fellow, who had been
thrown by accident into the companionship or the neighborhood of two
persons, one of whom he knew to be dangerous, and the other he
believed instinctively might be capable of crime.

The Doctor rode down to the Dudley mansion solely for the sake of
seeing old Sophy.  He was lucky enough to find her alone in her
kitchen.  He began taking with her as a physician; he wanted to know
how her rheumatism had been.  The shrewd old woman saw through all
that with her little beady black eyes.  It was something quite
different he had come for, and old Sophy answered very briefly for
her aches and ails.

"Old folks' bones a'n't like young folks'," she said.  "It's the
Lord's doin's, 'n' 't a'n't much matter.  I sha'n' be long roan' this
kitchen.  It's the young Missis, Doctor,--it 's our Elsie,--it 's the
baby, as we use' t' call her,--don' you remember, Doctor?  Seventeen
year ago, 'n' her poor mother cryin' for her,--'Where is she?  where
is she?  Let me see her!  '--'n' how I run up-stairs,--I could run
then,--'n' got the coral necklace 'n' put it round her little neck,
'n' then showed her to her mother,--'n' how her mother looked at her,
'n' looked, 'n' then put out her poor thin fingers 'n' lifted the
necklace,--'n' fell right back on her piller, as white as though she
was laid out to bury?"

The Doctor answered her by silence and a look of grave assent.  He
had never chosen to let old Sophy dwell upon these matters, for
obvious reasons.  The girl must not grow up haunted by perpetual
fears and prophecies, if it were possible to prevent it.

"Well, how has Elsie seemed of late?"  he said, after this brief
pause.

The old woman shook her head.  Then she looked up at the Doctor so
steadily and searchingly that the diamond eyes of Elsie herself could
hardly have pierced more deeply.

The Doctor raised his head, by his habitual movement, and met the old
woman's look with his own calm and scrutinizing gaze, sharpened by
the glasses through which he now saw her.

Sophy spoke presently in an awed tone, as if telling a vision.

"We shall be havin' trouble before long.  The' 's somethin' comin'
from the Lord.  I've had dreams, Doctor.  It's many a year I've been
a-dreamin', but now they're comin' over 'n' over the same thing.
Three times I've dreamed one thing, Doctor,--one thing!"

"And what was that?" the Doctor said, with that shade of curiosity in
his tone which a metaphysician would probably say is an index of a
certain tendency to belief in the superstition to which the question
refers.

"I ca'n' jestly tell y' what it was, Doctor," the old woman answered,
as if bewildered and trying to clear up her recollections; "but it
was somethin' fearful, with a great noise 'n' a great cryin' o'
people,--like the Las' Day, Doctor!  The Lord have mercy on my poor
chil', 'n' take care of her, if anything happens!  But I's feared
she'll never live to see the Las' Day, 'f 't don' come pooty quick."

Poor Sophy, only the third generation from cannibalism, was, not
unnaturally, somewhat confused in her theological notions.  Some of
the Second-Advent preachers had been about, and circulated their
predictions among the kitchen--population of Rockland.  This was the
way in which it happened that she mingled her fears in such a strange
manner with their doctrines.

The Doctor answered solemnly, that of the day and hour we knew not,
but it became us to be always ready.--"Is there anything going on in
the household different from common?"

Old Sophy's wrinkled face looked as full of life and intelligence,
when she turned it full upon the Doctor, as if she had slipped off
her infirmities and years like an outer garment.  All those fine
instincts of observation which came straight to her from her savage
grandfather looked out of her little eyes.  She had a kind of faith
that the Doctor was a mighty conjurer, who, if he would, could
bewitch any of them.  She had relieved her feelings by her long talk
with the minister, but the Doctor was the immediate adviser of the
family, and had watched them through all their troubles.  Perhaps he
could tell them what to do.  She had but one real object of affection
in the world,--this child that she had tended from infancy to
womanhood.  Troubles were gathering thick round her; how soon they
would break upon her, and blight or destroy her, no one could tell;
but there was nothing in all the catalogue of terrors which might not
come upon the household at any moment.  Her own wits had sharpened
themselves in keeping watch by day and night, and her face had
forgotten its age in the excitement which gave life to its features.

"Doctor," old Sophy said, "there's strange things goin' on here by
night and by day.  I don' like that man,--that Dick,--I never liked
him.  He giv' me some o' these things I' got on; I take 'em 'cos I
know it make him mad, if I no take 'em; I wear 'em, so that he need
n' feel as if I did n' like him; but, Doctor, I hate him,--jes' as
much as a member of the church has the Lord's leave to hate anybody."

Her eyes sparkled with the old savage light, as if her ill-will to
Mr. Richard Veneer might perhaps go a little farther than the
Christian limit she had assigned.  But remember that her grandfather
was in the habit of inviting his friends to dine with him upon the
last enemy he had bagged, and that her grandmother's teeth were filed
down to points, so that they were as sharp as a shark's.

"What is that you have seen about Mr. Richard Veneer that gives you
such a spite against him, Sophy?"  asked the Doctor.

"What I' seen 'bout Dick Veneer?"  she replied, fiercely.  "I'll tell
y' what I' seen.  Dick wan's to marry our Elsie,--that 's what he
wan's; 'n' he don' love her, Doctor,--he hates her, Doctor, as bad as
I hate him!  He wan's to marry our Elsie, In' live here in the big
house, 'n' have nothin' to do but jes' lay still 'n' watch.  Massa
Venner 'n' see how long 't Ill take him to die, 'n' 'f he don' die
fas' 'puff, help him some way t' die fasser !---Come close up t' me,
Doctor!  I wan' t' tell you somethin' I tol' th' minister t' other
day.  Th' minister, he come down 'n' prayed 'n' talked good,--he's a
good man, that Doctor Honeywood, 'n' I tol' him all 'bout our Elsie,
but he did n' tell nobody what to do to stop all what I' been
dreamin' about happenin'.  Come close up to me, Doctor!"

The Doctor drew his chair close up to that of the old woman.

"Doctor, nobody mus'n' never marry our Elsie 's longs she lives!
Nobody mus' n' never live with Elsie but ol Sophy; 'n' ol Sophy won't
never die 's long 's Elsie 's alive to be took care of.  But I's
feared, Doctor, I's greatly feared Elsie wan' to marry somebody.
The' 's a young gen'l'm'n up at that school where she go,--so some of
'em tells me, 'n' she loves t' see him 'n' talk wi' him, 'n' she
talks about him when she 's asleep sometimes.  She mus 'n' never
marry nobody, Doctor!  If she do, he die, certain!"

"If she has a fancy for the young man up at the school there," the
Doctor said, "I shouldn't think there would be much danger from
Dick."

"Doctor, nobody know nothin' 'bout Elsie but of Sophy.  She no like
any other creator' th't ever drawed the bref o' life.  If she ca'n'
marry one man 'cos she love him, she marry another man 'cos she hate
him."

"Marry a man because she hates him, Sophy?  No woman ever did such a
thing as that, or ever will do it."

"Who tol' you Elsie was a woman, Doctor?"  said old Sophy, with a
flash of strange intelligence in her eyes.

The Doctor's face showed that he was startled.  The old woman could
not know much about Elsie that he did not know; but what strange
superstition had got into her head, he was puzzled to guess.  He had
better follow Sophy's lead and find out what she meant.

"I should call Elsie a woman, and a very handsome one," he said.
"You don't mean that she has any mark about her, except--you know--
under the necklace?"

The old woman resented the thought of any deformity about her
darling.

"I did n' say she had nothin'--but j es' that--you know.  My beauty
have anything ugly?  She's the beautifullest-shaped lady that ever
had a shinin' silk gown drawed over her shoulders.  On'y she a'n't
like no other woman in none of her ways.  She don't cry 'n' laugh
like other women.  An' she ha'n' got the same kind o' feelin's as
other women.---Do you know that young gen'1'm'n up at the school,
Doctor?"

"Yes, Sophy, I've met him sometimes.  He's a very nice sort of young
man, handsome, too, and I don't much wonder Elsie takes to him.  Tell
me, Sophy, what do you think would happen, if he should chance to
fall in love with Elsie, and she with him, and he should marry her?"

"Put your ear close to my lips, Doctor, dear!"  She whispered a
little to the Doctor, then added aloud, "He die,--that's all."

"But surely, Sophy, you a'n't afraid to have Dick marry her, if she
would have him for any reason, are you?  He can take care of himself,
if anybody can."

"Doctor!" Sophy answered, "nobody can take care of hisself that live
wi' Elsie!  Nobody never in all this worl' mus' live wi' Elsie but of
Sophy, I tell you.  You don' think I care for Dick?  What do I care,
if Dick Venner die?  He wam's to marry our Elsie so 's to live in the
big house 'n' get all the money 'n' all the silver things 'n' all the
chists full o' linen 'n' beautiful clothes.  That's what Dick wan's.
An' he hates Elsie 'cos she don' like him.  But if he marry Elsie,
she 'll make him die some wrong way or other, 'n' they'll take her
'n' hang her, or he'll get mad with her 'n' choke her.--Oh, I know
his chokin' tricks!--he don' leave his keys roun' for nothin'"

"What's that you say, Sophy?  Tell me what you mean by all that."

So poor Sophy had to explain certain facts not in all respects to her
credit.  She had taken the opportunity of his absence to look about
his chamber, and, having found a key in one of his drawers, had
applied it to a trunk, and, finding that it opened the trunk, had
made a kind of inspection for contraband articles, and, seeing the
end of a leather thong, had followed it up until she saw that it
finished with a noose, which, from certain appearances, she inferred
to have seen service of at least doubtful nature.  An unauthorized
search; but old Sophy considered that a game of life and death was
going on in the household, and that she was bound to look out for her
darling.

The Doctor paused a moment to think over this odd piece of
information.  Without sharing Sophy's belief as to the kind of use
this mischievous-looking piece of property had been put to, it was
certainly very odd that Dick should have such a thing at the bottom
of his trunk.  The Doctor remembered reading or hearing something
about the lasso and the lariat and the bolas, and had an indistinct
idea that they had been sometimes used as weapons of warfare or
private revenge; but they were essentially a huntsman's implements,
after all, and it was not very strange that this young man had
brought one of them with him.  Not strange, perhaps, but worth
noting.

"Do you really think Dick means mischief to anybody, that he has such
dangerous-looking things?"  the Doctor said, presently.

"I tell you, Doctor. Dick means to have Elsie.  If he ca'n' get her,
he never let nobody else have her!  Oh, Dick 's a dark man, Doctor!
I know him!  I 'member him when he was little boy,--he always cunin'.
I think he mean mischief to somebody.  He come home late nights,--
come in softly,--oh, I hear him!  I lay awake, 'n' got sharp ears,--I
hear the cats walkin' over the roofs,--'n' I hear Dick Veneer, when
he comes up in his stockin'-feet as still as a cat.  I think he mean'
mischief to somebody.  I no like his looks these las' days.--Is that
a very pooty gen'l'm'n up at the schoolhouse, Doctor?"

"I told you he was good-looking.  What if he is?"

"I should like to see him, Doctor,--I should like to see the pooty
gen'l'm'n that my poor Elsie loves.  She mus 'n' never marry nobody,
--but, oh, Doctor, I should like to see him, 'n' jes' think a little
how it would ha' been, if the Lord had n' been so hard on Elsie."

She wept and wrung her hands.  The kind Doctor was touched, and left
her a moment to her thoughts.

"And how does Mr. Dudley Veneer take all this?" he said, by way of
changing the subject a little.

"Oh, Massa Veneer, he good man, but he don' know nothin' 'bout Elsie,
as of Sophy do.  I keep close by her; I help her when she go to bed,
'n' set by her sometime when she--'sleep; I come to her in th'
mornin' 'n' help her put on her things."--Then, in a whisper;--
"Doctor, Elsie lets of Sophy take off that necklace for her.  What
you think she do, 'f anybody else tech it?"

"I don't know, I'm sure, Sophy,--strike the person, perhaps."

"Oh, yes, strike 'em!  but not with her han's, Doctor!"--The old
woman's significant pantomime must be guessed at.

"But you haven't told me, Sophy, what Mr. Dudley Veneer thinks of his
nephew, nor whether he has any notion that Dick wants to marry
Elsie."

"I tell you.  Massa Venner, he good man, but he no see nothin' 'bout
what goes on here in the house.  He sort o' broken-hearted, you
know,--sort o' giv up,--don' know what to do wi' Elsie, 'xcep' say
'Yes, yes.'  Dick always look smilin' 'n' behave well before him.
One time I thought Massa Veneer b'lieve Dick was goin' to take to
Elsie; but now he don' seem to take much notice,--he kin' o' stupid-'
like 'bout sech things.  It's trouble, Doctor; 'cos Massa Veneer
bright man naterally,--'n' he's got a great heap o' books.  I don'
think Massa Veneer never been jes' heself sence Elsie 's born.  He
done all he know how,--but, Doctor, that wa'n' a great deal.  You
men-folks don' know nothin' 'bout these young gals; 'n' 'f you knowed
all the young gals that ever lived, y' would n' know nothin' 'bout
our Elsie."

"No,--but, Sophy, what I want to know is, whether you think Mr.
Veneer has any kind of suspicion about his nephew,--whether he has
any notion that he's a dangerous sort of fellow,--or whether he feels
safe to have him about, or has even taken a sort of fancy to him."

"Lar' bless you, Doctor, Massa Veneer no more idee 'f any mischief
'bout Dick than he has 'bout you or me.  Y' see, he very fond o' the
Cap'n,--that Dick's father,--'n' he live so long alone here, 'long
wi' us, that he kin' o' like to see mos' anybody 't 's got any o' th'
of family-blood in 'em.  He ha'n't got no more suspicions 'n a baby,
--y' never see sech a man 'n y'r life.  I kin' o' think he don' care
for nothin' in this world 'xcep' jes' t' do what Elsie wan's him to.
The fus' year after young Madam die he do nothin' but jes' set at the
window 'n' look out at her grave, 'n' then come up 'n' look at the
baby's neck 'n' say, 'It's fadin', Sophy, a'n't it? 'n' then go down
in the study 'n' walk 'n' walk, 'n' them kneel down 'n' pray.
Doctor, there was two places in the old carpet that was all
threadbare, where his knees had worn 'em.  An' sometimes, you
remember 'bout all that,--he'd go off up into The Mountain, 'n' be
gone all day, 'n' kill all the Ugly Things he could find up there.---
Oh, Doctor, I don' like to think o' them days!--An' by 'n' by he
grew kin' o' still, 'n' begun to read a little, 'n' 't las' he got 's
quiet's a lamb, 'n' that's the way he is now.  I think he's got
religion, Doctor; but he a'n't so bright about what's goin' on, 'n' I
don' believe he never suspec' nothin' till somethin' happens; for
the' 's somethin' goin' to happen, Doctor, if the Las' Day does n'
come to stop it; 'n' you mus' tell us what to do, 'n' save my poor
Elsie, my baby that the Lord has n' took care of like all his other
childer."

The Doctor assured the old woman that he was thinking a great deal
about them all, and that there were other eyes on Dick besides her
own.  Let her watch him closely about the house, and he would keep a
look-out elsewhere.  If there was anything new, she must let him know
at once.  Send up one of the menservants, and he would come down at a
moment's warning.

There was really nothing definite against this young man; but the
Doctor was sure that he was meditating some evil design or other.  He
rode straight up to the Institute.  There he saw Mr. Bernard, and had
a brief conversation with him, principally on matters relating to his
personal interests.

That evening, for some unknown reason, Mr. Bernard changed the place
of his desk and drew down the shades of his windows.  Late that night
Mr. Richard Venner drew the charge of a rifle, and put the gun back
among the fowling-pieces, swearing that a leather halter was worth a
dozen of it.




CHAPTER XXV.

THE PERILOUS HOUR.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Helen's eyes glistened as she interrupted him,--

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

Mr. Bernard smiled, but rather sadly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What is it?"--he said.  "Who'shurt?  What's happened?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Come, look here naow, yeou, don' Stan' askin' questions over 'n'
over;--'t beats all!  ha'n't I tol' y' a dozen times?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He fired.

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Bernard put his hand to his head.

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

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

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

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

The Doctor looked at the prisoner through his spectacles.

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

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

"Out of joint.  Untie his hands, Abel"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Bernard came forward.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dick told him the secret of his golden belt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just then Mr. Bernard and Abel came up together.  "Here they be,"
said the Colonel.  "Stan' beck, gentlemen!"

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER XXVI.

THE NEWS REACHES THE DUDLEY MANSION.

Early the next morning Abel Stebbins made his appearance at Dudley
Veneer's, and requested to see the maan o' the haouse abaout
somethin' o' consequence.  Mr. Veneer sent word that the messenger
should wait below, and presently appeared in the study, where Abel
was making himself at home, as is the wont of the republican citizen,
when he hides the purple of empire beneath the apron of domestic
service.

"Good mornin', Squire!" said Abel, as Mr. Venner entered.  "My name's
Stebbins, 'n' I'm stoppin' f'r a spell 'ith of Doctor Kittredge."

"Well, Stebbins," said Mr. Dudley Veneer, "have you brought any
special message from the Doctor?"

"Y' ha'n't heerd nothin' abaout it, Squire, d' ye mean t' say?" said
Abel,--beginning to suspect that he was the first to bring the news
of last evening's events.

"About what?"  asked Mr. Veneer, with some interest.

"Dew tell, naow!  Waal, that beats all!  Why, that 'ere Portagee
relation o' yourn 'z been tryin' t' ketch a fellah 'n a slippernoose,
'n' got ketched himself,---that's all.  Y' ha'n't heerd noth'n'
abaout it?"

"Sit down," said Mr. Dudley Veneer, calmly, "and tell me all you have
to say."

So Abel sat down and gave him an account of the events of the last
evening.  It was a strange and terrible surprise to Dudley Veneer to
find that his nephew, who had been an inmate of his house and the
companion of his daughter, was to all intents and purposes guilty of
the gravest of crimes.  But the first shock was no sooner over than
he began to think what effect the news would have on Elsie.  He
imagined that there was a kind of friendly feeling between them, and
he feared some crisis would be provoked in his daughter's mental
condition by the discovery.  He would wait, however, until she came
from her chamber, before disturbing her with the evil tidings.

Abel did not forget his message with reference to the equipments of
the dead mustang.

"The' was some things on the hoss, Squire, that the man he ketched
said he did n' care no gre't abaout; but perhaps you'd like to have
'em fetched to the mansion-haouse.  Ef y' did n' care abaout 'em,
though, I should n' min' keepin' on 'em; they might come handy some
time or 'nother; they say, holt on t' anything for ten year 'n'
there 'll be some kin' o' use for 't."

"Keep everything," said Dudley Veneer.  "I don't want to see anything
belonging to that young man."

So Abel nodded to Mr. Veneer, and left the study to find some of the
men about the stable to tell and talk over with them the events of
the last evening.  He presently came upon Elbridge, chief of the
equine department, and driver of the family-coach.

"Good mornin', Abe," said Elbridge.  "What's fetched y' daown here so
all-fired airly?"

"You're a darned pooty lot daown here, you be!"

Abel answered.  "Better keep your Portagees t' home nex' time,
ketchin' folks 'ith slippernooses raoun' their necks, 'n' kerryin'
knives 'n their boots!"

"What 'r' you jawin' abaout?"  Elbridge said, looking up to see if he
was in earnest, and what he meant.

"Jawin' abaout?  You'll find aout'z soon 'z y' go into that 'ere
stable o' yourn!  Y' won't curry that 'ere long-tailed black hoss no
more; 'n' y' won't set y'r eyes on the fellah that rid him, ag'in, in
a hurry!"

Elbridge walked straight to the stable, without saying a word, found
the door unlocked, and went in.

"Th' critter's gone, sure enough!" he said.  "Glad on 't!  The
darndest, kickin'est, bitin'est beast th't ever I see, 'r ever wan'
t' see ag'in!  Good reddance!  Don' wan' no snappin'-turkles in my
stable!  Whar's the man gone th't brought the critter?"

"Whar he's gone?  Guess y' better go 'n ask my ol man; he kerried him
off lass' night; 'n' when he comes back, mebbe he 'll tell ye whar
he's gone tew!"

By this time Elbridge had found out that Abel was in earnest, and had
something to tell.  He looked at the litter in the mustang's stall,
then at the crib.

"Ha'n't eat b't haalf his feed.  Ha'n't been daown on his straw.
Must ha' been took aout somewhere abaout ten 'r 'levee o'clock.  I
know that 'ere critter's ways.  The fellah's had him aout nights
afore; b't I never thought nothin' o' no mischief.  He 's a kin' o'
haalf Injin.  What is 't the chap's been a-doin' on?  Tell 's all
abaout it."

Abel sat down on a meal-chest, picked up a straw and put it into his
mouth.  Elbridge sat down at the other end, pulled out his jack-
knife, opened the penknife-blade, and began sticking it into the lid
of the meal-chest.  The Doctor's man had a story to tell, and he
meant to get all the enjoyment out of it.  So he told it with every
luxury of circumstance.  Mr. Veneer's man heard it all with open
mouth.  No listener in the gardens of Stamboul could have found more
rapture in a tale heard amidst the perfume of roses and the voices of
birds and tinkling of fountains than Elbridge in following Abel's
narrative, as they sat there in the aromatic ammoniacal atmosphere of
the stable, the grinding of the horses' jaws keeping evenly on
through it all, with now and then the interruption of a stamping
hoof, and at intervals a ringing crow from the barn-yard.

Elbridge stopped a minute to think, after Abel had finished.

"Who's took care o' them things that was on the hoss?  "he said,
gravely.

"Waal, Langden, he seemed to kin 'o' think I'd ought to have 'em,--
'n' the Squire; he did n' seem to have no 'bjection; 'n' so,--waal, I
calc'late I sh'll jes' holt on to 'em myself; they a'n't good f 'r
much, but they're cur'ous t' keep t' look at."

Mr. Veneer's man did not appear much gratified by this arrangement,
especially as he had a shrewd suspicion that some of the ornaments of
the bridle were of precious metal, having made occasional
examinations of them with the edge of a file.  But he did not see
exactly what to do about it, except to get them from Abel in the way
of bargain.

"Waal, no,--they a'n't good for much 'xcep' to look at.  'F y' ever
rid on that seddle once, y' would n' try it ag'in, very spry,--not 'f
y' c'd haalp y'rsaalf.

"I tried it,--darned 'f I sot daown f'r th' nex' week,--eat all my
victuals stan'in'.  I sh'd like t' hev them things wal enough to heng
up 'n the stable; 'f y' want t' trade some day, fetch 'em along
daown."

Abel rather expected that Elbridge would have laid claim to the
saddle and bridle on the strength of some promise or other
presumptive title, and thought himself lucky to get off with only
offering to think abaout tradin'.

When Elbridge returned to the house, he found the family in a state
of great excitement.  Mr. Venner had told Old Sophy, and she had
informed the other servants.  Everybody knew what had happened,
excepting Elsie.  Her father had charged them all to say nothing
about it to her; he would tell her, when she came down.

He heard her step at last,--alight, gliding step,--so light that her
coming was often unheard, except by those who perceived the faint
rustle that went with it.  She was paler than common this morning, as
she came into her father's study.

After a few words of salutation, he said quietly,  "Elsie, my dear,
your cousin Richard has left us."

She grew still paler, as she asked,

"Is he dead?"

Dudley Venner started to see the expression with which Elsie put this
question.

"He is living,--but dead to us from this day forward," said her
father.

He proceeded to tell her, in a general way, the story he had just
heard from Abel.  There could be no doubting it;--he remembered him
as the Doctor's man; and as Abel had seen all with his own eyes, as
Dick's chamber, when unlocked with a spare key, was found empty, and
his bed had not been slept in, he accepted the whole account as true.

When he told of Dick's attempt on the young schoolmaster, ("You know
Mr. Langdon very well, Elsie,--a perfectly inoffensive young man, as
I understand,") Elsie turned her face away and slid along by the wall
to the window which looked out oh the little grass-plot with the
white stone standing in it.  Her father could not see her face, but
he knew by her movements that her dangerous mood was on her.  When
she heard the sequel of the story, the discomfiture and capture of
Dick, she turned round for an instant, with a look of contempt and of
something like triumph upon her face.  Her father saw that her cousin
had become odious to her: He knew well, by every change of her
countenance, by her movements, by every varying curve of her graceful
figure, the transitions front passion to repose, from fierce
excitement to the dull languor which often succeeded her threatening
paroxysms.

She remained looking out at the window.  A group of white fan-tailed
pigeons had lighted on the green plot before it and clustered about
one of their companions who lay on his back, fluttering in a strange
way, with outspread wings and twitching feet.  Elsie uttered a faint
cry; these were her special favorites and often fed from her hand.
She threw open the long window, sprang out, caught up the white
fantail, and held it to her bosom.  The bird stretched himself out,
and then lay still, with open eyes, lifeless.  She looked at him a
moment, and, sliding in through the open window and through the
study, sought her own apartment, where she locked herself in, and
began to sob and moan like those that weep.  But the gracious solace
of tears seemed to be denied her, and her grief, like her anger, was
a dull ache, longing, like that, to finish itself with a fierce
paroxysm, but wanting its natural outlet.

This seemingly trifling incident of the death of her favorite
appeared to change all the current of her thought.  Whether it were
the sight of the dying bird, or the thought that her own agency might
have beep concerned in it, or some deeper grief, which took this
occasion to declare itself,--some dark remorse or hopeless longing,--
whatever it might be, there was an unwonted tumult in her soul.  To
whom should she go in her vague misery?  Only to Him who knows all
His creatures' sorrows, and listens to the faintest human cry.  She
knelt, as she had  been taught to kneel from her childhood, and tried
to pray.  But her thoughts refused to flow in the language of
supplication.  She could not plead for herself as other women plead
in their hours of anguish.  She rose like one who should stoop to
drink, and find dust in the place of water.  Partly from
restlessness, partly from an attraction she hardly avowed to herself,
she followed her usual habit and strolled listlessly along to the
school.

Of course everybody at the Institute was full of the terrible
adventure of the preceding evening.  Mr. Bernard felt poorly enough;
but he had made it a point to show himself the next morning, as if
nothing had happened.  Helen Darley knew nothing of it all until she
hard risen, when the gossipy matron of the establishment made her
acquainted with all its details, embellished with such additional
ornamental appendages as it had caught up in transmission from lip to
lip.  She did not love to betray her sensibilities, but she was pale
and tremulous and very nearly tearful when Mr. Bernard entered the
sitting-room, showing on his features traces of the violent shock he
had received and the heavy slumber from which he had risen with
throbbing brows.  What the poor girl's impulse was, on seeing him, we
need not inquire too curiously.  If he had been her own brother, she
would have kissed him and cried on his neck; but something held her
back.  There is no galvanism in kiss-your-brother; it is copper
against copper: but alien bloods develop strange currents, when they
flow close to each other, with only the films that cover lip and
cheek between them.  Mr. Bernard, as some of us may remember,
violated the proprieties and laid himself open to reproach by his
enterprise with a bouncing village-girl, to whose rosy cheek an
honest smack was not probably an absolute novelty.  He made it all up
by his discretion and good behavior now.  He saw by Helen's moist eye
and trembling lip that her woman's heart was off its guard, and he
knew, by the infallible instinct of sex, that he should be forgiven,
if he thanked her for her sisterly sympathies in the most natural
way,--expressive, and at the same time economical of breath and
utterance.  He would not give a false look to their friendship by any
such demonstration.  Helen was a little older than himself, but the
aureole of young womanhood had not yet begun to fade from around her.
She was surrounded by that enchanted atmosphere into which the girl
walks with dreamy eyes, and out of which the woman passes with a
story written on her forehead.  Some people think very little of
these refinements; they have not studied magnetism and the law of the
square of the distance.

So Mr. Bernard thanked Helen for her interest without the aid of the
twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet,--the love labial,--the limping
consonant which it takes two to speak plain.  Indeed, he scarcely let
her say a word, at first; for he saw that it was hard for her to
conceal her emotion.  No wonder; he had come within a hair's-breadth
of losing his life, and he had been a very kind friend and a very
dear companion to her.

There were some curious spiritual experiences connected with his last
evening's adventure which were working very strongly in his mind.  It
was borne in upon him irresistibly that he had been dead since he had
seen Helen,--as dead as the son of the Widow of Nain before the bier
was touched and he sat up and began to speak.  There was an interval
between two conscious moments which appeared to him like a temporary
annihilation, and the thoughts it suggested were worrying him with
strange perplexities.

He remembered seeing the dark figure on horseback rise in the saddle
and something leap from its hand.  He remembered the thrill he felt
as the coil settled on his shoulders, and the sudden impulse which
led him to fire as he did.  With the report of the pistol all became
blank, until he found himself in a strange, bewildered state, groping
about for the weapon, which he had a vague consciousness of having
dropped.  But, according to Abel's account, there must have been an
interval of some minutes between these recollections, and he could
not help asking, Where was the mind, the soul, the thinking
principle, all this time?

A man is stunned by a blow with a stick on the head.  He becomes
unconscious.  Another man gets a harder blow on the head from a
bigger stick, and it kills him.  Does he become unconscious, too?  If
so, when does he come to his consciousness?  The man who has had a
slight or moderate blow comes to himself when the immediate shock
passes off and the organs begin to work again, or when a bit of the
skull is pried up, if that happens to be broken.  Suppose the blow is
hard enough to spoil the brain and stop the play of the organs, what
happens them?

A British captain was struck by a cannon-ball on the head, just as he
was giving an order, at the Battle of the Nile.  Fifteen months
afterwards he was trephined at Greenwich Hospital, having been
insensible all that time.  Immediately after the operation his
consciousness returned, and he at once began carrying out the order
he was giving when the shot struck him.  Suppose he had never been
trephined, when would his consciousness have returned?  When his
breath ceased and his heart stopped beating?

When Mr. Bernard said to Helen, "I have been dead since I saw you,"
it startled her not a little; for his expression was that of perfect
good faith, and she feared that his mind was disordered.  When he
explained, not as has been done just now, at length, but in a
hurried, imperfect way, the meaning of his strange assertion, and the
fearful Sadduceeisms which it had suggested to his mind, she looked
troubled at first, and then thoughtful.  She did not feel able to
answer all the difficulties he raised, but she met them with that
faith which is the strength as well as the weakness of women,--which
makes them weak in the hands of man, but strong in the presence of
the Unseen.

"It is a strange experience," she said; "but I once had something
like it.  I fainted, and lost some five or ten minutes out of my
life, as much as if I had been dead.  But when I came to myself, I
was the same person every way, in my recollections and character.  So
I suppose that loss of consciousness is not death.  And if I was born
out of unconsciousness into infancy with many family-traits of mind
and body, I can believe, from my own reason, even without help from
Revelation, that I shall be born again out of the unconsciousness of
death with my individual traits of mind and body.  If death is, as it
should seem to be, a loss of consciousness, that does not shake my
faith; for I have been put into a body once already to fit me for
living here, and I hope to be in some way fitted after this life to
enjoy a better one.  But it is all trust in God and in his Word.
These are enough for me; I hope they are for you."

Helen was a minister's daughter, and familiar from her childhood with
this class of questions, especially with all the doubts and
perplexities which are sure to assail every thinking child bred in
any inorganic or not thoroughly vitalized faith,--as is too often the
case with the children of professional theologians.  The kind of
discipline they are subjected to is like that of the Flat-Head Indian
pappooses.  At five or ten or fifteen years old they put their hands
up to their foreheads and ask, What are they strapping down my brains
in this way for?  So they tear off the sacred bandages of the great
Flat-Head tribe, and there follows a mighty rush of blood to the
long-compressed region.  This accounts, in the most lucid manner, for
those sudden freaks with which certain children of this class
astonish their worthy parents at the period of life when they are
growing fast, and, the frontal pressure beginning to be felt as
something intolerable, they tear off the holy compresses.

The hour for school came, and they went to the great hall for study.
It would not have occurred to Mr. Silas Peckham to ask his assistant
whether he felt well enough to attend to his duties; and Mr. Bernard
chose to be at his post.  A little headache and confusion were all
that remained of his symptoms.

Later, in the course of the forenoon, Elsie Venner came and took her
place.  The girls all stared at her--naturally enough; for it was
hardly to have been expected that she would show herself, after such
an event in the household to which she belonged.  Her expression was
somewhat peculiar, and, of course, was attributed to the shock her
feelings had undergone on hearing of the crime attempted by her
cousin and daily companion.  When she was looking on her book, or on
any indifferent object, her countenance betrayed some inward
disturbance, which knitted her dark brows, and seemed to throw a
deeper shadow over her features.  But, from time to time, she would
lift her eyes toward Mr. Bernard, and let them rest upon him, without
a thought, seemingly, that she herself was the subject of observation
or remark.  Then they seemed to lose their cold glitter, and soften
into a strange, dreamy tenderness.  The deep instincts of womanhood
were striving to grope their way to the surface of her being through
all the alien influences which overlaid them.  She could be secret
and cunning in working out any of her dangerous impulses, but she did
not know how to mask the unwonted feeling which fixed her eyes and
her thoughts upon the only person who had ever reached the spring of
her hidden sympathies.

The girls all looked at Elsie, whenever they could steal a glance
unperceived, and many of them were struck with this singular
expression her features wore.  They had long whispered it around
among each other that she had a liking for the master; but there were
too many of them of whom something like this could be said, to make
it very remarkable.  Now, however, when so many little hearts were
fluttering at the thought of the peril through which the handsome
young master had so recently passed, they were more alive than ever
to the supposed relation between him and the dark school-girl.  Some
had supposed there was a mutual attachment between them; there was a
story that they were secretly betrothed, in accordance with the rumor
which had been current in the village.  At any rate, some conflict
was going on in that still, remote, clouded soul, and all the girls
who looked upon her face were impressed and awed as they had never
been before by the shadows that passed over it.

One of these girls was more strongly arrested by Elsie's look than
the others.  This was a delicate, pallid creature, with a high
forehead, and wide-open pupils, which looked as if they could take in
all the shapes that flit in what, to common eyes, is darkness,--a
girl said to be clairvoyant under certain influences.  In the recess,
as it was called, or interval of suspended studies in the middle of
the forenoon, this girl carried her autograph-book,--for she had one
of those indispensable appendages of the boarding-school miss of
every degree,--and asked Elsie to write her name in it.  She had an
irresistible feeling, that, sooner or later, and perhaps very soon,
there would attach an unusual interest to this autograph.  Elsie took
the pen and wrote, in her sharp Italian hand,

Elsie Venner, Infelix.

It was a remembrance, doubtless, of the forlorn queen of the
"AEneid"; but its coming to her thought in this way confirmed the
sensitive school-girl in her fears for Elsie, and she let fall a tear
upon the page before she closed it.

Of course, the keen and practised observation of Helen Darley could
not fail to notice the change of Elsie's manner and expression.  She
had long seen that she was attracted to the young master, and had
thought, as the old Doctor did, that any impression which acted upon
her affections might be the means of awakening a new life in her
singularly isolated nature.  Now, however, the concentration of the
poor girl's thoughts upon the one object which had had power to reach
her deeper sensibilities was so painfully revealed in her features,
that Helen began to fear once more, lest Mr. Bernard, in escaping the
treacherous violence of an assassin, had been left to the equally
dangerous consequences of a violent, engrossing passion in the breast
of a young creature whose love it would be ruin to admit and might be
deadly to reject.  She knew her own heart too well to fear that any
jealousy might mingle with her new apprehensions.  It was understood
between Bernard and Helen that they were too good friends to tamper
with the silences and edging proximities of lovemaking.  She knew,
too, the simply human, not masculine, interest which Mr. Bernard took
in Elsie; he had been frank with Helen, and more than satisfied her
that with all the pity and sympathy which overflowed his soul, when
he thought of the stricken girl, there mingled not one drop of such
love as a youth may feel for a maiden.

It may help the reader to gain some understanding of the anomalous
nature of Elsie Veneer, if we look with Helen into Mr. Bernard's
opinions and feelings with reference to her, as they had shaped
themselves in his consciousness at the period of which we are
speaking.

At first he had been impressed by her wild beauty, and the contrast
of all her looks and ways with those of the girls around her.
Presently a sense of some ill-defined personal element, which half-
attracted and half-repelled those who looked upon her, and especially
those on whom she looked, began to make itself obvious to him, as he
soon found it was painfully sensible to his more susceptible
companion, the lady-teacher.  It was not merely in the cold light of
her diamond eyes, but in all her movements, in her graceful postures
as she sat, in her costume, and, he sometimes thought, even in her
speech, that this obscure and exceptional character betrayed itself.
When Helen had said, that, if they were living in times when human
beings were subject to possession, she should have thought there was
something not human about Elsie, it struck an unsuspected vein of
thought in his own mind, which he hated to put in words, but which
was continually trying to articulate itself among the dumb thoughts
which lie under the perpetual stream of mental whispers.

Mr. Bernard's professional training had made him slow to accept
marvellous stories and many forms of superstition.  Yet, as a man of
science, he well knew that just on the verge of the demonstrable
facts of physics and physiology there is a nebulous border-land which
what is called "common sense" perhaps does wisely not to enter, but
which uncommon sense, or the fine apprehension of privileged
intelligences, may cautiously explore, and in so doing find itself
behind the scenes which make up for the gazing world the show which
is called Nature.

It was with something of this finer perception, perhaps with some
degree of imaginative exaltation, that he set himself to solving the
problem of Elsie's influence to attract and repel those around her.
His letter already submitted to the reader hints in what direction
his thoughts were disposed to turn.  Here was a magnificent
organization, superb in vigorous womanhood, with a beauty such as
never comes but after generations of culture; yet through all this
rich nature there ran some alien current of influence, sinuous and
dark, as when a clouded streak seams the white marble of a perfect
statue.

It would be needless to repeat the particular suggestions which had
come into his mind, as they must probably have come into that of the
reader who has noted the singularities of Elsie's tastes and personal
traits.  The images which certain poets had dreamed of seemed to have
become a reality before his own eyes.  Then came that unexplained
adventure of The Mountain,--almost like a dream in recollection, yet
assuredly real in some of its main incidents,--with all that it
revealed or hinted.  This girl did not fear to visit the dreaded
region, where danger lurked in every nook and beneath every tuft of
leaves.  Did the tenants of the fatal ledge recognize some mysterious
affinity which made them tributary to the cold glitter of her diamond
eyes?  Was she from her birth one of those frightful children, such
as he had read about, and the Professor had told him of, who form
unnatural friendships with cold, writhing ophidians?  There was no
need of so unwelcome a thought as this; she had drawn him away from
the dark opening in the rock at the moment when he seemed to be
threatened by one of its malignant denizens; that was all he could be
sure of; the counter-fascination might have been a dream, a fancy, a
coincidence.  All wonderful things soon grow doubtful in our own
minds, as do even common events, if great interests prove suddenly to
attach to their truth or falsehood.

--I, who am telling of these occurrences, saw a friend in the great
city, on the morning of a most memorable disaster, hours after the
time when the train which carried its victims to their doom had left.
I talked with him, and was for some minutes, at least, in his
company.  When I reached home, I found that the story had gone before
that he was among the lost, and I alone could contradict it to his
weeping friends and relatives.  I did contradict it; but, alas!  I
began soon to doubt myself, penetrated by the contagion of their
solicitude; my recollection began to question itself; the order of
events became dislocated; and when I heard that he had reached home
in safety, the relief was almost as great to me as to those who had
expected to see their own brother's face no more.

Mr. Bernard was disposed, then, not to accept the thought of any
odious personal relationship of the kind which had suggested itself
to him when he wrote the letter referred to.  That the girl had
something of the feral nature, her wild, lawless rambles in forbidden
and blasted regions of The Mountain at all hours, her familiarity
with the lonely haunts where any other human foot was so rarely seen,
proved clearly enough.  But the more he thought of all her strange
instincts and modes of being, the more he became convinced that
whatever alien impulse swayed her will and modulated or diverted or
displaced her affections came from some impression that reached far
back into the past, before the days when the faithful Old Sophy had
rocked her in the cradle.  He believed that she had brought her
ruling tendency, whatever it was, into the world with her.

When the school was over and the girls had all gone, Helen lingered
in the schoolroom to speak with Mr. Bernard.

"Did you remark Elsie's ways this forenoon?"  she said.

"No, not particularly; I have not noticed anything as sharply as I
commonly do; my head has been a little queer, and I have been
thinking over what we were talking about, and how near I came to
solving the great problem which every day makes clear to such
multitudes of people.  What about Elsie?"

"Bernard, her liking for you is growing into a passion.  I have
studied girls for a long while, and I know the difference between
their passing fancies and their real emotions.  I told you, you
remember, that Rosa would have to leave us; we barely missed a scene,
I think, if not a whole tragedy, by her going at the right moment.
But Elsie is infinitely more dangerous to herself and others.
Women's love is fierce enough, if it once gets the mastery of them,
always; but this poor girl does not know what to do with a passion."

Mr. Bernard had never told Helen the story of the flower in his
Virgil, or that other adventure--which he would have felt awkwardly
to refer to; but it had been perfectly understood between them that
Elsie showed in her own singular way a well-marked partiality for the
young master.

"Why don't they take her away from the school, if she is in such a
strange, excitable state?" said Mr. Bernard.

"I believe they are afraid of her," Helen answered.  "It is just one
of those cases that are ten thousand thousand times worse than
insanity.  I don't think from what I hear, that her father has ever
given up hoping that she will outgrow her peculiarities.  Oh, these
peculiar children for whom parents go on hoping every morning and
despairing every night!  If I could tell you half that mothers have
told me, you would feel that the worst of all diseases of the moral
sense and the will are those which all the Bedlams turn away from
their doors as not being cases of insanity!"

"Do you think her father has treated her judiciously?" said Mr.
Bernard.

"I think," said Helen, with a little hesitation, which Mr. Bernard
did not happen to notice,--"I think he has been very kind and
indulgent, and I do not know that he could have treated her otherwise
with a better chance of success."

"He must of course be fond of her," Mr. Bernard said; "there is
nothing else in the world for him to love."

Helen dropped a book she held in her hand, and, stooping to pick it
up, the blood rushed into her cheeks.

"It is getting late," she said; "you must not stay any longer in this
close schoolroom.  Pray, go and get a little fresh air before dinner-
time."




CHAPTER XXVII.

A SOUL IN DISTRESS.

The events told in the last two chapters had taken place toward the
close of the week.  On Saturday evening the Reverend Chauncy
Fairweather received a note which was left at his door by an unknown
person who departed without saying a word.  Its words were these:
"One who is in distress of mind requests the prayers of this
congregation that God would be pleased to look in mercy upon the soul
that he has afflicted."

There was nothing to show from whom the note came, or the sex or age
or special source of spiritual discomfort or anxiety of the writer.
The handwriting was delicate and might well be a woman's.  The
clergyman was not aware of any particular affliction among his
parishioners which was likely to be made the subject of a request of
this kind.  Surely neither of the Venners would advertise the
attempted crime of their relative in this way.  But who else was
there?  The more he thought about it, the more it puzzled him, and as
he did not like to pray in the dark, without knowing for whom he was
praying, he could think of nothing better than to step into old
Doctor Kittredge's and see what he had to say about it.

The old Doctor was sitting alone in his study when the Reverend Mr.
Fairweather was ushered in.  He received his visitor very pleasantly,
expecting, as a matter of course, that he would begin with some new
grievance, dyspeptic, neuralgic, bronchitic, or other.  The minister,
however, began with questioning the old Doctor about the sequel of
the other night's adventure; for he was already getting a little
Jesuitical, and kept back the object of his visit until it should
come up as if accidentally in the course of conversation.

"It was a pretty bold thing to go off alone with that reprobate, as
you did," said the minister.

"I don't know what there was bold about it," the Doctor answered.
"All he wanted was to get away.  He was not quite a reprobate, you
see; he didn't like the thought of disgracing his family or facing
his uncle.  I think he was ashamed to see his cousin, too, after what
he had done."

"Did he talk with you on the way?"

"Not much.  For half an hour or so he did n't speak a word.  Then he
asked where I was driving him.  I told him, and he seemed to be
surprised into a sort of grateful feeling.  Bad enough, no doubt, but
might be worse.  Has some humanity left in him yet.  Let him go.  God
can judge him,--I can't."

"You are too charitable, Doctor," the minister said.  "I condemn him
just as if he had carried out his project, which, they say, was to
make it appear as if the schoolmaster had committed suicide.  That's
what people think the rope found by him was for.  He has saved his
neck,--but his soul is a lost one, I am afraid, beyond question."

"I can't judge men's souls," the Doctor said.  "I can judge their
acts, and hold them responsible for those,--but I don't know much
about their souls.  If you or I had found our soul in a half-breed
body; and been turned loose to run among the Indians, we might have
been playing just such tricks as this fellow has been trying.  What
if you or I had inherited all the tendencies that were born with his
cousin Elsie?"

"Oh, that reminds me,"--the minister said, in a sudden way,--"I have
received a note, which I am requested to read from the pulpit
tomorrow.  I wish you would just have the kindness to look at it and
see where you think it came from."

The Doctor examined it carefully.  It was a woman's or girl's note,
he thought.  Might come from one of the school-girls who was anxious
about her spiritual condition.  Handwriting was disguised; looked a
little like Elsie Veneer's, but not characteristic enough to make it
certain.  It would be a new thing, if she had asked public prayers
for herself, and a very favorable indication of a change in her
singular moral nature.  It was just possible Elsie might have sent
that note.  Nobody could foretell her actions.  It would be well to
see the girl and find out whether any unusual impression had been
produced on her mind by the recent occurrence or by any other cause.

The Reverend Mr. Fairweather folded the note and put it into his
pocket.

"I have been a good deal exercised in mind lately, myself," he said.

The old Doctor looked at him through his spectacles, and said, in his
usual professional tone,

"Put out your tongue."

The minister obeyed him in that feeble way common with persons of
weak character,--for people differ as much in their mode of
performing this trifling act as Gideon's soldiers in their way of
drinking at the brook.  The Doctor took his hand and placed a finger
mechanically on his wrist.

"It is more spiritual, I think, than bodily," said the Reverend Mr.
Fairweather.

"Is your appetite as good as usual?"  the Doctor asked.

"Pretty good," the minister answered; "but my sleep, my sleep,
Doctor,--I am greatly troubled at night with lying awake and thinking
of my future, I am not at ease in mind."

He looked round at all the doors, to be sure they were shut, and
moved his chair up close to the Doctor's.

"You do not know the mental trials I have been going through for the
last few months."

"I think I do," the old Doctor said.  "You want to get out of the new
church into the old one, don't you?"

The minister blushed deeply; he thought he had been going on in a
very quiet way, and that nobody suspected his secret.  As the old
Doctor was his counsellor in sickness, and almost everybody's
confidant in trouble, he had intended to impart cautiously to him
some hints of the change of sentiments through which he had been
passing.  He was too late with his information, it appeared, and
there was nothing to be done but to throw himself on the Doctor's
good sense and kindness, which everybody knew, and get what hints he
could from him as to the practical course he should pursue.  He
began, after an awkward pause,

"You would not have me stay in a communion which I feel to be alien
to the true church, would you?"

"Have you stay, my friend?" said the Doctor, with a pleasant,
friendly look,--"have you stay?  Not a month, nor a week, nor a day,
if I could help it.  You have got into the wrong pulpit, and I have
known it from the first.  The sooner you go where you belong, the
better.  And I'm very glad you don't mean to stop half-way.  Don't
you know you've always come to me when you've been dyspeptic or sick
anyhow, and wanted to put yourself wholly into my hands, so that I
might order you like a child just what to do and what to take?  That
's exactly what you want in religion.  I don't blame you for it.  You
never liked to take the responsibility of your own body; I don't see
why you should want to have the charge of your own soul.  But I'm
glad you're going to the Old Mother of all.  You wouldn't have been
contented short of that."

The Reverend Mr. Fairweather breathed with more freedom.  The Doctor
saw into his soul through those awful spectacles of his,--into it and
beyond it, as one sees through a thin fog.  But it was with a real
human kindness, after all.  He felt like a child before a strong man;
but the strong man looked on him with a father's indulgence.  Many
and many a time, when he had come desponding and bemoaning himself on
account of some contemptible bodily infirmity, the old Doctor had
looked at him through his spectacles, listened patiently while he
told his ailments, and then, in his large parental way, given him a
few words of wholesome advice, and cheered him up so that he went off
with a light heart, thinking that the heaven he was so much afraid of
was not so very near, after all.  It was the same thing now.  He
felt, as feeble natures always do in the presence of strong ones,
overmastered, circumscribed, shut in, humbled; but yet it seemed as
if the old Doctor did not despise him any more for what he considered
weakness of mind than he used to despise him when he complained of
his nerves or his digestion.

Men who see into their neighbors are very apt to be contemptuous; but
men who see through them find something lying behind every human soul
which it is not for them to sit in judgment on, or to attempt to
sneer out of the order of God's manifold universe.

Little as the Doctor had said out of which comfort could be
extracted, his genial manner had something grateful in it.  A film of
gratitude came over the poor man's cloudy, uncertain eye, and a look
of tremulous relief and satisfaction played about his weak mouth.  He
was gravitating to the majority, where he hoped to find "rest"; but
he was dreadfully sensitive to the opinions of the minority he was on
the point of leaving.

The old Doctor saw plainly enough what was going on in his mind.

"I sha'n't quarrel with you," he said,--"you know that very well; but
you mustn't quarrel with me, if I talk honestly with you; it isn't
everybody that will take the trouble.  You flatter yourself that you
will make a good many enemies by leaving your old communion.  Not so
many as you think.  This is the way the common sort of people will
talk:--'You have got your ticket to the feast of life, as much as any
other man that ever lived.  Protestantism says,--"Help yourself;
here's a clean plate, and a knife and fork of your own, and plenty of
fresh dishes to choose from."  The Old Mother says,--"Give me your
ticket, my dear, and I'll feed you with my gold spoon off these
beautiful old wooden trenchers.  Such nice bits as those good old
gentlemen have left for you!"  There is no quarrelling with a man who
prefers broken victuals.'  That's what the rougher sort will say; and
then, where one scolds, ten will laugh.  But, mind you, I don't
either scold or laugh.  I don't feel sure that you could very well
have helped doing what you will soon do.  You know you were never
easy without some medicine to take when you felt ill in body.  I'm
afraid I've given you trashy stuff sometimes, just to keep you quiet.
Now, let me tell you, there is just the same difference in spiritual
patients that there is in bodily ones.  One set believes in wholesome
ways of living, and another must have a great list of specifics for
all the soul's complaints.  You belong with the last, and got
accidentally shuffled in with the others."

The minister smiled faintly, but did not reply.  Of course, he
considered that way of talking as the result of the Doctor's
professional training.  It would not have been worth while to take
offence at his plain speech, if he had been so disposed; for he might
wish to consult him the next day as to "what he should take" for his
dyspepsia or his neuralgia.

He left the Doctor with a hollow feeling at the bottom of his soul,
as if a good piece of his manhood had been scooped out of him.  His
hollow aching did not explain itself in words, but it grumbled and
worried down among the unshaped thoughts which lie beneath them.  He
knew that he had been trying to reason himself out of his birthright
of reason.  He knew that the inspiration which gave him understanding
was losing its throne in his intelligence, and the almighty Majority-
Vote was proclaiming itself in its stead.  He knew that the great
primal truths, which each successive revelation only confirmed, were
fast becoming hidden beneath the mechanical forms of thought, which,
as with all new converts, engrossed so large a share of his
attention.  The "peace," the "rest," which he had purchased were
dearly bought to one who had been trained to the arms of thought, and
whose noble privilege it might have been to live in perpetual warfare
for the advancing truth which the next generation will claim as the
legacy of the present.

The Reverend Mr. Fairweather was getting careless about his sermons.
He must wait the fitting moment to declare himself; and in the mean
time he was preaching to heretics.  It did not matter much what he
preached, under such circumstances.  He pulled out two old yellow
sermons from a heap of such, and began looking over that for the
forenoon.  Naturally enough, he fell asleep over it, and, sleeping,
he began to dream.

He dreamed that he was under the high arches of an old cathedral,
amidst a throng of worshippers.  The light streamed in through vast
windows, dark with the purple robes of royal saints, or blazing with
yellow glories around the heads of earthly martyrs and heavenly
messengers.  The billows of the great organ roared among the
clustered columns, as the sea breaks amidst the basaltic pillars
which crowd the stormy cavern of the Hebrides.  The voice of the
alternate choirs of singing boys swung back and forward, as the
silver censer swung in the hands of the whiterobed children.  The
sweet cloud of incense rose in soft, fleecy mists, full of
penetrating suggestions of the East and its perfumed altars.  The
knees of twenty generations had worn the pavement; their feet had
hollowed the steps; their shoulders had smoothed the columns.  Dead
bishops and abbots lay under the marble of the floor in their
crumbled vestments; dead warriors, in rusted armor, were stretched
beneath their sculptured effigies.  And all at once all the buried
multitudes who had ever worshipped there came thronging in through
the aisles.  They choked every space, they swarmed into all the
chapels, they hung in clusters over the parapets of the galleries,
they clung to the images in every niche, and still the vast throng
kept flowing and flowing in, until the living were lost in the rush
of the returning dead who had reclaimed their own.  Then, as his
dream became more fantastic, the huge cathedral itself seemed to
change into the wreck of some mighty antediluvian vertebrate; its
flying-buttresses arched round like ribs, its piers shaped themselves
into limbs, and the sound of the organ-blast changed to the wind
whistling through its thousand-jointed skeleton.

And presently the sound lulled, and softened and softened, until it
was as the murmur of a distant swarm of bees.  A procession of monks
wound along through an old street, chanting, as they walked.  In his
dream he glided in among them and bore his part in the burden of
their song.  He entered with the long train under a low arch, and
presently he was kneeling in a narrow cell before an image of the
Blessed Maiden holding the Divine Child in her arms, and his lips
seemed to whisper,

               Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis!

He turned to the crucifix, and, prostrating himself before the spare,
agonizing shape of the Holy Sufferer, fell into a long passion of
tears and broken prayers.  He rose and flung himself, worn-out, upon
his hard pallet, and, seeming to slumber, dreamed again within his
dream.  Once more in the vast cathedral, with throngs of the living
choking its aisles, amidst jubilant peals from the cavernous depths
of the great organ, and choral melodies ringing from the fluty
throats of the singing boys.  A day of great rejoicings,--for a
prelate was to be consecrated, and the bones of the mighty skeleton-
minster were shaking with anthems, as if there were life of its own
within its buttressed ribs.  He looked down at his feet; the folds of
the sacred robe were flowing about them: he put his hand to his head;
it was crowned with the holy mitre.  A long sigh, as of perfect
content in the consummation of all his earthly hopes, breathed
through the dreamer's lips, and shaped itself, as it escaped, into
the blissful murmur,

               Ego sum Episcopus!

One grinning gargoyle looked in from beneath the roof through an
opening in a stained window.  It was the face of a mocking fiend,
such as the old builders loved to place under the eaves to spout the
rain through their open mouths.  It looked at him, as he sat in his
mitred chair, with its hideous grin growing broader and broader,
until it laughed out aloud, such a hard, stony, mocking laugh, that
he awoke out of his second dream through his first into his common
consciousness, and shivered, as he turned to the two yellow sermons
which he was to pick over and weed of the little thought they might
contain, for the next day's service.

The Reverend Chauncy Fairweather was too much taken up with his own
bodily and spiritual condition to be deeply mindful of others.  He
carried the note requesting the prayers of the congregation in his
pocket all day; and the soul in distress, which a single tender
petition might have soothed, and perhaps have saved from despair or
fatal error, found no voice in the temple to plead for it before the
Throne of Mercy!




CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE SECRET IS WHISPERED.

The Reverend Chauncy Fairweather's congregation was not large, but
select.  The lines of social cleavage run through religious creeds as
if they were of a piece with position and fortune.  It is expected of
persons of a certain breeding, in some parts of New England, that
they shall be either Episcopalians or Unitarians.  The mansion-house
gentry of Rockland were pretty fairly divided between the little
chapel, with the stained window and the trained rector, and the
meeting-house where the Reverend Mr. Fairweather officiated.

It was in the latter that Dudley Venner worshipped, when he attended
service anywhere,--which depended very much on the caprice of Elsie.
He saw plainly enough that a generous and liberally cultivated nature
might find a refuge and congenial souls in either of these two
persuasions, but he objected to some points of the formal creed of
the older church, and especially to the mechanism which renders it
hard to get free from its outworn and offensive formulae,--
remembering how Archbishop Tillotson wished in vain that it could be
"well rid of" the Athanasian Creed.  This, and the fact that the
meeting-house was nearer than the chapel, determined him, when the
new rector, who was not quite up to his mark in education, was
appointed, to take a pew in the "liberal" worshippers' edifice.

Elsie was very uncertain in her feeling about going to church.  In
summer, she loved rather to stroll over The Mountain, on Sundays.
There was even a story, that she had one of the caves before
mentioned fitted up as an oratory, and that she had her own wild way
of worshipping the God whom she sought in the dark chasms of the
dreaded cliffs.  Mere fables, doubtless; but they showed the common
belief, that Elsie, with all her strange and dangerous elements of
character, had yet strong religious feeling mingled with them.  The
hymn-book which Dick had found, in his midnight invasion of her
chamber, opened to favorite hymns, especially some of the Methodist
and Quietist character.  Many had noticed, that certain tunes, as
sung by the choir, seemed to impress her deeply; and some said, that
at such times her whole expression would change, and her stormy look
would soften so as to remind them of her poor, sweet mother.

On the Sunday morning after the talk recorded in the last chapter,
Elsie made herself ready to go to meeting.  She was dressed much as
usual, excepting that she wore a thick veil, turned aside, but ready
to conceal her features.  It was natural enough that she should not
wish to be looked in the face by curious persons who would be staring
to see what effect the occurrence of the past week had had on her
spirits.  Her father attended her willingly; and they took their
seats in the pew, somewhat to the surprise of many, who had hardly
expected to see them, after so humiliating a family development as
the attempted crime of their kinsman had just been furnishing for the
astonishment of the public.

The Reverend Mr. Fairweather was now in his coldest mood.  He had
passed through the period of feverish excitement which marks a change
of religious opinion.  At first, when he had began to doubt his own
theological positions, he had defended them against himself with more
ingenuity and interest, perhaps, than he could have done against
another; because men rarely take the trouble to understand anybody's
difficulties in a question but their own.  After this, as he began to
draw off from different points of his old belief, the cautious
disentangling of himself from one mesh after another gave sharpness
to his intellect, and the tremulous eagerness with which he seized
upon the doctrine which, piece by piece, under various pretexts and
with various disguises, he was appropriating, gave interest and
something like passion to his words.  But when he had gradually
accustomed his people to his new phraseology, and was really
adjusting his sermons and his service to disguise his thoughts, he
lost at once all his intellectual acuteness and all his spiritual
fervor.

Elsie sat quietly through the first part of the service, which was
conducted in the cold, mechanical way to be expected.  Her face was
hidden by her veil; but her father knew her state of feeling, as well
by her movements and attitudes as by the expression of her features.
The hymn had been sung, the short prayer offered, the Bible read, and
the long prayer was about to begin.  This was the time at which the
"notes" of any who were in affliction from loss of friends, the sick
who were doubtful of recovery, those who had cause to be grateful for
preservation of life or other signal blessing, were wont to be read.

Just then it was that Dudley Veneer noticed that his daughter was
trembling,--a thing so rare, so unaccountable, indeed, under the
circumstances, that he watched her closely, and began to fear that
some nervous paroxysm, or other malady, might have just begun to show
itself in this way upon her.

The minister had in his pocket two notes.  One, in the handwriting of
Deacon Soper, was from a member of this congregation, returning
thanks for his preservation through a season of great peril, supposed
to be the exposure which he had shared with others, when standing in
the circle around Dick Veneer.  The other was the anonymous one, in a
female hand, which he had received the evening before.  He forgot
them both.  His thoughts were altogether too much taken up with more
important matters.  He prayed through all the frozen petitions of his
expurgated form of supplication, and not a single heart was soothed
or lifted, or reminded that its sorrows were struggling their way up
to heaven, borne on the breath from a human soul that was warm with
love.

The people sat down as if relieved when the dreary prayer was
finished.  Elsie alone remained standing until her father touched
her.  Then she sat down, lifted her veil, and looked at him with a
blank, sad look, as if she had suffered some pain or wrong, but could
not give any name or expression to her vague trouble.  She did not
tremble any longer, but remained ominously still, as if she had been
frozen where she sat.

--Can a man love his own soul too well?  Who, on the whole,
constitute the nobler class of human beings? those who have lived
mainly to make sure of their own personal welfare in another and
future condition of existence, or they who have worked with all their
might for their race, for their country, for the advancement of the
kingdom of God, and left all personal arrangements concerning
themselves to the sole charge of Him who made them and is responsible
to himself for their safe-keeping?  Is an anchorite who has worn the
stone floor of his cell into basins with his knees bent in prayer,
more acceptable than the soldier who gives his life for the
maintenance of any sacred right or truth, without thinking what will
specially become of him in a world where there are two or three
million colonists a month, from this one planet, to be cared for?
These are grave questions, which must suggest themselves to those who
know that there are many profoundly selfish persons who are sincerely
devout and perpetually occupied with their own future, while there
are others who are perfectly ready to sacrifice themselves for any
worthy object in this world, but are really too little occupied with
their exclusive personality to think so much as many do about what is
to become of them in another.

The Reverend Chauncy Fairweather did not, most certainly, belong to
this latter class.  There are several kinds of believers, whose
history we find among the early converts to Christianity.

There was the magistrate, whose social position was such that he
preferred a private interview in the evening with the Teacher to
following him--with the street-crowd.  He had seen extraordinary
facts which had satisfied him that the young Galilean had a divine
commission.  But still he cross-questioned the Teacher himself.  He
was not ready to accept statements without explanation.  That was the
right kind of man.  See how he stood up for the legal rights of his
Master, when the people were for laying hands on him!

And again, there was the government official, intrusted with public
money, which, in those days, implied that he was supposed to be
honest.  A single look of that heavenly countenance, and two words of
gentle command, were enough for him.  Neither of these men, the early
disciple, nor the evangelist, seems to have been thinking primarily
about his own personal safety.

But now look at the poor, miserable turnkey, whose occupation shows
what he was like to be, and who had just been thrusting two
respectable strangers, taken from the hands of a mob, covered with
stripes and stripped of clothing, into the inner prison, and making
their feet fast in the stocks.  His thought, in the moment of terror,
is for himself: first, suicide; then, what he shall do,--not to save
his household,--not to fulfil his duty to his office,--not to repair
the outrage he has been committing,--but to secure his own personal
safety.  Truly, character shows itself as much in a man's way of
becoming a Christian as in any other!

--Elsie sat, statue-like, through the sermon.  It would not be fair
to the reader to give an abstract of that.  When a man who has been
bred to free thought and free speech suddenly finds himself stepping
about, like a dancer amidst his eggs, among the old addled majority-
votes which he must not tread upon, he is a spectacle for men and
angels.  Submission to intellectual precedent and authority does very
well for those who have been bred to it; we know that the underground
courses of their minds are laid in the Roman cement of tradition, and
that stately and splendid structures may be reared on such a
foundation.  But to see one laying a platform over heretical
quicksands, thirty or forty or fifty years deep, and then beginning
to build upon it, is a sorry sight.  A new convert from the reformed
to the ancient faith may be very strong in the arms, but he will
always have weak legs and shaky knees.  He may use his hands well,
and hit hard with his fists, but he will never stand on his legs in
the way the man does who inherits his belief.

The services were over at last, and Dudley Venner and his daughter
walked home together in silence.  He always respected her moods, and
saw clearly enough that some inward trouble was weighing upon her.
There was nothing to be said in such cases, for Elsie could never
talk of her griefs.  An hour, or a day, or a week of brooding, with
perhaps a sudden flash of violence: this was the way in which the
impressions which make other women weep, and tell their griefs by
word or letter, showed their effects in her mind and acts.

She wandered off up into the remoter parts of The Mountain, that day,
after their return.  No one saw just where she went,--indeed, no one
knew its forest-recesses and rocky fastnesses as she did.  She was
gone until late at night; and when Old Sophy, who had watched for
her, bound up her long hair for her sleep, it was damp with the cold
dews.

The old black woman looked at her without speaking, but questioning
her with every feature as to the sorrow that was weighing on her.

Suddenly she turned to Old Sophy.

"You want to know what there is troubling me;" she said.  "Nobody
loves me.  I cannot love anybody.  What is love, Sophy?"

"It's what poor Ol' Sophy's got for her Elsie," the old woman
answered.  "Tell me, darlin',--don' you love somebody?---don' you
love? you know,--oh, tell me, darlin', don' you love to see the
gen'l'man that keeps up at the school where you go?  They say he's
the pootiest gen'l'man that was ever in the town here.  Don' be
'fraid of poor Ol' Sophy, darlin',--she loved a man once,--see here!
Oh, I've showed you this often enough!"

She took from her pocket a half of one of the old Spanish silver
coins, such as were current in the earlier part of this century.  The
other half of it had been lying in the deep sea-sand for more than
fifty years.

Elsie looked her in the face, but did not answer in words.  What
strange intelligence was that which passed between them through the
diamond eyes and the little beady black ones?---what subtile
intercommunication, penetrating so much deeper than articulate
speech?  This was the nearest approach to sympathetic relations that
Elsie ever had: a kind of dumb intercourse of feeling, such as one
sees in the eyes of brute mothers looking on their young.  But,
subtile as it was, it was narrow and individual; whereas an emotion
which can shape itself in language opens the gate for itself into the
great community of human affections; for every word we speak is the
medal of a dead thought or feeling, struck in the die of some human
experience, worn smooth by innumerable contacts, and always
transferred warm from one to another.  By words we share the common
consciousness of the race, which has shaped itself in these symbols.
By music we reach those special states of consciousness which, being
without form, cannot be shaped with the mosaics of the vocabulary.
The language of the eyes runs deeper into the personal nature, but it
is purely individual, and perishes in the expression.

If we consider them all as growing out of the consciousness as their
root, language is the leaf, music is the flower; but when the eyes
meet and search each other, it is the uncovering of the blanched stem
through which the whole life runs, but which has never taken color or
form from the sunlight.

For three days Elsie did not return to the school.  Much of the time
she was among the woods and rocks.  The season was now beginning to
wane, and the forest to put on its autumnal glory.  The dreamy haze
was beginning to soften the landscape, and the mast delicious days of
the year were lending their attraction to the scenery of The
Mountain.  It was not very singular that Elsie should be lingering in
her old haunts, from which the change of season must soon drive her.
But Old Sophy saw clearly enough that some internal conflict was
going on, and knew very well that it must have its own way and work
itself out as it best could.  As much as looks could tell Elsie had
told her.  She had said in words, to be sure, that she could not
love.  Something warped and thwarted the emotion which would have
been love in another, no doubt; but that such an emotion was striving
with her against all malign influences which interfered with it the
old woman had a perfect certainty in her own mind.

Everybody who has observed the working of emotions in persons of
various temperaments knows well enough that they have periods of
incubation, which differ with the individual, and with the particular
cause and degree of excitement, yet evidently go through a strictly
self-limited series of evolutions, at the end of which, their result
--an act of violence, a paroxysm of tears, a gradual subsidence into
repose, or whatever it may be--declares itself, like the last stage
of an attack of fever and ague.  No one can observe children without
noticing that there is a personal equation, to use the astronomer's
language, in their tempers, so that one sulks an hour over an offence
which makes another a fury for five minutes, and leaves him or her an
angel when it is over.

At the end of three days, Elsie braided her long, glossy, black hair,
and shot a golden arrow through it.  She dressed herself with more
than usual care, and came down in the morning superb in her stormy
beauty.  The brooding paroxysm was over, or at least her passion had
changed its phase.  Her father saw it with great relief; he had
always many fears for her in her hours and days of gloom, but, for
reasons before assigned, had felt that she must be trusted to
herself, without appealing to actual restraint, or any other
supervision than such as Old Sophy could exercise without offence.

She went off at the accustomed hour to the school.  All the girls had
their eyes on her.  None so keen as these young misses to know an
inward movement by an outward sign of adornment: if they have not as
many signals as the ships that sail the great seas, there is not an
end of ribbon or a turn of a ringlet which is not a hieroglyphic with
a hidden meaning to these little cruisers over the ocean of
sentiment.

The girls all looked at Elsie with a new thought; for she was more
sumptuously arrayed than perhaps ever before at the school; and they
said to themselves that she had come meaning to draw the young
master's eyes upon her.  That was it; what else could it be?  The
beautiful cold girl with the diamond eyes meant to dazzle the
handsome young gentleman.  He would be afraid to love her; it
couldn't be true, that which some people had said in the village; she
was n't the kind of young lady to make Mr. Langdon happy.  Those dark
people are never safe: so one of the young blondes said to herself.
Elsie was not literary enough for such a scholar: so thought Miss
Charlotte Ann Wood, the young poetess.  She couldn't have a good
temper, with those scowling eyebrows: this was the opinion of several
broad-faced, smiling girls, who thought, each in her own snug little
mental sanctum, that, if, etc., etc., she could make him so happy!

Elsie had none of the still, wicked light in her eyes, that morning.
She looked gentle, but dreamy; played with her books; did not trouble
herself with any of the exercises,--which in itself was not very
remarkable, as she was always allowed, under some pretext or other,
to have her own way.

The school-hours were over at length.  The girls went out, but she
lingered to the last.  She then came up to Mr. Bernard, with a book
in her hand, as if to ask a question.

"Will you walk towards my home with me today?  "she said, in a very
low voice, little more than a whisper.

Mr. Bernard was startled by the request, put in such a way.  He had a
presentiment of some painful scene or other.  But there was nothing
to be done but to assure her that it would give him great pleasure.

So they walked along together on their way toward the Dudley mansion.

"I have no friend," Elsie said, all at once.  "Nothing loves me but
one old woman.  I cannot love anybody.  They tell me there is
something in my eyes that draws people to me and makes them faint:
Look into them, will you?"

She turned her face toward him.  It was very pale, and the diamond
eyes were glittering with a film, such as beneath other lids would
have rounded into a tear.

"Beautiful eyes, Elsie," he said,--"sometimes very piercing,--but
soft now, and looking as if there were something beneath them that
friendship might draw out.  I am your friend, Elsie.  Tell me what I
can do to render your life happier."

"Love me!" said Elsie Venner.

What shall a man do, when a woman makes such a demand, involving such
an avowal?  It was the tenderest, cruellest, humblest moment of Mr.
Bernard's life.  He turned pale, he trembled almost, as if he had
been a woman listening to her lover's declaration.

"Elsie," he said, presently, "I so long to be of some use to you, to
have your confidence and sympathy, that I must not let you say or do
anything to put us in false relations.  I do love you, Elsie, as a
suffering sister with sorrows of her own,--as one whom I would save
at the risk of my happiness and life,--as one who needs a true friend
more than--any of all the young girls I have known.  More than this
you would not ask me to say.  You have been through excitement and
trouble lately, and it has made you feel such a need more than ever.
Give me your hand, dear Elsie, and trust me that I will be as true a
friend to you as if we were children of the same mother."

Elsie gave him her hand mechanically.  It seemed to him that a cold
aura shot from it along his arm and chilled the blood running through
his heart.  He pressed it gently, looked at her with a face full of
grave kindness and sad interest, then softly relinquished it.

It was all over with poor Elsie.  They walked almost in silence the
rest of the way.  Mr. Bernard left her at the gate of the mansion-
house, and returned with sad forebodings.  Elsie went at once to her
own room, and did not come from it at the usual hours.  At last Old
Sophy began to be alarmed about her, went to her apartment, and,
finding the door unlocked, entered cautiously.  She found Elsie lying
on her bed, her brows strongly contracted, her eyes dull, her whole
look that of great suffering.  Her first thought was that she had
been doing herself a harm by some deadly means or other.  But Elsie,
saw her fear, and reassured her.

"No," she said, "there is nothing wrong, such as you are thinking of;
I am not dying.  You may send for the Doctor; perhaps he can take the
pain from my head.  That is all I want him to do.  There is no use in
the pain, that I know of; if he can stop it, let him."

So they sent for the old Doctor.  It was not long before the solid
trot of Caustic, the old bay horse, and the crashing of the gravel
under the wheels, gave notice that the physician was driving up the
avenue.

The old Doctor was a model for visiting practitioners.  He always
came into the sick-room with a quiet, cheerful look, as if he had a
consciousness that he was bringing some sure relief with him.  The
way a patient snatches his first look at his doctor's face, to see
whether he is doomed, whether he is reprieved, whether he is
unconditionally pardoned, has really something terrible about it.  It
is only to be met by an imperturbable mask of serenity, proof against
anything and everything in a patient's aspect.  The physician whose
face reflects his patient's condition like a mirror may do well
enough to examine people for a life-insurance office, but does not
belong to the sickroom.  The old Doctor did not keep people waiting
in dread suspense, while he stayed talking about the case,--the
patient all the time thinking that he and the friends are discussing
some alarming symptom or formidable operation which he himself is by-
and-by--to hear of.

He was in Elsie's room almost before she knew he was in the house.
He came to her bedside in such a natural, quiet way, that it seemed
as if he were only a friend who had dropped in for a moment to say a
pleasant word.  Yet he was very uneasy about Elsie until he had seen
her; he never knew what might happen to her or those about her, and
came prepared for the worst.

"Sick, my child?" he said, in a very soft, low voice.

Elsie nodded, without speaking.

The Doctor took her hand,--whether with professional views, or only
in a friendly way, it would have been hard to tell.  So he sat a few
minutes, looking at her all the time with a kind of fatherly
interest, but with it all noting how she lay, how she breathed, her
color, her expression, all that teaches the practised eye so much
without a single question being asked.  He saw she was in suffering,
and said presently,

"You have pain somewhere; where is it?"

She put her hand to her head.

As she was not disposed to talk, he watched her for a while,
questioned Old Sophy shrewdly a few minutes, and so made up his mind
as to the probable cause of disturbance and the proper remedies to be
used.

Some very silly people thought the old Doctor did not believe in
medicine, because he gave less than certain poor half-taught
creatures in the smaller neighboring towns, who took advantage of
people's sickness to disgust and disturb them with all manner of ill-
smelling and ill-behaving drugs.  In truth, he hated to give anything
noxious or loathsome to those who were uncomfortable enough already,
unless he was very sure it would do good,--in which case, he never
played with drugs, but gave good, honest, efficient doses.  Sometimes
he lost a family of the more boorish sort, because they did not think
they got their money's worth out of him, unless they had something
more than a taste of everything he carried in his saddlebags.

He ordered some remedies which he thought would relieve Elsie, and
left her, saying he would call the next day, hoping to find her
better.  But the next day came, and the next, and still Elsie was on
her bed, feverish, restless, wakeful, silent.  At night she tossed
about and wandered, and it became at length apparent that there was a
settled attack, something like what they called, formerly, a "nervous
fever."

On the fourth day she was more restless than common.  One of the
women of the house came in to help to take care of her; but she
showed an aversion to her presence.

"Send me Helen Darley," she said, at last.

The old Doctor told them, that, if possible, they must indulge this
fancy of hers.  The caprices of sick people were never to be
despised, least of all of such persons as Elsie, when rendered
irritable and exacting by pain and weakness.

So a message was sent to Mr. Silas Peckham at the Apollinean
Institute, to know if he could not spare Miss Helen Darley for a few
days, if required, to give her attention to a young lady who attended
his school and who was now lying ill,--no other person than the
daughter of Dudley Venner.

A mean man never agrees to anything without deliberately turning it
over, so that he may see its dirty side, and, if he can, sweating the
coin he pays for it.  If an archangel should offer to save his soul
for sixpence, he would try to find a sixpence with a hole in it.  A
gentleman says yes to a great many things without stopping to think:
a shabby fellow is known by his caution in answering questions, for
fear of, compromising his pocket or himself.

Mr. Silas Peckham looked very grave at the request.  The dooties of
Miss Darley at the Institoot were important, very important.  He paid
her large sums of money for her time,--more than she could expect to
get in any other institootion for the edoocation of female youth.  A
deduction from her selary would be necessary, in case she should
retire from the sphere of her dooties for a season.  He should be put
to extry expense, and have to perform additional labors himself.  He
would consider of the matter.  If any arrangement could be made, he
would send word to Squire Venner's folks.

"Miss Darley," said Silas Peckham, "the' 's a message from Squire
Venner's that his daughter wants you down at the mansion-house to see
her.  She's got a fever, so they inform me.  If it's any kind of
ketchin' fever, of course you won't think of goin' near the mansion-
house.  If Doctor Kittredge says it's safe, perfec'ly safe, I can't
object to your goin', on sech conditions as seem to be fair to all'
concerned.  You will give up your pay for the whole time you are.
absent,--portions of days to be caounted as whole days.  You will be
charged with board the same as if you eat your victuals with the
household.  The victuals are of no use after they're cooked but to be
eat, and your bein' away is no savin' to our folks.  I shall charge
you a reasonable compensation for the demage to the school by the
absence of a teacher.  If Miss Crabs undertakes any dooties belongin'
to your department of instruction, she will look to you for sech
pecooniary considerations as you may agree upon between you.  On
these conditions I am willin' to give my consent to your temporary
absence from the post of dooty.  I will step down to Doctor
Kittredge's myself, and make inquiries as to the natur' of the
complaint."

Mr. Peckham took up a rusty and very narrow-brimmed hat, which he
cocked upon one side of his head, with an air peculiar to the rural
gentry.  It was the hour when the Doctor expected to be in his
office, unless he had some special call which kept him from home.

He found the Reverend Chauncy Fairweather just taking leave of the
Doctor.  His hand was on the pit of his stomach, and his countenance
was expressive of inward uneasiness.

"Shake it before using," said the Doctor; "and the sooner you make up
your mind to speak right out, the better it will be for your
digestion."

"Oh, Mr. Peckham!  Walk in, Mr. Peckham!  Nobody sick up at the
school, I hope?"

"The haalth of the school is fust-rate," replied Mr. Peckham.  "The
sitooation is uncommonly favorable to saloobrity."  (These last words
were from the Annual Report of the past year.) "Providence has spared
our female youth in a remarkable measure.  I've come with reference
to another consideration.  Dr. Kittredge, is there any ketchin'
complaint goin' about in the village?"

"Well, yes," said the Doctor, "I should say there was something of
that sort.  Measles.  Mumps.  And Sin,--that's always catching."

The old Doctor's eye twinkled; once in a while he had his little
touch of humor.

Silas Peckham slanted his eye up suspiciously at the Doctor, as if he
was getting some kind of advantage over him.  That is the way people
of his constitution are apt to take a bit of pleasantry.

"I don't mean sech things, Doctor; I mean fevers.  Is there any
ketchin' fevers--bilious, or nervous, or typus, or whatever you call
'em--now goin' round this village?  That's what I want to ascertain,
if there's no impropriety."

The old Doctor looked at Silas through his spectacles.

"Hard and sour as a green cider-apple," he thought to himself.
"No,"; he said,--"I don't know any such cases."

"What's the matter with Elsie Venner?"  asked Silas, sharply, as if
he expected to have him this time.

"A mild feverish attack, I should call it in anybody else; but she
has a peculiar constitution, and I never feel so safe about her as I
should about most people."

"Anything ketchin' about it?"  Silas asked, cunningly.

"No, indeed!" said the Doctor,--"catching?  no,--what put that into
your head, Mr. Peckham?"

"Well, Doctor," the conscientious Principal answered, "I naterally
feel a graat responsibility, a very gmaaat responsibility, for the
noomerous and lovely young ladies committed to my charge.  It has
been a question, whether one of my assistants should go, accordin' to
request, to stop with Miss Venner for a season.  Nothin' restrains my
givin' my full and free consent to her goin' but the fear lest
contagious maladies should be introdooced among those lovely female
youth.  I shall abide by your opinion,--I understan' you to say
distinc'ly, her complaint is not ketchin'?---and urge upon Miss
Darley to fulfil her dooties to a sufferin' fellow-creature at any
cost to myself and my establishment.  We shall miss her very much;
but it is a good cause, and she shall go,--and I shall trust that
Providence will enable us to spare her without permanent demage to
the interests of the Institootion."

Saying this, the excellent Principal departed, with his rusty narrow-
brimmed hat leaning over, as if it had a six-knot breeze abeam, and
its gunwale (so to speak) was dipping into his coat-collar.  He
announced the result of his inquiries to Helen, who had received a
brief note in the mean time from a poor relation of Elsie's mother,
then at the mansion-house, informing her of the critical situation of
Elsie and of her urgent desire that Helen should be with her.  She
could not hesitate.  She blushed as she thought of the comments that
might be made; but what were such considerations in a matter of life
and death?  She could not stop to make terms with Silas Peckham.  She
must go.  He might fleece her, if he would; she would not complain,--
not even to Bernard, who, she knew, would bring the Principal to
terms, if she gave the least hint of his intended extortions.

So Helen made up her bundle of clothes to be sent after her, took a
book or two with her to help her pass the time, and departed for the
Dudley mansion.  It was with a great inward effort that she undertook
the sisterly task which was thus forced upon her.  She had a kind of
terror of Elsie; and the thought of having charge of her, of being
alone with her, of coming under the full influence of those diamond
eyes,--if, indeed, their light were not dimmed by suffering and
weariness,--was one she shrank from.  But what could she do?  It
might be a turning-point in the life of the poor girl; and she must
overcome all her fears, all her repugnance, and go to her rescue.

"Is Helen come?" said Elsie, when she heard, with her fine sense
quickened by the irritability of sickness, a light footfall on the
stair, with a cadence unlike that of any inmate of the house.

"It's a strange woman's step," said Old Sophy, who, with her
exclusive love for Elsie, was naturally disposed to jealousy of a
new-comer.  "Let Ol' Sophy set at 'th' foot o' th' bed, if th' young
missis sets by th' piller,--won' y', darlin'?  The' 's nobody that's
white can love y' as th' of black woman does;--don' sen' her away,
now, there 's a dear soul!"

Elsie motioned her to sit in the place she had pointed to, and Helen
at that moment entered the room.  Dudley Venner followed her.

"She is your patient," he said, "except while the Doctor is here.
She has been longing to have you with her, and we shall expect you to
make her well in a few days."

So Helen Darley found herself established in the most unexpected
manner as an inmate of the Dudley mansion.  She sat with Elsie most
of the time, by day and by night, soothing her, and trying to enter
into her confidence and affections, if it should prove that this
strange creature was really capable of truly sympathetic emotions.

What was this unexplained something which came between her soul and
that of every other human being with whom she was in relations?
Helen perceived, or rather felt, that she had, folded up in the
depths of her being, a true womanly nature.  Through the cloud that
darkened her aspect, now and then a ray would steal forth, which,
like the smile of stern and solemn people, was all the more
impressive from its contrast with the expression she wore habitually.
It might well be that pain and fatigue had changed her aspect; but,
at any rate, Helen looked into her eyes without that nervous
agitation which their cold glitter had produced on her when they were
full of their natural light.  She felt sure that her mother must have
been a lovely, gentle woman.  There were gleams of a beautiful nature
shining through some ill-defined medium which disturbed and made them
flicker and waver, as distant images do when seen through the
rippling upward currents of heated air.  She loved, in her own way,
the old black woman, and seemed to keep up a kind of silent
communication with her, as if they did not require the use of speech.
She appeared to be tranquillized by the presence of Helen, and loved
to have her seated at the bedside.  Yet something, whatever it was,
prevented her from opening her heart to her kind companion; and even
now there were times when she would lie looking at her, with such a
still, watchful, almost dangerous expression, that Helen would sigh,
and change her place, as persons do whose breath some cunning orator
had been sucking out of them with his spongy eloquence, so that, when
he stops, they must get some air and stir about, or they feel as if
they should be half smothered and palsied.

It was too much to keep guessing what was the meaning of all this.
Helen determined to ask Old Sophy some questions which might probably
throw light upon her doubts.  She took the opportunity one evening
when Elsie was lying asleep and they were both sitting at some
distance from her bed.

"Tell me, Sophy," she said, "was Elsie always as shy as she seems to
be now, in talking with those to whom she is friendly?"

"Alway jes' so, Miss Darlin', ever sense she was little chil'.  When
she was five, six year old, she lisp some,--call me Thophy; that make
her kin' o' 'shamed, perhaps: after she grow up, she never lisp, but
she kin' o' got the way o' not talkin' much.  Fac' is, she don' like
talkin' as common gals do, 'xcep' jes' once in a while wi' some
partic'lar folks,--'n' then not much."

"How old is Elsie?"

"Eighteen year this las' September."

"How long ago did her mother die?" Helen asked, with a little
trembling in her voice.

"Eighteen year ago this October," said Old Sophy.

Helen was silent for a moment.  Then she whispered, almost
inaudibly,--for her voice appeared to fail her,

"What did her mother die of, Sophy?"

The old woman's small eyes dilated until a ring of white showed round
their beady centres.  She caught Helen by the hand and clung to it,
as if in fear.  She looked round at Elsie, who lay sleeping, as of
she might be listening.  Then she drew Helen towards her and led her
softly out of the room.

"'Sh !---'sh!" she said, as soon as they were outside the door.
"Don' never speak in this house 'bout what Elsie's mother died of!"
she said.  "Nobody never says nothin' 'bout it.  Oh, God has made
Ugly Things wi' death in their mouths, Miss Darlin', an' He knows
what they're for; but my poor Elsie!---to have her blood changed in
her before--It was in July Mistress got her death, but she liv' till
three week after my poor Elsie was born."

She could speak no more.  She had said enough.  Helen remembered the
stories she had heard on coming to the village, and among them one
referred to in an early chapter of this narrative.  All the
unaccountable looks and tastes and ways of Elsie came back to her in
the light of an ante-natal impression which had mingled an alien
element in her nature.  She knew the secret of the fascination which
looked out of her cold, glittering eyes.  She knew the significance
of the strange repulsion which she felt in her own intimate
consciousness underlying the inexplicable attraction which drew her
towards the young girl in spite of this repugnance.  She began to
look with new feelings on the contradictions in her moral nature,--
the longing for sympathy, as shown by her wishing for Helen's
company, and the impossibility of passing beyond the cold circle of
isolation within which she had her being.  The fearful truth of that
instinctive feeling of hers, that there was something not human
looking out of Elsie's eyes, came upon her with a sudden flash of
penetrating conviction.  There were two warring principles in that
superb organization and proud soul.  One made her a woman, with all a
woman's powers and longings.  The other chilled all the currents of
outlet for her emotions.  It made her tearless and mute, when another
woman would have wept and pleaded.  And it infused into her soul
something--it was cruel now to call it malice--which was still and
watchful and dangerous, which waited its opportunity, and then shot
like an arrow from its bow out of the coil of brooding premeditation.
Even those who had never seen the white scars on Dick Venner's wrist,
or heard the half-told story of her supposed attempt to do a graver
mischief, knew well enough by looking at her that she was one of the
creatures not to be tampered with,--silent in anger and swift in
vengeance.

Helen could not return to the bedside at once after this
communication.  It was with altered eyes that she must look on the
poor girl, the victim of such an unheard-of fatality.  All was
explained to her now.  But it opened such depths of solemn thought in
her awakened consciousness, that it seemed as if the whole mystery of
human life were coming up again before her for trial and judgment.
"Oh," she thought, "if, while the will lies sealed in its fountain,
it may be poisoned at its very source, so that it shall flow dark and
deadly through its whole course, who are we that we should judge our
fellow-creatures by ourselves?"  Then came the terrible question, how
far the elements themselves are capable of perverting the moral
nature: if valor, and justice, and truth, the strength of man and the
virtue of woman, may not be poisoned out of a race by the food of the
Australian in his forest, by the foul air and darkness of the
Christians cooped up in the "tenement-houses" close by those who live
in the palaces of the great cities?

She walked out into the garden, lost in thought upon these dark and
deep matters.  Presently she heard a step behind her, and Elsie's
father came up and joined her.  Since his introduction to Helen at
the distinguished tea-party given by the Widow Rowens, and before her
coming to sit with Elsie, Mr. Dudley Venner had in the most
accidental way in the world met her on several occasions: once after
church, when she happened to be caught in a slight shower and he
insisted on holding his umbrella over her on her way home;--once at a
small party at one of the mansion-houses, where the quick-eyed lady
of the house had a wonderful knack of bringing people together who
liked to see each other;--perhaps at other times and places; but of
this there is no certain evidence.

They naturally spoke of Elsie, her illness, and the aspect it had
taken.  But Helen noticed in all that Dudley Venner said about his
daughter a morbid sensitiveness, as it seemed to her, an aversion to
saying much about her physical condition or her peculiarities,
--a wish to feel and speak as a parent should, and yet a shrinking,
as if there were something about Elsie which he could not bear to
dwell upon.  She thought she saw through all this, and she could
interpret it all charitably.  There were circumstances about his
daughter which recalled the great sorrow of his life; it was not
strange that this perpetual reminder should in some degree have
modified his feelings as a father.  But what a life he must have been
leading for so many years, with this perpetual source of distress
which he could not name!  Helen knew well enough, now, the meaning of
the sadness which had left such traces in his features and tones, and
it made her feel very kindly and compassionate towards him.

So they walked over the crackling leaves in the garden, between the
lines of box breathing its fragrance of eternity;--for this is one of
the odors which carry us out of time into the abysses of the
unbeginning past; if we ever lived on another ball of stone than
this, it must be that there was box growing on it.  So they walked,
finding their way softly to each other's sorrows and sympathies, each
matching some counterpart to the other's experience of life, and
startled to see how the different, yet parallel, lessons they had
been taught by suffering had led them step by step to the same serene
acquiescence in the orderings of that Supreme Wisdom which they both
devoutly recognized.

Old Sophy was at the window and saw them walking up and down the
garden-alleys.  She watched them as her grandfather the savage
watched the figures that moved among the trees when a hostile tribe
was lurking about his mountain.

"There'll be a weddin' in the ol house," she said, "before there's
roses on them bushes ag'in.  But it won' be my poor Elsie's weddin',
'n' ol' Sophy won' be there."

When Helen prayed in the silence of her soul that evening, it was not
that Elsie's life might be spared.  She dared not ask that as a favor
of Heaven.  What could life be to her but a perpetual anguish, and to
those about her but an ever-present terror?  Might she but be so
influenced by divine grace, that what in her was most truly human,
most purely woman-like, should overcome the dark, cold, unmentionable
instinct which had pervaded her being like a subtile poison that was
all she could ask, and the rest she left to a higher wisdom and
tenderer love than her own.




CHAPTER XXIX.

THE WHITE ASH.

When Helen returned to Elsie's bedside, it was with a new and still
deeper feeling of sympathy, such as the story told by Old Sophy might
well awaken.  She understood, as never before, the singular
fascination and as singular repulsion which she had long felt in
Elsie's presence.  It had not been without a great effort that she
had forced herself to become the almost constant attendant of the
sick girl; and now she was learning, but not for the first time, the
blessed truth which so many good women have found out for themselves,
that the hardest duty bravely performed soon becomes a habit, and
tends in due time to transform itself into a pleasure.

The old Doctor was beginning to look graver, in spite of himself.
The fever, if such it was, went gently forward, wasting the young
girl's powers of resistance from day to day; yet she showed no
disposition to take nourishment, and seemed literally to be living on
air.  It was remarkable that with all this her look was almost
natural, and her features were hardly sharpened so as to suggest that
her life was burning away.  He did not like this, nor various other
unobtrusive signs of danger which his practised eye detected.  A very
small matter might turn the balance which held life and death poised
against each other. He surrounded her with precautions, that Nature
might have every opportunity of cunningly shifting the weights from
the scale of death to the scale of life, as she will often do if not
rudely disturbed or interfered with.

Little tokens of good-will and kind remembrance were constantly
coming to her from the girls in the school and the good people in the
village. Some of the mansion-house people obtained rare flowers which
they sent her, and her table was covered with fruits which tempted
her in vain.  Several of the school-girls wished to make her a basket
of their own handiwork, and, filling it with autumnal flowers, to
send it as a joint offering.  Mr. Bernard found out their project
accidentally, and, wishing to have his share in it, brought home from
one of his long walks some boughs full of variously tinted leaves,
such as were still clinging to the stricken trees.  With these he
brought also some of the already fallen leaflets of the white ash,
remarkable for their rich olive-purple color, forming a beautiful
contrast with some of the lighter-hued leaves.  It so happened that
this particular tree, the white ash, did not grow upon The Mountain,
and the leaflets were more welcome for their comparative rarity.  So
the girls made their basket, and the floor of it they covered with
the rich olive-purple leaflets.  Such late flowers as they could lay
their hands upon served to fill it, and with many kindly messages
they sent it to Miss Elsie Venner at the Dudley mansion-house.

Elsie was sitting up in her bed when it came, languid, but tranquil,
and Helen was by her, as usual, holding her hand, which was strangely
cold, Helen thought, for one who was said to have some kind of fever.
The school-girls' basket was brought in with its messages of love and
hopes for speedy recovery.  Old Sophy was delighted to see that it
pleased Elsie, and laid it on the bed before her.  Elsie began
looking at the flowers, and taking them from the basket, that she
might see the leaves.  All at once she appeared to be agitated; she
looked at the basket, then around, as if there were some fearful
presence about her which she was searching for with her eager
glances.  She took out the flowers, one by one, her breathing growing
hurried, her eyes staring, her hands trembling,--till, as she came
near the bottom of the basket, she flung out all the rest with a
hasty movement, looked upon the olive-purple leaflets as if paralyzed
for a moment, shrunk up, as it were, into herself in a curdling
terror, dashed the basket from her, and fell back senseless, with a
faint cry which chilled the blood of the startled listeners at her
bedside.

"Take it away!---take it away!---quick!" said Old Sophy, as she
hastened to her mistress's pillow.  "It 's the leaves of the tree
that was always death to her,--take it away!  She can't live wi' it
in the room!"

The poor old woman began chafing Elsie's hands, and Helen to try to
rouse her with hartshorn, while a third frightened attendant gathered
up the flowers and the basket and carried them out of the apartment,
She came to herself after a time, but exhausted and then wandering.
In her delirium she talked constantly as if she were in a cave, with
such exactness of circumstance that Helen could not doubt at all that
she had some such retreat among the rocks of The Mountain, probably
fitted up in her own fantastic way, where she sometimes hid herself
from all human eyes, and of the entrance to which she alone possessed
the secret.

All this passed away, and left her, of course, weaker than before.
But this was not the only influence the unexplained paroxysm had left
behind it.  From this time forward there was a change in her whole
expression and her manner.  The shadows ceased flitting over her
features, and the old woman, who watched her from day to day and from
hour to hour as a mother watches her child, saw the likeness she bore
to her mother coming forth more and more, as the cold glitter died
out of the diamond eyes, and the stormy scowl disappeared from the
dark brows and low forehead.

With all the kindness and indulgence her father had bestowed upon
her, Elsie had never felt that he loved her.  The reader knows well
enough what fatal recollections and associations had frozen up the
springs of natural affection in his breast.  There was nothing in the
world he would not do for Elsie.  He had sacrificed his whole life to
her.  His very seeming carelessness about restraining her was all
calculated; he knew that restraint would produce nothing but utter
alienation.  Just so far as she allowed him, he shared her studies,
her few pleasures, her thoughts; but she was essentially solitary and
uncommunicative.  No person, as was said long ago, could judge him,
because his task was not merely difficult, but simply impracticable
to human powers.  A nature like Elsie's had necessarily to be studied
by itself, and to be followed in its laws where it could not be led.

Every day, at different hours, during the whole of his daughter's
illness, Dudley Venner had sat by her, doing all he could to soothe
and please her.  Always the same thin film of some emotional non-
conductor between them; always that kind of habitual regard and
family-interest, mingled with the deepest pity on one side and a sort
of respect on the other, which never warmed into outward evidences of
affection.

It was after this occasion, when she had been so profoundly agitated
by a seemingly insignificant cause, that her father and Old Sophy
were sitting, one at one side of her bed and one at the other.  She
had fallen into a light slumber.  As they were looking at her, the
same thought came into both their minds at the same moment.  Old
Sophy spoke for both, as she said, in a low voice,

"It 's her mother's look,--it 's her mother's own face right over
again,--she never look' so before, the Lord's hand is on her!  His
will be done!"

When Elsie woke and lifted her languid eyes upon her father's face,
she saw in it a tenderness, a depth of affection, such as she
remembered at rare moments of her childhood, when she had won him to
her by some unusual gleam of sunshine in her fitful temper.

"Elsie, dear," he said, "we were thinking how much your expression
was sometimes like that of your sweet mother.  If you could but have
seen her, so as to remember her!"

The tender look and tone, the yearning of the daughter's heart for
the mother she had never seen, save only with the unfixed,
undistinguishing eyes of earliest infancy, perhaps the under-thought
that she might soon rejoin her in another state of being,--all came
upon her with a sudden overflow of feeling which broke through all
the barriers between her heart and her eyes, and Elsie wept.  It
seemed to her father as if the malign influence--evil spirit it might
almost be called--which had pervaded her being, had at last been
driven forth or exorcised, and that these tears were at once the sign
and the pledge of her redeemed nature.  But now she was to be
soothed, and not excited.  After her tears she slept again, and the
look her face wore was peaceful as never before.

Old Sophy met the Doctor at the door and told him all the
circumstances connected with the extraordinary attack from which
Elsie had suffered.  It was the purple leaves, she said.  She
remembered that Dick once brought home a branch of a tree with some
of the same leaves on it, and Elsie screamed and almost fainted then.
She, Sophy, had asked her, after she had got quiet, what it was in
the leaves that made her feel so bad.  Elsie could n't tell her,--did
n't like to speak about it,--shuddered whenever Sophy mentioned it.

This did not sound so strangely to the old Doctor as it does to some
who listen to his narrative.  He had known some curious examples of
antipathies, and remembered reading of others still more singular.
He had known those who could not bear the presence of a cat, and
recollected the story, often told, of a person's hiding one in a
chest when one of these sensitive individuals came into the room, so
as not to disturb him; but he presently began to sweat and turn pale,
and cried out that there must be a cat hid somewhere.  He knew people
who were poisoned by strawberries, by honey, by different meats, many
who could not endure cheese,--some who could not bear the smell of
roses.  If he had known all the stories in the old books, he would
have found that some have swooned and become as dead men at the smell
of a rose,--that a stout soldier has been known to turn and run at
the sight or smell of rue,--that cassia and even olive-oil have
produced deadly faintings in certain.  individuals,--in short, that
almost everything has seemed to be a poison to somebody.

"Bring me that basket, Sophy," said the old Doctor, "if you can find
it."

Sophy brought it to him,--for he had not yet entered Elsie's
apartment.

"These purple leaves are from the white ash," he said.  "You don't
know the notion that people commonly have about that tree, Sophy?"

"I know they say the Ugly Things never go where the white ash grows,"
Sophy answered.  "Oh, Doctor dear, what I'm thinkin' of a'n't true,
is it?"

The Doctor smiled sadly, but did not answer.  He went directly to
Elsie's room.  Nobody would have known by his manner that he saw any
special change in his patient.  He spoke with her as usual, made some
slight alteration in his prescriptions, and left the room with a
kind, cheerful look.  He met her father on the stairs.

"Is it as I thought?" said Dudley Veneer.

"There is everything to fear," the Doctor said, "and not much, I am
afraid, to hope.  Does not her face recall to you one that you
remember, as never before?"

"Yes," her father answered,--"oh, yes!  What is the meaning of this
change which has come over her features, and her voice, her temper,
her whole being?  Tell me, oh, tell me, what is it?  Can it be that
the curse is passing away, and my daughter is to be restored to me,--
such as her mother would have had her,--such as her mother was?"

"Walk out with me into the garden," the Doctor said, "and I will tell
you all I know and all I think about this great mystery of Elsie's
life."

They walked out together, and the Doctor began: "She has lived a
double being, as it were,--the consequence of the blight which fell
upon her in the dim period before consciousness.  You can see what
she might have been but for this.  You know that for these eighteen
years her whole existence has taken its character from that influence
which we need not name.  But you will remember that few of the lower
forms of life last as human beings do; and thus it might have been
hoped and trusted with some show of reason, as I have always
suspected you hoped and trusted, perhaps more confidently than
myself, that the lower nature which had become engrafted on the
higher would die out and leave the real woman's life she inherited to
outlive this accidental principle which had so poisoned her childhood
and youth.  I believe it is so dying out; but I am afraid,--yes, I
must say it, I fear it has involved the centres of life in its own
decay.  There is hardly any pulse at Elsie's wrist; no stimulants
seem to rouse her; and it looks as if life were slowly retreating
inwards, so that by-and-by she will sleep as those who lie down in
the cold and never wake."

Strange as it may seem, her father heard all this not without deep
sorrow, and such marks of it as his thoughtful and tranquil nature,
long schooled by suffering, claimed or permitted, but with a
resignation itself the measure of his past trials.  Dear as his
daughter might become to him, all he dared to ask of Heaven was that
she might be restored to that truer self which lay beneath her false
and adventitious being.  If he could once see that the icy lustre in
her eyes had become a soft, calm light,--that her soul was at peace
with all about her and with Him; above,--this crumb from the
children's table was enough for him, as it was for the Syro-
Phoenician woman who asked that the dark spirit might go out from her
daughter.

There was little change the next day, until all at once she said in a
clear voice that she should like to see her master at the school, Mr.
Langdon.  He came accordingly, and took the place of Helen at her
bedside.  It seemed as if Elsie had forgotten the last scene with
him.  Might it be that pride had come in, and she had sent for him
only to show how superior she had grown to the weakness which had
betrayed her into that extraordinary request, so contrary to the
instincts and usages of her sex?  Or was it that the singular change
which had come over her had involved her passionate fancy for him and
swept it away with her other habits of thought and feeling?  Or could
it be that she felt that all earthly interests were becoming of
little account to her, and wished to place herself right with one to
whom she had displayed a wayward movement of her unbalanced
imagination?  She welcomed Mr. Bernard as quietly as she had received
Helen Darley.  He colored at the recollection of that last scene,
when he came into her presence; but she smiled with perfect
tranquillity.  She did not speak to him of any apprehension; but he
saw that she looked upon herself as doomed.  So friendly, yet so calm
did she seem through all their interview, that Mr. Bernard could only
look back upon her manifestation of feeling towards him on their walk
from the school as a vagary of a mind laboring under some unnatural
excitement, and wholly at variance with the true character of Elsie
Venner as he saw her before him in her subdued, yet singular beauty.
He looked with almost scientific closeness of observation into the
diamond eyes; but that peculiar light which he knew so well was not
there.  She was the same in one sense as on that first day when he
had seen her coiling and uncoiling her golden chain; yet how
different in every aspect which revealed her state of mind and
emotion!  Something of tenderness there was, perhaps, in her tone
towards him; she would not have sent for him, had she not felt more
than an ordinary interest in him.  But through the whole of his visit
she never lost her gracious self-possession.  The Dudley race might
well be proud of the last of its daughters, as she lay dying, but
unconquered by the feeling of the present or the fear of the future.

As for Mr. Bernard, he found it very hard to look upon her, and
listen to her unmoved.  There was nothing that reminded him of the
stormy--browed, almost savage girl he remembered in her fierce
loveliness,--nothing of all her singularities of air and of costume.
Nothing?  Yes, one thing.  Weak and suffering as she was, she had
never parted with one particular ornament, such as a sick person
would naturally, as it might be supposed, get rid of at once.  The
golden cord which she wore round her neck at the great party was
still there.  A bracelet was lying by her pillow; she had unclasped
it from her wrist.

Before Mr. Bernard left her, she said,

"I shall never see you again.  Some time or other, perhaps, you will
mention my name to one whom you love.  Give her this from your
scholar and friend Elsie."

He took the bracelet, raised her hand to his lips, then turned his
face away; in that moment he was the weaker of the two.

"Good-bye," she said; "thank you for coming."

His voice died away in his throat, as he tried to answer her.  She
followed him with her eyes as he passed from her sight through the
door, and when it closed after him sobbed tremulously once or twice,
but stilled herself, and met Helen, as she entered, with a composed
countenance.

"I have had a very pleasant visit from Mr. Langdon," Elsie said.
"Sit by me, Helen, awhile without speaking; I should like to sleep,
if I can,--and to dream."




CHAPTER XXX.

THE GOLDEN CORD IS LOOSED.

The Reverend Chauncy Fairweather, hearing that his parishioner's
daughter, Elsie, was very ill, could do nothing less than come to the
mansion-house and tender such consolations as he was master of.  It
was rather remarkable that the old Doctor did not exactly approve of
his visit.  He thought that company of every sort might be injurious
in her weak state.  He was of opinion that Mr. Fairweather, though
greatly interested in religious matters, was not the most sympathetic
person that could be found; in fact, the old Doctor thought he was
too much taken up with his own interests for eternity to give himself
quite 'so heartily to the need of other people as some persons got up
on a rather more generous scale (our good neighbor Dr. Honeywood, for
instance) could do.  However, all these things had better be arranged
to suit her wants; if she would like to talk with a clergyman, she
had a great deal better see one as often as she liked, and run the
risk of the excitement, than have a hidden wish for such a visit and
perhaps find herself too weak to see him by-and-by.

The old Doctor knew by sad experience that dreadful mistake against
which all medical practitioners should be warned.  His experience may
well be a guide for others.  Do not overlook the desire for spiritual
advice and consolation which patients sometimes feel, and, with the
frightful mauvaise honte peculiar to Protestantism, alone among all
human beliefs, are ashamed to tell.  As a part of medical treatment,
it is the physician's business to detect the hidden longing for the
food of the soul, as much as for any form of bodily nourishment.
Especially in the higher walks of society, where this unutterably
miserable false shame of Protestantism acts in proportion to the
general acuteness of the cultivated sensibilities, let no
unwillingness to suggest the sick person's real need suffer him to
languish between his want and his morbid sensitiveness.  What an
infinite advantage the Mussulmans and the Catholics have over many of
our more exclusively spiritual sects in the way they keep their
religion always by them and never blush for it!  And besides this
spiritual longing, we should never forget that

          "On some fond breast the parting soul relies,"

and the minister of religion, in addition to the sympathetic nature
which we have a right to demand in him, has trained himself to the
art of entering into the feelings of others.

The reader must pardon this digression, which introduces the visit of
the Reverend Chauncy Fairweather to Elsie Veneer.  It was mentioned
to her that he would like to call and see how she was, and she
consented,--not with much apparent interest, for she had reasons of
her own for not feeling any very deep conviction of his sympathy for
persons in sorrow.  But he came, and worked the conversation round to
religion, and confused her with his hybrid notions, half made up of
what he had been believing and teaching all his life, and half of the
new doctrines which he had veneered upon the surface of his old
belief.  He got so far as to make a prayer with her,--a cool, well-
guarded prayer, which compromised his faith as little as possible,
and which, if devotion were a game played against Providence, might
have been considered a cautious and sagacious move.

When he had gone, Elsie called Old Sophy to her.

"Sophy," she said, "don't let them send that cold hearted man to me
any more.  If your old minister comes--to see you, I should like to
hear him talk.  He looks as if he cared for everybody, and would care
for me.  And, Sophy, if I should die one of these days, I should like
to have that old minister come and say whatever is to be said over
me.  It would comfort Dudley more, I know, than to have that hard man
here, when you're in trouble, for some of you will be sorry when I'm
gone,--won't you, Sophy?"

The poor old black.  woman could not stand this question.  The cold
minister had frozen Elsie until she felt as if nobody cared for her
or would regret her,--and her question had betrayed this momentary
feeling.

"Don' talk so!  don' talk so, darlin'!" she cried, passionately.
"When you go, Ol' Sophy'll go; 'n' where you go, Ol' Sophy'll go: 'n'
we'll both go t' th' place where th' Lord takes care of all his
children, whether their faces are white or black.  Oh, darlin',
darlin'!  if th' Lord should let me die firs', you shall fin' all
ready for you when you come after me.  On'y don' go 'n' leave poor
Ol' Sophy all 'lone in th' world!"

Helen came in at this moment and quieted the old woman with a look.
Such scenes were just what were most dangerous, in the state in which
Elsie was lying: but that is one of the ways in which an affectionate
friend sometimes unconsciously wears out the life which a hired
nurse, thinking of nothing but her regular duties and her wages,
would have spared from all emotional fatigue.

The change which had come over Elsie's disposition was itself the
cause of new excitements.  How was it possible that her father could
keep away from her, now that she was coming back to the nature and
the very look of her mother, the bride of his youth?  How was it
possible to refuse her, when she said to Old Sophy, that she should
like to have her minister come in and sit by her, even though his
presence might perhaps prove a new source of excitement?

But the Reverend Doctor did come and sit by her, and spoke such
soothing words to her, words of such peace and consolation, that from
that hour she was tranquil as never before.  All true hearts are
alike in the hour of need; the Catholic has a reserved fund of faith
for his fellow-creature's trying moment, and the Calvinist reveals
those springs of human brotherhood and charity in his soul which are
only covered over by the iron tables inscribed with the harder dogmas
of his creed.  It was enough that the Reverend Doctor knew all
Elsie's history.  He could not judge her by any formula, like those
which have been moulded by past ages out of their ignorance.  He did
not talk with her as if she were an outside sinner worse than
himself.  He found a bruised and languishing soul, and bound up its
wounds.  A blessed office,--one which is confined to no sect or
creed, but which good men in all times, under various names and with
varying ministries, to suit the need of each age, of each race, of
each individual soul, have come forward to discharge for their
suffering fellow-creatures.

After this there was little change in Elsie, except that her heart
beat more feebly every day,--so that the old Doctor himself, with all
his experience, could see nothing to account for the gradual failing
of the powers of life, and yet could find no remedy which seemed to
arrest its progress in the smallest degree.

"Be very careful," he said, "that she is not allowed to make any
muscular exertion.  Any such effort, when a person is so enfeebled,
may stop the heart in a moment; and if it stops, it will never move
again."

Helen enforced this rule with the greatest care.  Elsie was hardly
allowed to move her hand or to speak above a whisper.  It seemed to
be mainly the question now, whether this trembling flame of life
would be blown out by some light breath of air, or whether it could
be so nursed and sheltered by the hollow of these watchful hands that
it would have a chance to kindle to its natural brightness.

--Her father came in to sit with her in the evening.  He had never
talked so freely with her as during the hour he had passed at her
bedside, telling her little circumstances of her mother's life,
living over with her all that was pleasant in the past, and trying to
encourage her with some cheerful gleams of hope for the future.  A
faint smile played over her face, but she did not answer his
encouraging suggestions.  The hour came for him to leave her with
those who watched by her.

"Good-night, my dear child," he said, and stooping down, kissed her
cheek.

Elsie rose by a sudden effort, threw her arms round his neck, kissed
him, and said, "Good-night, my dear father!"

The suddenness of her movement had taken him by surprise, or he would
have checked so dangerous an effort.  It was too late now.  Her arms
slid away from him like lifeless weights,--her head fell back upon
her pillow,--along sigh breathed through her lips.

"She is faint," said Helen, doubtfully; "bring me the hartshorn,
Sophy."

The old woman had started from her place, and was now leaning over
her, looking in her face, and listening for the sound of her
breathing.

"She 's dead!  Elsie 's dead!  My darlin 's dead!"  she cried aloud,
filling the room with her utterance of anguish.

Dudley Venner drew her away and silenced her with a voice of
authority, while Helen and an assistant plied their restoratives.  It
was all in vain.

The solemn tidings passed from the chamber of death through the
family.  The daughter, the hope of that old and honored house, was
dead in the freshness of her youth, and the home of its solitary
representative was hereafter doubly desolate.

A messenger rode hastily out of the avenue.  A little after this the
people of the village and the outlying farm-houses were startled by
the sound of a bell.

One,--two,--three,--four,

They stopped in every house, as far as the wavering vibrations
reached, and listened

five,--six,--seven,--

It was not the little child which had been lying so long at the point
of death; that could not be more than three or four years old

eight,--nine,--ten,--and so on to fifteen, sixteen,--seventeen,--
eighteen

The pulsations seemed to keep on,--but it was the brain, and not the
bell, that was throbbing now.

"Elsie 's dead!" was the exclamation at a hundred firesides.

"Eighteen year old," said old Widow Peake, rising from her chair.
"Eighteen year ago I laid two gold eagles on her mother's eyes,--he
wouldn't have anything but gold touch her eyelids,--and now Elsie's
to be straightened,--the Lord have mercy on her poor sinful soul!"

Dudley Venner prayed that night that he might be forgiven, if he had
failed in any act of duty or kindness to this unfortunate child of
his, now freed from all the woes born with her and so long poisoning
her soul.  He thanked God for the brief interval of peace which had
been granted her, for the sweet communion they had enjoyed in these
last days, and for the hope of meeting her with that other lost
friend in a better world.

Helen mingled a few broken thanks and petitions with her tears:
thanks that she had been permitted to share the last days and hours
of this poor sister in sorrow; petitions that the grief of
bereavement might be lightened to the lonely parent and the faithful
old servant.

Old Sophy said almost nothing, but sat day and night by her dead
darling.  But sometimes her anguish would find an outlet in strange
sounds, something between a cry and a musical note,--such as noise
had ever heard her utter before.  These were old remembrances surging
up from her childish days, coming through her mother from the
cannibal chief, her grandfather,--death-wails, such as they sing in
the mountains of Western Africa, when they see the fires on distant
hill-sides and know that their own wives and children are undergoing
the fate of captives.

The time came when Elsie was to be laid by her mother in the small
square marked by the white stone.

It was not unwillingly that the Reverend Chauncy Fairweather had
relinquished the duty of conducting the service to the Reverend
Doctor Honeywood, in accordance with Elsie's request.  He could not,
by any reasoning, reconcile his present way of thinking with a hope
for the future of his unfortunate parishioner.  Any good old Roman
Catholic priest, born and bred to his faith and his business, would
have found a loophole into some kind of heaven for her, by virtue of
his doctrine of "invincible ignorance," or other special proviso; but
a recent convert cannot enter into the working conditions of his new
creed.  Beliefs must be lived in for a good while, before they
accommodate themselves to the soul's wants, and wear loose enough to
be comfortable.

The Reverend Doctor had no such scruples.  Like thousands of those
who are classed nominally with the despairing believers, he had never
prayed over a departed brother or sister without feeling and
expressing a guarded hope that there was mercy in store for the poor
sinner, whom parents, wives, children, brothers and sisters could not
bear to give up to utter ruin without a word,--and would not, as he
knew full well, in virtue of that human love and sympathy which
nothing can ever extinguish.  And in this poor Elsie's history he
could read nothing which the tears of the recording angel might not
wash away.  As the good physician of the place knew the diseases that
assailed the bodies of men and women, so he had learned the mysteries
of the sickness of the soul.

So many wished to look upon Elsie's face once more, that her father
would not deny them; nay, he was pleased that those who remembered
her living should see her in the still beauty of death.  Helen and
those with her arrayed her for this farewell-view.  All was ready for
the sad or curious eyes which were to look upon her.  There 'was no
painful change to be concealed by any artifice.  Even her round neck
was left uncovered, that she might be more like one who slept.  Only
the golden cord was left in its place: some searching eye might
detect a trace of that birthmark which it was whispered she had
always worn a necklace to conceal.

At the last moment, when all the preparations were completed, Old
Sophy stooped over her, and, with trembling hand, loosed the golden
cord.  She looked intently; for some little space: there was no shade
nor blemish where the ring of gold had encircled her throat.  She
took it gently away and laid it in the casket which held her
ornaments.

"The Lord be praised!" the old woman cried, aloud.  "He has taken
away the mark that was on her; she's fit to meet his holy angels
now!"

So Elsie lay for hours in the great room, in a kind of state, with
flowers all about her,--her black hair braided as in life,--her brows
smooth, as if they had never known the scowl of passion,--and on her
lips the faint smile with which she had uttered her last "Good--
night."  The young girls from the school looked at her, one after
another, and passed on, sobbing, carrying in their hearts the picture
that would be with them all their days.  The great people of the
place were all there with their silent sympathy.  The lesser kind of
gentry, and many of the plainer folk of the village, half-pleased to
find themselves passing beneath the stately portico of the ancient
mansion-house, crowded in, until the ample rooms were overflowing.
All the friends whose acquaintance we have made were there, and many
from remoter villages and towns.

There was a deep silence at last.  The hour had come for the parting
words to be spoken over the dead.  The good old minister's voice rose
out of the stillness, subdued and tremulous at first, but growing
firmer and clearer as he went on, until it reached the ears of the
visitors who were in the far, desolate chambers, looking at the
pictured hangings and the old dusty portraits.  He did not tell her
story in his prayer.  He only spoke of our dear departed sister as
one of many whom Providence in its wisdom has seen fit to bring under
bondage from their cradles.  It was not for us to judge them by any
standard of our own.  He who made the heart alone knew the
infirmities it inherited or acquired.  For all that our dear sister
had presented that was interesting and attractive in her character we
were to be grateful; for whatever was dark or inexplicable we must
trust that the deep shadow which rested on the twilight dawn of her
being might render a reason before the bar of Omniscience; for the
grace which had lightened her last days we should pour out our hearts
in thankful acknowledgment.  From the life and the death of this our
dear sister we should learn a lesson of patience with our fellow-
creatures in their inborn peculiarities, of charity in judging what
seem to us wilful faults of character, of hope and trust, that, by
sickness or affliction, or such inevitable discipline as life must
always bring with it, if by no gentler means, the soul which had been
left by Nature to wander into the path of error and of suffering
might be reclaimed and restored to its true aim, and so led on by
divine grace to its eternal welfare.  He closed his prayer by
commending each member of the afflicted family to the divine
blessing.

Then all at once rose the clear sound of the girls' voices, in the
sweet, sad melody of a funeral hymn,--one of those which Elsie had
marked, as if prophetically, among her own favorites.

And so they laid her in the earth, and showered down flowers upon
her, and filled her grave, and covered it with green sods.  By the
side of it was another oblong ridge, with a white stone standing at
its head.  Mr. Bernard looked upon it, as he came close to the place
where Elsie was laid, and read the inscription,

                         CATALINA

                  WIFE TO DUDLEY VENNER

                          DIED
                    OCTOBER 13TH 1840

                      AGED XX YEARS

A gentle rain fell on the turf after it was laid.  This was the
beginning of a long and dreary autumnal storm, a deferred
"equinoctial," as many considered it.  The mountain streams were all
swollen and turbulent, and the steep declivities were furrowed in
every direction by new channels.  It made the house seem doubly
desolate to hear the wind howling and the rain beating upon the
roofs.  The poor relation who was staying at the house would insist
on Helen's remaining a few days: Old Sophy was in such a condition,
that it kept her in continual anxiety, and there were many cares
which Helen could take off from her.

The old black woman's life was buried in her darling's grave.  She
did nothing but moan and lament for her.  At night she was restless,
and would get up and wander to Elsie's apartment and look for her and
call her by name.  At other times she would lie awake and listen to
the wind and the rain,--sometimes with such a wild look upon her
face, and with such sudden starts and exclamations, that it seemed as
if she heard spirit-voices and were answering the whispers of unseen
visitants.  With all this were mingled hints of her old
superstition,--forebodings of something fearful about to happen,--
perhaps the great final catastrophe of all things, according to the
prediction current in the kitchens of Rockland.

"Hark!" Old Sophy would say,--"don' you hear th' crackin' 'n' th'
snappin' up in Th' Mountain, 'n' th' rollin' o' th' big stones?  The'
's somethin' stirrin' among th' rocks; I hear th' soun' of it in th'
night, when th' wind has stopped blowin'.  Oh, stay by me a little
while, Miss Darlin'!  stay by me!  for it's th' Las' Day, maybe,
that's close on us, 'n' I feel as if I could n' meet th' Lord all
alone!"

It was curious,--but Helen did certainly recognize sounds, during the
lull of the storm, which were not of falling rain or running
streams,--short snapping sounds, as of tense cords breaking,--long
uneven sounds, as of masses rolling down steep declivities.  But the
morning came as usual; and as the others said nothing of these
singular noises, Helen did not think it necessary to speak of them.
All day long she and the humble relative of Elsie's mother, who had
appeared as poor relations are wont to in the great prises of life,
were busy in arranging the disordered house, and looking over the
various objects which Elsie's singular tastes had brought together,
to dispose of them as her father might direct.  They all met together
at the usual hour for tea.  One of the servants came in, looking very
blank, and said to the poor relation,

"The well is gone dry; we have nothing but rainwater."

Dudley Venner's countenance changed; he sprang to, his feet and went
to--assure himself of the fact, and, if he could, of the reason of
it.  For a well to dry up during such a rain-storm was
extraordinary,--it was ominous.

He came back, looking very anxious.

"Did any of you notice any remarkable sounds last night," he said,--
"or this morning?  Hark!  do you hear anything now?"

They listened in perfect silence for a few moments.  Then there came
a short cracking sound, and two or three snaps, as of parting cords.

Dudley Venner called all his household together.

"We are in danger here, as I think, to-night," he said,--"not very
great danger, perhaps, but it is a risk I do not wish you to run.
These heavy rains have loosed some of the rocks above, and they may
come down and endanger the house.  Harness the horses, Elbridge, and
take all the family away.  Miss Darley will go to the Institute; the
others will pass the night at the Mountain House.  I shall stay here,
myself: it is not at all likely that anything will come of these
warnings; but if there should, I choose to be there and take my
chance."

It needs little, generally, to frighten servants, and they were all
ready enough to go.  The poor relation was one of the timid sort, and
was terribly uneasy to be got out of the house.  This left no
alternative, of course, for Helen, but to go also.  They all urged
upon Dudley Veneer to go with them: if there was danger, why should
he remain to risk it, when he sent away the others?

Old Sophy said nothing until the time came for her to go with the
second of Elbridge's carriage-loads.

"Come, Sophy," said Dudley Veneer, "get your things and go.  They
will take good care of you at the Mountain House; and when we have
made sure that there is no real danger, you shall come back at once."

"No, Masse!"  Sophy answered.  "I've seen Elsie into th' ground, 'n'
I a'n't goin' away to come back 'n' fin' Masse Veneer buried under
th' rocks.  My darlin' 's gone; 'n' now, if Masse goes, 'n' th' of
place goes, it's time for Ol' Sophy to go, too.  No, Masse Veneer,
we'll both stay in th' of mansion 'n' wait for th' Lord!"

Nothing could change the old woman's determination; and her master,
who only feared, but did not really expect the long-deferred
catastrophe, was obliged to consent to her staying.  The sudden
drying of the well at such a time was the most alarming sign; for he
remembered that the same thing had been observed just before great
mountain-slides.  This long rain, too, was just the kind of cause
which was likely to loosen the strata of rock piled up in the ledges;
if the dreaded event should ever come to pass, it would be at such a
time.

He paced his chamber uneasily until long past midnight.  If the
morning came without accident, he meant to have a careful examination
made of all the rents and fissures above, of their direction and
extent, and especially whether, in case of a mountain-slide, the huge
masses would be like to reach so far to the east and so low down the
declivity as the mansion.

At two o'clock in the morning he was dozing in his chair.  Old Sophy
had lain down on her bed, and was muttering in troubled dreams.

All at once a loud crash seemed to rend the very heavens above them:
a crack as of the thunder that follows close upon the bolt,--a
rending and crashing as of a forest snapped through all its stems,
torn, twisted, splintered, dragged with all its ragged boughs into
one chaotic ruin.  The ground trembled under them as in an
earthquake; the old mansion shuddered so that all its windows
chattered in their casements; the great chimney shook off its heavy
cap-stones, which came down on the roof with resounding concussions;
and the echoes of The Mountain roared and bellowed in long
reduplication, as if its whole foundations were rent, and this were
the terrible voice of its dissolution.

Dudley Venner rose from his chair, folded his arms, and awaited his
fate.  There was no knowing where to look for safety; and he
remembered too well the story of the family that was lost by rushing
out of the house, and so hurrying into the very jaws of death.

He had stood thus but for a moment, when he heard the voice of Old
Sophy in a wild cry of terror:

"It's th' Las' Day!  It's th' Las' Day!  The Lord is comin' to take
us all!"

"Sophy!"  he called; but she did not hear him or heed him, and rushed
out of the house.

The worst danger was over.  If they were to be destroyed, it would
necessarily be in a few seconds from the first thrill of the terrible
convulsion.  He waited in awful suspense, but calm.  Not more than
one or two minutes could have passed before the frightful tumult and
all its sounding echoes had ceased.  He called Old Sophy; but she did
not answer.  He went to the western window and looked forth into the
darkness.  He could not distinguish the outlines of the landscape,
but the white stone was clearly visible, and by its side the new-made
mound.  Nay, what was that which obscured its outline, in shape like
a human figure?  He flung open the window and sprang through.  It was
all that there was left of poor Old Sophy, stretched out lifeless,
upon her darling's grave.

He had scarcely composed her limbs and drawn the sheet over her, when
the neighbors began to arrive from all directions.  Each was
expecting to hear of houses overwhelmed and families destroyed; but
each came with the story that his own household was safe.  It was not
until the morning dawned that the true nature and extent of the
sudden movement was ascertained.  A great seam had opened above the
long cliff, and the terrible Rattlesnake Ledge, with all its
envenomed reptiles, its dark fissures and black caverns, was buried
forever beneath a mighty incumbent mass of ruin.




CHAPTER XXXI.

MR. SILAS PECKHAM RENDERS HIS ACCOUNT.

The morning rose clear and bright.  The long storm was over, and the
calm autumnal sunshine was now to return, with all its infinite
repose and sweetness.  With the earliest dawn exploring parties were
out in every direction along the southern slope of The Mountain,
tracing the ravages of the great slide and the track it had followed.
It proved to be not so much a slide as the breaking off and falling
of a vast line of cliff, including the dreaded Ledge.  It had folded
over like the leaves of a half-opened book when they close, crushing
the trees below, piling its ruins in a glacis at the foot of what had
been the overhanging wall of the cliff, and filling up that deep
cavity above the mansion-house which bore the ill-omened name of Dead
Man's Hollow.  This it was which had saved the Dudley mansion.  The
falling masses, or huge fragments breaking off from them, would have
swept the house and all around it to destruction but for this deep
shelving dell, into which the stream of ruin was happily directed.
It was, indeed, one of Nature's conservative revolutions; for the
fallen masses made a kind oz shelf, which interposed a level break
between the inclined planes above and below it, so that the
nightmare-fancies of the dwellers in the Dudley mansion, and in many
other residences under the shadow of The Mountain, need not keep them
lying awake hereafter to listen for the snapping of roots and the
splitting of the rocks above them.

Twenty-four hours after the falling of the cliff, it seemed as if it
had happened ages ago.  The new fact had fitted itself in with all
the old predictions, forebodings, fears, and acquired the solidarity
belonging to all events which have slipped out of the fingers of Time
and dissolved in the antecedent eternity.

Old Sophy was lying dead in the Dudley mansion.  If there were tears
shed for her, they could not be bitter ones; for she had lived out
her full measure of days, and gone--who could help fondly believing
it?--to rejoin her beloved mistress.  They made a place for her at
the foot of the two mounds.  It was thus she would have chosen to
sleep, and not to have wronged her humble devotion in life by asking
to lie at the side of those whom she had served so long and
faithfully.  There were very few present at the simple ceremony.
Helen Darley was one of these few.  The old black woman had been her
companion in all the kind offices of which she had been the
ministering angel to Elsie.

After it was all over, Helen was leaving with the rest, when Dudley
Veneer begged her to stay a little, and he would send her back: it
was a long walk; besides, he wished to say some things to her, which
he had not had the opportunity of speaking.  Of course Helen could
not refuse him; there must be many thoughts coming into his mind
which he would wish to share with her who had known his daughter so
long and been with filer in her last days.

She returned into the great parlor with the wrought cornices and the
medallion-portraits on the ceiling.

"I am now alone in the world," Dudley Veneer said.

Helen must have known that before he spoke.  But the tone in which he
said it had so much meaning, that she could not find a word to answer
him with.  They sat in silence, which the old tall clock counted out
in long seconds; but it was silence which meant more than any words
they had ever spoken.

"Alone in the world.  Helen, the freshness of my life is gone, and
there is little left of the few graces which in my younger days might
have fitted me to win the love of women.  Listen to me,--kindly, if
you can; forgive me, at least.  Half my life has been passed in
constant fear and anguish, without any near friend to share my
trials.  My task is done now; my fears have ceased to prey upon me;
the sharpness of early sorrows has yielded something of its edge to
time.  You have bound me to you by gratitude in the tender care you
have taken of my poor child.  More than this.  I must tell you all
now, out of the depth of this trouble through which I am passing.  I
have loved you from the moment we first met; and if my life has
anything left worth accepting, it is yours.  Will you take the
offered gift?"

Helen looked in his face, surprised, bewildered.

"This is not for me,--not for me," she said.  "I am but a poor faded
flower, not worth the gathering, of such a one as you.  No, no,--I
have been bred to humble toil all my days, and I could not be to you
what you ought to ask.  I am accustomed to a kind of loneliness and
self-dependence.  I have seen nothing, almost, of the world, such as
you were born to move in.  Leave me to my obscure place and duties; I
shall at least have peace;--and you--you will surely find in due time
some one better fitted by Nature and training to make you happy."

"No, Miss Darley!  "Dudley Venner said, almost sternly.  "You must
not speak to a man, who has lived through my experiences, of looking
about for a new choice after his heart has once chosen.  Say that you
can never love me; say that I have lived too long to share your young
life; say that sorrow has left nothing in me for Love to find his
pleasure in; but do not mock me with the hope of a new affection for
some unknown object.  The first look of yours brought me to your
side.  The first tone of your voice sunk into my heart.  From this
moment my life must wither out or bloom anew.  My home is desolate.
Come under my roof and make it bright once more,--share my life with
me,--or I shall give the halls of the old mansion to the bats and the
owls, and wander forth alone without a hope or a friend!"

To find herself with a man's future at the disposal of a single word
of hers!---a man like this, too, with a fascination for her against
which she had tried to shut her heart, feeling that he lived in
another sphere than hers, working as she was for her bread a poor
operative in the factory of a hard master and jealous overseer, the
salaried drudge of Mr. Silas Peckham!  Why, she had thought he was
grateful to her as a friend of his daughter; she had even pleased
herself with the feeling that he liked her, in her humble place, as a
woman of some cultivation and many sympathetic points of relation
with himself; but that he loved her,--that this deep, fine nature, in
a man so far removed from her in outward circumstance, should have
found its counterpart in one whom life had treated so coldly as
herself,--that Dudley Venner should stake his happiness on a breath
of hers,--poor Helen Darley's,---it was all a surprise, a confusion,
a kind of fear not wholly fearful.  Ah, me!  women know what it is,
that mist over the eyes, that trembling in the limbs, that faltering
of the voice, that sweet, shame-faced, unspoken confession of
weakness which does not wish to be strong, that sudden overflow in
the soul where thoughts loose their hold on each other and swim
single and helpless in the flood of emotion,--women know what it is!

No doubt she was a little frightened and a good deal bewildered, and
that her sympathies were warmly excited for a friend to whom she had
been brought so near, and whose loneliness she saw and pitied.  She
lost that calm self-possession she had hoped to maintain.

"If I thought that I could make you happy,--if I should speak from my
heart, and not my reason,--I am but a weak woman,--yet if I can be to
you--What can I say?"

What more could this poor, dear Helen say?


"Elbridge, harness the horses and take Miss Darley back to the
school."

What conversation had taken place since Helen's rhetorical failure is
not recorded in the minutes from which this narrative is constructed.
But when the man who had been summoned had gone to get the carriage
ready, Helen resumed something she had been speaking of.

"Not for the world.  Everything must go on just as it has gone on,
for the present.  There are proprieties to be consulted.  I cannot be
hard with you, that out of your very affliction has sprung this--this
well--you must name it for me,--but the world will never listen to
explanations.  I am to be Helen Darley, lady assistant in Mr. Silas
Peckham's school, as long as I see fit to hold my office.  And I mean
to attend to my scholars just as before; so that I shall have very
little time for visiting or seeing company.  I believe, though, you
are one of the Trustees and a Member of the Examining Committee; so
that, if you should happen to visit the school, I shall try to be
civil to you."

Every lady sees, of course, that Helen was quite right; but perhaps
here and there one will think that Dudley Venner was all wrong,--that
he was too hasty,--that he should have been too full of his recent
grief for such a confession as he has just made, and the passion from
which it sprung.  Perhaps they do not understand the sudden recoil of
a strong nature long compressed.  Perhaps they have not studied the
mystery of allotropism in the emotions of the human heart.  Go to the
nearest chemist and ask him to show you some of the dark-red
phosphorus which will not burn without fierce heating, but at
500 deg. Fahrenheit, changes back again to the inflammable substance
we know so well.  Grief seems more like ashes than like fire; but as
grief has been love once, so it may become love again.  This is
emotional allotropism.

Helen rode back to the Institute and inquired for Mr. Peckham. She
had not seen him during the brief interval between her departure from
the mansion-house and her return to Old Sophy's funeral.  There were
various questions about the school she wished to ask.

"Oh, how's your haalth, Miss Darley?" Silas began.  "We've missed you
consid'able.  Glad to see you back at the post of dooty.  Hope the
Squire treated you hahnsomely,--liberal pecooniary compensation,
--hey?  A'n't much of a loser, I guess, by acceptin' his
propositions?"

Helen blushed at this last question, as if Silas had meant something
by it beyond asking what money she had received; but his own
double-meaning expression and her blush were too nice points for him
to have taken cognizance of.  He was engaged in a mental calculation
as to the amount of the deduction he should make under the head of
"demage to the institootion,"--this depending somewhat on that of the
"pecooniary compensation" she might have received for her services as
the friend of Elsie Venner.

So Helen slid back at once into her routine, the same faithful,
patient creature she had always been.  But what was this new light
which seemed to have kindled in her eyes?  What was this look of
peace, which nothing could disturb, which smiled serenely through all
the little meannesses with which the daily life of the educational
factory surrounded her, which not only made her seem resigned, but
overflowed all her features with a thoughtful, subdued happiness? Mr.
Bernard did not know,--perhaps he did not guess.  The inmates of the
Dudley mansion were not scandalized by any mysterious visits of a
veiled or unveiled lady.  The vibrating tongues of the "female youth"
of the Institute were not set in motion by the standing of an
equipage at the gate, waiting for their lady-teacher.  The servants
at the mansion did not convey numerous letters with superscriptions
in a bold, manly hand, sealed with the arms of a well-known house,
and directed to Miss Helen Darley; nor, on the other hand, did Hiram,
the man from the lean streak in New Hampshire, carry sweet-smelling,
rose-hued, many-layered, criss-crossed, fine-stitch-lettered packages
of note-paper directed to Dudley Venner, Esq., and all too scanty to
hold that incredible expansion of the famous three words which a
woman was born to say,--that perpetual miracle which astonishes all
the go-betweens who wear their shoes out in carrying a woman's
infinite variations on the theme

"I love you."

But the reader must remember that there are walks in country-towns
where people are liable to meet by accident, and that the hollow of
an old tree has served the purpose of a post-office sometimes; so
that he has her choice (to divide the pronouns impartially) of
various hypotheses to account for the new glory of happiness which
seemed to have irradiated our poor Helen's features, as if her dreary
life were awakening in the dawn of a blessed future.

With all the alleviations which have been hinted at, Mr. Dudley
Venner thought that the days and the weeks had never moved so slowly
as through the last period of the autumn that was passing.  Elsie had
been a perpetual source of anxiety to him, but still she had been a
companion.  He could not mourn for her; for he felt that she was
safer with her mother, in that world where there are no more sorrows
and dangers, than she could have been with him.  But as he sat at his
window and looked at the three mounds, the loneliness of the great
house made it seem more like the sepulchre than these narrow
dwellings where his beloved and her daughter lay close to each other,
side by side,--Catalina, the bride of his youth, and Elsie, the child
whom he had nurtured, with poor Old Sophy, who had followed them like
a black shadow, at their feet, under the same soft turf, sprinkled
with the brown autumnal leaves.  It was not good for him to be thus
alone.  How should he ever live through the long months of November
and December?

The months of November and December did, in some way or other, get
rid of themselves at last, bringing with them the usual events of
village-life and a few unusual ones.  Some of the geologists had been
up to look at the great slide, of which they gave those prolix
accounts which everybody remembers who read the scientific journals
of the time.  The engineers reported that there was little
probability of any further convulsion along the line of rocks which
overhung the more thickly settled part of the town.  The naturalists
drew up a paper on the "Probable Extinction of the Crotalus Durissus
in the Township of Rockland."  The engagement of the Widow Rowens to
a Little Millionville merchant was announced,--"Sudding 'n'
onexpected," Widow Leech said,--"waalthy, or she wouldn't ha' looked
at him,--fifty year old, if he is a day, 'n' hu'n't got a white hair
in his head."  The Reverend Chauncy Fairweather had publicly
announced that he was going to join the Roman Catholic communion,--
not so much to the surprise or consternation of the religious world
as he had supposed.  Several old ladies forthwith proclaimed their
intention of following him; but, as one or two of them were deaf, and
another had been threatened with an attack of that mild, but
obstinate complaint, dementia senilis, many thought it was not so
much the force of his arguments as a kind of tendency to jump as the
bellwether jumps, well known in flocks not included in the Christian
fold.  His bereaved congregation immediately began pulling candidates
on and off, like new boots, on trial.  Some pinched in tender places;
some were too loose; some were too square-toed; some were too coarse,
and did n't please; some were too thin, and would n't last;--in
short, they could n't possibly find a fit.  At last, people began to
drop in to hear old Doctor Honeywood.  They were quite surprised to
find what a human old gentleman he was, and went back and told the
others, that, instead of being a case of confluent sectarianism, as
they supposed, the good old minister had been so well vaccinated with
charitable virus that he was now a true, open-souled Christian of the
mildest type.  The end of all which was, that the liberal people went
over to the old minister almost in a body, just at the time that
Deacon Shearer and the "Vinegar-Bible" party split off, and that not
long afterwards they sold their own meeting-house to the
malecontents, so that Deacon Soper used often to remind Colonel
Sprowle of his wish that "our little man and him [the Reverend Doctor]
would swop pulpits," and tell him it had "pooty nigh come trew."---
But this is anticipating the course of events, which were much longer
in coming about; for we have but just got through that terrible long
month, as Mr. Dudley Venner found it, of December.

On the first of January, Mr. Silas Peckham was in the habit of
settling his quarterly accounts, and making such new arrangements as
his convenience or interest dictated.  New Year was a holiday at the
Institute.  No doubt this accounted for Helen's being dressed so
charmingly,--always, to be sure in, her own simple way, but yet with
such a true lady's air, that she looked fit to be the mistress of any
mansion in the land.

She was in the parlor alone, a little before noon, when Mr. Peckham
came in.

"I'm ready to settle my accaount with you now, Miss Darley," said
Silas.

"As you please, Mr. Peckham," Helen answered, very graciously.

"Before payin' you your selary," the Principal continued, "I wish to
come to an understandin' as to the futur'.  I consider that I've been
payin' high, very high, for the work you do.  Women's wages can't be
expected to do more than feed and clothe 'em, as a gineral thing,
with a little savin', in case of sickness, and to bury 'em, if they
break daown, as all of 'em are liable to do at any time.  If I a'n't
misinformed, you not only support yourself out of my establishment,
but likewise relatives of yours, who I don't know that I'm called
upon to feed and clothe.  There is a young woman, not burdened with
destitute relatives, has signified that she would be glad to take
your dooties for less pecooniary compensation, by a consid'able
amaount, than you now receive.  I shall be willin', however, to
retain your services at sech redooced rate as we shall fix upon,--
provided sech redooced rate be as low or lower than the same services
can be obtained elsewhere."

"As you please, Mr. Peckham," Helen answered, with a smile so sweet
that the Principal (who of course had trumped up this opposition-
teacher for the occasion) said to himself she would stand being cut
down a quarter, perhaps a half, of her salary.

"Here is your accaount, Miss Darley, and the balance doo you," said
Silas Peckham, handing her a paper and a small roll of infectious-
flavored bills wrapping six poisonous coppers of the old coinage.

She took the paper and began looking at it.  She could not quite make
up her mind to touch the feverish bills with the cankering coppers in
them, and left them airing themselves on the table.

The document she held ran as follows:

Silas Peckham, Esq., Principal of the Apollinean Institute,
In Account with Helen Darley, Assist.  Teacher.

          Dr.                                Cr.

To salary for quarter              By Deduction for absence
ending Jan 1st @ $75 per             1 week 3 days ...........$10.00
quarter ................ $75.00
                                   "Board, lodging, etc for
                                     10 days @ 75 cts per day.. 7.50

                                   "Damage to Institution by
                                     absence of teacher from
                                     duties, say ............. 25.00

                                   "Stationary furnished .....   .43

                                   "Postage-stamp ............   .01

                                   "Balance due Helen Darley.  32.06
                         ------                             --------
                          $75.00                              $75.00

ROCKLAND, Jan. 1st, 1859.


Now Helen had her own private reasons for wishing to receive the
small sum which was due her at this time without any unfair
deduction,--reasons which we need not inquire into too particularly,
as we may be very sure that they were right and womanly.  So, when
she looked over this account of Mr. Silas Peckham's, and saw that he
had contrived to pare down her salary to something less than half its
stipulated amount, the look which her countenance wore was as near to
that of righteous indignation as her gentle features and soft blue
eyes would admit of its being.

"Why, Mr. Peckham," she said, "do you mean this?  If I am of so much
value to you that you must take off twenty-five dollars for ten days'
absence, how is it that my salary is to be cut down to less than
seventy-five dollars a quarter, if I remain here?"

"I gave you fair notice," said Silas.  "I have a minute of it I took
down immed'ately after the intervoo."

He lugged out his large pocket-book with the strap going all round
it, and took from it a slip of paper which confirmed his statement.

"Besides," he added, slyly, "I presoom you have received a liberal
pecooniary compensation from Squire Venner for nussin' his daughter."

Helen was looking over the bill while he was speaking.

"Board and lodging for ten days, Mr. Peckham,--whose board and
lodging, pray?"

The door opened before Silas Peckham could answer, and Mr. Bernard
walked into the parlor.  Helen was holding the bill in her hand,
looking as any woman ought to look who has been at once wronged and
insulted.

"The last turn of the thumbscrew!" said Mr. Bernard to himself.

"What is it, Helen?  You look troubled."

She handed him the account.

He looked at the footing of it.  Then he looked at the items.  Then
he looked at Silas Peckham.

At this moment Silas was sublime.  He was so transcendently
unconscious of the emotions going on in Mr. Bernard's mind at the
moment, that he had only a single thought.

"The accaount's correc'ly cast, I presoom;--if the' 's any mistake of
figgers or addin' 'em up, it'll be made all right.  Everything's
accordin' to agreement.  The minute written immed'ately after the
intervoo is here in my possession."

Mr. Bernard looked at Helen.  Just what would have happened to Silas
Peckham, as he stood then and there, but for the interposition of a
merciful Providence, nobody knows or ever will know; for at that
moment steps were heard upon the stairs, and Hiram threw open the
parlor-door for Mr. Dudley Venner to enter.

He saluted them all gracefully with the good-wishes of the season,
and each of them returned his compliment,--Helen blushing fearfully,
of course, but not particularly noticed in her embarrassment by more
than one.

Silas Peckham reckoned with perfect confidence on his Trustees, who
had always said what he told them to, and done what he wanted.  It
was a good chance now to show off his power, and, by letting his
instructors know the unstable tenure of their offices, make it easier
to settle his accounts and arrange his salaries.  There was nothing
very strange in Mr. Venner's calling; he was one of the Trustees, and
this was New Year's Day.  But he had called just at the lucky moment
for Mr. Peckham's object.

"I have thought some of makin' changes in the department of
instruction," he began.  "Several accomplished teachers have applied
to me, who would be glad of sitooations.  I understand that there
never have been so many fust-rate teachers, male and female, out of
employment as doorin' the present season.  If I can make
sahtisfahctory arrangements with my present corpse of teachers, I
shall be glad to do so; otherwise I shell, with the permission of the
Trustees, make sech noo arrangements as circumstahnces compel."

"You may make arrangements for a new assistant in my department, Mr.
Peckham," said Mr. Bernard, "at once,--this day,--this hour.  I am
not safe to be trusted with your person five minutes out of this
lady's presence,--of whom I beg pardon for this strong language.  Mr.
Venner, I must beg you, as one of the Trustees of this Institution,
to look at the manner in which its Principal has attempted to swindle
this faithful teacher whose toils and sacrifices and self-devotion to
the school have made it all that it is, in spite of this miserable
trader's incompetence.  Will you look at the paper I hold?"

Dudley Venner took the account and read it through, without changing
a feature.  Then he turned to Silas Peckham.

"You may make arrangements for anew assistant in the branches this
lady has taught.  Miss Helen Darley is to be my wife.  I had hoped to
have announced this news in a less abrupt and ungraceful manner.  But
I came to tell you with my own lips what you would have learned
before evening from my friends in the village."

Mr. Bernard went to Helen, who stood silent, with downcast eyes, and
took her hand warmly, hoping she might find all the happiness she
deserved.  Then he turned to Dudley Venner, and said,
"She is a queen, but has never found it out.  The world has nothing
nobler than this dear woman, whom you have discovered in the disguise
of a teacher.  God bless her and you!"

Dudley Venner returned his friendly grasp, without answering a word
in articulate speech.

Silas remained dumb and aghast for a brief space.  Coming to himself
a little, he thought there might have been some mistake about the
items,--would like to have Miss barley's bill returned,--would make
it all right,--had no idee that Squire Venner had a special int'rest
in Miss barley,--was sorry he had given offence,--if he might take
that bill and look it over--

"No.  Mr. Peckham," said Mr. Dudley Venner, "there will be a full
meeting of the Board next week, and the bill, and such evidence with
reference to the management of the Institution and the treatment of
its instructors as Mr. Langdon sees fit to bring forward will be laid
before them."

Miss Helen Darley became that very day the guest of Miss Arabella
Thornton, the Judge's daughter.  Mr. Bernard made his appearance a
week or two later at the Lectures, where the Professor first
introduced him to the reader.

He stayed after the class had left the room.

"Ah, Mr. Langdon! how do you do?  Very glad to see you back again.
How have you been since our correspondence on Fascination and other
curious scientific questions?"

It was the Professor who spoke,--whom the reader will recognize as
myself, the teller of this story.

"I have been well," Mr. Bernard answered, with a serious look which
invited a further question.

"I hope you have had none of those painful or dangerous experiences
you seemed to be thinking of when you wrote; at any rate, you have
escaped having your obituary written."

"I have seen some things worth remembering.  Shall I call on you this
evening and tell you about them?"

"I shall be most happy to see you."

This was the way in which I, the Professor, became acquainted with
some of the leading events of this story.  They interested me
sufficiently to lead me to avail myself of all those other
extraordinary methods of obtaining information well known to writers
of narrative.

Mr. Langdon seemed to me to have gained in seriousness and strength
of character by his late experiences.  He threw his whole energies
into his studies with an effect which distanced all his previous
efforts.  Remembering my former hint, he employed his spare hours in
writing for the annual prizes, both of which he took by a unanimous
vote of the judges.  Those who heard him read his Thesis at the
Medical Commencement will not soon forget the impression made by his
fine personal appearance and manners, nor the universal interest
excited in the audience, as he read, with his beautiful enunciation,
that striking paper entitled "Unresolved Nebulae in Vital Science."
It was a general remark of the Faculty,--and old Doctor Kittredge,
who had come down on purpose to hear Mr. Langdon, heartily agreed to
it,--that there had never been a diploma filled up, since the
institution which conferred upon him the degree of Doctor Medicdnce
was founded, which carried with it more of promise to the profession
than that which bore the name of

                    BERNARDUS CARYL LANGDON




CHAPTER XXXII.

CONCLUSION.

Mr. Bernard Langdon had no sooner taken his degree, than, in
accordance with the advice of one of his teachers whom he frequently
consulted, he took an office in the heart of the city where he had
studied.  He had thought of beginning in a suburb or some remoter
district of the city proper.

"No," said his teacher,--to wit, myself,--"don't do any such thing.
You are made for the best kind of practice; don't hamper yourself
with an outside constituency, such as belongs to a practitioner of
the second class.  When a fellow like you chooses his beat, he must
look ahead a little.  Take care of all the poor that apply to you,
but leave the half-pay classes to a different style of doctor,--the
people who spend one half their time in taking care of their
patients, and the other half in squeezing out their money.  Go for
the swell-fronts and south-exposure houses; the folks inside are just
as good as other people, and the pleasantest, on the whole, to take
care of.  They must have somebody, and they like a gentleman best.
Don't throw yourself away.  You have a good presence and pleasing
manners.  You wear white linen by inherited instinct.  You can
pronounce the word view.  You have all the elements of success; go
and take it.  Be polite and generous, but don't undervalue yourself.
You will be useful, at any rate; you may just as well be happy, while
you are about it.  The highest social class furnishes incomparably
the best patients, taking them by and large.  Besides, when they
won't get well and bore you to death, you can send 'em off to travel.
Mind me now, and take the tops of your sparrowgrass.  Somebody must
have 'em,--why shouldn't you?  If you don't take your chance, you'll
get the butt-ends as a matter of course."

Mr. Bernard talked like a young man full of noble sentiments.  He
wanted to be useful to his fellow-beings.  Their social differences
were nothing to him.  He would never court the rich,--he would go
where he was called.  He would rather save the life of a poor mother
of a family than that of half a dozen old gouty millionnaires whose
heirs had been yawning and stretching these ten years to get rid of
them.

"Generous emotions!  "I exclaimed.  "Cherish 'em; cling to 'em till
you are fifty, till you are seventy, till you are ninety!  But do as
I tell you,--strike for the best circle of practice, and you 'll be
sure to get it!"

Mr. Langdon did as I told him,--took a genteel office, furnished it
neatly, dressed with a certain elegance, soon made a pleasant circle
of acquaintances, and began to work his way into the right kind of
business.  I missed him, however, for some days, not long after he
had opened his office.  On his return, he told me he had been up at
Rockland, by special invitation, to attend the wedding of Mr. Dudley
Venner and Miss Helen Darley.  He gave me a full account of the
ceremony, which I regret that I cannot relate in full.  "Helen looked
like an angel,"--that, I am sure, was one of his expressions.  As for
her dress, I should like to give the details, but am afraid of
committing blunders, as men always do, when they undertake to
describe such matters.  White dress, anyhow,--that I am sure of,--
with orange-flowers, and the most wonderful lace veil that was ever
seen or heard of.  The Reverend Doctor Honeywood performed the
ceremony, of course.  The good people seemed to have forgotten they
ever had had any other minister, except Deacon Shearer and his set of
malcontents, who were doing a dull business in the meeting-house
lately occupied by the Reverend Mr. Fairweather.

"Who was at the wedding?"

"Everybody, pretty much.  They wanted to keep it quiet, but it was of
no use.  Married at church.  Front pews, old Dr. Kittredge and all
the mansionhouse people and distinguished strangers,--Colonel Sprowle
and family, including Matilda's young gentleman, a graduate of one of
the fresh-water colleges,--Mrs. Pickins (late Widow Rowens) and
husband,--Deacon Soper and numerous parishioners.  A little nearer
the door, Abel, the Doctor's man, and Elbridge, who drove them to
church in the family-coach.  Father Fairweather, as they all call him
now, came in late with Father McShane."

"And Silas Peckham?"

"Oh, Silas had left The School and Rockland.  Cut up altogether too
badly in the examination instituted by the Trustees.  Had removed
over to Tamarack, and thought of renting a large house and 'farming'
the town-poor."


Some time after this, as I was walking with a young friend along by
the swell-fronts and south-exposures, whom should I see but Mr.
Bernard Langdon, looking remarkably happy, and keeping step by the
side of a very handsome and singularly well-dressed young lady?  He
bowed and lifted his hat as we passed.

"Who is that pretty girl my young doctor has got there?" I said to my
companion.

"Who is that?"  he answered.  "You don't know?  Why, that is neither
more nor less than Miss Letitia Forrester, daughter of--of--why, the
great banking firm, you know, Bilyuns Brothers & Forrester.  Got
acquainted with her in the country, they say.  There 's a story that
they're engaged, or like to be, if the firm consents."

"Oh" I said.

I did not like the look of it in the least.  Too young,--too young.
Has not taken any position yet.  No right to ask for the hand of
Bilyuns Brothers & Co.'s daughter.  Besides, it will spoil him for
practice, if he marries a rich girl before he has formed habits of
work.

I looked in at his office the other day.  A box of white kids was
lying open on the table.  A three-cornered note, directed in a very
delicate lady's-hand, was distinguishable among a heap of papers.  I
was just going to call him to account for his proceedings, when he
pushed the three-cornered note aside and took up a letter with a
great corporation-seal upon it.  He had received the offer of a
professor's chair in an ancient and distinguished institution.

"Pretty well for three-and-twenty, my boy," I said.  "I suppose
you'll think you must be married one of these days, if you accept
this office."

Mr. Langdon blushed.--There had been stories about him, he knew.
His name had been mentioned in connection with that of a very
charming young lady.  The current reports were not true.  He had met
this young lady, and been much pleased with her, in the country, at
the house of her grandfather, the Reverend Doctor Honeywood,--you
remember Miss Letitia Forrester, whom I have mentioned repeatedly?
On coming to town, he found his country-acquaintance in a social
position which seemed to discourage his continued intimacy.  He had
discovered, however; that he was a not unwelcome visitor, and had
kept up friendly relations with her.  But there was no truth in the
current reports,--none at all.'

Some months had passed, after this visit, when I happened one evening
to stroll into a box in one of the principal theatres of the city.  A
small party sat on the seats before me: a middle-aged gentleman and
his lady, in front, and directly behind them my young doctor and the
same very handsome young lady I had seen him walking with on the
sidewalk before the swell-fronts and south-exposures.  As Professor
Langdon seemed to be very much taken up with his companion, and both
of them looked as if they were enjoying themselves, I determined not
to make my presence known to my young friend, and to withdraw quietly
after feasting my eyes with the sight of them for a few minutes.

"It looks as if something might come of it," I said to myself.  At
that moment the young lady lifted her arm accidentally in such a way
that the light fell upon the clasp of a chain which encircled her
wrist.  My eyes filled with tears as I read upon the clasp, in sharp-
cut Italic letters, E. Y.  They were tears at once of sad remembrance
and of joyous anticipation; for the ornament on which I looked was
the double pledge of a dead sorrow and a living affection.  It was
the golden bracelet,--the parting-gift of Elsie Venner.





End of Project Gutenberg's Etext Elsie Venner, by Oliver Wendell Holmes






THE GUARDIAN ANGEL

by Oliver Wendell Holmes




TO MY READERS.

"A new Preface" is, I find, promised with my story.  If there are any
among my readers who loved Aesop's Fables chiefly on account of the
Moral appended, they will perhaps be pleased to turn backward and
learn what I have to say here.

This tale forms a natural sequence to a former one, which some may
remember, entitled "Elsie Venner."  Like that,--it is intended for
two classes of readers, of which the smaller one includes the readers
of the "Morals" in Aesop and of this Preface.

The first of the two stories based itself upon an experiment which
some thought cruel, even on paper.  It imagined an alien element
introduced into the blood of a human being before that being saw the
light.  It showed a human nature developing itself in conflict with
the ophidian characteristics and instincts impressed upon it during
the pre-natal period.  Whether anything like this ever happened, or
was possible, mattered little: it enabled me, at any rate, to suggest
the limitations of human responsibility in a simple and effective
way.

The story which follows comes more nearly within the range of common
experience.  The successive development of inherited bodily aspects
and habitudes is well known to all who have lived long enough to see
families grow up under their own eyes.  The same thing happens, but
less obviously to common observation, in the mental and moral nature.
There is something frightful in the way in which not only
characteristic qualities, but particular manifestations of them, are
repeated from generation to generation.  Jonathan Edwards the younger
tells the story of a brutal wretch in New Haven who was abusing his
father, when the old man cried out, "Don't drag me any further, for I
did n't drag my father beyond this tree."  [The original version of
this often-repeated story may be found in Aristotle's Ethics, Book
7th, Chapter 7th.]  I have attempted to show the successive evolution
of some inherited qualities in the character of Myrtle Hazard, not so
obtrusively as to disturb the narrative, but plainly enough to be
kept in sight by the small class of preface-readers.

If I called these two stories Studies of the Reflex Function in its
higher sphere, I should frighten away all but the professors and the
learned ladies.  If I should proclaim that they were protests against
the scholastic tendency to shift the total responsibility of all
human action from the Infinite to the finite, I might alarm the
jealousy of the cabinet-keepers of our doctrinal museums.  By saying
nothing about it, the large majority of those whom my book reaches,
not being preface-readers, will never suspect anything to harm them
beyond the simple facts of the narrative.

Should any professional alarmist choose to confound the doctrine of
limited responsibility with that which denies the existence of any
self-determining power, he may be presumed to belong to the class of
intellectual half-breeds, of which we have many representatives in
our new country, wearing the garb of civilization, and even the gown
of scholarship.  If we cannot follow the automatic machinery of
nature into the mental and moral world, where it plays its part as
much as in the bodily functions, without being accused of laying "all
that we are evil in to a divine thrusting on," we had better return
at once to our old demonology, and reinstate the Leader of the Lower
House in his time-honored prerogatives.

As fiction sometimes seems stranger than truth, a few words may be
needed here to make some of my characters and statements appear
probable.  The long-pending question involving a property which had
become in the mean time of immense value finds its parallel in the
great De Haro land-case, decided in the Supreme Court while this
story was in progress (May 14th, 1867).  The experiment of breaking
the child's will by imprisonment and fasting is borrowed from a
famous incident, happening long before the case lately before one of
the courts of a neighboring Commonwealth, where a little girl was
beaten to death because she would not say her prayers.  The mental
state involving utter confusion of different generations in a person
yet capable of forming a correct judgment on other matters, is almost
a direct transcript from nature.  I should not have ventured to
repeat the questions of the daughters of the millionaires to Myrtle
Hazard about her family conditions, and their comments, had not a
lady of fortune and position mentioned to me a similar circumstance
in the school history of one of her own children.  Perhaps I should
have hesitated in reproducing Myrtle Hazard's "Vision," but for a
singular experience of his own related to me by the late Mr.
Forceythe Willson.

Gifted Hopkins (under various alliasis) has been a frequent
correspondent of mine.  I have also received a good many
communications, signed with various names, which must have been from
near female relatives of that young gentleman.  I once sent a kind of
encyclical letter to the whole family connection; but as the delusion
under which they labor is still common, and often leads to the
wasting of time, the contempt of honest study or humble labor, and
the misapplication of intelligence not so far below mediocrity as to
be incapable of affording a respectable return when employed in the
proper direction, I thought this picture from life might also be of
service.  When I say that no genuine young poet will apply it to
himself, I think I have so far removed the sting that few or none
will complain of being wounded.

It is lamentable to be forced to add that the Reverend Joseph Bellamy
Stoker is only a softened copy of too many originals to whom, as a
regular attendant upon divine worship from my childhood to the
present time, I have respectfully listened, while they dealt with me
and mine and the bulk of their fellow-creatures after the manner of
their sect.  If, in the interval between his first showing himself in
my story and its publication in a separate volume, anything had
occurred to make me question the justice or expediency of drawing and
exhibiting such a portrait, I should have reconsidered it, with the
view of retouching its sharper features.  But its essential
truthfulness has been illustrated every month or two, since my story
has been in the course of publication, by a fresh example from real
life, stamped in darker colors than any with which I should have
thought of staining my pages.

There are a great many good clergymen to one bad one, but a writer
finds it hard to keep to the true proportion of good and bad persons
in telling a story.  The three or four good ministers I have
introduced in this narrative must stand for many whom I have known
and loved, and some of whom I count to-day among my most valued
friends.  I hope the best and wisest of them will like this story and
approve it.  If they cannot all do this, I know they will recognize
it as having been written with a right and honest purpose.

BOSTON, 1867.






PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION.

It is a quarter of a century since the foregoing Preface was written,
and that is long enough to allow a story to be forgotten by the
public, and very possibly by the writer of it also.  I will not
pretend that I have forgotten all about "The Guardian Angel," but it
is long since I have read it, and many of its characters and
incidents are far from being distinct in my memory.  There are,
however, a few points which hold their place among my recollections.
The revolt of Myrtle Hazard from the tyranny of that dogmatic dynasty
now breaking up in all directions has found new illustrations since
this tale was written.  I need only refer to two instances of many.
The first is from real life.  Mr. Robert C. Adams's work, "Travels in
Faith from Tradition to Reason," is the outcome of the teachings of
one of the most intransigeant of our New England Calvinists, the late
Reverend Nehemiah Adams.  For an example in fiction,--fiction which
bears all the marks of being copied from real life,--I will refer to
"The Story of an African Farm."  The boy's honest, but terrible
outburst, "I hate God," was, I doubt not, more acceptable in the view
of his Maker than the lying praise of many a hypocrite who, having
enthroned a demon as Lord of the Universe, thinks to conciliate his
favor by using the phrases which the slaves of Eastern despots are in
the habit of addressing to their masters.  I have had many private
letters showing the same revolt of reasoning natures against
doctrines which shock the more highly civilized part of mankind in
this nineteenth century and are leading to those dissensions which
have long shown as cracks, and are fast becoming lines of cleavage in
some of the largest communions of Protestantism.

The principle of heredity has been largely studied since this story
was written.  This tale, like "Elsie Venner," depends for its deeper
significance on the ante-natal history of its subject.  But the story
was meant to be readable for those who did not care for its
underlying philosophy.  If it fails to interest the reader who
ventures upon it, it may find a place on an unfrequented bookshelf in
common with other "medicated novels."

Perhaps I have been too hard with Gifted Hopkins and the tribe of
rhymesters to which he belongs.  I ought not to forget that I too
introduced myself to the reading world in a thin volume of verses;
many of which had better not have been written, and would not be
reprinted now, but for the fact that they have established a right to
a place among my poems in virtue of long occupancy.  Besides,
although the writing of verses is often a mark of mental weakness, I
cannot forget that Joseph Story and George Bancroft each published
his little book, of rhymes, and that John Quincy Adams has left many
poems on record, the writing of which did not interfere with the vast
and important labors of his illustrious career.

BEVERLY FARMS, MASS., August 7, 1891.

O.  W.  H.







                    THE GUARDIAN ANGEL



CHAPTER I.

AN ADVERTISEMENT.


On Saturday, the 18th day of June, 1859, the "State Banner and
Delphian Oracle," published weekly at Oxbow Village, one of the
principal centres in a thriving river-town of New England, contained
an advertisement which involved the story of a young life, and
stained the emotions of a small community.  Such faces of dismay,
such shaking of heads, such gatherings at corners, such halts of
complaining, rheumatic wagons, and dried-up, chirruping chaises, for
colloquy of their still-faced tenants, had not been known since the
rainy November Friday, when old Malachi Withers was found hanging in
his garret up there at the lonely house behind the poplars.

The number of the "Banner and Oracle" which contained this
advertisement was a fair specimen enough of the kind of newspaper to
which it belonged.  Some extracts from a stray copy of the issue of
the date referred to will show the reader what kind of entertainment
the paper was accustomed to furnish its patrons, and also serve some
incidental purposes of the writer in bringing into notice a few
personages who are to figure in this narrative.

The copy in question was addressed to one of its regular
subscribers,--"B. Gridley, Esq."  The sarcastic annotations at
various points, enclosed in brackets and italicised that they may be
distinguished from any other comments, were taken from the pencilled
remarks of that gentleman, intended for the improvement of a member
of the family in which he resided, and are by no means to be
attributed to the harmless pen which reproduces them.

Byles Gridley, A. M., as he would have been styled by persons
acquainted with scholarly dignities, was a bachelor, who had been a
schoolmaster, a college tutor, and afterwards for many years
professor,--a man of learning, of habits, of whims and crotchets,
such as are hardly to be found, except in old, unmarried students,
--the double flowers of college culture, their stamina all turned to
petals, their stock in the life of the race all funded in the
individual.  Being a man of letters, Byles Gridley naturally rather
undervalued the literary acquirements of the good people of the rural
district where he resided, and, having known much of college and
something of city life, was apt to smile at the importance they
attached to their little local concerns.  He was, of course, quite as
much an object of rough satire to the natural observers and
humorists, who are never wanting in a New England village,--perhaps
not in any village where a score or two of families are brought
together,--enough of them, at any rate, to furnish the ordinary
characters of a real-life stock company.

The old Master of Arts was a permanent boarder in the house of a very
worthy woman, relict of the late Ammi Hopkins, by courtesy Esquire,
whose handsome monument--in a finished and carefully colored
lithograph, representing a finely shaped urn under a very nicely
groomed willow--hung in her small, well-darkened, and, as it were,
monumental parlor.  Her household consisted of herself, her son,
nineteen years of age, of whom more hereafter, and of two small
children, twins, left upon her doorstep when little more than mere
marsupial possibilities, taken in for the night, kept for a week, and
always thereafter cherished by the good soul as her own; also of Miss
Susan Posey, aged eighteen, at school at the "Academy" in another
part of the same town, a distant relative, boarding with her.

What the old scholar took the village paper for it would be hard to
guess, unless for a reason like that which carried him very regularly
to hear the preaching of the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker, colleague of
the old minister of the village parish; namely, because he did not
believe a word of his favorite doctrines, and liked to go there so as
to growl to himself through the sermon, and go home scolding all the
way about it.

The leading article of the "Banner and Oracle" for June 18th must
have been of superior excellence, for, as Mr. Gridley remarked,
several of the "metropolitan" journals of the date of June 15th and
thereabout had evidently conversed with the writer and borrowed some
of his ideas before he gave them to the public.  The Foreign News by
the Europa at Halifax, 15th, was spread out in the amplest dimensions
the type of the office could supply.  More battles!  The Allies
victorious!  The King and General Cialdini beat the Austrians at
Palestro!  400 Austrians drowned in a canal!  Anti-French feeling in
Germany!  Allgermine Zeiturg talks of conquest of Allsatia and
Loraine and the occupation of Paris! [Vicious digs with a pencil
through the above proper names.] Race for the Derby won by Sir Joseph
Hawley's Musjid!  [That's what England cares for!  Hooray for the
Darby!  Italy be deedeed!]  Visit of Prince Alfred to the Holy Land.
Letter from our, own Correspondent.  [Oh!  Oh!  A West Minkville?]
Cotton advanced.  Breadstuffs declining.--Deacon Rumrill's barn
burned down on Saturday night.  A pig missing; supposed to have
"fallen a prey to the devouring element."  [Got roasted.]  A yellow
mineral had been discovered on the Doolittle farm, which, by the
report of those who had seen it, bore a strong resemblance to
California gold ore.  Much excitement in the neighborhood in
consequence [Idiots!  Iron pyrites!] A hen at Four Corners had just
laid an egg measuring 7 by 8 inches.  Fetch on your biddies!
[Editorial wit!]  A man had shot an eagle measuring six feet and a
half from tip to tip of his wings.--Crops suffering for want of rain
[Always just so.  "Dry times, Father Noah!"]  The editors had
received a liberal portion of cake from the happy couple whose
matrimonial union was recorded in the column dedicated to Hymen.
Also a superior article of [article of!  bah!] steel pen from the
enterprising merchant [shopkeeper] whose advertisement was to be
found on the third page of this paper.--An interesting Surprise
Party [cheap theatricals] had transpired [bah!] on Thursday evening
last at the house of the Rev. Mr. Stoker.  The parishioners had
donated [donated! GIVE is a good word enough for the Lord's Prayer.
DONATE our daily bread!] a bag of meal, a bushel of beans, a keg of
pickles, and a quintal of salt-fish.  The worthy pastor was much
affected, etc., etc.  [Of course.  Call'em.  SENSATION parties and
done with it!] The Rev. Dr. Pemberton and the venerable Dr. Hurlbut
honored the occasion with their presence.--We learn that the Rev.
Ambrose Eveleth, rector of St. Bartholomew's Chapel, has returned
from his journey, and will officiate to-morrow.

Then came strings of advertisements, with a luxuriant vegetation of
capitals and notes of admiration.  More of those PRIME GOODS!  Full
Assortments of every Article in our line!  [Except the one thing you
want!] Auction Sale.  Old furniture, feather-beds, bed-spreads
[spreads!  ugh!], setts [setts!] crockery-ware, odd vols., ullage
bbls. of this and that, with other household goods, etc., etc.,
etc.,--the etceteras meaning all sorts of insane movables, such as
come out of their bedlam-holes when an antiquated domestic
establishment disintegrates itself at a country "vandoo."--Several
announcements of "Feed," whatever that may be,--not restaurant
dinners, anyhow,--also of "Shorts,"--terms mysterious to city ears as
jute and cudbear and gunnybags to such as drive oxen in the remote
interior districts.--Then the marriage column above alluded to, by
the fortunate recipients of the cake.  Right opposite, as if for
matrimonial ground-bait, a Notice that Whereas my wife, Lucretia
Babb, has left my bed and board, I will not be responsible, etc.,
etc., from this date.--Jacob Penhallow (of the late firm Wibird and
Penhallow) had taken Mr. William Murray Bradshaw into partnership,
and the business of the office would be carried on as usual under the
title Penhallow and Bradshaw, Attorneys at Law.  Then came the
standing professional card of Dr. Lemuel Hurlbut and Dr. Fordyce
Hurlbut, the medical patriarch of the town and his son.  Following
this, hideous quack advertisements, some of them with the
certificates of Honorables, Esquires, and Clergymen.--Then a cow,
strayed or stolen from the subscriber.--Then the advertisement
referred to in our first paragraph:

MYRTLE HAZARD has been missing from her home in this place
since Thursday morning, June 16th.  She is fifteen years old, tall
and womanly for her age, has dark hair and eyes, fresh complexion,
regular features, pleasant smile and voice, but shy with strangers.
Her common dress was a black and white gingham check, straw hat,
trimmed with green ribbon.  It is feared she may have come to harm in
some way, or be wandering at large in a state of temporary mental
alienation.  Any information relating to the missing child will be
gratefully received and properly rewarded by her afflicted aunt,

MISS SILENCE WITHERS,
Residing at the Withers Homestead, otherwise known as "The Poplars,"
in this village.




CHAPTER II.

GREAT EXCITEMENT

The publication of the advertisement in the paper brought the village
fever of the last two days to its height.  Myrtle Hazard's
disappearance had been pretty well talked round through the immediate
neighborhood, but now that forty-eight hours of search and inquiry
had not found her, and the alarm was so great that the young girl's
friends were willing to advertise her in a public journal, it was
clear that the gravest apprehensions were felt and justified.  The
paper carried the tidings to many who had not heard it.  Some of the
farmers who had been busy all the week with their fields came into
the village in their wagons on Saturday, and there first learned the
news, and saw the paper, and the placards which were posted up, and
listened, open-mouthed, to the whole story.

Saturday was therefore a day of much agitation in Oxbow Village, and
some stir in the neighboring settlements.  Of course there was a
great variety of comment, its character depending very much on the
sense, knowledge, and disposition of the citizens, gossips, and young
people who talked over the painful and mysterious occurrence.

The Withers Homestead was naturally the chief centre of interest.
Nurse Byloe, an ancient and voluminous woman, who had known the girl
when she was a little bright-eyed child, handed over "the baby" she
was holding to another attendant, and got on her things to go
straight up to The Poplars.  She had been holding "the baby" these
forty years and more, but somehow it never got to be more than a
month or six weeks old.  She reached The Poplars after much toil and
travail.  Mistress Fagan, Irish, house-servant, opened the door, at
which Nurse Byloe knocked softly, as she was in the habit of doing at
the doors of those who sent for her.

"Have you heerd anything yet, Kitty Fagan?" asked Nurse Byloe.

"Niver a blissed word," said she.  "Miss Withers is upstairs with
Miss Bathsheby, a cryin' and a lamentin'.  Miss Badlam's in the
parlor.  The men has been draggin' the pond.  They have n't found not
one thing, but only jest two, and that was the old coffeepot and the
gray cat,--it's them nigger boys hanged her with a string they tied
round her neck and then drownded her."  [P. Fagan, Jr., Aet. 14, had
a snarl of similar string in his pocket.]

Mistress Fagan opened the door of the best parlor.  A woman was
sitting there alone, rocking back and forward, and fanning herself
with the blackest of black fans.

"Nuss Byloe, is that you?  Well, to be sure, I'm glad to see you,
though we 're all in trouble.  Set right down, Nuss, do.  Oh, it's
dreadful times!"

A handkerchief which was in readiness for any emotional overflow was
here called on for its function.

Nurse Byloe let herself drop into a flaccid squab chair with one of
those soft cushions, filled with slippery feathers, which feel so
fearfully like a very young infant, or a nest of little kittens, as
they flatten under the subsiding person.

The woman in the rocking-chair was Miss Cynthia Badlam, second-cousin
of Miss Silence Withers, with whom she had been living as a companion
at intervals for some years.  She appeared to be thirty-five years
old, more or less, and looked not badly for that stage of youth,
though of course she might have been handsomer at twenty, as is often
the case with women.  She wore a not unbecoming cap; frequent
headaches had thinned her locks somewhat of late years.  Features a
little too sharp, a keen, gray eye, a quick and restless glance,
which rather avoided being met, gave the impression that she was a
wide-awake, cautious, suspicious, and, very possibly, crafty person.

"I could n't help comin'," said Nurse Byloe, "we do so love our
babies,--how can we help it, Miss Badlam?"

The spinster colored up at the nurse's odd way of using the
possessive pronoun, and dropped her eyes, as was natural on hearing
such a speech.

"I never tended children as you have, Nuss," she said.  "But I 've
known Myrtle Hazard ever since she was three years old, and to think
she should have come to such an end,--'The heart is deceitful above
all things and desperately wicked,'"--and she wept.

"Why, Cynthy Badlam, what do y' mean?" said Nurse Byloe.  "Y' don't
think anything dreadful has come o' that child's wild nater, do ye?"

"Child!" said Cynthia Badlam,--"child enough to wear this very gown I
have got on and not find it too big for her neither."  [It would have
pinched Myrtle here and there pretty shrewdly.]

The two women looked each other in the eyes with subtle interchange
of intelligence, such as belongs to their sex in virtue of its
specialty.  Talk without words is half their conversation, just as it
is all the conversation of the lower animals.  Only the dull senses
of men are dead to it as to the music of the spheres.

Their minds travelled along, as if they had been yoked together,
through whole fields of suggestive speculation, until the dumb
growths of thought ripened in both their souls into articulate
speech, consentingly, as the movement comes after the long stillness
of a Quaker meeting.

Their lips opened at the same moment.  "You don't mean"--began Nurse
Byloe, but stopped as she heard Miss Badlam also speaking.

"They need n't drag the pond," she said.  "They need n't go beating
the woods as if they were hunting a patridge,--though for that matter
Myrtle Hazard was always more like a patridge than she was like a
pullet.  Nothing ever took hold of that girl,--not catechising, nor
advising, nor punishing.  It's that dreadful will of hers never was
broke.  I've always been afraid that she would turn out a child of
wrath.  Did y' ever watch her at meetin' playing with posies and
looking round all the time of the long prayer?  That's what I've seen
her do many and many a time.  I'm afraid--Oh dear!  Miss Byloe, I'm
afraid to say--what I'm afraid of.  Men are so wicked, and young
girls are full of deceit and so ready to listen to all sorts of
artful creturs that take advantage of their ignorance and tender
years."  She wept once more, this time with sobs that seemed
irrepressible.

"Dear suz!" said the nurse, "I won't believe no sech thing as
wickedness about Myrtle Hazard.  You mean she's gone an' run off with
some good-for-nothin' man or other?  If that ain't what y' mean, what
do y' mean?  It can't be so, Miss Badlam: she's one o' my babies.  At
any rate, I handled her when she fust come to this village,--and none
o' my babies never did sech a thing.  Fifteen year old, and be
bringin' a whole family into disgrace!  If she was thirty year old,
or five-an'-thirty or more, and never'd had a chance to be married,
and if one o' them artful creturs you was talkin' of got hold of her,
then, to be sure,--why, dear me!--law!  I never thought, Miss
Badlam!--but then of course you could have had your pickin' and
choosin' in the time of it; and I don't mean to say it's too late now
if you felt called that way, for you're better lookin' now than some
that's younger, and there's no accountin' for tastes."

A sort of hysteric twitching that went through the frame of Cynthia
Badlam dimly suggested to the old nurse that she was not making her
slightly indiscreet personality much better by her explanations.  She
stopped short, and surveyed the not uncomely person of the maiden
lady sitting before her with her handkerchief pressed to her eyes,
and one hand clenching the arm of the reeking-chair, as if some spasm
had clamped it there.  The nurse looked at her with a certain growing
interest she had never felt before.  It was the first time for some
years that she had had such a chance, partly because Miss Cynthia had
often been away for long periods,--partly because she herself had
been busy professionally.  There was no occasion for her services, of
course, in the family at The Poplars; and she was always following
round from place to place after that everlasting migratory six-weeks
or less old baby.

There was not a more knowing pair of eyes, in their way, in a circle
of fifty miles, than those kindly tranquil orbs that Nurse Byloe
fixed on Cynthia Badlam.  The silver threads in the side fold of
hair, the delicate lines at the corner of the eye, the slight drawing
down at the angle of the mouth,--almost imperceptible, but the nurse
dwelt upon it,--a certain moulding of the features as of an artist's
clay model worked by delicate touches with the fingers, showing that
time or pain or grief had had a hand in shaping them, the contours,
the adjustment of every fold of the dress, the attitude, the very way
of breathing, were all passed through the searching inspection of the
ancient expert, trained to know all the changes wrought by time and
circumstance.  It took not so long as it takes to describe it, but it
was an analysis of imponderables, equal to any of Bunsen's with the
spectroscope.

Miss Badlam removed her handkerchief and looked in a furtive,
questioning way, in her turn, upon the nurse.

"It's dreadful close here,--I'm 'most smothered," Nurse Byloe said;
and, putting her hand to her throat, unclasped the catch of the
necklace of gold beads she had worn since she was a baby,--a bead
having been added from time to time as she thickened.  It lay in a
deep groove of her large neck, and had not troubled her in breathing
before, since the day when her husband was run over by an ox-team.

At this moment Miss Silence Withers entered, followed by Bathsheba
Stoker, daughter of Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker.

She was the friend of Myrtle, and had come to comfort Miss Silence,
and consult with her as to what further search they should institute.
The two, Myrtle's aunt and her friend, were as unlike as they could
well be.  Silence Withers was something more than forty years old, a
shadowy, pinched, sallow, dispirited, bloodless woman, with the
habitual look of the people in the funeral carriage which follows
next to the hearse, and the tone in speaking that may be noticed in a
household where one of its members is lying white and still in a
cool, darkened chamber overhead.  Bathsheba Stoker was not called
handsome; but she had her mother's youthful smile, which was so fresh
and full of sweetness that she seemed like a beauty while she was
speaking or listening; and she could never be plain so long as any
expression gave life to her features.  In perfect repose, her face, a
little prematurely touched by sad experiences,--for she was but
seventeen years old,--had the character and decision stamped in its
outlines which any young man who wanted a companion to warn, to
comfort, and command him, might have depended on as warranting the
courage, the sympathy, and the sense demanded for such a
responsibility.  She had been trying her powers of consolation on
Miss Silence.  It was a sudden freak of Myrtle's.  She had gone off
on some foolish but innocent excursion.  Besides, she was a girl that
would take care of herself; for she was afraid of nothing, and
nimbler than any boy of her age, and almost as strong as any.  As for
thinking any bad thoughts about her, that was a shame; she cared for
none of the young fellows that were round her.  Cyprian Eveleth was
the one she thought most of; but Cyprian was as true as his sister
Olive, and who else was there?

To all this Miss Silence answered only by sighing and moaning, For
two whole days she had been kept in constant fear and worry, afraid
every minute of some tragical message, perplexed by the conflicting
advice of all manner of officious friends, sleepless of course
through the two nights, and now utterly broken down and collapsed.

Bathsheba had said all she could in the way of consolation, and
hastened back to her mother's bedside, which she hardly left, except
for the briefest of visits.

"It's a great trial, Miss Withers, that's laid on you," said Nurse
Byloe.

"If I only knew that she was dead, and had died in the Lord," Miss
Silence answered,--"if I only knew that but if she is living in sin,
or dead in wrong--doing, what is to become of me?--Oh, what is to
become of me when 'He maketh inquisition far blood'?"

"Cousin Silence," said Miss Cynthia, "it is n't your fault, if that
young girl has taken to evil ways.  If going to meeting three times
every Sabbath day, and knowing the catechism by heart, and reading of
good books, and the best of daily advice, and all needful discipline,
could have corrected her sinful nature, she would never have run away
from a home where she enjoyed all these privileges.  It's that Indian
blood, Cousin Silence.  It's a great mercy you and I have n't got any
of it in our veins!  What can you expect of children that come from
heathens and savages?  You can't lay it to yourself, Cousin Silence,
if Myrtle Hazard goes wrong"---

"The Lord will lay it to me,--the Lord will lay it to me," she
moaned.  "Did n't he say to Cain, 'Where is Abel, thy brother?'"

Nurse Byloe was getting very red in the face.  She had had about
enough of this talk between the two women.  "I hope the Lard 'll take
care of Myrtle Hazard fust, if she's in trouble, 'n' wants help," she
said; "'n' then look out for them that comes next.  Y' 're too
suspicious, Miss Badlam; y' 're too easy to believe stories.  Myrtle
Hazard was as pretty a child and as good a child as ever I see, if
you did n't rile her; 'n' d' d y' ever see one o' them hearty lively
children, that had n't a sperrit of its own?  For my part, I'd rather
handle one of 'em than a dozen o' them little waxy, weak-eyed, slim-
necked creturs that always do what they tell 'em to, and die afore
they're a dozen year old; and never was the time when I've seen
Myrtle Hazard, sence she was my baby, but what it's always been,
'Good mornin', Miss Byloe,' and 'How do you do, Miss Byloe?  I'm so
glad to see you.'  The handsomest young woman, too, as all the old
folks will agree in tellin' you, s'ence the time o' Judith Pride that
was,--the Pride of the County they used to call her, for her beauty.
Her great-grandma, y' know, Miss Cynthy, married old King David
Withers.  What I want to know is, whether anything has been heerd,
and jest what's been done about findin' the poor thing.  How d' ye
know she has n't fell into the river?  Have they fired cannon?  They
say that busts the gall of drownded folks, and makes the corpse rise.
Have they looked in the woods everywhere?  Don't believe no wrong of
nobody, not till y' must,--least of all of them that come o' the same
folks, partly, and has lived with yo all their days.  I tell y',
Myrtle Hazard's jest as innocent of all what y' 've been thinkin'
about,--bless the poor child; she's got a soul that's as clean and
sweet-well, as a pond-lily when it fust opens of a mornin', without a
speck on it no more than on the fust pond-lily God Almighty ever
made!"

That gave a turn to the two women's thoughts, and their handkerchiefs
went up to their faces.  Nurse Byloe turned her eyes quickly on
Cynthia Badlam, and repeated her close inspection of every outline
and every light and shadow in her figure.  She did not announce any
opinion as to the age or good looks or general aspect or special
points of Miss Cynthia; but she made a sound which the books write
humph! but which real folks make with closed lips, thus: m'!--a sort
of half-suppressed labio-palato-nasal utterance, implying that there
is a good deal which might be said, and all the vocal organs want to
have a chance at it, if there is to be any talking.

Friends and neighbors were coming in and out; and the next person
that came was the old minister, of whom, and of his colleague, the
Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker, some account may here be introduced.

The Rev. Eliphalet Pemberton Father Pemberton as brother ministers
called him, Priest Pemberton as he was commonly styled by the country
people--would have seemed very old, if the medical patriarch of the
village had not been so much older.  A man over ninety is a great
comfort to all his elderly neighbors: he is a picket-guard at the
extreme outpost; and the young folks of sixty and seventy feel that
the enemy must get by him before he can come near their camp.  Dr.
Hurlbut, at ninety-two, made Priest Pemberton seem comparatively
little advanced; but the college catalogue showed that he must be
seventy-five years old, if, as we may suppose, he was twenty at the
time of his graduation.

He was a man of noble presence always, and now, in the grandeur of
his flowing silver hair and with the gray shaggy brows overhanging
his serene and solemn eyes, with the slow gravity of motion and the
measured dignity of speech which gave him the air of an old pontiff,
he was an imposing personage to look upon, and could be awful, if the
occasion demanded it.  His creed was of the sternest: he was looked
up to as a bulwark against all the laxities which threatened New
England theology.  But it was a creed rather of the study and of the
pulpit than of every-day application among his neighbors.  He dealt
too much in the lofty abstractions which had always such fascinations
for the higher class of New England divines, to busy himself as much
as he might have done with the spiritual condition of individuals.
He had also a good deal in him of what he used to call the Old Man,
which, as he confessed, he had never succeeded in putting off,
--meaning thereby certain qualities belonging to humanity, as much as
the natural gifts of the dumb creatures belong to them, and tending
to make a man beloved by his weak and erring fellow-mortals.

In the olden time he would have lived and died king of his parish,
monarch, by Divine right, as the noblest, grandest, wisest of all
that made up the little nation within hearing of his meeting-house
bell.  But Young Calvinism has less reverence and more love of
novelty than its forefathers.  It wants change, and it loves young
blood.  Polyandry is getting to be the normal condition of the
Church; and about the time a man is becoming a little overripe for
the livelier human sentiments, he may be pretty sure the women are
looking round to find him a colleague.  In this way it was that the
Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker became the colleague of the Rev. Eliphalet
Pemberton.

If one could have dived deep below all the Christian graces--the
charity, the sweetness of disposition, the humility--of Father
Pemberton, he would have found a small remnant of the "Old Man," as
the good clergyman would have called it, which was never in harmony
with the Rev. Mr. Stoker.  The younger divine felt his importance,
and made his venerable colleague feel that he felt it.  Father
Pemberton had a fair chance at rainy Sundays and hot summer-afternoon
services; but the junior pushed him aside without ceremony whenever
he thought there was like to be a good show in the pews.  As for
those courtesies which the old need, to soften the sense of declining
faculties and failing attractions, the younger pastor bestowed them
in public, but was negligent of them, to say the least, when not on
exhibition.

Good old Father Pemberton could not love this man, but he would not
hate him, and he never complained to him or of him.  It would have
been of no use if he had: the women of the parish had taken up the
Rev. Mr. Stoker; and when the women run after a minister or a doctor,
what do the men signify?

Why the women ran after him, some thought it was not hard to guess.
He was not ill-looking, according to the village standard, parted his
hair smoothly, tied his white cravat carefully, was fluent,
plausible, had a gift in prayer, was considered eloquent, was fond of
listening to their spiritual experiences, and had a sickly wife.
This is what Byles Gridley said; but he was apt to be caustic at
times.

Father Pemberton visited his people but rarely.  Like Jonathan
Edwards, like David Osgood, he felt his call to be to study-work, and
was impatient of the egotisms and spiritual megrims, in listening to
which, especially from the younger females of his flock, his
colleague had won the hearts of so many of his parishioners.  His
presence had a wonderful effect in restoring the despondent Miss
Silence to her equanimity; for not all the hard divinity he had
preached for half a century had spoiled his kindly nature; and not
the gentle Melanchthon himself, ready to welcome death as a refuge
from the rage and bitterness of theologians, was more in contrast
with the disputants with whom he mingled, than the old minister, in
the hour of trial, with the stern dogmatist in his study, forging
thunderbolts to smite down sinners.

It was well that there were no tithing-men about on that next day,
Sunday; for it shone no Sabbath day for the young men within half a
dozen miles of the village.  They were out on Bear Hill the whole
day, beating up the bushes as if for game, scaring old crows out of
their ragged nests, and in one dark glen startling a fierce-eyed,
growling, bobtailed catamount, who sat spitting and looking all ready
to spring at them, on the tall tree where he clung with his claws
unsheathed, until a young fellow came up with a gun and shot him
dead.  They went through and through the swamp at Musquash Hollow;
but found nothing better than a wicked old snapping-turtle, evil to
behold, with his snaky head and alligator tail, but worse to meddle
with, if his horny jaws were near enough to spring their man-trap on
the curious experimenter.  At Wood-End there were some Indians, ill-
conditioned savages in a dirty tent, making baskets, the miracle of
which was that they were so clean.  They had seen a young lady
answering the description, about a week ago.  She had bought a
basket.  Asked them if they had a canoe they wanted to sell.--Eyes
like hers (pointing to a squaw with a man's hat on).

At Pocasset the young men explored all the thick woods,--some who
ought to have known better taking their guns, which made a talk, as
one might well suppose it would.  Hunting on a Sabbath day!  They did
n't mean to shoot Myrtle Hazard, did they? it was keenly asked.  A
good many said it was all nonsense, and a mere excuse to get away
from meeting and have a sort of frolic on pretence that it was a work
of necessity and mercy, one or both.

While they were scattering themselves about in this way, some in
earnest, some rejoicing in the unwonted license, lifting off for a
little while that enormous Sabbath-day pressure which weighs like
forty atmospheres on every true-born Puritan, two young men had been
since Friday in search of the lost girl, each following a clue of his
own, and determined to find her if she was among the living.

Cyprian Eveleth made for the village of Mapleton, where his sister
Olive was staying, trusting that, with her aid, he might get a clue
to the mystery of Myrtle's disappearance.

William Murray Bradshaw struck for a railroad train going to the
great seaport, at a station where it stops for wood and water.

In the mean time, a third young man, Gifted Hopkins by name, son of
the good woman already mentioned, sat down, with tears in his eyes,
and wrote those touching stanzas, "The Lost Myrtle," which were
printed in the next "Banner and Oracle," and much admired by many who
read them.




CHAPTER III.

ANTECEDENTS.

The Withers Homestead was the oldest mansion in town.  It was built
on the east bank of the river, a little above the curve which gave
the name to Oxbow Village.  It stood on an elevation, its west gable
close to the river's edge, an old orchard and a small pond at the
foot of the slope behind it, woods at the east, open to the south,
with a great row of Lombardy poplars standing guard in front of the
house.  The Hon. Selah Withers, Esq., a descendant of one of the
first colonists, built it for his own residence, in the early part of
the last century.  Deeply impressed with his importance in the order
of things, he had chosen to place it a little removed from the
cluster of smaller dwellings about the Oxbow; and with some vague
fancy in his mind of the castles that overlook the Rhine and the
Danube, he had selected this eminence on which to place his
substantial gambrel roofed dwelling-house.  Long afterwards a bay-
window, almost a little room of itself, had been thrown out of the
second story on the west side, so that it looked directly down on the
river running beneath it.  The chamber, thus half suspended in the
air, had been for years the special apartment of Myrtle Hazard; and
as the boys paddling about on the river would often catch glimpses,
through the window, of the little girl dressed in the scarlet jacket
she fancied in those days, one of them, Cyprian Eveleth had given it
a name which became current among the young people, and indeed
furnished to Gifted Hopkins the subject of one of his earliest poems,
to wit, "The Fire-hang-bird's Nest."

If we would know anything about the persons now living at the Withers
Homestead, or The Poplars, as it was more commonly called of late
years, we must take a brief inventory of some of their vital
antecedents.  It is by no means certain that our individual
personality is the single inhabitant of these our corporeal frames.
Nay, there is recorded an experience of one of the living persons
mentioned in this narrative,--to be given in full in its proper
place, which, so far as it is received in evidence, tends to show
that some, at least, who have long been dead, may enjoy a kind of
secondary and imperfect, yet self-conscious life, in these bodily
tenements which we are in the habit of considering exclusively our
own.  There are many circumstances, familiar to common observers,
which favor this belief to a certain extent.  Thus, at one moment we
detect the look, at another the tone of voice, at another some
characteristic movement of this or that ancestor, in our relations or
others.  There are times when our friends do not act like themselves,
but apparently in obedience to some other law than that of their own
proper nature.  We all do things both awake and asleep which surprise
us.  Perhaps we have cotenants in this house we live in.  No less
than eight distinct personalities are said to have coexisted in a
single female mentioned by an ancient physician of unimpeachable
authority.  In this light we may perhaps see the meaning of a
sentence, from a work which will be repeatedly referred to in this
narrative, viz.: "This body in which we journey across the isthmus
between the two oceans is not a private carriage, but an omnibus."

The ancestry of the Withers family had counted a martyr to their
faith before they were known as Puritans.  The record was obscure in
some points; but the portrait, marked "Ann Holyoake, burned by ye
bloudy Papists, ano 15.."  (figures illegible), was still hanging
against the panel over the fireplace in the west parlor at The
Poplars.  The following words were yet legible on the canvas:
"Thou hast made a covenant O Lord with mee and my Children forever."

The story had come down, that Ann Holyoake spoke these words in a
prayer she offered up at the stake, after the fagots were kindled.
There had always been a secret feeling in the family, that none of
her descendants could finally fall from grace, in virtue of this
solemn "covenant."

There had been also a legend in the family, that the martyred woman's
spirit exercised a kind of supervision over her descendants; that she
either manifested herself to them, or in some way impressed them,
from time to time; as in the case of the first pilgrim before he cast
his lot with the emigrants,--of one Mrs. Winslow, a descendant in the
third generation, when the Indians were about to attack the
settlement where she lived,--and of another, just before he was
killed at Quebec.

There was a remarkable resemblance between the features of Ann
Holyoake, as shown in the portrait, and the miniature likeness of
Myrtle's mother.  Myrtle adopted the nearly obsolete superstition
more readily on this account, and loved to cherish the fancy that the
guardian spirit which had watched over her ancestors was often near
her, and would be with her in her time of need.

The wife of Selah Withers was accused of sorcery in the evil days of
that delusion.  A careless expression in one of her letters, that "ye
Parson was as lyke to bee in league with ye Divell as anie of em,"
had got abroad, and given great offence to godly people.  There was
no doubt that some odd "manifestations," as they would be called
nowadays, had taken place in the household when she was a girl, and
that she presented many of the conditions belonging to what are at
the present day called mediums.

Major Gideon Withers, her son, was of the very common type of hearty,
loud, portly men, who like to show themselves at militia trainings,
and to hear themselves shout orders at musters, or declaim patriotic
sentiments at town-meetings and in the General Court.  He loved to
wear a crimson sash and a military cap with a large red feather, in
which the village folk used to say he looked as "hahnsome as a
piny,"--meaning a favorite flower of his, which is better spelt
peony, and to which it was not unnatural that his admirers should
compare him.

If he had married a wife like himself, there might probably enough
have sprung from the alliance a family of moon-faced children, who
would have dropped into their places like posts into their holes,
asking no questions of life, contented, like so many other honest
folks, with the part of supernumeraries in the drama of being, their
wardrobe of flesh and bones being furnished them gratis, and nothing
to do but to walk across the stage wearing it.  But Major Gideon
Withers, for some reason or other, married a slender, sensitive,
nervous, romantic woman, which accounted for the fact that his son
David, "King David," as he was called in his time, had a very
different set of tastes from his father, showing a turn for
literature and sentiment in his youth, reading Young's "Night
Thoughts," and Thomson's "Seasons," and sometimes in those early days
writing verses himself to Celia or to Chloe, which sounded just as
fine to him as Effie and Minnie sound to young people now, as
Musidora, as Saccharissa, as Lesbia, as Helena, as Adah and Zillah,
have all sounded to young people in their time,--ashes of roses as
they are to us now, and as our endearing Scotch diminutives will be
to others by and by.

King David Withers, who got his royal prefix partly because he was
rich, and partly because he wrote hymns occasionally, when he grew
too old to write love-poems, married the famous beauty before
mentioned, Miss Judith Pride, and the race came up again in vigor.
Their son, Jeremy, took for his first wife a delicate, melancholic
girl, who matured into a sad-eyed woman, and bore him two children,
Malachi and Silence.

When she died, he mourned for her bitterly almost a year, and then
put on a ruffled shirt and went across the river to tell his grief to
Miss Virginia Wild, there residing.  This lady was said to have a few
drops of genuine aboriginal blood in her veins; and it is certain
that her cheek had a little of the russet tinge which a Seckel pear
shows on its warmest cheek when it blushes.--Love shuts itself up in
sympathy like a knife-blade in its handle, and opens as easily.  All
the rest followed in due order according to Nature's kindly
programme.

Captain Charles Hazard, of the ship Orient Pearl, fell desperately in
love with the daughter of this second wife, married her, and carried
her to India, where their first and only child was born, and received
the name of Myrtle, as fitting her cradle in the tropics.  So her
earliest impressions,--it would not be exact to call them
recollections,--besides the smiles of her father and mother, were of
dusky faces, of loose white raiment, of waving fans, of breezes
perfumed with the sweet exhalations of sandal-wood, of gorgeous
flowers and glowing fruit, of shady verandas, of gliding palanquins,
and all the languid luxury of the South.  The pestilence which has
its natural home in India, but has journeyed so far from its birth
place in these later years, took her father and mother away,
suddenly, in the very freshness of their early maturity.  A relation
of Myrtle's father, wife of another captain, was returning to America
on a visit, and the child was sent back, under her care, while still
a mere infant, to her relatives at the old homestead.  During the
long voyage, the strange mystery of the ocean was wrought into her
consciousness so deeply, that it seemed to have become a part of her
being.  The waves rocked her, as if the sea had been her mother; and,
looking over the vessel's side from the arms that held her with
tender care, she used to watch the play of the waters, until the
rhythm of their movement became a part of her, almost as much as her
own pulse and breath.

The instincts and qualities belonging to the ancestral traits which
predominated in the conflict of mingled lives lay in this child in
embryo, waiting to come to maturity.  It was as when several grafts,
bearing fruit that ripens at different times, are growing upon the
same stock.  Her earlier impulses may have been derived directly from
her father and mother, but all the ancestors who have been mentioned,
and more or less obscurely many others, came uppermost in their time,
before the absolute and total result of their several forces had
found its equilibrium in the character by which she was to be known
as an individual.  These inherited impulses were therefore many,
conflicting, some of them dangerous.  The World, the Flesh, and the
Devil held mortgages on her life before its deed was put in her
hands; but sweet and gracious influences were also born with her; and
the battle of life was to be fought between them, God helping her in
her need, and her own free choice siding with one or the other.  The
formal statement of this succession of ripening characteristics need
not be repeated, but the fact must be borne in mind.

This was the child who was delivered into the hands of Miss Silence
Withers, her mother's half--sister, keeping house with her brother
Malachi, a bachelor, already called Old Malachi, though hardly
entitled by his years to such a venerable prefix.  Both these persons
had inherited the predominant traits of their sad-eyed mother.
Malachi, the chief heir of the family property, was rich, but felt
very poor.  He owned this fine old estate of some hundreds of acres.
He had moneys in the bank, shares in various companies, wood-lots in
the town; and a large tract of Western land, the subject of a lawsuit
which seemed as if it would never be settled, and kept him always
uneasy.

Some said he hoarded gold somewhere about the old house, but nobody
knew this for a certainty.  In spite of his abundant means, he talked
much of poverty, and kept the household on the narrowest footing of
economy.  One Irishwoman, with a little aid from her husband now and
then, did all their work; and the only company they saw was Miss
Cynthia Badlam, who, as a relative, claimed a home with them whenever
she was so disposed.

The "little Indian," as Malachi called her, was an awkward accession
to the family.  Silence Withers knew no more about children and their
ways and wants than if she had been a female ostrich.  Thus it was
that she found it necessary to send for a woman well known in the
place as the first friend whose acquaintance many of the little
people of the town had made in this vale of tears.

Thirty years of practice had taught Nurse Byloe the art of handling
the young of her species with the soft firmness which one may notice
in cats with their kittens,--more grandly in a tawny lioness mouthing
her cubs.  Myrtle did not know she was held; she only felt she was
lifted, and borne up, as a cherub may feel upon a white-woolly cloud,
and smiled accordingly at the nurse, as if quite at home in her arms.

"As fine a child as ever breathed the breath of life.  But where did
them black eyes come from?  Born in Injy,--that 's it, ain't it?  No,
it's her poor mother's eyes to be sure.  Does n't it seem as if there
was a kind of Injin look to 'em?  She'll be a lively one to manage,
if I know anything about childun.  See her clinchin' them little
fists!"

This was when Miss Silence came near her and brought her rather
severe countenance close to the child for inspection of its features.
The ungracious aspect of the woman and the defiant attitude of the
child prefigured in one brief instant the history of many long coming
years.

It was not a great while before the two parties in that wearing
conflict of alien lives, which is often called education, began to
measure their strength against each other.  The child was bright,
observing, of restless activity, inquisitively curious, very hard to
frighten, and with a will which seemed made for mastery, not
submission.

The stern spinster to whose care this vigorous life was committed was
disposed to discharge her duty to the girl faithfully and
conscientiously; but there were two points in her character and
belief which had a most important bearing on the manner in which she
carried out her laudable intentions.  First, she was one of that
class of human beings whose one single engrossing thought is their
own welfare,--in the next world, it is true, but still their own
personal welfare.  The Roman Church recognizes this class, and
provides every form of specific to meet their spiritual condition.
But in so far as Protestantism has thrown out works as a means of
insuring future safety, these unfortunates are as badly off as
nervous patients who have no drops, pills, potions, no doctors'
rules, to follow.  Only tell a poor creature what to do, and he or
she will do it, and be made easy, were it a pilgrimage of a thousand
miles, with shoes full of split peas instead of boiled ones; but if
once assured that doing does no good, the drooping Little-faiths are
left at leisure to worry about their souls, as the other class of
weaklings worry about their bodies.  The effect on character does not
seem to be very different in the two classes.  Metaphysicians may
discuss the nature of selfishness at their leisure; if to have all
her thoughts centring on the one point of her own well-being by and
by was selfishness, then Silence Withers was supremely selfish; and
if we are offended with that form of egotism, it is no more than ten
of the twelve Apostles were, as the reader may see by turning to the
Gospel of St.  Matthew, the twentieth chapter and the twenty-fourth
verse.

The next practical difficulty was, that she attempted to carry out a
theory which, whatever might be its success in other cases, did not
work kindly in the case of Myrtle Hazard, but, on the contrary,
developed a mighty spirit of antagonism in her nature, which
threatened to end in utter lawlessness.  Miss Silence started from
the approved doctrine, that all children are radically and utterly
wrong in all their motives, feelings, thoughts, and deeds, so long as
they remain subject to their natural instincts.  It was by the
eradication, and not the education, of these instincts, that the
character of the human being she was moulding was to be determined.
The first great preliminary process, so soon as the child manifested
any evidence of intelligent and persistent self-determination, was to
break her will.

There is no doubt that this was a legitimate conclusion from the
teaching of Priest Pemberton, but it required a colder and harder
nature than his own to carry out many of his dogmas to their
practical application.  He wrought in the pure mathematics, so to
speak, of theology, and left the working rules to the good sense and
good feeling of his people.

Miss Silence had been waiting for her opportunity to apply the great
doctrine, and it came at last in a very trivial way.

"Myrtle does n't want brown bread.  Myrtle won't have brown bread.
Myrtle will have white bread."

"Myrtle is a wicked child.  She will have what Aunt Silence says she
shall have.  She won't have anything but brown bread."

Thereupon the bright red lip protruded, the hot blood mounted to her
face, the child untied her little "tire," got down from the table,
took up her one forlorn, featureless doll, and went to bed without
her supper.  The next morning the worthy woman thought that hunger
and reflection would have subdued the rebellious spirit.  So there
stood yesterday's untouched supper waiting for her breakfast.  She
would not taste it, and it became necessary to enforce that extreme
penalty of the law which had been threatened, but never yet put in
execution.  Miss Silence, in obedience to what she felt to be a
painful duty, without any passion, but filled with high, inexorable
purpose, carried the child up to the garret, and, fastening her so
that she could not wander about and hurt herself, left her to her
repentant thoughts, awaiting the moment when a plaintive entreaty for
liberty and food should announce that the evil nature had yielded and
the obdurate will was broken.

The garret was an awful place.  All the skeleton-like ribs of the
roof showed in the dim light, naked overhead, and the only floor to
be trusted consisted of the few boards which bridged the lath and
plaster.  A great, mysterious brick tower climbed up through it,--it
was the chimney, but it looked like a horrible cell to put criminals
into.  The whole place was festooned with cobwebs,--not light films,
such as the housewife's broom sweeps away before they have become a
permanent residence, but vast gray draperies, loaded with dust,
sprinkled with yellow powder from the beams where the worms were
gnawing day and night, the home of old, hairy spiders who had, lived
there since they were eggs and would leave it for unborn spiders who
would grow old and huge like themselves in it, long after the human
tenants had left the mansion for a narrower home.  Here this little
criminal was imprisoned, six, twelve,--tell it not to mothers,
--eighteen dreadful hours, hungry until she was ready to gnaw her
hands, a prey to all childish imaginations; and here at her stern
guardian's last visit she sat, pallid, chilled, almost fainting, but
sullen and unsubdued.  The Irishwoman, poor stupid Kitty Fagan, who
had no theory of human nature, saw her over the lean shoulders of the
spinster, and, forgetting all differences of condition and questions
of authority, rushed to her with a cry of maternal tenderness, and,
with a tempest of passionate tears and kisses, bore her off to her
own humble realm, where the little victorious martyr was fed from the
best stores of the house, until there was as much danger from
repletion as there had been from famine.  How the experiment might
have ended but for this empirical and most unphilosophical
interference, there is no saying; but it settled the point that the
rebellious nature was not to be subjugated in a brief conflict.

The untamed disposition manifested itself in greater enormities as
she grew older.  At the age of four years she was detected in making
a cat's-cradle at meeting, during sermon-time, and, on being
reprimanded for so doing, laughed out loud, so as to be heard by
Father Pemberton, who thereupon bent his threatening, shaggy brows
upon the child, and, to his shame be it spoken, had such a sudden
uprising of weak, foolish, grandfatherly feelings, that a mist came
over his eyes, and he left out his "ninthly" altogether, thereby
spoiling the logical sequence of propositions which had kept his
large forehead knotty for a week.

At eight years old she fell in love with the high-colored picture of
Major Gideon Withers in the crimson sash and the red feather of his
exalted military office.  It was then for the first time that her
aunt Silence remarked a shade of resemblance between the child and
the portrait.  She had always, up to this time, been dressed in sad
colors, as was fitting, doubtless, for a forlorn orphan; but
happening one day to see a small negro girl peacocking round in a
flaming scarlet petticoat, she struck for bright colors in her own
apparel, and carried her point at last.  It was as if a ground-
sparrow had changed her gray feathers for the burning plumage of some
tropical wanderer; and it was natural enough that Cyprian Eveleth
should have called her the fire-hang-bird, and her little chamber the
fire-hang-bird's nest,--using the country boy's synonyme for the
Baltimore oriole.

At ten years old she had one of those great experiences which give
new meaning to the life of a child.

Her uncle Malachi had seemed to have a strong liking for her at one
time, but of late years his delusions had gained upon him, and under
their influence he seemed to regard her as an encumbrance and an
extravagance.  He was growing more and more solitary in his habits,
more and more negligent of his appearance.  He was up late at night,
wandering about the house from the cellar to the garret, so that, his
light being seen flitting from window to window, the story got about
that the old house was haunted.

One dreary, rainy Friday in November, Myrtle was left alone in the
house.  Her uncle had been gone since the day before.  The two women
were both away at the village.  At such times the child took a
strange delight in exploring all the hiding-places of the old
mansion.  She had the mysterious dwelling-place of so many of the
dead and the living all to herself.  What a fearful kind of pleasure
in its silence and loneliness!  The old clock that Marmaduke Storr
made in London more than a hundred years ago was clicking the steady
pulse-beats of its second century.  The featured moon on its dial had
lifted one eye, as if to watch the child, as it had watched so many
generations of children, while the swinging pendulum ticked them
along into youth, maturity, gray hairs, deathbeds,--ticking through
the prayer at the funeral, ticking without grief through all the
still or noisy woe of mourning,--ticking without joy when the smiles
and gayety of comforted heirs had come back again.  She looked at
herself in the tall, bevelled mirror in the best chamber.  She pulled
aside the curtains of the stately bedstead whereon the heads of the
house had slept until they died and were stretched out upon it, and
the sheet shaped itself to them in vague, awful breadth of outline,
like a block of monumental marble the sculptor leaves just hinted by
the chisel.

She groped her way up to the dim garret, the scene of her memorable
punishment.  A rusty hook projected from one of the joists a little
higher than a man's head.  Something was hanging from it,--an old
garment, was it?  She went bravely up and touched--a cold hand.  She
did what most children of that age would do,--uttered a cry and ran
downstairs with all her might.  She rushed out of the door and called
to the man Patrick, who was doing some work about the place.  What
could be done was done, but it was too late.

Uncle Malachi had made away with himself.  That was plain on the face
of thing.  In due time the coroner's verdict settled it.  It was not
so strange as it seemed; but it made a great talk in the village and
all the country round about.  Everybody knew he had money enough, and
yet he had hanged himself for fear of starving to death.

For all that, he was found to have left a will, dated some years
before, leaving his property to his sister Silence, with the
exception of a certain moderate legacy to be paid in money to Myrtle
Hazard when she should arrive at the age of twenty years.

The household seemed more chilly than ever after this tragical event.
Its depressing influence followed the child to school, where she
learned the common branches of knowledge.  It followed her to the
Sabbath-day catechisings, where she repeated the answers about the
federal headship of Adam, and her consequent personal
responsibilities, and other technicalities which are hardly milk for
babes, perhaps as well as other children, but without any very
profound remorse for what she could not help, so far as she
understood the matter, any more than her sex or stature, and with no
very clear comprehension of the phrases which the New England
followers of the Westminster divines made a part of the elementary
instruction of young people.

At twelve years old she had grown tall and womanly enough to attract
the eyes of the youth and older boys, several of whom made advances
towards her acquaintance.  But the dreary discipline of the household
had sunk into her soul, and she had been shaping an internal life for
herself, which it was hard for friendship to penetrate.  Bathsheba
Stoker was chained to the bedside of an invalid mother.  Olive
Eveleth, a kind, true-hearted girl, belonged to another religious
communion; and this tended to render their meetings less frequent,
though Olive was still her nearest friend.  Cyprian was himself a
little shy, and rather held to Myrtle through his sister than by any
true intimacy directly with herself.  Of the other young men of the
village Gifted Hopkins was perhaps the most fervent of her admirers,
as he had repeatedly shown by effusions in verse, of which, under the
thinnest of disguises, she was the object.

William Murray Bradshaw, ten years older than herself, a young man of
striking aspect and claims to exceptional ability, had kept his eye
on her of late; but it was generally supposed that he would find a
wife in the city, where he was in the habit of going to visit a
fashionable relative, Mrs. Clymer Ketchum, of 24 Carat Place.
She, at any rate, understood very well that he meant, to use his own
phrase, "to go in for a corner lot,"--understanding thereby a young
lady with possessions and without encumbrances.  If the old man had
only given his money to Myrtle, William Murray Bradshaw would have
made sure of her; but she was not likely ever to get much of it.
Miss Silence Withers, it was understood, would probably leave her
money as the Rev. Mr. Stoker, her spiritual director, should
indicate, and it seemed likely that most of it would go to a rising
educational institution where certain given doctrines were to be
taught through all time, whether disproved or not, and whether those
who taught them believed them or not, provided only they would say
they believed them.

Nobody had promised to say masses for her soul if she made this
disposition of her property, or pledged the word of the Church that
she should have plenary absolution.  But she felt that she would be
making friends in Influential Quarters by thus laying up her
treasure, and that she would be safe if she had the good-will of the
ministers of her sect.

Myrtle Hazard had nearly reached the age of fourteen, and, though not
like to inherit much of the family property, was fast growing into a
large dower of hereditary beauty.  Always handsome, her features
shaped themselves in a finer symmetry, her color grew richer, her
figure promised a perfect womanly development, and her movements had
the grace which high-breeding gives the daughter of a queen, and
which Nature now and then teaches the humblest of village maidens.
She could not long escape the notice of the lovers and flatterers of
beauty, and the time of danger was drawing near.

At this period of her life she made two discoveries which changed the
whole course of her thoughts, and opened for her a new world of ideas
and possibilities.

Ever since the dreadful event of November, 1854, the garret had been
a fearful place to think of, and still more to visit.  The stories
that the house was haunted gained in frequency of repetition and
detail of circumstance.  But Myrtle was bold and inquisitive, and
explored its recesses at such times as she could creep among them
undisturbed.  Hid away close under the eaves she found an old trunk
covered with dust and cobwebs.  The mice had gnawed through its
leather hinges, and, as it had been hastily stuffed full, the cover
had risen, and two or three volumes had fallen to the floor.  This
trunk held the papers and books which her great-grandmother, the
famous beauty, had left behind her, records of the romantic days when
she was the belle of the county,--storybooks, memoirs, novels, and
poems, and not a few love-letters,--a strange collection, which, as
so often happens with such deposits in old families, nobody had cared
to meddle with, and nobody had been willing to destroy, until at last
they had passed out of mind, and waited for a new generation to bring
them into light again.

The other discovery was of a small hoard of coin.  Under one of the
boards which formed the imperfect flooring of the garret was hidden
an old leather mitten.  Instead of a hand, it had a fat fist of
silver dollars, and a thumb of gold half-eagles.

Thus knowledge and power found their way to the simple and secluded
maiden.  The books were hers to read as much as any other's; the gold
and silver were only a part of that small provision which would be
hers by and by, and if she borrowed it, it was borrowing of herself.
The tree of the knowledge of good and evil had shaken its fruit into
her lap, and, without any serpent to tempt her, she took thereof and
did eat.




CHAPTER IV.

BYLES GRIDLEY, A. M.

The old Master of Arts was as notable a man in his outside
presentment as one will find among five hundred college alumni as
they file in procession.  His strong, squared features, his
formidable scowl, his solid-looking head, his iron-gray hair, his
positive and as it were categorical stride, his slow, precise way of
putting a statement, the strange union of trampling radicalism in
some directions and high-stepping conservatism in others, which made
it impossible to calculate on his unexpressed opinions, his testy
ways and his generous impulses, his hard judgments and kindly
actions, were characteristics that gave him a very decided
individuality.

He had all the aspects of a man of books.  His study, which was the
best room in Mrs. Hopkins's house, was filled with a miscellaneous-
looking collection of volumes, which his curious literary taste had
got together from the shelves of all the libraries that had been
broken up during his long life as a scholar.  Classics, theology,
especially of the controversial sort, statistics, politics, law,
medicine, science, occult and overt, general literature,--almost
every branch of knowledge was represented.  His learning was very
various, and of course mixed up, useful and useless, new and ancient,
dogmatic and rational,--like his library, in short; for a library
gathered like his is a looking-glass in which the owner's mind is
reflected.

The common people about the village did not know what to make of such
a phenomenon.  He did not preach, marry, christen, or bury, like the
ministers, nor jog around with medicines for sick folks, nor carry
cases into court for quarrelsome neighbors.  What was he good for?
Not a great deal, some of the wiseacres thought,--had "all sorts of
sense but common sense,"--"smart mahn, but not prahctical."  There
were others who read him more shrewdly.  He knowed more, they said,
than all the ministers put together, and if he'd stan' for
Ripresentative they 'd like to vote for him,--they hed n't hed a
smart mahn in the Gineral Court sence Squire Wibird was thar.

They may have overdone the matter in comparing his knowledge with
that of all the ministers together, for Priest Pemberton was a real
scholar in his special line of study,--as all D. D.'s are supposed to
be, or they would not have been honored with that distinguished
title.  But Mr. Byles Gridley not only had more learning than the
deep-sea line of the bucolic intelligence could fathom; he had more
wisdom also than they gave him credit for, even those among them who
thought most of his abilities.

In his capacity of schoolmaster he had sharpened his wits against
those of the lively city boys he had in charge, and made such a
reputation as "Master" Gridley, that he kept that title even after he
had become a college tutor and professor.  As a tutor he had to deal
with many of these same boys, and others like them, in the still more
vivacious period of their early college life.  He got rid of his
police duties when he became a professor, but he still studied the
pupils as carefully as he used once to watch them, and learned to
read character with a skill which might have fitted him for governing
men instead of adolescents.  But he loved quiet and he dreaded
mingling with the brawlers of the market-place, whose stock in trade
is a voice and a vocabulary.  So it was that he had passed his life
in the patient mechanical labor of instruction, leaving too many of
his instincts and faculties in abeyance.

The alluvium of all this experience bore a nearer resemblance to
worldly wisdom than might have been conjectured; much nearer, indeed,
than it does in many old instructors, whose eyes get fish-like as
their blood grows cold, and who are not fit to be trusted with
anything more practical than a gerund or a cosine.  Master Gridley
not only knew a good deal of human nature, but he knew how to keep
his knowledge to himself upon occasion.  He understood singularly
well the ways and tendencies of young people.  He was shrewd in the
detection of trickery, and very confident in those who had once
passed the ordeal of his well-schooled observing powers.  He had no
particular tendency to meddle with the personal relations of those
about him; but if they were forced upon him in any way, he was like
to see into them at least as quickly as any of his neighbors who
thought themselves most endowed with practical skill.

In leaving the duties of his office he considered himself, as he said
a little despondently, like an old horse unharnessed and turned out
to pasture.  He felt that he had separated himself from human
interests, and was henceforth to live in his books with the dead,
until he should be numbered with them himself.  He had chosen this
quiet village as a place where he might pass his days undisturbed,
and find a peaceful resting-place in its churchyard, where the gravel
was dry, and the sun lay warm, and the glowing woods of autumn would
spread their many-colored counterpane over the bed where he would be
taking his rest.  It sometimes came over him painfully that he was
never more to be of any importance to his fellow-creatures.  There
was nobody living to whom he was connected by any very near ties.  He
felt kindly enough to the good woman in whose house he lived; he
sometimes gave a few words of counsel to her son; he was not
unamiable with the few people he met; he bowed with great
consideration to the Rev. Dr. Pemberton; and he studied with no small
interest the physiognomy of the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker, to whose
sermons he listened, with a black scowl now and then, and a nostril
dilating with ominous intensity of meaning.  But he said sadly to
himself, that his life had been a failure,--that he had nothing to
show for it, and his one talent was ready in its napkin to give back
to his Lord.

He owed something of this sadness, perhaps, to a cause which many
would hold of small significance.  Though he had mourned for no lost
love, at least so far as was known, though he had never suffered the
pang of parting with a child, though he seemed isolated from those
joys and griefs which come with the ties of family, he too had his
private urn filled with the ashes of extinguished hopes.  He was the
father of a dead book.

Why "Thoughts on the Universe, by Byles Gridley, A. M.," had not met
with an eager welcome and a permanent demand from the discriminating
public, it would take us too long to inquire in detail.  Indeed; he
himself was never able to account satisfactorily for the state of
things which his bookseller's account made evident to him.  He had
read and re-read his work; and the more familiar he became with it,
the less was he able to understand the singular want of popular
appreciation of what he could not help recognizing as its
excellences.  He had a special copy of his work, printed on large
paper and sumptuously bound.  He loved to read in this, as people
read over the letters of friends who have long been dead; and it
might have awakened a feeling of something far removed from the
ludicrous, if his comments on his own production could have been
heard.  "That's a thought, now, for you!--See Mr. Thomas Babington
Macaulay's Essay printed six years after thus book."  "A felicitous
image! and so everybody would have said if only Mr. Thomas Carlyle
had hit upon it."  "If this is not genuine pathos, where will you
find it, I should like to know?  And nobody to open the book where it
stands written but one poor old man--in this generation, at least--in
this generation!"  It may be doubted whether he would ever have loved
his book with such jealous fondness if it had gone through a dozen
editions, and everybody was quoting it to his face.  But now it lived
only for him; and to him it was wife and child, parent, friend, all
in one, as Hector was all in all to his spouse.  He never tired of
it, and in his more sanguine moods he looked forward to the time when
the world would acknowledge its merits, and his genius would find
full recognition.  Perhaps he was right: more than one book which
seemed dead and was dead for contemporary readers has had a
resurrection when the rivals who triumphed over it lived only in the
tombstone memory of antiquaries.  Comfort for some of us, dear
fellow-writer

It followed from the way in which he lived that he must have some
means of support upon which he could depend.  He was economical, if
not over frugal in some of his habits; but he bought books, and took
newspapers and reviews, and had money when money was needed; the fact
being, though it was not generally known, that a distant relative had
not long before died, leaving him a very comfortable property.

His money matters had led him to have occasional dealings with the
late legal firm of Wibird and Penhallow, which had naturally passed
into the hands of the new partnership, Penhallow and Bradshaw.  He
had entire confidence in the senior partner, but not so much in the
young man who had been recently associated in the business.

Mr. William Murray Bradshaw, commonly called by his last two names,
was the son of a lawyer of some note for his acuteness, who marked
out his calling for him in having him named after the great Lord
Mansfield.  Murray Bradshaw was about twenty-five years old, by
common consent good-looking, with a finely formed head, a searching
eye, and a sharp-cut mouth, which smiled at his bidding without the
slightest reference to the real condition of his feeling at the
moment.  This was a great convenience; for it gave him an appearance
of good-nature at the small expense of a slight muscular movement
which was as easy as winking, and deceived everybody but those who
had studied him long and carefully enough to find that this play of
his features was what a watch maker would call a detached movement.

He had been a good scholar in college, not so much by hard study as
by skilful veneering, and had taken great pains to stand well with
the Faculty, at least one of whom, Byles Gridley, A. M., had watched
him with no little interest as a man with a promising future,
provided he were not so astute as to outwit and overreach himself in
his excess of contrivance.  His classmates could not help liking him;
as to loving him, none of them would have thought of that.  He was so
shrewd, so keen, so full of practical sense, and so good-humored as
long as things went on to his liking, that few could resist his
fascination.  He had a way of talking with people about what they
were interested in, as if it were the one matter in the world nearest
to his heart.  But he was commonly trying to find out something, or
to produce some impression, as a juggler is working at his miracle
while he keeps people's attention by his voluble discourse and make-
believe movements.  In his lightest talk he was almost always edging
towards a practical object, and it was an interesting and instructive
amusement to watch for the moment at which he would ship the belt of
his colloquial machinery on to the tight pulley.  It was done so
easily and naturally that there was hardly a sign of it.  Master
Gridley could usually detect the shifting action, but the young man's
features and voice never betrayed him.

He was a favorite with the other sex, who love poetry and romance, as
he well knew, for which reason he often used the phrases of both, and
in such a way as to answer his purpose with most of those whom he
wished to please.  He had one great advantage in the sweepstakes of
life: he was not handicapped with any burdensome ideals.  He took
everything at its marked value.  He accepted the standard of the
street as a final fact for to-day, like the broker's list of prices.

His whole plan of life was laid out.  He knew that law was the best
introduction to political life, and he meant to use it for this end.
He chose to begin his career in the country, so as to feel his way
more surely and gradually to its ultimate aim; but he had no
intention of burning his shining talents in a grazing district,
however tall its grass might grow.  His business was not with these
stiff-jointed, slow-witted graziers, but with the supple, dangerous,
far-seeing men who sit scheming by the gas-light in the great cities,
after all the lamps and candles are out from the Merrimac to the
Housatonic.  Every strong and every weak point of those who might
probably be his rivals were laid down on his charts, as winds and
currents and rocks are marked on those of a navigator.  All the young
girls in the country, and not a few in the city, with which, as
mentioned, he had frequent relations, were on his list of possible
availabilities in the matrimonial line of speculation, provided
always that their position and prospects were such as would make them
proper matches for so considerable a person as the future Hon.
William Murray Bradshaw.

Master Gridley had made a careful study of his old pupil since they
had resided in the same village.  The old professor could not help
admiring him, notwithstanding certain suspicious elements in his
character; for after muddy village talk, a clear stream of
intelligent conversation was a great luxury to the hard-headed
scholar.  The more he saw of him, the more he learned to watch his
movements, and to be on his guard in talking with him.  The old man
could be crafty, with all his simplicity, and he had found out that
under his good-natured manner there often lurked some design more or
less worth noting, and which might involve other interests deserving
protection.

For some reason or other the old Master of Arts had of late
experienced a certain degree of relenting with regard to himself,
probably brought about by the expressions of gratitude from worthy
Mrs. Hopkins for acts of kindness to which he himself attached no
great value.  He had been kind to her son Gifted; he had been
fatherly with Susan Posey, her relative and boarder; and he had shown
himself singularly and unexpectedly amiable with the little twins who
had been adopted by the good woman into her household.  In fact, ever
since these little creatures had begun to toddle about and explode
their first consonants, he had looked through his great round
spectacles upon them with a decided interest; and from that time it
seemed as if some of the human and social sentiments which had never
leafed or flowered in him, for want of their natural sunshine, had
begun growing up from roots which had never lost their life.  His
liking for the twins may have been an illustration of that singular
law which old Dr. Hurlbut used to lay down, namely, that at a certain
period of life, say from fifty to sixty and upward, the grand-
paternal instinct awakens in bachelors, the rhythms of Nature
reaching them in spite of her defeated intentions; so that when men
marry late they love their autumn child with a twofold affection,
--father's and grandfather's both in one.

However this may be, there is no doubt that Mr. Byles Gridley was
beginning to take a part in his neighbors' welfare and misfortunes,
such as could hardly have been expected of a man so long lost in his
books and his scholastic duties.  And among others, Myrtle Hazard had
come in for a share of his interest.  He had met her now and then in
her walks to and from school and meeting, and had been taken with her
beauty and her apparent unconsciousness of it, which he attributed to
the forlorn kind of household in which she had grown up.  He had got
so far as to talk with her now and then, and found himself puzzled,
as well he might be, in talking with a girl who had been growing into
her early maturity in antagonism with every influence that surrounded
her.

"Love will reach her by and by," he said, "in spite of the dragons up
at the den yonder.

    "'Centum fronte oculos, centum cervice gerebat
     Argus, et hos unus saepe fefellit amor.'"

But there was something about Myrtle,--he hardly knew whether to call
it dignity, or pride, or reserve, or the mere habit of holding back
brought about by the system of repression under which she had been
educated,--which kept even the old Master of Arts at his distance.
Yet he was strongly drawn to her, and had a sort of presentiment that
he might be able to help her some day, and that very probably she
would want his help; for she was alone in the world, except for the
dragons, and sure to be assailed by foes from without and from
within.

He noticed that her name was apt to come up in his conversations with
Murray Bradshaw; and, as he himself never introduced it, of course
the young man must have forced it, as conjurers force a card, and
with some special object.  This set him thinking hard; and, as a
result of it, he determined the next time Mr. Bradshaw brought her
name up to set him talking.

So he talked, not suspecting how carefully the old man listened.

"It was a demonish hard case," he said, "that old Malachi had left
his money as he did.  Myrtle Hazard was going to be the handsomest
girl about, when she came to her beauty, and she was coming to it
mighty fast.  If they could only break that will, but it was no use
trying.  The doctors said he was of sound mind for at least two years
after making it.  If Silence Withers got the land claim, there'd be a
pile, sure enough.  Myrtle Hazard ought to have it.  If the girl had
only inherited that property--whew?  She'd have been a match for any
fellow.  That old Silence Withers would do just as her minister told
her,--even chance whether she gives it to the Parson-factory, or
marries Bellamy Stoker, and gives it to him after his wife's dead.
He'd take it if he had to take her with it.  Earn his money, hey,
Master Gridley?"

"Why, you don't seem to think very well of the Rev. Joseph Bellamy
Stoker?" said Mr. Gridley, smiling.

"Think well of him?  Too fond of using the Devil's pitchfork for my
fancy!  Forks over pretty much all the world but himself and his lot
into--the bad place, you know; and toasts his own cheese with it with
very much the same kind of comfort that other folks seem to take in
that business.  Besides, he has a weakness for pretty saints--and
sinners.  That's an odd name he has.  More belle amie than Joseph
about him, I rather guess!"

The old professor smiled again.  "So you don't think he believes all
the mediaeval doctrines he is in the habit of preaching, Mr.
Bradshaw?"

"No, sir; I think he belongs to the class I have seen described
somewhere.  'There are those who hold the opinion that truth is only
safe when diluted,--about one fifth to four fifths lies,--as the
oxygen of the air is with its nitrogen.  Else it would burn us all
up.'"

Byles Gridley colored and started a little.  This was one of his own
sayings in "Thoughts on the Universe."  But the young man quoted it
without seeming to suspect its authorship.

"Where did you pick up that saying, Mr. Bradshaw?"

"I don't remember.  Some paper, I rather think.  It's one of those
good things that get about without anybody's knowing who says 'em.
Sounds like Coleridge."

"That's what I call a compliment worth having," said Byles Gridley to
himself, when he got home.  "Let me look at that passage."

He took down "Thoughts on the Universe," and got so much interested,
reading on page after page, that he did not hear the little tea-bell,
and Susan Posey volunteered to run up to his study and call him down
to tea.




CHAPTER V

THE TWINS.

Miss Suzan Posey knocked timidly at his door and informed him that
tea was waiting.  He rather liked Susan Posey.  She was a pretty
creature, slight, blonde, a little too light, a village beauty of the
second or third grade, effective at picnics and by moonlight,--the
kind of girl that very young men are apt to remember as their first
love.  She had a taste for poetry, and an admiration of poets; but,
what was better, she was modest and simple, and a perfect sister and
mother and grandmother to the two little forlorn twins who had been
stranded on the Widow Hopkins's doorstep.

These little twins, a boy and girl, were now between two and three
years old.  A few words will make us acquainted with them.  Nothing
had ever been known of their origin.  The sharp eyes of all the
spinsters had been through every household in the village and
neighborhood, and not a suspicion fixed itself on any one.  It was a
dark night when they were left; and it was probable that they had
been brought from another town, as the sound of wheels had been heard
close to the door where they were found, had stopped for a moment,
then been heard again, and lost in the distance.

How the good woman of the house took them in and kept them has been
briefly mentioned.  At first nobody thought they would live a day,
such little absurd attempts at humanity did they seem.  But the young
doctor came and the old doctor came, and the infants were laid in
cotton-wool, and the room heated up to keep them warm, and baby-
teaspoonfuls of milk given them, and after being kept alive in this
way, like the young of opossums and kangaroos, they came to a
conclusion about which they did not seem to have made up their
thinking-pulps for some weeks, namely, to go on trying to cross the
sea of life by tugging at the four-and-twenty oars which must be
pulled day and night until the unknown shore is reached, and the oars
lie at rest under the folded hands.

As it was not very likely that the parents who left their offspring
round on doorsteps were of saintly life, they were not presented for
baptism like the children of church-members.  Still, they must have
names to be known by, and Mrs. Hopkins was much exercised in the
matter.  Like many New England parents, she had a decided taste for
names that were significant and sonorous.  That which she had chosen
for her oldest child, the young poet, was either a remarkable
prophecy, or it had brought with it the endowments it promised.  She
had lost, or, in her own more pictorial language, she had buried, a
daughter to whom she had given the names, at once of cheerful omen
and melodious effect, Wealthy Amadora.

As for them poor little creturs, she said, she believed they was
rained down out o' the skies, jest as they say toads and tadpoles
come.  She meant to be a mother to 'em for all that, and give 'em
jest as good names as if they was the governor's children, or the
minister's.  If Mr. Gridley would be so good as to find her some kind
of a real handsome Chris'n name for 'em, she'd provide 'em with the
other one.  Hopkinses they shall be bred and taught, and Hopkinses
they shall be called.  Ef their father and mother was ashamed to own
'em, she was n't.  Couldn't Mr. Gridley pick out some pooty sounding
names from some of them great books of his.  It's jest as well to
have 'em pooty as long as they don't cost any more than if they was
Tom and Sally.

A grim smile passed over the rugged features of Byles Gridley.
"Nothing is easier than that, Mrs. Hopkins," he said.  "I will give
you two very pretty names that I think will please you and other
folks.  They're new names, too.  If they shouldn't like to keep them,
they can change them before they're christened, if they ever are.
Isosceles will be just the name for the boy, and I'm sure you won't
find a prettier name for the girl in a hurry than Helminthia."

Mrs. Hopkins was delighted with the dignity and novelty of these two
names, which were forthwith adopted.  As they were rather long for
common use in the family, they were shortened into the easier forms
of Sossy and Minthy, under which designation the babes began very
soon to thrive mightily, turning bread and milk into the substance of
little sinners at a great rate, and growing as if they were put out
at compound interest.

This short episode shows us the family conditions surrounding Byles
Gridley, who, as we were saying, had just been called down to tea by
Miss Susan Posey.

"I am coming, my dear," he said,--which expression quite touched Miss
Susan, who did not know that it was a kind of transferred caress from
the delicious page he was reading.  It was not the living child that
was kissed, but the dead one lying under the snow, if we may make a
trivial use of a very sweet and tender thought we all remember.

Not long after this, happening to call in at the lawyer's office, his
eye was caught by the corner of a book lying covered up by a pile of
papers.  Somehow or other it seemed to look very natural to him.
Could that be a copy of "Thoughts on the Universe"?  He watched his
opportunity, and got a hurried sight of the volume.  His own
treatise, sure enough!  Leaves Uncut.  Opened of itself to the one
hundred and twentieth page.  The axiom Murray Bradshaw had quoted--he
did not remember from what,--"sounded like Coleridge"--was staring
him in the face from that very page.  When he remembered how he had
pleased himself with that compliment the other day, he blushed like a
school-girl; and then, thinking out the whole trick,--to hunt up his
forgotten book, pick out a phrase or two from it, and play on his
weakness with it, to win his good opinion,--for what purpose he did
not know, but doubtless to use him in some way,--he grinned with a
contempt about equally divided between himself and the young schemer.

"Ah ha!" he muttered scornfully.  "Sounds like Coleridge, hey?
Niccolo Macchiavelli Bradshaw!"

From this day forward he looked on all the young lawyer's doings with
even more suspicion than before.  Yet he would not forego his company
and conversation; for he was very agreeable and amusing to study; and
this trick he had played him was, after all, only a diplomatist's way
of flattering his brother plenipotentiary.  Who could say?  Some time
or other he might cajole England or France or Russia into a treaty
with just such a trick.  Shallower men than he had gone out as
ministers of the great Republic.  At any rate, the fellow was worth
watching.




CHAPTER VI.

THE USE OF SPECTACLES.

The old Master of Arts had a great reputation in the house where he
lived for knowing everything that was going on.  He rather enjoyed
it; and sometimes amused himself with surprising his simple-hearted
landlady and her boarders with the unaccountable results of his
sagacity.  One thing was quite beyond her comprehension.  She was
perfectly sure that Mr. Gridley could see out of the back of his
head, just as other people see with their natural organs.  Time and
again he had told her what she was doing when his back was turned to
her, just as if he had been sitting squarely in front of her.  Some
laughed at this foolish notion; but others, who knew more of the
nebulous sciences, told her it was like's not jes' so.  Folks had
read letters laid ag'in' the pits o' their stomachs, 'n' why should
n't they see out o' the backs o' their heads?

Now there was a certain fact at the bottom of this belief of Mrs.
Hopkins; and as it world be a very small thing to make a mystery of
so simple a matter, the reader shall have the whole benefit of
knowing all there is in it,--not quite yet, however, of knowing all
that came of it.  It was not the mirror trick, of course, which Mrs.
Felix Lorraine and other dangerous historical personages have so long
made use of.  It was nothing but this: Mr. Byles Gridley wore a pair
of formidable spectacles with large round glasses.  He had often
noticed the reflection of objects behind him when they caught their
images at certain angles, and had got the habit of very often looking
at the reflecting surface of one or the other of the glasses, when he
seemed to be looking through them.  It put a singular power into his
possession, which might possibly hereafter lead to something more
significant than the mystification of the Widow Hopkins.

A short time before Myrtle Hazard's disappearance, Mr. Byles Gridley
had occasion to call again at the office of Penhallow and Bradshaw on
some small matter of business of his own.  There were papers to look
over, and he put on his great round-glassed spectacles.  He and Mr.
Penhallow sat down at the table, and Mr. Bradshaw was at a desk
behind them.  After sitting for a while, Mr. Penhallow seemed to
remember something he had meant to attend to, for he said all at
once: "Excuse me, Mr. Gridley.  Mr. Bradshaw, if you are not busy, I
wish you would look over this bundle of papers.  They look like old
receipted bills and memoranda of no particular use; but they came
from the garret of the Withers place, and might possibly have
something that would be of value.  Look them over, will you, and see
whether there is anything there worth saving."

The young man took the papers, and Mr. Penhallow sat down again at
the table with Mr. Byles Gridley.

This last-named gentleman felt just then a strong impulse to observe
the operations of Murray Bradshaw.  He could not have given any very
good reason for it, any more than any of us can for half of what we
do.

"I should like to examine that conveyance we were speaking of once
more," said he.  "Please to look at this one in the mean time, will
you, Mr. Penhallow?"

Master Gridley held the document up before him.  He did not seem to
find it quite legible, and adjusted his spectacles carefully, until
they were just as he wanted them.  When he had got them to suit
himself, sitting there with his back to Murray Bradshaw, he could see
him and all his movements, the desk at which he was standing, and the
books in the shelves before him,--all this time appearing as if he
were intent upon his own reading.

The young man began in a rather indifferent way to look over the
papers.  He loosened the band round them, and took them up one by
one, gave a careless glance at them, and laid them together to tie up
again when he had gone through them.  Master Gridley saw all this
process, thinking what a fool he was all the time to be watching such
a simple proceeding.  Presently he noticed a more sudden movement:
the young man had found something which arrested his attention, and
turned his head to see if he was observed.  The senior partner and
his client were both apparently deep in their own affairs.  In his
hand Mr. Bradshaw held a paper folded like the others, the back of
which he read, holding it in such a way that Master Gridley saw very
distinctly three large spots of ink upon it, and noticed their
position.  Murray Bradshaw took another hurried glance at the two
gentlemen, and then quickly opened the paper.  He ran it over with a
flash of his eye, folded it again, and laid it by itself.  With
another quick turn of his head, as if to see whether he were observed
or like to be, he reached his hand out and took a volume down from
the shelves.  In this volume he shut the document, whatever it was,
which he had just taken out of the bundle, and placed the book in a
very silent and as it were stealthy way back in its place.  He then
gave a look at each of the other papers, and said to his partner:
"Old bills, old leases, and insurance policies that have run out.
Malachi seems to have kept every scrap of paper that had a signature
to it."

"That 's the way with the old misers, always," said Mr. Penhallow.

Byles Gridley had got through reading the document he held,--or
pretending to read it.  He took off his spectacles.

"We all grow timid and cautious as we get old, Mr. Penhallow."  Then
turning round to the young man, he slowly repeated the lines,

   "'Multa senem circumveniunt incommoda, vel quod
     Quaerit et inventis miser abstinet, ac timet uti;
     Vel quod res omnes timide, gelideque ministrat '

"You remember the passage, Mr. Bradshaw?"

While he was reciting these words from Horace, which he spoke slowly
as if he relished every syllable, he kept his eyes on the young man
steadily, but with out betraying any suspicion.  His old habits as a
teacher made that easy.

Murray Bradshaw's face was calm as usual, but there was a flush on
his cheek, and Master Gridley saw the slight but unequivocal signs of
excitement.

"Something is going on inside there," the old man said to himself.
He waited patiently, on the pretext of business, until Mr. Bradshaw
got up and left the office.  As soon as he and the senior partner
were alone, Master Gridley took a lazy look at some of the books in
his library.  There stood in the book-shelves a copy of the Corpus
Juris Civilis,--the fine Elzevir edition of 1664.  It was bound in
parchment, and thus readily distinguishable at a glance from all the
books round it.  Now Mr. Penhallow was not much of a Latin scholar,
and knew and cared very little about the civil law.  He had fallen in
with this book at an auction, and bought it to place in his shelves
with the other "properties" of the office, because it would look
respectable.  Anything shut up in one of those two octavos might stay
there a lifetime without Mr. Penhallow's disturbing it; that Master
Gridley knew, and of course the young man knew it too.

We often move to the objects of supreme curiosity or desire, not in
the lines of castle or bishop on the chess-board, but with the
knight's zigzag, at first in the wrong direction, making believe to
ourselves we are not after the thing coveted.  Put a lump of sugar in
a canary-bird's cage, and the small creature will illustrate the
instinct for the benefit of inquirers or sceptics.  Byles Gridley
went to the other side of the room and took a volume of Reports from
the shelves.  He put it back and took a copy of "Fearne on Contingent
Remainders," and looked at that for a moment in an idling way, as if
from a sense of having nothing to do.  Then he drew the back of his
forefinger along the books on the shelf, as if nothing interested him
in them, and strolled to the shelf in front of the desk at which
Murray Bradshaw had stood.  He took down the second volume of the
Corpus Juris Civilis, turned the leaves over mechanically, as if in
search of some title, and replaced it.

He looked round for a moment.  Mr. Penhallow was writing hard at his
table, not thinking of him, it was plain enough.  He laid his hand on
the FIRST volume of the Corpus Juris Civilis.  There was a document
shut up in it.  His hand was on the book, whether taking it out or
putting it back was not evident, when the door opened and Mr. William
Murray Bradshaw entered.

"Ah, Mr. Gridley," he said, "you are not studying the civil law, are
you?"  He strode towards him as he spoke, his face white, his eyes
fixed fiercely on him.

"It always interests me, Mr. Bradshaw," he answered, "and this is a
fine edition of it.  One may find a great many valuable things in the
Corpus Juris Civilis."

He looked impenetrable, and whether or not he had seen more than Mr.
Bradshaw wished him to see, that gentleman could not tell.  But there
stood the two books in their place, and when, after Master Gridley
had gone, he looked in the first volume, there was the document he
had shut up in it.




CHAPTER VII.

MYRTLE'S LETTER--THE YOUNG MEN'S PURSUIT.

"You know all about it, Olive?" Cyprian Eveleth said to his sister,
after a brief word of greeting.

"Know of what, Cyprian?"

"Why, sister, don't you know that Myrtle Hazard is missing,--gone!
--gone nobody knows where, and that we are looking in all directions
to find her?"

Olive turned very pale and was silent for a moment.  At the end of
that moment the story seemed almost old to her.  It was a natural
ending of the prison-life which had been round Myrtle since her
earliest years.  When she got large and strong enough, she broke out
of jail,--that was all.  The nursery-bar is always climbed sooner or
later, whether it is a wooden or an iron one.  Olive felt as if she
had dimly foreseen just such a finishing to the tragedy of the poor
girl's home bringing-up.  Why could not she have done something to
prevent it?  Well,--what shall we do now, and as it is?--that is the
question.

"Has she left no letter,--no explanation of her leaving in this way?"

"Not a word, so far as anybody in the village knows."

"Come over to the post-office with me; perhaps we may find a letter.
I think we shall."

Olive's sagacity and knowledge of her friend's character had not
misled her.  She found a letter from Myrtle to herself, which she
opened and read as here follows:

MY DEAREST OLIVE:--Think no evil of me for what I have done.  The
fire-hang-bird's nest, as Cyprian called it, is empty, and the poor
bird is flown.

I can live as I have lived no longer.  This place is chilling all the
life out of me, and I must find another home.  It is far, far away,
and you will not hear from me again until I am there.  Then I will
write to you.

You know where I was born,--under a hot sun and in the midst of
strange, lovely scenes that I seem still to remember.  I must visit
them again: my heart always yearns for them.  And I must cross the
sea to get there,--the beautiful great sea that I have always longed
for and that my river has been whispering about to me ever so many
years.  My life is pinched and starved here.  I feel as old as aunt
Silence, and I am only fifteen,--a child she has called me within a
few days.  If this is to be a child, what is it to be a woman?

I love you dearly,--and your brother is almost to me as if he were
mine.  I love our sweet, patient Bathsheba,--yes, and the old man
that has spoken so kindly with me, good Master Gridley; I hate to
give you pain,--to leave you all,--but my way of life is killing me,
and I am too young to die.  I cannot take the comfort with you, my
dear friends, that I would; for it seems as if I carried a lump of
ice in my heart, and all the warmth I find in you cannot thaw it out.

I have had a strange warning to leave this place, Olive.  Do you
remember how the angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph and told him to
flee into Egypt?  I have had a dream like that, Olive.  There is an
old belief in our family that the spirit of one who died many
generations ago watches over some of her descendants.  They say it
led our first ancestor to come over here when it was a wilderness.  I
believe it has appeared to others of the family in times of trouble.
I have had a strange dream at any rate, and the one I saw, or thought
I saw, told me to leave this place.  Perhaps I should have stayed if
it had not been for that, but it seemed like an angel's warning.

Nobody will know how I have gone, or which way I have taken.  On
Monday, you may show this letter to my friends, not before.  I do not
think they will be in danger of breaking their hearts for me at our
house.  Aunt Silence cares for nothing but her own soul, and the
other woman hates me, I always thought.  Kitty Fagan will cry hard.
Tell her perhaps I shall come back by and by.  There is a little box
in my room, with some keepsakes marked,--one is for poor Kitty.  You
can give them to the right ones.  Yours is with them.

Good-by, dearest.  Keep my secret, as I told you, till Monday.  And
if you never see me again, remember how much I loved you.  Never
think hardly of me, for you have grown up in a happy home, and do not
know how much misery can be crowded into fifteen years of a young
girl's life.  God be with you!

MYRTLE HAZARD.


Olive could not restrain her tears, as she handed the letter to
Cyprian.  "Her secret is as safe with you as with me," she said.
"But this is madness, Cyprian, and we must keep her from doing
herself a wrong.

"What she means to do, is to get to Boston, in some way or other, and
sail for India.  It is strange that they have not tracked her.  There
is no time to be lost.  She shall not go out into the world in this
way, child that she is.  No; she shall come back, and make her home
with us, if she cannot be happy with these people.  Ours is a happy
and a cheerful home, and she shall be to me as a younger sister, and
your sister too, Cyprian.  But you must see her; you must leave this
very hour; and you may find her.  Go to your cousin Edward, in
Boston, at once; tell him your errand, and get him to help you find
our poor dear sister.  Then give her the note I will write, and say I
know your heart, Cyprian, and I can trust that to tell you what to
say."

In a very short time Cyprian Eveleth was on his way to Boston.  But
another, keener even in pursuit than he, was there before him.

Ever since the day when Master Gridley had made that over-curious
observation of the young lawyer's proceedings at the office, Murray
Bradshaw had shown a far livelier interest than before in the
conditions and feelings of Myrtle Hazard.  He had called frequently
at The Poplars to talk over business matters, which seemed of late to
require a deal of talking.  He had been very deferential to Miss
Silence, and had wound himself into the confidence of Miss Badlam.
He found it harder to establish any very near relations with Myrtle,
who had never seemed to care much for any young man but Cyprian
Eveleth, and to care for him quite as much as Olive's brother as for
any personal reason.  But he carefully studied Myrtle's tastes and
ways of thinking and of life, so that, by and by, when she should
look upon herself as a young woman, and not as a girl, he would have
a great advantage in making her more intimate acquaintance.

Thus, she corresponded with a friend of her mother's in India.  She
talked at times as if it were her ideal home, and showed many tastes
which might well be vestiges of early Oriental impressions.  She made
herself a rude hammock,--such as are often used in hot climates,--and
swung it between two elms.  Here she would lie in the hot summer
days, and fan herself with the sandal-wood fan her friend in India
had sent her,--the perfume of which, the women said, seemed to throw
her into day-dreams, which were almost like trances.

These circumstances gave a general direction to his ideas, which were
presently fixed more exactly by two circumstances which he learned
for himself and kept to himself; for he had no idea of making a hue
and cry, and yet he did not mean that Myrtle Hazard should get away
if he could help it.

The first fact was this.  He found among the copies of the city
newspaper they took at The Poplars a recent number from which a
square had been cut out.  He procured another copy of this paper of
the same date, and found that the piece cut out was an advertisement
to the effect that the A 1 Ship Swordfish, Captain Hawkins, was to
sail from Boston for Calcutta, on the 20th of June.

The second fact was the following.  On the window-sill of her little
hanging chamber, which the women allowed him to inspect, he found
some threads of long, black, glossy hair caught by a splinter in the
wood.  They were Myrtle's of course.  A simpleton might have
constructed a tragedy out of this trivial circumstance,--how she had
cast herself from the window into the waters beneath it,--how she had
been thrust out after a struggle, of which this shred from her
tresses was the dreadful witness,--and so on.  Murray Bradshaw did
not stop to guess and wonder.  He said nothing about it, but wound
the shining threads on his finger, and, as soon as he got home,
examined them with a magnifier.  They had been cut off smoothly, as
with a pair of scissors.  This was part of a mass of hair, then,
which had been shorn and thrown from the window.  Nobody would do
that but she herself.  What would she do it for?  To disguise her
sex, of course.  The other inferences were plain enough.

The wily young man put all these facts and hints together, and
concluded that be would let the rustics drag the ponds and the river,
and scour the woods and swamps, while he himself went to the seaport
town from which she would without doubt sail if she had formed the
project he thought on the whole most probable.

Thus it was that we found him hurrying to the nearest station to
catch the train to Boston, while they were all looking for traces of
the missing girl nearer home.  In the cars he made the most
suggestive inquiries he could frame, to stir up the gentlemanly
conductor's memory.  Had any young fellow been on the train within a
day or two, who had attracted his notice?  Smooth, handsome face,
black eyes, short black hair, new clothes, not fitting very well,
looked away when he paid his fare, had a soft voice like a woman's,--
had he seen anybody answering to some such description as this?  The
gentlemanly conductor had not noticed,--was always taking up and
setting down way-passengers,--might have had such a young man
aboard,--there was two or three students one day in the car singing
college songs,--he did n't care how folks looked if they had their
tickets ready,--and minded their own business,--and, so saying, he
poked a young man upon whose shoulder a ringleted head was reclining
with that delightful abandon which the railroad train seems to
provoke in lovely woman,--"Fare!"

It is a fine thing to be set down in a great, overcrowded hotel,
where they do not know you, looking dusty, and for the moment shabby,
with nothing but a carpet-bag in your hand, feeling tired, and
anything but clean, and hungry, and worried, and every way miserable
and mean, and to undergo the appraising process of the gentleman in
the office, who, while he shoves the book round to you for your name,
is making a hasty calculation as to how high up he can venture to
doom you.  But Murray Bradshaw's plain dress and carpet-bag were more
than made up for by the air and tone which imply the habit of being
attended to.  The clerk saw that in a glance, and, as he looked at
the name and address in the book, spoke sharply in the explosive
dialect of his tribe,--

"Jun! ta'tha'genlm'n'scarpetbag'n'showhimupt'thirtyone!"

When Cyprian Eveleth reached the same hotel late at night, he
appeared in his best clothes and with a new valise; but his amiable
countenance and gentle voice and modest manner sent him up two
stories higher, where he found himself in a room not much better than
a garret, feeling lonely enough, for he did not know he had an
acquaintance in the same house.  The two young men were in and out so
irregularly that it was not very strange that they did not happen to
meet each other.

The young lawyer was far more likely to find Myrtle if she were in
the city than the other, even with the help of his cousin Edward.  He
was not only older, but sharper, better acquainted with the city and
its ways, and, whatever might be the strength of Cyprian's motives,
his own were of such intensity that he thought of nothing else by
day, and dreamed of nothing else by night.  He went to work,
therefore, in the most systematic manner.  He first visited the ship
Swordfish, lying at her wharf, saw her captain, and satisfied himself
that as yet nobody at all corresponding to the description of Myrtle
Hazard had been seen by any person on board.  He visited all the
wharves, inquiring on every vessel where it seemed possible she might
have been looking about.  Hotels, thoroughfares, every place where he
might hear of her or meet her, were all searched.  He took some of
the police into his confidence, and had half a dozen pairs of eyes
besides his own opened pretty widely, to discover the lost girl.

On Sunday, the 19th, he got the first hint which encouraged him to
think he was on the trail of his fugitive.  He had gone down again to
the wharf where the Swordfish, advertised to sail the next day, was
lying.  The captain was not on board, but one of the mates was there,
and he addressed his questions to him, not with any great hope of
hearing anything important, but determined to lose no chance, however
small.  He was startled with a piece of information which gave him
such an exquisite pang of delight that he could hardly keep the usual
quiet of his demeanor.  A youth corresponding to his description of
Myrtle Hazard in her probable disguise had been that morning on board
the Swordfish, making many inquires as to the hour at which she was
to sail, and who were to be the passengers, and remained some time on
board, going all over the vessel, examining her cabin accommodations,
and saying he should return to-morrow before she sailed,--doubtless
intending to take passage in her, as there was plenty of room on
board.  There could be little question, from the description, who
this young person was.  It was a rather delicate--looking, dark--
haired youth, smooth-faced, somewhat shy and bashful in his ways, and
evidently excited and nervous.  He had apparently been to look about
him, and would come back at the last moment, just as the vessel was
ready to sail, and in an hour or two be beyond the reach of inquiry.

Murray Bradshaw returned to his hotel, and, going to his chamber,
summoned all his faculties in state council to determine what course
he should follow, now that he had the object of his search certainly
within reaching distance.  There was no danger now of her eluding
him; but the grave question arose, what was he to do when he stood
face to face with her.  She must not go,--that was fixed.  If she
once got off in that ship, she might be safe enough; but what would
become of certain projects in which he was interested,--that was the
question.  But again, she was no child, to be turned away from her
adventure by cajolery, or by any such threats as common truants would
find sufficient to scare them back to their duty.  He could tell the
facts of her disguise and the manner of her leaving home to the
captain of the vessel, and induce him to send her ashore as a stray
girl, to be returned to her relatives.  But this would only make her
furious with him; and he must not alienate her from himself, at any
rate.  He might plead with her in the name of duty, for the sake of
her friends, for the good name of the family.  She had thought all
these things over before she ran away.  What if he should address her
as a lover, throw himself at her feet, implore her to pity him and
give up her rash scheme, and, if things came to the very worst, offer
to follow her wherever she went, if she would accept him in the only
relation that would render it possible.  Fifteen years old,--he
nearly ten years older,--but such things had happened before, and
this was no time to stand on trifles.

He worked out the hypothesis of the matrimonial offer as he would
have reasoned out the probabilities in a law case he was undertaking.

1.  He would rather risk that than lose all hold upon her.  The girl
was handsome enough for his ambitious future, wherever it might carry
him.  She came of an honorable family, and had the great advantage of
being free from a tribe of disagreeable relatives, which is such a
drawback on many otherwise eligible parties.  To these considerations
were to be joined other circumstances which we need not here mention,
of a nature to add greatly to their force, and which would go far of
themselves to determine his action.

2.  How was it likely she would look on such an extraordinary
proposition?  At first, no doubt, as Lady Anne looked upon the
advances of Richard.  She would be startled, perhaps shocked.  What
then?  She could not help feeling flattered at such an offer from
him,--him, William Murray Bradshaw, the rising young man of his
county, at her feet, his eyes melting with the love he would throw
into them, his tones subdued to their most sympathetic quality, and
all those phrases on his lips which every day beguile women older and
more discreet than this romantic, long-imprisoned girl, whose rash
and adventurous enterprise was an assertion of her womanhood and her
right to dispose of herself as she chose.  He had not lived to be
twenty-five years old without knowing his power with women.  He
believed in himself so thoroughly, that his very confidence was a
strong promise of success.

3.  In case all his entreaties, arguments, and offers made no
impression, should he make use of that supreme resource, not to be
employed save in extreme need, but which was of a nature, in his
opinion, to shake a resolution stronger than this young girl was like
to oppose to it?  That would be like Christian's coming to his weapon
called All-prayer, he said to himself, with a smile that his early
readings of Bunyan should have furnished him an image for so
different an occasion.  The question was one he could not settle till
the time came,--he must leave it to the instinct of the moment.

The next morning found him early waking after a night of feverish
dreams.  He dressed himself with more than usual care, and walked
down to the wharf where the Swordfish was moored.  The ship had left
the wharf, and was lying out in the stream: A small boat had just
reached her, and a slender youth, as he appeared at that distance,
climbed, not over-adroitly, up the vessel's side.

Murray Bradshaw called to a boatman near by and ordered the man to
row him over as fast as he could to the vessel lying in the stream.
He had no sooner reached the deck of the Swordfish than he asked for
the young person who had just been put on board.

"He is in the cabin, sir, just gone down with the captain," was the
reply.

His heart beat, in spite of his cool temperament, as he went down the
steps leading to the cabin.  The young person was talking earnestly
with the captain, and, on his turning round, Mr. William Murray
Bradshaw had the pleasure of recognizing his young friend, Mr.
Cyprian Eveleth.




CHAPTER VIII.

DOWN THE RIVER.

Look at the flower of a morning-glory the evening before the dawn
which is to see it unfold.  The delicate petals are twisted into a
spiral, which at the appointed hour, when the sunlight touches the
hidden springs of its life, will uncoil itself and let the day into
the chamber of its virgin heart.  But the spiral must unwind by its
own law, and the hand that shall try to hasten the process will only
spoil the blossom which would have expanded in symmetrical beauty
under the rosy fingers of morning.

We may take a hint from Nature's handling of the flower in dealing
with young souls, and especially with the souls of young girls,
which, from their organization and conditions, require more careful
treatment than those of their tougher-fibred brothers.  Many parents
reproach themselves for not having enforced their own convictions on
their children in the face of every inborn antagonism they
encountered.  Let them not be too severe in their self-condemnation.
A want of judgment in this matter has sent many a young person to
Bedlam, whose nature would have opened kindly enough if it had only
been trusted to the sweet influences of morning sunshine.  In such
cases it may be that the state we call insanity is not always an
unalloyed evil.  It may take the place of something worse, the
wretchedness of a mind not yet dethroned, but subject to the
perpetual interferences of another mind governed by laws alien and
hostile to its own.  Insanity may perhaps be the only palliative left
to Nature in this extremity.  But before she comes to that, she has
many expedients.  The mind does not know what diet it can feed on
until it has been brought to the starvation point.  Its experience is
like that of those who have been long drifting about on rafts or in
long-boats.  There is nothing out of which it will not contrive to
get some sustenance.  A person of note, long held captive for a
political offence, is said to have owed the preservation of his
reason to a pin, out of which he contrived to get exercise and
excitement by throwing it down carelessly on the dark floor of his
dungeon, and then hunting for it in a series of systematic
explorations until he had found it.

Perhaps the most natural thing Myrtle Hazard could have done would
have been to go crazy, and be sent to the nearest asylum, if
Providence, which in its wisdom makes use of the most unexpected
agencies, had not made a special provision for her mental welfare.
She was in that arid household as the prophet in the land where there
was no dew nor rain for these long years.  But as he had the brook
Cherith, and the bread and flesh in the morning and the bread and
flesh in the evening which the ravens brought him, so she had the
river and her secret store of books.

The river was light and life and music and companionship to her.  She
learned to row herself about upon it, to swim boldly in it, for it
had sheltered nooks but a little way above The Poplars.  But there
was more than that in it,--it was infinitely sympathetic.  A river is
strangely like a human soul.  It has its dark and bright days, its
troubles from within, and its disturbances from without.  It often
runs over ragged rocks with a smooth surface, and is vexed with
ripples as it slides over sands that are level as a floor.  It
betrays its various moods by aspects which are the commonplaces of
poetry, as smiles and dimples and wrinkles and frowns.  Its face is
full of winking eyes, when the scattering rain-drops first fall upon
it, and it scowls back at the storm-cloud, as with knitted brows,
when the winds are let loose.  It talks, too, in its own simple
dialect, murmuring, as it were, with busy lips all the way to the
ocean, as children seeking the mother's breast and impatient of
delay.  Prisoners who know what a flower or an insect has been to
them in their solitary cell, invalids who have employed their vacant
minds in studying the patterns of paper-hangings on the walls of
their sick-chambers, can tell what the river was to the lonely,
imaginative creature who used to sit looking into its depths, hour
after hour, from the airy height of the Fire-hang-bird's Nest.

Of late a thought had mingled with her fancies which had given to the
river the aspect of something more than a friend and a companion.  It
appeared all at once as a Deliverer.  Did not its waters lead, after
long wanderings, to the great highway of the world, and open to her
the gates of those cities from which she could take her departure
unchallenged towards the lands of the morning or of the sunset?
Often, after a freshet, she had seen a child's miniature boat
floating down on its side past her window, and traced it in
imagination back to some crystal brook flowing by the door of a
cottage far up a blue mountain in the distance.  So she now began to
follow down the stream the airy shallop that held her bright fancies.
These dreams of hers were colored by the rainbows of an enchanted
fountain,--the books of adventure, the romances, the stories which
fortune had placed in her hands,--the same over which the heart of
the Pride of the County had throbbed in the last century, and on the
pages of some of which the traces of her tears might still be seen.

The literature which was furnished for Myrtle's improvement was
chiefly of a religious character, and, however interesting and
valuable to those to whom it was adapted, had not been chosen with
any wise regard to its fitness for her special conditions.  Of what
use was it to offer books like the "Saint's Rest" to a child whose
idea of happiness was in perpetual activity?  She read "Pilgrim's
Progress," it is true, with great delight.  She liked the idea of
travelling with a pack on one's back, the odd shows at the House of
the interpreter, the fighting, the adventures, the pleasing young
ladies at the palace the name of which was Beautiful, and their very
interesting museum of curiosities.  As for the allegorical meaning,
it went through her consciousness like a peck of wheat through a
bushel measure with the bottom out, without touching.

But the very first book she got hold of out of the hidden treasury
threw the "Pilgrim's Progress" quite into the shade.  It was the
story of a youth who ran away and lived on an island,--one Crusoe,
--a homely narrative, but evidently true, though full of remarkable
adventures.  There too was the history, coming much nearer home, of
Deborah Sampson, the young woman who served as a soldier in the
Revolutionary War, with a portrait of her in man's attire, looking
intrepid rather than lovely.  A virtuous young female she was, and
married well, as she deserved to, and raised a family with as good a
name as wife and mother as the best of them.  But perhaps not one of
these books and stories took such hold of her imagination as the tale
of Rasselas, which most young persons find less entertaining than the
"Vicar of Wakefield," with which it is nowadays so commonly bound up.
It was the prince's discontent in the Happy Valley, the iron gate
opening to the sound of music, and closing forever on those it
admitted, the rocky boundaries of the imprisoning valley, the visions
of the world beyond, the projects of escape, and the long toil which
ended in their accomplishment, which haunted her sleeping and waking.
She too was a prisoner, but it was not in the Happy Valley.  Of the
romances and the love-letters we must take it for granted that she
selected wisely, and read discreetly; at least we know nothing to the
contrary.

There were mysterious reminiscences and hints of her past coming over
her constantly.  It was in the course of the long, weary spring
before her disappearance, that a dangerous chord was struck which
added to her growing restlessness.  In an old closet were some
seashells and coral-fans, and dried star-fishes and sea, horses, and
a natural mummy of a rough-skinned dogfish.  She had not thought of
them for years, but now she felt impelled to look after them.  The
dim sea odors which still clung to them penetrated to the very inmost
haunts of memory, and called up that longing for the ocean breeze
which those who have once breathed and salted their blood with it
never get over, and which makes the sweetest inland airs seem to them
at last tame and tasteless.  She held a tigershell to her ear, and
listened to that low, sleepy murmur, whether in the sense or in the
soul we hardly know, like that which had so often been her lullaby,
--a memory of the sea, as Landor and Wordsworth have sung.

"You are getting to look like your father," Aunt Silence said one
day; "I never saw it before.  I always thought you took after old
Major Gideon Withers.  Well, I hope you won't come to an early grave
like poor Charles,--or at any rate, that you may be prepared."

It did not seem very likely that the girl was going out of the world
at present, but she looked Miss Silence in the face very seriously,
and said, "Why not an early grave, Aunt, if this world is such a bad
place as you say it is?"

"I'm afraid you are not fit for a better."

She wondered if Silence Withers and Cynthia Badlam were just ripe for
heaven.

For some months Miss Cynthia Badlam, who, as was said, had been an
habitual visitor at The Poplars, had lived there as a permanent
resident.  Between her and Silence Withers, Myrtle Hazard found no
rest for her soul.  Each of them was for untwisting the morning-glory
without waiting for the sunshine to do it.  Each had her own wrenches
and pincers to use for that purpose.  All this promised little for
the nurture and admonition of the young girl, who, if her will could
not be broken by imprisonment and starvation at three years old, was
not likely to be over-tractable to any but gentle and reasonable
treatment at fifteen.

Aunt Silence's engine was responsibility,--her own responsibility,
and the dreadful consequences which would follow to her, Silence, if
Myrtle should in any way go wrong.  Ever since her failure in that
moral coup d'etat by which the sinful dynasty of the natural self-
determining power was to be dethroned, her attempts in the way of
education had been a series of feeble efforts followed by plaintive
wails over their utter want of success.  The face she turned upon the
young girl in her solemn expostulations looked as if it were
inscribed with the epitaphs of hope and virtue.  Her utterances were
pitched in such a forlorn tone, that the little bird in his cage, who
always began twittering at the sound of Myrtle's voice, would stop in
his song, and cock his head with a look of inquiry full of pathos, as
if he wanted to know what was the matter, and whether he could do
anything to help.

The specialty of Cynthia Badlam was to point out all the dangerous
and unpardonable trangressions into which young people generally, and
this young person in particular, were likely to run, to hold up
examples of those who had fallen into evil ways and come to an evil
end, to present the most exalted standard of ascetic virtue to the
lively girl's apprehension, leading her naturally to the conclusion
that a bright example of excellence stood before her in the
irreproachable relative who addressed her.  Especially with regard to
the allurements which the world offers to the young and inexperienced
female, Miss Cynthia Badlam was severe and eloquent.  Sometimes poor
Myrtle would stare, not seeing the meaning of her wise caution,
sometimes look at Miss Cynthia with a feeling that there was
something about her that was false and forced, that she had nothing
in common with young people, that she had no pity for them, only
hatred of their sins, whatever these might be,--a hatred which seemed
to extend to those sources of frequent temptation, youth and beauty,
as if they were in themselves objectionable.

Both the lone women at The Poplars were gifted with a thin vein of
music.  They gave it expression in psalmody, of course, in which
Myrtle, who was a natural singer, was expected to bear her part.
This would have been pleasantry if the airs most frequently selected
had been cheerful or soothing, and if the favorite hymns had been of
a sort to inspire a love for what was lovely in this life, and to
give some faint foretaste of the harmonies of a better world to come.
But there is a fondness for minor keys and wailing cadences common to
the monotonous chants of cannibals and savages generally, to such
war-songs as the wild, implacable "Marseillaise," and to the favorite
tunes of low--spirited Christian pessimists.  That mournful "China,"
which one of our most agreeable story-tellers has justly singled out
as the cry of despair itself, was often sung at The Poplars, sending
such a sense of utter misery through the house, that poor Kitty Fagan
would cross herself, and wring her hands, and think of funerals, and
wonder who was going to die,--for she fancied she heard the Banshee's
warning in those most dismal ululations.

On the first Saturday of June, a fortnight before her disappearance,
Myrtle strolled off by the river shore, along its lonely banks, and
came dome with her hands full of leaves and blossoms.  Silence
Withers looked at them as if they were a kind of melancholy
manifestation of frivolity on the part of the wicked old earth.  Not
that she did not inhale their faint fragrance with a certain
pleasure, and feel their beauty as none whose souls are not wholly
shriveled and hardened can help doing, but the world was, in her
estimate, a vale of tears, and it was only by a momentary
forgetfulness that she could be moved to smile at anything.

Miss Cynthia, a sharper-edged woman, had formed the habit of crushing
everything for its moral, until it lost its sweetness and grew almost
odious, as flower-de-luces do when handled roughly.  "There's a worm
in that leaf, Myrtle.  He has rolled it all round him, and hidden
himself from sight; but there is a horrid worm in it, for all it is
so young and fresh.  There is a worm in every young soul, Myrtle."

"But there is not a worm in every leaf, Miss Cynthia.  Look," she
said," all these are open, and you can see all over and under them,
and there is nothing there.  Are there never any worms in the leaves
after they get old and yellow, Miss Cynthia?"

That was a pretty fair hit for a simple creature of fifteen, but
perhaps she was not so absolutely simple as one might have thought.

It was on the evening of this same day that they were sitting
together.  The sweet season was opening, and it seemed as if the
whispering of the leaves, the voices of the birds, the softness of
the air, the young life stirring in everything, called on all
creatures to join the universal chorus of praise that was going up
around them.

"What shall we sing this evening?" said Miss Silence.

"Give me one of the books, if you please, Cousin Silence," said Miss
Cynthia."  It is Saturday evening.  Holy time has begun.  Let us
prepare our minds for the solemnities of the Sabbath."

She took the book, one well known to the schools and churches of this
nineteenth century.

"Book Second.  Hymn 44.  Long metre.  I guess 'Putney' will be as
good a tune as any to sing it to."

The trio began,--

         "With holy fear, and humble song,"

and got through the first verse together pretty well.  Then came the
second verse:

         "Far in the deep where darkness dwells,
          The land of horror and despair,
          Justice has built a dismal hell,
          And laid her stores of vengeance there."

Myrtle's voice trembled a little in singing this verse, and she
hardly kept up her part with proper spirit.

"Sing out, Myrtle," said Miss Cynthia, and she struck up the third
verse:

         "Eternal plagues and heavy chains,
          Tormenting racks and fiery coals,
          And darts t' inflict immortal pains,
          Dyed in the blood of damned souls."

This last verse was a duet, and not a trio.  Myrtle closed her lips
while it was singing, and when it was done threw down the book with a
look of anger and disgust.  The hunted soul was at bay.

"I won't sing such words," she said, "and I won't stay here to hear
them sung.  The boys in the streets say just such words as that, and
I am not going to sing them.  You can't scare me into being good with
your cruel hymn-book!"

She could not swear: she was not a boy.  She would not cry: she felt
proud, obdurate, scornful, outraged.  All these images, borrowed from
the holy Inquisition, were meant to frighten her--and had simply
irritated her.  The blow of a weapon that glances off, stinging, but
not penetrating, only enrages.  It was a moment of fearful danger to
her character, to her life itself.

Without heeding the cries of the two women, she sprang up-stairs to
her hanging chamber.  She threw open the window and looked down into
the stream.  For one moment her head swam with the sudden,
overwhelming, almost maddening thought that came over her,--the
impulse to fling herself headlong into those running waters and dare
the worst these dreadful women had threatened her with.  Something
she often thought afterwards it was an invisible hand held her back
during that brief moment, and the paroxysm--just such a paroxysm as
throws many a young girl into the Thames or the Seine--passed away.
She remained looking, in a misty dream, into the water far below.
Its murmur recalled the whisper of the ocean waves.  And through the
depths it seemed as if she saw into that strange, half--remembered
world of palm-trees and white robes and dusky faces, and amidst them,
looking upon her with ineffable love and tenderness, until all else
faded from her sight, the face of a fair woman,--was it hers, so
long, long dead, or that dear young mother's who was to her less a
recollection than a dream?

Could it have been this vision that soothed her, so that she
unclasped her hands and lifted her bowed head as if she had heard a
voice whispering to her from that unknown world where she felt there
was a spirit watching over her?  At any rate, her face was never more
serene than when she went to meeting with the two maiden ladies on
the following day, Sunday, and heard the Rev. Mr. Stoker preach a
sermon from Luke vii. 48, which made both the women shed tears, but
especially so excited Miss Cynthia that she was in a kind of half-
hysteric condition all the rest of the day.

After that Myrtle was quieter and more docile than ever before.
Could it be, Miss Silence thought, that the Rev. Mr. Stoker's sermon
had touched her hard heart?  However that was, she did not once wear
the stormy look with which she had often met the complaining
remonstrances Miss Silence constantly directed against all the
spontaneous movements of the youthful and naturally vivacious subject
of her discipline.

June is an uncertain month, as everybody knows, and there were frosts
in many parts of New England in the June of 1859.  But there were
also beautiful days and nights, and the sun was warm enough to be
fast ripening the strawberries,--also certain plans which had been in
flower some little time.  Some preparations had been going on in a
quiet way, so that at the right moment a decisive movement could be
made.  Myrtle knew how to use her needle, and always had a dexterous
way of shaping any article of dress or ornament,--a natural gift not
very rare, but sometimes very needful, as it was now.

On the morning of the 15th of June she was wandering by the shores of
the river, some distance above The Poplars, when a boat came drifting
along by her, evidently broken loose from its fastenings farther up
the stream.  It was common for such waifs to show themselves after
heavy rains had swollen the river.  They might have run the gauntlet
of nobody could tell how many farms, and perhaps passed by half a
dozen towns and villages in the night, so that, if of common, cheap
make, they were retained without scruple, by any who might find them,
until the owner called for them, if he cared to take the trouble.

Myrtle took a knife from her pocket, cut down a long, slender
sapling, and coaxed the boat to the side of the bank.  A pair of old
oars lay in the bottom of the boat; she took one of these and paddled
it into a little cove, where it could lie hid among the thick alders.
Then she went home and busied herself about various little matters
more interesting to her than to us.

She was never more amiable and gracious than on this day.  But she
looked often at the clock, as they remembered afterwards, and studied
over a copy of the Farmer's Almanac which was lying in the kitchen,
with a somewhat singular interest.  The days were nearly at their
longest, the weather was mild, the night promised to be clear and
bright.

The household was, to all appearance, asleep at the usual early hour.
When all seemed quiet, Myrtle lighted her lamp, stood before her
mirror, and untied the string that bound her long and beautiful.
dark hair, which fell in its abundance over her shoulders and below
her girdle.

She lifted its heavy masses with one hand, and severed it with a
strong pair of scissors, with remorseless exaction of every wandering
curl, until she stood so changed by the loss of that outward glory of
her womanhood, that she felt as if she had lost herself and found a
brother she had never seen before.

"Good-by, Myrtle!" she said, and, opening her window very gently, she
flung the shining tresses upon the running water, and watched them
for a few moments as they floated down the stream.  Then she dressed
herself in the character of her imaginary brother, took up the
carpet-bag in which she had placed what she chose to carry with her,
stole softly down-stairs, and let herself out of a window on the
lower floor, shutting it very carefully so as to be sure that nobody
should be disturbed.

She glided along, looking all about her, fearing she might be seen by
some curious wanderer, and reached the cove where the boat she had
concealed was lying.  She got into it, and, taking the rude oars,
pulled herself into the middle of the swollen stream.  Her heart beat
so that it seemed to her as if she could hear it between the strokes
of the oar.  The lights were not all out in the village, and she
trembled lest she should see the figure of some watcher looking from
the windows in sight of which she would have to pass, and that a
glimpse of this boat stealing along at so late an hour might give the
clue to the secret of her disappearance, with which the whole region
was to be busied in the course of the next day.

Presently she came abreast of The Poplars.  The house lay so still,
so peaceful,--it would wake to such dismay!  The boat slid along
beneath her own overhanging chamber.

"No song to-morrow from the Fire-hang-bird's Nest!" she said.  So she
floated by the slumbering village, the flow of the river carrying her
steadily on, and the careful strokes of the oars adding swiftness to
her flight.

At last she came to the "Broad Meadows," and knew that she was alone,
and felt confident that she had got away unseen.  There was nothing,
absolutely nothing, to point out which way she had gone.  Her boat
came from nobody knew where, her disguise had been got together at
different times in such a manner as to lead to no suspicion, and not
a human being ever had the slightest hint that she had planned and
meant to carry out the enterprise which she had now so fortunately
begun.

Not till the last straggling house had been long past, not till the
meadows were stretched out behind her as well as before her,
spreading far off into the distance on each side, did she give way to
the sense of wild exultation which was coming fast over her.  But
then, at last, she drew a long, long breath, and, standing up in the
boat, looked all around her.  The stars were shining over her head
and deep down beneath her.  The cool wind came fresh upon her cheek
over the long grassy reaches.  No living thing moved in all the wide
level circle which lay about her.  She had passed the Red Sea, and
was alone in the Desert.

She threw down her oars, lifted her hands like a priestess, and her
strong, sweet voice burst into song,--the song of the Jewish maiden
when she went out before the chorus of, women and sang that grand
solo, which we all remember in its ancient words, and in their modern
paraphrase,

    "Sound the loud timbrel o'er Egypt's dark sea!
     Jehovah hath triumphed, his people are free!"

The poor child's repertory was limited to songs of the religious sort
mainly, but there was a choice among these.  Her aunt's favorites,
beside "China," already mentioned, were "Bangor," which the worthy
old New England clergyman so admired that he actually had the down-
east city called after it, and "Windsor," and "Funeral Hymn."  But
Myrtle was in no mood for these.  She let off her ecstasy in
"Balerma," and "Arlington," and "Silver Street," and at last in that
most riotous of devotional hymns, which sounds as if it had been
composed by a saint who had a cellar under his chapel,--"Jordan."  So
she let her wild spirits run loose; and then a tenderer feeling stole
over her, and she sang herself into a more tranquil mood with the
gentle music of "Dundee."  And again she pulled quietly and steadily
at her oars, until she reached the wooded region through which the
river winds after leaving the "Broad Meadows."

The tumult in her blood was calmed, yet every sense and faculty was
awake to the manifold delicious, mysterious impressions of that
wonderful June night, The stars were shining between the tall trees,
as if all the jewels of heaven had been set in one belt of midnight
sky.  The voices of the wind, as they sighed through the pines,
seemed like the breath of a sleeping child, and then, as they lisped
from the soft, tender leaves of beeches and maples, like the half-
articulate whisper of the mother hushing all the intrusive sounds
that might awaken it.  Then came the pulsating monotone of the frogs
from a far-off pool, the harsh cry of an owl from an old tree that
overhung it, the splash of a mink or musquash, and nearer by, the
light step of a woodchuck, as he cantered off in his quiet way to his
hole in the nearest bank.  The laurels were just coming into bloom,--
the yellow lilies, earlier than their fairer sisters, pushing their
golden cups through the water, not content, like those, to float on
the surface of the stream that fed them, emblems of showy wealth,
and, like that, drawing all manner of insects to feed upon them.  The
miniature forests of ferns came down to the edge of the stream, their
tall, bending plumes swaying in the night breeze.  Sweet odors from
oozing pines, from dewy flowers, from spicy leaves, stole out of the
tangled thickets, and made the whole scene more dream-like with their
faint, mingled suggestions.

By and by the banks of the river grew lower and marshy, and in place
of the larger forest-trees which had covered them stood slender
tamaracks, sickly, mossy, looking as if they had been moon-struck and
were out of their wits, their tufts of leaves staring off every way
from their spindling branches.  The winds came cool and damp out of
the hiding-places among their dark recesses.  The country people
about here called this region the "Witches' Hollow," and had many
stories about the strange things that happened there.  The Indians
used to hold their "powwows,"  or magical incantations, upon a broad
mound which rose out of the common level, and where some old hemlocks
and beeches formed a dark grove, which served them as a temple for
their demon-worship.  There were many legends of more recent date
connected with this spot, some of them hard to account for, and no
superstitious or highly imaginative person would have cared to pass
through it alone in the dead of the night, as this young girl was
doing.

She knew nothing of all these fables and fancies.  Her own singular
experiences in this enchanted region were certainly not suggested by
anything she had heard, and may be considered psychologically curious
by those who would not think of attributing any mystical meaning to
them.  We are at liberty to report many things without attempting to
explain them, or committing ourselves to anything beyond the fact
that so they were told us.  The reader will find Myrtle's "Vision,"
as written out at a later period from her recollections, at the end
of this chapter.

The night was passing, and she meant to be as far away as possible
from the village she had left, before morning.  But the boat, like
all craft on country rivers, was leaky, and she had to work until
tired, bailing it out, before she was ready for another long effort.
The old tin measure, which was all she had to bail with, leaked as
badly as the boat, and her task was a tedious one.  At last she got
it in good trim, and sat down to her oars with the determination to
pull steadily as long as her strength would hold out.

Hour after hour she kept at her work, sweeping round the long bends
where the river was hollowing out one bank and building new shore on
the opposite one, so as gradually to shift its channel; by clipper-
shaped islands, sharp at the bows looking up stream, sharp too at the
stern, looking down,--their shape solving the navigator's problem of
least resistance, as a certain young artist had pointed out; by
slumbering villages; by outlying farm-houses; between cornfields
where the young plants were springing up in little thready fountains;
in the midst of stumps where the forest had just been felled; through
patches, where the fire of the last great autumnal drought had turned
all the green beauty of the woods into brown desolation; and again
amidst broad expanses of open meadow stretching as far as the eye
could reach in the uncertain light.  A faint yellow tinge was
beginning to stain the eastern horizon.  Her boat was floating
quietly along, for she had at last taken in her oars, and she was now
almost tired out with toil and excitement.  She rested her head upon
her hands, and felt her eyelids closing in spite of herself.  And now
there stole upon her ear a low, gentle, distant murmur, so soft that
it seemed almost to mingle with the sound of her own breathing, but
so steady, so uniform, that it soothed her to sleep, as if it were
the old cradle-song the ocean used to sing to her, or the lullaby of
her fair young mother.

So she glided along, slowly, slowly, down the course of the winding
river, and the flushing dawn kindled around her as she slumbered, and
the low, gentle murmur grew louder and louder, but still she slept,
dreaming of the murmuring ocean.




APPENDIX TO CHAPTER VIII.

MYRTLE HAZARD'S STATEMENT.

"A Vision seen by me, Myrtle Hazard, aged fifteen, on the night of
June 15, 1859.  Written out at the request of a friend from my
recollections.

"The place where I saw these sights is called, as I have been told
since, Witches' Hollow.  I had never been there before, and did not
know that it was called so, or anything about it.

"The first strange thing that I noticed was on coming near a kind of
hill or mound that rose out of the low meadows.  I saw a burning
cross lying on the slope of that mound.  It burned with a pale
greenish light, and did not waste, though I watched it for a long
time, as the boat I was in moved slowly with the current and I had
stopped rowing.

"I know that my eyes were open, and I was awake while I was looking
at this cross.  I think my eyes were open when I saw these other
appearances, but I felt just as if I were dreaming while awake.

"I heard a faint rustling sound, and on looking up I saw many figures
moving around me, and I seemed to see myself among them as if I were
outside of myself.

"The figures did not walk, but slid or glided with an even movement,
as if without any effort.  They made many gestures, and seemed to
speak, but I cannot tell whether I heard what they said, or knew its
meaning in some other way.

"I knew the faces of some of these figures.  They were the same I
have seen in portraits, as long as I can remember, at the old house
where I was brought up, called The Poplars.  I saw my father and my
mother as they look in the two small pictures; also my grandmother,
and her father and mother and grandfather, and one other person, who
lived a great while ago.  All of these have been long dead, and the
longer they had been dead the less like substance they looked and the
more like shadows, so that the oldest was like one's breath of a
frosty morning, but shaped like the living figure.

"There was no motion of their breasts, and their lips seemed to be
moving as if they were saying, Breath! Breath! Breath!  I thought
they wanted to breathe the air of this world again in my shape, which
I seemed to see as it were empty of myself and of these other selves,
like a sponge that has water pressed out of it.

"Presently it seemed to me that I returned to myself, and then those
others became part of me by being taken up, one by one, and so lost
in my own life.

"My father and mother came up, hand in hand, looking more real than
any of the rest.  Their figures vanished, and they seemed to have
become a part of me; for I felt all at once the longing to live over
the life they had led, on the sea and in strange countries.

"Another figure was just like the one we called the Major, who was a
very strong, hearty-looking man, and who is said to have drank hard
sometimes, though there is nothing about it on his tombstone, which I
used to read in the graveyard.  It seemed to me that there was
something about his life that I did not want to make a part of mine,
but that there was some right he had in me through my being of his
blood, and so his health and his strength went all through me, and I
was always to have what was left of his life in that shadow-like
shape, forming a portion of mine.

"So in the same way with the shape answering to the portrait of that
famous beauty who was the wife of my great-grandfather, and used to
be called the Pride of the County.

"And so too with another figure which had the face of that portrait
marked on the back, Ruth Bradford, who married one of my ancestors,
and was before the court, as I have heard, in the time of the
witchcraft trials.

"There was with the rest a dark, wild-looking woman, with a head-
dress of feathers.  She kept as it were in shadow, but I saw
something of my own features in her face.

"It was on my mind very strongly that the shape of that woman of our
blood who was burned long ago by the Papists came very close to me,
and was in some way made one with mine, and that I feel her presence
with me since, as if she lived again in me; but not always,--only at
times,--and then I feel borne up as if I could do anything in the
world.  I had a feeling as if she were my guardian and protector.

"It seems to me that these, and more, whom I have not mentioned, do
really live over some part of their past lives in my life.  I do not
understand it all, and perhaps it can be accounted for in some way I
have not thought of.  I write it down as nearly as I can give it from
memory, by request, and if it is printed at this time had rather have
all the real names withheld.

"MYRTLE HAZARD."


NOTE BY THE FRIEND.

"This statement must be accounted for in some way, or pass into the
category of the supernatural.  Probably it was one of those
intuitions, with objective projection, which sometimes come to
imaginative young persons, especially girls, in certain exalted
nervous conditions.  The study of the portraits, with the knowledge
of some parts of the history of the persons they represented, and the
consciousness of instincts inherited in all probability from these
same ancestors, formed the basis of Myrtle's 'Vision.'  The lives of
our progenitors are, as we know, reproduced in different proportions
in ourselves.  Whether they as individuals have any consciousness of
it, is another matter.  It is possible that they do get a second as
it were fractional life in us.  It might seem that many of those
whose blood flows in our veins struggle for the mastery, and by and
by one or more get the predominance, so that we grow to be like
father, or mother, or remoter ancestor, or two or more are blended in
us, not to the exclusion, however, it must be understood, of a
special personality of our own, about which these others are grouped.
Independently of any possible scientific value, this 'Vision' serves
to illustrate the above-mentioned fact of common experience, which is
not sufficiently weighed by most moralists.

"How much it may be granted to certain young persons to see, not in
virtue of their intellectual gifts, but through those direct channels
which worldly wisdom may possibly close to the luminous influx, each
reader must determine for himself by his own standards of faith and
evidence.

"One statement of the narrative admits of a simple natural
explanation, which does not allow the lovers of the marvellous to
class it with the quasi-miraculous appearance seen by Colonel
Gardiner, and given in full by Dr. Doddridge in his Life of that
remarkable Christian soldier.  Decaying wood is often phosphorescent,
as many readers must have seen for themselves.  The country people
are familiar with the sight of it in wild timber-land, and have given
it the name of 'Fox-fire.'  Two trunks of trees in this state, lying
across each other, will account for the fact observed, and vindicate
the truth of the young girl's story without requiring us to suppose
any exceptional occurrence outside of natural laws."




CHAPTER IX.

MR. CLEMENT LINDSAY RECEIVES A LETTER, AND BEGINS HIS ANSWER.

It was already morning when a young man living in the town of
Alderbank, after lying awake for an hour thinking the unutterable
thoughts that nineteen years of life bring to the sleeping and waking
dreams of young people, rose from his bed, and, half dressing
himself, sat down at his desk, from which he took a letter, which he
opened and read.  It was written in a delicate, though hardly formed
female hand, and crossed like a checker-board, as is usual with these
redundant manuscripts.  The letter was as follows:


OXBOW VILLAGE, June 13, 1859.

MY DEAREST CLEMENT,--You was so good to write me such a sweet little
bit of a letter,--only, dear, you never seem to be in quite so good
spirits as you used to be.  I wish your Susie was with you to cheer
you up; but no, she must be patient, and you must be patient too, for
you are so ambitious!  I have heard you say so many times that nobody
could be a great artist without passing years and years at work, and
growing pale and lean with thinking so hard.  You won't grow pale and
lean, I hope; for I do so love to see that pretty color in your
cheeks you have always had ever since I have known you; and besides,
I do not believe you will have to work so very hard to do something
great,--you have so much genius, and people of genius do such
beautiful things with so little trouble.  You remember those
beautiful lines out of our newspaper I sent you?  Well, Mr. Hopkins
told me he wrote those lines in one evening without stopping!  I wish
you could see Mr. Hopkins,--he is a very talented person.  I cut out
this little piece about him from the paper on purpose to show you,
--for genius loves genius,--and you would like to hear him read his
own poetry,--he reads it beautifully.  Please send this piece from
the paper back, as I want to put it in my scrapbook, under his
autograph:--

"Our young townsman, Mr. Gifted Hopkins, has proved himself worthy of
the name he bears.  His poetical effusions are equally creditable to
his head and his heart, displaying the highest order of genius and
powers of imagination and fancy hardly second to any writer of the
age.  He is destined to make a great sensation in the world of
letters."


Mrs. Hopkins is the same good soul she always was.  She is very proud
of her son, as is natural, and keeps a copy of everything he writes.
I believe she cries over them every time she reads them.  You don't
know how I take to little Sossy and Minthy, those two twins I have
written to you about before.  Poor little creatures,--what a cruel
thing it was in their father and mother not to take care of them!
What do you think?  Old bachelor Gridley lets them come up into his
room, and builds forts and castles for them with his big books!  "The
world's coming to an end," Mrs. Hopkins said the first time he did
so.  He looks so savage with that scowl of his, and talks so gruff
when he is scolding at things in general, that nobody would have
believed he would have let such little things come anywhere near him.
But he seems to be growing kind to all of us and everybody.  I saw
him talking to the Fire-hang-bird the other day.  You know who the
Fire-hang-bird is, don't you?  Myrtle Hazard her name is.  I wish you
could see her.  I don't know as I do, though.  You would want to make
a statue of her, or a painting, I know.  She is so handsome that all
the young men stand round to see her come out of meeting.  Some say
that Lawyer Bradshaw is after her; but my! he is ten years older than
she is.  She is nothing but a girl, though she looks as if she was
eighteen.  She lives up at a place called The Poplars, with an old
woman that is her aunt or something, and nobody seems to be much
acquainted with her except Olive Eveleth, who is the minister's
daughter at Saint Bartholomew's Church.  She never has beauxs round
her, as some young girls do--they say that she is not happy with her
aunt and another woman that stays with her, and that is the reason
she keeps so much to herself.  The minister came to see me the other
day,--Mr. Stoker his name is.  I was all alone, and it frightened me,
for he looks, oh, so solemn on Sundays!  But he called me "My dear,"
and did n't say anything horrid, you know, about my being such a
dreadful, dreadful sinner, as I have heard of his saying to some
people,--but he looked very kindly at me, and took my hand, and laid
his hand on my shoulder like a brother, and hoped I would come and
see him in his study.  I suppose I must go, but I don't want to.  I
don't seem to like him exactly.

I hope you love me as well as ever you did.  I can't help feeling
sometimes as if you was growing away from me,--you know what I mean,
--getting to be too great a person for such a small person as I am.

I know I can't always understand you when you talk about art, and
that you know a great deal too much for such a simple girl as I am.
Oh, if I thought I could never make you happy!...  There, now!  I am
almost ashamed to send this paper so spotted.  Gifted Hopkins wrote
some beautiful verses one day on "A Maiden Weeping."  He compared the
tears falling from her eyes to the drops of dew which one often sees
upon the flowers in the morning.  Is n't it a pretty thought?

I wish I loved art as well as I do poetry; but I am afraid I have not
so much taste as some girls have.  You remember how I liked that
picture in the illustrated magazine, and you said it was horrid.  I
have been afraid since to like almost anything, for fear you should
tell me some time or other it was horrid.  Don't you think I shall
ever learn to know what is nice from what is n't?

Oh, dear Clement, I wish you would do one thing to please me.  Don't
say no, for you can do everything you try to,--I am sure you can.  I
want you to write me some poetry,--just three or four little verses
TO SUZIE.  Oh, I should feel so proud to have some lines written all
on purpose for me.  Mr. Hopkins wrote some the other day, and printed
them in the paper, "To M---e."  I believe he meant them for Myrtle,
--the first and last letter of her name, you see, "M "and "e."

Your letter was a dear one, only so short!  I wish yon would tell me
all about what you are doing at Alderbank.  Have you made that model
of Innocence that is to have my forehead, and hair parted like mine!
Make it pretty, do, that is a darling.

Now don't make a face at my letter.  It is n't a very good one, I
know; but your poor little Susie does the best she can, and she loves
you so much!

Now do be nice and write me one little bit of a mite of a poem,--it
will make me just as happy!

I am very well, and as happy as I can be when you are away.

Your affectionate        SUSIE.

(Directed to Mr. Clement Lindsay, Alderbank.)


The envelope of this letter was unbroken, as was before said, when
the young man took it from his desk.  He did not tear it with the hot
impatience of some lovers, but cut it open neatly, slowly, one would
say sadly.  He read it with an air of singular effort, and yet with a
certain tenderness.  When he had finished it, the drops were thick on
his forehead; he groaned and put his hands to his face, which was
burning red.

This was what the impulse of boyhood, years ago, had brought him to!
He was a stately youth, of noble bearing, of high purpose, of
fastidious taste; and, if his broad forehead, his clear, large blue
eyes, his commanding features, his lips, firm, yet plastic to every
change of thought and feeling, were not an empty mask, might not
improbably claim that Promethean quality of which the girl's letter
had spoken,--the strange, divine, dread gift of genius.

This poor, simple, innocent, trusting creature, so utterly incapable
of coming into any true relation with his aspiring mind, his large
and strong emotions,--this mere child, all simplicity and goodness,
but trivial and shallow as the little babbling brooklet that ran by
his window to the river, to lose its insignificant being in the swift
torrent he heard rushing over the rocks,--this pretty idol for a weak
and kindly and easily satisfied worshipper, was to be enthroned as
the queen of his affections, to be adopted as the companion of his
labors!  The boy, led by the commonest instinct, the mere attraction
of biped to its female, which accident had favored, had thrown away
the dearest possession of manhood,--liberty,--and this bauble was to
be his lifelong reward!  And yet not a bauble either, for a pleasing
person and a gentle and sweet nature, which had once made her seem to
him the very paragon of loveliness, were still hers.  Alas!  her
simple words were true,--he had grown away from her.  Her only fault
was that she had not grown with him, and surely he could not reproach
her with that.

"No," he said to himself, "I will never leave her so long as her
heart clings to me.  I have been rash, but she shall not pay the
forfeit.  And if I may think of myself, my life need not be wretched
because she cannot share all my being with me.  The common human
qualities are more than all exceptional gifts.  She has a woman's
heart; and what talent of mine is to be named by the love a true
woman can offer in exchange for these divided and cold affections?
If it had pleased God to mate me with one more equal in other ways,
who could share my thoughts, who could kindle my inspiration, who had
wings to rise into the air with me as well as feet to creep by my
side upon the earth,--what cannot such a woman do for a man!

"What!  cast away the flower I took in the bud because it does not
show as I hoped it would when it opened?  I will stand by my word; I
will be all as a man that I promised as a boy.  Thank God, she is
true and pure and sweet.  My nest will be a peaceful one; but I must
take wing alone,--alone."

He drew one long sigh, and the cloud passed from his countenance.  He
must answer that letter now, at once.  There were reasons, he
thought, which made it important.  And so, with the cheerfulness
which it was kind and becoming to show, so far as possible, and yet
with a little excitement on one particular point, which was the cause
of his writing so promptly, he began his answer.


ALDERBANK, Thursday morning, June 16, 1859.

MY DEAR SUSIE,--I have just been reading your pleasant letter; and if
I do not send you the poem you ask for so eloquently, I will give you
a little bit of advice, which will do just as well,--won't it, my
dear?  I was interested in your account of various things going on at
Oxbow Village.  I am very glad you find young Mr. Hopkins so
agreeable a friend.  His poetry is better than some which I see
printed in the village papers, and seems generally unexceptionable in
its subjects and tone.  I do not believe he is a dangerous companion,
though the habit of writing verse does not always improve the
character.  I think I have seen it make more than one of my
acquaintances idle, conceited, sentimental, and frivolous,--perhaps
it found them so already.  Don't make too much of his talent, and
particularly don't let him think that because he can write verses he
has nothing else to do in this world.  That is for his benefit, dear,
and you must skilfully apply it.

Now about yourself.  My dear Susie, there was something in your
letter that did not please me.  You speak of a visit from the Rev.
Mr. Stoker, and of his kind, brotherly treatment, his cordiality of
behavior, and his asking you to visit him in his study.  I am very
glad to hear you say that you "don't seem to like him."  He is very
familiar, it seems to me, for so new an acquaintance.  What business
had he to be laying his hand on your shoulder?  I should like to see
him try these free-and-easy ways in my presence!  He would not have
taken that liberty, my dear!  No, he was alone with you, and thought
it safe to be disrespectfully familiar.  I want you to maintain your
dignity always with such persons, and I beg you not to go to the
study of this clergyman, unless some older friend goes with you on
every occasion, and sits through the visit.  I must speak plainly to
you, my dear, as I have a right to.  If the minister has anything of
importance to say, let it come through the lips of some mature
person.  It may lose something of the fervor with which it would have
been delivered at first hand, but the great rules of Christian life
are not so dependent on the particular individual who speaks them,
that you must go to this or that young man to find out what they are.
If to any man, I should.  prefer the old gentleman whom you have
mentioned in your letters, Father Pemberton.  You understand me, my
dear girl, and the subject is not grateful.  You know how truly I am
interested in all that relates to you,--that I regard you with an
affection which

     HELP!  HELP!  HELP!

A cry as of a young person's voice was heard faintly, coming from the
direction of the river.  Something in the tone of it struck to his
heart, and he sprang as if he had been stabbed.  He flung open his
chamber window and leaped from it to the ground.  He ran straight to
the bank of the river by the side of which the village of Alderbank
was built, a little farther down the stream than the house in which
he was living.

Everybody that travels in that region knows the beautiful falls which
break the course of the river just above the village; narrow and
swift, and surrounded by rocks of such picturesque forms that they
are sought and admired by tourists.  The stream was now swollen, and
rushed in a deep and rapid current over the ledges, through the rocky
straits, plunging at last in tumult and foam, with loud, continuous
roar, into the depths below the cliff from which it tumbled.

A short distance above the fall there projected from the water a rock
which had, by parsimonious saving during a long course of years,
hoarded a little soil, out of which a small tuft of bushes struggled.
to support a decent vegetable existence.  The high waters had nearly
submerged it, but a few slender twigs were seen above their surface.

A skiff was lying close to this rock, between it and the brink of the
fall, which was but a few rods farther down.  In the skiff was a
youth of fourteen or fifteen years, holding by the slender twigs, the
boat dragging at them all the time, and threatening to tear them away
and go over the fall.  It was not likely that the boy would come to
shore alive if it did.  There were stories, it is true, that the
Indians used to shoot the fall in their canoes with safety; but
everybody knew that at least three persons had been lost by going
over it since the town was settled; and more than one dead body had
been found floating far down the river, with bruises and fractured
bones, as if it had taken the same fatal plunge.

There was no time to lose.  Clement ran a little way up the river-
bank, flung off his shoes, and sprang from the bank as far as he
could leap into the water.  The current swept him toward the fall,
but he worked nearer and nearer the middle of the stream.  He was
making for the rock, thinking he could plant his feet upon it and at
the worst hold the boat until he could summon other help by shouting.
He had barely got his feet upon the rock, when the twigs by which the
boy was holding gave way.  He seized the boat, but it dragged him
from his uncertain footing, and with a desperate effort he clambered
over its side and found himself its second doomed passenger.

There was but an instant for thought.

"Sit still," he said, "and, just as we go over, put your arms round
me under mine, and don't let go for your life!"

He caught up the single oar, and with a few sharp paddle-strokes
brought the skiff into the blackest centre of the current, where it
was deepest, and would plunge them into the deepest pool.

"Hold your breath!  God save us!  Now!"

They rose, as if with one will, and stood for an instant, the arms of
the younger closely embracing the other as he had directed.

A sliding away from beneath them of the floor on which they stood, as
the drop fails under the feet of a felon.  A great rush of air, and a
mighty, awful, stunning roar,--an involuntary gasp, a choking flood
of water that came bellowing after them, and hammered them down into
the black depths so far that the young man, though used to diving and
swimming long distances underwater, had well-nigh yielded to the
fearful need of air, and sucked in his death in so doing.

The boat came up to the surface, broken in twain, splintered, a load
of firewood for those who raked the river lower down.  It had turned
crosswise, and struck the rocks.  A cap rose to the surface, such a
one as boys wear,--the same that boy had on.  And then--after how
many seconds by the watch cannot be known, but after a time long
enough, as the young man remembered it, to live his whole life over
in memory--Clement Lindsay felt the blessed air against his face,
and, taking a great breath, came to his full consciousness.  The arms
of the boy were still locked around him as in the embrace of death.
A few strokes brought him to the shore, dragging his senseless burden
with him.

He unclasped the arms that held him so closely encircled, and laid
the slender form of the youth he had almost died to save gently upon
the grass.  It was as if dead.  He loosed the ribbon that was round
the neck, he tore open the checked shirt

The story of Myrtle Hazard's sex was told; but she was deaf to his
cry of surprise, and no blush came to her cold cheek.  Not too late,
perhaps, to save her,--not too late to try to save her, at least!

He placed his lips to hers, and filled her breast with the air from
his own panting chest.  Again and again he renewed these efforts,
hoping, doubting, despairing,--once more hoping, and at last, when he
had almost ceased to hope, she gasped, she breathed, she moaned, and
rolled her eyes wildly round her, she was born again into this mortal
life.

He caught her up in his arms, bore her to the house, laid her on a
sofa, and, having spent his strength in this last effort, reeled and
fell, and lay as one over whom have just been whispered the words,

"He is gone."




CHAPTER X.

MR. CLEMENT LINDSAY FINISHES HIS LETTER--WHAT CAME OF IT.

The first thing Clement Lindsay did, when he was fairly himself
again, was to finish his letter to Susan Posey.  He took it up where
it left off, "with an affection which " and drew a long dash, as
above.  It was with great effort he wrote the lines which follow, for
he had got an ugly blow on the forehead, and his eyes were "in
mourning," as the gentlemen of the ring say, with unbecoming levity.

"An adventure!  Just as I was writing these last words, I heard the
cry of a young person, as it sounded, for help.  I ran to the river
and jumped in, and had the pleasure of saving a life.  I got some
bruises which have laid me up for a day or two; but I am getting over
them very well now, and you need not worry about me at all.  I will
write again soon; so pray do not fret yourself, for I have had no
hurt that will trouble me for any time."

Of course, poor Susan Posey burst out crying, and cried as if her
heart would break.  Oh dear!  Oh dear! what should she do!  He was
almost killed, she knew he was, or he had broken some of his bones.
Oh dear!  Oh dear!  She would go and see him, there!--she must and
would.  He would die, she knew he would,--and so on.

It was a singular testimony to the evident presence of a human
element in Mr. Bytes Gridley that the poor girl, on her extreme
trouble, should think of him as a counsellor.  But the wonderful
relenting kind of look on his grave features as he watched the little
twins tumbling about his great books, and certain marks of real
sympathy he had sometimes shown for her in her lesser woes,
encouraged her, and she went straight to his study, letter in hand.
She gave a timid knock at the door of that awful sanctuary.

"Come in, Susan Posey," was its answer, in a pleasant tone.  The old
master knew her light step and the maidenly touch of her small hand
on the panel.

What a sight!  'there were Sossy and Minthy intrenched in a
Sebastopol which must have cost a good half-hour's engineering, and
the terrible Bytes Gridley besieging the fortress with hostile
manifestations of the most singular character.  He was actually
discharging a large sugar-plum at the postern gate, which having been
left unclosed, the missile would certainly have reached one of the
garrison, when he paused as the door opened, and the great round
spectacles and four wide, staring infants' eyes were levelled at Miss
Susan Posey.

She almost forgot her errand, grave as it was, in astonishment at
this manifestation.  The old man had emptied his shelves of half
their folios to build up the fort, in the midst of which he had
seated the two delighted and uproarious babes.  There was his Cave's
"Historia Literaria," and Sir Walter Raleigh's "History of the
World," and a whole array of Christian Fathers, and Plato, and
Aristotle, and Stanley's book of Philosophers, with Effigies, and the
Junta Galen, and the Hippocrates of Foesius, and Walton's Polyglot,
supported by Father Sanchez on one side and Fox's "Acts and
Monuments" on the other,--an odd collection, as folios from lower
shelves are apt to be.

The besieger discharged his sugar-plum, which was so well aimed that
it fell directly into the lap of Minthy, who acted with it as if the
garrison had been on short rations for some time.

He saw at once, on looking up, that there was trouble.  "What now,
Susan Posey, my dear?"

"O Mr. Gridley, I am in such trouble!  What shall I do?  What shall I
do?"

She turned back the name and the bottom of the letter in such a way
that Mr. Gridley could read nothing but the few lines relating their
adventure.

"So Mr. Clement Lindsay has been saving a life, has he, and got some
hard knocks doing it, hey, Susan Posey?  Well, well, Clement Lindsay
is a brave fellow, and there is no need of hiding his name, my child.
Let me take the letter again a moment, Susan Posey.  What is the date
of it?  June 16th.  Yes,--yes,--yes!"

He read the paragraph over again, and the signature too, if he wanted
to; for poor Susan had found that her secret was hardly opaque to
those round spectacles and the eyes behind them, and, with a not
unbecoming blush, opened the fold of the letter before she handed it
back.

"No, no, Susan Posey.  He will come all right.  His writing is
steady, and if he had broken any bones he would have mentioned it.
It's a thing his wife will be proud of, if he is ever married, Susan
Posey," (blushes,) "and his children too," (more blushes running up
to her back hair,) "and there 's nothing to be worried about.  But
I'll tell you what, my dear, I've got a little business that calls me
down the river tomorrow, and I shouldn't mind stopping an hour at
Alderbank and seeing how our young friend Clement Lindsay is; and
then, if he was going to have a long time of it, why we could manage
it somehow that any friend who had any special interest in him could
visit him, just to while away the tiresomeness of being sick.  That's
it, exactly.  I'll stop at Alderbank, Susan Posey.  Just clear up
these two children for me, will you, my dear?  Isosceles, come now,--
that 's a good child.  Helminthia, carry these sugar-plums down--
stairs for me, and take good care of them, mind!"

It was a case of gross bribery and corruption, for the fortress was
immediately, evacuated on the receipt of a large paper of red and
white comfits, and the garrison marched down--stairs much like
conquerors, under the lead of the young lady, who was greatly eased
in mind by the kind words and the promise of Mr. Byles Gridley.

But he, in the mean time, was busy with thoughts she did not suspect.
"A young person," he said to himself,--"why a young person?  Why not
say a boy, if it was a boy?  What if this should be our handsome
truant?--'June 16th, Thursday morning!'--About time to get to
Alderbank by the river, I should think.  None of the boats missing?
What then?  She may have made a raft, or picked up some stray skiff.
Who knows?  And then got shipwrecked, very likely.  There are rapids
and falls farther along the river.  It will do no harm to go down
there and look about, at any rate."

On Saturday morning, therefore, Mr. Byles Gridley set forth to
procure a conveyance to make a visit, as he said, dawn the river, and
perhaps be gone a day or two.  He went to a stable in the village,
and asked if they could let him have a horse.

The man looked at him with that air of native superiority which the
companionship of the generous steed confers on all his associates,
down to the lightest weight among the jockeys.

"Wal, I hain't got nothin' in the shape of a h'oss, Mr. Gridley.
I've got a mare I s'pose I could let y' have."

"Oh, very well," said the old master, with a twinkle in his eye as
sly as the other's wink,--he had parried a few jokes in his time,--"
they charge half-price for mares always, I believe."

That was a new view of the subject.  It rather took the wind out of
the stable-keeper, and set a most ammoniacal fellow, who stood
playing with a currycomb, grinning at his expense.  But he rallied
presently.

"Wal, I b'lieve they do for some mares, when they let 'em to some
folks; but this here ain't one o' them mares, and you ain't one o'
them folks.  All my cattle's out but this critter, 'n' I don't jestly
want to have nobody drive her that ain't pretty car'ful,--she's
faast, I tell ye,--don't want no whip.--How fur d' d y' want t' go?"

Mr. Gridley was quite serious now, and let the man know that he
wanted the mare and a light covered wagon, at once, to be gone for
one or two days, and would waive the question of sex in the matter of
payment.

Alderbank was about twenty miles down the river by the road.  On
arriving there, he inquired for the house where a Mr. Lindsay lived.
There was only one Lindsay family in town,--he must mean Dr. William
Lindsay.  His house was up there a little way above the village,
lying a few rods back from the river.

He found the house without difficulty, and knocked at the door.  A
motherly-looking woman opened it immediately, and held her hand up as
if to ask him to speak and move softly.

"Does Mr. Clement Lindsay live here?"

"He is staying here for the present.  He is a nephew of ours.  He is
in his bed from an injury."

"Nothing very serious, I hope?"

"A bruise on his head,--not very bad, but the doctor was afraid of
erysipelas.  Seems to be doing well enough now."

"Is there a young person here, a stranger?"

"There is such a young person here.  Do you come with any authority
to make inquiries?"

"I do.  A young friend of mine is missing, arid I thought it possible
I might learn something here about it.  Can I see this young person?"

The matron came nearer to Byles Gridley, and said: "This person is a
young woman disguised as a boy.  She was rescued by my nephew at the
risk of his life, and she has been delirious ever since she has
recovered her consciousness.  She was almost too far gone to be
resuscitated, but Clement put his mouth to hers and kept her
breathing until her own breath returned and she gradually came to."

"Is she violent in her delirium?"

"Not now.  No; she is quiet enough, but wandering,--wants to know
where she is, and whose the strange faces are,--mine and my
husband's,--that 's Dr. Lindsay,--and one of my daughters, who has
watched with her."

"If that is so, I think I had better see her.  If she is the person I
suspect her to be, she will know me; and a familiar face may bring
back her recollections and put a stop to her wanderings.  If she does
not know me, I will not stay talking with her.  I think she will, if
she is the one I am seeking after.  There is no harm in trying."

Mrs. Lindsay took a good long look at the old man.  There was no
mistaking his grave, honest, sturdy, wrinkled, scholarly face.  His
voice was assured and sincere in its tones.  His decent black coat
was just what a scholar's should be,--old, not untidy, a little shiny
at the elbows with much leaning on his study-table, but neatly bound
at the cuffs, where worthy Mrs. Hopkins had detected signs of fatigue
and come to the rescue.  His very hat looked honest as it lay on the
table.  It had moulded itself to a broad, noble head, that held
nothing but what was true and fair, with a few harmless crotchets
just to fill in with, and it seemed to know it.

The good woman gave him her confidence at once.  "Is the person you
are seeking a niece or other relative of yours?"

(Why did not she ask if the girl was his daughter?  What is that look
of paternity and of maternity which observing and experienced mothers
and old nurses know so well in men and in women?)

"No, she is not a relative.  But I am acting for those who are."

"Wait a moment and I will go and see that the room is all right."

She returned presently.  "Follow me softly, if you please.  She is
asleep,--so beautiful,--so innocent!"

Byles Gridley, Master of Arts, retired professor, more than sixty
years old, childless, loveless, stranded in a lonely study strewed
with wrecks of the world's thought, his work in life finished, his
one literary venture gone down with all it held, with nobody to care
for him but accidental acquaintances, moved gently to the side of the
bed and looked upon the pallid, still features of Myrtle Hazard.  He
strove hard against a strange feeling that was taking hold of him,
that was making his face act rebelliously, and troubling his eyes
with sudden films.  He made a brief stand against this invasion.
"A weakness,--a weakness!" he said to himself.  "What does all this
mean?  Never such a thing for these twenty years!  Poor child!  poor
child!--Excuse me, madam," he said, after a little interval, but for
what offence he did not mention.  A great deal might be forgiven,
even to a man as old as Byles Gridley, looking upon such a face,--so
lovely, yet so marked with the traces of recent suffering, and even
now showing by its changes that she was struggling in some fearful
dream.  Her forehead contracted, she started with a slight convulsive
movement, and then her lips parted, and the cry escaped from them,--
how heart-breaking when there is none to answer it,--"Mother!"

Gone back again through all the weary, chilling years of her girlhood
to that hardly remembered morning of her life when the cry she
uttered was answered by the light of loving eyes, the kiss of
clinging lips, the embrace of caressing arms!

"It is better to wake her," Mrs. Lindsay said; "she is having a
troubled dream.  Wake up, my child, here is a friend waiting to see
you."

She laid her hand very gently on Myrtle's forehead.  Myrtle opened
her eyes, but they were vacant as yet.

"Are we dead?" she said.  "Where am I?  This is n't heaven--there are
no angels--Oh, no, no, no! don't send me to the other place--fifteen
years,--only fifteen years old--no father, no mother--nobody loved
me.  Was it wicked in me to live?  "Her whole theological training
was condensed in that last brief question.

The, old man took her hand and looked her in the face, with a
wonderful tenderness in his squared features.  "Wicked to live, my
dear?  No indeed!  Here!  look at me, my child; don't you know your
old friend Byles Gridley?"

She was awake now.  The sight of a familiar countenance brought back
a natural train of thought.  But her recollection passed over
everything that had happened since Thursday morning.

"Where is the boat I was in?" she said.  "I have just been in the
water, and I was dreaming that I was drowned.  Oh!  Mr. Gridley, is
that you?  Did you pull me out of the water?"

"No, my dear, but you are out of it, and safe and sound: that is the
main point.  How do you feel now you are awake?"

She yawned, and stretched her arms and looked round, but did not
answer at first.  This was all natural, and a sign that she was
coming right.  She looked down at her dress.  It was not
inappropriate to her sex, being a loose gown that belonged to one of
the girls in the house.

"I feel pretty well," she answered, "but a little confused.  My boat
will be gone, if you don't run and stop it now.  How did you get me
into dry clothes so quick?"

Master Byles Gridley found himself suddenly possessed by a large and
luminous idea of the state of things, and made up his mind in a
moment as to what he must do.  There was no time to be lost.  Every
day, every hour, of Myrtle's absence was not only a source of anxiety
and a cause of useless searching but it gave room for inventive
fancies to imagine evil.  It was better to run some risk of injury to
health, than to have her absence prolonged another day.

"Has this adventure been told about in the village, Mrs. Lindsay?"

"No, we thought it best to wait until she could tell her own story,
expecting her return to consciousness every hour, and thinking there
might be some reason for her disguise which it would be kinder to
keep quiet about."

"You know nothing about her, then?"

"Not a word.  It was a great question whether to tell the story and
make inquiries; but she was safe, and could hardly bear disturbance,
and, my dear sir, it seemed too probable that there was some sad
story behind this escape in disguise, and that the poor child might
need shelter and retirement.  We meant to do as well as we could for
her."

"All right, Mrs. Lindsay.  You do not know who she is, then?"

"No, sir, and perhaps it is as well that I should not know.  Then I
shall not have to answer any questions about it."

"Very good, madam,--just as it should be.  And your family, are they
as discreet as yourself?"

"Not one word of the whole story has been or will be told by any one
of us.  That was agreed upon among us."

"Now then, madam.  My name, as you heard me say, is Byles Gridley.
Your husband will know it, perhaps; at any rate I will wait until he
comes back.  This child is of good family and of good name.  I know
her well, and mean, with your kind help, to save her from the
consequences which her foolish adventure might have brought upon her.
Before the bells ring for meeting to-morrow morning this girl must be
in her bed at her home, at Oxbow Village, and we must keep her story
to ourselves as far as may be.  It will all blow over, if we do.  The
gossips will only know that she was upset in the river and cared for
by some good people,--good people and sensible people too, Mrs.
Lindsay.  And now I want to see the young man that rescued my friend
here,--Clement Lindsay, I have heard his name before."

Clement was not a beauty for the moment, but Master Gridley saw well
enough that he was a young man of the right kind.  He knew them at
sight, fellows with lime enough in their bones and iron enough in
their blood to begin with,--shapely, large-nerved, firm-fibred and
fine-fibred, with well-spread bases to their heads for the ground-
floor of the faculties, and well-vaulted arches for the upper range
of apprehensions and combinations.  "Plenty of basements," he used to
say, "without attics and skylights.  Plenty of skylights without
rooms enough and space enough below."  But here was "a three-story
brain," he said to himself as he looked at it, and this was the youth
who was to find his complement in our pretty little Susan Posey!  His
judgment may seem to have been hasty, but he took the measure of
young men of twenty at sight from long and sagacious observation, as
Nurse Byloe knew the "heft" of a baby the moment she fixed her old
eyes on it.

Clement was well acquainted with Byles Gridley, though he had never
seen him, for Susan's letters had had a good deal to say about him of
late.  It was agreed between them that the story should be kept as
quiet as possible, and that the young girl should not know the name
of her deliverer,--it might save awkward complications.  It was not
likely that she would be disposed to talk of her adventure, which had
ended so disastrously, and thus the whole story would soon die out.

The effect of the violent shock she had experienced was to change the
whole nature of Myrtle for the time.  Her mind was unsettled: she
could hardly recall anything except the plunge over the fall.  She
was perfectly docile and plastic,--was ready to go anywhere Mr.
Gridley wanted her to go, without any sign of reluctance.  And so it
was agreed that he should carry her back in his covered wagon that
very night.  All possible arrangements were made to render her
journey comfortable.  The fast mare had to trot very gently, and the
old master would stop and adjust the pillows from time to time, and
administer the restoratives which the physician had got ready, all as
naturally and easily as if he had been bred a nurse, vastly to his
own surprise, and with not a little gain to his self-appreciation.
He was a serviceable kind of body on occasion, after all, was he not,
hey, Mr. Byles Gridley? he said to himself.

At half past four o'clock on Sunday morning the shepherd brought the
stray lamb into the paved yard at The Poplars, and roused the
slumbering household to receive back the wanderer.

It was the Irishwoman, Kitty Fagan, huddled together in such
amorphous guise, that she looked as if she had been fitted in a
tempest of petticoats and a whirlwind of old shawls, who presented
herself at the door.

But there was a very warm heart somewhere in that queer-looking
bundle of clothes, and it was not one of those that can throb or
break in silence.  When she saw the long covered wagon, and the grave
face of the old master, she thought it was all over with the poor
girl she loved, and that this was the undertaker's wagon bringing
back only what had once been Myrtle Hazard.  She screamed aloud,--so
wildly that Myrtle lifted her head from the pillow against which she
had rested it, and started forward.

The Irishwoman looked at her for a moment to assure herself that it
was the girl she loved, and not her ghost.  Then it all came over
her,--she had been stolen by thieves, who had carried her off by
night, and been rescued by the brave old man who had brought her
back.  What crying and kisses and prayers and blessings were poured
forth, in a confusion of which her bodily costume was a fitting type,
those who know the vocabulary and the enthusiasm of her eloquent race
may imagine better than we could describe it.

The welcome of the two other women was far less demonstrative.  There
were awful questions to be answered before the kind of reception she
was to have could be settled.  What they were, it is needless to
suggest; but while Miss Silence was weeping, first with joy that her
"responsibility" was removed, then with a fair share of pity and
kindness, and other lukewarm emotions,--while Miss Badlam waited for
an explanation before giving way to her feelings,--Mr. Gridley put
the essential facts before them in a few words.  She had gone down
the river some miles in her boat, which was upset by a rush of the
current, and she had come very near being drowned.  She was got out,
however, by a person living near by, and cared for by some kind women
in a house near the river, where he had been fortunate enough to
discover her.--Who cut her hair off?  Perhaps those good people,
--she had been out of her head.  She was alive and unharmed, at any
rate, wanting only a few days' rest.  They might be very thankful to
get her back, and leave her to tell the rest of her story when she
had got her strength and memory, for she was not quite herself yet,
and might not be for some days.

And so there she was at last laid in her own bed, listening again to
the ripple of the waters beneath her, Miss Silence sitting on one
side looking as sympathetic as her insufficient nature allowed her to
look; the Irishwoman uncertain between delight at Myrtle's return and
sorrow for her condition; and Miss Cynthia Badlaxn occupying herself
about house-matters, not unwilling to avoid the necessity of
displaying her conflicting emotions.

Before he left the house, Mr. Gridley repeated the statement is the
most precise manner,--some miles down the river--upset and nearly
drowned--rescued almost dead--brought to and cared for by kind women
in the house where he, Byles Gridley, found her.  These were the
facts, and nothing more than this was to be told at present.  They
had better be made known at once, and the shortest and best way would
be to have it announced by the minister at meeting that forenoon.
With their permission, he would himself write the note for Mr. Stoker
to read, and tell the other ministers that they might announce it to
their people.

The bells rang for meeting, but the little household at The Poplars
did not add to the congregation that day.  In the mean time Kitty
Fagan had gone down with Mr. Byles Gridley's note, to carry it to the
Rev. Mr. Stoker.  But, on her way, she stopped at the house of one
Mrs. Finnegan, a particular friend of hers; and the great event of
the morning furnishing matter for large discourse, and various social
allurements adding to the fascination of having a story to tell,
Kitty Fagan forgot her note until meeting had begun and the minister
had read the text of his sermon.  "Bless my soul! and sure I 've
forgot ahl about the letter!" she cried all at once, and away she
tramped for the meeting-house.  The sexton took the note, which was
folded, and said he would hand it up to the pulpit after the sermon,
--it would not do to interrupt the preacher.

The Rev. Mr. Stoker had, as was said, a somewhat remarkable gift in
prayer,--an endowment by no means confined to profoundly spiritual
persons,--in fact, not rarely owing much of its force to a strong
animal nature underlying the higher attributes.  The sweet singer of
Israel would never have written such petitions and such hymns if his
manhood had been less complete; the flavor of remembered frailties
could not help giving a character to his most devout exercises, or
they would not have come quite home to our common humanity.  But
there is no gift more dangerous to the humility and sincerity of a
minister.  While his spirit ought to be on its knees before the
throne of grace, it is too apt to be on tiptoe, following with
admiring look the flight of its own rhetoric.  The essentially
intellectual character of an extemporaneous composition spoken to the
Creator with the consciousness that many of his creatures are
listening to criticise or to admire, is the great argument for set
forms of prayer.

The congregation on this particular Sunday was made up chiefly of
women and old men.  The young men were hunting after Myrtle Hazard.
Mr. Byles Gridley was in his place, wondering why the minister did
not read his notice before the prayer.  This prayer, was never
reported, as is the questionable custom with regard to some of these
performances, but it was wrought up with a good deal of rasping force
and broad pathos.  When he came to pray for "our youthful sister,
missing from her pious home, perhaps nevermore to return to her
afflicted relatives," and the women and old men began crying, Byles
Gridley was on the very point of getting up and cutting short the
whole matter by stating the simple fact that she had got back, all
right, and suggesting that he had better pray for some of the older
and tougher sinners before him.  But on the whole it would be more
decorous to wait, and perhaps he was willing to hear what the object
of his favorite antipathy had to say about it.  So he waited through
the prayer.  He waited through the hymn, "Life is the time"--He
waited to hear the sermon.

The minister gave out his text from the Book of Esther, second
chapter, seventh verse: "For she had neither father nor mother, and
the maid was fair and beautiful."  It was to be expected that the
reverend gentleman, who loved to produce a sensation, would avail
himself of the excitable state of his audience to sweep the key-board
of their emotions, while, as we may, say, all the stops were drawn
out.  His sermon was from notes; for, though absolutely
extemporaneous composition may be acceptable to one's Maker, it is
not considered quite the thing in speaking to one's fellow-mortals.
He discoursed for a time on the loss of parents, and on the dangers
to which the unfortunate orphan is exposed.  Then he spoke of the
peculiar risks of the tender female child, left without its natural
guardians.  Warming with his subject, he dilated with wonderful
unction on the temptations springing from personal attractions.  He
pictured the "fair and beautiful" women of Holy Writ, lingering over
their names with lover-like devotion.  He brought Esther before his
audience, bathed and perfumed for the royal presence of Ahasuerus.
He showed them the sweet young Ruth, lying down in her innocence at
the feet of the lord of the manor.  He dwelt with special luxury on
the charms which seduced the royal psalmist,--the soldier's wife for
whom he broke the commands of the decalogue, and the maiden for whose
attentions, in his cooler years, he violated the dictates of prudence
and propriety.  All this time Byles Gridley had his stern eyes on
him.  And while he kindled into passionate eloquence on these
inspiring themes, poor Bathsheba, whom her mother had sent to church
that she might get a little respite from her home duties, felt her
blood growing cold in her veins, as the pallid image of the invalid
wife, lying on her bed of suffering, rose in the midst of the glowing
pictures which borrowed such warmth from her husband's imagination.

The sermon, with its hinted application to the event of the past
week, was over at last.  The shoulders of the nervous women were
twitching with sobs.  The old men were crying in their vacant way.
But all the while the face of Byles Gridley, firm as a rock in the
midst of this lachrymal inundation, was kept steadily on the
preacher, who had often felt the look that came through the two round
glasses searching into the very marrow of his bones.

As the sermon was finished, the sexton marched up through the broad
aisle and handed the note over the door of the pulpit to the
clergyman, who was wiping his face after the exertion of delivering
his discourse.  Mr. Stoker looked at it, started, changed color,--his
vision of "The Dangers of Beauty, a Sermon printed by Request," had
vanished,--and passed the note to Father Pemberton, who sat by him in
the pulpit.  With much pains he deciphered its contents, for his eyes
were dim with years, and, having read it, bowed his head upon his
hands in silent thanksgiving.  Then he rose in the beauty of his
tranquil and noble old age, so touched with the message he had to
proclaim to his people, that the three deep furrows on his forehead,
which some said he owed to the three dogmas of original sin,
predestination, and endless torment, seemed smoothed for the moment,
and his face was as that of an angel while lie spoke.

"Sisters and Brethren,--Rejoice with us, for we have found our lamb
which had strayed from the fold.  This our daughter was dead and is
alive again; she was lost and is found.  Myrtle Hazard, rescued from
great peril of the waters, and cared for by good Samaritans, is now
in her home.  Thou, O Lord, who didst let the water-flood overflow
her, didst not let the deep swallow her up, nor the pit shut its
mouth upon her.  Let us return our thanks to the God of Abraham, the
God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, who is our God and Father, and who
hath wrought this great deliverance."

After his prayer, which it tried him sorely to utter in unbroken
tones, he gave out the hymn,

    "Lord, thou hast heard thy servant cry,
     And rescued from the grave ";

but it was hardly begun when the leading female voice trembled and
stopped,--and another,--and then a third,--and Father Pemberton,
seeing that they were all overcome, arose and stretched out his arms,
and breathed over them his holy benediction.

The village was soon alive with the news.  The sexton forgot the
solemnity of the Sabbath, and the bell acted as if it was crazy,
tumbling heels over head at such a rate, and with such a clamor, that
a good many thought there was a fire, and, rushing out from every
quarter, instantly caught the great news with which the air was
ablaze.

A few of the young men who had come back went even further in their
demonstrations.  They got a small cannon in readiness, and without
waiting for the going down of the sun, began firing rapidly, upon
which the Rev. Mr. Stoker sallied forth to put a stop to this
violation of the Sabbath.  But in the mean time it was heard on all
the hills, far and near.  Some said they were firing in the hope of
raising the corpse; but many who heard the bells ringing their crazy
peals guessed what had happened.  Before night the parties were all
in, one detachment bearing the body of the bob-tailed catamount swung
over a pole, like the mighty cluster of grapes from Eshcol, and
another conveying with wise precaution that monstrous snapping-turtle
which those of our friends who wish to see will find among the
specimens marked Chelydra, Serpentine in the great collection at
Cantabridge.




CHAPTER XI.

VEXED WITH A DEVIL.

It was necessary at once to summon a physician to advise as to the
treatment of Myrtle, who had received a shock, bodily and mental, not
lightly to be got rid of, and very probably to be followed by serious
and varied disturbances.  Her very tranquillity was suspicious, for
there must be something of exhaustion in it, and the reaction must
come sooner or later.

Old Dr. Lemuel Hurlbut, at the age of ninety-two, very deaf, very
nearly blind, very feeble, liable to odd lapses of memory, was yet a
wise counsellor in doubtful and difficult cases, and on rare
occasions was still called upon to exercise his ancient skill.  Here
was a case in which a few words from him might soothe the patient and
give confidence to all who were interested in her.  Miss Silence
Withers went herself to see him.

"Miss Withers, father, wants to talk with you about her niece, Miss
Hazard," said Dr. Fordyce Hurlbut.

"Miss Withers, Miss Withers?--Oh, Silence Withers,--lives up at The
Poplars.  How's the Deacon, Miss Withers?" [Ob.  1810.]

"My grandfather is not living, Dr. Hurlbut," she screamed into his
ear.

"Dead, is he?  Well, it isn't long since he was with us; and they
come and go,--they come and go.  I remember his father, Major Gideon
Withers.  He had a great red feather on training-days,--that was what
made me remember him.  Who did you say was sick and wanted to see me,
Fordyce?"

"Myrtle Hazard, father,--she has had a narrow escape from drowning,
and it has left her in a rather nervous state.  They would like to
have you go up to The Poplars and take a look at her.  You remember
Myrtle Hazard?  She is the great-granddaughter of your old friend the
Deacon."

He had to wait a minute before his thoughts would come to order; with
a little time, the proper answer would be evolved by the slow
automatic movement of the rusted mental machinery.

After the silent moment: "Myrtle Hazard, Myrtle Hazard,--yes, yes, to
be sure!  The old Withers stock,--good constitutions,--a little apt
to be nervous, one or two of 'em.  I've given 'em a good deal of
valerian and assafoetida,--not quite so much since the new blood came
in.  There is n't the change in folks people think,--same thing over
and over again.  I've seen six fingers on a child that had a six-
fingered great-uncle, and I've seen that child's grandchild born with
six fingers.  Does this girl like to have her own way pretty well,
like the rest of the family?"

"A little too well, I suspect, father.  You will remember all about
her when you come to see her and talk with her.  She would like to
talk with you, and her aunt wants to see you too; they think there's
nobody like the 'old Doctor'."

He was not too old to be pleased with this preference, and said he
was willing to go when they were ready.  With no small labor of
preparation he was at last got to the house, and crept with his son's
aid up to the little room over the water, where his patient was still
lying.

There was a little too much color in Myrtle's cheeks and a glistening
lustre in her eyes that told of unnatural excitement.  It gave a
strange brilliancy to her beauty, and might have deceived an
unpractised observer.  The old man looked at her long and curiously,
his imperfect sight excusing the closeness of his scrutiny.

He laid his trembling hand upon her forehead, and then felt her pulse
with his shriveled fingers.  He asked her various questions about
herself, which she answered with a tone not quite so calm as natural,
but willingly and intelligently.  They thought she seemed to the old
Doctor to be doing very well, for he spoke cheerfully to her, and
treated her in such a way that neither she nor any of those around
her could be alarmed.  The younger physician was disposed to think
she was only suffering from temporary excitement, and that it would
soon pass off.

They left the room to talk it over.

"It does not amount to much, I suppose, father," said Dr. Fordyce
Hurlbut.  "You made the pulse about ninety,--a little hard,--did n't
you; as I did?  Rest, and low diet for a day or two, and all will be
right, won't it?"

Was it the feeling of sympathy, or was it the pride of superior
sagacity, that changed the look of the old man's wrinkled features?
"Not so fast,--not so fast, Fordyce," he said.  "I've seen that look
on another face of the same blood,--it 's a great many years ago, and
she was dead before you were born, my boy,--but I've seen that look,
and it meant trouble then, and I'm afraid it means trouble now.  I
see some danger of a brain fever.  And if she doesn't have that, then
look out for some hysteric fits that will make mischief.  Take that
handkerchief off of her head, and cut her hair close, and keep her
temples cool, and put some drawing plasters to the soles of her feet,
and give her some of my pilulae compositae, and follow them with some
doses of sal polychrest.  I've been through it all before--in that
same house.  Live folks are only dead folks warmed over.  I can see
'em all in that girl's face, Handsome Judith, to begin with.  And
that queer woman, the Deacon's mother,--there 's where she gets that
hystericky look.  Yes, and the black-eyed woman with the Indian blood
in her,--look out for that,--look out for that.  And--and--my son, do
you remember Major Gideon Withers?" [Ob. 1780.]

"Why no, father, I can't say that I remember the Major; but I know
the picture very well.  Does she remind you of him?"

He paused again, until the thoughts came slowly straggling, up to the
point where the question left him.  He shook his head solemnly, and
turned his dim eyes on his son's face.

Four generations--four generations; man and wife,--yes, five
generations, for old Selah Withers took me in his arms when I was a
child, and called me 'little gal,' for I was in girl's clothes,--five
generations before this Hazard child I 've looked on with these old
eyes.  And it seems to me that I can see something of almost every
one of 'em in this child's face, it's the forehead of this one, and
it's the eyes of that one, and it's that other's mouth, and the look
that I remember in another, and when she speaks, why, I've heard that
same voice before--yes, yes as long ago as when I was first married;
for I remember Rachel used to think I praised Handsome Judith's voice
more than it deserved,--and her face too, for that matter.  You
remember Rachel, my first wife,--don't you, Fordyce?"

"No, father, I don't remember her, but I know her portrait."  (As he
was the son of the old Doctor's second wife, he could hardly be
expected to remember her predecessor.)

The old Doctor's sagacity was not in fault about the somewhat
threatening aspect of Myrtle's condition.  His directions were
followed implicitly; for with the exception of the fact of
sluggishness rather than loss of memory, and of that confusion of
dates which in slighter degrees is often felt as early as middle-
life, and increases in most persons from year to year, his mind was
still penetrating, and his advice almost as trustworthy, as in his
best days.

It was very fortunate that the old Doctor ordered Myrtle's hair to be
cut, and Miss Silence took the scissors and trimmed it at once.  So,
whenever she got well and was seen about, there would be no mystery
about the loss of her locks,--the Doctor had been afraid of brain
fever, and ordered them to cut her hair.

Many things are uncertain in this world, and among them the effect of
a large proportion of the remedies prescribed by physicians.  Whether
it was by the use of the means ordered by the old Doctor, or by the
efforts of nature, or by both together, at any rate the first danger
was averted, and the immediate risk from brain fever soon passed
over.  But the impression upon her mind and body had been too
profound to be dissipated by a few days' rest.  The hysteric stage
which the wise old man had apprehended began to manifest itself by
its usual signs, if anything can be called usual in a condition the
natural order of which is disorder and anomaly.

And now the reader, if such there be, who believes in the absolute
independence and self-determination of the will, and the consequent
total responsibility of every human being for every irregular nervous
action and ill-governed muscular contraction, may as well lay down
this narrative, or he may lose all faith in poor Myrtle Hazard, and
all patience with the writer who tells her story.

The mental excitement so long sustained, followed by a violent shock
to the system, coming just at the period of rapid development, gave
rise to that morbid condition, accompanied with a series of mental
and moral perversions, which in ignorant ages and communities is
attributed to the influence of evil spirits, but for the better-
instructed is the malady which they call hysteria.  Few households
have ripened a growth of womanhood without witnessing some of its
manifestations, and its phenomena are largely traded in by scientific
pretenders and religious fanatics.  Into this cloud, with all its
risks and all its humiliations, Myrtle Hazard is about to enter.
Will she pass through it unharmed, or wander from her path, and fall
over one of those fearful precipices which lie before her?

After the ancient physician had settled the general plan of
treatment, its details and practical application were left to the
care of his son.  Dr. Fordyce Hurlbut was a widower, not yet forty
years old, a man of a fine masculine aspect and a vigorous nature.
He was a favorite with his female patients,--perhaps many of them
would have said because he was good-looking and pleasant in his
manners, but some thought in virtue of a special magnetic power to
which certain temperaments were impressible, though there was no
explaining it.  But he himself never claimed any such personal gift,
and never attempted any of the exploits which some thought were in
his power if he chose to exercise his faculty in that direction.
This girl was, as it were, a child to him, for he had seen her grow
up from infancy, and had often held her on his knee in her early
years.  The first thing he did was to get her a nurse, for he saw
that neither of the two women about her exercised a quieting
influence upon her nerves.  So he got her old friend, Nurse Byloe, to
come and take care of her.

The old nurse looked calm enough at one or two of his first visits,
but the next morning her face showed that something had been going
wrong.  "Well, what has been the trouble, Nurse?" the Doctor said, as
soon as he could get her out of the room.

"She's been attackted, Doctor, sence you been here, dreadful.  It's
them high stirricks, Doctor, 'n' I never see 'em higher, nor more of
'em.  Laughin' as ef she would bust.  Cryin' as ef she'd lost all her
friends, 'n' was a follerin' their corpse to their graves.  And
spassums,--sech spassums!  And ketchin' at her throat, 'n' sayin'
there was a great ball a risin' into it from her stommick.  One time
she had a kind o' lockjaw like.  And one time she stretched herself
out 'n' laid jest as stiff as ef she was dead.  And she says now that
her head feels as ef a nail had been driv' into it,--into the left
temple, she says, and that's what makes her look so distressed now."

The Doctor came once more to her bedside.  He saw that her forehead
was contracted, and that she was evidently suffering from severe pain
somewhere.

"Where is your uneasiness, Myrtle?" he asked.

She moved her hand very slowly, and pressed it on her left temple.
He laid his hand upon the same spot, kept it there a moment, and then
removed it.  She took it gently with her own, and placed it on her
temple again.  As he sat watching her, he saw that her features were
growing easier, and in a short time her deep, even breathing showed
that she was asleep.

"It beats all," the old nurse said.  "Why, she's been a complainin'
ever sence daylight, and she hain't slep' not a wink afore, sence
twelve o'clock las' night!  It's j es' like them magnetizers,--I
never heerd you was one o' them kind, Dr. Hurlbut."

"I can't say how it is, Nurse,--I have heard people say my hand was
magnetic, but I never thought of its quieting her so quickly.  No
sleep since twelve o'clock last night, you say?"

"Not a wink, 'n' actin' as ef she was possessed a good deal o' the
time.  You read your Bible, Doctor, don't you?  You're pious?  Do you
remember about that woman in Scriptur' out of whom the Lord cast
seven devils?  Well, I should ha' thought there was seventy devils in
that gal last night, from the way she carr'd on.  And now she lays
there jest as peaceful as a new-born babe,--that is, accordin' to the
sayin' about 'em; for as to peaceful new-born babes, I never see one
that come t' anything, that did n't screech as ef the haouse was
afire 'n' it wanted to call all the fire-ingines within ten mild."

The Doctor smiled, but he became thoughtful in a moment.  Did he
possess a hitherto unexercised personal power, which put the key of
this young girl's nervous system into his hands?  The remarkable
tranquillizing effect of the contact of his hand with her forehead
looked like an immediate physical action.

It might have been a mere coincidence, however.  He would not form an
opinion until his next visit.

At that next visit it did seem as if some of Nurse Byloe's seventy
devils had possession of the girl.  All the strange spasmodic
movements, the chokings, the odd sounds, the wild talk, the laughing
and crying, were in full blast.  All the remedies which had been
ordered seemed to have been of no avail.  The Doctor could hardly
refuse trying his quasi magnetic influence, and placed the tips of
his fingers on her forehead.  The result was the same that had
followed the similar proceeding the day before,--the storm was soon
calmed, and after a little time she fell into a quiet sleep, as in
the first instance.

Here was an awkward affair for the physician, to be sure!  He held
this power in his hands, which no remedy and no other person seemed
to possess.  How long would he be chained to her; and she to him, and
what would be the consequence of the mysterious relation which must
necessarily spring up between a man like him, in the plenitude of
vital force, of strongly attractive personality, and a young girl
organized for victory over the calmest blood and the steadiest
resistance?

Every day after this made matters worse.  There was something almost
partaking of the miraculous in the influence he was acquiring over
her.  His "Peace, be still!" was obeyed by the stormy elements of
this young soul, as if it had been a supernatural command.  How could
he resist the dictate of humanity which called him to make his visits
more frequent, that her intervals of rest might be more numerous?
How could he refuse to sit at her bedside for a while in the evening,
that she might be quieted, instead of beginning the night sleepless
and agitated?

The Doctor was a man of refined feeling as well as of principle, and
he had besides a sacred memory in the deepest heart of his
affections.  It was the common belief in the village that he would
never marry again, but that his first and only love was buried in the
grave of the wife of his youth.  It did not easily occur to him to
suspect himself of any weakness with regard to this patient of his,
little more than a child in years.  It did not at once suggest itself
to him that she, in her strange, excited condition, might fasten her
wandering thoughts upon him, too far removed by his age, as it
seemed, to strike the fancy of a young girl under almost any
conceivable conditions.

Thus it was that many of those beautiful summer evenings found him
sitting by his patient, the river rippling and singing beneath them,
the moon shining over them, sweet odors from the thickets on the
banks of the stream stealing in on the soft air that came through the
open window, and every time they were thus together, the subtile
influence which bound them to each other bringing them more and more
into inexplicable harmonies and almost spiritual identity.

But all this did not hinder the development of new and strange
conditions in Myrtle Hazard.  Her will was losing its power.  "I
cannot help it"--the hysteric motto--was her constant reply.  It is
not pleasant to confess the truth, but she was rapidly undergoing a
singular change of her moral nature.  She had been a truthful child.
If she had kept her secret about what she had found in the garret,
she thought she was exercising her rights, and she had never been
obliged to tell any lies about it.

But now she seemed to have lost the healthy instincts for veracity
and honesty.  She feigned all sorts of odd symptoms, and showed a
wonderful degree of cunning in giving an appearance of truth to them.
It became next to impossible to tell what was real and what was
simulated.  At one time she could not be touched ever so lightly
without shrinking and crying out.  At another time she would squint,
and again she would be half paralyzed for a time.  She would pretend
to fast for days, living on food she had concealed and took secretly
in the night.

The nurse was getting worn out.  Kitty Fagan would have had the
priest come to the house and sprinkle it with holy water.  The two
women were beginning to get nervous themselves.  The Rev. Mr. Stoker
said in confidence to Miss Silence, that there was reason to fear she
might have been given over for a time to the buffetings of Satan, and
that perhaps his (Mr. Stoker's) personal attentions might be useful
in that case.  And so it appeared that the "young doctor" was the
only being left with whom she had any complete relations and absolute
sympathy.  She had become so passive in his hands that it seemed as
if her only healthy life was, as it were, transmitted through him,
and that she depended on the transfer of his nervous power, as the
plant upon the light for its essential living processes.

The two young men who had met in so unexpected a manner on board the
ship Swordfish had been reasonably discreet in relating their
adventures.  Myrtle Hazard may or may not have had the plan they
attributed to her; however that was, they had looked rather foolish
when they met, and had not thought it worth while to be very
communicative about the matter when they returned.  It had at least
given them a chance to become a little better acquainted with each
other, and it was an opportunity which the elder and more artful of
the two meant to turn to advantage.

Of all Myrtle's few friends only one was in the habit of seeing her
often during this period, namely, Olive Eveleth, a girl so quiet and
sensible that she, if anybody, could be trusted with her.  But
Myrtle's whole character seemed to have changed, and Olive soon found
that she was in some mystic way absorbed into another nature.  Except
when the physician's will was exerted upon her, she was drifting
without any self-directing power, and then any one of those manifold
impulses which would in some former ages have been counted as
separate manifestations on the part of distinct demoniacal beings
might take possession of her.  Olive did little, therefore, but visit
Myrtle from time to time to learn if any change had occurred in her
condition.  All this she reported to Cyprian, and all this was got
out of him by Mr. William Murray Bradshaw.

That gentleman was far from being pleased with the look of things as
they were represented.  What if the Doctor, who was after all in the
prime of life and younger-looking than some who were born half a
dozen years after him, should get a hold on this young woman,--girl
now, if you will, but in a very few years certain to come within
possible, nay, not very improbable, matrimonial range of him?  That
would be pleasant, wouldn't it?  It had happened sometimes, as he
knew, that these magnetizing tricks had led to infatuation on the
part of the subjects of the wonderful influence.  So he concluded to
be ill and consult the younger Dr. Hurlbut, and incidentally find out
how the land lay.

The next question was, what to be ill with.  Some not ungentlemanly
malady, not hereditary, not incurable, not requiring any obvious
change in habits of life.  Dyspepsia would answer the purpose well
enough: so Mr. Murray Bradshaw picked up a medical book and read ten
minutes or more for that complaint.  At the end of this time he was
an accomplished dyspeptic; for lawyers half learn a thing quicker
than the members of any other profession.

He presented himself with a somewhat forlorn countenance to Dr.
Fordyce Hurlbut, as suffering from some of the less formidable
symptoms of that affection.  He got into a very interesting
conversation with him, especially about some nervous feelings which
had accompanied his attack of indigestion.  Thence to nervous
complaints in general.  Thence to the case of the young lady at The
Poplars whom he was attending.  The Doctor talked with a certain
reserve, as became his professional relations with his patient; but
it was plain enough that, if this kind of intercourse went on much
longer, it would be liable to end in some emotional explosion or
other, and there was no saying how it would at last turn out.

Murray Bradshaw was afraid to meddle directly.  He knew something
more about the history of Myrtle's adventure than any of his
neighbors, and, among other things, that it had given Mr. Byles
Gridley a peculiar interest in her, of which he could take advantage.
He therefore artfully hinted his fears to the old man, and left his
hint to work itself out.

However suspicious Master Gridley was of him and his motives, he
thought it worth while to call up at The Poplars and inquire for
himself of the nurse what was this new relation growing up between
the physician and his young patient.

She imparted her opinion to him in a private conversation with great
freedom.  "Sech doin's!  sech doin's!  The gal's jest as much
bewitched as ever any gal was sence them that was possessed in
Scriptur'.  And every day it 's wus and wus.  Ef that Doctor don't
stop comin', she won't breathe without his helpin' her to before
long.  And, Mr. Gridley, I don't like to say so,--but I can't help
thinkin' he's gettin' a little bewitched too.  I don't believe he
means to take no kind of advantage of her; but, Mr. Gridley, you've
seen them millers fly round and round a candle, and you know how it
ginerally comes out.  Men is men and gals is gals.  I would n't trust
no man, not ef he was much under a hundred year old,--and as for a
gal--!"

"Mulieri ne mortuae quidem credendum est," said Mr. Gridley.  "You
wouldn't trust a woman even if she was dead, hey, Nurse?"

"Not till she was buried, 'n' the grass growin' a foot high over
her," said Nurse Byloe, "unless I'd know'd her sence she was a baby.
I've know'd this one sence she was two or three year old; but this
gal ain't Myrtle Hazard no longer,--she's bewitched into somethin'
different.  I'll tell ye what, Mr. Gridley; you get old Dr. Hurlbut
to come and see her once a day for a week, and get the young doctor
to stay away.  I'll resk it.  She 'll have some dreadful tantrums at
fust, but she'll come to it in two or three, days."

Master Byles Gridley groaned in spirit.  He had come to this village
to end his days in peace, and here he was just going to make a martyr
of himself for the sake of a young person to whom he was under no
obligation, except that he had saved her from the consequences of her
own foolish act, at the expense of a great overturn of all his
domestic habits.  There was no help for it.  The nurse was right, and
he must perform the disagreeable duty of letting the Doctor know that
he was getting into a track which might very probably lead to
mischief, and that he must back out as fast as he could.

At 2 P. M.  Gifted Hopkins presented the following note at the
Doctor's door:

"Mr. Byles Gridley would be much obliged to Dr. Fordyce Hurlbut if he
would call at his study this evening."

"Odd, is n't it, father, the old man's asking me to come and see him?
Those old stub-twist constitutions never want patching."

"Old man!  old man!  Who's that you call old,--not Byles Gridley,
hey?  Old!  old!  Sixty year, more or less!  How old was Floyer when
he died, Fordyce?  Ninety-odd, was n't it?  Had the asthma though, or
he'd have lived to be as old as Dr. Holyoke,--a hundred year and
over.  That's old.  But men live to be a good deal more than that
sometimes.  What does Byles Gridley want of you, did you say?"

"I'm sure I can't tell, father; I'll go and find out."  So he went
over to Mrs. Hopkins's in the evening, and was shown up into the
study.

Master Gridley treated the Doctor to a cup of such tea as bachelors
sometimes keep hid away in mysterious caddies.  He presently began
asking certain questions about the grand climacteric, which eventful
period of life he was fast approaching.  Then he discoursed of
medicine, ancient and modern, tasking the Doctor's knowledge not a
little, and evincing a good deal of acquaintance with old doctrines
and authors.

He had a few curious old medical books in his library, which he said
he should like to show Dr. Hurlbut.

"There, now!  What do you say to this copy of Joannes de Ketam,
Venice, 1522?  Look at these woodcuts,--the first anatomical pictures
ever printed, Doctor, unless these others of Jacobus Berengarius are
older!  See this scene of the plague-patient, the doctor smelling at
his pouncet-box, the old nurse standing square at the bedside, the
young nurse with the bowl, holding back and turning her head away,
and the old burial-hag behind her, shoving her forward, a very
curious book, Doctor, and has the first phrenological picture in it
ever made.  Take a look, too, at my Vesalius,--not the Leyden
edition, Doctor, but the one with the grand old original figures,--so
good that they laid them to Titian.  And look here, Doctor, I could
n't help getting this great folio Albinus, 1747,--and the nineteenth
century can't touch it, Doctor,--can't touch it for completeness and
magnificence, so all the learned professors tell me!  Brave old
fellows, Doctor, and put their lives into their books as you
gentlemen don't pretend to do nowadays.  And good old fellows,
Doctor,--high-minded, scrupulous, conscientious, punctilious,--
remembered their duties to man and to woman, and felt all the
responsibilities of their confidential relation to families.  Did you
ever read the oldest of medical documents,--the Oath of Hippocrates?"

The Doctor thought he had read it, but did not remember much about
it.

"It 's worth reading, Doctor,--it's worth remembering; and, old as it
is, it is just as good to-day as it was when it was laid down as a
rule of conduct four hundred years before the Sermon on the Mount was
delivered.  Let me read it to you, Dr. Hurlbut."

There was something in Master Gridley's look that made the Doctor
feel a little nervous; he did not know just what was coming.

Master Gridley took out his great Hippocrates, the edition of
Foesius, and opened to the place.  He turned so as to face the
Doctor, and read the famous Oath aloud, Englishing it as he went
along.  When he came to these words which follow, he pronounced them
very slowly and with special emphasis.

"My life shall be pure and holy."

"Into whatever house I enter, I will go for the good of the patient:

"I will abstain from inflicting any voluntary injury, and from
leading away any, whether man or woman, bond or free."

The Doctor changed color as he listened, and the moisture broke out
on his forehead.

Master Gridley saw it, and followed up his advantage.  "Dr. Fordyce
Hurlbut, are you not in danger of violating the sanctities of your
honorable calling, and leading astray a young person committed to
your sacred keeping?"

While saying these words, Master Gridley looked full upon him, with a
face so charged with grave meaning, so impressed with the gravity of
his warning accents, that the Doctor felt as if he were before some
dread tribunal, and remained silent.  He was a member of the Rev. Mr.
Stoker's church, and the words he had just listened to were those of
a sinful old heathen who had never heard a sermon in his life; but
they stung him, for all that, as the parable of the prophet stung the
royal transgressor.

He spoke at length, for the plain honest words had touched the right
spring of consciousness at the right moment; not too early, for he
now saw whither he was tending,--not too late, for he was not yet in
the inner spirals of the passion which whirls men and women to their
doom in ever-narrowing coils, that will not unwind at the command of
God or man.

He spoke as one who is humbled by self-accusation, yet in a manly
way, as became his honorable and truthful character.

"Master Gridley," he said, "I stand convicted before you.  I know too
well what you are thinking of.  It is true, I cannot continue my
attendance on Myrtle--on Miss Hazard, for you mean her--without peril
to both of us.  She is not herself.  God forbid that I should cease
to be myself!  I have been thinking of a summer tour, and I will at
once set out upon it, and leave this patient in my father's hands.  I
think he will find strength to visit her under the circmnstances."

The Doctor went off the next morning without saying a word to Myrtle
Hazard, and his father made the customary visit in his place.

That night the spirit tare her, as may well be supposed, and so the
second night.  But there was no help for it: her doctor was gone,
and the old physician, with great effort, came instead, sat by her,
spoke kindly to her, left wise directions to her attendants, and
above all assured them that, if they would have a little patience,
they would see all this storm blow over.

On the third night after his visit, the spirit rent her sore, and
came out of her, or, in the phrase of to-day, she had a fierce
paroxysm, after which the violence of the conflict ceased, and she
might be called convalescent so far as that was concerned.

But all this series of nervous disturbances left her in a very
impressible and excitable condition.  This was just the state to
invite the spiritual manipulations of one of those theological
practitioners who consider that the treatment of all morbid states of
mind short of raving madness belongs to them and not to the doctors.
This same condition was equally favorable for the operations of any
professional experimenter who would use the flame of religious
excitement to light the torch of an earthly passion.  So many fingers
that begin on the black keys stray to the white ones before the tune
is played out!

If Myrtle Hazard was in charge of any angelic guardian, the time was
at hand when she would need all celestial influences; for the Rev.
Joseph Bellamy Stoker was about to take a deep interest in her
spiritual welfare.'




CHAPTER XII.

SKIRMISHING.

"So the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker has called upon you, Susan Posey,
has he?  And wants you to come and talk religion with him in his
study, Susan Posey, does he?  Religion is a good thing, my dear, the
best thing in the world, and never better than when we are young, and
no young people need it more than young girls.  There are temptations
to all, and to them as often as to any, Susan Posey.  And temptations
come to them in places where they don't look for them, and from
persons they never thought of as tempters.  So I am very glad to have
your thoughts called to the subject of religion.  'Remember thy
Creator in the days of thy youth.'

"But Susan Posey, my dear, I think you hard better not break in upon
the pious meditations of the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker in his
private study.  A monk's cell and a minister's library are hardly the
places for young ladies.  They distract the attention of these good
men from their devotions and their sermons.  If you think you must
go, you had better take Mrs. Hopkins with you.  She likes religious
conversation, and it will do her good too, and save a great deal of
time for the minister, conversing with two at once.  She is of
discreet age, and will tell you when it is time to come away,--you
might stay too long, you know.  I've known young persons stay a good
deal too long at these interviews,--a great deal too long, Susan
Posey!"

Such was the fatherly counsel of Master Byles Gridley.

Susan was not very quick of apprehension, but she could not help
seeing the justice of Master Gridley's remark, that for a young
person to go and break in on the hours that a minister requires for
his studies, without being accompanied by a mature friend who would
remind her when it was time to go, would be taking an unfair
advantage of his kindness in asking her to call upon him.  She
promised, therefore, that she would never go without having Mrs.
Hopkins as her companion, and with this assurance her old friend
rested satisfied.

It is altogether likely that he had some deeper reason for his advice
than those with which he satisfied the simple nature of Susan Posey.
Of that it will be easier to judge after a glance at the conditions
and character of the minister and his household.

The Rev. Mr. Stoker had, in addition to the personal advantages
already alluded to, some other qualities which might prove attractive
to many women.  He had, in particular, that art of sliding into easy
intimacy with them which implies some knowledge of the female nature,
and, above all, confidence in one's powers.  There was little doubt,
the gossips maintained, that many of the younger women of his parish
would have been willing, in certain contingencies, to lift for him
that other end of his yoke under which poor Mrs. Stoker was fainting,
unequal to the burden.

That lady must have been some years older than her husband,--how many
we need not inquire too curiously,--but in vitality she had long
passed the prime in which he was still flourishing.  She had borne
him five children, and cried her eyes hollow over the graves of three
of them.  Household cares had dragged upon her; the routine of
village life wearied her; the parishioners expected too much of her
as the minister's wife; she had wanted more fresh air and more
cheerful companionship; and her thoughts had fed too much on death
and sin,--good bitter tonics to increase the appetite for virtue, but
not good as food and drink for the spirit.

But there was another grief which lay hidden far beneath these
obvious depressing influences.  She felt that she was no longer to
her husband what she had been to him, and felt it with something of
self-reproach,--which was a wrong to herself, for she had been a true
and tender wife.  Deeper than all the rest was still another feeling,
which had hardly risen into the region of inwardly articulated
thought, but lay unshaped beneath all the syllabled trains of
sleeping or waking consciousness.

The minister was often consulted by his parishioners upon spiritual
matters, and was in the habit of receiving in his study visitors who
came with such intent.  Sometimes it was old weak-eyed Deacon
Rumrill, in great iron-bowed spectacles, with hanging nether lip and
tremulous voice, who had got his brain onto a muddle about the beast
with two horns, or the woman that fled into the wilderness, or other
points not settled to his mind in Scott's Commentary.  The minister
was always very busy at such times, and made short work of his
deacon's doubts.  Or it might be that an ancient woman, a mother or a
grandmother in Israel, came with her questions and her perplexities
to her pastor; and it was pretty certain that just at that moment he
was very deep in his next sermon, or had a pressing visit to make.

But it would also happen occasionally that one of the tenderer ewe-
lambs of the flock needed comfort from the presence of the shepherd.
Poor Mrs. Stoker noticed, or thought she noticed, that the good man
had more leisure for the youthful and blooming sister than for the
more discreet and venerable matron or spinster.  The sitting was apt
to be longer; and the worthy pastor would often linger awhile about
the door, to speed the parting guest, perhaps, but a little too much
after the fashion of young people who are not displeased with each
other, and who often find it as hard to cross a threshold single as a
witch finds it to get over a running stream.  More than once, the
pallid, faded wife had made an errand to the study, and, after a keen
look at the bright young cheeks, flushed with the excitement of
intimate spiritual communion, had gone back to her chamber with her
hand pressed against her heart, and the bitterness of death in her
soul.

The end of all these bodily and mental trials was, that the
minister's wife had fallen into a state of habitual invalidism, such
as only women, who feel all the nerves which in men are as insensible
as telegraph-wires, can experience.

The doctor did not know what to make of her case,--whether she would
live or die,--whether she would languish for years, or, all at once,
roused by some strong impression, or in obedience to some unexplained
movement of the vital forces, take up her bed and walk.  For her bed
had become her home, where she lived as if it belonged to her
organism.  There she lay, a not unpleasing invalid to contemplate,
always looking resigned, patient, serene, except when the one deeper
grief was stirred, always arrayed with simple neatness, and
surrounded with little tokens that showed the constant presence with
her of tasteful and thoughtful affection.  She did not know, nobody
could know, how steadily, how silently all this artificial life was
draining the veins and blanching the cheek of her daughter Bathsheba,
one of the everyday, air-breathing angels without nimbus or aureole
who belong to every story which lets us into a few households, as
much as the stars and the flowers belong to everybody's verses.

Bathsheba's devotion to her mother brought its own reward, but it was
not in the shape of outward commendation.  Some of the more
censorious members of her father's congregation were severe in their
remarks upon her absorption in the supreme object of her care.  It
seems that this had prevented her from attending to other duties
which they considered more imperative.  They did n't see why she
shouldn't keep a Sabbath-school as well as the rest, and as to her
not comin' to meetin' three times on Sabbath day like other folks,
they couldn't account for it, except because she calculated that she
could get along without the means of grace, bein' a minister's
daughter.  Some went so far as to doubt if she had ever experienced
religion, for all she was a professor.  There was a good many
indulged a false hope.  To this, others objected her life of utter
self-denial and entire surrender to her duties towards her mother as
some evidence of Christian character.  But old Deacon Rumrill put
down that heresy by showing conclusively from Scott's Commentary on
Romans xi. 1-6, that this was altogether against her chance of being
called, and that the better her disposition to perform good works,
the more unlikely she was to be the subject of saving grace.  Some of
these severe critics were good people enough themselves, but they
loved active work and stirring companionship, and would have found
their real cross if they had been called to sit at an invalid's
bedside.

As for the Rev. Mr. Stoker, his duties did not allow him to give so
much time to his suffering wife as his feelings would undoubtedly
have prompted.  He therefore relinquished the care of her (with great
reluctance we may naturally suppose) to Bathsheba, who had inherited
not only her mother's youthful smile, but that self-forgetfulness
which, born with some of God's creatures, is, if not "grace," at
least a manifestation of native depravity which might well be
mistaken for it.

The intimacy of mother and daughter was complete, except on a single
point.  There was one subject on which no word ever passed between
them.  The excuse of duties to others was by a tacit understanding a
mantle to cover all short-comings in the way of attention from the
husband and father, and no word ever passed between them implying a
suspicion of the loyalty of his affections.  Bathsheba came at last
so to fill with her tenderness the space left empty in the neglected
heart, that her mother only spoke her habitual feeling when she said,
"I should think you were in love with me, my darling, if you were not
my daughter."

This was a dangerous state of things for the minister.  Strange
suggestions and unsafe speculations began to mingle with his dreams
and reveries.  The thought once admitted that another's life is
becoming superfluous and a burden, feeds like a ravenous vulture on
the soul.  Woe to the man or woman whose days are passed in watching
the hour-glass through which the sands run too slowly for longings
that are like a skulking procession of bloodless murders!  Without
affirming such horrors of the Rev. Mr. Stoker, it would not be
libellous to say that his fancy was tampering with future
possibilities, as it constantly happens with those who are getting
themselves into training for some act of folly, or some crime, it may
be, which will in its own time evolve itself as an idea in the
consciousness, and by and by ripen into fact.

It must not be taken for granted that he was actually on the road to
some fearful deed, or that he was an utterly lost soul.  He was ready
to yield to temptation if it came in his way; he would even court it,
but he did not shape out any plan very definitely in his mind, as a
more desperate sinner would have done.  He liked the pleasurable
excitement of emotional relations with his pretty lambs, and enjoyed
it under the name of religious communion.  There is a border land
where one can stand on the territory of legitimate instincts and
affections, and yet be so near, the pleasant garden of the Adversary,
that his dangerous fruits and flowers are within easy reach.  Once
tasted, the next step is like to be the scaling of the wall.  The
Rev. Mr. Stoker was very fond of this border land.  His imagination
was wandering over it too often when his pen was travelling almost of
itself along the weary parallels of the page before him.  All at once
a blinding flash would come over him the lines of his sermon would
run together, the fresh manuscript would shrivel like a dead leaf,
and the rows of hard-hearted theology on the shelves before him, and
the broken-backed Concordance, and the Holy Book itself, would fade
away as he gave himself up to the enchantment of his delirious dream.

The reader will probably consider it a discreet arrangement that
pretty Susan Posey should seek her pastor in grave company.  Mrs.
Hopkins willingly consented to the arrangement which had been
proposed, and agreed to go with the young lady on her visit to the
Rev. Mr. Stoker's study.  They were both arrayed in their field-day
splendors on this occasion.  Susan was lovely in her light curls and
blue ribbons, and the becoming dress which could not help betraying
the modestly emphasized crescendos and gently graded diminuendos of
her figure.  She was as round as if she had been turned in a lathe,
and as delicately finished as if she had been modelled for a Flora.
She had naturally an airy toss of the head and a springy movement of
the joints, such as some girls study in the glass (and make dreadful
work of it), so that she danced all over without knowing it, like a
little lively bobolink on a bulrush.  In short, she looked fit to
spoil a homily for Saint Anthony himself.

Mrs. Hopkins was not less perfect in her somewhat different style.
She might be called impressive and imposing in her grand-costume,
which she wore for this visit.  It was a black silk dress, with a
crape shawl, a firmly defensive bonnet, and an alpaca umbrella with
a stern-looking and decided knob presiding as its handle.  The dried-
leaf rustle of her silk dress was suggestive of the ripe autumn of
life, bringing with it those golden fruits of wisdom and experience
which the grave teachers of mankind so justly prefer to the idle
blossoms of adolescence.

It is needless to say that the visit was conducted with the most
perfect propriety in all respects.  Mrs. Hopkins was disposed to take
upon herself a large share of the conversation.  The minister, on the
other hand, would have devoted himself more particularly to Miss
Susan, but, with a very natural make-believe obtuseness, the good
woman drew his fire so constantly that few of his remarks, and hardly
any of his insinuating looks, reached the tender object at which they
were aimed.  It is probable that his features or tones betrayed some
impatience at having thus been foiled of his purpose, for Mrs.
Hopkins thought he looked all the time as if he wanted to get rid of
her.  The three parted, therefore, not in the best humor all round.
Mrs. Hopkins declared she'd see the minister in Jericho before she'd
fix herself up as if she was goin' to a weddin' to go and see him
again.  Why, he did n't make any more of her than if she'd been a
tabby-cat.  She believed some of these ministers thought women's
souls dried up like peas in a pod by the time they was forty year
old; anyhow, they did n't seem to care any great about 'em, except
while they was green and tender.  It was all Miss Se-usan, Miss Se-
usan, Miss Se-usan, my dear!  but as for her, she might jest as well
have gone with her apron on, for any notice he took of her.  She did
n't care, she was n't goin' to be left out when there was talkin'
goin' on, anyhow.

Susan Posey, on her part, said she did n't like him a bit.  He looked
so sweet at her, and held his head on one side,--law! just as if he
had been a young beau!  And,--don't tell,--but he whispered that he
wished the next time I came I wouldn't bring that Hopkins woman!

It would not be fair to repeat what the minister said to himself; but
we may own as much as this, that, if worthy Mrs. Hopkins had heard
it, she would have treated him to a string of adjectives which would
have greatly enlarged his conceptions of the female vocabulary.




CHAPTER XIII.

BATTLE.

In tracing the history of a human soul through its commonplace
nervous perturbations, still more through its spiritual humiliations,
there is danger that we shall feel a certain contempt for the subject
of such weakness.  It is easy to laugh at the erring impulses of a
young girl; but you who remember when_______ _________, only fifteen
years old, untouched by passion, unsullied in name, was found in the
shallow brook where she had sternly and surely sought her death,--
(too true! too true!--ejus animae Jesu miserere!--but a generation
has passed since then,)--will not smile so scornfully.

Myrtle Hazard no longer required the physician's visits, but her mind
was very far from being poised in the just balance of its faculties.
She was of a good natural constitution and a fine temperament; but
she had been overwrought by all that she had passed through, and,
though happening to have been born in another land, she was of
American descent.  Now, it has long been noticed that there is
something in the influences, climatic or other, here prevailing,
which predisposes to morbid religious excitement.  The graver reader
will not object to seeing the exact statement of a competent witness
belonging to a by-gone century, confirmed as it is by all that we see
about us.

"There is no Experienced Minister of the Gospel who hath not in the
Cases of Tempted Souls often had this Experience, that the ill Cases
of their distempered Bodies are the frequent Occasion and Original of
their Temptations."  "The Vitiated Humours in many Persons, yield the
Steams whereinto Satan does insinuate himself, till he has gained a
sort of Possession in them, or at least an Opportunity to shoot into
the Mind as many Fiery Darts as may cause a sad Life unto them; yea,
't is well if Self-Murder be not the sad end into which these hurred
(?) People are thus precipitated.  New England, a country where
Splenetic Maladies are prevailing and pernicious, perhaps above any
other, hath afforded Numberless Instances, of even pious People, who
have contracted these Melancholy Indispositions which have unhinged
them from all Service or Comfort; yea, not a few Persons have been
hurried thereby to lay Violent Hands upon themselves at the last.
These are among the unsearchable Judgments of God!"

Such are the words of the Rev. Cotton Mather.

The minister had hardly recovered from his vexatious defeat in the
skirmish where the Widow Hopkins was his principal opponent, when he
received a note from Miss Silence Withers, which promised another and
more important field of conflict.  It contained a request that he
would visit Myrtle Hazard, who seemed to be in a very excitable and
impressible condition, and who might perhaps be easily brought under
those influences which she had resisted from her early years, through
inborn perversity of character.

When the Rev. Mr. Stoker received this note, he turned very pale,--
which was a bad sign.  Then he drew a long breath or two, and
presently a flush tingled up to his cheek, where it remained a fixed
burning glow.  This may have been from the deep interest he felt in
Myrtle's spiritual welfare; but he had often been sent for by aged
sinners in more immediate peril, apparently, without any such
disturbance of the circulation.

To know whether a minister, young or still in flower; is in safe or
dangerous paths, there are two psychometers, a comparison between
which will give as infallible a return as the dry and wet bulbs of
the ingenious "Hygrodeik."  The first is the black broadcloth forming
the knees of his pantaloons; the second, the patch of carpet before
his mirror.  If the first is unworn and the second is frayed and
threadbare, pray for him.  If the first is worn and shiny, while the
second keeps its pattern and texture, get him to pray for you.

The Rev. Mr. Stoker should have gone down on his knees then and
there, and sought fervently for the grace which he was like to need
in the dangerous path just opening before him.  He did not do this;
but he stood up before his looking-glass and parted his hair as
carefully as if he had been separating the saints of his congregation
from the sinners, to send the list to the statistical columns of a
religious newspaper.  He selected a professional neckcloth, as
spotlessly pure as if it had been washed in innocency, and adjusted
it in a tie which was like the white rose of Sharon.  Myrtle Hazard
was, he thought, on the whole, the handsomest girl he had ever seen;
Susan Posey was to her as a buttercup from the meadow is to a tiger-
lily.  He, knew the nature of the nervous disturbances through which
she had been passing, and that she must be in a singularly
impressible condition.  He felt sure that he could establish intimate
spiritual relations with her by drawing out her repressed sympathies,
by feeding the fires of her religious imagination, by exercising all
those lesser arts of fascination which are so familiar to the Don
Giovannis, and not always unknown to the San Giovannis.

As for the hard doctrines which he used to produce sensations with in
the pulpit, it would have been a great pity to worry so lovely a
girl, in such a nervous state, with them.  He remembered a savory
text about being made all things to all men, which would bear
application particularly well to the case of this young woman.  He
knew how to weaken his divinity, on occasion, as well as an old
housewife to weaken her tea, lest it should keep people awake.

The Rev. Mr. Stoker was a man of emotions.  He loved to feel his
heart beat; he loved all the forms of non-alcoholic drunkenness,
which are so much better than the vinous, because they taste
themselves so keenly, whereas the other (according to the statement
of experts who are familiar with its curious phenomena) has a certain
sense of unreality connected with it.  He delighted in the reflex
stimulus of the excitement he produced in others by working on their
feelings.  A powerful preacher is open to the same sense of
enjoyment--an awful, tremulous, goose-flesh sort of state, but still
enjoyment--that a great tragedian feels when he curdles the blood of
his audience.

Mr. Stoker was noted for the vividness of his descriptions of the
future which was in store for the great bulk of his fellow-townsmen
and fellow-worlds-men.  He had three sermons on this subject, known
to all the country round as the sweating sermon, the fainting sermon,
and the convulsion-fit sermon, from the various effects said to have
been produced by them when delivered before large audiences.  It
might be supposed that his reputation as a terrorist would have
interfered with his attempts to ingratiate himself with his young
favorites.  But the tragedian who is fearful as Richard or as Iago
finds that no hindrance to his success in the part of Romeo.  Indeed,
women rather take to terrible people; prize-fighters, pirates,
highwaymen, rebel generals, Grand Turks, and Bluebeards generally
have a fascination for the sex; your virgin has a natural instinct to
saddle your lion.  The fact, therefore, that the young girl had sat
under his tremendous pulpitings, through the sweating sermon, the
fainting sermon, and the convulsion-fit sermon, did not secure her
against the influence of his milder approaches.

Myrtle was naturally surprised at receiving a visit from him; but she
was in just that unbalanced state in which almost any impression is
welcome.  He showed so much interest, first in her health, then in
her thoughts and feelings, always following her lead in the
conversation, that before he left her she felt as if she had made a
great discovery; namely, that this man, so formidable behind the guns
of his wooden bastion, was a most tenderhearted and sympathizing
person when he came out of it unarmed.  How delightful he was as he
sat talking in the twilight in low and tender tones, with respectful
pauses of listening, in which he looked as if he too had just made a
discovery,--of an angel, to wit, to whom he could not help unbosoming
his tenderest emotions, as to a being from another sphere!

It was a new experience to Myrtle.  She was all ready for the
spiritual manipulations of an expert.  The excitability which had
been showing itself in spasms and strange paroxysms had been
transferred to those nervous centres, whatever they may be, cerebral
or ganglionic, which are concerned in the emotional movements of the
religious nature.  It was taking her at an unfair disadvantage, no
doubt.  In the old communion, some priest might have wrought upon her
while in this condition, and we might have had at this very moment
among us another Saint Theresa or Jacqueline Pascal.  She found but a
dangerous substitute in the spiritual companionship of a saint like
the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker.

People think the confessional is unknown in our Protestant churches.
It is a great mistake.  The principal change is, that there is no
screen between the penitent and the father confessor.  The minister
knew his rights, and very soon asserted them.  He gave aunt Silence
to understand that he could talk more at ease if he and his young
disciple were left alone together.  Cynthia Badlam did not like this
arrangement.  She was afraid to speak about it; but she glared at
them aslant, with the look of a biting horse when his eyes follow one
sideways until they are all white but one little vicious spark of
pupil.

It was not very long before the Rev. Mr. Stoker had established
pretty intimate relations with the household at The Poplars.  He had
reason to think, he assured Miss Silence, that Myrtle was in a state
of mind which promised a complete transformation of her character.
He used the phrases of his sect, of course, in talking with the
elderly lady; but the language which he employed with the young girl
was free from those mechanical expressions which would have been like
to offend or disgust her.

As to his rougher formulae, he knew better than to apply them to a
creature of her fine texture.  If he had been disposed to do so, her
simple questions and answers to his inquiries would have made it
difficult.  But it was in her bright and beautiful eyes, in her
handsome features, and her winning voice, that he found his chief
obstacle.  How could he look upon her face in its loveliness, and
talk to her as if she must be under the wrath and curse of God for
the mere fact of her existence?  It seemed more natural and it
certainly was more entertaining, to question her in such a way as to
find out what kind of theology had grown up in her mind as the result
of her training in the complex scheme of his doctrinal school.  And
as he knew that the merest child, so soon as it begins to think at
all, works out for itself something like a theory of human nature, he
pretty soon began sounding Myrtle's thoughts on this matter.

What was her own idea; he would be pleased to know, about her natural
condition as one born of a sinful race, and her inherited liabilities
on that account?

Myrtle smiled like a little heathen, as she was, according to the
standard of her earlier teachings.  That kind of talk used to worry
her when she was a child, sometimes.  Yes, she remembered its coming
back to her in a dream she had, when--when--(She did not finish her
sentence.)  Did he think she hated every kind of goodness and loved
every kind of evil?  Did he think she was hateful to the Being who
made her?

The minister looked straight into the bright, brave, tender eyes, and
answered, "Nothing in heaven or on earth could help loving you,
Myrtle!"

Pretty well for a beginning!

Myrtle saw nothing but pious fervor in this florid sentiment.  But as
she was honest and clear-sighted, she could not accept a statement
which seemed so plainly in contradiction with his common teachings,
without bringing his flattering assertion to the test of another
question.

Did he suppose, she asked, that any persons could be Christians, who
could not tell the day or the year of their change from children of
darkness to children of light.

The shrewd clergyman, whose creed could be lax enough on occasion,
had provided himself with authorities of all kinds to meet these
awkward questions in casuistical divinity.  He had hunted up recipes
for spiritual neuralgia, spasms, indigestion, psora, hypochondriasis,
just as doctors do for their bodily counterparts.

To be sure they could.  Why, what did the great Richard Baxter say in
his book on Infant Baptism?  That at a meeting of many eminent
Christians, some of them very famous ministers, when it was desired
that every one should give an account of the time and manner of his
conversion, there was but one of them all could do it.  And as for
himself, Mr. Baxter said, he could not remember the day or the year
when he began to be sincere, as he called it.  Why, did n't President
Wheelock say to a young man who consulted him, that some persons
might be true Christians without suspecting it?

All this was so very different from the uncompromising way in which
religious doctrines used to be presented to the young girl from the
pulpit, that it naturally opened her heart and warmed her affections.
Remember, if she needs excuse, that the defeated instincts of a
strong nature were rushing in upon her, clamorous for their rights,
and that she was not yet mature enough to understand and manage them.
The paths of love and religion are at the fork of a road which every
maiden travels.  If some young hand does not open the turnpike gate
of the first, she is pretty sure to try the other, which has no toll-
bar.  It is also very commonly noticed that these two paths, after
diverging awhile, run into each other.  True love leads many
wandering souls into the better way.  Nor is it rare to see those who
started in company for the gates of pearl seated together on the
banks that border the avenue to that other portal, gathering the
roses for which it is so famous.

It was with the most curious interest that the minister listened to
the various heresies into which her reflections had led her.  Somehow
or other they did not sound so dangerous coming from her lips as when
they were uttered by the coarser people of the less rigorous
denominations, or preached in the sermons of heretical clergymen.  He
found it impossible to think of her in connection with those
denunciations of sinners for which his discourses had been noted.
Some of the sharp old church-members began to complain that his
exhortations were losing their pungency.  The truth was, he was
preaching for Myrtle Hazard.  He was getting bewitched and driven
beside himself by the intoxication of his relations with her.

All this time she was utterly unconscious of any charm that she was
exercising, or of being herself subject to any personal fascination.
She loved to read the books of ecstatic contemplation which he
furnished her.  She loved to sing the languishing hymns which he
selected for her.  She loved to listen to his devotional rhapsodies,
hardly knowing sometimes whether she were in the body, or out of the
body, while he lifted her upon the wings of his passion-kindled
rhetoric.  The time came when she had learned to listen for his step,
when her eyes glistened at meeting him, when the words he uttered
were treasured as from something more than a common mortal, and the
book he had touched was like a saintly relic.  It never suggested
itself to her for an instant that this was anything more than such a
friendship as Mercy might have cultivated with Great-Heart.  She gave
her confidence simply because she was very young and innocent.  The
green tendrils of the growing vine must wind round something.

The seasons had been changing their scenery while the events we have
told were occurring, and the loveliest days of autumn were now
shining.  To those who know the "Indian summer" of our Northern
States, it is needless to describe the influence it exerts on the
senses and the soul.  The stillness of the landscape in that
beautiful time is as if the planet were sleeping, like a top, before
it begins to rock with the storms of autumn.  All natures seem to
find themselves more truly in its light; love grows more tender,
religion more spiritual, memory sees farther back into the past,
grief revisits its mossy marbles, the poet harvests the ripe thoughts
which he will tie in sheaves of verses by his winter fireside.

The minister had got into the way of taking frequent walks with
Myrtle, whose health had seemed to require the open air, and who was
fast regaining her natural look.  Under the canopy of the scarlet,
orange, and crimson leaved maples, of the purple and violet clad
oaks, of the birches in their robes of sunshine, and the beeches in
their clinging drapery of sober brown, they walked together while he
discoursed of the joys of heaven, the sweet communion of kindred
souls, the ineffable bliss of a world where love would be immortal
and beauty should never know decay.  And while she listened, the
strange light of the leaves irradiated the youthful figure of Myrtle,
as when the stained window let in its colors on Madeline, the rose-
bloom and the amethyst and the glory.

"Yes!  we shall be angels together," exclaimed the Rev. Mr. Stoker.
"Our souls were made for immortal union.  I know it; I feel it in
every throb of my heart.  Even in this world you are as an angel to
me, lifting me into the heaven where I shall meet you again, or it
will not be heaven.  Oh, if on earth our communion could have been
such as it must be hereafter!  O Myrtle, Myrtle!"

He stretched out his hands as if to clasp hers between them in the
rapture of his devotion.  Was it the light reflected from the glossy
leaves of the poison sumach which overhung the path that made his
cheek look so pale?  Was he going to kneel to her?

Myrtle turned her dark eyes on him with a simple wonder that saw an
excess of saintly ardor in these demonstrations, and drew back from
it.

"I think of heaven always as the place where I shall meet my mother,"
she said calmly.

These words recalled the man to himself for a moment and he was
silent.  Presently he seated himself on a stone.  His lips were
tremulous as he said, in a low tone, "Sit down by me, Myrtle."


"No," she answered, with something which chilled him in her voice,"
we will not stay here any longer; it is time to go home."

"Full time!" muttered Cynthia Badlam, whose watchful eyes had been
upon them, peering through a screen of yellow leaves, that turned her
face pace as if with deadly passion.




CHAPTER XIV.

FLANK MOVEMENT.

Miss Cynthia Badlam was in the habit of occasionally visiting the
Widow Hopkins.  Some said but then people will talk, especially in
the country, where they have not much else to do, except in haying-
time.  She had always known the widow, long before Mr. Gridley came
there to board, or any other special event happened in her family.
No matter what people said.

Miss Badlam called to see Mrs. Hopkins, then, and the two had a long
talk together, of which only a portion is on record.  Here are such
fragments as have been preserved.

"What would I do about it?  Why, I'd put a stop to such carry'n's on,
mighty quick, if I had to tie the girl to the bedpost, and have a
bulldog that world take the seat out of any pair of black pantaloons
that come within forty rod of her,--that's what I'd do about it!  He
undertook to be mighty sweet with our Susan one while, but ever sence
he's been talkin' religion with Myrtle Hazard he's let us alone.  Do
as I did when he asked our Susan to come to his study,--stick close
to your girl and you 'll put a stop to all this business.  He won't
make love to two at once, unless they 're both pretty young, I 'll
warrant.  Follow her round, Miss Cynthy, and keep your eyes on her."

"I have watched her like a cat, Mrs. Hopkins, but I can't follow her
everywhere,--she won't stand what Susan Posey 'll stand.  There's no
use our talking to her,--we 've done with that at our house.  You
never know what that Indian blood of hers will make her do.  She's
too high-strung for us to bit and bridle.  I don't want to see her
name in the paper again, alongside of that" (She did not finish the
sentence.) "I'd rather have her fished dead out of the river, or find
her where she found her uncle Malachi!"

"You don't think, Miss Cynthy, that the man means to inveigle the
girl with the notion of marryin' her by and by, after poor Mrs.
Stoker's dead and gone?"

"The Lord in heaven forbid!" exclaimed Miss Cynthia, throwing up her
hands.  "A child of fifteen years old, if she is a woman to look at!"

"It's too bad,--it's too bad to think of, Miss Cynthy; and there's
that poor woman dyin' by inches, and Miss Bathsheby settin' with her
day and night, she has n't got a bit of her father in her, it's all
her mother,--and that man, instead of bein' with her to comfort her
as any man ought to be with his wife, in sickness and in health,
that's what he promised.  I 'm sure when my poor husband was sick....
To think of that man goin' about to talk religion to all the
prettiest girls he can find in the parish, and his wife at home like
to leave him so soon,--it's a shame,--so it is, come now!  Miss
Cynthy, there's one of the best men and one of the learnedest men
that ever lived that's a real friend of Myrtle Hazard, and a better
friend to her than she knows of,--for ever sence he brought her home,
he feels jest like a father to her,--and that man is Mr. Gridley,
that lives in this house.  It's him I 'll speak to about the
minister's carry'in's on.  He knows about his talking sweet to our
Susan, and he'll put things to rights!  He's a master hand when he
does once take hold of anything, I tell you that!  Jest get him to
shet up them books of his, and take hold of anybody's troubles, and
you'll see how he 'll straighten 'em out."

There was a pattering of little feet on the stairs, and the two small
twins, "Sossy" and "Minthy," in the home dialect, came hand in hand
into the room, Miss Susan leaving them at the threshold, not wishing
to interrupt the two ladies, and being much interested also in
listening to Mr. Gifted Hopkins, who was reading some of his last
poems to her, with great delight to both of them.

The good woman rose to take them from Susan, and guide their
uncertain steps.  "My babies, I call 'em, Miss Cynthy.  Ain't they
nice children?  Come to go to bed, little dears?  Only a few minutes,
Miss Cynthy."

She took them into the bedroom on the same floor, where they slept,
and, leaving the door open, began undressing them.  Cynthia turned
her rocking-chair round so as to face the open door.  She looked on
while the little creatures were being undressed; she heard the few
words they lisped as their infant prayer, she saw them laid in their
beds, and heard their pretty good-night.

A lone woman to whom all the sweet cares of maternity have been
denied cannot look upon a sight like this without feeling the void in
her own heart where a mother's affection should have nestled.
Cynthia sat perfectly still, without rocking, and watched kind Mrs.
Hopkins at her quasi parental task.  A tear stole down her rigid face
as she saw the rounded limbs of the children bared in their white
beauty, and their little heads laid on the pillow.  They were
sleeping quietly when Mrs. Hopkins left the room for a moment on some
errand of her own.  Cynthia rose softly from her chair, stole swiftly
to the bedside, and printed a long, burning kiss on each of their
foreheads.

When Mrs. Hopkins came back, she found the maiden lady sitting in her
place just as she left her, but rocking in her chair and sobbing as
one in sudden pangs of grief.

"It is a great trouble, Miss Cynthy," she said,--"a great trouble to
have such a child as Myrtle to think of and to care for.  If she was
like our Susan Posey, now!--but we must do the best we can; and if
Mr. Gridley once sets himself to it, you may depend upon it he 'll
make it all come right.  I wouldn't take on about it if I was you.
You let me speak to our Mr. Gridley.  We all have our troubles.  It
is n't everybody that can ride to heaven in a C-spring shay, as my
poor husband used to say; and life 's a road that 's got a good many
thank-you-ma'ams to go bumpin' over, says he."

Miss Badlam acquiesced in the philosophical reflections of the late
Mr. Ammi Hopkins, and left it to his widow to carry out her own
suggestion in reference to consulting Master Gridley.  The good woman
took the first opportunity she had to introduce the matter, a little
diffusely, as is often the way of widows who keep boarders.

"There's something going on I don't like, Mr. Gridley.  They tell me
that Minister Stoker is following round after Myrtle Hazard, talking
religion at her jest about the same way he'd have liked to with our
Susan, I calculate.  If he wants to talk religion to me or Silence
Withers,--well, no, I don't feel sure about Silence,--she ain't as
young as she used to be, but then ag'in she ain't so fur gone as
some, and she's got money,--but if he wants to talk religion with me,
he may come and welcome.  But as for Myrtle Hazard, she's been sick,
and it's left her a little flighty by what they say, and to have a
minister round her all the time ravin' about the next world as if he
had a latch-key to the front door of it, is no way to make her come
to herself again.  I 've seen more than one young girl sent off to
the asylum by that sort of work, when, if I'd only had 'em, I'd have
made 'em sweep the stairs, and mix the puddin's, and tend the babies,
and milk the cow, and keep 'em too busy all day to be thinkin' about
themselves, and have 'em dress up nice evenin's and see some young
folks and have a good time, and go to meetin' Sundays, and then have
done with the minister, unless it was old Father Pemberton.  He knows
forty times as much about heaven as that Stoker man does, or ever 's
like to,--why don't they run after him, I should like to know?
Ministers are men, come now; and I don't want to say anything against
women, Mr. Gridley, but women are women, that's the fact of it, and
half of 'em are hystericky when they're young; and I've heard old Dr.
Hurlbut say many a time that he had to lay in an extra stock of
valerian and assafaetida whenever there was a young minister round,--
for there's plenty of religious ravin', says he, that's nothin' but
hysterics."

[Mr. Fronde thinks that was the trouble with Bloody Queen Mary, but
the old physician did not get the idea from him.]

"Well, and what do you propose to do about the Rev. Joseph Bellamy
Stoker and his young proselyte, Miss Myrtle Hazard?" said Mr.
Gridley, when Mrs. Hopkins at last gave him a chance to speak.

"Mr. Gridley,"--Mrs. Hopkins looked full upon him as she spoke,--"
people used to say that you was a good man and a great man and one of
the learnedest men alive, but that you didn't know much nor care for
much except books.  I know you used to live pretty much to yourself
when you first came to board in this house.  But you've been very
good to my son; ...and if Gifted lives till you ...till you are in
...your grave, ...he will write a poem--I know he will--that will
tell your goodness to babes unborn."

[Here Master Gridley groaned, and repeated to himself silently,

    "Scindentur vestes gemmae frangentur et aurum,
     Carmina quam tribuent fama perennis erit."

All this inwardly, and without interrupting the worthy woman's talk.]

"And if ever Gifted makes a book,--don't say anything about it, Mr.
Gridley, for goodness' sake, for he wouldn't have anybody know it,
only I can't help thinking that some time or other he will print a
book,--and if he does, I know whose name he'll put at the head of
it,--'Dedicated to B. G., with the gratitude and respect--' There,
now, I had n't any business to say a word about it, and it's only
jest in case he does, you know.  I'm sure you deserve it all.  You've
helped him with the best of advice.  And you've been kind to me when
I was in trouble.  And you've been like a grandfather" [Master
Gridley winced,--why could n't the woman have said father?--that
grand struck his ear like a spade going into the gravel] "to those
babes, poor little souls! left on my door-step like a couple of
breakfast rolls,--only you know it's the baker left then.  I believe
in you, Mr. Gridley, as I believe in my Maker and in Father
Pemberton,--but, poor man, he's old, and you won't be old these
twenty years yet."

[Master Gridley shook his head as if to say that was n't so, but felt
comforted and refreshed.]

"You've got to help Myrtle Hazard again.  You brought her home when
she come so nigh drowning.  You got the old doctor to go and see her
when she come so nigh being bewitched with the magnetism and
nonsense, whatever they call it, and the young doctor was so nigh
bein' crazy, too.  I know, for Nurse Byloe told me all about it.  And
now Myrtle's gettin' run away with by that pesky Minister Stoker.
Cynthy Badlam was here yesterday crying and sobbing as if her heart
would break about it.  For my part, I did n't think Cynthy cared so
much for the girl as all that, but I saw her takin' on dreadfully
with my own eyes.  That man's like a hen-hawk among the chickens,
first he picks up one, and then he picks up another.  I should like
to know if nobody but young folks has souls to be saved, and
specially young women!"

"Tell me all you know about Myrtle Hazard and Joseph Bellamy Stoker,"
said Master Gridley.

Thereupon that good lady related all that Miss Badlam had imparted to
her, of which the reader knows the worst, being the interview of
which the keen spinster had been a witness, having followed them for
the express purpose of knowing, in her own phrase, what the minister
was up to.

It is not to be supposed that Myrtle had forgotten the discreet
kindness of Master Gridley in bringing her back and making the best
of her adventure.  He, on his part, had acquired a kind of right to
consider himself her adviser, and had begun to take a pleasure in the
thought that he, the worn-out and useless old pedant, as he had been
in the way of considering himself, might perhaps do something even
more important than his previous achievement to save this young girl
from the dangers that surrounded her.  He loved his classics and his
old books; he took an interest, too, in the newspapers and
periodicals that brought the fermenting thought and the electric life
of the great world into his lonely study; but these things just about
him were getting strong hold on him, and most of all the fortunes of
this beautiful young woman.  How strange!  For a whole generation he
had lived in no nearer relation to his fellow-creatures than that of
a half-fossilized teacher; and all at once he found himself face to
face with the very most intense form of life, the counsellor of
threatened innocence, the champion of imperilled loveliness.  What
business was it of his? growled the lower nature, of which he had
said in "Thoughts on the Universe,"--"Every man leads or is led by
something that goes on four legs."

Then he remembered the grand line of the African freedman, that makes
all human interests everybody's business, and had a sudden sense of
dilatation and evolution, as it were, in all his dimensions, as if he
were a head taller, and a foot bigger round the chest, and took in an
extra gallon of air at every breath, Then--you who have written a
book that holds your heart-leaves between its pages will understand
the movement--he took down "Thoughts on the Universe" for a
refreshing draught from his own wellspring.  He opened as chance
ordered it, and his eyes fell on the following passage:

"The true American formula was well phrased by the late Samuel Patch,
the Western Empedocles, 'Some things can be done as well as others.'
A homely utterance, but it has virtue to overthrow all dynasties and
hierarchies.  These were all built up on the Old-World dogma that
some things can NOT be done as well as others."

"There, now!" he said, talking to himself in his usual way, "is n't
that good?  It always seems to me that I find something to the point
when I open that book.  'Some things can be done as well as others,'
can they?  Suppose I should try what I can do by visiting Miss Myrtle
Hazard?  I think I may say I am old and incombustible enough to be
trusted.  She does not seem to be a safe neighbor to very inflammable
bodies?"

Myrtle was sitting in the room long known as the Study, or the
Library, when Master Byles Gridley called at The Poplars to see her.
Miss Cynthia, who received him, led him to this apartment and left
him alone with Myrtle.  She welcomed him very cordially, but colored
as she did so,--his visit was a surprise.  She was at work on a piece
of embroidery.  Her first instinctive movement was to thrust it out
of sight with the thought of concealment; but she checked this, and
before the blush of detection had reached her cheek, the blush of
ingenuous shame for her weakness had caught and passed it, and was in
full possession.  She sat with her worsted pattern held bravely in
sight, and her cheek as bright as its liveliest crimson.

"Miss Cynthia has let me in upon you," he said, "or I should not have
ventured to disturb you in this way.  A work of art, is it, Miss
Myrtle Hazard?"

"Only a pair of slippers, Mr. Gridley,--for my pastor."

"Oh!  oh!  That is well.  A good old man.  I have a great regard for
the Rev. Eliphalet Pemberton.  I wish all ministers were as good and
simple and pure-hearted as the Rev. Eliphalet Pemberton.  And I wish
all the young people thought as much about their elders as you do,
Miss Myrtle Hazard.  We that are old love little acts of kindness.
You gave me more pleasure than you knew of, my dear, when you worked
that handsome cushion for me.  The old minister will be greatly
pleased,--poor old man!"

"But, Mr. Gridley, I must not let you think these are for Father
Pemberton.  They are for--Mr. Stoker."

"The Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker!  He is not an old man, the Rev.
Joseph Bellamy Stoker.  He may perhaps be a widower before a great
while.--Does he know that you are working those slippers for him?"

"Dear me! no, Mr. Gridley.  I meant them for a surprise to him.  He
has been so kind to me, and understands me so much better than I
thought anybody did.  He is so different from what I thought; he
makes religion so perfectly simple, it seems as if everybody would
agree with him, if they could only hear him talk."

"Greatly interested in the souls of his people, is n't he?"

"Too much, almost, I am afraid.  He says he has been too hard in his
sermons sometimes, but it was for fear he should not impress his
hearers enough."

"Don't you think he worries himself about the souls of young women
rather more than for those of old ones, Myrtle?"

There was something in the tone of this question that helped its
slightly sarcastic expression.  Myrtle's jealousy for her minister's
sincerity was roused.

"How can you ask that, Mr. Gridley?  I am sure I wish you or anybody
could have heard him talk as I have.  There is no age in souls, he
says; and I am sure that it would do anybody good to hear him, old or
young."

"No age in souls,--no age in souls.  Souls of forty as young as souls
of fifteen; that 's it."  Master Gridley did not say this loud.  But
he did speak as follows: "I am glad to hear what you say of the Rev.
Joseph Bellamy Stoker's love of being useful to people of all ages.
You have had comfort in his companionship, and there are others who
might be very glad to profit by it.  I know a very excellent person
who has had trials, and is greatly interested in religious
conversation.  Do you think he would be willing to let this friend of
mine share in the privileges of spiritual intercourse which you
enjoy?"

There was but one answer possible.  Of course he would.

"I hope it is so, my dear young lady.  But listen to me one moment.
I love you, my dear child, do you know, as if I were your own--
grandfather."  (There was moral heroism in that word.) "I love you as
if you were of my own blood; and so long as you trust me, and suffer
me, I mean to keep watch against all dangers that threaten you in
mind, body, or estate.  You may wonder at me, you may sometimes doubt
me; but until you say you distrust me, when any trouble comes near
you, you will find me there.  Now, my dear child, you ought to know
that the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker has the reputation of being too
fond of prosecuting religious inquiries with young and handsome
women."

Myrtle's eyes fell,--a new suspicion seemed to have suggested itself.

"He wanted to get up a spiritual intimacy with our Susan Posey,--a
very pretty girl, as you know."

Myrtle tossed her head almost imperceptibly, and bit her lip.

"I suppose there are a dozen young people that have been talked about
with him.  He preaches cruel sermons in his pulpit, cruel as death,
and cold-blooded enough to freeze any mother's blood if nature did
not tell her he lied, and then smooths it all over with the first
good-looking young woman he can get to listen to him."

Myrtle had dropped the slipper she was working on.

"Tell me, my dear, would you be willing to give up meeting this man
alone, and gratify my friend, and avoid all occasion of reproach?"

"Of course I would," said Myrtle, her eyes flashing, for her doubts,
her shame, her pride, were all excited.  "Who is your friend, Mr.
Gridley?"

"An excellent woman,--Mrs. Hopkins.  You know her, Gifted Hopkins's
mother, with whom I am residing.  Shall the minister be given to
understand that you will see him hereafter in her company?"

Myrtle came pretty near a turn of her old nervous perturbations.  "As
you say," she answered.  "Is there nobody that I can trust, or is
everybody hunting me like a bird?"  She hid her face in her hands.

"You can trust me, my dear," said Byles Gridley.  "Take your needle,
my child, and work at your pattern,--it will come out a rose by and
by.  Life is like that, Myrtle, one stitch at a time, taken
patiently, and the pattern will come out all right like the
embroidery.  You can trust me.  Good-by, my dear."

"Let her finish the slippers," the old man said to himself as he
trudged home, "and make 'em big enough for Father Pemberton.  He
shall have his feet in 'em yet, or my name is n't Byles Gridley!"




CHAPTER XV.

ARRIVAL OF REINFORCEMENTS.

Myrtle Hazard waited until the steps of Master Byles Gridley had
ceased to be heard, as he walked in his emphatic way through the long
entry of the old mansion.  Then she went to her little chamber and
sat down in a sort of revery.  She could not doubt his sincerity, and
there was something in her own consciousness which responded to the
suspicions he had expressed with regard to the questionable impulses
of the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker.

It is not in the words that others say to us, but in those other
words which these make us say to ourselves, that we find our gravest
lessons and our sharpest rebukes.  The hint another gives us finds
whole trains of thought which have been getting themselves ready to
be shaped in inwardly articulated words, and only awaited the touch
of a burning syllable, as the mottoes of a pyrotechnist only wait for
a spark to become letters of fire.

The artist who takes your photograph must carry you with him into his
"developing" room, and he will give you a more exact illustration of
the truth just mentioned.  There is nothing to be seen on the glass
just taken from the camera.  But there is a potential, though
invisible, picture hid in the creamy film which covers it.  Watch him
as he pours a wash over it, and you will see that miracle wrought
which is at once a surprise and a charm,--the sudden appearance of
your own features where a moment before was a blank without a vestige
of intelligence or beauty.

In some such way the grave warnings of Master Byles Gridley had
called up a fully shaped, but hitherto unworded, train of thought in
the consciousness of Myrtle Hazard.  It was not merely their
significance, it was mainly because they were spoken at the fitting
time.  If they had been uttered a few weeks earlier, when Myrtle was
taking the first stitch on the embroidered slippers, they would have
been as useless as the artist's developing solution on a plate which
had never been exposed in the camera.  But she had been of late in
training for her lesson in ways that neither she nor anybody else
dreamed of.  The reader who has shrugged his (or her) shoulders over
the last illustration will perhaps hear this one which follows more
cheerfully.  The physician in the Arabian Nights made his patient
play at ball with a bat, the hollow handle of which contained drugs
of marvellous efficacy.  Whether it was the drugs that made the sick
man get well, or the exercise, is not of so much consequence as the
fact that he did at any rate get well.

These walks which Myrtle had taken with her reverend counsellor had
given her a new taste for the open air, which was what she needed
just now more than confessions of faith or spiritual paroxysms.  And
so it happened that, while he had been stimulating all those
imaginative and emotional elements of her nature which responded to
the keys he loved to play upon, the restoring influences of the sweet
autumnal air, the mellow sunshine, the soothing aspects of the woods
and fields and sky, had been quietly doing their work.  The color was
fast returning to her cheek, and the discords of her feelings and her
thoughts gradually resolving themselves into the harmonious and
cheerful rhythms of bodily and mental health.  It needed but the
timely word from the fitting lips to change the whole programme of
her daily mode of being.  The word had been spoken.  She saw its
truth; but how hard it is to tear away a cherished illusion, to cast
out an unworthy intimate!  How hard for any!--but for a girl so
young, and who had as yet found so little to love and trust, how
cruelly hard!

She sat, still and stony, like an Egyptian statue.  Her eyes were
fixed on a vacant chair opposite the one on which she was sitting.
It was a very singular and fantastic old chair, said to have been
brought over by the first emigrant of her race.  The legs and arms
were curiously turned in spirals, the suggestions of which were half
pleasing and half repulsive.  Instead of the claw-feet common in
furniture of a later date, each of its legs rested on a misshapen
reptile, which it seemed to flatten by its weight, as if it were
squeezing the breath out of the ugly creature.  Over this chair hung
the portrait of her beautiful ancestress, her neck and arms, the
specialty of her beauty, bare, except for a bracelet on the left
wrist, and her shapely figure set off by the ample folds of a rich
crimson brocade.  Over Myrtle's bed hung that other portrait, which
was to her almost as the pictures of the Mater Dolorosa to trustful
souls of the Roman faith.  She had longed for these pictures while
she was in her strange hysteric condition, and they had been hung up
in her chamber.

The night was far gone, as she knew by the declining of the
constellations which she bad seen shining brightly almost overhead in
the early evening, when she awoke, and found herself still sitting in
the very attitude in which she was sitting hours before.  Her lamp
had burned out, and the starlight but dimly illuminated her chamber.
She started to find herself sitting there, chilled and stiffened by
long remaining in one posture; and as her consciousness returned, a
great fear seized her, and she sprang for a match.  It broke with the
quick movement she made to kindle it, and she snatched another as if
a fiend were after her.  It flashed and went out.  Oh the terror, the
terror!  The darkness seemed alive with fearful presences.  The lurid
glare of her own eyeballs flashed backwards into her brain.  She
tried one more match; it kindled as it should, and she lighted
another lamp.  Her first impulse was to assure herself that nothing
was changed in the familiar objects around her.  She held the lamp up
to the picture of Judith Pride.  The beauty looked at her, it seemed
as if with a kind of lofty recognition in her eyes; but there she
was, as always.  She turned the light upon the pale face of the
martyr-portrait.  It looked troubled and faded, as it seemed to
Myrtle, but still it was the same face she remembered from her
childhood.  Then she threw the light on the old chair, and,
shuddering, caught up a shawl and flung it over the spiral-wound arms
and legs, and the flattened reptiles on which it stood.

In those dead hours of the night which had passed over her sitting
there, still and stony, as it should seem, she had had strange
visitors.  Two women had been with her, as real as any that breathed
the breath of life,--so it appeared to her,--yet both had long been
what is called, in our poor language, dead.  One came in all the
glory of her ripened beauty, bare-necked, bare-armed, full dressed by
nature in that splendid animal equipment which in its day had
captivated the eyes of all the lusty lovers of complete muliebrity.
The other,--how delicate, how translucent, how aerial she seemed!
yet real and true to the lineaments of her whom the young girl looked
upon as her hereditary protector.

The beautiful woman turned, and, with a face full of loathing and
scorn, pointed to one of the reptiles beneath the feet of the chair.
And while Myrtle's eyes followed hers, the flattened and half-crushed
creature seemed to swell and spread like his relative in the old
fable, like the black dog in Faust, until he became of tenfold size,
and at last of colossal proportions.  And, fearful to relate, the
batrachian features humanized themselves as the monster grew, and,
shaping themselves more and more into a remembered similitude, Myrtle
saw in them a hideous likeness of--No!  no! it was too horrible, was
that the face which had been so close to hers but yesterday? were
those the lips, the breath from which had stirred her growing curls
as he leaned over her while they read together some passionate stanza
from a hymn that was as much like a love-song as it dared to be in
godly company?  A shadow of disgust--the natural repugnance of
loveliness for deformity-ran all through her, and she shrieked, as
she thought, and threw herself at the feet of that other figure.  She
felt herself lifted from the floor, and then a cold thin hand seemed
to take hers.  The warm life went out of her, and she was to herself
as a dimly conscious shadow that glided with passive acquiescence
wherever it was led.  Presently she found herself in a half-lighted
apartment, where there were books on the shelves around, and a desk
with loose manuscripts lying on it, and a little mirror with a worn
bit of carpet before it.  And while she looked, a great serpent
writhed in through the half-open door, and made the circuit of the
room, laying one huge ring all round it, and then, going round again,
laid another ring over the first, and so on until he was wound all
round the room like the spiral of a mighty cable, leaving a hollow in
the centre; and then the serpent seemed to arch his neck in the air,
and bring his head close down to Myrtle's face; and the features were
not those of a serpent, but of a man, and it hissed out the words she
had read that very day in a little note which said, "Come to my study
to-morrow, and we will read hymns together."

Again she was back in her little chamber, she did not know how, and
the two women were looking into her eyes with strange meaning in
their own.  Something in them seemed to plead with her to yield to
their influence, and her choice wavered which of them to follow, for
each would have led her her own way,--whither she knew not.  It was
the strife of her "Vision," only in another form,--the contest of two
lives her blood inherited for the mastery of her soul.  The might of
beauty conquered.  Myrtle resigned herself to the guidance of the
lovely phantom, which seemed so much fuller of the unextinguished
fire of life, and so like herself as she would grow to be when noon
should have ripened her into maturity.

Doors opened softly before them; they climbed stairs, and threaded
corridors, and penetrated crypts, strange yet familiar to her eyes,
which seemed to her as if they could see, as it were, in darkness.
Then came a confused sense of eager search for something that she
knew was hidden, whether in the cleft of a rock, or under the boards
of a floor, or in some hiding-place among the skeleton rafters, or in
a forgotten drawer, or in a heap of rubbish, she could not tell; but
somewhere there was something which she was to find, and which, once
found, was to be her talisman.  She was in the midst of this eager
search when she awoke.

The impression was left so strongly on her mind that with all her
fears she could not resist the desire to make an effort to find what
meaning there was in this frightfully real dream.  Her courage came
back as her senses assured her that all around her was natural, as
when she left it.  She determined to follow the lead of the strange
hint her nightmare had given her.

In one of the upper chambers of the old mansion there stood a tall,
upright desk of the ancient pattern, with folding doors above and
large drawers below.  "That desk is yours, Myrtle," her uncle Malachi
had once said to her; "and there is a trick or two about it that it
will pay you to study."  Many a time Myrtle had puzzled herself about
the mystery of the old desk.  All the little drawers, of which there
were a considerable number, she had pulled out, and every crevice, as
she thought, she had carefully examined.  She determined to make one
more trial.  It was the dead of the night, and this was a fearful old
place to be wandering about; but she was possessed with an urgent
feeling which would not let her wait until daylight.

She stole like a ghost from her chamber.  She glided along the narrow
entries as she had seemed to move in her dream.  She opened the
folding doors of the great upright desk.  She had always before
examined it by daylight, and though she had so often pulled all the
little drawers out, she had never thoroughly explored the recesses
which received them.  But in her new-born passion of search, she held
her light so as to illuminate all these deeper spaces.  At once she
thought she saw the marks of pressure with a finger.  She pressed her
own finger on this place, and, as it yielded with a slight click, a
small mahogany pilaster sprang forward, revealing its well-kept
secret that it was the mask of a tall, deep, very narrow drawer.
There was something heavy in it, and, as Myrtle turned it over, a
golden bracelet fell into her hand.  She recognized it at once as
that which had been long ago the ornament of the fair woman whose
portrait hung in her chamber.  She clasped it upon her wrist, and
from that moment she felt as if she were the captive of the lovely
phantom who had been with her in her dream.

"The old man walked last night, God save us!" said Kitty Fagan to
Biddy Finnegan, the day after Myrtle's nightmare and her curious
discovery.




CHAPTER XVI.

VICTORY.

It seems probable enough that Myrtle's whole spiritual adventure was
an unconscious dramatization of a few simple facts which her
imagination tangled together into a kind of vital coherence.  The
philosopher who goes to the bottom of things will remark that all the
elements of her fantastic melodrama had been furnished her while
waking.  Master Byles Gridley's penetrating and stinging caution was
the text, and the grotesque carvings and the portraits furnished the
"properties" with which her own mind had wrought up this scenic show.

The philosopher who goes to the bottom of things might not find it so
easy to account for the change which came over Myrtle Hazard from the
hour when she clasped the bracelet of Judith Pride upon her wrist.
She felt a sudden loathing of the man whom she had idealized as a
saint.  A young girl's caprice?  Possibly.  A return of the natural
instincts of girlhood with returning health?  Perhaps so.  An
impression produced by her dream?  An effect of an influx from
another sphere of being?  The working of Master Byles Gridley's
emphatic warning?  The magic of her new talisman?

We may safely leave these questions for the present.  As we have to
tell, not what Myrtle Hazard ought to have done, and why she should
have done it, but what she did do, our task is a simpler one than it
would be to lay bare all the springs of her action.  Until this
period, she had hardly thought of herself as a born beauty.  The
flatteries she had received from time to time were like the chips and
splinters under the green wood, when the chill women pretended to
make a fire in the best parlor at The Poplars, which had a way of
burning themselves out, hardly warming, much less kindling, the fore-
stick and the back-log.

Myrtle had a tinge of what some call superstition, and she began to
look upon her strange acquisition as a kind of amulet.  Its
suggestions betrayed themselves in one of her first movements.
Nothing could be soberer than the cut of the dresses which the
propriety of the severe household had established as the rule of her
costume.  But the girl was no sooner out of bed than a passion came
over her to see herself in that less jealous arrangement of drapery
which the Beauty of the last century had insisted on as presenting
her most fittingly to the artist.  She rolled up the sleeves of her
dress, she turned down its prim collar and neck, and glanced from her
glass to the portrait, from the portrait back to the glass.  Myrtle
was not blind nor dull, though young, and in many things untaught.
She did not say in so many words, "I too am a beauty," but she could
mot help seeing that she had many of the attractions of feature and
form which had made the original of the picture before her famous.
The same stately carriage of the head, the same full-rounded neck,
the same more than hinted outlines of figure, the same finely shaped
arms and hands, and something very like the same features startled
her by their identity in the permanent image of the canvas and the
fleeting one of tile mirror.

The world was hers then,--for she had not read romances and love-
letters without finding that beauty governs it in all times and
places.  Who was this middle-aged minister that had been hanging
round her and talking to her about heaven, when there was not a
single joy of earth that she had as yet tasted?  A man that had been
saying all his fine things to Miss Susan Posey, too, had he, before
he had bestowed his attentions on her?  And to a dozen other girls,
too, nobody knows who!

The revulsion was a very sadden one.  Such changes of feeling are apt
to be sudden in young people whose nerves have been tampered with,
and Myrtle was not of a temperament or an age to act with much
deliberation where a pique came in to the aid of a resolve.  Master
Gridley guessed sagaciously what would be the effect of his
revelation, when he told her of the particular attentions the
minister had paid to pretty Susan Posey and various other young
women.

The Rev. Mr. Stoker had parted his hair wonderfully that morning, and
made himself as captivating as his professional costume allowed.  He
had drawn down the shades of his windows so as to let in that subdued
light which is merciful to crow's-feet and similar embellishments,
and wheeled up his sofa so that two could sit at the table and read
from the same book.

At eleven o'clock he was pacing the room with a certain feverish
impatience, casting a glance now and then at the mirror as he passed
it.  At last the bell rang, and he himself went to answer it, his
heart throbbing with expectation of meeting his lovely visitor.

Myrtle Hazard appeared by an envoy extraordinary, the bearer of
sealed despatches.  Mistress Kitty Fagan was the young lady's
substitute, and she delivered into the hand of the astonished
clergyman the following missive:

TO THE REV. MR. STOKER.

Reverend Sir,--I shall not come to your study this day.  I do not
feel that I have any more need of religious counsel at this time, and
I am told by a friend that there are others who will be glad to hear
you talk on this subject.  I hear that Mrs. Hopkins is interested in
religious subjects, and would have been glad to see you in my
company.  As I cannot go with her, perhaps Miss Susan Posey will take
my place.  I thank you for all the good things you have said to me,
and that you have given me so much of your company.  I hope we shall
sing hymns together in heaven some time, if we are good enough, but I
want to wait for that awhile, for I do not feel quite ready.  I am
not going to see you any more alone, reverend sir.  I think this is
best, and I have good advice.  I want to see more of young people of
my own age, and I have a friend, Mr. Gridley, who I think is older
than you are, that takes an interest in me; and as you have many
others that you must be interested in, he can take the place of a
father better than you can do.  I return to you the hymn-book, I read
one of those you marked, and do not care to read any more.

Respectfully yours,

MYRTLE HAZARD.


The Rev. Mr. Stoker uttered a cry of rage as he finished this
awkwardly written, but tolerably intelligible letter.  What could he
do about it?  It would hardly do to stab Myrtle Hazard, and shoot
Byles Gridley, and strangle Mrs. Hopkins, every one of which
homicides he felt at the moment that he could have committed.  And
here he was in a frantic paroxysm, and the next day was Sunday, and
his morning's discourse was unwritten.  His savage mediaeval theology
came to his relief, and he clutched out of a heap of yellow
manuscripts his well-worn "convulsion-fit" sermon.  He preached it
the next day as if it did his heart good, but Myrtle Hazard did not
hear it, for she had gone to St. Bartholomew's with Olive Eveleth.




CHAPTER XVII.

SAINT AND SINNER

It happened a little after this time that the minister's invalid wife
improved--somewhat unexpectedly in health, and, as Bathsheba was
beginning to suffer from imprisonment in her sick-chamber, the
physician advised very strongly that she should vary the monotony of
her life by going out of the house daily for fresh air and cheerful
companionship.  She was therefore frequently at the house of Olive
Eveleth; and as Myrtle wanted to see young people, and had her own
way now as never before, the three girls often met at the parsonage.
Thus they became more and more intimate, and grew more and more into
each other's affections.

These girls presented three types of spiritual character which are to
be found in all our towns and villages.  Olive had been carefully
trained, and at the proper age confirmed.  Bathsheba had been prayed
for, and in due time startled and converted.  Myrtle was a simple
daughter of Eve, with many impulses like those of the other two
girls, and some that required more watching.  She was not so safe,
perhaps, as either of the other girls, for this world or the next;
but she was on some accounts more interesting, as being a more
genuine representative of that inexperienced and too easily deluded,
yet always cherished, mother of our race, whom we must after all
accept as embodying the creative idea of woman, and who might have
been alive and happy now (though at a great age) but for a single
fatal error.

The Rev. Ambrose Eveleth, Rector of Saint Bartholomew's, Olive's
father, was one of a class numerous in the Anglican Church, a
cultivated man, with pure tastes, with simple habits, a good reader,
a neat writer, a safe thinker, with a snug and well-fenced mental
pasturage, which his sermons kept cropped moderately close without
any exhausting demand upon the soil.  Olive had grown insensibly into
her religious maturity, as into her bodily and intellectual
developments, which one might suppose was the natural order of things
in a well-regulated Christian--household, where the children are
brought up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

Bathsheba had been worried over and perplexed and depressed with
vague apprehensions about her condition, conveyed in mysterious
phrases and graveyard expressions of countenance, until about the age
of fourteen years, when she had one of those emotional paroxysms very
commonly considered in some Protestant sects as essential to the
formation of religious character.  It began with a shivering sense of
enormous guilt, inherited and practised from her earliest infancy.
Just as every breath she ever drew had been malignantly poisoning the
air with carbonic acid, so her every thought and feeling had been
tainting the universe with sin.  This spiritual chill or rigor had in
due order been followed by the fever-flush of hope, and that in its
turn had ushered in the last stage, the free opening of all the
spiritual pores in the peaceful relaxation of self-surrender.

Good Christians are made by many very different processes.  Bathsheba
had taken her religion after the fashion of her sect; but it was
genuine, in spite of the cavils of the formalists, who could not
understand that the spirit which kept her at her mother's bedside was
the same as that which poured the tears of Mary of Magdala on the
feet of her Lord, and led her forth at early dawn with the other Mary
to visit his sepulchre.

Myrtle was a child of nature, and of course, according to the out-
worn formulae which still shame the distorted religion of humanity,
hateful to the Father in Heaven who made her.  She had grown up in
antagonism with all that surrounded her.  She had been talked to
about her corrupt nature and her sinful heart, until the words had
become an offence and an insult.  Bathsheba knew her father's
fondness for young company too well to suppose that his intercourse
with Myrtle had gone beyond the sentimental and poetical stage, and
was not displeased when she found that there was some breach between
them.  Myrtle herself did not profess to have passed through the
technical stages of the customary spiritual paroxysm.  Still, the
gentle daughter of the terrible preacher loved her and judged her
kindly.  She was modest enough to think that perhaps the natural
state of some girls might be at least as good as her own after the
spiritual change of which she had been the subject.  A manifest
heresy, but not new, nor unamiable, nor inexplicable.

The excellent Bishop Joseph Hall, a painful preacher and solid divine
of Puritan tendencies, declares that he prefers good-nature before
grace in the election of a wife; because, saith he, "it will be a
hard Task, where the Nature is peevish and froward, for Grace to make
an entire Conquest whilst Life lasteth."  An opinion apparently
entertained by many modern ecclesiastics, and one which may be
considered very encouraging to those young ladies of the politer
circles who have a fancy for marrying bishops and other fashionable
clergymen.  Not of course that "grace" is so rare a gift among the
young ladies of the upper social sphere; but they are in the habit of
using the word with a somewhat different meaning from that which the
good Bishop attached to it.




CHAPTER XVIII.

VILLAGE POET.

It was impossible for Myrtle to be frequently at Olive's without
often meeting Olive's brother, and her reappearance with the bloom on
her cheek was a signal which her other admirers were not likely to
overlook as a hint to recommence their flattering demonstrations; and
so it was that she found herself all at once the centre of attraction
to three young men with whom we have made some acquaintance, namely,
Cyprian Eveleth, Gifted Hopkins, and Murray Bradshaw.

When the three girls were together at the house of Olive, it gave
Cyprian a chance to see something of Myrtle in the most natural way.
Indeed, they all became used to meeting him in a brotherly sort of
relation; only, as he was not the brother of two of them, it gave him
the inside track, as the sporting men say, with reference to any
rivals for the good-will of either of these.  Of course neither
Bathsheba nor Myrtle thought of him in any other light than as
Olive's brother, and would have been surprised with the manifestation
on his part of any other feeling, if it existed.  So he became very
nearly as intimate with them as Olive was, and hardly thought of his
intimacy as anything more than friendship, until one day Myrtle sang
some hymns so sweetly that Cyprian dreamed about her that night; and
what young person does not know that the woman or the man once
idealized and glorified in the exalted state of the imagination
belonging to sleep becomes dangerous to the sensibilities in the
waking hours that follow?  Yet something drew Cyprian to the gentler
and more subdued nature of Bathsheba, so that he often thought, like
a gayer personage than himself, whose divided affections are famous
in song, that he could have been blessed to share her faithful heart,
if Myrtle had not bewitched him with her unconscious and innocent
sorceries.  As for poor, modest Bathsheba, she thought nothing of
herself, but was almost as much fascinated by Myrtle as if she had
been one of the sex she was born to make in love with her.

The first rival Cyprian was to encounter in his admiration of Myrtle
Hazard was Mr. Gifted Hopkins.  This young gentleman had the enormous
advantage of that all-subduing accomplishment, the poetical
endowment.  No woman, it is pretty generally understood, can resist
the youth or man who addresses her in verse.  The thought that she is
the object of a poet's love is one which fills a woman's ambition
more completely than all that wealth or office or social eminence can
offer.  Do the young millionnaires and the members of the General
Court get letters from unknown ladies, every day, asking for their
autographs and photographs?  Well, then!

Mr. Gifted Hopkins, being a poet, felt that it was so, to the very
depth of his soul.  Could he not confer that immortality so dear to
the human heart?  Not quite yet, perhaps,--though the "Banner and
Oracle" gave him already "an elevated niche in the Temple of Fame,"
to quote its own words,--but in that glorious summer of his genius,
of which these spring blossoms were the promise.  It was a most
formidable battery, then, which Cyprian's first rival opened upon the
fortress of Myrtle's affections.

His second rival, Mr. William Murray Bradshaw, had made a half-
playful bet with his fair relative, Mrs. Clymer Ketchum, that he
would bag a girl within twelve months of date who should unite three
desirable qualities, specified in the bet, in a higher degree than
any one of the five who were on the matrimonial programme which she
had laid out for him,--and Myrtle was the girl with whom he meant to
win the bet.  When a young fellow like him, cool and clever, makes up
his mind to bring down his bird, it is no joke, but a very serious
and a tolerably certain piece of business.  Not being made a fool of
by any boyish nonsense,--passion and all that,--he has a great
advantage.  Many a woman rejects a man because he is in love with
her, and accepts another because he is not.  The first is thinking
too much of himself and his emotions,--the other makes a study of her
and her friends, and learns what ropes to pull.  But then it must be
remembered that Murray Bradshaw had a poet for his rival, to say
nothing of the brother of a bosom friend.

The qualities of a young poet are so exceptional, and such
interesting objects of study, that a narrative like this can well
afford to linger awhile in the delineation of this most envied of all
the forms of genius.  And by contrasting the powers and limitations
of two such young persons as Gifted Hopkins and Cyprian Eveleth, we
may better appreciate the nature of that divine inspiration which
gives to poetry the superiority it claims over every other form of
human expression.

Gifted Hopkins had shown an ear for rhythm, and for the simpler forms
of music, from his earliest childhood.  He began beating with his
heels the accents of the psalm tunes sung at meeting at a very tender
age,--a habit, indeed, of which he had afterwards to correct himself,
as, though it shows a sensibility to rhythmical impulses like that
which is beautifully illustrated when a circle join hands and
emphasize by vigorous downward movements the leading syllables in the
tune of Auld Lang Syne, yet it is apt to be too expressive when a
large number of boots join in the performance.  He showed a
remarkable talent for playing on one of the less complex musical
instruments, too limited in compass to satisfy exacting ears, but
affording excellent discipline to those who wish to write in the
simpler metrical forms,--the same which summons the hero from his
repose and stirs his blood in battle.

By the time he was twelve years old he was struck with the pleasing
resemblance of certain vocal sounds which, without being the same,
yet had a curious relation which made them agree marvellously well in
couples; as eyes with skies; as heart with art, also with part and
smart; and so of numerous others, twenty or thirty pairs, perhaps,
which number he considerably increased as he grew older, until he may
have had fifty or more such pairs at his command.

The union of so extensive a catalogue of words which matched each
other, and of an ear so nice that it could tell if there were nine or
eleven syllables in an heroic line, instead of the legitimate ten,
constituted a rare combination of talents in the opinion of those
upon whose judgment he relied.  He was naturally led to try his
powers in the expression of some just thought or natural sentiment in
the shape of verse, that wonderful medium of imparting thought and
feeling to his fellow-creatures which a bountiful Providence had made
his rare and inestimable endowment.

It was at about this period of his life, that is to say, when he was
of the age of thirteen, or we may perhaps say fourteen years, for we
do not wish to overstate his precocity, that he experienced a
sensation so entirely novel, that, to the best of his belief, it was
such as no other young person had ever known, at least in anything
like the same degree.  This extraordinary emotion was brought on by
the sight of Myrtle Hazard, with whom he had never before had any
near relations, as they had been at different schools, and Myrtle was
too reserved to be very generally known among the young people of his
age.

Then it was that he broke forth in his virgin effort, "Lines to
M----e," which were published in the village paper, and were claimed
by all possible girls but the right one; namely, by two Mary Annes,
one Minnie, one Mehitable, and one Marthie, as she saw fit to spell
the name borrowed from her who was troubled about many things.

The success of these lines, which were in that form of verse known to
the hymn-books as "common metre," was such as to convince the youth
that, whatever occupation he might be compelled to follow for a time
to obtain a livelihood or to assist his worthy parent, his true
destiny was the glorious career of a poet.  It was a most pleasing
circumstance, that his mother, while she fully recognized the
propriety of his being diligent in the prosaic line of business to
which circumstances had called him, was yet as much convinced as he
himself that he was destined to achieve literary fame.  She had read
Watts and Select Hymns all through, she said, and she did n't see but
what Gifted could make the verses come out jest as slick, and the
sound of the rhymes jest as pooty, as Izik Watts or the Selectmen,
whoever they was,--she was sure they couldn't be the selectmen of
this town, wherever they belonged.  It is pleasant to say that the
young man, though favored by nature with this rarest of talents, did
not forget the humbler duties that Heaven, which dresses few singing-
birds in the golden plumes of fortune, had laid upon him.  After
having received a moderate amount of instruction at one of the less
ambitious educational institutions of the town, supplemented, it is
true, by the judicious and gratuitous hints of Master Gridley, the
young poet, in obedience to a feeling which did him the highest
credit, relinquished, at least for the time, the Groves of Academus,
and offered his youth at the shrine of Plutus, that is, left off
studying and took to business.  He became what they call a "clerk" in
what they call a "store" up in the huckleberry districts, and kept
such accounts as were required by the business of the establishment.
His principal occupation was, however, to attend to the details of
commerce as it was transacted over the counter.  This industry
enabled him, to his great praise be it spoken, to assist his
excellent parent, to clothe himself in a becoming manner, so that he
made a really handsome figure on Sundays and was always of
presentable aspect, likewise to purchase a book now and then, and to
subscribe for that leading periodical which furnishes the best models
to the youth of the country in the various modes of composition.

Though Master Gridley was very kind to the young man, he was rather
disposed to check the exuberance of his poetical aspirations.  The
truth was, that the old classical scholar did not care a great deal
for modern English poetry.  Give him an Ode of Horace, or a scrap
from the Greek Anthology, and he would recite it with great inflation
of spirits; but he did not think very much of "your Keatses, and your
Tennysons, and the whole Hasheesh crazy lot," as he called the
dreamily sensuous idealists who belong to the same century that
brought in ether and chloroform.  He rather shook his head at Gifted
Hopkins for indulging so largely in metrical composition.

"Better stick to your ciphering, my young friend," he said to him,
one day.  "Figures of speech are all very well, in their way; but if
you undertake to deal much in them, you'll figure down your prospects
into a mighty small sum.  There's some danger that it will take all
the sense out of you, if you keep writing verses at this rate.  You
young scribblers think any kind of nonsense will do for the public,
if it only has a string of rhymes tacked to it.  Cut off the bobs of
your kite, Gifted Hopkins, and see if it does n't pitch, and stagger,
and come down head-foremost.  Don't write any stuff with rhyming
tails to it that won't make a decent show for itself after you've
chopped all the rhyming tails off.  That's my advice, Gifted Hopkins.
Is there any book you would like to have out of my library?  Have you
ever read Spenser's Faery Queen?"

He had tried, the young man answered, on the recommendation of
Cyprian Eveleth, but had found it rather hard reading.

Master Gridley lifted his eyebrows very slightly, remembering that
some had called Spenser the poet's poet.  "What a pity," he said to
himself, "that this Gifted Hopkins has n't got the brains of that
William Murray Bradshaw!  What's the reason, I wonder, that all the
little earthen pots blow their covers off and froth over in rhymes at
such a great rate, while the big iron pots keep their lids on, and do
all their simmering inside?"

That is the way these old pedants will talk, after all their youth
and all their poetry, if they ever had any, are gone.  The smiles of
woman, in the mean time, encouraged the young poet to smite the lyre.
Fame beckoned him upward from her templed steep.  The rhymes which
rose before him unbidden were as the rounds of Jacob's ladder, on
which he would climb to a heaven of-glory.

Master Gridley threw cold water on the young man's too sanguine
anticipations of success.  "All up with the boy, if he's going to
take to rhyming when he ought to be doing up papers of brown sugar
and weighing out pounds of tea.  Poor-house,--that 's what it'll end
in.  Poets, to be sure!  Sausage-makers!  Empty skins of old
phrases,--stuff 'em with odds and ends of old thoughts that never
were good for anything,--cut 'em up in lengths and sell'em to fools!

"And if they ain't big fools enough to buy 'em, give'em away; and if
you can't do that, pay folks to take'em.  Bah! what a fine style of
genius common-sense is!  There's a passage in the book that would fit
half these addle-headed rhymesters.  What is that saying of mine
about I squinting brains?"

He took down "Thoughts on the Universe," and read:--


                    "Of Squinting Brains.

"Where there is one man who squints with his eyes, there are a dozen
who squint with their brains.  It is an infirmity in one of the eyes,
making the two unequal in power, that makes men squint.  Just so it
is an inequality in the two halves of the brain that makes some men
idiots and others rascals.  I knows a fellow whose right half is a
genius, but his other hemisphere belongs to a fool; and I had a
friend perfectly honest on one side, but who was sent to jail because
the other had an inveterate tendency in the direction of picking
pockets and appropriating aes alienum."

All this, talking and reading to himself in his usual fashion.

The poetical faculty which was so freely developed in Gifted Hopkins
had never manifested itself in Cyprian Eveleth, whose look and voice
might, to a stranger, have seemed more likely to imply an imaginative
nature.  Cyprian was dark, slender, sensitive, contemplative, a lover
of lonely walks,--one who listened for the whispers of Nature and
watched her shadows, and was alive to the symbolisms she writes over
everything.  But Cyprian had never shown the talent or the
inclination for writing in verse.

He was on the pleasantest terms with the young poet, and being
somewhat older, and having had the advantage of academic and college
culture, often gave him useful hints as to the cultivation of his
powers, such as genius frequently requires at the hands of humbler
intelligences.  Cyprian was incapable of jealousy; and although the
name of Gifted Hopkins was getting to be known beyond the immediate
neighborhood, and his autograph had been requested by more than one
young lady living in another county, he never thought of envying the
young poet's spreading popularity.

That the poet himself was flattered by these marks of public favor
may be inferred from the growing confidence with which he expressed
himself in his conversations with Cyprian, more especially in one
which was held at the "store" where he officiated as "clerk."

"I become more and more assured, Cyprian," he said, leaning over the
counter, "that I was born to be a poet.  I feel it in my marrow.  I
must succeed.  I must win the laurel of fame.  I must taste the
sweets of"---

" Molasses," said a bareheaded girl of ten who entered at that
moment, bearing in her hand a cracked pitcher, "ma wants three gills
of molasses."

Gifted Hopkins dropped his subject and took up a tin measure.  He
served the little maid with a benignity quite charming to witness,
made an entry on a slate of .08, and resumed the conversation.

"Yes, I am sure of it, Cyprian.  The very last piece I wrote was
copied in two papers.  It was 'Contemplations in Autumn,' and--don't
think I am too vain--one young lady has told me that it reminded her
of Pollok.  You never wrote in verse, did you, Cyprian?"

"I never wrote at all, Gifted, except school and college exercises,
and a letter now and then.  Do you find it an easy and pleasant
exercise to make rhymes?"

Pleasant!  Poetry is to me a delight and a passion.  I never know
what I am going to write when I sit down.  And presently the rhymes
begin pounding in my brain,--it seems as if there were a hundred
couples of them, paired like so many dancers,--and then these rhymes
seem to take possession of me, like a surprise party, and bring in
all sorts of beautiful thoughts, and I write and write, and the
verses run measuring themselves out like"---

"Ribbins,--any narrer blue ribbins, Mr. Hopkins?  Five eighths of a
yard, if you please, Mr. Hopkins.  How's your folks?"  Then, in a
lower tone, "Those last verses of yours in the Bannernoracle were
sweet pooty."

Gifted Hopkins meted out the five eighths of blue ribbon by the aid
of certain brass nails on the counter.  He gave good measure, not
prodigal, for he was loyal to his employer, but putting a very
moderate strain on the ribbon, and letting the thumb-nail slide with
a contempt of infinitesimals which betokened a large soul in its
genial mood.

The young lady departed, after casting upon him one of those
bewitching glances which the young poet--let us rather say the poet,
without making odious distinctions--is in the confirmed habit of
receiving from dear woman.

Mr. Gifted Hopkins resumed: "I do not know where this talent, as my
friends call it, of mine, comes from.  My father used to carry a
chain for a surveyor sometimes, and there is a ten-foot pole in the
house he used to measure land with.  I don't see why that should make
me a poet.  My mother was always fond of Dr. Watts's hymns; but so
are other young men's mothers, and yet they don't show poetical
genius.  But wherever I got it, it comes as easy to me to write in
verse as to write in prose, almost.  Don't you ever feel a longing to
send your thoughts forth in verse, Cyprian?"

"I wish I had a greater facility of expression very often," Cyprian
answered; "but when I have my best thoughts I do not find that I have
words that seem fitting to clothe them.  I have imagined a great many
poems, Gifted, but I never wrote a rhyming verse, or verse of any
kind.  Did you ever hear Olive play 'Songs without Words'?  If you
have ever heard her, you will know what I mean by unrhymed and
unversed poetry."

"I am sure I don't know what you mean, Cyprian, by poetry without
rhyme or verse, any more than I should if you talked about pictures
that were painted on nothing, or statues that were made out of
nothing.  How can you tell that anything is poetry, I should like to
know, if there is neither a regular line with just so many syllables,
nor a rhyme?  Of course you can't.  I never have any thoughts too
beautiful to put in verse: nothing can be too beautiful for it."

Cyprian left the conversation at this point.  It was getting more
suggestive than interpenetrating, and he thought he might talk the
matter over better with Olive.  Just then a little boy came in, and
bargained with Gifted for a Jews-harp, which, having obtained, he
placed against his teeth, and began playing upon it with a pleasure
almost equal to that of the young poet reciting his own verses.

"A little too much like my friend Gifted Hopkins's poetry," Cyprian
said, as he left the "store."  "All in one note, pretty much.  Not a
great many tunes, 'Hi Betty Martin,' 'Yankee Doodle,' and one or two
more like them.  But many people seem to like them, and I don't doubt
it is as exciting to Gifted to write them as it is to a great genius
to express itself in a poem."

Cyprian was, perhaps, too exacting.  He loved too well the sweet
intricacies of Spenser, the majestic and subtly interwoven harmonies
of Milton.  These made him impatient of the simpler strains of Gifted
Hopkins.

Though he himself never wrote verses, he had some qualities which his
friend the poet may have undervalued in comparison with the talent of
modelling the symmetries of verse and adjusting the correspondences
of rhyme.  He had kept in a singular degree all the sensibilities of
childhood, its simplicity, its reverence.  It seemed as if nothing of
all that he met in his daily life was common or unclean to him, for
there was no mordant in his nature for what was coarse or vile, and
all else he could not help idealizing into its own conception of
itself, so to speak.  He loved the leaf after its kind as well as the
flower, and the root as well as the leaf, and did not exhaust his
capacity of affection or admiration on the blossom or bud upon which
his friend the poet lavished the wealth of his verse.  Thus Nature
took him into her confidence.  She loves the men of science well, and
tells them all her family secrets,--who is the father of this or that
member of the group, who is brother, sister, cousin, and so on,
through all the circle of relationship.  But there are others to whom
she tells her dreams; not what species or genus her lily belongs to,
but what vague thought it has when it dresses in white, or what
memory of its birthplace that is which we call its fragrance.
Cyprian was one of these.  Yet he was not a complete nature.  He
required another and a wholly different one to be the complement of
his own.  Olive came as near it as a sister could, but--we must
borrow an old image--moonlight is no more than a cold and vacant
glimmer on the sun-dial, which only answers to the great flaming orb
of day.  If Cyprian could but find some true, sweet-tempered, well-
balanced woman, richer in feeling than in those special imaginative
gifts which made the outward world at times unreal to him in the
intense reality of his own inner life, how he could enrich and adorn
her existence,--how she could direct and chasten and elevate the
character of all his thoughts and actions!

"Bathsheba," said Olive, "it seems to me that Cyprian is getting more
and more fascinated with Myrtle Hazard.  He has never got over the
fancy he took to her when he first saw her in her red jacket, and
called her the fire-hang-bird.  Wouldn't they suit each other by and
by, after Myrtle has come to herself and grown into a beautiful and
noble woman, as I feel sure she will in due time?"

"Myrtle is very lovely," Bathsheba answered, "but is n't she a little
too--flighty--for one like your brother?  Cyprian isn't more like
other young men than Myrtle is like other young girls.  I have
thought sometimes--I wondered whether out-of-the-way people and
common ones do not get along best together.  Does n't Cyprian want
some more every-day kind of girl to keep him straight?  Myrtle is
beautiful, beautiful,--fascinates everybody.  Has Mr. Bradshaw been
following after her lately?  He is taken with her too.  Didn't you
ever think she would have to give in to Murray Bradshaw at last?  He
looks to me like a man that would hold on desperately as a lover."

If Myrtle Hazard, instead of being a half-finished school-girl,
hardly sixteen years old, had been a young woman of eighteen or
nineteen, it would have been plain sailing enough for Murray
Bradshaw.  But he knew what a distance their ages seemed just now to
put between them,--a distance which would grow practically less and
less with every year, and he did not wish to risk anything so long as
there was no danger of interference.  He rather encouraged Gifted
Hopkins to write poetry to Myrtle.  "Go in, Gifted," he said,
"there's no telling what may come of it," and Gifted did go in at a
great rate.

Murray Bradshaw did not write poetry himself, but he read poetry with
a good deal of effect, and he would sometimes take a hint from one of
Gifted Hopkins's last productions to recite a passionate lyric of
Byron or Moore, into which he would artfully throw so much meaning
that Myrtle was almost as much puzzled, in her simplicity, to know
what it meant, as she had been by the religious fervors of the Rev.
Mr. Stoker.

He spoke well of Cyprian Eveleth.  A good young man,--limited, but
exemplary.  Would succeed well as rector of a small parish.  That
required little talent, but a good deal of the humbler sort of
virtue.  As for himself, he confessed to ambition,--yes, a great deal
of ambition.  A failing, he supposed, but not the worst of failings.
He felt the instinct to handle the larger interests of society.  The
village would perhaps lose sight of him for a time; but he meant to
emerge sooner or later in the higher spheres of government or
diplomacy.  Myrtle must keep his secret.  Nobody else knew it.  He
could not help making a confidant of her,--a thing he had never done
before with any other person as to his plans in life.  Perhaps she
might watch his career with more interest from her acquaintance with
him.  He loved to think that there was one woman at least who would
be pleased to hear of his success if he succeeded, as with life and
health he would,--who would share his disappointment if fate should
not favor him.--So he wound and wreathed himself into her thoughts.

It was not very long before Myrtle began to accept the idea that she
was the one person in the world whose peculiar duty it was to
sympathize with the aspiring young man whose humble beginnings she
had the honor of witnessing.  And it is not very far from being the
solitary confidant, and the single source of inspiration, to the
growth of a livelier interest, where a young man and a young woman
are in question.

Myrtle was at this time her own mistress as never before.  The three
young men had access to her as she walked to and from meeting and in
her frequent rambles, besides the opportunities Cyprian had of
meeting her in his sister's company, and the convenient visits which,
in connection with the great lawsuit, Murray Bradshaw could make,
without question, at The Poplars.

It was not long before Cyprian perceived that he could never pass a
certain boundary of intimacy with Myrtle.  Very pleasant and sisterly
always she was with him; but she never looked as if she might mean
more than she said, and cherished a little spark of sensibility which
might be fanned into the flame of love.  Cyprian felt this so
certainly that he was on the point of telling his grief to Bathsheba,
who looked to him as if she would sympathize as heartily with him as
his own sister, and whose sympathy would have a certain flavor in
it,--something which one cannot find in the heart of the dearest
sister that ever lived.  But Bathsheba was herself sensitive, and
changed color when Cyprian ventured a hint or two in the direction of
his thought, so that he never got so fax as to unburden his heart to
her about Myrtle, whom she admired so sincerely that she could not
have helped feeling a great interest in his passion towards her.

As for Gifted Hopkins, the roses that were beginning to bloom fresher
and fresher every day in Myrtle's cheeks unfolded themselves more and
more freely, to speak metaphorically, in his song.  Every week she
would receive a delicately tinted note with lines to "Myrtle
awaking," or to "Myrtle retiring," (one string of verses a little too
Musidora-ish, and which soon found itself in the condition of a
cinder, perhaps reduced to that state by spontaneous combustion,) or
to "The Flower of the Tropics," or to the "Nymph of the River-side,"
or other poetical alias, such as bards affect in their sieges of the
female heart.

Gifted Hopkins was of a sanguine temperament.  As he read and re-read
his verses it certainly seemed to him that they must reach the heart
of the angelic being to whom they were addressed.  That she was slow
in confessing the impression they made upon her, was a favorable
sign; so many girls called his poems "sweet pooty," that those
charming words, though soothing, no longer stirred him deeply.
Myrtle's silence showed that the impression his verses had made was
deep.  Time would develop her sentiments; they were both young; his
position was humble as yet; but when he had become famous through the
land-oh blissful thought!--the bard of Oxbow Village would bear a
name that any woman would be proud to assume, and the M. H.  which
her delicate hands had wrought on the kerchiefs she wore would yet
perhaps be read, not Myrtle Hazard, but Myrtle Hopkins.




CHAPTER XIX.

SUSAN'S YOUNG MAN.

There seems no reasonable doubt that Myrtle Hazard  might have made a
safe thing of it with Gifted Hopkins, (if so inclined,) provided that
she had only been secured against interference.  But the constant
habit of reading his verses to Susan Posey was not without its risk
to so excitable a nature as that of the young poet.  Poets were
always capable of divided affections, and Cowley's "Chronicle" is a
confession that would fit the whole tribe of them.  It is true that
Gifted had no right to regard Susan's heart as open to the wiles of
any new-comer.  He knew that she considered herself, and was
considered by another, as pledged and plighted.  Yet she was such a
devoted listener, her sympathies were so easily roused, her blue eyes
glistened so tenderly at the least poetical hint, such as "Never, oh
never," "My aching heart," "Go, let me weep,"--any of those touching
phrases out of the long catalogue which readily suggests itself, that
her influence was getting to be such that Myrtle (if really anxious
to secure him) might look upon it with apprehension, and the owner of
Susan's heart (if of a jealous disposition) might have thought it
worth while to make a visit to Oxbow Village to see after his
property.

It may seem not impossible that some friend had suggested as much as
this to the young lady's lover.

The caution would have been unnecessary, or at least premature.
Susan was loyal as ever to her absent friend.  Gifted Hopkins had
never yet presumed upon the familiar relations existing between them
to attempt to shake her allegiance.  It is quite as likely, after
all, that the young gentleman about to make his appearance in Oxbow
Village visited the place of his own accord, without a hint from
anybody.  But the fact concerns us more than the reason of it, just
now.

"Who do you think is coming, Mr. Gridley?  Who do you think is
coming?" said Susan Posey, her face covered with a carnation such as
the first season may see in a city belle, but not the second.

"Well, Susan Posey, I suppose I must guess, though I am rather slow
at that business.  Perhaps the Governor.  No, I don't think it can be
the Governor, for you would n't look so happy if it was only his
Excellency.  It must be the President, Susan Posey,--President James
Buchanan.  Have n't I guessed right, now, tell me, my dear?"

"O Mr. Gridley, you are too bad,--what do I care for governors and
presidents?  I know somebody that's worth fifty million thousand
presidents,--and he 's coming,--my Clement is coming," said Susan,
who had by this time learned to consider the awful Byles Gridley as
her next friend and faithful counsellor.

Susan could not stay long in the house after she got her note
informing her that her friend was soon to be with her.  Everybody
told everything to Olive Eveleth, and Susan must run over to the
parsonage to tell her that there was a young gentleman coming to
Oxbow Village; upon which Olive asked who it was, exactly as if she
did not know; whereupon Susan dropped her eyes and said, "Clement,--I
mean Mr. Lindsay."

That was a fair piece of news now, and Olive had her bonnet on five
minutes after Susan was gone, and was on her way to Bathsheba's,--it
was too bad that the poor girl who lived so out of the world
shouldn't know anything of what was going on in it.  Bathsheba had
been in all the morning, and the Doctor had said she must take the
air every day; so Bathsheba had on her bonnet a little after Olive
had gone, and walked straight up to The Poplars to tell Myrtle Hazard
that a certain young gentleman, Clement Lindsay, was coming to Oxbow
Village.

It was perhaps fortunate that there was no special significance to
Myrtle in the name of Clement Lindsay.  Since the adventure which had
brought these two young persons together, and, after coming so near a
disaster, had ended in a mere humiliation and disappointment, and but
for Master Gridley's discreet kindness might have led to foolish
scandal, Myrtle had never referred to it in any way.  Nobody really
knew what her plans had been except Olive and Cyprian, who had
observed a very kind silence about the whole matter.  The common
version of the story was harmless, and near enough to the truth,
--down the river,--boat upset,--pulled out,--taken care of by some
women in a house farther down,--sick, brain fever,--pretty near it,
anyhow,--old Dr. Hurlbut called in,--had her hair cut,--hystericky,
etc., etc.

Myrtle was contented with this statement, and asked no questions, and
it was a perfectly understood thing that nobody alluded to the
subject in her presence.  It followed from all this that the name of
Clement Lindsay had no peculiar meaning for her.  Nor was she like to
recognize him as the youth in whose company she had gone through her
mortal peril, for all her recollections were confused and dreamlike
from the moment when she awoke and found herself in the foaming
rapids just above the fall, until that when her senses returned, and
she saw Master Byles Gridley standing over her with that look of
tenderness in his square features which had lingered in her
recollection, and made her feel towards him as if she were his
daughter.

Now this had its advantage; for as Clement was Susan's young man, and
had been so for two or three years, it would have been a great pity
to have any such curious relations established between him and Myrtle
Hazard as a consciousness on both sides of what had happened would
naturally suggest.

"Who is this Clement Lindsay, Bathsheba?" Myrtle asked.

Why, Myrtle, don't you remember about Susan Posey's is-to-be,--the
young man that has been well, I don't know, but I suppose engaged to
her ever since they were children almost?"

"Yes, yes, I remember now.  Oh dear!  I have forgotten so many
things, I should think I had been dead and was coming back to life
again.  Do you know anything about him, Bathsheba?  Did n't somebody
say he was very handsome?  I wonder if he is really in love with
Susan Posey.  Such a simple thing?  I want to see him.  I have seen
so few young men."

As Myrtle said these words, she lifted the sleeve a little on her
left arm, by a half-instinctive and half-voluntary movement.  The
glimmering gold of Judith Pride's bracelet flashed out the yellow
gleam which has been the reddening of so many hands and the
blackening of so, many souls since that innocent sin-breeder was
first picked up in the land of Havilah.  There came a sudden light
into her eye, such as Bathsheba had never seen there before.  It
looked to her as if Myrtle were saying unconsciously to herself that
she had the power of beauty, and would like to try its influence on
the handsome young man whom she was soon to meet, even at the risk of
unseating poor little Susan in his affections.  This pained the
gentle and humble-minded girl, who, without having tasted the world's
pleasures, had meekly consecrated herself to the lowly duties which
lay nearest to her.  For Bathsheba's phrasing of life was in the
monosyllables of a rigid faith.  Her conceptions of the human soul
were all simplicity and purity, but elementary.  She could not
conceive the vast license the creative energy allows itself in
mingling the instincts which, after long conflict, may come into
harmonious adjustment.  The flash which Myrtle's eye had caught from
the gleam of the golden bracelet filled Bathsheba with a sudden fear
that she was like to be led away by the vanities of that world lying
in wickedness of which the minister's daughter had heard so much and
seen so little.

Not that Bathsheba made any fine moral speeches, to herself.  She
only felt a slight shock, such as a word or a look from one we love
too often gives us,--such as a child's trivial gesture or movement
makes a parent feel,--that impalpable something which in the
slightest possible inflection of a syllable or gradation of a tone
will sometimes leave a sting behind it, even in a trusting heart.
This was all.  But it was true that what she saw meant a great deal.
It meant the dawning in Myrtle Hazard of one of her as yet unlived
secondary lives.  Bathsheba's virgin perceptions had caught a faint
early ray of its glimmering twilight.

She answered, after a very slight pause, which this explanation has
made seem so long, that she had never seen the young gentleman, and
that she did not know about Susan's sentiments.  Only, as they had
kept so long to each other, she supposed there must be love between
them.

Myrtle fell into a revery, with certain tableaux glowing along its
perspectives which poor little Susan Posey would have shivered to
look upon, if they could have been transferred from the purple clouds
of Myrtle's imagination to the pale silvery mists of Susan's pretty
fancies.  She sat in her day-dream long after Bathsheba had left her,
her eyes fixed, not on the faded portrait of her beatified
ancestress, but on that other canvas where the dead Beauty seemed to
live in all the splendors of her full-blown womanhood.

The young man whose name had set her thoughts roving was handsome, as
the glance at him already given might have foreshadowed.  But his
features had a graver impress than his age seemed to account for, and
the sober tone of his letter to Susan implied that something had
given him a maturity beyond his years.  The story was not an uncommon
one.  At sixteen he had dreamed-and told his dream.  At eighteen he
had awoke, and found, as he believed, that a young heart had grown to
his so that its life was dependent on his own.  Whether it would have
perished if its filaments had been gently disentangled from the
object to which they had attached themselves, experienced judges of
such matters may perhaps question.  To justify Clement in his
estimate of the danger of such an experiment, we must remember that
to young people in their teens a first passion is a portentous and
unprecedented phenomenon.  The young man may have been mistaken in
thinking that Susan would die if he left her, and may have done more
than his duty in sacrificing himself; but if so, it was the mistake
of a generous youth, who estimated the depth of another's feelings by
his own.  He measured the depth of his own rather by what he felt
they might be, than by that of any abysses they had yet sounded.

Clement was called a "genius" by those who knew him, and was
consequently in danger of being spoiled early.  The risk is great
enough anywhere, but greatest in a new country, where there is an
almost universal want of fixed standards of excellence.

He was by nature an artist; a shaper with the pencil or the chisel, a
planner, a contriver capable of turning his hand to almost any work
of eye and hand.  It would not have been strange if he thought he
could do everything, having gifts which were capable of various
application,--and being an American citizen.  But though he was a
good draughtsman, and had made some reliefs and modelled some
figures, he called himself only an architect.  He had given him.
self up to his art, not merely from a love of it and talent for it,
but with a kind of heroic devotion, because he thought his country
wanted a race of builders to clothe the new forms of religious,
social, and national life afresh from the forest, the quarry, and the
mine.  Some thought he would succeed, others that he would be a
brilliant failure.

"Grand notions,--grand notions," the master with whom he studied
said.  "Large ground plan of life,--splendid elevation.  A little
wild in some of his fancies, perhaps, but he's only a boy, and he's
the kind of boy that sometimes grows to be a pretty big man.  Wait
and see,--wait and see.  He works days, and we can let him dream
nights.  There's a good deal of him, anyhow."  His fellow-students
were puzzled.  Those who thought of their calling as a trade, and
looked forward to the time when they should be embodying the ideals
of municipal authorities in brick and stone, or making contracts with
wealthy citizens, doubted whether Clement would have a sharp eye
enough for business.  "Too many whims, you know.  All sorts of queer
ideas in his head,--as if a boy like him were going to make things
all over again!".

No doubt there was something of youthful extravagance in his plans
and expectations.  But it was the untamed enthusiasm which is the
source of all great thoughts and deeds,--a beautiful delirium which
age commonly tames down, and for which the cold shower-bath the world
furnishes gratis proves a pretty certain cure.

Creation is always preceded by chaos.  The youthful architect's mind
was confused by the multitude of suggestions which were crowding in
upon it, and which he had not yet had time or developed mature
strength sufficient to reduce to order.  The young American of any
freshness of intellect is stimulated to dangerous excess by the
conditions of life into which he is born.  There is a double
proportion of oxygen in the New World air.  The chemists have not
found it out yet, but human brains and breathing-organs have long
since made the discovery.

Clement knew that his hasty entanglement had limited his
possibilities of happiness in one direction, and he felt that there
was a certain grandeur in the recompense of working out his defeated
instincts through the ambitious medium of his noble art.  Had not
Pharaohs chosen it to proclaim their longings for immortality,
Caesars their passion for pomp and luxury, and priests to symbolize
their conceptions of the heavenly mansions?  His dreams were on a
grand scale; such, after all, are the best possessions of youth.  Had
he but been free, or mated with a nature akin to his own, he would
have felt himself as truly the heir of creation as any young man that
lived.  But his lot was cast, and his youth had all the serious
aspect to himself of thoughtful manhood.  In the region of his art
alone he hoped always to find freedom and a companionship which his
home life could never give him.

Clement meant to have visited his beloved before he left Alderbank,
but was called unexpectedly back to the city.  Happily Susan was not
exacting; she looked up to him with too great a feeling of distance
between them to dare to question his actions.  Perhaps she found a
partial consolation in the company of Mr. Gifted Hopkins, who tried
his new poems on her, which was the next best thing to addressing
them to her.  "Would that you were with us at this delightful
season," she wrote in the autumn; "but no, your Susan must not
repine.  Yet, in the beautiful words of our native poet,

"Oh would, oh would that thou wast here,
For absence makes thee doubly dear;
Ah! what is life while thou 'rt away?
'T is night without the orb of day!'"

The poet referred to, it need hardly be said, was our young and
promising friend G. H., as he sometimes modestly signed himself.  The
letter, it is unnecessary to state, was voluminous,--for a woman can
tell her love, or other matter of interest, over and over again in as
many forms as another poet, not G. H., found for his grief in ringing
the musical changes of "In Memoriam."

The answers to Susan's letters were kind, but not very long.  They
convinced her that it was a simple impossibility that Clement could
come to Oxbow Village, on account of the great pressure of the work
he had to keep him in the city, and the plans he must finish at any
rate.  But at last the work was partially got rid of, and Clement was
coming; yes, it was so nice, and, oh dear! should n't she be real
happy to see him?

To Susan he appeared as a kind of divinity, almost too grand for
human nature's daily food.  Yet, if the simple-hearted girl could
have told herself the whole truth in plain words, she would have
confessed to certain doubts which from time to time, and oftener of
late, cast a shadow on her seemingly bright future.  With all the
pleasure that the thought of meeting Clement gave her, she felt a
little tremor, a certain degree of awe, in contemplating his visit.
If she could have clothed her self-humiliation in the gold and purple
of the "Portuguese Sonnets," it would have been another matter; but
the trouble with the most common sources of disquiet is that they
have no wardrobe of flaming phraseology to air themselves in; the
inward burning goes on without the relief and gratifying display of
the crater.

"A friend of mine is coming to the village," she said to Mr. Gifted
Hopkins.  "I want you to see him.  He is a genius,--as some other
young men are."  (This was obviously personal, and the youthful poet
blushed with ingenuous delight.)  "I have known him for ever so many
years.  He and I are very good friends."  The poet knew that this
meant an exclusive relation between them; and though the fact was no
surprise to him, his countenance fell a little.  The truth was, that
his admiration was divided between Myrtle, who seemed to him divine
and adorable, but distant, and Susan, who listened to his frequent
poems, whom he was in the habit of seeing in artless domestic
costumes, and whose attractions had been gaining upon him of late in
the enforced absence of his divinity.

He retired pensive from this interview, and, flinging himself at his
desk, attempted wreaking his thoughts upon expression, to borrow the
language of one of his brother bards, in a passionate lyric which he
began thus

          "ANOTHER'S!

"Another's!  Oh the pang, the smart!
     Fate owes to Love a deathless grudge,--
The barbed fang has rent a heart
     Which--which

"judge--judge,--no, not judge.  Budge, drudge, fudge--What a
disgusting language English is!  Nothing fit to couple with such a
word as grudge!  And the gush of an impassioned moment arrested in
full flow, stopped short, corked up, for want of a paltry rhyme!
Judge,--budge,--drudge,--nudge, oh!--smudge,--misery!--fudge.  In
vain,--futile,--no use,--all up for to-night!"

While the poet, headed off in this way by the poverty of his native
tongue, sought inspiration by retiring into the world of dreams,--
went to bed, in short, his more fortunate rival was just entering the
village, where he was to make his brief residence at the house of
Deacon Rumrill, who, having been a loser by the devouring element,
was glad to receive a stray boarder when any such were looking about
for quarters.

For some reason or other he was restless that evening, and took out a
volume he had brought with him to beguile the earlier hours of the
night.  It was too late when he arrived to disturb the quiet of Mrs.
Hopkins's household, and whatever may have been Clement's impatience,
he held it in check, and sat tranquilly until midnight over the pages
of the book with which he had prudently provided himself.

"Hope you slept well last night," said the old Deacon, when Mr.
Clement came down to breakfast the next morning.

"Very well, thank you,--that is, after I got to bed.  But I sat up
pretty late reading my favorite Scott.  I am apt to forget how the
hours pass when I have one of his books in my hand."

The worthy Deacon looked at Mr. Clement with a sudden accession of
interest.

"You couldn't find better reading, young man.  Scott is my favorite
author.  A great man.  I have got his likeness in a gilt-frame
hanging up in the other room.  I have read him all through three
times."

The young man's countenance brightened.  He had not expected to find
so much taste for elegant literature in an old village deacon.

"What are your favorites among his writings, Deacon?  I suppose you
have your particular likings, as the rest of us have."

The Deacon was flattered by the question.  "Well," he answered, "I
can hardly tell you.  I like pretty much everything Scott ever wrote.
Sometimes I think it is one thing, and sometimes another.  Great on
Paul's Epistles,--don't you think so?"

The honest fact was, that Clement remembered very little about
"Paul's Letters to his Kinsfolk,"--a book of Sir Walter's less famous
than many of his others; but he signified his polite assent to the
Deacon's statement, rather wondering at his choice of a favorite, and
smiling at his queer way of talking about the Letters as Epistles.

"I am afraid Scott is not so much read now-a-days as he once was, and
as he ought to be," said Mr. Clement: "Such character, such nature
and so much grace."

"That's it,--that's it, young man," the Deacon broke in,--"Natur' and
Grace,--Natur' and Grace.  Nobody ever knew better what those two
words meant than Scott did, and I'm very glad to see--you've chosen
such good wholesome reading.  You can't set up too late, young man,
to read Scott.  If I had twenty children, they should all begin
reading Scott as soon as they were old enough to spell sin,--and
that's the first word my little ones learned, next to 'pa' and I
'ma.' Nothing like beginning the lessons of life in good season."

"What a grim old satirist!" Clement said to himself.  "I wonder if
the old man reads other novelists.--Do tell me, Deacon, if you have
read Thackeray's last story? "

"Thackeray's story?  Published by the American Tract Society?"

"Not exactly," Clement answered, smiling, and quite delighted to find
such an unexpected vein of grave pleasantry about the demure-looking
church-dignitary; for the Deacon asked his question without moving a
muscle, and took no cognizance whatever of the young man's tone and
smile.  First-class humorists are, as is well known, remarkable for
the immovable solemnity of their features.  Clement promised himself
not a little amusement from the curiously sedate drollery of the
venerable Deacon, who, it was plain from his conversation, had
cultivated a literary taste which would make him a more agreeable
companion than the common ecclesiastics of his grade in country
villages.

After breakfast, Mr. Clement walked forth in the direction of Mrs.
Hopkins's house, thinking as he went of the pleasant surprise his
visit would bring to his longing and doubtless pensive Susan; for
though she knew he was coming, she did not know that he was at that
moment in Oxbow Village.

As he drew near the house, the first thing he saw was Susan Posey,
almost running against her just as he turned a corner.  She looked
wonderfully lively and rosy, for the weather was getting keen and the
frosts had begun to bite.  A young gentleman was walking at her side,
and reading to her from a paper he held in his hand.  Both looked
deeply interested,--so much so that Clement felt half ashamed of
himself for intruding upon them so abruptly.

But lovers are lovers, and Clement could not help joining them.  The
first thing, of course, was the utterance of two simultaneous
exclamations, "Why, Clement!"  "Why, Susan!"  What might have come
next in the programme, but for the presence of a third party, is
matter of conjecture; but what did come next was a mighty awkward
look on the part of Susan Posey, and the following short speech:
"Mr. Lindsay, let me introduce Mr. Hopkins, my friend, the poet I 've
written to you about.  He was just reading two of his poems to me.
Some other time, Gifted--Mr. Hopkins."

"Oh no, Mr. Hopkins,--pray go on," said Clement.  "I 'm very fond of
poetry."

The poet did not require much urging, and began at once reciting over
again the stanzas which were afterwards so much admired in the
"Banner and Oracle,"--the first verse being, as the readers of that
paper will remember,

    "She moves in splendor, like the ray
     That flashes from unclouded skies,
     And all the charms of night and day
     Are mingled in her hair and eyes."

Clement, who must have been in an agony of impatience to be alone
with his beloved, commanded his feelings admirably.  He signified his
approbation of the poem by saying that the lines were smooth and the
rhymes absolutely without blemish.  The stanzas reminded him forcibly
of one of the greatest poets of the century.

Gifted flushed hot with pleasure.  He had tasted the blood of his own
rhymes; and when a poet gets as far as that, it is like wringing the
bag of exhilarating gas from the lips of a fellow sucking at it, to
drag his piece away from him.

"Perhaps you will like these lines still better," he said; "the style
is more modern:--

     "'O daughter of the spiced South,
          Her bubbly grapes have spilled the wine
          That staineth with its hue divine
     The red flower of thy perfect mouth.'"

And so on, through a series of stanzas like these, with the pulp of
two rhymes between the upper and lower crust of two others.

Clement was cornered.  It was necessary to say something for the
poet's sake,--perhaps for Susan's; for she was in a certain sense
responsible for the poems of a youth of genius, of whom she had
spoken so often and so enthusiastically.

"Very good, Mr. Hopkins, and a form of verse little used, I should
think, until of late years.  You modelled this piece on the style of
a famous living English poet, did you not?"

"Indeed I did not, Mr. Lindsay,--I never imitate.  Originality is, if
I may be allowed to say so much for myself, my peculiar forte.  Why,
the critics allow as much as that.  See here, Mr. Lindsay."

Mr. Gifted Hopkins pulled out his pocket-book, and, taking therefrom
a cutting from a newspaper,--which dropped helplessly open of itself,
as if tired of the process, being very tender in the joints or
creases, by reason of having been often folded and unfolded read
aloud as follows:

"The bard of Oxbow Pillage--our valued correspondent who writes over
the signature of G. H.--is, in our opinion, more remarkable for his
originality than for any other of his numerous gifts."

Clement was apparently silenced by this, and the poet a little elated
with a sense of triumph.  Susan could not help sharing his feeling of
satisfaction, and without meaning it in the least, nay, without
knowing it, for she was as simple and pure as new milk, edged a
little bit--the merest infinitesimal atom--nearer to Gifted Hopkins,
who was on one side of her, while Clement walked on the other.  Women
love the conquering party,--it is the way of their sex.  And poets,
as we have seen, are well-nigh irresistible when they exert their
dangerous power of fascination upon the female heart.  But Clement
was above jealousy; and, if be perceived anything of this movement,
took no notice of it.

He saw a good deal of his pretty Susan that day.  She was tender in
her expressions and manners as usual, but there was a little
something in her looks and language from time to time that Clement
did not know exactly what to make of.  She colored once or twice when
the young poet's name was mentioned.  She was not so full of her
little plans for the future as she had sometimes been, "everything
was so uncertain," she said.  Clement asked himself whether she felt
quite as sure that her attachment would last as she once did.  But
there were no reproaches, not even any explanations, which are about
as bad between lovers.  There was nothing but an undefined feeling on
his side that she did not cling quite so closely to him, perhaps, as
he had once thought, and that, if he had happened to have been
drowned that day when he went down with the beautiful young woman, it
was just conceivable that Susan, who would have cried dreadfully, no
doubt, would in time have listened to consolation from some other
young man,--possibly from the young poet whose verses he had been
admiring.  Easy-crying widows take new husbands soonest; there is
nothing like wet weather for transplanting, as Master Gridley used to
say.  Susan had a fluent natural gift for tears, as Clement well
knew, after the exercise of which she used to brighten up like the
rose which had been washed, just washed in a shower, mentioned by
Cowper.

As for the poet, he learned more of his own sentiments during this
visit of Clement's than he had ever before known.  He wandered about
with a dreadfully disconsolate look upon his countenance.  He showed
a falling-off in his appetite at tea-time, which surprised and
disturbed his mother, for she had filled the house with fragrant
suggestions of good things coming, in honor of Mr. Lindsay, who was
to be her guest at tea.  And chiefly the genteel form of doughnut
called in the native dialect cymbal ( Qu. Symbol?  B. G.) which
graced the board with its plastic forms, suggestive of the most
pleasing objects,--the spiral ringlets pendent from the brow of
beauty; the magic circlet, which is the pledge of plighted
affection,--the indissoluble knot, which typifies the union of
hearts, which organs were also largely represented; this exceptional
delicacy would at any other time have claimed his special notice.
But his mother remarked that he paid little attention to these, and
his, "No, I thank you," when it came to the preserved "damsels," as
some call them, carried a pang with it to the maternal bosom.  The
most touching evidence of his unhappiness--whether intentional or the
result of accident was not evident was a broken heart, which he left
upon his plate, the meaning of which was as plain as anything in the
language of flowers.  His thoughts were gloomy during that day,
running a good deal on the more picturesque and impressive methods of
bidding a voluntary farewell to a world which had allured him with
visions of beauty only to snatch them from his impassioned gaze.  His
mother saw something of this, and got from him a few disjointed
words, which led her to lock up the clothes-line and hide her late
husband's razors,--an affectionate, yet perhaps unnecessary
precaution, for self-elimination contemplated from this point of view
by those who have the natural outlet of verse to relieve them is
rarely followed by a casualty.  It may rather be considered as
implying a more than average chance for longevity; as those who
meditate an--imposing finish naturally save themselves for it, and
are therefore careful of their health until the time comes, and this
is apt to be indefinitely postponed so long as there is a poem to
write or a proof to be corrected.




CHAPTER XX.

THE SECOND MEETING.

Miss Eveleth requests the pleasure of Mr. Lindsay's company to meet a
few friends on the evening of the Feast of St. Ambrose, December 7th,
Wednesday.

THE PARSONAGE, December 6th.


It was the luckiest thing in the world.  They always made a little
festival of that evening at the Rev. Ambrose Eveleth's, in honor of
his canonized namesake, and because they liked to have a good time.
It came this year just at the right moment, for here was a
distinguished stranger visiting in the place.  Oxbow Village seemed
to be running over with its one extra young man,--as may be seen
sometimes in larger villages, and even in cities of moderate
dimensions.

Mr. William Murray Bradshaw had called on Clement the day after his
arrival.  He had already met the Deacon in the street, and asked some
questions about his transient boarder.

A very interesting young man, the Deacon said, much given to the
reading of pious books.  Up late at night after he came, reading
Scott's Commentary.  Appeared to be as fond of serious works as other
young folks were of their novels and romances and other immoral
publications.  He, the Deacon, thought of having a few religious
friends to meet the young gentleman, if he felt so disposed; and
should like to have him, Mr. Bradshaw, come in and take a part in the
exercises.--Mr. Bradshaw was unfortunately engaged.  He thought the
young gentleman could hardly find time for such a meeting during his
brief visit.

Mr. Bradshaw expected naturally to see a youth of imperfect
constitution, and cachectic or dyspeptic tendencies, who was in
training to furnish one of those biographies beginning with the
statement that, from his infancy, the subject of it showed no
inclination for boyish amusements, and so on, until he dies out, for
the simple reason that there was not enough of him to live.  Very
interesting, no doubt, Master Byles Gridley would have said, but had
no more to do with good, hearty, sound life than the history of those
very little people to be seen in museums preserved in jars of
alcohol, like brandy peaches.

When Mr. Clement Lindsay presented himself, Mr. Bradshaw was a good
deal surprised to see a young fellow of such a mould.  He pleased
himself with the idea that he knew a man of mark at sight, and he set
down Clement in that category at his first glance.  The young man met
his penetrating and questioning look with a frank, ingenuous, open
aspect, before which he felt himself disarmed, as it were, and thrown
upon other means of analysis.  He would try him a little in talk.

"I hope you like these people you are with.  What sort of a man do
you find my old friend the Deacon?"

Clement laughed.  "A very queer old character.  Loves his joke as
well, and is as sly in making it, as if he had studied Joe Miller
instead of the Catechism."

Mr. Bradshaw looked at the young man to know what he meant.  Mr.
Lindsay talked in a very easy way for a serious young person.  He was
puzzled.  He did not see to the bottom of this description of the
Deacon.  With a lawyer's instinct, he kept his doubts to himself and
tried his witness with a new question.

"Did you talk about books at all with the old man?"

"To be sure I did.  Would you believe it,--that aged saint is a great
novel-reader.  So he tells me.  What is more, he brings up his
children to that sort of reading, from the time when they first begin
to spell.  If anybody else had told me such a story about an old
country deacon, I wouldn't have believed it; but he said so himself,
to me, at breakfast this morning."

Mr. Bradshaw felt as if either he or Mr. Lindsay must certainly be in
the first stage of mild insanity, and he did not think that he
himself could be out of his wits.  He must try one more question.  He
had become so mystified that he forgot himself, and began putting his
interrogation in legal form.

"Will you state, if you please--I beg your pardon--may I ask who is
your own favorite author?"

"I think just now I like to read Scott better than almost anybody."

"Do you mean the Rev. Thomas Scott, author of the Commentary?"

Clement stared at Mr. Bradshaw, and wondered whether he was trying to
make a fool of him.  The young lawyer hardly looked as if he could be
a fool himself.

"I mean Sir Walter Scott," he said, dryly.

"Oh!" said Mr. Bradshaw.  He saw that there had been a slight
misunderstanding between the young man and his worthy host, but it
was none of his business, and there were other subjects of interest
to talk about.

"You know one of our charming young ladies very well, I believe, Mr.
Lindsay.  I think you are an old acquaintance of Miss Posey, whom we
all consider so pretty."

Poor Clement!  The question pierced to the very marrow of his soul,
but it was put with the utmost suavity and courtesy, and honeyed with
a compliment to the young lady, too, so that there was no avoiding a
direct and pleasant answer to it.

"Yes," he said, "I have known the young lady you speak of for a long
time, and very well,--in fact, as you must have heard, we are
something more than friends.  My visit here is principally on her
account."

"You must give the rest of us a chance to see something of you during
your visit, Mr. Lindsay.  I hope you are invited to Miss Eveleth's
to-morrow evening?"

"Yes, I got a note this morning.  Tell me, Mr. Bradshaw, who is there
that I shall meet if I go?  I have no doubt there are girls here in
the village I should like to see, and perhaps some young fellows that
I should like to talk with.  You know all that's prettiest and
pleasantest, of course."

"Oh, we're a little place, Mr. Lindsay.  A few nice people, the rest
comme Va, you know.  High-bush blackberries and low-bush black-
berries,--you understand,--just so everywhere,--high-bush here and
there, low-bush plenty.  You must see the two parsons' daughters,
--Saint Ambrose's and Saint Joseph's,--and another girl I want
particularly to introduce you to.  You shall form your own opinion of
her.  I call her handsome and stylish, but you have got spoiled, you
know.  Our young poet, too, one we raised in this place, Mr. Lindsay,
and a superior article of poet, as we think,--that is, some of us,
for the rest of us are jealous of him, because the girls are all
dying for him and want his autograph.  And Cyp,--yes, you must talk
to Cyp,--he has ideas.  But don't forget to get hold of old Byles
Master Gridley I mean--before you go.  Big head.  Brains enough for a
cabinet minister, and fit out a college faculty with what was left
over.  Be sure you see old Byles.  Set him talking about his book,
'Thoughts on the Universe.'  Did n't sell much, but has got knowing
things in it.  I'll show you a copy, and then you can tell him you
know it, and he will take to you.  Come in and get your dinner with
me to-morrow.  We will dine late, as the city folks do, and after
that we will go over to the Rector's.  I should like to show you some
of our village people."

Mr. Bradshaw liked the thought of showing the young man to some of
his friends there.  As Clement was already "done for," or "bowled
out," as the young lawyer would have expressed the fact of his being
pledged in the matrimonial direction, there was nothing to be
apprehended on the score of rivalry.  And although Clement was
particularly good-looking, and would have been called a
distinguishable youth anywhere, Mr. Bradshaw considered himself far
more than his match, in all probability, in social accomplishments.
He expected, therefore, a certain amount of reflex credit for
bringing such a fine young fellow in his company, and a second
instalment of reputation from outshining him in conversation.  This
was rather nice calculating, but Murray Bradshaw always calculated.
With most men life is like backgammon, half skill, and half luck, but
with him it was like chess.  He never pushed a pawn without reckoning
the cost, and when his mind was least busy it was sure to be half a
dozen moves ahead of the game as it was standing.

Mr. Bradshaw gave Clement a pretty dinner enough for such a place as
Oxbow Village.  He offered him some good wine, and would have made
him talk so as to show his lining, to use one of his own expressions,
but Clement had apparently been through that trifling experience, and
could not be coaxed into saying more than he meant to say.  Murray
Bradshaw was very curious to find out how it was that he had become
the victim of such a rudimentary miss as Susan Posey.  Could she be
an heiress in disguise?  Why no, of course not; had not he made all
proper inquiries about that when Susan came to town?  A small
inheritance from an aunt or uncle, or some such relative, enough to
make her a desirable party in the eyes of certain villagers perhaps,
but nothing to allure a man like this, whose face and figure as
marketable possessions were worth say a hundred thousand in the
girl's own right, as Mr. Bradshaw put it roughly, with another
hundred thousand if his talent is what some say, and if his
connection is a desirable one, a fancy price,--anything he would
fetch.  Of course not.  Must have got caught when he was a child.
Why the diavolo didn't he break it off, then?

There was no fault to find with the modest entertainment at the
Parsonage.  A splendid banquet in a great house is an admirable
thing, provided always its getting up did not cost the entertainer an
inward conflict, nor its recollection a twinge of economical regret,
nor its bills a cramp of anxiety.  A simple evening party in the
smallest village is just as admirable in its degree, when the parlor
is cheerfully lighted, and the board prettily spread, and the guests
are made to feel comfortable without being reminded that anybody is
making a painful effort.

We know several of the young people who were there, and need not
trouble ourselves for the others.  Myrtle Hazard had promised to
come.  She had her own way of late as never before; in fact, the
women were afraid of her.  Miss Silence felt that she could not be
responsible for her any longer.  She had hopes for a time that Myrtle
would go through the customary spiritual paroxysm under the influence
of the Rev. Mr. Stoker's assiduous exhortations; but since she had
broken off with him, Miss Silence had looked upon her as little
better than a backslider.  And now that the girl was beginning to
show the tendencies which seemed to come straight down to her from
the belle of the last century, (whose rich physical developments
seemed to the under-vitalized spinster as in themselves a kind of
offence against propriety,) the forlorn woman folded her thin hands
and looked on hopelessly, hardly venturing a remonstrance for fear of
some new explosion.  As for Cynthia, she was comparatively easy since
she had, through Mr. Byles Gridley, upset the minister's questionable
arrangement of religious intimacy.  She had, in fact, in a quiet way,
given Mr. Bradshaw to understand that he would probably meet Myrtle
at the Parsonage if he dropped in at their small gathering.  Clement
walked over to Mrs. Hopkins's after his dinner with the young lawyer,
and asked if Susan was ready to go with him.  At the sound of his
voice, Gifted Hopkins smote his forehead, and called himself, in
subdued tones, a miserable being.  His imagination wavered uncertain
for a while between pictures of various modes of ridding himself of
existence, and fearful deeds involving the life of others.  He had no
fell purpose of actually doing either, but there was a gloomy
pleasure in contemplating them as possibilities, and in mentally
sketching the "Lines written in Despair" which would be found in what
was but an hour before the pocket of the youthful bard, G. H., victim
of a hopeless passion.  All this emotion was in the nature of  a
surprise to the young man.  He had fully believed himself desperately
in love with Myrtle Hazard; and it was not until Clement came into
the family circle with the right of eminent domain over the realm of
Susan's affections, that this unfortunate discovered that Susan's
pretty ways and morning dress and love of poetry and liking for his
company had been too much for him, and that he was henceforth to be
wretched during the remainder of his natural life, except so far as
he could unburden himself in song.

Mr. William Murray Bradshaw had asked the privilege of waiting upon
Myrtle to the little party at the Eveleths.  Myrtle was not
insensible to the attractions of the young lawyer, though she had
never thought of herself except as a child in her relations with any
of these older persons.  But she was not the same girl that she had
been but a few months before.  She had achieved her independence by
her audacious and most dangerous enterprise.  She had gone through
strange nervous trials and spiritual experiences which had matured
her more rapidly than years of common life would have done.  She had
got back her health, bringing with it a riper wealth of womanhood.
She had found her destiny in the consciousness that she inherited the
beauty belonging to her blood, and which, after sleeping for a
generation or two as if to rest from the glare of the pageant that
follows beauty through its long career of triumph, had come to the
light again in her life, and was to repeat the legends of the olden
time in her own history.

Myrtle's wardrobe had very little of ornament, such as the modistes
of the town would have thought essential to render a young girl like
her presentable.  There were a few heirlooms of old date, however,
which she had kept as curiosities until now, and which she looked
over until she found some lace and other convertible material, with
which she enlivened her costume a little for the evening.  As she
clasped the antique bracelet around her wrist, she felt as if it were
an amulet that gave her the power of charming which had been so long
obsolete in her lineage.  At the bottom of her heart she cherished a
secret longing to try her fascinations on the young lawyer.  Who
could blame her?  It was not an inwardly expressed intention,--it was
the simple instinctive movement to subjugate the strongest of the
other sex who had come in her way, which, as already said, is as
natural to a woman as it is to a man to be captivated by the
loveliest of those to whom he dares to aspire.

Before William Murray Bradshaw and Myrtle Hazard had reached the
Parsonage, the girl's cheeks were flushed and her dark eyes were
flashing with a new excitement.  The young man had not made love to
her directly, but he had interested her in herself by a delicate and
tender flattery of manner, and so set her fancies working that she
was taken with him as never before, and wishing that the Parsonage
had been a mile farther from The Poplars.  It was impossible for a
young girl like Myrtle to conceal the pleasure she received from
listening to her seductive admirer, who was trying all his trained
skill upon his artless companion.  Murray Bradshaw felt sure that the
game was in his hands if he played it with only common prudence.
There was no need of hurrying this child,--it might startle her to
make downright love abruptly; and now that he had an ally in her own
household, and was to have access to her with a freedom he had never
before enjoyed, there was a refined pleasure in playing his fish,--
this gamest of golden-scaled creatures,--which had risen to his fly,
and which he wished to hook, but not to land, until he was sure it
would be worth his while.

They entered the little parlor at the Parsonage looking so beaming,
that Olive and Bathsheba exchanged glances which implied so much that
it would take a full page to tell it with all the potentialities
involved.

"How magnificent Myrtle is this evening, Bathsheba!" said Cyprian
Eveleth, pensively.

"What a handsome pair they are, Cyprian!" said Bathsheba cheerfully.

Cyprian sighed.  "She always fascinates me whenever I look upon her.
Is n't she the very picture of what a poet's love should be,--a poem
herself,--a glorious lyric,--all light and music!  See what a smile
the creature has!  And her voice!  When did you ever hear such tones?
And when was it ever so full of life before."

Bathsheba sighed.  "I do not know any poets but Gifted Hopkins.  Does
not Myrtle look more in her place by the side of Murray Bradshaw than
she would with Gifted hitched on her arm?"

Just then the poet made his appearance.  He looked depressed, as if
it had cost him an effort to come.  He was, however, charged with a
message which he must deliver to the hostess of the evening.

"They 're coming presently," he said.  "That young man and Susan.
Wants you to introduce him, Mr. Bradshaw."

The bell rang presently, and Murray Bradshaw slipped out into the
entry to meet the two lovers.

"How are you, my fortunate friend?" he said, as he met them at the
door.  "Of course you're well and happy as mortal man can be in this
vale of tears.  Charming, ravishing, quite delicious, that way of
dressing your hair, Miss Posey!  Nice girls here this evening, Mr.
Lindsay.  Looked lovely when I came out of the parlor.  Can't say how
they will show after this young lady puts in an appearance."  In
reply to which florid speeches Susan blushed, not knowing what else
to do, and Clement smiled as naturally as if he had been sitting for
his photograph.

He felt, in a vague way, that he and Susan were being patronized,
which is not a pleasant feeling to persons with a certain pride of
character.  There was no expression of contempt about Mr. Bradshaw's
manner or language at which he could take offence.  Only he had the
air of a man who praises his neighbor without stint, with a calm
consciousness that he himself is out of reach of comparison in the
possessions or qualities which he is admiring in the other.  Clement
was right in his obscure perception of Mr. Bradshaw's feeling while
he was making his phrases.  That gentleman was, in another moment, to
have the tingling delight of showing the grand creature he had just
begun to tame.  He was going to extinguish the pallid light of
Susan's prettiness in the brightness of Myrtle's beauty.  He would
bring this young man, neutralized and rendered entirely harmless by
his irrevocable pledge to a slight girl, face to face with a
masterpiece of young womanhood, and say to him, not in words, but as
plainly as speech could have told him, "Behold my captive!"

It was a proud moment for Murray Bradshaw.  He had seen, or thought
that he had seen, the assured evidence of a speedy triumph over all
the obstacles of Myrtle's youth and his own present seeming slight
excess of maturity.  Unless he were very greatly mistaken, he could
now walk the course; the plate was his, no matter what might be the
entries.  And this youth, this handsome, spirited-looking, noble-
aired young fellow, whose artist-eye could not miss a line of
Myrtle's proud and almost defiant beauty, was to be the witness of
his power, and to look in admiration upon his prize!  He introduced
him to the others, reserving her for the last.  She was at that
moment talking with the worthy Rector, and turned when Mr. Bradshaw
spoke to her.

"Miss Hazard, will you allow me to present to you my friend, Mr.
Clement Lindsay?"

They looked full upon each other, and spoke the common words of
salutation.  It was a strange meeting; but we who profess to tell the
truth must tell strange things, or we shall be liars.

In poor little Susan's letter there was some allusion to a bust of
Innocence which the young artist had begun, but of which he had said
nothing in his answer to her.  He had roughed out a block of marble
for that impersonation; sculpture was a delight to him, though
secondary to his main pursuit.  After his memorable adventure, the
image of the girl he had rescued so haunted him that the pale ideal
which was to work itself out in the bust faded away in its perpetual
presence, and--alas, poor Susan!  in obedience to the impulse that he
could not control, he left Innocence sleeping in the marble, and
began modelling a figure of proud and noble and imperious beauty, to
which he gave the name of Liberty.

The original which had inspired his conception was before him.  These
were the lips to which his own had clung when he brought her back
from the land of shadows.  The hyacinthine curl of her lengthening
locks had added something to her beauty; but it was the same face
which had haunted him.  This was the form he had borne seemingly
lifeless in his arms, and the bosom which heaved so visibly before
him was that which his eyes they were the calm eyes of a sculptor,
but of a sculptor hardly twenty years old.

Yes,--her bosom was heaving.  She had an unexplained feeling of
suffocation, and drew great breaths,--she could not have said why,
--but she could not help it; and presently she became giddy, and had
a great noise in her ears, and rolled her eyes about, and was on the
point of going into an hysteric spasm.  They called Dr. Hurlbut, who
was making himself agreeable to Olive just then, to come and see what
was the matter with Myrtle.

"A little nervous turn,--that is all," he said.

"Open the window.  Loose the ribbon round her neck.  Rub her hands.
Sprinkle some water on her forehead.

"A few drops of cologne.  Room too warm for her,--that 's all, I
think."

Myrtle came to herself after a time without anything like a regular
paroxysm.  But she was excitable, and whatever the cause of the
disturbance may have been, it seemed prudent that she should go home
early; and the excellent Rector insisted on caring for her, much to
the discontent of Mr. William Murray Bradshaw.

"Demonish odd," said this gentleman, "was n't it, Mr. Lindsay, that
Miss Hazard should go off in that way.  Did you ever see her before?"

"I--I--have seen that young lady before," Clement answered.

"Where did you meet her?" Mr. Bradshaw asked, with eager interest.

"I met her in the Valley of the Shadow of Death," Clement answered,
very solemnly.--"I leave this place to-morrow morning.  Have you any
commands for the city?"

"Knows how to shut a fellow up pretty well for a young one, doesn't
he?" Mr. Bradshaw thought to himself.

"Thank you, no," he answered, recovering himself.  "Rather a
melancholy place to make acquaintance in, I should think, that Valley
you spoke of.  I should like to know about it."

Mr. Clement had the power of looking steadily into another person's
eyes in a way that was by no means encouraging to curiosity or
favorable to the process of cross-examination.  Mr. Bradshaw was not
disposed to press his question in the face of the calm, repressive
look the young man gave him.

"If he was n't bagged, I shouldn't like the shape of things any too
well," he said to himself.

The conversation between Mr. Clement Lindsay and Miss Susan Posey, as
they walked home together, was not very brilliant.  "I am going to-
morrow morning," he said, "and I must bid you good-by tonight."
Perhaps it is as well to leave two lovers to themselves, under these
circumstances.

Before he went he spoke to his worthy host, whose moderate demands he
had to satisfy, and with whom he wished to exchange a few words.

"And by the way, Deacon, I have no use for this book, and as it is in
a good type, perhaps you would like it.  Your favorite, Scott, and
one of his greatest works.  I have another edition of it at home, and
don't care for this volume."

"Thank you, thank you, Mr. Lindsay, much obleeged.  I shall read that
copy for your sake, the best of books next to the Bible itself."

After Mr. Lindsay had gone, the Deacon looked at the back of the
book.  "Scott's Works, Vol. IX."  He opened it at hazard, and
happened to fall on a well-known page, from which he began reading
aloud, slowly,

    "When Izrul, of the Lord beloved,
     Out of the land of bondage came."

The whole hymn pleased the grave Deacon.  He had never seen this work
of the author of the Commentary.  No matter; anything that such a
good man wrote must be good reading, and he would save it up for
Sunday.  The consequence of this was, that, when the Rev. Mr. Stoker
stopped in on his way to meeting on the "Sabbath," he turned white
with horror at the spectacle of the senior Deacon of his church
sitting, open-mouthed and wide-eyed, absorbed in the pages of
"Ivanhoe," which he found enormously interesting; but, so far as he
had yet read, not occupied with religious matters so much as he had
expected.

Myrtle had no explanation to give of her nervous attack.  Mr.
Bradshaw called the day after the party, but did not see her.  He met
her walking, and thought she seemed a little more distant than
common.  That would never do.  He called again at The Poplars a few
days afterwards, and was met in the entry by Miss Cynthia, with whom
he had a long conversation on matters involving Myrtle's interests
and their own.




CHAPTER XXI.

MADNESS?

Mr. Clement Lindsay returned to the city and his usual labors in a
state of strange mental agitation.  He had received an impression for
which he was unprepared.  He had seen for the second time a young
girl whom, for the peace of his own mind, and for the happiness of
others, he should never again have looked upon until Time had taught
their young hearts the lesson which all hearts must learn, sooner or
later.

What shall the unfortunate person do who has met with one of those
disappointments, or been betrayed into one of those positions, which
do violence to all the tenderest feelings, blighting the happiness of
youth, and the prospects of after years?

If the person is a young man, he has various resources.  He can take
to the philosophic meerschaum, and nicotine himself at brief
intervals into a kind of buzzing and blurry insensibility, until he
begins to "color" at last like the bowl of his own pipe, and even his
mind gets the tobacco flavor.  Or he can have recourse to the more
suggestive stimulants, which will dress his future up for him in
shining possibilities that glitter like Masonic regalia, until the
morning light and the waking headache reveal his illusion.  Some kind
of spiritual anaesthetic he must have, if he holds his grief fast
tied to his heartstrings.  But as grief must be fed with thought, or
starve to death, it is the best plan to keep the mind so busy in
other ways that it has no time to attend to the wants of that
ravening passion.  To sit down and passively endure it, is apt to end
in putting all the mental machinery into disorder.

Clement Lindsay had thought that his battle of life was already
fought, and that he had conquered.  He believed that he had subdued
himself completely, and that he was ready, without betraying a shadow
of disappointment, to take the insufficient nature which destiny had
assigned him in his companion, and share with it all of his own
larger being it was capable, not of comprehending, but of
apprehending.

He had deceived himself.  The battle was not fought and won.  There
had been a struggle, and what seemed to be a victory, but the enemy
--intrenched in the very citadel of life--had rallied, and would make
another desperate attempt to retrieve his defeat.

The haste with which the young man had quitted the village was only a
proof that he felt his danger.  He believed that, if he came into the
presence of Myrtle Hazard for the third time, he should be no longer
master of his feelings.  Some explanation must take place between
them, and how was it possible that it should be without emotion? and
in what do all emotions shared by a young man with such a young girl
as this tend to find their last expression?

Clement determined to stun his sensibilities by work.  He would give
himself no leisure to indulge in idle dreams of what might have been.
His plans were never so carefully finished, and his studies were
never so continuous as now.  But the passion still wrought within
him, and, if he drove it from his waking thoughts, haunted his sleep
until he could endure it no longer, and must give it some
manifestation.  He had covered up the bust of Liberty so closely,
that not an outline betrayed itself through the heavy folds of
drapery in which it was wrapped.  His thoughts recurred to his
unfinished marble, as offering the one mode in which he could find a
silent outlet to the feelings and thoughts which it was torture to
keep imprisoned in his soul.  The cold stone would tell them, but
without passion; and having got the image which possessed him out of
himself into a lifeless form, it seemed as if he might be delivered
from a presence which, lovely as it was, stood between him and all
that made him seem honorable and worthy to himself.

He uncovered the bust which he had but half shaped, and struck the
first flake from the glittering marble.  The toil, once begun,
fascinated him strangely, and after the day's work was done, and at
every interval he could snatch from his duties, he wrought at his
secret task.

"Clement is graver than ever," the young men said at the office.
"What's the matter, do you suppose?  Turned off by the girl they say
he means to marry by and by?  How pale he looks too!  Must have
something worrying him: he used to look as fresh as a clove pink."

The master with whom he studied saw that he was losing color, and
looking very much worn; and determined to find out, if he could,
whether he was not overworking himself.  He soon discovered that his
light was seen burning late into the night, that he was neglecting
his natural rest, and always busy with some unknown task, not called
for in his routine of duty or legitimate study.

"Something is wearing on you, Clement," he said.  "You are killing
yourself with undertaking too much.  Will you let me know what keeps
you so busy when you ought to be asleep, or taking your ease and
comfort in some way or other?"

Nobody but himself had ever seen his marble or its model.  He had now
almost finished it, laboring at it with such sleepless devotion, and
he was willing to let his master have a sight of his first effort of
the kind,--for he was not a sculptor, it must be remembered, though
he had modelled in clay, not without some success, from time to time.

"Come with me," he said.

The master climbed the stairs with him up to his modest chamber.  A
closely shrouded bust stood on its pedestal in the light of the
solitary window.

"That is my ideal personage," Clement said.  "Wait one moment, and
you shall see how far I have caught the character of our uncrowned
queen."

The master expected, very naturally, to see the conventional young
woman with classical wreath or feather headdress, whom we have placed
upon our smallest coin, so that our children may all grow up loving
Liberty.

As Clement withdrew the drapery that covered his work, the master
stared at it in amazement.  He looked at it long and earnestly, and
at length turned his eyes, a little moistened by some feeling which
thus betrayed itself, upon his scholar.

"This is no ideal, Clement.  It is the portrait of a very young but
very beautiful woman.  No common feeling could have guided your hand
in shaping such a portrait from memory.  This must be that friend of
yours of whom I have often heard as an amiable young person.  Pardon
me, for you know that nobody cares more for you than I do,--I hope
that you are happy in all your relations with this young friend of
yours.  How could one be otherwise?"

It was hard to bear, very hard.  He forced a smile.  "You are partly
right," he said.  "There is a resemblance, I trust, to a living
person, for I had one in my mind."

"Did n't you tell me once, Clement, that you were attempting a bust
of Innocence?  I do not see any block in your room but this.  Is that
done?"

"Done with!" Clement answered; and, as he said it, the thought stung
through him that this was the very stone which was to have worn the
pleasant blandness of pretty Susan's guileless countenance.  How the
new features had effaced the recollection of the others!

In a few days more Clement had finished his bust.  His hours were
again vacant to his thick-coming fancies.  While he had been busy
with his marble, his hands had required his attention, and he must
think closely of every detail upon which he was at work.  But at
length his task was done, and he could contemplate what he had made
of it.  It was a triumph for one so little exercised in sculpture.
The master had told him so, and his own eye could not deceive him.
He might never succeed in any repetition of his effort, but this once
he most certainly had succeeded.  He could not disguise from himself
the source of this extraordinary good fortune in so doubtful and
difficult an attempt.  Nor could he resist the desire of
contemplating the portrait bust, which--it was foolish to talk about
ideals--was not Liberty, but Myrtle Hazard.

It was too nearly like the story of the ancient sculptor; his own
work was an over-match for its artist.  Clement had made a mistake in
supposing that by giving his dream a material form he should drive it
from the possession of his mind.  The image in which he had fixed his
recollection of its original served only to keep her living presence
before him.  He thought of her as she clasped her arms around him,
and they were swallowed up in the rushing waters, coming so near to
passing into the unknown world together.  He thought of her as he
stretched her lifeless form upon the bank, and looked for one brief
moment on her unsunned loveliness,--"a sight to dream of, not to
tell."  He thought of her as his last fleeting glimpse had shown her,
beautiful, not with the blossomy prettiness that passes away with the
spring sunshine, but with a rich vitality of which noble outlines and
winning expression were only the natural accidents.  And that
singular impression which the sight of him had produced upon her,
--how strange!  How could she but have listened to him,--to him, who
was, as it were, a second creator to her, for he had bought her back
from the gates of the unseen realm,--if he had recalled to her the
dread moments they had passed in each other's arms, with death, not
love, in all their thoughts.  And if then he had told her how her
image had remained with him, how it had colored all his visions, and
mingled with all his conceptions, would not those dark eyes have
melted as they were turned upon him?  Nay, how could he keep the
thought away, that she would not have been insensible to his passion,
if he could have suffered its flame to kindle in his heart?  Did it
not seem as if Death had spared them for Love, and that Love should
lead them together through life's long journey to the gates of Death?

Never!  never!  never!  Their fates were fixed.  For him, poor insect
as he was, a solitary flight by day, and a return at evening to his
wingless mate!  For her--he thought he saw her doom.

Could he give her up to the cold embraces of that passionless
egotist, who, as he perceived plainly enough, was casting his shining
net all around her?  Clement read Murray Bradshaw correctly.  He
could not perhaps have spread his character out in set words, as we
must do for him, for it takes a long apprenticeship to learn to
describe analytically what we know as soon as we see it; but he felt
in his inner consciousness all that we must tell for him.
Fascinating, agreeable, artful, knowing, capable of winning a woman
infinitely above himself, incapable of understanding her,--oh, if he
could but touch him with the angel's spear, and bid him take his true
shape before her whom he was gradually enveloping in the silken
meshes of his subtle web!  He would make a place for her in the
world,--oh yes, doubtless.  He would be proud of her in company,
would dress her handsomely, and show her off in the best lights.  But
from the very hour that he felt his power over her firmly
established, he would begin to remodel her after his own worldly
pattern.  He would dismantle her of her womanly ideals, and give her
in their place his table of market-values.  He would teach her to
submit her sensibilities to her selfish interest, and her tastes to
the fashion of the moment, no matter which world or half-world it
came from.  "As the husband is, the wife is,"--he would subdue her to
what he worked in.

All this Clement saw, as in apocalyptic vision, stored up for the
wife of Murray Bradshaw, if he read him rightly, as he felt sure he
did, from the few times he had seen him.  He would be rich by and by,
very probably.  He looked like one of those young men who are sharp,
and hard enough to come to fortune.  Then she would have to take her
place in the great social exhibition where the gilded cages are daily
opened that the animals may be seen, feeding on the sight of
stereotyped toilets and the sound of impoverished tattle.  O misery
of semi-provincial fashionable life, where wealth is at its wit's end
to avoid being tired of an existence which has all the labor of
keeping up appearances, without the piquant profligacy which saves it
at least from being utterly vapid!  How many fashionable women at the
end of a long season would be ready to welcome heaven itself as a
relief from the desperate monotony of dressing, dawdling, and
driving!

This could not go on so forever.  Clement had placed a red curtain so
as to throw a rose-bloom on his marble, and give it an aspect which
his fancy turned to the semblance of life.  He would sit and look at
the features his own hand had so faithfully wrought, until it seemed
as if the lips moved, sometimes as if they were smiling, sometimes as
if they were ready to speak to him.  His companions began to whisper
strange things of him in the studio,--that his eye was getting an
unnatural light,--that he talked as if to imaginary listeners,--in
short, that there was a look as if something were going wrong with
his brain, which it might be feared would spoil his fine
intelligence.  It was the undecided battle, and the enemy, as in his
noblest moments he had considered the growing passion, was getting
the better of him.

He was sitting one afternoon before the fatal bust which had smiled
and whispered away his peace, when the post-man brought him a letter.
It was from the simple girl to whom he had given his promise.  We
know how she used to prattle in her harmless way about her innocent
feelings, and the trifling matters that were going on in her little
village world.  But now she wrote in sadness.  Something, she did not
too clearly explain what, had grieved her, and she gave free
expression to her feelings.  "I have no one that loves me but you,"
she said; "and if you leave me I must droop and die.  Are you true to
me, dearest Clement,--true as when we promised each other that we
would love while life lasted?  Or have you forgotten one who will
never cease to remember that she was once your own Susan?"

Clement dropped the letter from his hand, and sat a long hour looking
at the exquisitely wrought features of her who had come between him
and honor and his plighted word.

At length he arose, and, lifting the bust tenderly from its pedestal,
laid it upon the cloth with which it had been covered.  He wrapped it
closely, fold upon fold, as the mother whom man condemns and God
pities wraps the child she loves before she lifts her hand against
its life.  Then he took a heavy hammer and shattered his lovely idol
into shapeless fragments.  The strife was over.




CHAPTER XXII.

A CHANGE OF PROGRAMME.

Mr. William Murray Bradshaw was in pretty intimate relations with
Miss Cynthia Badlam.  It was well understood between them that it
might be of very great advantage to both of them if he should in due
time become the accepted lover of Myrtle Hazard.  So long as he could
be reasonably secure against interference, he did not wish to hurry
her in making her decision.  Two things he did wish to be sure of, if
possible, before asking her the great question;--first, that she
would answer it in the affirmative; and secondly, that certain
contingencies, the turning of which was not as yet absolutely capable
of being predicted, should happen as he expected.  Cynthia had the
power of furthering his wishes in many direct and indirect ways, and
he felt sure of her cooperation.  She had some reason to fear his
enmity if she displeased him, and he had taken good care to make her
understand that her interests would be greatly promoted by the
success of the plan which he had formed, and which was confided to
her alone.

He kept the most careful eye on every possible source of disturbance
to this quietly maturing plan.  He had no objection to have Gifted
Hopkins about Myrtle as much as she would endure to have him.  The
youthful bard entertained her very innocently with his bursts of
poetry, but she was in no danger from a young person so intimately
associated with the yard-stick, the blunt scissors, and the brown-
paper parcel.  There was Cyprian too, about whom he did not feel any
very particular solicitude.  Myrtle had evidently found out that she
was handsome and stylish and all that, and it was not very likely she
would take up with such a bashful, humble, country youth as this.  He
could expect nothing beyond a possible rectorate in the remote
distance, with one of those little pony chapels to preach in, which,
if it were set up on a stout pole, would pass for a good-sized
martin-house.  Cyprian might do to practise on, but there was no
danger of her looking at him in a serious way.  As for that youth,
Clement Lindsay, if he had not taken himself off as he did, Murray
Bradshaw confessed to himself that he should have felt uneasy.  He
was too good-looking, and too clever a young fellow to have knocking
about among fragile susceptibilities.  But on reflection he saw there
could be no danger.

"All up with him,--poor diavolo!  Can't understand it--such a little
sixpenny miss--pretty enough boiled parsnip blonde, if one likes that
sort of thing--pleases some of the old boys, apparently.  Look out,
Mr. L. remember Susanna and the Elders.  Good!

"Safe enough if something new doesn't turn up.  Youngish.  Sixteen's
a little early.  Seventeen will do.  Marry a girl while she's in the
gristle, and you can shape her bones for her.  Splendid creature
without her trimmings.  Wants training.  Must learn to dance, and
sing something besides psalm-tunes."

Mr. Bradshaw began humming the hymn, "When I can read my title
clear," adding some variations of his own.  "That 's the solo for my
prima donna!"

In the mean time Myrtle seemed to be showing some new developments.
One would have said that the instincts of the coquette, or at least
of the city belle, were coming uppermost in her nature.  Her little
nervous attack passed away, and she gained strength and beauty every
day.  She was becoming conscious of her gifts of fascination, and
seemed to please herself with the homage of her rustic admirers.  Why
was it that no one of them had the look and bearing of that young man
she had seen but a moment the other evening?  To think that he should
have taken up with such a weakling as Susan Posey!  She sighed, and
not so much thought as felt how kind it would have been in Heaven to
have made her such a man.  But the image of the delicate blonde stood
between her and all serious thought of Clement Lindsay.  She saw the
wedding in the distance, and very foolishly thought to herself that
she could not and would not go to it.

But Clement Lindsay was gone, and she must content herself with such
worshippers as the village afforded.  Murray Bradshaw was surprised
and confounded at the easy way in which she received his compliments,
and played with his advances, after the fashion of the trained ball-
room belles, who know how to be almost caressing in manner, and yet
are really as far off from the deluded victim of their suavities as
the topmost statue of the Milan cathedral from the peasant that
kneels on its floor.  He admired her all the more for this, and yet
he saw that she would be a harder prize to win than he had once
thought.  If he made up his mind that he would have her, he must go
armed with all implements, from the red hackle to the harpoon.

The change which surprised Murray Bradshaw could not fail to be
noticed by all those about her.  Miss Silence had long ago come to
pantomime, rolling up of eyes, clasping of hands, making of sad
mouths, and the rest,--but left her to her own way, as already the
property of that great firm of World & Co. which drives such sharp
bargains for young souls with the better angels.  Cynthia studied her
for her own purposes, but had never gained her confidence.  The Irish
servant saw that some change had come over her, and thought of the
great ladies she had sometimes looked upon in the old country.  They
all had a kind of superstitious feeling about Myrtle's bracelet, of
which she had told them the story, but which Kitty half believed was
put in the drawer by the fairies, who brought her ribbons and
partridge feathers, and other slight adornments with which she
contrived to set off her simple costume, so as to produce those
effects which an eye for color and cunning fingers can bring out of
almost nothing.

Gifted Hopkins was now in a sad, vacillating condition, between the
two great attractions to which he was exposed.  Myrtle looked so
immensely handsome ere Sunday when he saw her going to church, not to
meeting, for she world not go, except when she knew Father Pemberton
was going to be the preacher, that the young poet was on the point of
going down on his knees to her, and telling her that his heart was
hers and hers alone.  But he suddenly remembered that he had on his
best trousers, and the idea of carrying the marks of his devotion in
the shape of two dusty impressions on his most valued article of
apparel turned the scale against the demonstration.  It happened the
next morning, that Susan Posey wore the most becoming ribbon she had
displayed for a long time, and Gifted was so taken with her pretty
looks that he might very probably have made the same speech to her
that he had been on the point of making to Myrtle the day before, but
that he remembered her plighted affections, and thought what he
should have to say for himself when Clement Lindsay, in a frenzy of
rage and jealousy, stood before him, probably armed with as many
deadly instruments as a lawyer mentions by name in an indictment for
murder.

Cyprian Eveleth looked very differently on the new manifestations
Myrtle was making of her tastes and inclinations.  He had always felt
dazzled, as well as attracted, by her; but now there was something in
her expression and manner which made him feel still more strongly
that they were intended for different spheres of life.  He could not
but own that she was born for a brilliant destiny,--that no ball-
room would throw a light from its chandeliers too strong for her,
--that no circle would be too brilliant for her to illuminate by her
presence.  Love does not thrive without hope, and Cyprian was
beginning to see that it was idle in him to think of folding these
wide wings of Myrtle's so that they would be shut up in any cage he
could ever offer her.  He began to doubt whether, after all, he might
not find a meeker and humbler nature better adapted to his own.  And
so it happened that one evening after the three girls, Olive, Myrtle,
and Bathsheba, had been together at the Parsonage, and Cyprian,
availing himself of a brother's privilege, had joined them, he found
he had been talking most of the evening with the gentle girl whose
voice had grown so soft and sweet, during her long ministry in the
sick-chamber, that it seemed to him more like music than speech.  It
would not be fair to say that Myrtle was piqued to see that Cyprian
was devoting himself to Bathsheba.  Her ambition was already reaching
beyond her little village circle, and she had an inward sense that
Cyprian found a form of sympathy in the minister's simple-minded
daughter which he could not ask from a young woman of her own
aspirations.

Such was the state of affairs when Master Byles Gridley was one
morning surprised by an early call from Myrtle.  He had a volume of
Walton's Polyglot open before him, and was reading Job in the
original, when she entered.

"Why, bless me, is that my young friend Miss Myrtle Hazard?" he
exclaimed.  "I might call you Keren-Happuch, which is Hebrew for
Child of Beauty, and not be very far out of the way, Job's youngest
daughter, my dear.  And what brings my young friend out in such good
season this morning?  Nothing going wrong up at our ancient mansion,
The Poplars, I trust?"

"I want to talk with you, dear Master Gridley," she answered.  She
looked as if she did not know just how to begin.

"Anything that interests you, Myrtle, interests me.  I think you have
some project in that young head of yours, my child.  Let us have it,
in all its dimensions, length, breadth, and thickness.  I think I can
guess, Myrtle, that we have a little plan of some kind or other.
We don't visit Papa Job quite so early as this without some special
cause,--do we, Miss Keren-Happuch?"

"I want to go to the city--to school," Myrtle said, with the
directness which belonged to her nature.

"That is precisely what I want you to do myself, Miss Myrtle Hazard.
I don't like to lose you from the village, but I think we must spare
you for a while."

"You're the best and dearest man that ever lived.  What could have
made you think of such a thing for me, Mr. Gridley?"

"Because you are ignorant, my child,--partly I want to see you fitted
to take a look at the world without feeling like a little country
miss.  Has your aunt Silence promised to bear your expenses while you
are in the city?  It will cost a good deal of money."

"I have not said a word to her about it.  I am sure I don't know what
she would say.  But I have some money, Mr. Gridley."

She showed him a purse with gold, telling him how she came by it.
"There is some silver besides.  Will it be enough?"

"No, no, my child, we must not meddle with that.  Your aunt will let
me put it in the bank for you, I think, where it will be safe.  But
that shall not make any difference.  I have got a little money lying
idle, which you may just as well have the use of as not.  You can pay
it back perhaps some time or other; if you did not, it would not make
much difference.  I am pretty much alone in the world, and except a
book now and then--Aut liberos aut libros, as our valiant heretic has
it,--you ought to know a little Latin, Myrtle, but never mind--I have
not much occasion for money.  You shall go to the best school that
any of our cities can offer, Myrtle, and you shall stay there until
we agree that you are fitted to come back to us an ornament to Oxbow
Village, and to larger places than this if you are called there.  We
have had some talk about it, your aunt Silence and I, and it is all
settled.  Your aunt does not feel very rich just now, or perhaps she
would do more for you.  She has many pious and poor friends, and it
keeps her funds low.  Never mind, my child, we will have it all
arranged for you, and you shall begin the year 1860 in Madam
Delacoste's institution for young ladies.  Too many rich girls and
fashionable ones there, I fear, but you must see some of all kinds,
and there are very good instructors in the school,--I know one,--he
was a college boy with me,--and you will find pleasant and good
companions there, so he tells me; only don't be in a hurry to choose
your friends, for the least desirable young persons are very apt to
cluster about a new-comer."

Myrtle was bewildered with the suddenness of the prospect thus held
out to her.  It is a wonder that she did not bestow an embrace upon
the worthy old master.  Perhaps she had too much tact.  It is a
pretty way enough of telling one that he belongs to a past
generation, but it does tell him that not over-pleasing fact.  Like
the title of Emeritus Professor, it is a tribute to be accepted,
hardly to be longed for.

When the curtain rises again, it will show Miss Hazard in a new
character, and surrounded by a new world.




CHAPTER XXIII.

MYRTLE HAZARD AT THE CITY SCHOOL.

Mr. Bradshaw was obliged to leave town for a week or two on business
connected with the great land-claim.  On his return, feeling in
pretty good spirits, as the prospects looked favorable, he went to
make a call at The Poplars.  He asked first for Miss Hazard.

"Bliss your soul, Mr. Bridshaw," answered Mistress Kitty Fagan,
"she's been gahn nigh a wake.  It's to the city, to the big school,
they've sint her."

This announcement seemed to make a deep impression on Murray
Bradshaw, for his feelings found utterance in one of the most
energetic forms of language to which ears polite or impolite are
accustomed.  He next asked for Miss Silence, who soon presented
herself.  Mr. Bradshaw asked, in a rather excited way, "Is it
possible, Miss Withers, that your niece has quitted you to go to a
city school?"

Miss Silence answered, with her chief--mourner expression, and her
death-chamber tone: "Yes, she has left us for a season.  I trust it
may not be her destruction.  I had hoped in former years that she
would become a missionary, but I have given up all expectation of
that now.  Two whole years, from the age of four to that of six, I
had prevailed upon her to give up sugar,--the money so saved to go to
a graduate of our institution--who was afterwards----he labored among
the cannibal-islanders.  I thought she seemed to take pleasure in
this small act of self-denial, but I have since suspected that Kitty
gave her secret lumps.  It was by Mr. Gridley's advice that she went,
and by his pecuniary assistance.  What could I do?  She was bent on
going, and I was afraid she would have fits, or do something
dreadful, if I did not let her have her way.  I am afraid she will
come back to us spoiled.  She has seemed so fond of dress lately, and
once she spoke of learning--yes, Mr. Bradshaw, of learning to--dance!
I wept when I heard of it.  Yes, I wept."

That was such a tremendous thing to think of, and especially to speak
of in Mr. Bradshaw's presence, for the most pathetic image in the
world to many women is that of themselves in tears,--that it brought
a return of the same overflow, which served as a substitute for
conversation until Miss Badlam entered the apartment.

Miss Cynthia followed the same general course of remark.  They could
not help Myrtle's going if they tried.  She had always maintained
that, if they had only once broke her will when she was little, they
would have kept the upper hand of her; but her will never was broke.
They came pretty near it once, but the child would n't give in.

Miss Cynthia went to the door with Mr. Bradshaw, and the conversation
immediately became short and informal.

"Demonish pretty business!  All up for a year or more,--hey?"

Don't blame me,--I couldn't stop her."

"Give me her address,--I 'll write to her.  Any young men teach in
the school?"

"Can't tell you.  She'll write to Olive and Bathsheba, and I'll find
out all about it."

Murray Bradshaw went home and wrote a long letter to Mrs. Clymer
Ketchum, of 24 Carat Place, containing many interesting remarks and
inquiries, some of the latter relating to Madam Delacoste's
institution for the education of young ladies.

While this was going on at Oxbow Village, Myrtle was establishing
herself at the rather fashionable school to which Mr. Gridley had
recommended her.  Mrs. or Madam Delacoste's boarding-school had a
name which on the whole it deserved pretty well.  She had some very
good instructors for girls who wished to get up useful knowledge in
case they might marry professors or ministers.  They had a chance to
learn music, dancing, drawing, and the way of behaving in company.
There was a chance, too, to pick up available acquaintances, for many
rich people sent their daughters to the school, and it was something
to have been bred in their company.

There was the usual division of the scholars into a first and second
set, according to the social position, mainly depending upon the
fortune, of the families to which they belonged.  The wholesale
dealer's daughter very naturally considered herself as belonging to a
different order from the retail dealer's daughter.  The keeper of a
great hotel and the editor of a widely circulated newspaper were
considered as ranking with the wholesale dealers, and their daughters
belonged also to the untitled nobility which has the dollar for its
armorial bearing.  The second set had most of the good scholars, and
some of the prettiest girls; but nobody knew anything about their
families, who lived off the great streets and avenues, or vegetated
in country towns.

Myrtle Hazard's advent made something like a sensation.  They did not
know exactly what to make of her.  Hazard?  Hazard?  No great firm of
that name.  No leading hotel kept by any Hazard, was there?  No
newspaper of note edited by anybody called Hazard, was there?  Came
from where?  Oxbow Village.  Oh, rural district.  Yes.--Still they
could not help owning that she was handsome, a concession which of
course had to be made with reservations.

"Don't you think she's vuiry good-lookin'?" said a Boston girl to a
New York girl.  "I think she's real pooty."

"I dew, indeed.  I didn't think she was haaf so handsome the feeest
time I saw her," answered the New York girl.

"What a pity she had n't been bawn in Bawston!"

"Yes, and moved very young to Ne Yock!"

"And married a sarsaparilla man, and lived in Fiff Avenoo, and moved
in the fust society."

"Better dew that than be strong-mainded, and dew your own cook'n, and
live in your own kitch'n."

"Don't forgit to send your card when you are Mrs. Old Dr. Jacob!"

"Indeed I shaan't.  What's the name of the alley, and which bell?"
The New York girl took out a memorandum-book as if to put it down.

"Had n't you better let me write it for you, dear?" said the Boston
girl.  "It is as well to have it legible, you know."

"Take it," said the New York girl.  "There 's tew York shill'ns in it
when I hand it to you."

"Your whole quarter's allowance, I bullieve,--ain't it?" said the
Boston girl.

"Elegant manners, correct deportment, and propriety of language will
be strictly attended to in this institution.  The most correct
standards of pronunciation will be inculcated by precept and example.
It will be the special aim of the teachers to educate their pupils
out of all provincialisms, so that they may be recognized as well-
bred English scholars wherever the language is spoken in its purity."
--Extract from the Prospectus of Madam Delacoste's Boarding-school.

Myrtle Hazard was a puzzle to all the girls.  Striking, they all
agreed, but then the criticisms began.  Many of the girls chattered a
little broken French, and one of them, Miss Euphrosyne De Lacy, had
been half educated in Paris, so that she had all the phrases which
are to social operators what his cutting instruments are to the
surgeon.  Her face she allowed was handsome; but her style, according
to this oracle, was a little bourgeoise, and her air not exactly
comme il faut.  More specifically, she was guilty of contours
fortement prononces,--corsage de paysanne,--quelque chose de sauvage,
etc., etc.  This girl prided herself on her figure.

Miss Bella Pool, (La Belle Poule as the demi-Parisian girl had
christened her,) the beauty of the school, did not think so much of
Myrtle's face, but considered her figure as better than the De Lacy
girl's.

The two sets, first and second, fought over her as the Greeks and
Trojans over a dead hero, or the Yale College societies over a live
freshman.  She was nobody by her connections, it is true, so far as
they could find out, but then, on the other hand, she had the walk of
a queen, and she looked as if a few stylish dresses and a season or
two would make her a belle of the first water.  She had that air of
indifference to their little looks and whispered comments which is
surest to disarm all the critics of a small tattling community.  On
the other hand, she came to this school to learn, and not to play;
and the modest and more plainly dressed girls, whose fathers did not
sell by the cargo, or keep victualling establishments for some
hundreds of people, considered her as rather in sympathy with them
than with the daughters of the rough-and-tumble millionnaires who
were grappling and rolling over each other in the golden dust of the
great city markets.

She did not mean to belong exclusively to either of their sets.  She
came with that sense of manifold deficiencies, and eager ambition to
supply them, which carries any learner upward, as if on wings, over
the heads of the mechanical plodders and the indifferent routinists.
She learned, therefore, in a way to surprise the experienced
instructors.  Her somewhat rude sketching soon began to show
something of the artist's touch.  Her voice, which had only been
taught to warble the simplest melodies, after a little training began
to show its force and sweetness and flexibility in the airs that
enchant drawing-room audiences.  She caught with great readiness the
manner of the easiest girls, unconsciously, for she inherited old
social instincts which became nature with the briefest exercise.  Not
much license of dress was allowed in the educational establishment of
Madam Delacoste, but every girl had an opportunity to show her taste
within the conventional limits prescribed.  And Myrtle soon began to
challenge remark by a certain air she contrived to give her dresses,
and the skill with which she blended their colors.

"Tell you what, girls," said Miss Berengaria Topping, female
representative of the great dynasty that ruled over the world-famous
Planet Hotel, "she's got style, lots of it.  I call her perfectly
splendid, when she's got up in her swell clothes.  That oriole's wing
she wears in her bonnet makes her look gorgeous, she'll be a stunning
Pocahontas for the next tableau."

Miss Rose Bugbee, whose family opulence grew out of the only
merchantable article a Hebrew is never known to seek profit from,
thought she could be made presentable in the first circles if taken
in hand in good season.  So it came about that, before many weeks had
passed over her as a scholar in the great educational establishment,
she might be considered as on the whole the most popular girl in the
whole bevy of them.  The studious ones admired her for her facility
of learning, and her extraordinary appetite for every form of
instruction, and the showy girls, who were only enduring school as
the purgatory that opened into the celestial world of society,
recognized in her a very handsome young person, who would be like to
make a sensation sooner or later.

There were, however, it must be confessed, a few who considered
themselves the thickest of the cream of the school-girls, who
submitted her to a more trying ordeal than any she had yet passed.

"How many horses does your papa keep?" asked Miss Florence Smythe."
We keep nine, and a pony for Edgar."

Myrtle had to explain that she had no papa, and that they did not
keep any horses.  Thereupon Miss Florence Smythe lost her desire to
form an acquaintance, and wrote home to her mother (who was an ex-
bonnet-maker) that the school was getting common, she was afraid,--
they were letting in persons one knew nothing about.

Miss Clare Browne had a similar curiosity about the amount of plate
used in the household from which Myrtle came.  Her father had just
bought a complete silver service.  Myrtle had to own that they used a
good deal of china at her own home,--old china, which had been a
hundred years in the family, some of it.

"A hundred years old!" exclaimed Miss Clare Browne.  "What queer-
looking stuff it must be!  Why, everything in our house is just as
new and bright!  Papaa had all our pictures painted on purpose for
us.  Have you got any handsome pictures in your house?"

"We have a good many portraits of members of the family," she said,
"some of them older than the china."

"How very very odd!  What do the dear old things look like?"

"One was a great beauty in her time."

"How jolly!"

"Another was a young woman who was put to death for her religion,
--burned to ashes at the stake in Queen Mary's time."

"How very very wicked!  It was n't nice a bit, was it?  Ain't you
telling me stories?  Was that a hundred years ago?--But you 've got
some new pictures and things, have n't you?  Who furnished your
parlors?"

"My great-grandfather, or his father, I believe."

"Stuff and nonsense.  I don't believe it.  What color are your
carriage-horses?"

"Our woman, Kitty Fagan, told somebody once we didn't keep any horse
but a cow."

" Not keep any horses!  Do for pity's sake let me look at your feet."

Myrtle put out as neat a little foot as a shoemaker ever fitted with
a pair of number two.  What she would have been tempted to do with
it, if she had been a boy, we will not stop to guess.  After all, the
questions amused her quite as much as the answers instructed Miss
Clara Browne.  Of that young lady's ancestral claims to distinction
there is no need of discoursing.  Her "papaa" commonly said sir in
talking with a gentleman, and her "mammaa" would once in a while
forget, and go down the area steps instead of entering at the proper
door; but they lived behind a brown stone front, which veneers
everybody's antecedents with a facing of respectability.

Miss Clara Browne wrote home to her mother in the same terms as Miss
Florence Smythe,--that the school was getting dreadful common, and
they were letting in very queer folks.

Still another trial awaited Myrtle, and one which not one girl in a
thousand would have been so unprepared to meet.  She knew absolutely
nothing of certain things with which the vast majority of young
persons were quite familiar.

There were literary young ladies, who had read everything of Dickens
and Thackeray, and something at least of Sir Walter, and
occasionally, perhaps, a French novel, which they had better have let
alone.  One of the talking young ladies of this set began upon Myrtle
one day.

"Oh, is n't 'Pickwick' nice?" she asked.

"I don't know," Myrtle replied; "I never tasted any."

The girl stared at her as if she were a crazy creature.  "Tasted any!
Why, I mean the 'Pickwick Papers,' Dickens's story.  Don't you think
they're nice."

Poor Myrtle had to confess that she had never read them, and did n't
know anything about them.

"What! did you never read any novels?" said the young lady.

"Oh, to be sure I have," said Myrtle, blushing as she thought of the
great trunk and its contents.  "I have read 'Caleb Williams,' and
'Evelina,' and 'Tristram Shandy'" (naughty girl!), "and the 'Castle
of Otranto,' and the 'Mysteries of Udolpho,' and the 'Vicar of
Wakefield,' and 'Don Quixote'--"

The young lady burst out laughing.  "Stop! stop! for mercy's sake,"
she cried.  "You must be somebody that's been dead and buried and
come back to life again.  Why you're Rip Van Winkle in a petticoat!
You ought to powder your hair and wear patches."

"We've got the oddest girl here," this young lady wrote home.  "She
has n't read any book that is n't a thousand years old.  One of the
girls says she wears a trilobite for a breastpin; some horrid old
stone, I believe that is, that was a bug ever so long ago.  Her name,
she says, is Myrtle Hazard, but I call her Rip Van Myrtle."

Notwithstanding the quiet life which these young girls were compelled
to lead, they did once in a while have their gatherings, at which a
few young gentlemen were admitted.  One of these took place about a
month after Myrtle had joined the school.  The girls were all in
their best, and by and by they were to have a tableau.  Myrtle came
out in all her force.  She dressed herself as nearly as she dared
like the handsome woman of the past generation whom she resembled.
The very spirit of the dead beauty seemed to animate every feature
and every movement of the young girl whose position in the school was
assured from that moment.  She had a good solid foundation to build
upon in the jealousy of two or three of the leading girls of the
style of pretensions illustrated by some of their talk which has been
given.  There is no possible success without some opposition as a
fulcrum: force is always aggressive, and crowds something or other,
if it does not hit or trample on it.

The cruelest cut of all was the remark attributed to Mr. Livingston
Jerkins, who was what the opposition girls just referred to called
the great "swell" among the privileged young gentlemen who were
present at the gathering.

"Rip Van Myrtle, you call that handsome girl, do you, Miss Clara?  By
Jove, she's the stylishest of the whole lot, to say nothing of being
a first-class beauty.  Of course you know I except one, Miss Clara.
If a girl can go to sleep and wake up after twenty years looking like
that, I know a good many who had better begin their nap without
waiting.  If I were Florence Smythe, I'd try it, and begin now,--eh,
Clara?"

Miss Browne felt the praise of Myrtle to be slightly alleviated by
the depreciation of Miss Smythe, who had long been a rival of her
own.  A little later in the evening Miss Smythe enjoyed almost
precisely the same sensation, produced in a very economical way by
Mr. Livingston Jenkins's repeating pretty nearly the same sentiments
to her, only with a change in the arrangement of the proper names.
The two young ladies were left feeling comparatively comfortable with
regard to each other, each intending to repeat Mr. Livingston
Jenkins's remark about her friend to such of her other friends as
enjoyed clever sayings, but not at all comfortable with reference to
Myrtle Hazard, who was evidently considered by the leading "swell" of
their circle as the most noticeable personage of the assembly.  The
individual exception in each case did very well as a matter of
politeness, but they knew well enough what he meant.

It seemed to Myrtle Hazard, that evening, that she felt the bracelet
on her wrist glow with a strange, unaccustomed warmth.  It was as if
it had just been unclasped from the arm of a yohng woman full of red
blood and tingling all over with swift nerve-currents.  Life had
never looked to her as it did that evening.  It was the swan's first
breasting the water,--bred on the desert sand, with vague dreams of
lake and river, and strange longings as the mirage came and
dissolved, and at length afloat upon the sparkling wave.  She felt as
if she had for the first time found her destiny.  It was to please,
and so to command, to rule with gentle sway in virtue of the royal
gift of beauty,--to enchant with the commonest exercise of speech,
through the rare quality of a voice which could not help being always
gracious and winning, of a manner which came to her as an inheritance
of which she had just found the title.  She read in the eyes of all
that she was more than any other the centre of admiration.  Blame her
who may, the world was a very splendid vision as it opened before her
eyes in its long vista of pleasures and of triumphs.  How different
the light of these bright saloons from the glimmer of the dim chamber
at The Poplars!  Silence Withers was at that very moment looking at
the portraits of Anne Holyoake and of Judith Pride.  "The old picture
seems to me to be fading faster than ever," she was thinking.  But
when she held her lamp before the other, it seemed to her that the
picture never was so fresh before, and that the proud smile upon its
lips was more full of conscious triumph than she remembered it.  A
reflex, doubtless, of her own thoughts, for she believed that the
martyr was weeping even in heaven over her lost descendant, and that
the beauty, changed to the nature of the malignant spiritual company
with which she had long consorted in the under-world, was pleasing
herself with the thought that Myrtle was in due time to bring her
news from the Satanic province overhead, where she herself had so
long indulged in the profligacy of embonpoint and loveliness.

The evening at the school-party was to terminate with some tableaux.
The girl who had suggested that Myrtle would look "stunning" or
"gorgeous" or "jolly," or whatever the expression was, as Pocahontas,
was not far out of the way, and it was so evident to the managing
heads that she would make a fine appearance in that character, that
the "Rescue of Captain John Smith" was specially got up to show her
off.

Myrtle had sufficient reason to believe that there was a hint of
Indian blood in her veins.  It was one of those family legends which
some of the members are a little proud of, and others are willing to
leave uninvestigated.  But with Myrtle it was a fixed belief that she
felt perfectly distinct currents of her ancestral blood at intervals,
and she had sometimes thought there were instincts and vague
recollections which must have come from the old warriors and hunters
and their dusky brides.  The Indians who visited the neighborhood
recognized something of their own race in her dark eyes, as the
reader may remember they told the persons who were searching after
her.  It had almost frightened her sometimes to find how like a wild
creature she felt when alone in the woods.  Her senses had much of
that delicacy for which the red people are noted, and she often
thought she could follow the trail of an enemy, if she wished to
track one through the forest, as unerringly as if she were a Pequot
or a Mohegan.

It was a strange feeling that came over Myrtle, as they dressed her
for the part she was to take.  Had she never worn that painted robe
before?  Was it the first time that these strings of wampum had ever
rattled upon her neck and arms?  And could it be that the plume of
eagle's feathers with which they crowned her dark, fast-lengthening
locks had never shadowed her forehead until now?  She felt herself
carried back into the dim ages when the wilderness was yet untrodden
save by the feet of its native lords.  Think of her wild fancy as we
may, she felt as if that dusky woman of her midnight vision on the
river were breathing for one hour through her lips.  If this belief
had lasted, it is plain enough where it would have carried her.  But
it came into her imagination and vivifying consciousness with the
putting on of her unwonted costume, and might well leave her when she
put it off.  It is not for us, who tell only what happened, to solve
these mysteries of the seeming admission of unhoused souls into the
fleshly tenements belonging to air-breathing personalities.  A very
little more, and from that evening forward the question would have
been treated in full in all the works on medical jurisprudence
published throughout the limits of Christendom.  The story must be
told or we should not be honest with the reader.

TABLEAU 1.  Captain John Smith (Miss Euphrosyne de Lacy) was to be
represented prostrate and bound, ready for execution; Powhatan (Miss
Florence Smythe) sitting upon a log; savages with clubs (Misses Clara
Browne, A. Van Boodle, E. Van Boodle, Heister, Booster, etc., etc.)
standing around; Pocahontas holding the knife in her hand, ready to
cut the cords with which Captain John Smith is bound.--Curtain.

TABLEAU 2.  Captain John Smith released and kneeling before
Pocahontas, whose hand is extended in the act of raising him and
presenting him to her father.  Savages in various attitudes of
surprise.  Clubs fallen from their hands.  Strontian flame to be
kindled.--Curtain.

This was a portion of the programme for the evening, as arranged
behind the scenes.  The first part went off with wonderful eclat, and
at its close there were loud cries for Pocahontas.  She appeared for
a moment.  Bouquets were flung to her; and a wreath, which one of the
young ladies had expected for herself in another part, was tossed
upon the stage, and laid at her feet.  The curtain fell.

"Put the wreath on her for the next tableau," some of them whispered,
just as the curtain was going to rise, and one of the girls hastened
to place it upon her head.

The disappointed young lady could not endure it, and, in a spasm of
jealous passion, sprang at Myrtle, snatched it from her head, and
trampled it under her feet at the very instant the curtain was
rising.  With a cry which some said had the blood-chilling tone of an
Indian's battle-shriek, Myrtle caught the knife up, and raised her
arm against the girl who had thus rudely assailed her.  The girl sank
to the ground, covering her eyes in her terror.  Myrtle, with her arm
still lifted, and the blade glistening in her hand, stood over her,
rigid as if she had been suddenly changed to stone.  Many of those
looking on thought all this was a part of the show, and were thrilled
with the wonderful acting.  Before those immediately around her had
had time to recover from the palsy of their fright Myrtle had flung
the knife away from her, and was kneeling, her head bowed and her
hands crossed upon her breast.  The audience went into a rapture of
applause as the curtain came suddenly down; but Myrtle had forgotten
all but the dread peril she had just passed, and was thanking God
that his angel--her own protecting spirit, as it seemed to her had
stayed the arm which a passion such as her nature had never known,
such as she believed was alien to her truest self, had lifted with
deadliest purpose.  She alone knew how extreme the danger had been.
"She meant to scare her,--that 's all," they said.  But Myrtle tore
the eagle's feathers from her hair, and stripped off her colored
beads, and threw off her painted robe.  The metempsychosis was far
too real for her to let her wear the semblance of the savage from
whom, as she believed, had come the lawless impulse at the thought of
which her soul recoiled in horror.

"Pocahontas has got a horrid headache," the managing young ladies
gave it out, "and can't come to time for the last tableau."  So this
all passed over, not only without loss of credit to Myrtle, but with
no small addition to her local fame,--for it must have been acting;
"and was n't it stunning to see her with that knife, looking as if
she was going to stab Bells, or to scalp her, or something?"

As Master Gridley had predicted, and as is the case commonly with
new-comers at colleges and schools, Myrtle had come first in contact
with those who were least agreeable to meet.  The low-bred youth who
amuse themselves with scurvy tricks on freshmen, and the vulgar girls
who try to show off their gentility to those whom they think less
important than themselves, are exceptions in every institution; but
they make themselves odiously prominent before the quiet and modest
young people have had time to gain the new scholar's confidence.
Myrtle found friends in due time, some of them daughters of rich
people, some poor girls, who came with the same sincerity of purpose
as herself.  But not one was her match in the facility of acquiring
knowledge.  Not one promised to make such a mark in society, if she
found an opening into its loftier circles.  She was by no means
ignorant of her natural gifts, and she cultivated them with the
ambition which would not let her rest.

During her stay at the great school, she made but one visit to Oxbow
Village.  She did not try to startle the good people with her
accomplishments, but they were surprised at the change which had
taken place in her.  Her dress was hardly more showy, for she was but
a school-girl, but it fitted her more gracefully.  She had gained a
softness of expression, and an ease in conversation, which produced
their effect on all with whom she came in contact.  Her aunt's voice
lost something of its plaintiveness in talking with her.  Miss
Cynthia listened with involuntary interest to her stories of school
and school-mates.  Master Byles Gridley accepted her as the great
success of his life, and determined to make her his chief heiress, if
there was any occasion for so doing.  Cyprian told Bathsheba that
Myrtle must come to be a great lady.  Gifted Hopkins confessed to
Susan Posey that he was afraid of her, since she had been to the
great city school.  She knew too much and looked too much like a
queen, for a village boy to talk with.

Mr. William Murray Bradshaw tried all his fascinations upon her, but
she parried compliments so well, and put off all his nearer advances
so dexterously, that he could not advance beyond the region of florid
courtesy, and never got a chance, if so disposed, to risk a question
which he would not ask rashly, believing that, if Myrtle once said
No, there would be little chance of her ever saying Yes.




CHAPTER XXIV.

MUSTERING OF FORCES.

Not long after the tableau performance had made Myrtle Hazard's name
famous in the school and among the friends of the scholars, she
received the very flattering attention of a call from Mrs. Clymer
Ketchum, of 24 Carat Place.  This was in consequence of a suggestion
from Mr. Livingston Jenkins, a particular friend of the family.

"They've got a demonish splendid school-girl over there," he said to
that lady, "made the stunningest looking Pocahontas at the show there
the other day.  Demonish plucky looking filly as ever you saw. Had a
row with another girl,--gave the war-whoop, and went at her with a
knife.  Festive,--hey?  Say she only meant to scare her,--looked as
if she meant to stick her, anyhow.  Splendid style.  Why can't you go
over to the shop and make 'em trot her out?"

The lady promised Mr. Livingston Jenkins that she certainly would,
just as soon as she could find a moment's leisure,--which, as she had
nothing in the world to do, was not likely to be very soon.  Myrtle
in the mean time was busy with her studies, little dreaming what an
extraordinary honor was awaiting her.

That rare accident in the lives of people who have nothing to do, a
leisure morning, did at last occur.  An elegant carriage, with a
coachman in a wonderful cape, seated on a box lofty as a throne, and
wearing a hat-band as brilliant as a coronet, stopped at the portal
of Madam Delacoste's establishment.  A card was sent in bearing the.
open sesame of Mrs. Clymer Ketchum, the great lady of 24 Carat Place.
Miss Myrtle Hazard was summoned as a matter of course, and the
fashionable woman and the young girl sat half an hour together in
lively conversation.

Myrtle was fascinated by her visitor, who had that flattering manner
which, to those not experienced in the world's ways, seems to imply
unfathomable depths of disinterested devotion.  Then it was so
delightful to look upon a perfectly appointed woman,--one who was as
artistically composed as a poem or an opera,--in whose costume a kind
of various rhythm undulated in one fluent harmony, from the spray
that nodded on her bonnet to the rosette that blossomed on her
sandal.  As for the lady, she was captivated with Myrtle.  There is
nothing that your fashionable woman, who has ground and polished her
own spark of life into as many and as glittering social facets as it
will bear, has a greater passion for than a large rough diamond,
which knows nothing of the sea of light it imprisons, and which it
will be her pride to have cut into a brilliant under her own eye, and
to show the world for its admiration and her own reflected glory.
Mrs. Clymer Ketchum had taken the entire inventory of Myrtle's
natural endowments before the interview was over.  She had no
marriageable children, and she was thinking what a killing bait
Myrtle would be at one of her stylish parties.

She soon got another letter from Mr. William Murray Bradshaw, which
explained the interest he had taken in Madam Delacoste's school,--all
which she knew pretty nearly beforehand, for she had found out a good
part of Myrtle's history in the half-hour they had spent in company.

"I had a particular reason for my inquiries about the school," he
wrote.  "There is a young girl there I take an interest in.  She is
handsome and interesting; and--though it is a shame to mention such a
thing has possibilities in the way of fortune not to be undervalued.
Why can't you make her acquaintance and be civil to her?  A country
girl, but fine old stock, and will make a figure some time or other,
I tell you.  Myrtle Hazard,--that's her name.  A mere schoolgirl.
Don't be malicious and badger me about her, but be polite to her.
Some of these country girls have got 'blue blood' in them, let me
tell you, and show it plain enough."

("In huckleberry season!") said Mrs. Ciymer Ketchum, in a
parenthesis,--and went on reading.

"Don't think I'm one of your love-in-a-cottage sort, to have my head
turned by a village beauty.  I've got a career before me, Mrs. K.,
and I know it.  But this is one of my pets, and I want you to keep an
eye on her.  Perhaps when she leaves school you wouldn't mind asking
her to come and stay with you a little while.  Possibly I may come
and see how she is getting on if you do,--won't that tempt you, Mrs.
C. K.?"

Mrs. Clymer Ketchum wrote back to her relative how she had already
made the young lady's acquaintance.

"Livingston Jerkins (you remember him) picked her out of the whole
lot of girls as the 'prettiest filly in the stable.'  That's his
horrid way of talking.  But your young milkmaid is really charming,
and will come into form like a Derby three-year-old.  There, now,
I've caught that odious creature's horse-talk, myself.  You're dead
in love with this girl, Murray, you know you are.

"After all, I don't know but you're right.  You would make a good
country lawyer enough, I don't doubt.  I used to think you had your
ambitions, but never mind.  If you choose to risk yourself on
'possibilities,' it is not my affair, and she's a beauty, there's no
mistake about that.

"There are some desirable partis at the school with your dulcinea.
There 's Rose Bugbee.  That last name is a good one to be married
from.  Rose is a nice girl,--there are only two of them.  The estate
will cut up like one of the animals it was made out of, you know,--
the sandwich-quadruped.  Then there 's Berengaria.  Old Topping owns
the Planet Hotel among other things,--so big, they say, there's
always a bell ringing from somebody's room day and night the year
round.  Only child--unit and six ciphers carries diamonds loose in
her pocket--that's the story--good-looking--lively--a little slangy
called Livingston Jerkins 'Living Jingo' to his face one day.  I want
you to see my lot before you do anything serious.  You owe something
to the family, Mr. William Murray Bradshaw!  But you must suit
yourself, after all: if you are contented with a humble position in
life, it is nobody's business that I know of.  Only I know what life
is, Murray B.  Getting married is jumping overboard, any way you look
at it, and if you must save some woman from drowning an old maid, try
to find one with a cork jacket, or she 'll carry you down with her."

Murray Bradshaw was calculating enough, but he shook his head over
this letter.  It was too demonish cold-blooded for him, he said to
himself.  (Men cannot pardon women for saying aloud what they do not
hesitate to think in silence themselves.)  Never mind,--he must have
Mrs. Clymer Ketchum's house and influence for his own purposes.
Myrtle Hazard must become her guest, and then if circumstances were
favorable, he was certain obtaining her aid in his project.

The opportunity to invite Myrtle to the great mansion presented
itself unexpectedly.  Early in the spring of 1861 there were some
cases of sickness in Madam Delacoste's establishment, which led to
closing the school for a while.  Mrs. Clymer Ketchum took advantage
of the dispersion of the scholars to ask Myrtle to come and spend
some weeks with her.  There were reasons why this was more agreeable
to the young girl than returning to Oxbow Village, and she very
gladly accepted the invitation.

It was very remarkable that a man living as Master Byles Gridley had
lived for so long a time should all at once display such liberality
as he showed to a young woman who had no claim upon him, except that
he had rescued her from the consequences of her own imprudence and
warned her against impending dangers.  Perhaps he cared more for her
than if the obligation had been the other way,--students of human
nature say it is commonly so.  At any rate, either he had ampler
resources than it was commonly supposed, or he was imprudently giving
way to his generous impulses, or he thought he was making advances
which would in due time be returned to him.  Whatever the reason was,
he furnished her with means, not only for her necessary expenses, but
sufficient to afford her many of the elegances which she would be
like to want in the fashionable society with which she was for a
short time to mingle.

Mrs. Clymer Ketchum was so well pleased with the young lady she was
entertaining, that she thought it worth while to give a party while
Myrtle was staying with her.  She had her jealousies and rivalries,
as women of the world will, sometimes, and these may have had their
share in leading her to take the trouble a large party involved.  She
was tired of the airs of Mrs. Pinnikle, who was of the great Apex
family, and her terribly accomplished daughter Rhadamartha, and
wanted to crush the young lady, and jaundice her mother, with a girl
twice as brilliant and ten times handsomer.  She was very willing,
also, to take the nonsense out of the Capsheaf girls, who thought
themselves the most stylish personages of their city world, and would
bite their lips well to see themselves distanced by a country miss.

In the mean time circumstances were promising to bring into Myrtle's
neighborhood several of her old friends and admirers.  Mrs. Clymer
Ketchum had written to Murray Bradshaw that she had asked his pretty
milkmaid to come and stay awhile with her, but he had been away on
business, and only arrived in the city a day or two before the party.
But other young fellows had found out the attractions of the girl who
was "hanging out at the Clymer Ketchum concern," and callers were
plenty, reducing tete-a-tetes in a corresponding ratio.  He did get
one opportunity, however, and used it well.  They had so many things
to talk about in common, that she could not help finding him good
company.  She might well be pleased, for he was an adept in the
curious art of being agreeable, as other people are in chess or
billiards, and had made a special study of her tastes, as a physician
studies a patient's constitution.  What he wanted was to get her
thoroughly interested in himself, and to maintain her in a receptive
condition until such time as he should be ready for a final move.
Any day might furnish the decisive motive; in the mean time he wished
only to hold her as against all others.

It was well for her, perhaps, that others had flattered her into a
certain consciousness of her own value.  She felt her veins full of
the same rich blood as that which had flushed the cheeks of handsome
Judith in the long summer of her triumph.  Whether it was vanity, or
pride, or only the instinctive sense of inherited force and
attraction, it was the best of defences.  The golden bracelet on her
wrist seemed to have brought as much protection with it as if it had
been a shield over her heart.


But far away in Oxbow Village other events were in preparation.  The
"fugitive pieces" of Mr. Gifted Hopkins had now reached a number so
considerable, that, if collected and printed in large type, with
plenty of what the unpleasant printers call "fat,"--meaning thereby
blank spaces,--upon a good, substantial, not to say thick paper, they
might perhaps make a volume which would have substance enough to bear
the title, printed lengthwise along the back, "Hopkins's Poems."
Such a volume that author had in contemplation.  It was to be the
literary event of the year 1861.

He could not mature such a project, one which he had been for some
time contemplating, without consulting Mr. Byles Gridley, who, though
he had not unfrequently repressed the young poet's too ardent
ambition, had yet always been kind and helpful.

Mr. Gridley was seated in his large arm-chair, indulging himself in
the perusal of a page or two of his own work before repeatedly
referred to.  His eye was glistening, for it had dust rested on the
following passage:

"There is infinite pathos in unsuccessful authorship.  The book that
perishes unread is the deaf mute of literature.  The great asylum of
Oblivion is full of such, making inaudible signs to each other in
leaky garrets and unattainable dusty upper shelves."

He shut the book, for the page grew a little dim as he finished this
elegiac sentence, and sighed to think how much more keenly he felt
its truth than when it was written,--than on that memorable morning
when he saw the advertisement in all the papers, "This day published,
'Thoughts on the Universe.' By Byles Gridley, A. M."

At that moment he heard a knock at his door.  He closed his eyelids
forcibly for ten seconds, opened them, and said cheerfully,
"Come in!"

Gifted Hopkins entered.  He had a collection of manuscripts in his
hands which it seemed to him would fill a vast number of pages.  He
did not know that manuscript is to type what fresh dandelions are to
the dish of greens that comes to table, of which last Nurse Byloe,
who considered them very wholesome spring grazing for her patients,
used to say that they "biled down dreadful."

"I have brought the autographs of my poems, Master Gridley, to
consult you about making arrangements for publication.  They have
been so well received by the public and the leading critics of this
part of the State, that I think of having them printed in a volume.
I am going to the city for that purpose.  My mother has given her
consent.  I wish to ask you several business questions.  Shall I part
with the copyright for a downright sum of money, which I understand
some prefer doing, or publish on shares, or take a percentage on the
sales?  These, I believe, are the different ways taken by authors."

Mr. Gridley was altogether too considerate to reply with the words
which would most naturally have come to his lips.  He waited as if he
were gravely pondering the important questions just put to him, all
the while looking at Gifted with a tenderness which no one who had
not buried one of his soul's children could have felt for a young
author trying to get clothing for his new-born intellectual
offspring.

"I think," he said presently, "you had better talk with an
intelligent and liberal publisher, and be guided by his advice.  I
can put you in correspondence with such a person, and you had better
trust him than me a great deal.  Why don't you send your manuscript
by mail?"

"What, Mr. Gridley?  Trust my poems, some of which are unpublished,
to the post-office?  No, sir, I could never make up my mind to such a
risk.  I mean to go to the city myself, and read them to some of the
leading publishers.  I don't want to pledge myself to any one of
them.  I should like to set them bidding against each other for the
copyright, if I sell it at all."

Mr. Gridley gazed upon the innocent youth with a sweet wonder in his
eyes that made him look like an angel, a little damaged in the
features by time, but full of celestial feelings.

"It will cost you something to make this trip, Gifted.  Have you the
means to pay for your journey and your stay at a city hotel?"

Gifted blushed.  "My mother has laid by a small sum for me," he said.
"She knows some of my poems by heart, and she wants to see them all
in print."

Master Gridley closed his eyes very firmly again, as if thinking, and
opened them as soon as the foolish film had left them.  He had read
many a page of "Thoughts on the Universe" to his own old mother,
long, long years ago, and she had often listened with tears of modest
pride that Heaven had favored her with a son so full of genius.

"I 'll tell you what, Gifted," he said.  "I have been thinking for a
good while that I would make a visit to the city, and if you have
made up your mind to try what you can do with the publishers, I will
take you with me as a companion.  It will be a saving to you and your
good mother, for I shall bear the expenses of the expedition."

Gifted Hopkins came very near going down on his knees.  He was so
overcome with gratitude that it seemed as if his very coattails
wagged with his emotion.

"Take it quietly," said Master Gridley.  "Don't make a fool of
yourself.  Tell your mother to have some clean shirts and things
ready for you, and we will be off day after to-morrow morning."

Gifted hastened to impart the joyful news to his mother, and to break
the fact to Susan Posey that he was about to leave them for a while,
and rush into the deliriums and dangers of the great city.

Susan smiled.  Gifted hardly knew whether to be pleased with her
sympathy, or vexed that she did not take his leaving more to heart.
The smile held out bravely for about a quarter of a minute.  Then
there came on a little twitching at the corners of the mouth.  Then.
the blue eyes began to shine with a kind of veiled glimmer.  Then the
blood came up into her cheeks with a great rush, as if the heart had
sent up a herald with a red flag from the citadel to know what was
going on at the outworks.  The message that went back was of
discomfiture and capitulation.  Poor Susan was overcome, and gave
herself up to weeping and sobbing.

The sight was too much for the young poet.  In a wild burst of
passion he seized her hand, and pressed it to his lips, exclaiming,
"Would that you could be mine forever!" and Susan forgot all that she
ought to have remembered, and, looking half reproachfully but half
tenderly through her tears, said, in tones of infinite sweetness, "O
Gifted!"




CHAPTER XXV.

THE POET AND THE PUBLISHER.

It was settled that Master Byles Gridley and Mr. Gifted Hopkins
should leave early in the morning of the day appointed, to take the
nearest train to the city.  Mrs. Hopkins labored hard to get them
ready, so that they might make a genteel appearance among the great
people whom they would meet in society.  She brushed up Mr. Gridley's
best black suit, and bound the cuffs of his dress-coat, which were
getting a little worried.  She held his honest-looking hat to the
fire, and smoothed it while it was warm, until one would have thought
it had just been ironed by the hatter himself.  She had his boots and
shoes brought into a more brilliant condition than they had ever
known: if Gifted helped, it was to his credit as much as if he had
shown his gratitude by polishing off a copy of verses in praise of
his benefactor.

When she had got Mr. Gridley's encumbrances in readiness for the
journey, she devoted herself to fitting out her son Gifted.  First,
she had down from the garret a capacious trunk, of solid wood, but
covered with leather, and adorned with brass-headed nails, by the
cunning disposition of which, also, the paternal initials stood out
on the rounded lid, in the most conspicuous manner.  It was his
father's trunk, and the first thing that went into it, as the widow
lifted the cover, and the smothering shut-up smell struck an old
chord of associations, was a single tear-drop.  How well she
remembered the time when she first unpacked it for her young husband,
and the white shirt bosoms showed their snowy plaits!  O dear, dear!

But women decant their affection, sweet and sound, out of the old
bottles into the new ones,--off from the lees of the past generation,
clear and bright, into the clean vessels just made ready to receive
it.  Gifted Hopkins was his mother's idol, and no wonder.  She had
not only the common attachment of a parent for him, as her offspring,
but she felt that her race was to be rendered illustrious by his
genius, and thought proudly of the time when some future biographer
would mention her own humble name, to be held in lasting remembrance
as that of the mother of Hopkins.

So she took great pains to equip this brilliant but inexperienced
young man with everything he could by any possibility need during his
absence.  The great trunk filled itself until it bulged with its
contents like a boa-constrictor who has swallowed his blanket.  Best
clothes and common clothes, thick clothes and thin clothes, flannels
and linens, socks and collars, with handkerchiefs enough to keep the
pickpockets busy for a week, with a paper of gingerbread and some
lozenges for gastralgia, and "hot drops," and ruled paper to write
letters on, and a little Bible, and a phial with hiera picra, and
another with paregoric, and another with "camphire" for sprains and
bruises,

--Gifted went forth equipped for every climate from the tropic to the
pole, and armed against every malady from Ague to Zoster.  He carried
also the paternal watch, a solid silver bull's-eye, and a large
pocketbook, tied round with a long tape, and, by way of precaution,
pinned into his breast-pocket.  He talked about having a pistol, in
case he were attacked by any of the ruffians who are so numerous in
the city, but Mr. Gridley told him, No! he would certainly shoot
himself, and he shouldn't think of letting him take a pistol.

They went forth, Mentor and Telemachus, at the appointed time, to
dare the perils of the railroad and the snares of the city.  Mrs.
Hopkins was firm up to near the last moment, when a little quiver in
her voice set her eyes off, and her face broke up all at once, so
that she had to hide it behind her handkerchief.  Susan Posey showed
the truthfulness of her character in her words to Gifted at parting.
"Farewell," she said, "and think of me sometimes while absent.  My
heart is another's, but my friendship, Gifted--my friendship--"

Both were deeply affected.  He took her hand and would have raised it
to his lips; but she did not forget herself, and gently withdrew it,
exclaiming, "O Gifted!" this time with a tone of tender reproach
which made him feel like a profligate.  He tore himself away, and
when at a safe distance flung her a kiss, which she rewarded with a
tearful smile.

Master Byles Gridley must have had some good dividends from some of
his property of late.  There is no other way of accounting for the
handsome style in which he did things on their arrival in the city.
He went to a tailor's and ordered a new suit to be sent home as soon
as possible, for he knew his wardrobe was a little rusty.  He looked
Gifted over from head to foot, and suggested such improvements as
would recommend him to the fastidious eyes of the selecter sort of
people, and put him in his own tailor's hands, at the same time
saying that all bills were to be sent to him, B. Gridley, Esq.,
parlor No. 6, at the Planet Hotel.  Thus it came to pass that in
three days from their arrival they were both in an eminently
presentable condition.  In the mean time the prudent Mr. Gridley had
been keeping the young man busy, and amusing himself by showing him
such of the sights of the city and its suburbs as he thought would
combine instruction with entertainment.

When they were both properly equipped and ready for the best company,
Mr. Gridley said to the young poet, who had found it very hard to
contain his impatience, that they would now call together on the
publisher to whom he wished to introduce him, and they set out
accordingly.

"My name is Gridley," he said with modest gravity, as he entered the
publisher's private room.  "I have a note of introduction here from
one of your authors, as I think he called himself, a very popular
writer for whom you publish."

The publisher rose and came forward in the most cordial and
respectful manner.  "Mr. Gridley?  Professor Byles Gridley,--author
of 'Thoughts on the Universe'?"

The brave-hearted old man colored as if he had been a young girl.
His dead book rose before him like an apparition.  He groped in
modest confusion for an answer.  "A child I buried long ago, my dear
sir," he said.  "Its title-page was its tombstone.  I have brought
this young friend with me,--this is Mr. Gifted Hopkins of Oxbow
Village,--who wishes to converse with you about--"

"I have come, sir--" the young poet began, interrupting him.

"Let me look at your manuscript, if you please, Mr. Popkins," said
the publisher, interrupting in his turn.

"Hopkins, if you please, sir," Gifted suggested mildly, proceeding to
extract the manuscript, which had got wedged into his pocket, and
seemed to be holding on with all its might.  He was wondering all the
time over the extraordinary clairvoyance of the publisher, who had
looked through so many thick folds, broadcloth, lining, brown paper,
and seen his poems lying hidden in his breast-pocket.  The idea that
a young person coming on such an errand should have to explain his
intentions would have seemed very odd to the publisher.  He knew the
look which belongs to this class of enthusiasts just as a horse-
dealer knows the look of a green purchaser with the equine fever
raging in his veins.  If a young author had come to him with a scrap
of manuscript hidden in his boots, like Major Andre's papers, the
publisher would have taken one glance at him and said, "Out with it!"

While he was battling for the refractory scroll with his pocket,
which turned half wrong side out, and acted as things always do when
people are nervous and in a hurry, the publisher directed his
conversation again to Master Byles Gridley.

"A remarkable book, that of yours, Mr. Gridley, would have a great
run if it were well handled.  Came out twenty years too soon,--that
was the trouble.  One of our leading scholars was speaking of it to
me the other day.  'We must have a new edition,' he said; people are
just ripe for that book.'  Did you ever think of that?  Change the
form of it a little, and give it a new title, and it will be a
popular book.  Five thousand or more, very likely."

Mr. Gridley felt as if he had been rapidly struck on the forehead
with a dozen distinct blows from a hammer not quite big enough to
stun him.  He sat still without saying a word.  He had forgotten for
the moment all about poor Gifted Hopkins, who had got out his
manuscript at last, and was calming the disturbed corners of it.
Coming to himself a little, he took a large and beautiful silk
handkerchief, one of his new purchases, from his pocket, and applied
it to his face, for the weather seemed to have grown very warm all at
once.  Then he remembered the errand on which he had come, and
thought of this youth, who had got to receive his first hard lesson
in life, and whom he had brought to this kind man that it should be
gently administered.

"You surprise me," he said,--"you surprise me.  Dead and buried.
Dead and buried.  I had sometimes thought that--at some future
period, after I was gone, it might--but I hardly know what to say
about your suggestions.  But here is my young friend, Mr. Hopkins,
who would like to talk with you, and I will leave him in your hands.
I am at the Planet Hotel, if you should care to call upon me.  Good
morning.  Mr. Hopkins will explain everything to you more at his
ease, without me, I am confident."

Master Gridley could not quite make up his mind to stay through the
interview between the young poet and the publisher.  The flush of
hope was bright in Gifted's eye and cheek, and the good man knew that
young hearts are apt to be over-sanguine, and that one who enters a
shower-bath often feels very differently from the same person when he
has pulled the string.

"I have brought you my Poems in the original autographs, sir," said
Mr. Gifted Hopkins.

He laid the manuscript on the table, caressing the leaves still with
one hand, as loath to let it go.

"What disposition had you thought of making of them?" the publisher
asked, in a pleasant tone.  He was as kind a man as lived, though he
worked the chief engine in a chamber of torture.

"I wish to read you a few specimens of the poems," he said, "with
reference to their proposed publication in a volume."

"By all means," said the kind publisher, who determined to be very
patient with the protege of the hitherto little-known, but remarkable
writer, Professor Gridley.  At the same time he extended his foot in
an accidental sort of way, and pressed it on the right hand knob of
three which were arranged in a line beneath the table.  A little bell
in a distant apartment--the little bell marked C--gave one slight
note; loud enough to start a small boy up, who looked at the clock,
and knew that he was to go and call the publisher in just twenty-five
minutes.  "A, five minutes; B, ten minutes; C, twenty-five minutes
";--that was the youngster's working formula.  Mr. Hopkins was
treated to the full allowance of time, as being introduced by
Professor Gridley.

The young man laid open the manuscript so that the title-page,
written out very handsomely in his own hand, should win the eye of
the publisher.


               BLOSSOMS OF THE SOUL.
           A WREATH OF VERSE; Original.

               BY GIFTED HOPKINS.

"a youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown."--Gray.

"Shall I read you some of the rhymed pieces first, or some of the
blank-verse poems, sir?" Gifted asked.

"Read what you think is best,--a specimen of your first-class style
of composition."

"I will read you the very last poem I have written," he said, and he
began:

     "THE TRIUMPH OF SONG.

"I met that gold-haired maiden, all too dear;
And I to her: Lo!  thou art very fair,
Fairer than all the ladies in the world
That fan the sweetened air with scented fans,
And I am scorched with exceeding love,
Yea, crisped till my bones are dry as straw.
Look not away with that high-arched brow,
But turn its whiteness that I may behold,
And lift thy great eyes till they blaze on mine,
And lay thy finger on thy perfect mouth,
And let thy lucent ears of careen pearl
Drink in the murmured music of my soul,
As the lush grass drinks in the globed dew;
For I have many scrolls of sweetest rhyme
I will unroll and make thee glad to hear.

"Then she: O shaper of the marvellous phrase
That openeth woman's heart as Both a key,
I dare not hear thee--lest the bolt should slide
That locks another's heart within my own.
Go, leave me,--and she let her eyelids fall,
And the great tears rolled from her large blue eyes.

"Then I: If thou not hear me, I shall die,
Yea, in my desperate mood may lift my hand
And do myself a hurt no leach can mend;
For poets ever were of dark resolve,
And swift stern deed

"That maiden heard no more,
But spike: Alas! my heart is very weak,
And but for--Stay!  And if some dreadful morn,
After great search and shouting thorough the wold,
We found thee missing,--strangled,--drowned i' the mere,
Then should I go distraught and be clean mad!

"O poet, read!  read all thy wondrous scrolls.
Yea, read the verse that maketh glad to hear!
Then I began and read two sweet, brief hours,
And she forgot all love save only mine!"

"Is all this from real life?" asked the publisher.

"It--no, sir--not exactly from real life--that is, the leading female
person is not wholly fictitious--and the incident is one which might
have happened.  Shall I read you the poems referred to in the one you
have just heard, sir?"

"Allow me, one moment.  Two hours' reading, I think, you said.  I
fear I shall hardly be able to spare quite time to hear them a11.
Let me ask what you intend doing with these productions, Mr.--- rr
Poplins."

"Hopkins, if you please, sir, not Poplins," said Gifted, plaintively.
He expressed his willingness to dispose of the copyright, to publish
on shares, or perhaps to receive a certain percentage on the profits.

"Suppose we take a glass of wine together, Mr.--Hopkins, before we
talk business," the publisher said, opening a little cupboard and
taking therefrom a decanter and two glasses.  He saw the young man
was looking nervous.  He waited a few minutes, until the wine had
comforted his epigastrium, and diffused its gentle glow through his
unspoiled and consequently susceptible organisation.

"Come with me," he said.

Gifted followed him into a dingy apartment in the attic, where one
sat at a great table heaped and piled with manuscripts.  By him was a
huge basket, ha'f full of manuscripts also.  As they entered he
dropped another manuscript into the basket and looked up.

"Tell me," said Gifted, "what are these papers, and who is he that
looks upon them and drops them into the basket?"

"These are the manuscript poems that we receive, and the one sitting
at the table is commonly spoken of among us as 'The Butcher'.  The
poems he drops into the basket are those rejected as of no account"

"But does he not read the poems before he rejects them?"

"He tastes them.  Do you eat a cheese before you buy it?"

"And what becomes of all those that he drops into the basket?"

"If they are not claimed by their author in proper season, they go to
the devil."

"What!" said Gifted, with his eyes stretched very round.

"To the paper factory, where they have a horrid machine they call the
devil, that tears everything to bits,--as the critics treat our
authors, sometimes, sometimes, Mr. Hopkins."

Gifted devoted a moment to silent reflection.

After this instructive sight they returned together to the
publisher's private room.  The wine had now warmed the youthful
poet's praecordia, so that he began to feel a renewed confidence in
his genius and his fortunes.

"I should like to know what that critic of yours would say to my
manuscript," he said boldly.

"You can try it if you want to," the publisher replied, with an
ominous dryness of manner which the sanguine youth did not perceive,
or, perceiving, did not heed.

"How can we manage to get an impartial judgment?"

"Oh, I'll arrange that.  He always goes to his luncheon about this
time.  Raw meat and vitriol punch,--that 's what the authors say.
Wait till we hear him go, and then I will lay your manuscript so that
he will come to it among the first after he gets back.  You shall see
with your own eyes what treatment it gets.  I hope it may please him,
but you shall see."

They went back to the publisher's private room and talked awhile.
Then the little office-boy came up with some vague message about a
gentleman--business--wants to see you, sir, etc., according to the
established programme; all in a vacant, mechanical sort of way, as if
he were a talking-machine just running down.

The publisher told the boy that he was engaged, and the gentleman
must wait.  Very soon they heard The Butcher's heavy footstep as he
went out to get his raw meat and vitriol punch.

Now, then," said the publisher, and led forth the confiding literary
lamb once more, to enter the fatal door of the critical shambles.

"Hand me your manuscript, if you please, Mr. Hopkins.  I will lay it
so that it shall be the third of these that are coming to hand.  Our
friend here is a pretty good judge of verse, and knows a merchantable
article about as quick as any man in his line of business.  If he
forms a favorable opinion of your poems, we will talk over your
propositions."

Gifted was conscious of a very slight tremor as he saw his precious
manuscript deposited on the table, under two others, and over a pile
of similar productions.  Still he could not help feeling that the
critic would be struck by his title.  The quotation from Gray must
touch his feelings.  The very first piece in the collection could not
fail to arrest him.  He looked a little excited, but he was in good
spirits.

"We will be looking about here when our friend comes back," the
publisher said."  He is a very methodical person, and will sit down
and go right to work just as if we were not here.  We can watch him,
and if he should express any particular interest in your poems, I
will, if you say so, carry you up to him and reveal the fact that you
are the author of the works that please him."

They waited patiently until The Butcher returned, apparently
refreshed by his ferocious refection, and sat down at his table.  He
looked comforted, and not in ill humor.  The publisher and the poet
talked in low tones, as if on business of their own, and watched him
as he returned to his labor.

The Butcher took the first manuscript that came to hand, read a
stanza here and there, turned over the leaves, turned back and tried
again,--shook his head--held it for an instant over the basket, as if
doubtful,--and let it softly drop.  He took up the second manuscript,
opened it in several places, seemed rather pleased with what he read,
and laid it aside for further examination.

He took up the third.  "Blossoms of the Soul," etc.  He glared at it
in a dreadfully ogreish way.  Both the lockers-on held their breath.
Gifted Hopkins felt as if half a glass more of that warm sherry would
not hurt him.  There was a sinking at the pit of his stomach, as if
he was in a swing, as high as he could go, close up to the swallows'
nests and spiders' webs.  The Butcher opened the manuscript at
random, read ten seconds, and gave a short low grunt.  He opened
again, read ten seconds, and gave another grunt, this time a little
longer and louder.  He opened once more, read five seconds, and, with
something that sounded like the snort of a dangerous animal, cast it
impatiently into the basket, and took up the manuscript that came
next in order.

Gifted Hopkins stood as if paralyzed for a moment.

"Safe, perfectly safe," the publisher said to him in a whisper."
I'll get it for you presently.  Come in and take another glass of
wine," he said, leading him back to his own office.

"No, I thank you," he said faintly, "I can bear it.  But this is
dreadful, sir.  Is this the way that genius is welcomed to the world
of letters?"

The publisher explained to him, in the kindest manner, that there was
an enormous over-production of verse, and that it took a great part
of one man's time simply to overhaul the cart-loads of it that were
trying to get themselves into print with the imprimatur of his famous
house.  "You are young, Mr. Hopkins.  I advise you not to try to
force your article of poetry on the market.  The B---, our friend,
there, that is, knows a thing that will sell as soon as he sees it.
You are in independent circumstances, perhaps?  If so, you can print
--at your own expense--whatever you choose.  May I take the liberty
to ask your--profession?"

Gifted explained that he was "clerk" in a "store," where they sold
dry goods and West India goods, and goods promiscuous.

"Oh, well, then," the publisher said, "you will understand me.  Do
you know a good article of brown sagas when you see it?"

Gifted Hopkins rather thought he did.  He knew at sight whether it
was a fair, salable article or not.

"Just so.  Now our friend, there, knows verses that are salable and
unsalable as well as you do brown sugar.--Keep quiet now, and I will
go and get your manuscript for you.

"There, Mr. Hopkins, take your poems,--they will give you a
reputation in your village, I don't doubt, which, is pleasant, but it
will cost you a good deal of money to print them in a volume.  You
are very young: you can afford to wait.  Your genius is not ripe yet,
I am confident, Mr. Hopkins.  These verses are very well for a
beginning, but a man of promise like you, Mr. Hopkins, must n't throw
away his chance by premature publication!  I should like to make you
a present of a few of the books we publish.  By and by, perhaps, we
can work you into our series of poets; but the best pears ripen
slowly, and so with genius.--Where shall I send the volumes?"

Gifted answered, to parlor No. 6, Planet Hotel, where he soon
presented himself to Master Gridley, who could guess pretty well what
was coming.  But he let him tell his story.

"Shall I try the other publishers?" said the disconsolate youth.

"I would n't, my young friend, I would n't.  You have seen the best
one of them--all.  He is right about it, quite right: you are young,
and had better wait.  Look here, Gifted, here is something to please
you.  We are going to visit the gay world together.  See what has
been left here this forenoon."

He showed him two elegant notes of invitation requesting the pleasure
of Professor Byles Gridley's and of Mr. Gifted Hopkins's company on
Thursday evening, as the guests of Mrs. Clymer Ketchum, of 24 Carat
Place.




CHAPTER XXVI.

MRS. CLYMER KETCHUM'S PARTY.

Myrtle Hazard had flowered out as beyond question the handsomest girl
of the season, There were hints from different quarters that she
might possibly be an heiress.  Vague stories were about of some
contingency which might possibly throw a fortune into her lap.  The
young men about town talked of her at the clubs in their free-and-
easy way, but all agreed that she was the girl of the new crop,--"
best filly this grass," as Livingston Jenkins put it.  The general
understanding seemed to be that the young lawyer who had followed her
to the city was going to capture her.  She seemed to favor him
certainly as much as anybody.  But Myrtle saw many young men now, and
it was not so easy as it would once have been to make out who was an
especial favorite.

There had been times when Murray Bradshaw would have offered his
heart and hand to Myrtle at once, if he had felt sure that she would
accept him.  But he preferred playing the safe game now, and only
wanted to feel sure of her.  He had done his best to be agreeable,
and could hardly doubt that he had made an impression.  He dressed
well when in the city,--even elegantly,--he had many of the lesser
social accomplishments, was a good dancer, and compared favorably in
all such matters with the more dashing young fellows in society.  He
was a better talker than most of them, and he knew more about the
girl he was dealing with than they could know.  "You have only got to
say the word, Murray," Mrs. Clymer Ketchum said to her relative, "and
you can have her.  But don't be rash.  I believe you can get
Berengaria if you try; and there 's something better there than
possibilities."  Murray Bradshaw laughed, and told Mrs. Clymer
Ketchum not to worry about him; he knew what he was doing.

It so happened that Myrtle met Master Byles Gridley walking with Mr.
Gifted Hopkins the day before the party.  She longed to have a talk
with her old friend, and was glad to have a chance of pleasing her
poetical admirer.  She therefore begged her hostess to invite them
both to her party to please her, which she promised to do at once.
Thus the two elegant notes were accounted for.

Mrs. Clymer Ketchum, though her acquaintances were chiefly in the
world of fortune and of fashion, had yet a certain weakness for what
she called clever people.  She therefore always variegated her
parties with a streak of young artists and writers, and a literary
lady or two; and, if she could lay hands on a first-class celebrity,
was as happy as an Amazon who had captured a Centaur.

"There's a demonish clever young fellow by the name of Lindsay,"
Mr. Livingston Jenkins said to her a little before the day of the
party.  "Better ask him.  They say he 's the rising talent in his
line, architecture mainly, but has done some remarkable things in the
way of sculpture.  There's some story about a bust he made that was
quite wonderful.  I'll find his address for you."  So Mr. Clement
Lindsay got his invitation, and thus Mrs. Clymer Ketchum's party
promised to bring together a number of persons with whom we are
acquainted, and who were acquainted with each other.

Mrs. Clymer Ketchum knew how to give a party.  Let her only have
carte blanche for flowers, music, and champagne, she used to tell her
lord, and she would see to the rest,--lighting the rooms, tables, and
toilet.  He needn't be afraid: all he had to do was to keep out of
the way.

Subdivision of labor is one of the triumphs of modern civilization.
Labor was beautifully subdivided in this lady's household.  It was
old Ketchum's business to make money, and he understood it.  It was
Mrs. K.'s business to spend money, and she knew how to do it.  The
rooms blazed with light like a conflagration; the flowers burned like
lamps of many-colored flame; the music throbbed into the hearts of
the promenaders and tingled through all the muscles of the dancers.

Mrs. Clymer Ketchum was in her glory.  Her point d'Alenyon must have
spoiled ever so many French girls' eyes.  Her bosom heaved beneath a
kind of breastplate glittering with a heavy dew of diamonds.  She
glistened and sparkled with every movement, so that the admirer
forgot to question too closely whether the eyes matched the
brilliants, or the cheeks glowed like the roses.  Not far from the
great lady stood Myrtle Hazard.  She was dressed as the fashion of
the day demanded, but she had added certain audacious touches of her
own, reminiscences of the time when the dead beauty had flourished,
and which first provoked the question and then the admiration of the
young people who had a natural eye for effect.  Over the long white
glove on her left arm was clasped a rich bracelet, of so quaint an
antique pattern that nobody had seen anything like it, and as some
one whispered that it was "the last thing out," it was greatly
admired by the fashion-plate multitude, as well as by the few who had
a taste of their own.  If the soul of Judith Pride, long divorced
from its once beautifully moulded dust, ever lived in dim
consciousness through any of those who inherited her blood, it was
then and there that she breathed through the lips of Myrtle Hazard.
The young girl almost trembled with the ecstasy of this new mode of
being, soliciting every sense with light, with perfume, with melody,
--all that could make her feel the wonderful complex music of a fresh
life when all its chords first vibrate together in harmony.  Miss
Rhadamantha Pinnikle, whose mother was an Apex (of whose race it was
said that they always made an obeisance when the family name was
mentioned, and had all their portraits painted with halos round their
heads), found herself extinguished in this new radiance.  Miss
Victoria Capsheaf stuck to the wall as if she had been a fresco on
it.  The fifty-year-old dynasties were dismayed and dismounted.
Myrtle fossilized them as suddenly as if she had been a Gorgon
instead of a beauty.

The guests in whom we may have some interest were in the mean time
making ready for the party, which was expected to be a brilliant one;
for 24 Carat Place was well known for the handsome style of its
entertainments.

Clement Lindsay was a little surprised by his invitation.  He had,
however, been made a lion of several times of late, and was very
willing to amuse himself once in a while with a peep into the great
world.

It was but an empty show to him at best, for his lot was cast, and he
expected to lead a quiet domestic life after his student days were
over.

Master Byles Gridley had known what society was in his earlier time,
and understood very well that all a gentleman of his age had to do
was to dress himself in his usual plain way, only taking a little
more care in his arrangements than was needed in the latitude of
Oxbow Village.  But Gifted must be looked after, that he should not
provoke the unamiable comments of the city youth by any defect or
extravagance of costume.  The young gentleman had bought a light sky-
blue neckerchief, and a very large breast-pin containing a gem which
he was assured by the vender was a genuine stone.  He considered that
both these would be eminently effective articles of dress, and Mr.
Gridley had some trouble to convince him that a white tie and plain
shirt-buttons would be more fitted to the occasion.

On the morning of the day of the great party Mr. William Murray
Bradshaw received a brief telegram, which seemed to cause him great
emotion, as he changed color, uttered a forcible exclamation, and
began walking up and down his room in a very nervous kind of way.  It
was a foreshadowing of a certain event now pretty sure to happen.
Whatever bearing this telegram may have had upon his plans, he made
up his mind that he would contrive an opportunity somehow that very
evening to propose himself as a suitor to Myrtle Hazard.  He could
not say that he felt as absolutely certain of getting the right
answer as he had felt at some previous periods.  Myrtle knew her
price, he said to himself, a great deal better than when she was a
simple country girl.  The flatteries with which she had been
surrounded, and the effect of all the new appliances of beauty, which
had set her off so that she could not help seeing her own
attractions, rendered her harder to please and to satisfy.  A little
experience in society teaches a young girl the arts and the phrases
which all the Lotharios have in common.  Murray Bradshaw was ready to
land his fish now, but he was not quite sure that she was yet hooked,
and he had a feeling that by this time she knew every fly in his
book.  However, as he had made up his mind not to wait another day,
he addressed himself to the trial before him with a determination to
succeed, if any means at his command would insure success.  He
arrayed himself with faultless elegance: nothing must be neglected on
such an occasion.  He went forth firm and grave as a general going
into a battle where all is to be lost or won.  He entered the blazing
saloon with the unfailing smile upon his lips, to which he set them
as he set his watch to a particular hour and minute.

The rooms were pretty well filled when he arrived and made his bow
before the blazing, rustling, glistening, waving, blushing appearance
under which palpitated, with the pleasing excitement of the magic
scene over which its owner presided, the heart of Mrs. Clymer
Ketchum.  He turned to Myrtle Hazard, and if he had ever doubted
which way his inclinations led him, he could doubt no longer.  How
much dress and how much light can a woman bear?  That is the way to
measure her beauty.  A plain girl in a simple dress, if she has only
a pleasant voice, may seem almost a beauty in the rosy twilight.  The
nearer she comes to being handsome, the more ornament she will bear,
and the more she may defy the sunshine or the chandelier.

Murray Bradshaw was fairly dazzled with the brilliant effect of
Myrtle in full dress.  He did not know before what handsome arms she
had,--Judith Pride's famous arms--which the high-colored young men in
top-boots used to swear were the handsomest pair in New England--
right over again.  He did not know before with what defiant effect
she would light up, standing as she did directly under a huge lustre,
in full flower of flame, like a burning azalea.  He was not a man who
intended to let his sentiments carry him away from the serious
interests of his future, yet, as he looked upon Myrtle Hazard, his
heart gave one throb which made him feel in every pulse that this way
a woman who in her own right, simply as a woman, could challenge the
homage of the proudest young man of her time.  He hardly knew till
this moment how much of passion mingled with other and calmer motives
of admiration.  He could say I love you as truly as such a man could
ever speak these words, meaning that he admired her, that he was
attracted to her, that he should be proud of her as his wife, that he
should value himself always as the proprietor of so rare a person,
that no appendage to his existence would take so high a place in his
thoughts.  This implied also, what is of great consequence to a young
woman's happiness in the married state, that she would be treated
with uniform politeness, with satisfactory evidences of affection,
and with a degree of confidence quite equal to what a reasonable
woman should expect from a very superior man, her husband.

If Myrtle could have looked through the window in the breast against
which only authors are privileged to flatten their features, it is
for the reader to judge how far the programme would have satisfied
her.

Less than this, a great deal less, does appear to satisfy many young
women; and it may be that the interior just drawn, fairly judged,
belongs to a model lover and husband.  Whether it does or not, Myrtle
did not see this picture.  There was a beautifully embroidered shirt-
bosom in front of that window through which we have just looked, that
intercepted all sight of what was going on within.  She only saw a
man, young, handsome, courtly, with a winning tongue, with an
ambitious spirit, whose every look and tone implied his admiration of
herself, and who was associated with her past life in such a way that
they alone appeared like old friends in the midst of that cold alien
throng.  It seemed as if he could not have chosen a more auspicious
hour than this; for she never looked so captivating, and her presence
must inspire his lips with the eloquence of love.  And she--was not
this delirious atmosphere of light and music just the influence to
which he would wish to subject her before trying the last experiment
of all which can stir the soul of a woman?  He knew the mechanism of
that impressionable state which served Coleridge so excellently
well,--

    "All impulses of soul and sense
     Had thrilled my guileless Genevieve
     The music, and the doleful tale,
     The rich and balmy eve,"--

though he hardly expected such startling results as happened in that
case,--which might be taken as an awful warning not to sing moving
ballads to young ladies of susceptible feelings, unless one is
prepared for very serious consequences.  Without expecting that
Myrtle would rush into his arms, he did think that she could not help
listening to him in the intervals of the delicious music, in some
recess where the roses and jasmines and heliotropes made the air
heavy with sweetness, and the crimson curtains drooped in heavy folds
that half hid their forms from the curious eyes all round them.  Her
heart would swell like Genevieve's as he told her in simple phrase
that she was his life, his love, his all,--for in some two or three
words like these he meant to put his appeal, and not in fine poetical
phrases: that would do for Gifted Hopkins and rhyming tom-tits of
that feather.

Full of his purpose, involving the plans of his whole life, implying,
as he saw clearly, a brilliant future or a disastrous disappointment,
with a great unexploded mine of consequences under his feet, and the
spark ready to fall into it, he walked about the gilded saloon with a
smile upon his lips so perfectly natural and pleasant, that one would
have said he was as vacant of any aim, except a sort of superficial
good-matured disposition to be amused, as the blankest-eyed simpleton
who had tied himself up in a white cravat and come to bore and be
bored.

Yet under this pleasant smile his mind was so busy with its thoughts
that he had forgotten all about the guests from Oxbow Village who, as
Myrtle had told him, were to come this evening.  His eye was all at
once caught by a familiar figure, and he recognized Master Byles
Gridley, accompanied by Mr. Gifted Hopkins, at the door of the
saloon.  He stepped forward at once to meet, and to present them.

Mr. Gridley in evening costume made an eminently dignified and
respectable appearance.  There was an unusual lock of benignity upon
his firmly moulded features, and an air of ease which rather
surprised Mr. Bradshaw, who did not know all the social experiences
which had formed a part of the old Master's history.  The greeting
between them was courteous, but somewhat formal, as Mr. Bradshaw was
acting as one of the masters of ceremony.  He nodded to Gifted in an
easy way, and led them both into the immediate Presence.

"This is my friend Professor Gridley, Mrs. Ketchum, whom I have the
honor of introducing to you,--a very distinguished scholar, as I have
no doubt you are well aware.  And this is my friend Mr. Gifted
Hopkins, a young poet of distinction, whose fame will reach you by
and by, if it has not come to your ears already."

The two gentlemen went through the usual forms, the poet a little
crushed by the Presence, but doing his best.  While the lady was
making polite speeches to them, Myrtle Hazard came forward.  She was
greatly delighted to meet her old friend, and even looked upon the
young poet with a degree of pleasure she would hardly have expected
to receive from his company.  They both brought with them so many
reminiscences of familiar scenes and events, that it was like going
back for the moment to Oxbow Village.  But Myrtle did not belong to
herself that evening, and had no opportunity to enter into
conversation just then with either of them.  There was to be dancing
by and by, and the younger people were getting impatient that it
should begin.  At last the music sounded the well-known summons, and
the floors began to ring to the tread of the dancers.  As usual on
such occasions there were a large number of noncombatants, who stood
as spectators around those who were engaged in the campaign of the
evening.  Mr. Byles Gridley looked on gravely, thinking of the
minuets and the gavots of his younger days.  Mr. Gifted Hopkins, who
had never acquired the desirable accomplishment of dancing, gazed
with dazzled and admiring eyes at the wonderful evolutions of the
graceful performers.  The music stirred him a good deal; he had also
been introduced to one or two young persons as Mr. Hopkins, the poet,
and he began to feel a kind of excitement, such as was often the
prelude of a lyric burst from his pen.  Others might have wealth and
beauty, he thought to himself, but what were these to the gift of
genius?  In fifty years the wealth of these people would have passed
into other hands.  In fifty years all these beauties would be dead,
or wrinkled and double-wrinkled great-grandmothers.  And when they
were all gone and forgotten, the name of Hopkins would be still fresh
in the world's memory.  Inspiring thought!  A smile of triumph rose
to his lips; he felt that the village boy who could look forward to
fame as his inheritance was richer than all the millionnaires, and
that the words he should set in verse would have an enduring lustre
to which the whiteness of pearls was cloudy, and the sparkle of
diamonds dull.

He raised his eyes, which had been cast down in reflection, to look
upon these less favored children of Fortune, to whom she had given
nothing but perishable inheritances.  Two or three pairs of eyes, he
observed, were fastened upon him.  His mouth perhaps betrayed a
little self-consciousness, but he tried to show his features in an
aspect of dignified self-possession.  There seemed to be remarks and
questionings going on, which he supposed to be something like the
following:--

Which is it?  Which is it?--Why, that one, there,--that young
fellow,--don't you see?--What young fellow are you two looking at?
Who is he?  What is he?--Why, that is Hopkins, the poet.--Hopkins,
the poet!  Let me see him!  Let me see him!  Hopkins?  What!  Gifted
Hopkins?  etc., etc.

Gifted Hopkins did not hear these words except in fancy, but he did
unquestionably find a considerable number of eyes concentrated upon
him, which he very naturally interpreted as an evidence that he had
already begun to enjoy a foretaste of the fame of which he should
hereafter have his full allowance.  Some seemed to be glancing
furtively, some appeared as if they wished to speak, and all the time
the number of those looking at him seemed to be increasing.  A vision
came through his fancy of himself as standing on a platform, and
having persons who wished to look upon him and shake hands with him
presented, as he had heard was the way with great people when going
about the country.  But this was only a suggestion, and by no means a
serious thought, for that would have implied infatuation.

Gifted Hopkins was quite right in believing that he attracted many
eyes.  At last those of Myrtle Hazard were called to him, and she
perceived that an accident was making him unenviably conspicuous.
The bow of his rather large white neck-tie had slid round and got
beneath his left ear.  A not very good-natured or well-bred young
fellow had pointed out the subject of this slight misfortune to one
or two others of not much better taste or breeding, and thus the
unusual attention the youthful poet was receiving explained itself.
Myrtle no sooner saw the little accident of which her rural friend
was the victim than she left her place in the dance with a simple
courage which did her credit.

"I want to speak to you a minute," she said.  "Come into this
alcove."

And the courageous young lady not only told Gifted what had happened
to him, but found a pin somehow, as women always do on a pinch, and
had him in presentable condition again almost before the bewildered
young man knew what was the matter.  On reflection it occurred to
him, as it has to other provincial young persons going to great
cities, that he might perhaps have been hasty in thinking himself an
object of general curiosity as yet.  There had hardly been time for
his name to have become very widely known.  Still, the feeling had
been pleasant for the moment, and had given him an idea of what the
rapture would be, when, wherever he went, the monster digit (to hint
a classical phrase) of the collective admiring public would be lifted
to point him out, and the whisper would pass from one to another,
"That's him!  That's Hopkins!"

Mr. Murray Bradshaw had been watching the opportunity for carrying
out his intentions, with his pleasant smile covering up all that was
passing in his mind, and Master Byles Gridley, looking equally
unconcerned, had been watching him.  The young man's time came at
last.  Some were at the supper-table, some were promenading, some
were talking, when he managed to get Myrtle a little apart from the
rest, and led her towards one of the recesses in the apartment, where
two chairs were invitingly placed.  Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes
were sparkling,--the influences to which he had trusted had not been
thrown away upon her.  He had no idea of letting his purpose be seen
until he was fully ready.  It required all his self-mastery to avoid
betraying himself by look or tone, but he was so natural that Myrtle
was thrown wholly off her guard.  He meant to make her pleased with
herself at the outset, and that not by point-blank flattery, of which
she had had more than enough of late, but rather by suggestion and
inference, so that she should find herself feeling happy without
knowing how.  It would be easy to glide from that to the impression
she had produced upon him, and get the two feelings more or less
mingled in her mind.  And so the simple confession he meant to make
would at length evolve itself logically, and hold by a natural
connection to the first agreeable train of thought which he had
called up.  Not the way, certainly, that most young men would arrange
their great trial scene; but Murray Bradshaw was a lawyer in love as
much as in business, and considered himself as pleading a cause
before a jury of Myrtle Hazard's conflicting motives.  What would any
lawyer do in a jury case but begin by giving the twelve honest men
and true to understand, in the first place, that their intelligence
and virtue were conceded by all, and that he himself had perfect
confidence in them, and leave them to shape their verdict in
accordance with these propositions and his own side of the case?

Myrtle had, perhaps, never so seriously inclined her ear to the
honeyed accents of the young pleader.  He flattered her with so much
tact, that she thought she heard an unconscious echo through his lips
of an admiration which he only shared with all around him.  But in
him he made it seem discriminating, deliberate, not blind, but very
real.  This it evidently was which had led him to trust her with his
ambitions and his plans,--they might be delusions, but he could never
keep them from her, and she was the one woman in the world to whom he
thought he could safely give his confidence.

The dread moment was close at hand.  Myrtle was listening with an
instinctive premonition of what was coming,--ten thousand mothers and
grandmothers and great-grandmothers, and so on, had passed through it
all in preceding generations until time reached backwards to the
sturdy savage who asked no questions of any kind, but knocked down
the primeval great-grandmother of all, and carried her off to his
hole in the rock, or into the tree where he had made his nest.  Why
should not the coming question announce itself by stirring in the
pulses and thrilling in the nerves of the descendant of all these
grandmothers?

She was leaning imperceptibly towards him, drawn by the mere blind
elemental force, as the plummet was attracted to the side of
Schehallion.  Her lips were parted, and she breathed a little faster
than so healthy a girl ought to breathe in a state of repose.  The
steady nerves of William Murray Bradshaw felt unwonted thrills and
tremors tingling through them, as he came nearer and nearer the few
simple words with which he was to make Myrtle Hazard the mistress' of
his destiny.  His tones were becoming lower and more serious; there
were slight breaks once or twice in the conversation; Myrtle had cast
down her eyes.

"There is but one word more to add," he murmured softly, as he bent
towards her

A grave voice interrupted him.  "Excuse me, Mr. Bradshaw," said
Master Bytes Gridley, "I wish to present a young gentleman to my
friend here.  I promised to show him the most charming young person I
have the honor to be acquainted with, and I must redeem my pledge.
Miss Hazard, I have the pleasure of introducing to your acquaintance
my distinguished young friend, Mr. Clement Lindsay."

Once mere, for the third time, these two young persons stood face to
face.  Myrtle was no longer liable to those nervous seizures which
any sudden impression was liable to produce when she was in her half-
hysteric state of mind and body.  She turned to the new-comer, who
found himself unexpectedly submitted to a test which he would never
have risked of his own will.  He must go through it, cruel as it was,
with the easy self-command which belongs to a gentleman in the most
trying social exigencies.  He addressed her, therefore, in the usual
terms of courtesy, and then turned and greeted Mr. Bradshaw, whom he
had never met since their coming together at Oxbow Village.  Myrtle
was conscious, the instant she looked upon Clement Lindsay, of the
existence of some peculiar relation between them; but what, she could
not tell.  Whatever it was, it broke the charm which had been weaving
between her and Murray Bradshaw.  He was not foolish enough to make a
scene.  What fault could he find with Clement Lindsay, who had only
done as any gentleman would do with a lady to whom he had just been
introduced, addressed a few polite words to her?  After saying those
words, Clement had turned very courteously to him, and they had
spoken with each other.  But Murray Bradshaw could not help seeing
that Myrtle had transferred her attention, at least for the moment,
from him to the new-comer.  He folded his arms and waited,--but he
waited in vain.  The hidden attraction which drew Clement to the
young girl with whom he had passed into the Valley of the Shadow of
Death overmastered all other feelings, and he gave himself up to the
fascination of her presence.

The inward rage of Murray Bradshaw at being interrupted just at the
moment when he was, as he thought, about to cry checkmate and finish
the first great game he had ever played may well be imagined.  But it
could not be helped.  Myrtle had exercised the customary privilege of
young ladies at parties, and had turned from talking with one to
talking with another,--that was all.  Fortunately, for him the young
man who had been introduced at such a most critical moment was not
one from whom he need apprehend any serious interference.  He felt
grateful beyond measure to pretty Susan Posey, who, as he had good
reason for believing, retained her hold upon her early lover, and was
looking forward with bashful interest to the time when she should
become Mrs. Lindsay.  It was better to put up quietly with his
disappointment; and, if he could get no favorable opportunity that
evening to resume his conversation at the interesting point where he
left it off, he would call the next day and bring matters to a
conclusion.

He called accordingly the next morning, but was disappointed in not
seeing Myrtle.  She had hardly slept that night, and was suffering
from a bad headache, which last reason was her excuse for not seeing
company.

He called again, the following day, and learned that Miss Hazard had
just left the city, and gone on a visit to Oxbow Village:




CHAPTER XXVII.

MINE AND COUNTERMINE.

What the nature of the telegram was which had produced such an effect
on the feelings and plans of Mr. William Murray Bradshaw nobody
especially interested knew but himself.  We may conjecture that it
announced some fact, which had leaked out a little prematurely,
relating to the issue of the great land-case in which the firm was
interested.  However that might be, Mr. Bradshaw no sooner heard
that Myrtle had suddenly left the city for Oxbow Village,--for what
reason he puzzled himself to guess,--than he determined to follow her
at once, and take up the conversation he had begun at the party where
it left off.  And as the young poet had received his quietus for the
present at the publisher's, and as Master Gridley had nothing
specially to detain him, they too returned at about the same time,
and so our old acquaintances were once more together within the
familiar precincts where we have been accustomed to see them.

Master Gridley did not like playing the part of a spy, but it must be
remembered that he was an old college officer, and had something of
the detective's sagacity, and a certain cunning derived from the
habit of keeping an eye on mischievous students.  If any underhand
contrivance was at work, involving the welfare of any one in whom he
was interested, he was a dangerous person for the plotters, for he
had plenty of time to attend to them, and would be apt to take a kind
of pleasure in matching his wits against another crafty person's,
--such a one, for instance, as Mr. Macchiavelli Bradshaw.

Perhaps he caught some words of that gentleman's conversation at the
party; at any rate, he could not fail to observe his manner.  When he
found that the young man had followed Myrtle back to the village, he
suspected something more than a coincidence.  When he learned that he
was assiduously visiting The Poplars, and that he was in close
communication with Miss Cynthia Badlam, he felt sure that he was
pressing the siege of Myrtle's heart.  But that there was some
difficulty in the way was equally clear to him, for he ascertained,
through channels which the attentive reader will soon have means of
conjecturing, that Myrtle had seen him but once in the week following
his return, and that in the presence of her dragons.  She had various
excuses when he called,--headaches, perhaps, among the rest, as these
are staple articles on such occasions.  But Master Gridley knew his
man too well to think that slight obstacles would prevent his going
forward to effect his purpose.

"I think he will get her; if he holds on," the old man said to
himself, "and he won't let go in a hurry, if there were any real love
about it--but surely he is incapable of such a human weakness as the
tender passion.  What does all this sudden concentration upon the
girl mean?  He knows something about her that we don't know,--that
must be it.  What did he hide that paper for, a year ago and more?
Could that have anything to do with his pursuit of Myrtle Hazard
today?"

Master Gridley paused as he asked this question of himself, for a
luminous idea had struck him.  Consulting daily with Cynthia Badlam,
was he?  Could there be a conspiracy between these two persons to
conceal some important fact, or to keep something back until it would
be for their common interest to have it made known?

Now Mistress Kitty Fagan was devoted, heart and soul, to Myrtle
Hazard, and ever since she had received the young girl from Mr.
Gridley's hands, when he brought her back safe and sound after her
memorable adventure, had considered him as Myrtle's best friend and
natural protector.  These simple creatures, whose thoughts are not
taken up, like those of educated people, with the care of a great
museum of dead phrases, are very quick to see the live facts which
are going on about them.  Mr. Gridley had met her, more or less
accidentally, several times of late, and inquired very particularly
about Myrtle, and how she got along at the house since her return,
and whether she was getting over her headaches, and how they treated
her in the family.

"Bliss your heart, Mr. Gridley," Kitty said to him on one of these
occasions, "it's ahltogither changed intirely.  Sure Miss Myrtle does
jist iverythin' she likes, an' Miss Withers niver middles with her at
ahl, excip' jist to roll up her eyes an' look as if she was the hid-
moorner at a funeril whiniver Miss Myrtle says she wants to do this
or that, or to go here or there.  It's Miss Badlam that's ahlwiz
after her, an' a-watchin' her,--she thinks she's cunnin'er than a
cat, but there 's other folks that's got eyes an' ears as good as
hers.  It's that Mr. Bridshaw that's a puttin' his head together with
Miss Badlam for somethin' or other, an' I don't believe there's no
good in it, for what does the fox an' the cat be a whisperin' about,
as if they was thaves an' incind'ries, if there ain't no mischief
hatchin'?"

"Why, Kitty," he said, "what mischief do you think is going on, and
who is to be harmed?"

"O Mr. Gridley," she answered, "if there ain't somebody to be chated
somehow, then I don't know an honest man and woman from two rogues.
An' have n't I heard Miss Myrtle's name whispered as if there was
somethin' goin' on agin' her, an' they was afraid the tahk would go
out through the doors, an' up through the chimbley?  I don't want to
tell no tales, Mr. Gridley, nor to hurt no honest body, for I'm a
poor woman, Mr. Gridley, but I comes of dacent folks, an' I vallies
my repitation an' character as much as if I was dressed in silks and
satins instead of this mane old gown, savin' your presence, which is
the best I 've got, an' niver a dollar to buy another.  But if I iver
I hears a word, Mr. Gridley, that manes any kind of a mischief to
Miss Myrtle,--the Lard bliss her soul an' keep ahl the divils away
from her!--I'll be runnin' straight down here to tell ye ahl about
it,--be right sure o' that, Mr. Gridley."

"Nothing must happen to Myrtle," he said," that we can help.  If you
see anything more that looks wrong, you had better come down here at
once and let me know, as you say you will.  At once, you understand.
And, Kitty, I am a little particular about the dress of people who
come to see me, so that if you would just take the trouble to get you
a tidy pattern of gingham or calico, or whatever you like of that
sort for a gown, you would please me; and perhaps this little trifle
will be a convenience to you when you come to pay for it."

Kitty thanked him with all the national accompaniments, and trotted
off to the store, where Mr. Gifted Hopkins displayed the native
amiability of his temper by fumbling down everything in the shape of
ginghams and calicoes they had on the shelves, without a murmur at
the taste of his customer, who found it hard to get a pattern
sufficiently emphatic for her taste.  She succeeded at last, and laid
down a five-dollar bill as if she were as used to the pleasing figure
on its face as to the sight of her own five digits.

Master Byles Gridley had struck a spade deeper than he knew into his
first countermine, for Kitty had none of those delicate scruples
about the means of obtaining information which might have embarrassed
a diplomatist of higher degree.




CHAPTER XXVIII.

MR. BRADSHAW CALLS ON MISS BADLAM

"Is Miss Hazard in, Kitty?"

"Indade she's in, Mr. Bridshaw, but she won't see nobody."

"What's the meaning of that, Kitty?  Here is the third time within
three days you've told me I could n't see her.  She saw Mr. Gridley
yesterday, I know; why won't she see me to-day?"

"Y' must ask Miss Myrtle what the rason is, it's none o' my business,
Mr. Bridshaw.  That's the order she give me."

"Is Miss Badlam in?"

Indade she's in, Mr. Bridshaw, an' I 'll go cahl her."

"Bedad," said Kitty Fagan to herself, "the cat an' the fox is goin'
to have another o' thim big tahks togither, an' sure the old hole for
the stove-pipe has niver been stopped up yet."

Mr. Bradshaw and Miss Cynthia went into the parlor together, and
Mistress Kitty retired to her kitchen.  There was a deep closet
belonging to this apartment, separated by a partition from the
parlor.  There was a round hole high up in this partition through
which a stove-pipe had once passed.  Mistress Kitty placed a stool
just under this opening, upon which, as on a, pedestal, she posed
herself with great precaution in the attitude of the goddess of other
people's secrets, that is to say, with her head a little on one side,
so as to bring her liveliest ear close to the opening.  The
conversation which took place in the hearing of the invisible third
party began in a singularly free-and-easy manner on Mr. Bradshaw's
part.

"What the d--- is the reason I can't see Myrtle, Cynthia?"

"That's more than I can tell you, Mr. Bradshaw.  I can watch her
goings on, but I can't account for her tantrums."

"You say she has had some of her old nervous whims,--has the doctor
been to see her?"

"No indeed.  She has kept to herself a good deal, but I don't think
there's anything in particular the matter with her.  She looks well
enough, only she seems a little queer,--as girls do that have taken a
fancy into their heads that they're in love, you know,--absent-
minded,--does n't seem to be interested in things as you would expect
after being away so long."

Mr. Bradshaw looked as if this did not please him particularly.  If
he was the object of her thoughts she would not avoid him, surely.

"Have you kept your eye on her steadily?"

"I don't believe there is an hour we can't account for,--Kitty and I
between us."

"Are you sure you can depend on Kitty?"

["Depind on Kitty, is it?  Oh, an' to be sure ye can depind on Kitty
to kape watch at the stove-pipe hole, an' to tell all y'r plottin's
an' contrivin's to them that'll get the cheese out o' y'r mousetrap
for ye before ye catch any poor cratur in it."  This was the
inaudible comment of the unseen third party.]

"Of course I can depend on her as far as I trust her.  All she knows
is that she must look out for the girl to see that she does not run
away or do herself a mischief.  The Biddies don't know much, but they
know enough to keep a watch on the--"

"Chickens."  Mr. Bradshaw playfully finished the sentence for Miss
Cynthia.

[" An' on the foxes, an' the cats, an' the wazels, an' the hen-hahks,
an' ahl the other bastes," added the invisible witness, in unheard
soliloquy.]

"I ain't sure whether she's quite as stupid as she looks," said the
suspicious young lawyer.  "There's a little cunning twinkle in her
eye sometimes that makes me think she might be up to a trick on
occasion.  Does she ever listen about to hear what people are
saying?"

"Don't trouble yourself about Kitty Fagan,' for pity's sake, Mr.
Bradshaw.  The Biddies are all alike, and they're all as stupid as
owls, except when you tell 'em just what to do, and how to do it.  A
pack of priest-ridden fools!"

The hot Celtic blood in Kitty Fagan's heart gave a leap.  The stout
muscles gave an involuntary jerk.  The substantial frame felt the
thrill all through, and the rickety stool on which she was standing
creaked sharply under its burden.

Murray Bradshaw started.  He got up and opened softly all the doors
leading from the room, one after another, and looked out.

"I thought I heard a noise as if somebody was moving, Cynthia.  It's
just as well to keep our own matters to ourselves."

"If you wait till this old house keeps still, Mr. Bradshaw, you might
as well wait till the river has run by.  It's as full of rats and
mice as an old cheese is of mites.  There's a hundred old rats in
this house, and that's what you hear."

["An' one old cat; that's what I hear."  Third party.]

"I told you, Cynthia, I must be off on this business to-morrow.  I
want to know that everything is safe before I go.  And, besides, I
have got something to say to you that's important, very important,
mind you."

He got up once more and opened every door softly and looked out.  He
fixed his eye suspiciously on a large sofa at the other side of the
room, and went, looking half ashamed of his extreme precaution, and
peeped under it, to see if there was any one hidden thereto listen.
Then he came back and drew his chair close up to the table at which
Miss Badlam had seated herself.  The conversation which followed was
in a low tone, and a portion of it must be given in another place in
the words of the third party.  The beginning of it we are able to
supply in this connection.

"Look here, Cynthia; you know what I am going for.  It's all right, I
feel sure, for I have had private means of finding out.  It's a sure
thing; but I must go once more to see that the other fellows don't
try any trick on us.  You understand what is for my advantage is for
yours, and, if I go wrong, you go overboard with me.  Now I must
leave the--you know--behind me.  I can't leave it in the house or the
office: they might burn up.  I won't have it about me when I am
travelling.  Draw your chair a little more this way.  Now listen."

["Indade I will," said the third party to herself.  The reader will
find out in due time whether she listened to any purpose or not.]

In the mean time Myrtle, who for some reason was rather nervous and
restless, had found a pair of half-finished slippers which she had
left behind her.  The color came into her cheeks when she remembered
the state of mind she was in when she was working on them for the
Rev. Mr. Stoker.  She recollected Master Gridley's mistake about
their destination, and determined to follow the hint he had given.
It would please him better if she sent them to good Father Pemberton,
she felt sure, than if he should get them himself.  So she enlarged
them somewhat, (for the old man did not pinch his feet, as the
younger clergyman was in the habit of doing, and was, besides, of
portly dimensions, as the old orthodox three-deckers were apt to be,)
and worked E. P. very handsomely into the pattern, and sent them to
him with her love and respect, to his great delight; for old
ministers do not have quite so many tokens of affection from fair
hands as younger ones.

What made Myrtle nervous and restless?  Why had she quitted the city
so abruptly, and fled to her old home, leaving all the gayeties
behind her which had so attracted and dazzled her?

She had not betrayed herself at the third meeting with the young man
who stood in such an extraordinary relation to her,--who had actually
given her life from his own breath,--as when she met him for the
second time.  Whether his introduction to her at the party, just at
the instant when Murray Bradshaw was about to make a declaration,
saved her from being in another moment the promised bride of that
young gentleman, or not, we will not be so rash as to say.  It
looked, certainly, as if he was in a fair way to carry his point; but
perhaps she would have hesitated, or shrunk back, when the great
question came to stare her in the face.

She was excited, at any rate, by the conversation, so that, when
Clement was presented to her, her thoughts could not at once be all
called away from her other admirer, and she was saved from all danger
of that sudden disturbance which had followed their second meeting.
Whatever impression he made upon her developed itself gradually,
--still, she felt strangely drawn towards him.  It was not simply in
his good looks, in his good manners, in his conversation, that she
found this attraction, but there was a singular fascination which she
felt might be dangerous to her peace, without explaining it to
herself in words.  She could hardly be in love with this young
artist; she knew that his affections were plighted to another, a fact
which keeps most young women from indulging unruly fancies; yet her
mind was possessed by his image to such an extent that it left little
room for that of Mr. William Murray Bradshaw.

Myrtle Hazard had been just ready to enter on a career of worldly
vanity and ambition.  It is hard to blame her, for we know how she
came by the tendency.  She had every quality, too, which fitted her
to shine in the gay world; and the general law is, that those who
have the power have the instinct to use it.  We do not suppose that
the bracelet on her arm was an amulet, but it was a symbol.  It
reminded her of her descent; it kept alive the desire to live over
the joys and excitements of a bygone generation.  If she had accepted
Murray Bradshaw, she would have pledged herself to a worldly life.
If she had refused him, it would perhaps have given her a taste of
power that might have turned her into a coquette.

This new impression saved her for the time.  She had come back to her
nest in the village like a frightened bird; her heart was throbbing,
her nerves were thrilling, her dreams were agitated; she wanted to be
quiet, and could not listen to the flatteries or entreaties of her
old lover.

It was a strong will and a subtle intellect that had arrayed their
force and skill against the ill-defended citadel of Myrtle's heart.
Murray Bradshaw was perfectly determined, and not to be kept back by
any trivial hindrances, such as her present unwillingness to accept
him, or even her repugnance to him, if a freak of the moment had
carried her so far.  It was a settled thing: Myrtle Hazard must
become Mrs. Bradshaw; and nobody could deny that, if he gave her his
name, they had a chance, at least, for a brilliant future.




CHAPTER XXIX.

MISTRESS KITTY FAGAN CALLS ON MASTER BYLES GRIDLEY.

"I 'd like to go down to the store this mornin', Miss Withers, plase.
Sure I've niver a shoe to my fut, only jist these two that I've got
on, an' one other pair, and thim is so full of holes that whin I 'm
standin' in 'em I'm outside of 'em intirely."

"You can go, Kitty," Miss Silence answered, funereally.

Thereupon Kitty Fagan proceeded to array herself in her most tidy
apparel, including a pair of shoes not exactly answering to her
description, and set out straight for the house of the Widow Hopkins.
Arrived at that respectable mansion, she inquired for Mr. Gridley,
and was informed that he was at home.  Had a message for him,--could
she see him in his study?  She could if she would wait a little
while.  Mr. Gridley was busy just at this minute.  Sit down, Kitty,
and warm yourself at the cooking-stove.

Mistress Kitty accepted Mrs. Hopkins's hospitable offer, and
presently began orienting herself, and getting ready to make herself
agreeable.  The kindhearted Mrs. Hopkins had gathered about her
several other pensioners besides the twins.  These two little people,
it may be here mentioned, were just taking a morning airing in charge
of Susan Posey, who strolled along in company with Gifted Hopkins on
his way to the store.

Mistress Kitty soon began the conversational blandishments so natural
to her good-humored race.  "It's a little blarney that'll jist suit
th' old lady," she said to herself, as she made her first
conciliatory advance.

"An' sure an' it's a beautiful kitten you've got there, Mrs. Hopkins.
An' it's a splendid mouser she is, I'll be bound.  Does n't she look
as if she'd clans the house out o'them little bastes, bad luck to em."

Mrs. Hopkins looked benignantly upon the more than middle-aged tabby,
slumbering as if she had never known an enemy, and turned smiling to
Mistress Kitty.  "Why, bless your heart, Kitty, our old puss would
n't know a mouse by sight, if you showed her one.  If I was a mouse,
I'd as lieves have a nest in one of that old cat's ears as anywhere
else.  You couldn't find a safer place for one."

"Indade, an' to be sure she's too big an' too handsome a pussy to be
after wastin' her time on them little bastes.  It's that little
tarrier dog of yours, Mrs. Hopkins, that will be after worryin' the
mice an' the rats, an' the thaves too, I 'll warrant.  Is n't he a
fust-rate-lookin' watch-dog, an' a rig'ler rat-hound?"

Mrs. Hopkins looked at the little short-legged and short-winded
animal of miscellaneous extraction with an expression of contempt and
affection, mingled about half and half.  "Worry 'em!  If they wanted
to sleep, I rather guess he would worry 'em!  If barkin' would do
their job for 'em, nary a mouse nor rat would board free gratis in my
house as they do now.  Noisy little good-for-nothing tike,--ain't
you, Fret?"

Mistress Kitty was put back a little by two such signal failures.
There was another chance, however, to make her point, which she
presently availed herself of,--feeling pretty sure this time that she
should effect a lodgement.  Mrs. Hopkins's parrot had been observing
Kitty, first with one eye and then with the other, evidently
preparing to make a remark, but awkward with a stranger.  "That 's a
beautiful part y 've got there," Kitty said, buoyant with the
certainty that she was on safe ground this time; "and tahks like a
book, I 'll be bound.  Poll!  Poll!  Poor Poll!"

She put forth her hand to caress the intelligent and affable bird,
which, instead of responding as expected, "squawked," as our phonetic
language has it, and, opening a beak imitated from a tooth-drawing
instrument of the good old days, made a shrewd nip at Kitty's
forefinger.  She drew it back with a jerk.

"An' is that the way your part tahks, Mrs. Hopkins?"

"Talks, bless you, Kitty!  why, that parrot hasn't said a word this
ten year.  He used to say Poor Poll!  when we first had him, but he
found it was easier to squawk, and that's all he ever does nowadays,
--except bite once in a while."

"Well, an' to be sure," Kitty answered, radiant as she rose from her
defeats, "if you'll kape a cat that does n't know a mouse when she
sees it, an' a dog that only barks for his livin', and a part that
only squawks an' bites an' niver spakes a word, ye must be the best-
hearted woman that's alive, an' bliss ye, if ye was only a good
Catholic, the Holy Father 'd make a saint of ye in less than no
time!"

So Mistress Kitty Fagan got in her bit of Celtic flattery, in spite
of her three successive discomfitures.

"You may come up now, Kitty," said Mr. Gridley over the stairs.  He
had just finished and sealed a letter.

"Well, Kitty, how are things going on up at The Poplars?  And how
does our young lady seem to be of late?"

"Whisht!  whisht!  your honor."

Mr. Bradshaw's lessons had not been thrown away on his attentive
listener.  She opened every door in the room, "by your lave," as she
said.  She looked all over the walls to see if there was any old
stovepipe hole or other avenue to eye or ear.  Then she went, in her
excess of caution, to the window.  She saw nothing noteworthy except
Mr. Gifted Hopkins and the charge he convoyed, large and small, in
the distance.  The whole living fleet was stationary for the moment,
he leaning on the fence with his cheek on his hand, in one of the
attitudes of the late Lord Byron; she, very near him, listening,
apparently, in the pose of Mignon aspirant au ciel, as rendered by
Carlo Dolce Scheffer.

Kitty came back, apparently satisfied, and stood close to Mr.
Gridley, who told her to sit down, which she did, first making a
catch at her apron to dust the chair with, and then remembering that
she had left that part of her costume at home.--Automatic movements,
curious.

Mistress Kitty began telling in an undertone of the meeting between
Mr. Bradshaw and Miss Badlam, and of the arrangements she made for
herself as the reporter of the occasion.  She then repeated to him,
in her own way, that part of the conversation which has been already
laid before the reader.  There is no need of going over the whole of
this again in Kitty's version, but we may fit what followed into the
joints of what has been already told.

"He cahled her Cynthy, d' ye see, Mr. Gridley, an' tahked to her jist
as asy as if they was two rogues, and she knowed it as well as he
did.  An' so, says he, I'm goin' away, says he, an' I'm goin' to be
gahn siveral days, or perhaps longer, says he, an' you'd better kape
it, says he."

"Keep what, Kitty?  What was it he wanted her to keep?" said Mr.
Gridley, who no longer doubted that he was on the trail of a plot,
and meant to follow it.  He was getting impatient with the "says
he's" with which Kitty double-leaded her discourse.

"An' to be sure ain't I tellin' you, Mr. Gridley, jist as fast as my
breath will let me?  An' so, says he, you'd better kape it, says he,
mixed up with your other paupers, says he," (Mr. Gridley started,)
"an' thin we can find it in the garret, says he, whinever we want it,
says he.  An' if it all goes right out there, says he, it won't be
lahng before we shall want to find it, says he.  And I can dipind on
you, says he, for we're both in the same boat, says he, an' you knows
what I knows, says he, an' I knows what you knows, says be.  And thin
he taks a stack o' paupers out of his pocket, an' he pulls out one of
'em, an' he says to her, says he, that's the pauper, says he, an' if
you die, says be, niver lose sight of that day or night, says he, for
it's life an' dith to both of us, says he.  An' thin he asks her if
she has n't got one o' them paupers--what is 't they cahls 'em?--
divilops, or some sich kind of a name--that they wraps up their
letters in; an' she says no, she has n't got none that's big enough
to hold it.  So he says, give me a shate o' pauper, says he.  An'
thin he takes the pauper that she give him, an' he folds it up like
one o' them--divilops, if that's the name of 'em; and thin he pulls a
stick o' salin'-wax out of his pocket, an' a stamp, an' he takes the
pauper an' puts it into th' other pauper, along with the rest of the
paupers, an' thin he folds th' other pauper over the paupers, and
thin he lights a candle, an' he milts the salin'-wax, and he sales up
the pauper that was outside th' other paupers, an' he writes on the
back of the pauper, an' thin he hands it to Miss Badlam."

"Did you see the paper that he showed her before he fastened it up
with the others, Kitty?"

"I did see it, indade, Mr. Gridley, and it's the truth I'm tellin'
ye."

"Did you happen to notice anything about it, Kitty?"

"I did, indade, Mr. Gridley.  It was a longish kind of a pauper, and
there was some blotches of ink on the back of it,--an' they looked
like a face without any mouth, for, says I, there's two spots for the
eyes, says I, and there's a spot for the nose, says I, and there's
niver a spot for the mouth, says I"

This was the substance of what Master Byles Gridley got out of Kitty
Fagan.  It was enough, yes, it was too much.  There was some deep-
laid plot between Murray Bradshaw and Cynthia Badlam, involving the
interests of some of the persons connected with the late Malachi
Withers; for that the paper described by Kitty was the same that he
had seen the young man conceal in the Corpus Juris Civilis, it was
impossible to doubt.  If it had been a single spot an the back of it,
or two, he might have doubted.  But three large spots "blotches" she
had called them, disposed thus *.*--would not have happened to be on
two different papers, in all human probability.

After grave consultation of all his mental faculties in committee of
the whole, he arrived at the following conclusion,--that Miss Cynthia
Badlam was the depositary of a secret involving interests which he
felt it his business to defend, and of a document which was
fraudulently withheld and meant to be used for some unfair purpose.
And most assuredly, Master Gridley said to himself, he held a master-
key, which, just so certainly as he could make up his mind to use it,
would open any secret in the keeping of Miss Cynthia Badlam.

He proceeded, therefore, without delay, to get ready for a visit to
that lady at The Poplars.  He meant to go thoroughly armed, for he
was a very provident old gentleman.  His weapons were not exactly of
the kind which a housebreaker would provide himself with, but of a
somewhat peculiar nature.

Weapon number one was a slip of paper with a date and a few words
written upon it.  "I think this will fetch the document," he said to
himself, "if it comes to the worst.  Not if I can help it,--not if I
can help it.  But if I cannot get at the heart of this thing
otherwise, why, I must come to this.  Poor woman!--Poor woman!"

Weapon number two was a small phial containing spirits of hartshorn,
sal volatile, very strong, that would stab through the nostrils, like
a stiletto, deep into the gray kernels that lie in the core of the
brain.  Excellent in cases of sudden syncope or fainting, such as
sometimes require the opening of windows, the dashing on of cold
water, the cutting of stays, perhaps, with a scene of more or less
tumultuous perturbation and afflux of clamorous womanhood.

So armed, Byles Gridley, A. M., champion of unprotected innocence,
grasped his ivory-handled cane and sallied forth on his way to The
Poplars.




CHAPTER XXX.

MASTER BYLES GRIDLEY CALLS ON MISS CYNTHIA BADLAM.

MISS Cynthia Badlam was seated in a small parlor which she was
accustomed to consider her own during her long residences at The
Poplars.  The entry stove warmed it but imperfectly, and she looked
pinched and cold, for the evenings were still pretty sharp, and the
old house let in the chill blasts, as old houses are in the habit of
doing.  She was sitting at her table, with a little trunk open before
her.  She had taken some papers from it, which she was looking over,
when a knock at her door announced a visitor, and Master Byles
Gridley entered the parlor.

As he came into the room, she gathered the papers together and
replaced them in the trunk, which she locked, throwing an unfinished
piece of needle-work over it, putting the key in her pocket, and
gathering herself up for company.  Something of all this Master
Gridley saw through his round spectacles, but seemed not to see, and
took his seat like a visitor making a call of politeness.

A visitor at such an hour, of the male sex, without special
provocation, without social pretext, was an event in the life of the
desolate spinster.  Could it be--No, it could not--and yet--and yet!
Miss Cynthia threw back the rather common-looking but comfortable
shawl which covered her shoulders, and showed her quite presentable
figure, arrayed with a still lingering thought of that remote
contingency which might yet offer itself at some unexpected moment;
she adjusted the carefully plaited cap, which was not yet of the
lasciate ogni speranza pattern, and as she obeyed these instincts of
her sex, she smiled a welcome to the respectable, learned, and
independent bachelor.  Mr. Gridley had a frosty but kindly age before
him, with a score or so of years to run, which it was after all not
strange to fancy might be rendered more cheerful by the companionship
of a well-conserved and amiably disposed woman, if any such should
happen to fall in his way.

That smile came very near disconcerting the plot of Master Byles
Gridley.  He had come on an inquisitor's errand, his heart secure, as
he thought, against all blandishments, his will steeled to break down
all resistance.  He had come armed with an instrument of torture
worse than the thumb-screw, worse than the pulleys which attempt the
miracle of adding a cubit to the stature, worse than the brazier of
live coals brought close to the naked soles of the feet,--an
instrument which, instead of trifling with the nerves, would clutch
all the nerve-centres and the heart itself in its gripe, and hold
them until it got its answer, if the white lips had life enough left
to shape one.  And here was this unfortunate maiden lady smiling at
him, setting her limited attractions in their best light, pleading
with him in that natural language which makes any contumacious
bachelor feel as guilty as Cain before any single woman.  If Mr.
Gridley had been alone, he would have taken a good sniff at his own
bottle of sal volatile; for his kind heart sunk within him as he
thought of the errand upon which he had come.  It would not do to
leave the subject of his vivisection under any illusion as to the
nature of his designs.

"Good evening, Miss Badlam," he said, "I have come to visit you on a
matter of business."

What was the internal panorama which had unrolled itself at the
instant of his entrance, and which rolled up as suddenly at the sound
of his serious voice and the look of his grave features?  It cannot
be reproduced, though pages were given to it; for some of the
pictures were near, and some were distant; some were clearly seen,
and some were only hinted; some were not recognized in the intellect
at all, and yet they were implied, as it were, behind the others.
Many times we have all found ourselves glad or sorry, and yet we
could not tell what thought it was that reflected the sunbeam or cast
the shadow.  Took into Cynthia's suddenly exalted consciousness and
see the picture, actual and potential, unroll itself in all its
details of the natural, the ridiculous, the selfish, the pitiful, the
human.  Glimpses, hints, echoes, suggestions, involving tender
sentiments hitherto unknown, we may suppose, to that unclaimed
sister's breast,--pleasant excitement of receiving congratulations
from suddenly cordial friends; the fussy delights of buying furniture
and shopping for new dresses,--(it seemed as if she could hear
herself saying, "Heavy silks,--best goods, if you please,")--with
delectable thumping down of flat-sided pieces of calico, cambric,
"rep," and other stiffs, and rhythmic evolution of measured yards,
followed by sharp snip of scissors, and that cry of rending tissues
dearer to woman's ear than any earthly sound until she hears the
voice of her own first-born,(much of this potentially, remember,)--
thoughts of a comfortable settlement, an imposing social condition, a
cheerful household, and by and by an Indian summer of serene
widowhood,--all these, and infinite other involved possibilities had
mapped themselves in one long swift flash before Cynthia's inward
eye, and all vanished as the old man spoke those few words.  The look
on his face, and the tone of his cold speech, had instantly swept
them all away, like a tea-set sliding in a single crash from a
slippery tray.

What could be the "business" on which he had come to her with that
solemn face?--she asked herself, as she returned his greeting and
offered him a chair.  She was conscious of a slight tremor as she put
this question to her own intelligence.

"Are we like to be alone and undisturbed?" Mr. Gridley asked.  It was
a strange question,--men do act strangely sometimes.  She hardly
knew.  whether to turn red or white.

"Yes, there is nobody like to come in at present," she answered.  She
did not know what to make of it.  What was coming next,
--a declaration, or an accusation of murder?

"My business," Mr. Gridley said, very gravely, "relates to this.  I
wish to inspect papers which I have reason to believe exist, and
which have reference to the affairs of the late Malachi Withers.  Can
you help me to get sight of any of these papers not to be found at
the Registry of Deeds or the Probate Office?"

"Excuse me, Mr. Gridley, but may I ask you what particular concern
you have with the affairs of my relative, Cousin Malachi Withers,
that's been dead and buried these half-dozen years?"

"Perhaps it would take some time to answer that question fully, Miss
Badlam.  Some of these affairs do concern those I am interested in,
if not myself directly."

"May I ask who the person or persons may be on whose account you wish
to look at papers belonging to my late relative, Malachi Withers?"

"You can ask me almost anything, Miss Badlam, but I should really be
very much obliged if you would answer my question first.  Can you
help me to get a sight of any papers relating to the estate of
Malachi Withers, not to be found at the Registry of Deeds or the
Probate Office,--any of which you may happen to have any private and
particular knowledge?"

"I beg your pardon, Mr. Gridley; but I don't understand why you come
to me with such questions.  Lawyer Penhallow is the proper person, I
should think, to go to.  He and his partner that was--Mr. Wibird, you
know--settled the estate, and he has got the papers, I suppose, if
there are any, that ain't to be found in the offices you mention."

Mr. Gridley moved his chair a little, so as to bring Miss Badlam's
face a little more squarely in view.

"Does Mr. William Murray Bradshaw know anything about any papers,
such as I am referring to, that may have been sent to the office?"

The lady felt a little moisture stealing through all her pores, and
at the same time a certain dryness of the vocal organs, so that her
answer came in a slightly altered tone which neither of them could
help noticing.

"You had better ask Mr. William Murray Bradshaw yourself about that,"
she answered.  She felt the hook now, and her spines were rising,
partly with apprehension, partly with irritation.

"Has that young gentleman ever delivered into your hands any papers
relating to the affairs of the late Malachi Withers, for your safe
keeping?"

"What do you mean by asking me these questions, Mr. Gridley?  I don't
choose to be catechised about Murray Bradshaw's business.  Go to him,
if you please, if you want to find out about it."

"Excuse my persistence, Miss Badlam, but I must prevail upon you to
answer my question.  Has Mr. William Murray Bradshaw ever delivered
into your hands any papers relating to the affairs of the late
Malachi Withers, for your safe keeping?"

"Do you suppose I am going to answer such questions as you are
putting me because you repeat them over, Mr. Gridley?  Indeed I
cha'n't.  Ask him, if you please, whatever you wish to know about his
doings."

She drew herself up and looked savagely at him.  She had talked
herself into her courage.  There was a color in her cheeks and a
sparkle in her eye; she looked dangerous as a cobra.

"Miss Cynthia Badlam," Master Gridley said, very deliberately, "I am
afraid we do not entirely understand each other.  You must answer my
question precisely, categorically, point-blank, and on the instant.
Will you do this at once, or will you compel me to show you the
absolute necessity of your doing it, at the expense of pain to both
of us?  Six words from me will make you answer all my questions."

"You can't say six words, nor sixty, Mr. Gridley, that will make me
answer one question I do not choose to.  I defy you!"

"I will not say one, Miss Cynthia Badlam.  There are some things one
does not like to speak in words.  But I will show you a scrap of
paper, containing just six words and a date; not one word more nor
one less.  You shall read them.  Then I will burn the paper in the
flame of your lamp.  As soon after that as you feel ready, I will ask
the same question again."

Master Gridley took out from his pocket-book a scrap of paper, and
handed it to Cynthia Badlam.  Her hand shook as she received it, for
she was frightened as well as enraged, and she saw that Mr. Gridley
was in earnest and knew what he was doing.

She read the six words, he looking at her steadily all the time, and
watching her as if he had just given her a drop of prussic acid.

No cry.  No sound from her lips.  She stared as if half stunned for
one moment, then turned her head and glared at Mr. Gridley as if she
would have murdered him if she dared.  In another instant her face
whitened, the scrap of paper fluttered to the floor, and she would
have followed it but for the support of both Mr. Gridley's arms.  He
disengaged one of them presently, and felt in his pocket for the sal
volatile.  It served him excellently well, and stung her back again
to her senses very quickly.  All her defiant aspect had gone.

"Look!" he said, as he lighted the scrap of paper in the flame."
You understand me, and you see that I must be answered the next time
I ask my question."

She opened her lips as if to speak.  It was as when a bell is rung in
a vacuum,--no words came from them,--only a faint gasping sound, an
effort at speech.  She was caught tight in the heart-screw.

"Don't hurry yourself, Miss Cynthia," he said, with a certain
relenting tenderness of manner.  "Here, take another sniff of the
smelling-salts.  Be calm, be quiet,--I am well disposed towards you,
--I don't like to give you trouble.  There, now, I must have the
answer to that question; but take your time, take your time."

"Give me some water,--some water!" she said, in a strange hoarse
whisper.  There was a pitcher of water and a tumbler on an old marble
sideboard near by.  He filled the tumbler, and Cynthia emptied it as
if she had just been taken from the rack, and could have swallowed a
bucketful.

"What do you want to know?" she asked.

"I wish to know all that you can tell me about a certain paper, or
certain papers, which I have reason to believe Mr. William Murray
Bradshaw committed to your keeping."

"There is only one paper of any consequence.  Do you want to make him
kill me? or do you want to make me kill myself?"

"Neither, Miss Cynthia, neither.  I wish to see that paper, but not
for any bad purpose.  Don't you think, on the whole, you have pretty
good reason to trust me?  I am a very quiet man, Miss Cynthia.  Don't
be afraid of me; only do what I ask,--it will be a great deal better
for you in the end."

She thrust her trembling hand into her pocket, and took out the key
of the little trunk.  She drew the trunk towards her, put the key in
the lock, and opened it.  It seemed like pressing a knife into her
own bosom and turning the blade.  That little trunk held all the
records of her life the forlorn spinster most cherished;--a few
letters that came nearer to love-letters than any others she had ever
received; an album, with flowers of the summers of 1840 and 1841
fading between its leaves; two papers containing locks of hair, half
of a broken ring, and other insignificant mementos which had their
meaning, doubtless, to her,--such a collection as is often priceless
to one human heart, and passed by as worthless in the auctioneer's
inventory.  She took the papers out mechanically, and laid them on
the table.  Among them was an oblong packet, sealed with what
appeared to be the office seal of Messrs. Penhallow and Bradshaw.

"Will you allow me to take that envelope containing papers, Miss
Badlam?  "Mr. Gridley asked, with a suavity and courtesy in his tone
and manner that showed how he felt for her sex and her helpless
position.

She seemed to obey his will as if she had none of her own left.  She
passed the envelope to him, and stared at him vacantly while he
examined it.  He read on the back of the package: "Withers Estate--
old papers--of no importance apparently.  Examine hereafter."

"May I ask when, where, and of whom you obtained these papers, Miss
Badlam?"

"Have pity on me, Mr. Gridley,--have pity on me.  I am a lost woman
if you do not.  Spare me! for God's sake, spare me!  There will no
wrong come of all this, if you will but wait a little while.  The
paper will come to light when it is wanted, and all will be right.
But do not make me answer any more questions, and let me keep this
paper.  O Mr. Gridley!  I am in the power of a dreadful man--"

"You mean Mr. William Murray Bradshaw?"

"I mean him."

"Has there not been some understanding between you that he should
become the approved suitor of Miss Myrtle Hazard?"

Cynthia wrung her hands and rocked herself backward and forward in
her misery, but answered not a word.  What could she answer, if she
had plotted with this "dreadful man" against a young and innocent
girl, to deliver her over into his hands, at the risk of all her
earthly hopes and happiness?

Master Gridley waited long and patiently for any answer she might
have the force to make.  As she made none, he took upon himself to
settle the whole matter without further torture of his helpless
victim.

"This package must go into the hands of the parties who had the
settlement of the estate of the late Malachi Withers.  Mr. Penhallow
is the survivor of the two gentlemen to whom that business was
intrusted.  How long is Mr. William Murray Bradshaw like to be away?"

"Perhaps a few days,--perhaps weeks,--and then he will come back and
kill me,--or--or--worse!  Don't take that paper, Mr. Gridley,--he
isn't like you! you would n't--but he would--he would send me to
everlasting misery to gain his own end, or to save himself.  And yet
he is n't every way bad, and if he did marry Myrtle she'd think there
never was such a man,--for he can talk her heart out of her, and the
wicked in him lies very deep and won't ever come out, perhaps, if the
world goes right with him."  The last part of this sentence showed
how Cynthia talked with her own conscience; all her mental and moral
machinery lay open before the calm eyes of Master Byles Gridley.

His thoughts wandered a moment from the business before him; he had
just got a new study of human nature, which in spite of himself would
be shaping itself into an axiom for an imagined new edition of
"Thoughts on the Universe," something like this, "The greatest saint
may be a sinner that never got down to "hard pan."  It was not the
time to be framing axioms.

"Poh!  poh!" he said to himself; "what are you about making phrases,
when you have got a piece of work like this in hand?"  Then to
Cynthia, with great gentleness and kindness of manner: "Have no fear
about any consequences to yourself.  Mr. Penhallow must see that
paper--I mean those papers.  You shall not be a loser nor a sufferer
if you do your duty now in these premises."

Master Gridley, treating her, as far as circumstances permitted, like
a gentleman, had shown no intention of taking the papers either
stealthily or violently.  It must be with her consent.  He had laid
the package down upon the table, waiting for her to give him leave to
take it.  But just as he spoke these last words, Cynthia, whose eye
had been glancing furtively at it while he was thinking out his
axiom, and taking her bearings to it pretty carefully, stretched her
hand out, and, seizing the package, thrust it into the sanctuary of
her bosom.

"Mr. Penhallow must see those papers, Miss Cynthia Badlam," Mr.
Gridley repeated calmly.  "If he says they or any of them can be
returned to your keeping, well and good.  But see them he must, for
they have his office seal and belong in his custody, and, as you see
by the writing on the back, they have not been examined.  Now there
may be something among them which is of immediate importance to the
relatives of the late deceased Malachi Withers, and therefore they
must be forthwith submitted to the inspection of the surviving
partner of the firm of Wibird and Penhallow.  This I propose to do,
with your consent, this evening.  It is now twenty-five minutes past
eight by the true time, as my watch has it.  At half past eight
exactly I shall have the honor of bidding you good evening, Miss
Cynthia Badlam, whether you give me those papers or not.  I shall go
to the office of Jacob Penhallow, Esquire, and there make one of two
communications to him; to wit, these papers and the facts connected
therewith, or another statement, the nature of which you may perhaps
conjecture."

There is no need of our speculating as to what Mr. Byles Gridley, an
honorable and humane man, would have done, or what would have been
the nature of that communication which he offered as an alternative
to the perplexed woman.  He had not at any rate miscalculated the
strength of his appeal, which Cynthia interpreted as he expected.
She bore the heart-screw about two minutes.  Then she took the
package from her bosom, and gave it with averted face to Master Byles
Gridley, who, on receiving it, made her a formal but not unkindly
bow, and bade her good evening.

"One would think it had been lying out in the dew," he said, as he
left the house and walked towards Mr. Penhallow's residence.




CHAPTER XXXI.


MASTER BYLES GRIDLEY CONSULTS WITH JACOB PENHALLOW, ESQUIRE

Lawyer Penhallow was seated in his study, his day's work over, his
feet in slippers, after the comfortable but inelegant fashion which
Sir Walter Scott reprobates, amusing himself with a volume of old
Reports.  He was a knowing man enough, a keen country lawyer but
honest, and therefore less ready to suspect the honesty of others.
He had a great belief in his young partner's ability, and, though he
knew him to be astute, did not think him capable of roguery.

It was at his request that Mr. Bradshaw had undertaken his journey,
which, as he believed,--and as Mr. Bradshaw had still stronger
evidence of a strictly confidential nature which led him to feel
sure,--would end in the final settlement of the great land claim in
favor of their client.  The case had been dragging along from year to
year, like an English chancery suit; and while courts and lawyers and
witnesses had been sleeping, the property had been steadily growing.
A railroad had passed close to one margin of the township, some mines
had been opened in the county, in which a village calling itself a
city had grown big enough to have a newspaper and Fourth of July
orations.  It was plain that the successful issue of the long process
would make the heirs of the late Malachi Withers possessors of an
ample fortune, and it was also plain that the firm of Penhallow and
Bradshaw were like to receive, in such case, the largest fee that had
gladdened the professional existence of its members.

Mr. Penhallow had his book open before him, but his thoughts were
wandering from the page.  He was thinking of his absent partner, and
the probable results of his expedition.  What would be the
consequence if all this property came into the possession of Silence
Withers?  Could she have any liberal intentions with reference to
Myrtle Hazard, the young girl who had grown up with her, or was the
common impression true, that she was bent on endowing an institution,
and thus securing for herself a favorable consideration in the higher
courts, where her beneficiaries would be, it might be supposed,
influential advocates?  He could not help thinking that Mr. Bradshaw
believed that Myrtle Hazard would eventually come to apart at least
of this inheritance.  For the story was, that he was paying his court
to the young lady whenever he got an opportunity, and that he was
cultivating an intimacy with Miss Cynthia Badlam.  "Bradshaw would
n'tmake a move in that direction," Mr. Penhallow said to himself,
"until he felt pretty sure that it was going to be a paying business.
If he was only a young minister now, there'd be no difficulty about
it.  Let any man, young or old, in a clerical white cravat, step up
to Myrtle Hazard, and ask her to be miserable in his company through
this wretched life, and aunt Silence would very likely give them her
blessing, and add something to it that the man in the white cravat
would think worth even more than that was.  But I don't know what
she'll say to Bradshaw.  Perhaps he 'd better have a hint to go to
meeting a little more regularly.  However, I suppose he knows what
he's about."

He was thinking all this over when a visitor was announced, and Mr.
Byles Gridley entered the study.

"Good evening, Mr. Penhallow," Mr. Gridley said, wiping his forehead.
"Quite warm, is n't it, this evening?"

"Warm!" said Mr. Penhallow, "I should think it would freeze pretty
thick to-night.  I should have asked you to come up to the fire and
warm yourself.  But take off your coat, Mr. Gridley,--very glad to
see you.  You don't come to the house half as often as you come to
the office.  Sit down, sit down."

Mr. Gridley took off his outside coat and sat down.  "He does look
warm, does n't he?" Mr. Penhallow thought.  "Wonder what has heated
up the old gentleman so.  Find out quick enough, for he always goes
straight to business."

"Mr. Penhallow," Mr. Gridley began at once, "I have come on a very
grave matter, in which you are interested as well as myself, and I
wish to lay the whole of it before you as explicitly as I can, so
that we may settle this night before I go what is to be done.  I am
afraid the good standing of your partner, Mr. William Murray
Bradshaw, is concerned in the matter.  Would it be a surprise to you,
if he had carried his acuteness in some particular case like the one
I am to mention beyond the prescribed limits?"

The question was put so diplomatically that there was no chance for
an indignant denial of the possibility of Mr. Bradshaw's being
involved in any discreditable transaction.

"It is possible," he answered, "that Bradshaw's keen wits may have
betrayed him into sharper practice than I should altogether approve
in any business we carried on together.  He is a very knowing young
man, but I can't think he is foolish enough, to say nothing of his
honesty, to make any false step of the kind you seem to hint.  I
think he might on occasion go pretty near the line, but I don't
believe he would cross it."

"Permit me a few questions, Mr. Penhallow.  You settled the estate of
the late Malachi Withers, did you not?"

"Mr. Wibird and myself settled it together."

"Have you received any papers from any of the family since the
settlement of the estate?"

"Let me see.  Yes; a roll of old plans of the Withers Place, and so
forth,--not of much use, but labelled and kept.  An old trunk with
letters and account-books, some of them in Dutch,--mere curiosities.
A year ago or more, I remember that Silence sent me over some papers
she had found in an odd corner,--the old man hid things like a
magpie.  I looked over most of them,--trumpery not worth keeping,--
old leases and so forth."

"Do you recollect giving some of them to Mr. Bradshaw to look over?"

"Now I come to think of it, I believe I did; but he reported to me,
if I remember right, that they amounted to nothing."

"If any of those papers were of importance, should you think your
junior partner ought to keep them from your knowledge?"

"I need not answer that question, Mr. Gridley.  Will you be so good
as to come at once to the facts on which you found your suspicions,
and which lead you to put these questions to me?"

Thereupon Mr. Gridley proceeded to state succinctly the singular
behavior of Murray Bradshaw in taking one paper from a number handed
to him by Mr. Penhallow, and concealing it in a volume.  He related
how he was just on the point of taking out the volume which contained
the paper, when Mr. Bradshaw entered and disconcerted him.  He had,
however, noticed three spots on the paper by which he should know it
anywhere.  He then repeated the substance of Kitty Fagan's story,
accenting the fact that she too noticed three remarkable spots on the
paper which Mr. Bradshaw had pointed out to Miss Badlam as the one so
important to both of them.  Here he rested the case for the moment.

Mr. Penhallow looked thoughtful.  There was something questionable in
the aspect of this business.  It did obviously suggest the idea of an
underhand arrangement with Miss Cynthia, possibly involving some very
grave consequences.  It would have been most desirable, he said, to
have ascertained what these papers, or rather this particular paper,
to which so much importance was attached, amounted to.  Without that
knowledge there was nothing, after all, which it might not be
possible to explain.  He might have laid aside the spotted paper to
examine for some object of mere curiosity.  It was certainly odd that
the one the Fagan woman had seen should present three spots so like
those on the other paper, but people did sometimes throw treys at
backgammon, and that which not rarely happened with two dice of six
faces might happen if they had sixty or six hundred faces.  On the
whole, he did not see that there was any ground, so far, for anything
more than a vague suspicion.  He thought it not unlikely that Mr.
Bradshaw was a little smitten with the young lady up at The Poplars,
and that he had made some diplomatic overtures to the duenna, after
the approved method of suitors.  She was young for Bradshaw,--very
young,--but he knew his own affairs.  If he chose to make love to a
child, it was natural enough that he should begin by courting her
nurse.

Master Byles Gridley lost himself for half a minute in a most
discreditable inward discussion as to whether Laura Penhallow was
probably one or two years older than Mr. Bradshaw.  That was his way,
he could not help it.  He could not think of anything without these
mental parentheses.  But he came back to business at the end of his
half-minute.

"I can lay the package before you at this moment, Mr. Penhallow.  I
have induced that woman in whose charge it was left to intrust it to
my keeping, with the express intention of showing it to you.  But it
is protected by a seal, as I have told you, which I should on no
account presume to meddle with."

Mr. Gridley took out the package of papers.

"How damp it is!" Mr. Penhallow said; "must have been lying in some
very moist neighborhood."

"Very," Mr. Gridley answered, with a peculiar expression which said,
"Never mind about that."

"Did the party give you possession of these documents without making
any effort to retain them?" the lawyer asked.

"Not precisely.  It cost some effort to induce Miss Badlam to let
them go out of her hands.  I hope you think I was justified in making
the effort I did, not without a considerable strain upon my feelings,
as well as her own, to get hold of the papers?"

"That will depend something on what the papers prove to be, Mr.
Gridley.  A man takes a certain responsibility in doing just what you
have done.  If, for instance, it should prove that this envelope
contained matters relating solely to private transactions between Mr.
Bradshaw and Miss Badlam, concerning no one but themselves,--and if
the words on the back of the envelope and the seal had been put there
merely as a protection for a package containing private papers of a
delicate but perfectly legitimate character--"

The lawyer paused, as careful experts do, after bending the bow of an
hypothesis, before letting the arrow go.  Mr. Gridley felt very warm
indeed, uncomfortably so, and applied his handkerchief to his face.
Could n't be anything in such a violent supposition as that, and yet
such a crafty fellow as that Bradshaw,--what trick was he not up to?
Absurd!  Cynthia was not acting,--Rachel would n't be equal to such a
performance!--" why then, Mr. Gridley," the lawyer continued, "I
don't see but what my partner would have you at an advantage, and, if
disposed to make you uncomfortable, could do so pretty effectively.
But this, you understand, is only a supposed case, and not a very
likely one.  I don't think it would have been prudent in you to
meddle with that seal.  But it is a very different matter with regard
to myself.  It makes no difference, so far as I am concerned, where
this package came from, or how it was obtained.  It is just as
absolutely within my control as any piece of property I call my own.
I should not hesitate, if I saw fit, to break this seal at once, and
proceed to the examination of any papers contained within the
envelope.  If I found any paper of the slightest importance relating
to the estate, I should act as if it had never been out of my
possession.

"Suppose, however, I chose to know what was in the package, and,
having ascertained, act my judgment about returning it to the party
from whom you obtained it.  In such case I might see fit to restore
or cause it to be restored, to the party, without any marks of
violence having been used being apparent.  If everything is not
right, probably no questions would be asked by the party having
charge of the package.  If there is no underhand work going on, and
the papers are what they profess to be, nobody is compromised but
yourself, so far as I can see, and you are compromised at any rate,
Mr. Gridley, at least in the good graces of the party from whom you
obtained the documents.  Tell that party that I took the package
without opening it, and shall return it, very likely, without
breaking the seal.  Will consider of the matter, say a couple of
days.  Then you shall hear from me, and she shall hear from you.  So.
So.  Yes, that's it.  A nice business.  A thing to sleep on.  You had
better leave the whole matter of dealing with the package to me.  If
I see fit to send it back with the seal unbroken, that is my affair.
But keep perfectly quiet, if you please, Mr. Gridley, about the whole
matter.  Mr. Bradshaw is off, as you know, and the business on which
he is gone is important,--very important.  He can be depended on for
that; he has acted all along as if he had a personal interest in the
success of our firm beyond his legal relation to it."

Mr. Penhallow's light burned very late in the office that night, and
the following one.  He looked troubled and absent-minded, and when
Miss Laura ventured to ask him how long Mr. Bradshaw was like to be
gone, he answered her in such a way that the girl who waited at table
concluded that he did n't mean to have Miss Laury keep company with
Mr. Bradshaw, or he'd never have spoke so dreadful hash to her when
she asked about him.




CHAPTER XXXII.

SUSAN POSEY'S TRIAL.

A day or two after Myrtle Hazard returned to the village, Master
Byles Gridley, accompanied by Gifted Hopkins, followed her, as has
been already mentioned, to the same scene of the principal events of
this narrative.  The young man had been persuaded that it would be
doing injustice to his talents to crowd their fruit prematurely upon
the market.  He carried his manuscript back with him, having
relinquished the idea of publishing for the present.  Master Byles
Gridley, on the other hand, had in his pocket a very flattering
proposal, from the same publisher to whom he had introduced the young
poet, for a new and revised edition of his work, "Thoughts on the
Universe," which was to be remodelled in some respects, and to have a
new title not quite so formidable to the average reader.

It would be hardly fair to Susan Posey to describe with what delight
and innocent enthusiasm she welcomed back Gifted Hopkins.  She had
been so lonely since he was away?  She had read such of his poems as
she possessed--duplicates of his printed ones, or autographs which he
had kindly written out for her--over and over again, not without the
sweet tribute of feminine sensibility, which is the most precious of
all testimonials to a poet's power over the heart.  True, her love
belonged to another,--but then she was so used to Gifted!  She did so
love to hear him read his poems,--and Clement had never written that
"little bit of a poem to Susie," which she had asked him for so long
ago!  She received him therefore with open arms,--not literally, of
course, which would have been a breach of duty and propriety, but in
a figurative sense, which it is hoped no reader will interpret to her
discredit.

The young poet was in need of consolation.  It is true that he had
seen many remarkable sights during his visit to the city; that he had
got "smarted up," as his mother called it, a good deal; that he had
been to Mrs. Clymer Ketchum's party, where he had looked upon life in
all its splendors; and that he brought back many interesting
experiences, which would serve to enliven his conversation for a long
time.  But he had failed in the great enterprise he had undertaken.
He was forced to confess to his revered parent, and his esteemed
friend Susan Posey, that his genius, which was freely acknowledged,
was not thought to be quite ripe as yet.  He told the young lady some
particulars of his visit to the publisher, how he had listened with
great interest to one of his poems, "The Triumph of Song,"--how he
had treated him with marked and flattering attention; but that he
advised him not to risk anything prematurely, giving him the hope
that by and by he would be admitted into that series of illustrious
authors which it was the publisher's privilege to present to the
reading public.  In short, he was advised not to print.  That was the
net total of the matter, and it was a pang to the susceptible heart
of the poet.  He had hoped to have come home enriched by the sale of
his copyright, and with the prospect of seeing his name before long
on the back of a handsome volume.

Gifted's mother did all in her power to console him in his
disappointment.  There was plenty of jealous people always that
wanted to keep young folks from rising in the world.  Never mind, she
did n't believe but what Gifted could make jest as good verses as any
of them that they kept such a talk about.  She had a fear that he
might pine away in consequence of the mental excitement he had gone
through, and solicited his appetite with her choicest appliances,--of
which he partook in a measure which showed that there was no
immediate cause of alarm.

But Susan Posey was more than a consoler,--she was an angel to him in
this time of his disappointment.  "Read me all the poems over again,"
she said,--"it is almost the only pleasure I have left, to hear you
read your beautiful verses."  Clement Lindsay had not written to
Susan quite so often of late as at some former periods of the history
of their love.  Perhaps it was that which had made her look paler
than usual for some little time.  Something was evidently preying on
her.  Her only delight seemed to be in listening to Gifted as he
read, sometimes with fine declamatory emphasis, sometimes in low,
tremulous tones, the various poems enshrined in his manuscript.  At
other times she was sad, and more than once Mrs. Hopkins had seen a
tear steal down her innocent cheek, when there seemed to be no
special cause for grief.  She ventured to speak of it to Master Byles
Gridley.

"Our Susan's in trouble, Mr. Gridley, for some reason or other that's
unbeknown to me, and I can't help wishing you could jest have a few
words with her.  You're a kind of a grandfather, you know, to all the
young folks, and they'd tell you pretty much everything about
themselves.  I calc'late she is n't at ease in her mind about
somethin' or other, and I kind o' think, Mr. Gridley, you could coax
it out of her."

"Was there ever anything like it?" said Master Byles Gridley to
himself.  "I shall have all the young folks in Oxbow Village to take
care of at this rate.  Susan Posey in trouble, too!  Well, well,
well, it's easier to get a birch-bark canoe off the shallows than a
big ship off the rocks.  Susan Posey's trouble will be come at easily
enough; but Myrtle Hazard floats in deeper water.  We must make Susan
Posey tell her own story, or let her tell it, for it will all come
out of itself."

"I am going to dust the books in the open shelves this morning.  I
wonder if Miss Susan Posey would n't like to help for half an hour or
so," Master Gridley remarked at the breakfast-table.

The amiable girl's very pleasant countenance lighted up at the
thought of obliging the old man who had been so kind to her and so
liberal to her friend, the poet.  She would be delighted to help him;
she would dust them all for him, if he wanted her to.  No, Master
Gridley said, he always wanted to have a hand in it; and, besides,
such a little body as she was could not lift those great folios out
of the lower shelves without overstraining herself; she might handle
the musketry and the light artillery, but he must deal with the heavy
guns himself.  "As low down as the octavos, Susan Posey, you shall
govern; below that, the Salic law."

Susan did not low much about the Salic law; but she knew he meant
that he would dust the big books and she would attend to the little
ones.

A very young and a very pretty girl is sometimes quite charming in a
costume which thinks of nothing less than of being attractive.  Susan
appeared after breakfast in the study, her head bound with a kerchief
of bright pattern, a little jacket she had outgrown buttoned, in
spite of opposition, close about her up to the throat, round which a
white handkerchief was loosely tied, and a pair of old gauntlets
protecting her hands, so that she suggested something between a
gypsy, a jaunty soubrette, and the fille du regiment.

Master Gridley took out a great volume from the lower shelf,--a folio
in massive oaken covers with clasps Like prison hinges, bearing the
stately colophon, white on a ground of vermilion, of Nicholas Jenson
and his associates.  He opened the volume,--paused over its blue, and
scarlet initial letter,--he turned page after page, admiring its
brilliant characters, its broad, white marginal rivers, and the
narrower white creek that separated the black-typed twin-columns, he
turned back to the beginning and read the commendatory paragraph,"
Nam ipsorum omnia fidgent tum correctione dignissima, tum cura
imprimendo splendida ac miranda,' and began reading, "Incipit
proemium super apparatum decretalium...." when it suddenly occurred
to him that this was not exactly doing what he had undertaken to do,
and he began whisking an ancient bandanna about the ears of the
venerable volume.  All this time Miss Susan Posey was catching the
little books by the small of their backs, pulling them out, opening
them, and clapping them together, 'p-'p-'p!  'p-'p-'p!  and carefully
caressing all their edges with a regular professional dusting-cloth,
so persuasively that they yielded up every particle that a year had
drifted upon them, and came forth refreshed and rejuvenated.  This
process went on for a while, until Susan had worked down among
the octavos and Master Gridley had worked up among the quartos.  He
had got hold of Calmet's Dictionary, and was caught by the article
Solomon, so that he forgot his occupation again.  All at once it
struck him that everything was very silent,--the 'p-'p-'p!  of
clapping the books had ceased, and the light rustle of Susan's dress
was no longer heard.  He looked up and saw her standing perfectly
still, with a book in one hand and her duster in the other.  She was
lost in thought, and by the shadow on her face and the glistening of
her blue eyes he knew it was her hidden sorrow that had just come
back to her.  Master Gridley shut up his book, leaving Solomon to his
fate, like the worthy Benedictine he was reading, without discussing
the question whether he was saved or not.

"Susan Posey, child, what is your trouble?"

Poor Susan was in the state of unstable equilibrium which the least
touch upsets, and fell to crying.  It took her some time to get down
the waves of emotion so that speech would live upon them.  At last it
ventured out,--showing at intervals, like the boat rising on the
billow, sinking into the hollow, and climbing again into notice.

"O Mr. Grid-ley--I can't--I can't--tell you or--any-body--what 's the
mat-mat-matter.  My heart will br-br-break."

"No, no, no, child," said Mr. Gridley, sympathetically stirred a
little himself by the sight of Susan in tears and sobbing and
catching her breath, "that mustn't be, Susan Posey.  Come off the
steps, Susan Posey, and stop dusting the books,--I can finish them,--
and tell me all abort your troubles.  I will try 'to help you out of
them, and I have begun to think I know how to help young people
pretty well.  I have had some experience at it."

But Susan cried and sobbed all the more uncontrollably and
convulsively.  Master Gridley thought he had better lead her at once
to what he felt pretty sure was the source of her grief, and that,
when she had had her cry out, she would probably make the hole in the
ice he had broken big enough in a very few minutes.

"I think something has gone wrong between you and your friend, the
young gentleman with whom you are in intimate relations, my child,
and I think you had better talk freely with me, for I can perhaps
give you a little counsel that will be of service."

Susan cried herself quiet at last.  "There's nobody in the world like
you, Mr. Gridley," she said, "and I've been wanting to tell you
something ever so long.  My friend--Mr. Clem--Clement Lindsay does
n't care for me as he used to,--I know he does n't.  He hasn't
written to me for--I don't know but it's a month.  And O Mr. Gridley!
he's such a great man, and I am such a simple person,--I can't help
thinking--he would be happier with somebody else than poor little
Susan Posey!"

This last touch of self-pity overcame her, as it is so apt to do
those who indulge in that delightful misery, and she broke up badly,
as a horse-fancier would say, so that it was some little time before
she recovered her conversational road-gait.

"O Mr. Gridley," she began again, at length, "if I only dared to tell
him what I think,--that perhaps it would be happier for us both--if
we could forget each other!  Ought I not to tell him so?  Don't you
think he would find another to make him happy?  Wouldn't he forgive
me for telling him he was free?  Were we not too young to know each
other's hearts when we promised each other that we would love as long
as we lived?  Sha'n't I write him a letter this very day and tell him
all?  Do you think it would be wrong in me to do it?  O Mr. Gridley,
it makes me almost crazy to think about it.  Clement must be free!  I
cannot, cannot hold him to a promise he does n't want to keep."

There were so many questions in this eloquent rhapsody of Susan's
that they neutralized each other, as one might say, and Master
Gridley had time for reflection.  His thoughts went on something in
this way:

"Pretty clear case!  Guess Mr. Clement can make up his mind to it.
Put it well, did n't she?  Not a word about our little Gifted!
That's the trouble.  Poets!  how they do bewitch these schoolgirls!
And having a chance every day, too, how could you expect her to stand
it?"  Then aloud: "Susan Posey, you are a good, honest little girl as
ever was.  I think you and Clement were too hasty in coming together
for life before you knew what life meant.  I think if you write
Clement a letter, telling him that you cannot help fearing that you
two are not perfectly adapted to each other, on account of certain
differences for which neither of you is responsible, and that you
propose that each should release the other from the pledge given so
long ago,--in that case, I say, I believe he will think no worse of
you for so doing, and may perhaps agree that it is best for both of
you to seek your happiness elsewhere than in each other."

The book-dusting came to as abrupt a close as the reading of
Lancelot.  Susan went straight to her room, dried her tears so as to
write in a fair hand, but had to stop every few lines and take a turn
at the "dust-layers," as Mrs. Clymer Ketchum's friend used to call
the fountains of sensibility.  It would seem like betraying Susan's
confidence to reveal the contents of this letter, but the reader may
be assured that it was simple and sincere and very sweetly written,
without the slightest allusion to any other young man, whether of the
poetical or cheaper human varieties.

It was not long before Susan received a reply from Clement Lindsay.
It was as kind and generous and noble as she could have asked.  It
was affectionate, as a very amiable brother's letter might be, and
candidly appreciative of the reasons Susan had assigned for her
proposal.  He gave her back her freedom, not that he should cease to
feel an interest in her, always.  He accepted his own release, not
that he would ever think she could be indifferent to his future
fortunes.  And within a very brief period of time after sending his
answer to Susan Posey, whether he wished to see her in person, or
whether he had some other motive, he had packed his trunk, and made
his excuses for an absence of uncertain length at the studio, and was
on his way to Oxbow Village.




CHAPTER XXXIII.

JUST AS YOU EXPECTED.

The spring of 1861 had now arrived,--that eventful spring which was
to lift the curtain and show the first scene of the first act in the
mighty drama which fixed the eyes of mankind during four bloody
years.  The little schemes of little people were going on in all our
cities and villages without thought of the fearful convulsion which
was soon coming to shatter the hopes and cloud the prospects of
millions.  Our little Oxbow Village, which held itself by no means
the least of human centres, was the scene of its own commotions, as
intense and exciting to those concerned as if the destiny of the
nation had been involved in them.

Mr. Clement Lindsay appeared suddenly in that important locality, and
repaired to his accustomed quarters at the house of Deacon Rumrill.
That worthy person received him with a certain gravity of manner,
caused by his recollections of the involuntary transgression into
which Mr. Lindsay had led him by his present of "Ivanhoe."--He was,
on the whole, glad to see him, for his finances were not yet wholly
recovered from the injury inflicted on them by the devouring element.
But he could not forget that his boarder had betrayed him into a
breach of the fourth commandment, and that the strict eyes of his
clergyman had detected him in the very commission of the offence.  He
had no sooner seen Mr. Clement comfortably installed, therefore, than
he presented himself at the door of his chamber with the book,
enveloped in strong paper and very securely tied round with a stout
string.

"Here is your vollum, Mr. Lindsay," the Deacon said.  "I understand
it is not the work of that great and good mahn who I thought wrote
it.  I did not see anything immoral in it as fur as I read, but it
belongs to what I consider a very dangerous class of publications.
These novels and romances are awfully destructive to our youth.  I
should recommend you, as a young man of principle, to burn the
vollum.  At least I hope you will not leave it about anywhere unless
it is carefully tied up.  I have written upon the paper round it to
warn off all the young persons of my household from meddling with
it."

True enough, Mr. Clement saw in strong black letters on the back of
the paper wrapping his unfortunate "Ivanhoe,"---

"DANGEROUS READING FOR CHRISTIAN YOUTH.

"TOUCH NOT THE UNCLEAN THING."

"I thought you said you had Scott's picture hung up in your parlor,
Deacon Rumrill," he said, a little amused with the worthy man's fear
and precautions.

"It is the great Scott's likeness that I have in my parlor," he said;
"I will show it to you if you will come with me."

Mr. Clement followed the Deacon into that sacred apartment.

"That is the portrait of the great Scott," he said, pointing to an
engraving of a heavy-looking person whose phrenological developments
were a somewhat striking contrast to those of the distinguished Sir
Walter.

"I will take good care that none of your young people see this
volume," Mr. Clement said; "I trust you read it yourself, however,
and found something to please you in it.  I am sure you are safe from
being harmed by any such book.  Did n't you have to finish it,
Deacon, after you had once begun?"

"Well, I--I--perused a consid'able portion of the work," the Deacon
answered, in a way that led Mr. Clement to think he had not stopped
much short of Finis.  "Anything new in the city?"

"Nothing except what you've all had,--Confederate States establishing
an army and all that,--not very new either.  What has been going on
here lately, Deacon?"

"Well, Mr. Lindsay, not a great deal.  My new barn is pretty nigh
done.  I've got as fine a litter of pigs as ever you see.  I don't
know whether you're a judge of pigs or no.  The Hazard gal's come
back, spilt, pooty much, I guess.  Been to one o' them fashionable
schools,--I 've heerd that she 's learnt to dance.  I've heerd say
that that Hopkins boy's round the Posey gal, come to think, she's the
one you went with some when you was here,--I 'm gettin' kind o'
forgetful.  Old Doctor Hurlbut's pretty low,--ninety-four year old,--
born in '67,--folks ain't ginerally very spry after they're ninety,
but he held out wonderful."

"How's Mr. Bradshaw?"

"Well, the young squire, he's off travellin' somewhere in the West,
or to Washin'ton, or somewhere else,--I don't jestly know where.
They say that he's follerin' up the courts in the business about old
Malachi's estate.  I don' know much about it."

The news got round Oxbow Village very speedily that Mr. Clement
Lindsay, generally considered the accepted lover of Miss Susan Posey,
had arrived in that place.  Now it had come to be the common talk of
the village that young Gifted Hopkins and Susan Posey were getting to
be mighty thick with each other, and the prevailing idea was that
Clement's visit had reference to that state of affairs.  Some said
that Susan had given her young man the mitten, meaning thereby that
she had signified that his services as a suitor were dispensed with.
Others thought there was only a wavering in her affection for her
lover, and that he feared for her constancy, and had come to
vindicate his rights.

Some of the young fellows, who were doubtless envious of Gifted's
popularity with the fair sex, attempted in the most unjustifiable
manner to play upon his susceptible nature.  One of them informed him
that he had seen that Lindsay fellah raound taown with the darndest
big stick y' ever did see.  Looked kind o' savage and wild like.
Another one told him that perhaps he'd better keep a little shady;
that are chap that had got the mittin was praowlin' abaout--with a
pistil,--one o' them Darringers,--abaout as long as your thumb, an'
fire a bullet as big as a p'tatah-ball,--'a fellah carries one in his
breeches-pocket, an' shoots y' right threugh his own pahnts, withaout
ever takin' on it aout of his pocket.  The stable-keeper, who, it may
be remembered, once exchanged a few playful words with Mr. Gridley,
got a hint from some of these unfeeling young men, and offered the
resources of his stable to the youth supposed to be in peril.

"I 've got a faast colt, Mr. Hopkins, that 'll put twenty mild
betwixt you an' this here village, as quick as any four huffs 'll dew
it in this here caounty, if you should want to get away suddin.  I've
heern tell there was some lookin' raound here that wouldn't be
wholesome to meet,--jest say the word, Mr. Hopkins, an' I 'll have ye
on that are colt's back in less than no time, an' start ye off full
jump.  There's a good many that's kind o' worried for fear something
might happen to ye, Mr. Hopkins,--y' see fellahs don't like to have
other chaps cuttin' on 'em aout with their gals."

Gifted Hopkins had become excessively nervous by this time.  It is
true that everything in his intimacy with Susan Posey, so far, might
come under the general head of friendship; but he was conscious that
something more was in both their thoughts.  Susan had given him
mysterious hints that her relations with Clement had undergone a
change, but had never had quite courage enough, perhaps had too much
delicacy, to reveal the whole truth.

Gifted was walking home, deeply immersed in thoughts excited by the
hints which hail been thus wantonly thrown out to inflame his
imagination, when all at once, on lifting his eyes, he saw Clement
Lindsay coming straight towards him.  Gifted was unarmed, except with
a pair of blunt scissors, which he carried habitually in his pocket.
What should he do?  Should he fly?  But he was never a good runner,
being apt to find himself scant o' breath, like Hamlet, after violent
exercise.  His demeanor on the occasion did credit to his sense of
his own virtuous conduct and his self-possession.  He put his hand
out, while yet at a considerable distance, and marched up towards
Clement, smiling with all the native amiability which belonged to
him.

To his infinite relief, Clement put out his hand to grasp the one
offered him, and greeted the young poet in the most frank and cordial
manner.

"And how is Miss Susan Posey, Mr. Hopkins?" asked Clement, in the
most cheerful tone.  "It is a long while since I have seen her, and
you must tell her that I hope I shall not leave the village without
finding time to call upon her.  She and I are good friends always,
Mr. Hopkins, though perhaps I shall not be quite so often at your
mother's as I was during my last visit to Oxbow Village."

Gifted felt somewhat as the subject of one of those old-fashioned
forms of argument, formerly much employed to convince men of error in
matters of religion, must have felt when the official who
superintended the stretching-machine said, "Slack up!"

He told Mr. Clement all about Susan, and was on the point of saying
that if he, Mr. Clement, did not claim any engrossing interest in
her, he, Gifted, was ready to offer her the devotion of a poet's
heart.  Mr. Clement, however, had so many other questions to ask him
about everybody in the village, more particularly concerning certain
young persons in whom he seemed to be specially interested, that
there was no chance to work in his own revelations of sentiment.

Clement Lindsay had come to Oxbow Village with a single purpose.  He
could now venture to trust himself in the presence of Myrtle Hazard.
He was free, and he knew nothing to show that she had lost the
liberty of disposing of her heart.  But after an experience such as
he had gone through, he was naturally distrustful of himself, and
inclined to be cautious and reserved in yielding to a new passion.
Should he tell her the true relations in which they stood to each
other,--that she owed her life to him, and that he had very nearly
sacrificed his own in saving hers?  Why not?  He had a claim on her
gratitude for what he had done in her behalf, and out of this
gratitude there might naturally spring a warmer feeling.

No, he could not try to win her affections by showing that he had
paid for them beforehand.  She seemed to be utterly unconscious of
the fact that it was he who had been with her in the abyss of waters.
If the thought came to her of itself, and she ever asked him, it
would be time enough to tell her the story.  If not, the moment might
arrive when he could reveal to her the truth that he was her
deliverer, without accusing himself of bribing her woman's heart to
reward him for his services.  He would wait for that moment.

It was the most natural thing in the world that Mr. Lindsay, a young
gentleman from the city, should call to see Miss Hazard, a young lady
whom he had met recently at a party.  To that pleasing duty he
addressed himself the evening after his arrival.

"The young gentleman's goin' a courtin', I calc'late," was the remark
of the Deacon's wife when she saw what a comely figure Mr. Clement
showed at the tea-table.

"A very hahnsome young mahn," the Deacon replied, "and looks as if he
might know consid'able.  An architect, you know,--a sort of a
builder.  Wonder if he has n't got any good plans for a hahnsome
pigsty.  I suppose he 'd charge somethin' for one, but it couldn't be
much, an' he could take it out in board."

"Better ask him," his wife--said; "he looks mighty pleasant; there's
nothin' lost by askin', an' a good deal got sometimes, grandma used
to say."

The Deacon followed her advice.  Mr. Clement was perfectly good-
natured about it, asked the Deacon the number of snouts in his
menagerie, got an idea of the accommodations required, and sketched
the plaza of a neat, and appropriate edifice for the Porcellarium, as
Master Gridley afterwards pleasantly christened it, which was carried
out by the carpenter, and stands to this day a monument of his
obliging disposition, and a proof that there is nothing so humble
that taste cannot be shown in it.

"What'll be your charge for the plan of the pigsty, Mr. Lindsay?" the
Deacon inquired with an air of interest,--he might have become
involved more deeply than he had intended.  "How much should you call
about right for the picter an' figgerin'?"

"Oh, you're quite welcome to my sketch of a plan, Deacon.  I've seen
much showier buildings tenanted by animals not very different from
those your edifice is meant for."

Mr. Clement found the three ladies sitting together in the chill, dim
parlor at The Poplars.  They had one of the city papers spread out on
the table, and Myrtle was reading aloud the last news from Charleston
Harbor.  She rose as Mr. Clement entered, and stepped forward to meet
him.  It was a strange impression this young man produced upon her,--
not through the common channels of the intelligence, not exactly that
"magnetic" influence of which she had had experience at a former
time.  It did not over come her as at the moment of their second
meeting.  But it was something she must struggle against, and she had
force and pride and training enough now to maintain her usual
tranquillity, in spite of a certain inward commotion which seemed to
reach her breathing and her pulse by some strange, inexplicable
mechanism.

Myrtle, it must be remembered, was no longer the simple country girl
who had run away at fifteen, but a young lady of seventeen, who had
learned all that more than a year's diligence at a great school could
teach her, who had been much with girls of taste and of culture, and
was familiar with the style and manners of those who came from what
considered itself the supreme order in the social hierarchy.  Her
natural love for picturesque adornment was qualified by a knowledge
of the prevailing modes not usual in so small a place as Oxbow
Village.  All this had not failed to produce its impression on those
about her.  Persons who, like Miss Silence Withers, believe, not in
education, inasmuch as there is no healthy nature to be educated, but
in transformation, worry about their charges up to a certain period
of their lives.  Then, if the transformation does not come, they seem
to think their cares and duties are at an end, and, considering their
theories of human destiny, usually accept the situation with
wonderful complacency.  This was the stage which Miss Silence Withers
had reached with reference to Myrtle.  It made her infinitely more
agreeable, or less disagreeable, as the reader may choose one or the
other statement, than when she was always fretting about her
"responsibility."  She even began to take an interest in some of
Myrtle's worldly experiences, and something like a smile would now
and then disarrange the chief-mourner stillness of her features, as
Myrtle would tell some lively story she had brought away from the gay
society she had frequented.

Cynthia Badlam kept her keen eyes on her like a hawk.  Murray
Bradshaw was away, and here was this handsome and agreeable youth
coming in to poach on the preserve of which she considered herself
the gamekeeper.  What did it mean?  She had heard the story about
Susan's being off with her old love and on with a new one.  Ah ha!
this is the game, is it?

Clement Lindsay passed not so much a pleasant evening, as one of
strange, perplexed, and mingled delight and inward conflict.  He had
found his marble once more turned to flesh and blood, and breathing
before him.  This was the woman he was born for; her form was fit to
model his proudest ideal from, her eyes melted him when they rested
for an instant on his face,--her voice reached the hidden
sensibilities of his inmost nature; those which never betray their
existence until the outward chord to which they vibrate in response
sends its message to stir them.  But was she not already pledged to
that other,--that cold-blooded, contriving, venal, cynical, selfish,
polished, fascinating man of the world, whose artful strategy would
pass with nine women out of ten for the most romantic devotion?

If he had known the impression he made, he would have felt less
anxiety with reference to this particular possibility.  Miss Silence
expressed herself gratified with his appearance, and thought he
looked like a good young man,--he reminded her of a young friend of
hers who--[It was the same who had gone to one of the cannibal
islands as a missionary,--and stayed there.] Myrtle was very quiet.
She had nothing to say about Clement, except that she had met him at
a party in the city, and found him agreeable.  Miss Cynthia wrote a
letter to Murray Bradshaw that very evening, telling him that he had
better come back to Oxbow Village as quickly as he could, unless he
wished to find his place occupied by an intruder.

In the mean time, the country was watching the garrison in Charleston
Harbor.  All at once the first gun of the four years' cannonade
hurled its ball against the walls of Fort Sumter.  There was no
hamlet in the land which the reverberations of that cannon-roar did
not reach.  There was no valley so darkened by overshadowing hills
that it did not see the American flag hauled down on the 13th of
April.  There was no loyal heart in the North that did not answer to
the call of the country to its defenders which went forth two days
later.  The great tide of feeling reached the locality where the
lesser events of our narrative were occurring.  A meeting of the
citizens was instantly called.  The venerable Father Pemberton opened
it with a prayer that filled every soul with courage and high
resolve.  The young farmers and mechanics of that whole region joined
the companies to which they belonged, or organized in squads and
marched at once, or got ready to march, to the scene of conflict.

The contagion of warlike patriotism reached the most peacefully
inclined young persons.

"My country calls me," Gifted Hopkins said to Susan Posey, "and I am
preparing to obey her summons.  If I can pass the medical
examination, which it is possible I may, though I fear my
constitution may be thought too weak, and if no obstacle impedes me,
I think of marching in the ranks of the Oxbow Invincibles.  If I go,
Susan, and I fall, will you not remember me .  .  .  as one who .  .
.  cherished the tenderest .  .  .  sentiments .  .  .  towards you .
.  .  and who had looked forward to the time when .  .  .  when .  ."

His eyes told the rest.  He loved!

Susan forgot all the rules of reserve to which she had been trained.
What were cold conventionalities at such a moment?  "Never!  never!"
she said, throwing her arms about his neck and mingling her tears
with his, which were flowing freely.  "Your country does not need
your sword ....  but it does need .  .  .  your pen.  Your poems will
inspire .  .  .  our soldiers.  .  .  .  The Oxbow Invincibles will
march to victory, singing your songs .  .  .  .  If you go .  .  .
and if you..  .  fall .  .  .  O Gifted!  .  .  .  I .  .  .  I .  .
.  . yes, I shall die too!"

His love was returned.  He was blest!

"Susan," he said, "my own Susan, I yield to your wishes at every
sacrifice.  Henceforth they will be my law.  Yes, I will stay and
encourage my brave countrymen to go forward to the bloody field.  My
voice shall urge them on to the battle-ground.  I will give my
dearest breath to stimulate their ardor.

"O Susan!  My own, own Susan!"

While these interesting events had been going on beneath the modest
roof of the Widow Hopkins, affairs had been rapidly hastening to a
similar conclusion under the statelier shadow of The Poplars.
Clement Lindsay was so well received at his first visit that he
ventured to repeat it several times, with so short intervals that it
implied something more than a common interest in one of the members
of the household.  There was no room for doubt who this could be, and
Myrtle Hazard could not help seeing that she was the object of his
undisguised admiration.  The belief was now general in the village
that Gifted Hopkins and Susan Posey were either engaged or on the
point of being so; and it was equally understood that, whatever might
be the explanation, she and her former lover had parted company in an
amicable manner.

Love works very strange transformations in young women.  Sometimes it
leads them to try every mode of adding to their attractions,--their
whole thought is how to be most lovely in the eyes they would fill so
as to keep out all other images.  Poor darlings!  We smile at their
little vanities, as if they were very trivial things compared with
the last Congressman's speech or the great Election Sermon; but
Nature knows well what she is about.  The maiden's ribbon or ruffle
means a great deal more for her than the judge's wig or the priest's
surplice.

It was not in this way that the gentle emotion awaking in the breast
of Myrtle Hazard betrayed itself.  As the thought dawned in her
consciousness that she was loved, a change came over her such as the
spirit that protected her, according to the harmless fancy she had
inherited, might have wept for joy to behold, if tears could flow
from angelic eyes.  She forgot herself and her ambitions,--the
thought of shining in the great world died out in the presence of new
visions of a future in which she was not to be her own,--of feelings
in the depth of which the shallow vanities which had drawn her young
eyes to them for a while seemed less than nothing.  Myrtle had not
hitherto said to herself that Clement was her lover, yet her whole
nature was expanding and deepening in the light of that friendship
which any other eye could have known at a glance for the great
passion.

Cynthia Badlam wrote a pressing letter to Murray Bradshaw.  "There is
no time to be lost; she is bewitched, and will be gone beyond hope if
this business is not put a stop to."

Love moves in an accelerating ratio; and there comes a time when the
progress of the passion escapes from all human formulae, and brings
two young hearts, which had been gradually drawing nearer and nearer
together, into complete union, with a suddenness that puts an
infinity between the moment when all is told and that which went just
before.

They were sitting together by themselves in the dimly lighted parlor.
They had told each other many experiences of their past lives, very
freely, as two intimate friends of different sex might do.  Clement
had happened to allude to Susan, speaking very kindly and tenderly of
her.  He hoped this youth to whom she was attached would make her
life happy.  "You know how simple-hearted and good she is; her image
will always be a pleasant one in my memory,--second to but one
other."

Myrtle ought, according to the common rules of conversation, to have
asked, What other?  but she did not.  She may have looked as if she
wanted to ask,--she may have blushed or turned pale, perhaps she
could not trust her voice; but whatever the reason was, she sat
still, with downcast eyes.  Clement waited a reasonable time, but,
finding it was of no use, began again.

"Your image is the one other,--the only one, let me say, for all else
fades in its presence,--your image fills all my thought.  Will you
trust your life and happiness with one who can offer you so little
beside his love?  You know my whole heart is yours."

Whether Myrtle said anything in reply or not, whether she acted like
Coleridge's Genevieve,--that is, "fled to him and wept," or suffered
her feelings to betray themselves in some less startling confession,
we will leave untold.  Her answer, spoken or silent, could not have
been a cruel one, for in another moment Clement was pressing his lips
to hers, after the manner of accepted lovers.

"Our lips have met to-day for the second time," he said, presently.

She looked at him in wonder.  What did he mean?  The second time!
How assuredly he spoke!  She looked him calmly in the face, and
awaited his explanation.

"I have a singular story to tell you.  On the morning of the 16th of
June, now nearly two years ago, I was sitting in my room at
Alderbank, some twenty miles down the river, when I heard a cry for
help coming from the river.  I ran down to the bank, and there I saw
a boy in an old boat--"

When it came to the "boy" in the old boat, Myrtle's cheeks flamed so
that she could not bear it, and she covered her face with both her
hands.  But Clement told his story calmly through to the end, sliding
gently over its later incidents, for Myrtle's heart was throbbing
violently, and her breath a little catching and sighing, as when she
had first lived with the new life his breath had given her.


"Why did you ask me for myself, when you could have claimed me?" she
said.

"I wanted a free gift, Myrtle," Clement answered, "and I have it."

They sat in silence, lost in the sense of that new life which had
suddenly risen on their souls.

The door-bell rang sharply.  Kitty Fagan answered its summons, and
presently entered the parlor and announced that Mr. Bradshaw was in
the library, and wished to see the ladies.




CHAPTER XXXIV.

MURRAY BRADSHAW PLAYS HIS LAST CARD.

"How can I see that man this evening, Mr. Lindsay?"

"May I not be Clement, dearest?  I would not see him at all, Myrtle.
I don't believe you will find much pleasure in listening to his fine
speeches."

"I cannot endure it.--Kitty, tell him I am engaged, and cannot see
him this evening.  No, no!  don't say engaged, say very much
occupied."

Kitty departed, communing with herself in this wise:--" Ockipied, is
it?  An' that's what ye cahl it when ye 're kapin' company with one
young gintleman an' don't want another young gintleman to come in an'
help the two of ye?  Ye won't get y'r pigs to market to-day, Mr.
Bridshaw, no, nor to-morrow, nayther, Mr. Bridshaw.  It's Mrs.
Lindsay that Miss Myrtle is goin' to be,--an' a big cake there'll be
at the weddin' frosted all over,--won't ye be plased with a slice o'
that, Mr. Bridshaw?"

With these reflections in her mind, Mistress Kitty delivered her
message, not without a gleam of malicious intelligence in her look
that stung Mr. Bradshaw sharply.  He had noticed a hat in the entry,
and a little stick by it which he remembered well as one he had seen
carried by Clement Lindsay.  But he was used to concealing his
emotions, and he greeted the two older ladies who presently came into
the library so pleasantly, that no one who had not studied his face
long and carefully would have suspected the bitterness of heart that
lay hidden far down beneath his deceptive smile.  He told Miss
Silence, with much apparent interest, the story of his journey.  He
gave her an account of the progress of the case in which the estate
of which she inherited the principal portion was interested.  He did
not tell her that a final decision which would settle the right to
the great claim might be expected at any moment, and he did not tell
her that there was very little doubt that it would be in favor of the
heirs of Malachi Withers.  He was very sorry he could not see Miss
Hazard that evening,--hoped he should be more fortunate to-morrow
forenoon, when he intended to call again,--had a message for her from
one of her former school friends, which he was anxious to give her.
He exchanged certain looks and hints with Miss Cynthia, which led her
to withdraw and bring down the papers he had entrusted to her.  At
the close of his visit, she followed him into the entry with a lamp,
as was her common custom.

"What's the meaning of all this, Cynthia?  Is that fellow making love
to Myrtle?"

"I'm afraid so, Mr. Bradshaw.  He's been here several times, and they
seem to be getting intimate.  I couldn't do anything to stop it."

"Give me the papers,--quick!"

Cynthia pulled the package from her pocket.  Murray Bradshaw looked
sharply at it.  A little crumpled,--crowded into her pocket.  Seal
unbroken.  All safe.

"I shall come again to-morrow forenoon.  Another day and it will be
all up.  The decision of the court will be known.  It won't be my
fault if one visit is not enough.--You don't suppose Myrtle is in
love with this fellow?"

"She acts as--if she might be.  You know he's broke with Susan Posey,
and there's nothing to hinder.  If you ask my opinion, I think it's
your last chance: she is n't a girl to half do things, and if she has
taken to this man it will be hard to make her change her mind.  But
she's young, and she has had a liking for you, and if you manage it
well there's no telling."

Two notes passed between Myrtle Hazard and Master Byles Gridley that
evening.  Mistress Kitty Fagan, who had kept her ears pretty wide
open, carried them.

Murray Bradshaw went home in a very desperate state of feeling.  He
had laid his plans, as he thought, with perfect skill, and the
certainty of their securing their end.  These papers were to have
been taken from the envelope, and found in the garret just at the
right moment, either by Cynthia herself or one of the other members
of the family, who was to be led on, as it were accidentally, to the
discovery.  The right moment must be close at hand.  He was to offer
his hand--and heart, of course--to Myrtle, and it was to be accepted.
As soon as the decision of the land case was made known, or not long
afterwards, there was to be a search in the garret for papers, and
these were to be discovered in a certain dusty recess, where, of
course, they would have been placed by Miss Cynthia.

And now the one condition which gave any value to these arrangements
seemed like to fail.  This obscure youth--this poor fool, who had
been on the point of marrying a simpleton to whom he had made a
boyish promise--was coming between him and the object of his long
pursuit,--the woman who had every attraction to draw him to herself.
It had been a matter of pride with Murray Bradshaw that he never lost
his temper so as to interfere with the precise course of action which
his cool judgment approved; but now he was almost beside himself with
passion.  His labors, as he believed, had secured the favorable issue
of the great case so long pending.  He had followed Myrtle through
her whole career, if not as her avowed lover, at least as one whose
friendship promised to flower in love in due season.  The moment had
come when the scene and the characters in this village drama were to
undergo a change as sudden and as brilliant as is seen in those fairy
spectacles where the dark background changes to a golden palace and
the sober dresses are replaced by robes of regal splendor.  The
change was fast approaching; but he, the enchanter, as he had thought
himself, found his wand broken, and his power given to another.

He could not sleep during that night.  He paced his room, a prey to
jealousy and envy and rage, which his calm temperament had kept him
from feeling in their intensity up to this miserable hour.  He
thought of all that a maddened nature can imagine to deaden its own
intolerable anguish.  Of revenge.  If Myrtle rejected his suit,
should he take her life on the spot, that she might never be
another's,--that neither man nor woman should ever triumph over him,
--the proud ambitious man, defeated, humbled, scorned?  No! that was
a meanness of egotism which only the most vulgar souls could be
capable of.  Should he challenge her lover?  It was not the way of
the people and time, and ended in absurd complications, if anybody
was foolish enough to try it.  Shoot him?  The idea floated through
his mind, for he thought of everything; but he was a lawyer, and not
a fool, and had no idea of figuring in court as a criminal.  Besides,
he was not a murderer,--cunning was his natural weapon, not violence.
He had a certain admiration of desperate crime in others, as showing
nerve and force, but he did not feel it to be his own style of doing
business.

During the night he made every arrangement for leaving the village
the next day, in case he failed to make any impression on Myrtle
Hazard and found that his chance was gone.  He wrote a letter to his
partner, telling him that he had left to join one of the regiments
forming in the city.  He adjusted all his business matters so that
his partner should find as little trouble as possible.  A little
before dawn he threw himself on the bed, but he could not sleep; and
he rose at sunrise, and finished his preparations for his departure
to the city.

The morning dragged along slowly.  He could not go to the office, not
wishing to meet his partner again.  After breakfast he dressed
himself with great care, for he meant to show himself in the best
possible aspect.  Just before he left the house to go to The Poplars,
he took the sealed package from his trunk, broke open the envelope,
took from it a single paper,--it had some spots on it which
distinguished it from all the rest,--put it separately in his pocket,
and then the envelope containing the other papers.  The calm smile be
wore on his features as he set forth cost him a greater effort than
he had ever made before to put it on.  He was moulding his face to
the look with which he meant to present himself; and the muscles had
been sternly fixed so long that it was a task to bring them to their
habitual expression in company,--that of ingenuous good-nature.

He was shown into the parlor at The Poplars; and Kitty told Myrtle
that he had called and inquired for her and was waiting down stairs.

"Tell him I will be down presently," she said.  "And, Kitty, now mind
just what I tell you.  Leave your kitchen door open, so that you can
hear anything fall in the parlor.  If you hear a book fall,--it will
be a heavy one, and will make some noise,--run straight up here to my
little chamber, and hang this red scarf out of the window.  The left-
hand side-sash, mind, so that anybody can see it from the road.  If
Mr. Gridley calls, show him into the parlor, no matter who is there."

Kitty Fagan looked amazingly intelligent, and promised that she would
do exactly as she was told.  Myrtle followed her down stairs almost
immediately, and went into the parlor, where Mr. Bradshaw was
waiting.

Never in his calmest moments had he worn a more insinuating smile on
his features than that with which he now greeted Myrtle.  So gentle,
so gracious, so full of trust, such a completely natural expression
of a kind, genial character did it seem, that to any but an expert it
would have appeared impossible that such an effect could be produced
by the skilful balancing of half a dozen pairs of little muscles that
manage the lips and the corners of the mouth.  The tones of his voice
were subdued into accord with the look of his features; his whole
manner was fascinating, as far as any conscious effort could make it
so.  It was just one of those artificially pleasing effects that so
often pass with such as have little experience of life for the
genuine expression of character and feeling.  But Myrtle had learned
the look that shapes itself on the features of one who loves with a
love that seeketh not its own, and she knew the difference between
acting and reality.  She met his insinuating approach with a courtesy
so carefully ordered that it was of itself a sentence without appeal.
Artful persons often interpret sincere ones by their own standard.
Murray Bradshaw thought little of this somewhat formal address,--a
few minutes would break this thin film to pieces.  He was not only a
suitor with a prize to gain, he was a colloquial artist about to
employ all the resources of his specialty.

He introduced the conversation in the most natural and easy way, by
giving her the message from a former school-mate to which he had
referred, coloring it so delicately, as he delivered it, that it
became an innocent-looking flattery.  Myrtle found herself in a rose-
colored atmosphere, not from Murray Bradshaw's admiration, as it
seemed, but only reflected by his mind from another source.  That was
one of his arts, always, if possible, to associate himself
incidentally, as it appeared, and unavoidably, with an agreeable
impression.

So Myrtle was betrayed into smiling and being pleased before he had
said a word about himself or his affairs.  Then he told her of the
adventures and labors of his late expedition; of certain evidence
which at the very last moment he had unearthed, and which was very
probably the turning-point in the case.  He could not help feeling
that she must eventually reap some benefit from the good fortune with
which his efforts had been attended.  The thought that it might yet
be so had been a great source of encouragement to him,--it would
always be a great happiness to him to remember that he had done
anything to make her happy.

Myrtle was very glad that he had been so far successful,--she did not
know that it made much difference to her, but she was obliged to him
for the desire of serving her that he had expressed.

"My services are always yours, Miss Hazard.  There is no sacrifice I
would not willingly make for your benefit.  I have never had but one
feeling toward you.  You cannot be ignorant of what that feeling is."

"I know, Mr. Bradshaw, it has been one of kindness.  I have to thank
you for many friendly attentions, for which I hope I have never been
ungrateful."

"Kindness is not all that I feel towards you, Miss Hazard.  If that
were all, my lips would not tremble as they do now in telling you my
feelings.--I love you."

He sprang the great confession on Myrtle a little sooner than he had
meant.  It was so hard to go on making phrases!  Myrtle changed color
a little, for she was startled.

The seemingly involuntary movement she made brought her arm against a
large dictionary, which lay very near the edge of the table on which
it was resting.  The book fell with a loud noise to the floor.

There it lay.  The young man awaited her answer; he did not think of
polite forms at such a moment.

"It cannot be, Mr. Bradshaw,--it must not be.  I have known you long,
and I am not ignorant of all your brilliant qualities, but you must
not speak to me of love.  Your regard,--your friendly interest, tell
me that I shall always have these, but do not distress me with
offering more than these."

"I do not ask you to give me your love in return; I only ask you not
to bid me despair.  Let me believe that the time may come' when you
will listen to me,--no matter how distant.  You are young,--you have
a tender heart,--you would not doom one who only lives for you to
wretchedness,--so long that we have known each other.  It cannot be
that any other has come between us--"

Myrtle blushed so deeply that there was no need of his finishing his
question.

"Do you mean, Myrtle Hazard, that you have cast me aside for another?
--for this stranger--this artist--who was with you yesterday when I
came, bringing with me the story of all I had done for you, yes, for
you,--and was ignominiously refused the privilege of seeing you?"
Rage and jealousy had got the better of him this time.  He rose as he
spoke, and looked upon her with such passion kindling in his eyes
that he seemed ready for any desperate act.

"I have thanked you for any services you may have rendered me, Mr.
Bradshaw," Myrtle answered, very calmly, "and I hope you will add one
more to them by sparing me this rude questioning.  I wished to treat
you as a friend; I hope you will not render that impossible."

He had recovered himself for one more last effort.  "I was impatient
overlook it, I beg you.  I was thinking of all the happiness I have
labored to secure for you, and of the ruin to us both it would be if
you scornfully rejected the love I offer you,--if you refuse to leave
me any hope for the future,--if you insist on throwing yourself away
on this man, so lately pledged to another.  I hold the key of all
your earthly fortunes in my hand.  My love for you inspired me in all
that I have done, and, now that I come to lay the result of my labors
at your feet, you turn from me, and offer my reward to a stranger.
I do not ask you to say this day that you will be mine,--I would not
force your inclinations,--but I do ask you that you will hold
yourself free of all others, and listen to me as one who may yet be
more than a friend.  Say so much as this, Myrtle, and you shall have
such a future as you never dreamed of.  Fortune, position, all that
this world can give, shall be yours."

"Never!  never!  If you could offer me the whole world, or take away
from me all that the world can give, it would make no difference to
me.  I cannot tell what power you hold over me, whether of life and
death, or of wealth and poverty; but after talking to me of love, I
should not have thought you would have wronged me by suggesting any
meaner motive.  It is only because we have been on friendly terms so
long that I have listened to you as I have done.  You have said more
than enough, and I beg you will allow me to put an end to this
interview."

She rose to leave the room.  But Murray Bradshaw had gone too far to
control himself,--he listened only to the rage which blinded him.

"Not yet!" he said.  "Stay one moment, and you shall know what your
pride and self-will have cost you!"

Myrtle stood, arrested, whether by fear, or curiosity, or the passive
subjection of her muscles to his imperious will, it would be hard to
say.

Murray Bradshaw took out the spotted paper from his breast-pocket,
and held it up before her.  "Look here!" he exclaimed.  "This would
have made you rich,--it would have crowned you a queen in society,--
it would have given you all, and more than all, that you ever dreamed
of luxury, of splendor, of enjoyment; and I, who won it for you,
would have taught you how to make life yield every bliss it had in
store to your wishes.  You reject my offer unconditionally?"

Myrtle expressed her negative only by a slight contemptuous movement.

Murray Bradshaw walked deliberately to the fireplace, and laid the
spotted paper upon the burning coals.  It writhed and curled,
blackened, flamed, and in a moment was a cinder dropping into ashes.
He folded his arms, and stood looking at the wreck of Myrtle's
future, the work of his cruel hand.  Strangely enough, Myrtle herself
was fascinated, as it were, by the apparent solemnity of this
mysterious sacrifice.  She had kept her eyes steadily on him all the
time, and was still gazing at the altar on which her happiness had
been in some way offered up, when the door was opened by Kitty Fagan,
and Master Byles Gridley was ushered into the parlor.

"Too late, old man!  "Murray Bradshaw exclaimed, in a hoarse and
savage voice, as he passed out of the room, and strode through the
entry and down the avenue.  It was the last time the old gate of The
Poplars was to open or close for him.  The same day he left the
village; and the next time his name was mentioned it was as an
officer in one of the regiments just raised and about marching to the
seat of war.




CHAPTER XXXV.

THE SPOTTED PAPER.

What Master Gridley may have said to Myrtle Hazard that served to
calm her after this exciting scene cannot now be recalled.  That
Murray Bradshaw thought he was inflicting a deadly injury on her was
plain enough.  That Master Gridley did succeed in convincing her that
no great harm had probably been done her is equally certain.

Like all bachelors who have lived a lonely life, Master Byles Gridley
had his habits, which nothing short of some terrestrial convulsion--
or perhaps, in his case, some instinct that drove him forth to help
somebody in trouble--could possibly derange.  After his breakfast, he
always sat and read awhile,--the paper, if a new one came to hand, or
some pleasant old author,--if a little neglected by the world of
readers, he felt more at ease with him, and loved him all the better.

But on the morning after his interview with Myrtle Hazard, he had
received a letter which made him forget newspapers, old authors,
almost everything, for the moment.  It was from the publisher with
whom he had had a conversation, it may be remembered, when he visited
the city, and was to this effect: That Our Firm propose to print and
stereotype the work originally published under the title of "Thoughts
on the Universe"; said work to be remodelled according to the plan
suggested by the Author, with the corrections, alterations,
omissions, and additions proposed by him; said work to be published
under the following title, to wit: ________ _________: said work to
be printed in 12mo, on paper of good quality, from new types, etc.,
etc., and for every copy thereof printed the author to receive, etc.,
etc.

Master Gridley sat as in a trance, reading this letter over and over,
to know if it could be really so.  So it really was.  His book had
disappeared from the market long ago, as the elm seeds that carpet
the ground and never germinate disappear.  At last it had got a
certain value as a curiosity for book-hunters.  Some one of them,
keener-eyed than the rest, had seen that there was a meaning and
virtue in this unsuccessful book, for which there was a new audience
educated since it had tried to breathe before its time.  Out of this
had grown at last the publisher's proposal.  It was too much: his
heart swelled with joy, and his eyes filled with tears.

How could he resist the temptation?  He took down his own particular
copy of the book, which was yet to do him honor as its parent, and
began reading.  As his eye fell on one paragraph after another, he
nodded approval of this sentiment or opinion, he shook his head as if
questioning whether this other were not to be modified or left out,
he condemned a third as being no longer true for him as when it was
written, and he sanctioned a fourth with his hearty approval.  The
reader may like a few specimens from this early edition, now a
rarity.  He shall have them, with Master Gridley's verbal comments.
The book, as its name implied, contained "Thoughts" rather than
consecutive trains of reasoning or continuous disquisitions.  What he
read and remarked upon were a few of the more pointed statements
which stood out in the chapters he was turning over.  The worth of
the book must not be judged by these almost random specimens.

"THE BEST THOUGHT, LIKE THE MOST PERFECT DIGESTION, IS DONE
UNCONSCIOUSLY.--Develop that.--Ideas at compound interest in the
mind.--Be aye sticking in an idea,--while you're sleeping it'll be
growing.  Seed of a thought to-day,--flower to-morrow--next week--ten
years from now, etc.--Article by and by for the....

"CAN THE INFINITE BE SUPPOSED TO SHIFT THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE
ULTIMATE DESTINY OF ANY CREATED THING TO THE FINITE?  OUR THEOLOGIANS
PRETEND THAT IT CAN.  I DOUBT.--Heretical.  Stet.

"PROTESTANTISM MEANS NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS.  BUT IT IS AFRAID OF ITS
OWN LOGIC.--Stet.  No logical resting-place short of None of your
business.

"THE SUPREME SELF-INDULGENCE IS TO SURRENDER THE WILL TO A SPIRITUAL
DIRECTOR.--Protestantism gave up a great luxury.--Did it though?

"ASIATIC MODES OF THOUGHT AND SPEECH DO NOT EXPRESS THE 'RELATIONS IN
WHICH THE AMERICAN FEELS HIM SELF TO STAND TO HIS SUPERIORS IN THIS
OR ANY OTHER SPHERE OF BEING.  REPUBLICANISM MUST HAVE ITS OWN
RELIGIOUS PHRASEOLOGY, WHICH IS NOT THAT BORROWED FROM ORIENTAL
DESPOTISMS.

"IDOLS AND DOGMAS IN PLACE OF CHARACTER; PILLS AND THEORIES IN PLACE
OF WHOLESOME LIVING.  SEE THE HISTORIES OF THEOLOGY AND MEDICINE
PASSIM.--Hits 'em.

"'OF SUCH IS THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN.' DO YOU MEAN TO SAY JEAN CHAUVIN,
THAT
          'HEAVEN LIES ABOUT US IN OUR INFANCY'?

"WHY DO YOU COMPLAIN OF YOUR ORGANIZATION?  YOUR SOUL WAS IN A HURRY,
AND MADE A RUSH FOR A BODY.  THERE ARE PATIENT SPIRITS THAT HAVE
WAITED FROM ETERNITY, AND NEVER FOUND PARENTS FIT TO BE BORN OF.
--How do you know anything about all that?  Dele.

"WHAT SWEET, SMOOTH VOICES THE NEGROES HAVE!  A HUNDRED GENERATIONS
FED ON BANANAS.--COMPARE THEM WITH OUR APPLE-EATING WHITE FOLKS!--It
won't do.  Bananas came from the West Indies.

"TO TELL A MAN'S TEMPERAMENT BY HIS HANDWRITING.  SEE IF THE DOTS OF
HIS I'S RUN AHEAD OR NOT, AND IF THEY DO, HOW FAR.--I have tried
that--on myself.

"MARRYING INTO SOME FAMILIES IS THE NEXT THING TO BEING CANONIZED.
--Not so true now as twenty or thirty years ago.  As many bladders,
but more pins.

"FISH AND DANDIES ONLY KEEP ON ICE.--Who will take?  Explain in note
how all warmth approaching blood heat spoils fops and flounders.

"FLYING IS A LOST ART AMONG MEN AND REPTILES.  BATS FLY, AND MEN
OUGHT TO.  TRY A LIGHT TURBINE.  RISE A MILE STRAIGHT, FALL HALF A
MILE SLANTING,--RISE HALF A MILE STRAIGHT, FALL HALF A MILE SLANTING,
AND SO ON.  OR SLANT UP AND SLANT DOWN.--Poh!  You ain't such a fool
as to think that is new,--are you?

"Put in my telegraph project.  Central station.  Cables with
insulated wires running to it from different quarters of the city.
These form the centripetal system.  From central station, wires to
all the livery stables, messenger stands, provision shops, etc., etc.
These form the centrifugal system.  Any house may have a wire in the
nearest cable at small cost.

"DO YOU WANT TO BE REMEMBERED AFTER THE CONTINENTS HAVE GONE UNDER,
AND COME UP AGAIN, AND DRIED, AND BRED NEW RACES?  HAVE YOUR NAME
STAMPED ON ALL YOUR PLATES AND CUPS AND SAUCERS.  NOTHING OF YOU OR
YOURS WILL LAST LIKE THOSE.  I NEVER SIT DOWN AT MY TABLE WITHOUT
LOOKING AT THE CHINA SERVICE, AND SAYING, 'HERE ARE MY MONUMENTS.
THAT BUTTER-DISH IS MY URN.  THIS SOUP-PLATE IS MY MEMORIAL TABLET.'
NO NEED OF A SKELETON AT MY BANQUETS!  I FEED FROM MY TOMBSTONE AND
READ MY EPITAPH AT THE BOTTOM OF EVERY TEACUP.--Good."

He fell into a revery as he finished reading this last sentence.  He
thought of the dim and dread future,--all the changes that it would
bring to him, to all the living, to the face of the globe, to the
order of earthly things.  He saw men of a new race, alien to all that
had ever lived, excavating with strange, vast engines the old
ocean-bed now become habitable land.  And as the great scoops turned
out the earth they had fetched up from the unexplored depths, a relic
of a former simple civilization revealed the fact that here a tribe
of human beings had lived and perished.--Only the coffee-cup he had
in his hand half an hour ago.--Where would he be then? and Mrs.
Hopkins, and Gifted, and Susan, and everybody? and President
Buchanan? and the Boston State-House? and Broadway?--O Lord, Lord,
Lord! And the sun perceptibly smaller, according to the astronomers,
and the earth cooled down a number of degrees, and inconceivable arts
practised by men of a type yet undreamed of, and all the fighting
creeds merged in one great universal

A knock at his door interrupted his revery.  Miss Susan Posey
informed him that a gentleman was waiting below who wished to see
him.

"Show him up to my study, Susan Posey, if you please," said Master
Gridley.

Mr. Penhallow presented himself at Mr. Gridley's door with a
countenance expressive of a very high state of excitement.

"You have heard the news, Mr. Gridley, I suppose?"

"What news, Mr. Penhallow?"

"First, that my partner has left very unexpectedly to enlist in a
regiment just forming.  Second, that the great land case is decided
in favor of the heirs of the late Malachi Withers."

"Your partner must have known about it yesterday?"

"He did, even before I knew it.  He thought himself possessed of a
very important document, as you know, of which he has made, or means
to make, some use.  You are aware of the artifice I employed to
prevent any possible evil consequences from any action of his.
I have the genuine document, of course.  I wish you to go over with
me to The Poplars, and I should be glad to have good old Father
Pemberton go with us; for it is a serious matter, and will be a great
surprise to more than one of the family."

They walked together to the old house, where the old clergyman had
lived for more than half a century.  He was used to being neglected
by the people who ran after his younger colleague; and the attention
paid him in asking him to be present on an important occasion, as he
understood this to be, pleased him greatly.  He smoothed his long
white locks, and called a grand-daughter to help make him look fitly
for such an occasion, and, being at last got into his grandest Sunday
aspect, took his faithful staff, and set out with the two gentlemen
for The Poplars.  On the way, Mr. Penhallow explained to him the
occasion of their visit, and the general character of the facts he
had to announce.  He wished the venerable minister to prepare Miss
Silence Withers for a revelation which would materially change her
future prospects.  He thought it might be well, also, if he would say
a few words to Myrtle Hazard, for whom a new life, with new and
untried temptations, was about to open.  His business was, as a
lawyer, to make known to these parties the facts just come to his own
knowledge affecting their interests.  He had asked Mr. Gridley to go
with him, as having intimate relations with one of the parties
referred to, and as having been the principal agent in securing to
that party the advantages which were to accrue to her from the new
turn of events.  "You are a second parent to her, Mr. Gridley," he
said.  "Your vigilance, your shrewdness, and your-spectacles have
saved her.  I hope she knows the full extent of her obligations to
you, and that she will always look to you for counsel in all her
needs.  She will want a wise friend, for she is to begin the world
anew."

What had happened, when she saw the three grave gentlemen at the door
early in the forenoon, Mistress Kitty Fagan could not guess.
Something relating to Miss Myrtle, no doubt: she wasn't goin' to be
married right off to Mr. Clement,--was she,--and no church, nor cake,
nor anything?  The gentlemen were shown into the parlor.  "Ask Miss
Withers to go into the library, Kitty," said Master Gridley.
"Dr. Pemberton wishes to speak with her."  The good old man was
prepared for a scene with Miss Silence.  He announced to her, in a
kind and delicate way, that she must make up her mind to the
disappointment of certain expectations which she had long
entertained, and which, as her lawyer, Mr. Penhallow, had come to
inform her and others, were to be finally relinquished from this
hour.

To his great surprise, Miss Silence received this communication
almost cheerfully.  It seemed more like a relief to her than anything
else.  Her one dread in this world was her "responsibility "; and the
thought that she might have to account for ten talents hereafter,
instead of one, had often of late been a positive distress to her.
There was also in her mind a secret disgust at the thought of the
hungry creatures who would swarm round her if she should ever be in a
position to bestow patronage.  This had grown upon her as the habits
of lonely life gave her more and more of that fastidious dislike to
males in general, as such, which is not rare in maidens who have seen
the roses of more summers than politeness cares to mention.

Father Pemberton then asked if he could see Miss Myrtle Hazard a few
moments in the library before they went into the parlor, where they
were to meet Mr. Penhallow and Mr. Gridley, for the purpose of
receiving the lawyer's communication.

What change was this which Myrtle had undergone since love had
touched her heart, and her visions of worldly enjoyment had faded
before the thought of sharing and ennobling the life of one who was
worthy of her best affections,--of living for another, and of finding
her own noblest self in that divine office of woman?  She had laid
aside the bracelet which she had so long worn as a kind of charm as
well as an ornament.  One would have said her features had lost
something of that look of imperious beauty which had added to her
resemblance to the dead woman whose glowing portrait hung upon her
wall.  And if it could be that, after so many generations, the blood
of her who had died for her faith could show in her descendants
veins, and the soul of that elect lady of her race look out from her
far-removed offspring's dark eyes, such a transfusion of the martyr's
life and spiritual being might well seem to manifest itself in Myrtle
Hazard.

The large-hearted old man forgot his scholastic theory of human
nature as he looked upon her face.  He thought he saw in her the
dawning of that grace which some are born with; which some, like
Myrtle, only reach through many trials and dangers; which some seem
to show for a while and then lose; which too many never reach while
they wear the robes of earth, but which speaks of the kingdom of
heaven already begun in the heart of a child of earth.  He told her
simply the story of the occurrences which had brought them together
in the old house, with the message the lawyer was to deliver to its
inmates.  He wished to prepare her for what might have been too
sudden a surprise.

But Myrtle was not wholly unprepared for some such revelation.  There
was little danger that any such announcement would throw her mind
from its balance after the inward conflict through which she had been
passing.  For her lover had left her almost as soon as he had told
her the story of his passion, and the relation in which he stood to
her.  He, too, had gone to answer his country's call to her children,
not driven away by crime and shame and despair, but quitting all--his
new-born happiness, the art in which he was an enthusiast, his
prospects of success and honor--to obey the higher command of duty.
War was to him, as to so many of the noble youth who went forth, only
organized barbarism, hateful but for the sacred cause which alone
redeemed it from the curse that blasted the first murderer.  God only
knew the sacrifice such young men as he made.

How brief Myrtle's dream had been!  She almost doubted, at some
moments, whether she would not awake from it, as from her other
visions, and find it all unreal.  There was no need of fearing any
undue excitement of her mind after the alternations of feeling she
had just experienced.  Nothing seemed of much moment to her which
could come from without,--her real world was within, and the light of
its day and the breath of its life came from her love, made holy by
the self-forgetfulness on both sides which was born with it.

Only one member of the household was in danger of finding the
excitement more than she could bear.  Miss Cynthia knew that all
Murray Bradshaw's plans, in which he had taken care that she should
have a personal interest, had utterly failed.  What he had done with
the means of revenge in his power,--if, indeed, they were still in
his power,--she did not know.  She only knew that there had been a
terrible scene, and that he had gone, leaving it uncertain whether he
would ever return.  It was with fear and trembling that she heard the
summons which went forth, that the whole family should meet in the
parlor to listen to a statement from Mr. Penhallow.  They all
gathered as requested, and sat round the room, with the exception of
Mistress Kitty Fagan, who knew her place too well to be sittin' down
with the likes o' them, and stood with attentive ears in the doorway.

Mr. Penhallow then read from a printed paper the decision of the
Supreme Court in the land case so long pending, where the estate of
the late Malachi Withers was the claimant, against certain parties
pretending to hold under an ancient grant.  The decision was in favor
of the estate.

"This gives a great property to the heirs," Mr. Penhallow remarked,
"and the question as to who these heirs are has to be opened.  For
the will under which Silence Withers, sister of the deceased, has
inherited is dated some years previous to the decease, and it was not
very strange that a will of later date should be discovered.  Such a
will has been discovered.  It is the instrument I have here."

Myrtle Hazard opened her eyes very widely, for the paper Mr.
Penlallow held looked exactly like that which Murray Bradshaw had
burned, and, what was curious, had some spots on it just like some
she had noticed on that.

"This will," Mr. Penhallow said, "signed by witnesses dead or absent
from this place, makes a disposition of the testator's property in
some respects similar to that of the previous one, but with a single
change, which proves to be of very great importance."

Mr. Penhallow proceeded to read the will.  The important change in
the disposition of the property was this: in case the land claim was
decided in favor of the estate, then, in addition to the small
provision made for Myrtle Hazard, the property so coming to the
estate should all go to her.  There was no question about the
genuineness and the legal sufficiency of this instrument.  Its date
was not very long after the preceding one, at a period when, as was
well known, he had almost given up the hope of gaining his case,
and when the property was of little value compared to that which it
had at present.

A long silence followed this reading.  Then, to the surprise of all,
Miss Silence Withers rose, and went to Myrtle Hazard, and wished her
joy with every appearance of sincerity.  She was relieved of a great
responsibility.  Myrtle was young and could bear it better.  She
hoped that her young relative would live long to enjoy the blessings
Providence had bestowed upon her, and to use them for the good of the
community, and especially the promotion of the education of deserving
youth.  If some fitting person could be found to advise Myrtle, whose
affairs would require much care, it would be a great relief to her.

They all went up to Myrtle and congratulated her on her change of
fortune.  Even Cynthia Badlam got out a phrase or two which passed
muster in the midst of the general excitement.  As for Kitty Fagan,
she could not say a word, but caught Myrtle's hand and kissed it as
if it belonged to her own saint; and then, suddenly applying her
apron to her eyes, retreated from a scene which was too much for her,
in a state of complete mental beatitude and total bodily
discomfiture.

Then Silence asked the old minister to make a prayer, and he
stretched his hands up to Heaven, and called down all the blessings
of Providence upon all the household, and especially upon this young
handmaiden, who was to be tried with prosperity, and would need all
aid from above to keep her from its dangers.

Then Mr. Penhallow asked Myrtle if she had any choice as to the
friend who should have charge of her affairs.  Myrtle turned to
Master Byles Gridley, and said, "You have been my friend and
protector so far, will you continue to be so hereafter?"

Master Gridley tried very hard to begin a few words of thanks to her
for her preference, but finding his voice a little uncertain,
contented himself with pressing her hand and saying, "Most willingly,
my dear daughter!"




CHAPTER XXXVI

CONCLUSION.

The same day the great news of Myrtle Hazard's accession to fortune
came out, the secret was told that she had promised herself in
marriage to Mr. Clement Lindsay.  But her friends hardly knew how to
congratulate her on this last event.  Her lover was gone, to risk his
life, not improbably to lose it, or to come home a wreck, crippled by
wounds, or worn out with disease.

Some of them wondered to see her so cheerful in such a moment of
trial.  They could not know how the manly strength of Clement's
determination had nerved her for womanly endurance.  They had not
learned that a great cause makes great souls, or reveals them to
themselves,--a lesson taught by so many noble examples in the times
that followed.  Myrtle's only desire seemed to be to labor in some
way to help the soldiers and their families.  She appeared to have
forgotten everything for this duty; she had no time for regrets, if
she were disposed to indulge them, and she hardly asked a question as
to the extent of the fortune which had fallen to her.

The next number of the "Banner and Oracle" contained two
announcements which she read with some interest when her attention
was called to them.  They were as follows:

"A fair and accomplished daughter of this village comes, by the late
decision of the Supreme Court, into possession of a property
estimated at a million of dollars or more.  It consists of a large
tract of land purchased many years ago by the late Malachi Withers,
now become of immense value by the growth of a city in its
neighborhood, the opening of mines, etc., etc.  It is rumored that
the lovely and highly educated heiress has formed a connection
looking towards matrimony with a certain distinguished artist."

"Our distinguished young townsman, William Murray Bradshaw, Esq., has
been among the first to respond to the call of the country for
champions to defend her from traitors.  We understand that he has
obtained a captaincy in the _th regiment, about to march to the
threatened seat of war.  May victory perch on his banners!"

The two lovers, parted by their own self-sacrificing choice in the
very hour that promised to bring them so much happiness, labored for
the common cause during all the terrible years of warfare, one in the
camp and the field, the other in the not less needful work which the
good women carried on at home, or wherever their services were
needed.  Clement--now Captain Lindsay--returned at the end of his
first campaign charged with a special office.  Some months later,
after one of the great battles, he was sent home wounded.  He wore
the leaf on his shoulder which entitled him to be called Major
Lindsay.  He recovered from his wound only too rapidly, for Myrtle
had visited him daily in the military hospital where he had resided
for treatment; and it was bitter parting.  The telegraph wires were
thrilling almost hourly with messages of death, and the long pine
boxes came by almost every train,--no need of asking what they held.

Once more he came, detailed on special duty, and this time with the
eagle on his shoulder,--he was Colonel Lindsay.  The lovers could not
part again of their own free will.  Some adventurous women had
followed their husbands to the camp, and Myrtle looked as if she
could play the part of the Maid of Saragossa on occasion.  So Clement
asked her if she would return with him as his wife; and Myrtle
answered, with as much willingness to submit as a maiden might fairly
show under such circumstances, that she would do his bidding.
Thereupon, with the shortest possible legal notice, Father Pemberton
was sent for, and the ceremony was performed in the presence of a few
witnesses in the large parlor at The Poplars, which was adorned with
flowers, and hung round with all the portraits of the dead members of
the family, summoned as witnesses to the celebration.  One witness
looked on with unmoved features, yet Myrtle thought there was a more
heavenly smile on her faded lips than she had ever seen before
beaming from the canvas,--it was Ann Holyoake, the martyr to her
faith, the guardian spirit of Myrtle's visions, who seemed to breathe
a holier benediction than any words--even those of the good old
Father Pemberton himself--could convey.

They went back together to the camp.  From that period until the end
of the war, Myrtle passed her time between the life of the tent and
that of the hospital.  In the offices of mercy which she performed
for the sick and the wounded and the dying, the dross of her nature
seemed to be burned away.  The conflict of mingled lives in her blood
had ceased.  No lawless impulses usurped the place of that serene
resolve which had grown strong by every exercise of its high
prerogative.  If she had been called now to die for any worthy cause,
her race would have been ennobled by a second martyr, true to the
blood of her who died under the cruel Queen.

Many sad sights she saw in the great hospital where she passed some
months at intervals,--one never to be forgotten.  An officer was
brought into the ward where she was in attendance.  "Shot through the
lungs,--pretty nearly gone."

She went softly to his bedside.  He was breathing with great
difficulty; his face was almost convulsed with the effort, but she
recognized him in a moment; it was Murray Bradshaw,--Captain
Bradshaw, as she knew by the bars on his coat flung upon the bed
where he had just been laid.

She addressed him by name, tenderly as if he had been a dear brother;
she saw on his face that hers were to be the last kind words he would
ever hear.

He turned his glazing eyes upon her.  "Who are you?" he said in a
feeble voice.

"An old friend," she answered; "you knew me as Myrtle Hazard."

He started.  "You by my bedside!  You caring for me!--for me, that
burned the title to your fortune to ashes before your eyes!  You
can't forgive that,--I won't believe it!  Don't you hate me, dying as
I am?"

Myrtle was used to maintaining a perfect calmness of voice and
countenance, and she held her feelings firmly down.  "I have nothing
to forgive you, Mr. Bradshaw.  You may have meant to do me wrong, but
Providence raised up a protector for me.  The paper you burned was
not the original,--it was a copy substituted for it--"

"And did the old man outwit me after all?" he cried out, rising
suddenly in bed, and clasping his hands behind his head to give him a
few more gasps of breath.  "I knew he was cunning, but I thought I
was his match.  It must have been Byles Gridley,--nobody else.  And
so the old man beat me after all, and saved you from ruin!  Thank God
that it came out so!  Thank God!  I can die now.  Give me your hand,
Myrtle."

She took his hand, and held it until it gently loosed its hold, and
he ceased to breathe.  Myrtle's creed was a simple one, with more of
trust and love in it than of systematized articles of belief.  She
cherished the fond hope that these last words of one who had erred so
miserably were a token of some blessed change which the influences of
the better world might carry onward until he should have outgrown the
sins and the weaknesses of his earthly career.

Soon after this she rejoined her husband in the camp.  From time to
time they received stray copies of the "Banner and Oracle," which, to
Myrtle especially, were full of interest, even to the last
advertisement.  A few paragraphs may be reproduced here which relate
to persons who have figured in this narrative.


                    "TEMPLE OF HYMEN.

"Married, on the 6th instant, Fordyce Hurlbut, M. D., to Olive, only
daughter of the Rev. Ambrose Eveleth.  The editor of this paper
returns his acknowledgments for a bountiful slice of the wedding-
cake.  May their shadows never be less!"

Not many weeks after this appeared the following:

"Died in this place, on the 28th instant, the venerable Lemuel
Hurlbut, M. D., at the great age of XCVI years.

"'With the ancient is wisdom, and in length of days understanding.'"


Myrtle recalled his kind care of her in her illness, and paid the
tribute of a sigh to his memory,--there was nothing in a death like
his to call for any aching regret.

The usual routine of small occurrences was duly recorded in the
village paper for some weeks longer, when she was startled and
shocked by receiving a number containing the following paragraph:


                    CALAMITOUS ACCIDENT

"It is known to our readers that the steeple of the old meeting-house
was struck by lightning about a month ago.  The frame of the building
was a good deal jarred by the shock, but no danger was apprehended
from the injury it had received.  On Sunday last the congregation
came together as usual.  The Rev. Mr. Stoker was alone m the pulpit,
the Rev. Doctor Pemberton having been detained by slight
indisposition.  The sermon was from the text, "The wolf also shall
dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid."
(Isaiah xi. 6.) The pastor described the millennium as--the reign of
love and peace, in eloquent and impressive language.  He was in the
midst of the prayer which follows the sermon, and had jest put up a
petition that the spirit of affection and faith and trust might grow
up and prevail among the flock of which he was the shepherd, more
especially those dear lambs whom he gathered with his arm, and
carried in his bosom, when the old sounding-board, which had hung
safely for nearly a century,--loosened, no doubt by the bolt which
had fallen on the church,--broke from its fastenings, and fell with a
loud crash upon the pulpit, crushing the Rev. Mr. Stoker under its
ruins.  The scene that followed beggars description.  Cries and
shrieks resounded through the horse.  Two or three young women
fainted entirely away.  Mr. Penhallow, Deacon Rumrill, Gifted
Hopkins, Esq., and others, came forward immediately, and after much
effort succeeded in removing the wreck of the sounding-board, and
extricating their unfortunate pastor.  He was not fatally injured, it
is hoped; but, sad to relate, he received such a violent blow upon
the spine of the back, that palsy of the lower extremities is like to
ensue.  He is at present lying entirely helpless.  Every attention is
paid to him by his affectionately devoted family."

Myrtle had hardly got over the pain which the reading of this
unfortunate occurrence gave her, when her eyes were gladdened by the
following pleasing piece of intelligence, contained in a subsequent
number of the village paper:

                    IMPOSING CEREMONY.

"The Reverend Doctor Pemberton performed the impressive rite of
baptism upon the first-born child of our distinguished townsman,
Gifted Hopkins, Esq., the Bard of Oxbow Village, and Mrs. Susan P.
Hopkins, his amiable and respected lady.  The babe conducted himself
with singular propriety on this occasion.  He received the Christian
name of Byron Tennyson Browning.  May be prove worthy of his name and
his parentage!"


The end of the war came at last, and found Colonel Lindsay among its
unharmed survivors.  He returned with Myrtle to her native village,
and they established themselves, at the request of Miss Silence
Withers, in the old family mansion.  Miss Cynthia, to whom Myrtle
made a generous allowance, had gone to live in a town not many miles
distant, where she had a kind of home on sufferance, as well as at
The Poplars.  This was a convenience just then, because Nurse Byloe
was invited to stay with them for a month or two; and one nurse and
two single women under the same roof keep each other in a stew all
the time, as the old dame somewhat sharply remarked.

Master Byles Gridley had been appointed Myrtle's legal protector,
and, with the assistance of Mr. Penhallow, had brought the property
she inherited into a more manageable and productive form; so that,
when Clement began his fine studio behind the old mansion, he felt
that at least he could pursue his art, or arts, if he chose to give
himself to sculpture, without that dreadful hag, Necessity, standing
by him to pinch the features of all his ideals, and give them
something of her own likeness.

Silence Withers was more cheerful now that she had got rid of her
responsibility.  She embellished her spare person a little more than
in former years.  These young people looked so happy!  Love was not
so unendurable, perhaps, after all.  No woman need despair,--
especially if she has a house over her, and a snug little property.
A worthy man, a former missionary, of the best principles, but of a
slightly jocose and good-humored habit, thought that he could piece
his widowed years with the not insignificant, fraction of life left
to Miss Silence, to their mutual advantage.  He came to the village,
therefore, where Father Pemberton was very glad to have him supply
the pulpit in the place of his unfortunate disabled colleague.  The
courtship soon began, and was brisk enough; for the good man knew
there was no time to lose at his period of life,--or hers either, for
that matter.  It was a rather odd specimen of love-making; for he was
constantly trying to subdue his features to a gravity which they were
not used to, and she was as constantly endeavoring to be as lively as
possible, with the innocent desire of pleasing her light-hearted
suitor.

"Vieille fille fait jeune mariee."  Silence was ten years younger as
a bride than she had seemed as a lone woman.  One would have said she
had got out of the coach next to the hearse, and got into one some
half a dozen behind it,--where there is often good and reasonably
cheerful conversation going on about the virtues of the deceased, the
probable amount of his property, or the little slips he may have
committed, and where occasionally a subdued pleasantry at his expense
sets the four waistcoats shaking that were lifting with sighs a half-
hour ago in the house of mourning.  But Miss Silence, that was,
thought that two families, with all the possible complications which
time might bring, would be better in separate establishments.  She
therefore proposed selling The Poplars to Myrtle and her husband, and
removing to a house in the village, which would be large enough for
them, at least for the present.  So the young folks bought the old
house, and paid a mighty good price for it; and enlarged it, and
beautified and glorified it, and one fine morning went together down
to the Widow Hopkins's, whose residence seemed in danger of being a
little crowded,--for Gifted lived there with his Susan,--and what had
happened might happen again,--and gave Master Byles Gridley a formal
and most persuasively worded invitation to come up and make his home
with them at The Poplars.

Now Master Gridley has been betrayed into palpable and undisguised
weakness at least once in the presence of this assembly, who are
looking upon him almost for the last time before they part from him,
and see his face no more.  Let us not inquire too curiously, then,
how he received this kind proposition.  It is enough, that, when he
found that a new study had been built on purpose for him, and a
sleeping-room attached to it so that he could live there without
disturbing anybody if he chose, he consented to remove there for a
while, and that he was there established amidst great rejoicing.

Cynthia Badlam had fallen of late into poor health.  She found at
last that she was going; and as she had a little property of her
own,--as almost all poor relations have, only there is not enough of
it,--she was much exercised in her mind as to the final arrangements
to be made respecting its disposition.  The Rev. Dr. Pemberton was
one day surprised by a message, that she wished to have an interview
with him.  He rode over to the town in which she was residing, and
there had a long conversation with her upon this matter.  When this
was settled, her mind seemed too be more at ease.  She died with a
comfortable assurance that she was going to a better world, and with
a bitter conviction that it would be hard to find one that would
offer her a worse lot than being a poor relation in this.

Her little property was left to Rev. Eliphalet Pemberton and Jacob
Penhallow, Esq., to be by them employed for such charitable purposes
as they should elect, educational or other.  Father Pemberton
preached an admirable funeral sermon, in which he praised her
virtues, known to this people among whom she had long lived, and
especially that crowning act by which she devoted all she had to
purposes of charity-and benevolence.

The old clergyman seemed to have renewed his youth since the
misfortune of his colleague had incapacitated him from labor.  He
generally preached in the forenoon now, and to the great acceptance
of the people,--for the truth was that the honest minister who had
married Miss Silence was not young enough or good-looking enough to
be an object of personal attentions like the Rev. Joseph Bellamy
Stoker, and the old minister appeared to great advantage contrasted
with him in the pulpit.  Poor Mr. Stoker was now helpless, faithfully
and tenderly waited upon by his own wife, who had regained her health
and strength,--in no small measure, perhaps, from the great need of
sympathy and active aid which her unfortunate husband now
experienced.  It was an astonishment to herself when she found that
she who had so long been served was able to serve another.  Some who
knew his errors thought his accident was a judgment; but others
believed that it was only a mercy in disguise,--it snatched him
roughly from his sin, but it opened his heart to gratitude towards
her whom his neglect could not alienate, and through gratitude to
repentance and better thoughts.  Bathsheba had long ago promised
herself to Cyprian Eveleth; and, as he was about to become the rector
of a parish in the next town, the marriage was soon to take place.

How beautifully serene Master Byles Gridley's face was growing!
Clement loved to study its grand lines, which had so much strength
and fine humanity blended in them.  He was so fascinated by their
noble expression that he sometimes seemed to forget himself, and
looked at him more like an artist taking his portrait than like an
admiring friend.  He maintained that Master Gridley had a bigger bump
of benevolence and as large a one of cautiousness as the two people
most famous for the size of these organs on the phrenological chart
he showed him, and proved it, or nearly proved it, by careful
measurements of his head.  Master Gridley laughed, and read him a
passage on the pseudo-sciences out of his book.

The disposal of Miss Cynthia's bequest was much discussed in the
village.  Some wished the trustees would use it to lay the
foundations of a public library.  Others thought it should be applied
for the relief of the families of soldiers who had fallen in the war.
Still another set would take it to build a monument to the memory of
those heroes.  The trustees listened with the greatest candor to all
these gratuitous hints.  It was, however, suggested, in a well-
written anonymous article which appeared in the village paper, that
it was desirable to follow the general lead of the testator's
apparent preference.  The trustees were at liberty to do as they saw
fit; but, other things being equal, same educational object should be
selected.

If there were any orphan children in the place, it would seem to be
very proper to devote the moderate sum bequeathed to educating them.
The trustees recognized the justice of this suggestion.  Why not
apply it to the instruction and maintenance of those two pretty and
promising children, virtually orphans, whom the charitable Mrs.
Hopkins had cared for so long without any recompense, and at a cost
which would soon become beyond her means?  The good people of the
neighborhood accepted this as the best solution of the difficulty.
It was agreed upon at length by the trustees, that the Cynthia Badlam
Fund for Educational Purposes should be applied for the benefit of
the two foundlings, known as Isosceles and Helminthia Hopkins.

Master Bytes Gridley was greatly exercised about the two
"preposterous names," as he called them, which in a moment of
eccentric impulse he had given to these children of nature.  He
ventured to hint as much to Mrs. Hopkins.  The good dame was vastly
surprised.  She thought they was about as pooty names as anybody had
had given 'em in the village.  And they was so handy, spoke short,
Sossy and Minthy,--she never should know how to call 'em anything
else.

"But my dear Mrs. Hopkins," Master Gridley urged, "if you knew the
meaning they have to the ears of scholars, you would see that I did
very wrong to apply such absurd names to my little fellow-creatures,
and that I am bound to rectify my error.  More than that, my dear
madam, I mean to consult you as to the new names; and if we can fix
upon proper and pleasing ones, it is my intention to leave a pretty
legacy in my will to these interesting children."

"Mr. Gridley," said Mrs. Hopkins, "you're the best man I ever see, or
ever shall see, .  .  .  except my poor dear Ammi .  .  .  .  I 'll
do jest as you say about that, or about anything else in all this
livin' world."

"Well, then, Mrs. Hopkins, what shall be the boy's name?"

"Byles Gridley Hopkins!" she answered instantly.

"Good Lord!" said Mr. Gridley, "think a minute, my dear madam.  I
will not say one word,--only think a minute, and mention some name
that will not suggest quite so many winks and whispers."

She did think something less than a minute, and then said aloud,
"Abraham Lincoln Hopkins."

"Fifteen thousand children have been so christened during the past
year, on a moderate computation."

"Do think of some name yourself, Mr. Gridley; I shall like anything
that you like.  To think of those dear babes having a fund--if that's
the right name--on purpose for 'em, and a promise of a legacy, I hope
they won't get that till they're a hundred year old!"

"What if we change Isosceles to Theodore, Mrs. Hopkins?  That means
the gift of God, and the child has been a gift from Heaven, rather
than a burden."

Mrs. Hopkins seized her apron, and held it to her eyes.  She was
weeping.  "Theodore!" she said, "Theodore!  My little brother's name,
that I buried when I was only eleven year old.  Drownded.  The
dearest little child that ever you see.  I have got his little mug
with Theodore on it now.  Kep' o' purpose.  Our little Sossy shall
have it.  Theodore P. Hopkins,--sha'n't it be, Mr. Gridley?"

"Well, if you say so; but why that P., Mrs. Hopkins?  Theodore
Parker, is it?"

"Doesn't P.  stand for Pemberton, and isn't Father Pemberton the best
man in the world--next to you, Mr. Gridley?"

"Well, well, Mrs. Hopkins, let it be so, if you are suited, I am.
Now about Helminthia; there can't be any doubt about what we ought to
call her,--surely the friend of orphans should be remembered in
naming one of the objects of her charity."

"Cynthia Badlam Fund Hopkins," said the good woman triumphantly,--"is
that what you mean?"

"Suppose we leave out one of the names,--four are too many.  I think
the general opinion will be that Hehninthia should unite the names of
her two benefactresses,--Cynthia Badlam Hopkins."

"Why, law!  Mr. Gridley, is n't that nice?--Minthy and Cynthy,--there
ain't but one letter of difference!  Poor Cynthy would be pleased if
she could know that one of our babes was to be called after her.  She
was dreadful fond of children."

On one of the sweetest Sundays that ever made Oxbow Village lovely,
the Rev. Dr. Eliphalet Pembertan was summoned to officiate at three
most interesting ceremonies,--a wedding and two christenings, one of
the latter a double one.

The first was celebrated at the house of the Rev. Mr. Stoker, between
the Rev. Cyprian Eveleth and Bathsheba, daughter of the first-named
clergyman.  He could not be present on account of his great
infirmity, but the door of his chamber was left open that he might
hear the marriage service performed.  The old, white-haired minister,
assisted, as the papers said, by the bridegroom's father, conducted
the ceremony according to the Episcopal form.  When he came to those
solemn words in which the husband promises fidelity to the wife so
long as they both shall live, the nurse, who was watching, near the
poor father, saw him bury his face in his pillow, and heard him
murmur the words, "God be merciful to me a sinner!"

The christenings were both to take place at the same service, in the
old meeting-house.  Colonel Clement Lindsay and Myrtle his wife came
in, and stout Nurse Byloe bore their sturdy infant in her arms.  A
slip of paper was handed to the Reverend Doctor on which these words
were written:--"The name is Charles Hazard."

The solemn and touching rite was then performed; and Nurse Byloe
disappeared with the child, its forehead glistening with the dew of
its consecration.

Then, hand in hand, like the babes in the wood, marched up the
broad aisle--marshalled by Mrs. Hopkins in front, and Mrs. Gifted
Hopkins bringing up the rear--the two children hitherto known as
Isosceles and Helminthia.  They had been well schooled, and, as the
mysterious and to them incomprehensible ceremony was enacted,
maintained the most stoical aspect of tranquillity.  In Mrs.
Hopkins's words, "They looked like picters, and behaved like angels."

That evening, Sunday evening as it was, there was a quiet meeting of
some few friends at The Poplars.  It was such a great occasion that
the Sabbatical rules, never strict about Sunday evening,--which was,
strictly speaking, secular time,--were relaxed.  Father Pemberton was
there, and Master Byles Gridley, of course, and the Rev. Ambrose
Eveleth, with his son and his daughter-in-law, Bathsheba, and her
mother, now in comfortable health, aunt Silence and her husband,
Doctor Hurlbut and his wife (Olive Eveleth that was), Jacob
Penhallow, Esq., Mrs. Hopkins, her son and his wife (Susan Posey that
was), the senior deacon of the old church (the admirer of the great
Scott), the Editor-in-chief of the "Banner and Oracle," and in the
background Nurse Byloe and the privileged servant, Mistress Kitty
Fagan, with a few others whose names we need not mention.

The evening was made pleasant with sacred music, and the fatigues of
two long services repaired by such simple refections as would not
turn the holy day into a day of labor.  A large paper copy of the new
edition of Byles Gridley's remarkable work was lying on the table.
He never looked so happy,--could anything fill his cup fuller?  In
the course of the evening Clement spoke of the many trials through
which they had passed in common with vast numbers of their
countrymen, and some of those peculiar dangers which Myrtle had had
to encounter in the course of a life more eventful, and attended with
more risks, perhaps, than most of them imagined.  But Myrtle, he
said, had always been specially cared for.  He wished them to look
upon the semblance of that protecting spirit who had been faithful to
her in her gravest hours of trial and danger.  If they would follow
him into one of the lesser apartments up stairs they would have an
opportunity to do so.

Myrtle wondered a little, but followed with the rest.  They all
ascended to the little projecting chamber, through the window of
which her scarlet jacket caught the eyes of the boys paddling about
on the river in those early days when Cyprian Eveleth gave it the
name of the Fire-hang-bird's Nest.

The light fell softly but clearly on the dim and faded canvas from
which looked the saintly features of the martyred woman, whose
continued presence with her descendants was the old family legend.
But underneath it Myrtle was surprised to see a small table with some
closely covered object upon it.  It was a mysterious arrangement,
made without any knowledge on her part.

"Now, then, Kitty!" Mr. Lindsay said.

Kitty Fagan, who had evidently been taught her part, stepped forward,
and removed the cloth which concealed the unknown object.  It was a
lifelike marble bust of Master Byles Gridley.

"And this is what you have been working at so long,--is it, Clement?"
Myrtle said.

"Which is the image of your protector, Myrtle?", he answered,
smiling.

Myrtle Hazard Lindsay walked up to the bust and kissed its marble
forehead, saying, "This is the face of my Guardian Angel."





End of Project Gutenberg's The Guardian Angel, by Oliver Wendell Holmes






A MORTAL ANTIPATHY

By Oliver Wendell Holmes




PREFACE.

"A MORTAL ANTIPATHY" was a truly hazardous experiment.  A very wise
and very distinguished physician who is as much at home in literature
as he is in science and the practice of medicine, wrote to me in
referring to this story: "I should have been afraid of my subject."
He did not explain himself, but I can easily understand that he felt
the improbability of the, physiological or pathological occurrence on
which the story is founded to be so great that the narrative could
hardly be rendered plausible.  I felt the difficulty for myself as
well as for my readers, and it was only by recalling for our
consideration a series of extraordinary but well-authenticated facts
of somewhat similar character that I could hope to gain any serious
attention to so strange a narrative.

I need not recur to these wonderful stories.  There is, however, one,
not to be found on record elsewhere, to which I would especially call
the reader's attention.  It is that of the middle-aged man, who
assured me that he could never pass a tall hall clock without an
indefinable terror.  While an infant in arms the heavy weight of one
of these tall clocks had fallen with aloud crash and produced an
impression on his nervous system which he had never got over.

The lasting effect of a shock received by the sense of sight or that
of hearing is conceivable enough.

But there is another sense, the nerves of which are in close relation
with the higher organs of consciousness.  The strength of the
associations connected with the function of the first pair of nerves,
the olfactory, is familiar to most persons in their own experience
and as related by others.  Now we know that every human being, as
well as every other living organism, carries its own distinguishing
atmosphere.  If a man's friend does not know it, his dog does, and
can track him anywhere by it.  This personal peculiarity varies with
the age and conditions of the individual.  It may be agreeable or
otherwise, a source of attraction or repulsion, but its influence is
not less real, though far less obvious and less dominant, than in the
lower animals.  It was an atmospheric impression of this nature which
associated itself with a terrible shock experienced by the infant
which became the subject of this story.  The impression could not be
outgrown, but it might possibly be broken up by some sudden change in
the nervous system effected by a cause as potent as the one which had
produced the disordered condition.

This is the best key that I can furnish to a story which must have
puzzled some, repelled others, and failed to interest many who did
not suspect the true cause of the mysterious antipathy.

BEVERLY FARMS, MASS., August, 1891.

O.  W.  H.






A MORTAL ANTIPATHY.

FIRST OPENING OF THE NEW PORTFOLIO.

INTRODUCTION.

"And why the New Portfolio, I would ask?"

Pray, do you remember, when there was an accession to the nursery in
which you have a special interest, whether the new-comer was commonly
spoken of as a baby?  Was it not, on the contrary, invariably, under
all conditions, in all companies, by the whole household, spoken of
as the baby?  And was the small receptacle provided for it commonly
spoken of as a cradle; or was it not always called the cradle, as if
there were no other in existence?

Now this New Portfolio is the cradle in which I am to rock my
new-born thoughts, and from which I am to lift them carefully and
show them to callers, namely, to the whole family of readers
belonging to my list of intimates, and such other friends as may drop
in by accident.  And so it shall have the definite article, and not
be lost in the mob of its fellows as a portfolio.

There are a few personal and incidental matters of which I wish to
say something before reaching the contents of the Portfolio, whatever
these may be.  I have had other portfolios before this,--two, more
especially, and the first thing I beg leave to introduce relates to
these.

Do not throw this volume down, or turn to another page, when I tell
you that the earliest of them, that of which I now am about to speak,
was opened more than fifty years ago.  This is a very dangerous
confession, for fifty years make everything hopelessly old-fashioned,
without giving it the charm of real antiquity.  If I could say a
hundred years, now, my readers would accept all I had to tell them
with a curious interest; but fifty years ago,--there are too many
talkative old people who know all about that time, and at best half a
century is a half-baked bit of ware.  A coin-fancier would say that
your fifty-year-old facts have just enough of antiquity to spot them
with rust, and not enough to give them--the delicate and durable
patina which is time's exquisite enamel.

When the first Portfolio was opened the coin of the realm bore for
its legend,--or might have borne if the more devout hero-worshippers
could have had their way,--Andreas Jackson, Populi Gratia, Imp.
Caesrzr.  Aug.  Div., Max., etc., etc.  I never happened to see any
gold or silver with that legend, but the truth is I was not very
familiarly acquainted with the precious metals at that period of my
career, and, there might have been a good deal of such coin in
circulation without my handling it, or knowing much about it.

Permit me to indulge in a few reminiscences of that far-off time.

In those days the Athenaeum Picture Gallery was a principal centre of
attraction to young Boston people and their visitors.  Many of us got
our first ideas of art, to say nothing of our first lessons in the
comparatively innocent flirtations of our city's primitive period, in
that agreeable resort of amateurs and artists.

How the pictures on those walls in Pearl Street do keep their places
in the mind's gallery!  Trumbull's Sortie of Gibraltar, with red
enough in it for one of our sunset after-glows; and Neagle's full-
length portrait of the blacksmith in his shirt-sleeves; and Copley's
long-waistcoated gentlemen and satin-clad ladies,--they looked like
gentlemen and ladies, too; and Stuart's florid merchants and high-
waisted matrons; and Allston's lovely Italian scenery and dreamy,
unimpassioned women, not forgetting Florimel in full flight on her
interminable rocking-horse,--you may still see her at the Art Museum;
and the rival landscapes of Doughty and Fisher, much talked of and
largely praised in those days; and the Murillo,--not from Marshal
Soup's collection; and the portrait of Annibale Caracci by himself,
which cost the Athenaeum a hundred dollars; and Cole's allegorical
pictures, and his immense and dreary canvas, in which the prostrate
shepherds and the angel in Joseph's coat of many colors look as if
they must have been thrown in for nothing; and West's brawny Lear
tearing his clothes to pieces.  But why go on with the catalogue,
when most of these pictures can be seen either at the Athenaeum
building in Beacon Street or at the Art Gallery, and admired or
criticised perhaps more justly, certainly not more generously, than
in those earlier years when we looked at them through the japanned
fish-horns?

If one happened to pass through Atkinson Street on his way to the
Athenaeum, he would notice a large, square, painted, brick house, in
which lived a leading representative of old-fashioned coleopterous
Calvinism, and from which emerged one of the liveliest of literary
butterflies.  The father was editor of the "Boston Recorder," a very
respectable, but very far from amusing paper, most largely patronized
by that class of the community which spoke habitually of the first
day of the week as "the Sahbuth."  The son was the editor of several
different periodicals in succession, none of them over severe or
serious, and of many pleasant books, filled with lively descriptions
of society, which be studied on the outside with a quick eye for form
and color, and with a certain amount of sentiment, not very deep, but
real, though somewhat frothed over by his worldly experiences.

Nathaniel Parker Willis was in full bloom when I opened my first
Portfolio.  He had made himself known by his religious poetry,
published in his father's paper, I think, and signed "Roy."  He had
started the "American Magazine," afterwards merged in the New York
Mirror."  He had then left off writing scripture pieces, and taken to
lighter forms of verse.  He had just written

         "I'm twenty-two, I'm twenty-two,
               They idly give me joy,
          As if I should be glad to know
               That I was less a boy."

He was young, therefore, and already famous.  He came very near being
very handsome.  He was tall; his hair, of light brown color, waved in
luxuriant abundance; his cheek was as rosy as if it had been painted
to show behind the footlights; he dressed with artistic elegance.  He
was something between a remembrance of Count D'Orsay and an
anticipation of Oscar Wilde.  There used to be in the gallery of the
Luxembourg a picture of Hippolytus and Phxdra, in which the beautiful
young man, who had kindled a passion in the heart of his wicked step-
mother, always reminded me of Willis, in spite of the shortcomings of
the living face as compared with the ideal.  The painted youth is
still blooming on the canvas, but the fresh-cheecked, jaunty young
author of the year 1830 has long faded out of human sight.  I took
the leaves which lie before me at this moment, as I write, from his
coffin, as it lay just outside the door of Saint Paul's Church, on a
sad, overclouded winter's day, in the year 1867.  At that earlier
time, Willis was by far the most prominent young American author.
Cooper, Irving, Bryant, Dana, Halleck, Drake, had all done their best
work.  Longfellow was not yet conspicuous.  Lowell was a school-boy.
Emerson was unheard of.  Whittier was beginning to make his way
against the writers with better educational advantages whom he was
destined to outdo and to outlive.  Not one of the great histories,
which have done honor to our literature, had appeared.  Our school-
books depended, so far as American authors were concerned, on
extracts from the orations and speeches of Webster and Everett; on
Bryant's Thanatopsis, his lines To a Waterfowl, and the Death of the
Flowers, Halleck's Marco Bozzaris, Red Jacket, and Burns; on Drake's
American Flag, and Percival's Coral Grove, and his Genius Sleeping
and Genius Waking,--and not getting very wide awake, either.  These
could be depended upon.  A few other copies of verses might be found,
but Dwight's "Columbia, Columbia," and Pierpont's Airs of Palestine,
were already effaced, as many of the favorites of our own day and
generation must soon be, by the great wave which the near future will
pour over the sands in which they still are legible.

About this time, in the year 1832, came out a small volume entitled
"Truth, a Gift for Scribblers," which made some talk for a while, and
is now chiefly valuable as a kind of literary tombstone on which may
be read the names of many whose renown has been buried with their
bones.  The "London Athenaeum" spoke of it as having been described
as a "tomahawk sort of satire."  As the author had been a trapper in
Missouri, he was familiarly acquainted with that weapon and the
warfare of its owners.  Born in Boston, in 1804, the son of an army
officer, educated at West Point, he came back to his native city
about the year 1830.  He wrote an article on Bryant's Poems for the
"North American Review," and another on the famous Indian chief,
Black Hawk.  In this last-mentioned article he tells this story as
the great warrior told it himself.  It was an incident of a fight
with the Osages.

"Standing by my father's side, I saw him kill his antagonist and tear
the scalp from his head.  Fired with valor and ambition, I rushed
furiously upon another, smote him to the earth with my tomahawk, ran
my lance through his body, took off his scalp, and returned in
triumph to my father.  He said nothing, but looked pleased."

This little red story describes very well Spelling's style of
literary warfare.  His handling of his most conspicuous victim,
Willis, was very much like Black Hawk's way of dealing with the
Osage.  He tomahawked him in heroics, ran him through in prose, and
scalped him in barbarous epigrams.  Bryant and Halleck were
abundantly praised; hardly any one else escaped.

If the reader wishes to see the bubbles of reputation that were
floating, some of them gay with prismatic colors, half a century ago,
he will find in the pages of "Truth" a long catalogue of celebrities
he never heard of.  I recognize only three names, of all which are
mentioned in the little book, as belonging to persons still living;
but as I have not read the obituaries of all the others, some of them
may be still flourishing in spite of Mr. Spelling's exterminating
onslaught.  Time dealt as hardly with poor Spelling, who was not
without talent and instruction, as he had dealt with our authors.  I
think he found shelter at last under a roof which held numerous
inmates, some of whom had seen better and many of whom had known
worse days than those which they were passing within its friendly and
not exclusive precincts.  Such, at least, was the story I heard after
he disappeared from general observation.

That was the day of Souvenirs, Tokens, Forget-me-nots, Bijous, and
all that class of showy annuals.  Short stories, slender poems, steel
engravings, on a level with the common fashion-plates of advertising
establishments, gilt edges, resplendent binding,--to manifestations
of this sort our lighter literature had very largely run for some
years.  The "Scarlet Letter" was an unhinted possibility.  The
"Voices of the Night" had not stirred the brooding silence; the
Concord seer was still in the lonely desert; most of the contributors
to those yearly volumes, which took up such pretentious positions on
the centre table, have shrunk into entire oblivion, or, at best, hold
their place in literature by a scrap or two in some omnivorous
collection.

What dreadful work Spelling made among those slight reputations,
floating in swollen tenuity on the surface of the stream, and
mirroring each other in reciprocal reflections!  Violent, abusive as
he was, unjust to any against whom he happened to have a prejudice,
his castigation of the small litterateurs of that day was not
harmful, but rather of use.  His attack on Willis very probably did
him good; he needed a little discipline, and though he got it too
unsparingly, some cautions came with it which were worth the stripes
he had to smart under.  One noble writer Spelling treated with
rudeness, probably from some accidental pique, or equally
insignificant reason.  I myself, one of the three survivors before
referred to, escaped with a love-pat, as the youngest son of the
Muse.  Longfellow gets a brief nod of acknowledgment.  Bailey, an
American writer, "who made long since a happy snatch at fame," which
must have been snatched away from him by envious time, for I cannot
identify him; Thatcher, who died early, leaving one poem, The Last
Request, not wholly unremembered; Miss Hannah F.  Gould, a very
bright and agreeable writer of light verse,--all these are commended
to the keeping of that venerable public carrier, who finds his scythe
and hour-glass such a load that he generally drops the burdens
committed to his charge, after making a show of paying every possible
attention to them so long as he is kept in sight.

It was a good time to open a portfolio.  But my old one had boyhood
written on every page.  A single passionate outcry when the old
warship I had read about in the broadsides that were a part of our
kitchen literature, and in the "Naval Monument," was threatened with
demolition; a few verses suggested by the sight of old Major Melville
in his cocked hat and breeches, were the best scraps that came out of
that first Portfolio, which was soon closed that it should not
interfere with the duties of a profession authorized to claim all the
time and thought which would have been otherwise expended in filling
it.

During a quarter of a century the first Portfolio remained closed for
the greater part of the time.  Only now and then it would be taken up
and opened, and something drawn from it for a special occasion, more
particularly for the annual reunions of a certain class of which I
was a member.

In the year 1857, towards its close, the "Atlantic Monthly," which I
had the honor of naming, was started by the enterprising firm of
Phillips & Sampson, under the editorship of Mr. James Russell Lowell.
He thought that I might bring something out of my old Portfolio which
would be not unacceptable in the new magazine.  I looked at the poor
old receptacle, which, partly from use and partly from neglect, had
lost its freshness, and seemed hardly presentable to the new company
expected to welcome the new-comer in the literary world of Boston,
the least provincial of American centres of learning and letters.
The gilded covering where the emblems of hope and aspiration had
looked so bright had faded; not wholly, perhaps, but how was the gold
become dim!---how was the most fine gold changed!  Long devotion to
other pursuits had left little time for literature, and the waifs and
strays gathered from the old Portfolio had done little more than keep
alive the memory that such a source of supply was still in existence.
I looked at the old Portfolio, and said to myself, "Too late!  too
late.  This tarnished gold will never brighten, these battered covers
will stand no more wear and tear; close them, and leave them to the
spider and the book-worm."

In the mean time the nebula of the first quarter of the century had
condensed into the constellation of the middle of the same period.
When, a little while after the establishment of the new magazine, the
"Saturday Club" gathered about the long table at "Parker's," such a
representation of all that was best in American literature had never
been collected within so small a compass.  Most of the Americans whom
educated foreigners cared to see-leaving out of consideration
official dignitaries, whose temporary importance makes them objects
of curiosity--were seated at that board.  But the club did not yet
exist, and the "Atlantic Monthly" was an experiment.  There had
already been several monthly periodicals, more or less successful and
permanent, among which "Putnam's Magazine" was conspicuous, owing its
success largely to the contributions of that very accomplished and
delightful writer, Mr. George William Curtis.  That magazine, after a
somewhat prolonged and very honorable existence, had gone where all
periodicals go when they die, into the archives of the deaf, dumb,
and blind recording angel whose name is Oblivion.  It had so well
deserved to live that its death was a surprise and a source of
regret.  Could another monthly take its place and keep it when that,
with all its attractions and excellences, had died out, and left a
blank in our periodical literature which it would be very hard to
fill as well as that had filled it?

This was the experiment which the enterprising publishers ventured
upon, and I, who felt myself outside of the charmed circle drawn
around the scholars and poets of Cambridge and Concord, having given
myself to other studies and duties, wondered somewhat when Mr. Lowell
insisted upon my becoming a contributor.  And so, yielding to a
pressure which I could not understand, and yet found myself unable to
resist, I promised to take a part in the new venture, as an
occasional writer in the columns of the new magazine.

That was the way in which the second Portfolio found its way to my
table, and was there opened in the autumn of the year 1857.  I was
already at least

          'Nel mezzo del cammin di mia, vita,'

when I risked myself, with many misgivings, in little-tried paths of
what looked at first like a wilderness, a selva oscura, where, if I
did not meet the lion or the wolf, I should be sure to find the
critic, the most dangerous of the carnivores, waiting to welcome me
after his own fashion.

The second Portfolio is closed and laid away.  Perhaps it was hardly
worth while to provide and open a new one; but here it lies before
me, and I hope I may find something between its covers which will
justify me in coming once more before my old friends.  But before I
open it I want to claim a little further indulgence.

There is a subject of profound interest to almost every writer, I
might say to almost every human being.  No matter what his culture or
ignorance, no matter what his pursuit, no matter what his character,
the subject I refer to is one of which he rarely ceases to think,
and, if opportunity is offered, to talk.  On this he is eloquent, if
on nothing else.  The slow of speech becomes fluent; the torpid
listener becomes electric with vivacity, and alive all over with
interest.

The sagacious reader knows well what is coming after this prelude.
He is accustomed to the phrases with which the plausible visitor, who
has a subscription book in his pocket, prepares his victim for the
depressing disclosure of his real errand.  He is not unacquainted
with the conversational amenities of the cordial and interesting
stranger, who, having had the misfortune of leaving his carpet-bag in
the cars, or of having his pocket picked at the station, finds
himself without the means of reaching that distant home where
affluence waits for him with its luxurious welcome, but to whom for
the moment the loan of some five and twenty dollars would be a
convenience and a favor for which his heart would ache with gratitude
during the brief interval between the loan and its repayment.

I wish to say a few words in my own person relating to some passages
in my own history, and more especially to some of the recent
experiences through which I have been passing.

What can justify one in addressing himself to the general public as
if it were his private correspondent?  There are at least three
sufficient reasons: first, if he has a story to tell that everybody
wants to hear,--if be has been shipwrecked, or has been in a battle,
or has witnessed any interesting event, and can tell anything new
about it; secondly, if he can put in fitting words any common
experiences not already well told, so that readers will say, "Why,
yes!  I have had that sensation, thought, emotion, a hundred times,
but I never heard it spoken of before, and I never saw any mention of
it in print;" and thirdly, anything one likes, provided he can so
tell it as to make it interesting.

I have no story to tell in this Introduction which can of itself
claim any general attention.  My first pages relate the effect of a
certain literary experience upon myself,--a series of partial
metempsychoses of which I have been the subject.  Next follows a
brief tribute to the memory of a very dear and renowned friend from
whom I have recently been parted.  The rest of the Introduction will
be consecrated to the memory of my birthplace.

I have just finished a Memoir, which will appear soon after this page
is written, and will have been the subject of criticism long before
it is in the reader's hands.  The experience of thinking another
man's thoughts continuously for a long time; of living one's self
into another man's life for a month, or a year, or more, is a very
curious one.  No matter how much superior to the biographer his
subject may be, the man who writes the life feels himself, in a
certain sense, on the level of the person whose life he is writing.
One cannot fight over the battles of Marengo or Austerlitz with
Napoleon without feeling as if he himself had a fractional claim to
the victory, so real seems the transfer of his personality into that
of the conqueror while he reads.  Still more must this identification
of "subject" and "object" take place when one is writing of a person
whose studies or occupations are not unlike his own.

Here are some of my metempsychoses:
Ten years ago I wrote what I called A Memorial Outline of a
remarkable student of nature.  He was a born observer, and such are
far from common.  He was also a man of great enthusiasm and
unwearying industry.  His quick eye detected what others passed by
without notice: the Indian relic, where another would see only
pebbles and fragments; the rare mollusk, or reptile, which his
companion would poke with his cane, never suspecting that there was a
prize at the end of it.  Getting his single facts together with
marvellous sagacity and long-breathed patience, he arranged them,
classified them, described them, studied them in their relations, and
before those around him were aware of it the collector was an
accomplished naturalist.  When--he died his collections remained, and
they still remain, as his record in the hieratic language of science.
In writing this memoir the spirit of his quiet pursuits, the even
temper they bred in him, gained possession of my own mind, so that I
seemed to look at nature through his gold-bowed spectacles, and to
move about his beautifully ordered museum as if I had myself prepared
and arranged its specimens.  I felt wise with his wisdom, fair-minded
with his calm impartiality; it seemed as if for the time his placid,
observant, inquiring, keen-sighted nature "slid into my soul," and if
I had looked at myself in the glass I should almost have expected to
see the image of the Hersey professor whose life and character I was
sketching.

A few years hater I lived over the life of another friend in writing
a Memoir of which he was the subject.  I saw him, the beautiful,
bright-eyed boy, with dark, waving hair; the youthful scholar, first
at Harvard, then at Gottingen and Berlin, the friend and companion of
Bismarck; the young author, making a dash for renown as a novelist,
and showing the elements which made his failures the promise of
success in a larger field of literary labor; the delving historian,
burying his fresh young manhood in the dusty alcoves of silent
libraries, to come forth in the face of Europe and America as one of
the leading historians of the time; the diplomatist, accomplished, of
captivating presence and manners, an ardent American, and in the time
of trial an impassioned and eloquent advocate of the cause of
freedom; reaching at last the summit of his ambition as minister at
the Court of Saint James.  All this I seemed to share with him as I
tracked his career from his birthplace in Dorchester, and the house
in Walnut Street where he passed his boyhood, to the palaces of
Vienna and London.  And then the cruel blow which struck him from the
place he adorned; the great sorrow that darkened his later years; the
invasion of illness, a threat that warned of danger, and after a
period of invalidism, during a part of which I shared his most
intimate daily life, the sudden, hardly unwelcome, final summons.
Did not my own consciousness migrate, or seem, at least, to transfer
itself into this brilliant life history, as I traced its glowing
record?  I, too, seemed to feel the delight of carrying with me, as
if they were my own, the charms of a presence which made its own
welcome everywhere.  I shared his heroic toils, I partook of his
literary and social triumphs, I was honored by the marks of
distinction which gathered about him, I was wronged by the indignity
from which he suffered, mourned with him in his sorrow, and thus,
after I had been living for months with his memory, I felt as if I
should carry a part of his being with me so long as my self-
consciousness might remain imprisoned in the ponderable elements.

The years passed away, and the influences derived from the
companionships I have spoken of had blended intimately with my own
current of being.  Then there came to me a new experience in my
relations with an eminent member of the medical profession, whom I
met habitually for a long period, and to whose memory I consecrated a
few pages as a prelude to a work of his own, written under very
peculiar circumstances.  He was the subject of a slow, torturing,
malignant, and almost necessarily fatal disease.  Knowing well that
the mind would feed upon itself if it were not supplied with food
from without, he determined to write a treatise on a subject which
had greatly interested him, and which would oblige him to bestow much
of his time and thought upon it, if indeed he could hold out to
finish the work.  During the period while he was engaged in writing
it, his wife, who had seemed in perfect health, died suddenly of
pneumonia.  Physical suffering, mental distress, the prospect of
death at a near, if uncertain, time always before him, it was hard to
conceive a more terrible strain than that which he had to endure.
When, in the hour of his greatest need, his faithful companion, the
wife of many years of happy union, whose hand had smoothed his
pillow, whose voice had consoled and cheered him, was torn from him
after a few days of illness, I felt that my, friend's trial was such
that the cry of the man of many afflictions and temptations might
well have escaped from his lips: "I was at ease, but he hath broken
me asunder; he hath also taken me by my neck and shaken me to pieces,
and set me up for his mark.  His archers compass me round about, he
cleaveth my reins asunder, and doth not spare; he poureth out my gall
upon the ground."

I had dreaded meeting him for the first time after this crushing
blow.  What a lesson he gave me of patience under sufferings which
the fearful description of the Eastern poet does not picture too
vividly!  We have been taught to admire the calm philosophy of
Haller, watching his faltering pulse as he lay dying; we have heard
the words of pious resignation said to have been uttered with his
last breath by Addison: but here was a trial, not of hours, or days,
or weeks, but of months, even years, of cruel pain, and in the midst
of its thick darkness the light of love, which had burned steadily at
his bedside, was suddenly extinguished.

There were times in which the thought would force itself upon my
consciousness, How long is the universe to look upon this dreadful
experiment of a malarious planet, with its unmeasurable freight of
suffering, its poisonous atmosphere, so sweet to breathe, so sure to
kill in a few scores of years at farthest, and its heart-breaking
woes which make even that brief space of time an eternity?  There can
be but one answer that will meet this terrible question, which must
arise in every thinking nature that would fain "justify the ways of
God to men."  So must it be until that

         "one far-off divine event
          To which the whole creation moves"

has become a reality, and the anthem in which there is no discordant
note shall be joined by a voice from every life made "perfect through
sufferings."

Such was the lesson into which I lived in those sad yet placid years
of companionship with my suffering and sorrowing friend, in retracing
which I seemed to find another existence mingled with my own.

And now for many months I have been living in daily relations of
intimacy with one who seems nearer to me since he has left us than
while he was here in living form and feature.  I did not know how
difficult a task I had undertaken in venturing upon a memoir of a man
whom all, or almost all, agree upon as one of the great lights of the
New World, and whom very many regard as an unpredicted Messiah.
Never before was I so forcibly reminded of Carlyle's description of
the work of a newspaper editor,--that threshing of straw already
thrice beaten by the flails of other laborers in the same field.
What could be said that had not been said of "transcendentalism" and
of him who was regarded as its prophet; of the poet whom some admired
without understanding, a few understood, or thought they did, without
admiring, and many both understood and admired,--among these there
being not a small number who went far beyond admiration, and lost
themselves in devout worship?  While one exalted him as "the greatest
man that ever lived," another, a friend, famous in the world of
letters, wrote expressly to caution me against the danger of
overrating a writer whom he is content to recognize as an American
Montaigne, and nothing more.

After finishing this Memoir, which has but just left my hands, I
would gladly have let my brain rest for a while.  The wide range of
thought which belonged to the subject of the Memoir, the occasional
mysticism and the frequent tendency toward it, the sweep of
imagination and the sparkle of wit which kept his reader's mind on
the stretch, the union of prevailing good sense with exceptional
extravagances, the modest audacity of a nature that showed itself in
its naked truthfulness and was not ashamed, the feeling that I was in
the company of a sibylline intelligence which was discounting the
promises of the remote future long before they were due,--all this
made the task a grave one.  But when I found myself amidst the
vortices of uncounted, various, bewildering judgments, Catholic and
Protestant, orthodox and liberal, scholarly from under the tree of
knowledge and instinctive from over the potato-hill; the passionate
enthusiasm of young adorers and the cool, if not cynical, estimate of
hardened critics, all intersecting each other as they whirled, each
around its own centre, I felt that it was indeed very difficult to
keep the faculties clear and the judgment unbiassed.

It is a great privilege to have lived so long in the society of such
a man.  "He nothing common" said, "or mean."  He was always the same
pure and high-souled companion.  After being with him virtue seemed
as natural to man as its opposite did according to the old
theologies.  But how to let one's self down from the high level of
such a character to one's own poor standard?  I trust that the
influence of this long intellectual and spiritual companionship never
absolutely leaves one who has lived in it.  It may come to him in the
form of self-reproach that he falls so far short of the superior
being who has been so long the object of his contemplation.  But it
also carries him at times into the other's personality, so that he
finds himself thinking thoughts that are not his own, using phrases
which he has unconsciously borrowed, writing, it may be, as nearly
like his long-studied original as Julio Romano's painting was like
Raphael's; and all this with the unquestioning conviction that he is
talking from his own consciousness in his own natural way.  So far as
tones and expressions and habits which belonged to the idiosyncrasy
of the original are borrowed by the student of his life, it is a
misfortune for the borrower.  But to share the inmost consciousness
of a noble thinker, to scan one's self in the white light of a pure
and radiant soul,--this is indeed the highest form of teaching and
discipline.

I have written these few memoirs, and I am grateful for all that they
have taught me.  But let me write no more.  There are but two
biographers who can tell the story of a man's or a woman's life.  One
is the person himself or herself; the other is the Recording Angel.
The autobiographer cannot be trusted to tell the whole truth, though
he may tell nothing but the truth, and the Recording Angel never lets
his book go out of his own hands.  As for myself, I would say to my
friends, in the Oriental phrase, "Live forever!"  Yes, live forever,
and I, at least, shall not have to wrong your memories by my
imperfect record and unsatisfying commentary.

In connection with these biographies, or memoirs, more properly, in
which I have written of my departed friends, I hope my readers will
indulge me in another personal reminiscence.  I have just lost my
dear and honored contemporary of the last century.  A hundred years
ago this day, December 13, 1784, died the admirable and ever to be
remembered Dr. Samuel Johnson.  The year 1709 was made ponderous and
illustrious in English biography by his birth.  My own humble advent
to the world of protoplasm was in the year 1809 of the present
century.  Summer was just ending when those four letters, "son b."
were written under the date of my birth, August 29th.  Autumn had
just begun when my great pre-contemporary entered this un-Christian
universe and was made a member of the Christian church on the same
day, for he was born and baptized on the 18th of September.

Thus there was established a close bond of relationship between the
great English scholar and writer and myself.  Year by year, and
almost month by month, my life has kept pace in this century with his
life in the last century.  I had only to open my Boswell at any time,
and I knew just what Johnson at my age, twenty or fifty or seventy,
was thinking and doing; what were his feelings about life; what
changes the years had wrought in his body, his mind, his feelings,
his companionships, his reputation.  It was for me a kind of unison
between two instruments, both playing that old familiar air, "Life,"
--one a bassoon, if you will, and the other an oaten pipe, if you
care to find an image for it, but still keeping pace with each other
until the players both grew old and gray.  At last the thinner thread
of sound is heard by itself, and its deep accompaniment rolls out its
thunder no more.

I feel lonely now that my great companion and friend of so many years
has left me.  I felt more intimately acquainted with him than I do
with many of my living friends.  I can hardly remember when I did not
know him.  I can see him in his bushy wig, exactly like that of the
Reverend Dr. Samuel Cooper (who died in December, 1783) as Copley
painted him,--he hangs there on my wall, over the revolving bookcase.
His ample coat, too, I see, with its broad flaps and many buttons and
generous cuffs, and beneath it the long, still more copiously
buttoned waistcoat, arching in front of the fine crescentic, almost
semi-lunar Falstaffian prominence, involving no less than a dozen of
the above-mentioned buttons, and the strong legs with their sturdy
calves, fitting columns of support to the massive body and solid,
capacious brain enthroned over it.  I can hear him with his heavy
tread as he comes in to the Club, and a gap is widened to make room
for his portly figure.  "A fine day," says Sir Joshua.  "Sir," he
answers, "it seems propitious, but the atmosphere is humid and the
skies are nebulous," at which the great painter smiles, shifts his
trumpet, and takes a pinch of snuff.

Dear old massive, deep-voiced dogmatist and hypochondriac of the
eighteenth century, how one would like to sit at some ghastly Club,
between you and the bony, "mighty-mouthed," harsh-toned termagant and
dyspeptic of the nineteenth!  The growl of the English mastiff and
the snarl of the Scotch terrier would make a duet which would enliven
the shores of Lethe.  I wish I could find our "spiritualist's" paper
in the Portfolio, in which the two are brought together, but I hardly
know what I shall find when it is opened.

Yes, my life is a little less precious to me since I have lost that
dear old friend; and when the funeral train moves to Westminster
Abbey next Saturday, for I feel as if this were 1784, and not 1884,--
I seem to find myself following the hearse, one of the silent
mourners.

Among the events which have rendered the past year memorable to me
has been the demolition of that venerable and interesting old
dwelling-house, precious for its intimate association with the
earliest stages of the war of the Revolution, and sacred to me as my
birthplace and the home of my boyhood.

The "Old Gambrel-roofed House" exists no longer.  I remember saying
something, in one of a series of papers published long ago, about the
experience of dying out of a house,--of leaving it forever, as the
soul dies out of the body.  We may die out of many houses, but the
house itself can die but once; and so real is the life of a house to
one who has dwelt in it, more especially the life of the house which
held him in dreamy infancy, in restless boyhood, in passionate
youth,--so real, I say, is its life, that it seems as if something
like a soul of it must outlast its perishing frame.

The slaughter of the Old Gambrel-roofed House was, I am ready to
admit, a case of justifiable domicide.  Not the less was it to be
deplored by all who love the memories of the past.  With its
destruction are obliterated some of the footprints of the heroes and
martyrs who took the first steps in the long and bloody march which
led us through the wilderness to the promised land of independent
nationality.  Personally, I have a right to mourn for it as a part of
my life gone from me.  My private grief for its loss would be a
matter for my solitary digestion, were it not that the experience
through which I have just passed is one so familiar to my fellow-
countrymen that, in telling my own reflections and feelings, I am
repeating those of great numbers of men and women who have had the
misfortune to outlive their birthplace.

It is a great blessing to be born surrounded by a natural horizon.
The Old Gambrel-roofed House could not boast an unbroken ring of
natural objects encircling it.  Northerly it looked upon its own
outbuildings and some unpretending two-story houses which had been
its neighbors for a century and more.  To the south of it the square
brick dormitories and the belfried hall of the university helped to
shut out the distant view.  But the west windows gave a broad outlook
across the common, beyond which the historical "Washington elm" and
two companions in line with it, spread their leaves in summer and
their networks in winter.  And far away rose the hills that bounded
the view, with the glimmer here and there of the white walls or the
illuminated casements of some embowered, half-hidden villa.
Eastwardly also, the prospect was, in my earlier remembrance, widely
open, and I have frequently seen the sunlit sails gliding along as if
through the level fields, for no water was visible.  So there were
broad expanses on two sides at least, for my imagination to wander
over.

I cannot help thinking that we carry our childhood's horizon with us
all our days.  Among these western wooded hills my day-dreams built
their fairy palaces, and even now, as I look at them from my library
window, across the estuary of the Charles, I find myself in the
familiar home of my early visions.  The "clouds of glory" which we
trail with us in after life need not be traced to a pre-natal state.
There is enough to account for them in that unconsciously remembered
period of existence before we have learned the hard limitations of
real life.  Those earliest months in which we lived in sensations
without words, and ideas not fettered in sentences, have all the
freshness of proofs of an engraving "before the letter."  I am very
thankful that the first part of my life was not passed shut in
between high walls and treading the unimpressible and unsympathetic
pavement.

Our university town was very much like the real country, in those
days of which I am thinking.  There were plenty of huckleberries and
blueberries within half a mile of the house.  Blackberries ripened in
the fields, acorns and shagbarks dropped from the trees, squirrels
ran among the branches, and not rarely the hen-hawk might be seen
circling over the barnyard.  Still another rural element was not
wanting, in the form of that far-diffused, infragrant effluvium,
which, diluted by a good half mile of pure atmosphere, is no longer
odious, nay is positively agreeable, to many who have long known it,
though its source and centre has an unenviable reputation.  I need
not name the animal whose Parthian warfare terrifies and puts to
flight the mightiest hunter that ever roused the tiger from his
jungle or faced the lion of the desert.  Strange as it may seem, an
aerial hint of his personality in the far distance always awakens in
my mind pleasant remembrances and tender reflections.  A whole
neighborhood rises up before me: the barn, with its haymow, where the
hens laid their eggs to hatch, and we boys hid our apples to ripen,
both occasionally illustrating the sic vos non vobis; the shed, where
the annual Tragedy of the Pig was acted with a realism that made
Salvini's Othello seem but a pale counterfeit; the rickety old
outhouse, with the "corn-chamber" which the mice knew so well; the
paved yard, with its open gutter,--these and how much else come up at
the hint of my far-off friend, who is my very near enemy.  Nothing is
more familiar than the power of smell in reviving old memories.
There was that quite different fragrance of the wood-house, the smell
of fresh sawdust.  It comes back to me now, and with it the hiss of
the saw; the tumble of the divorced logs which God put together and
man has just put asunder; the coming down of the axe and the hah!
that helped it,--the straight-grained stick opening at the first
appeal of the implement as if it were a pleasure, and the stick with
a knot in the middle of it that mocked the blows and the hahs!  until
the beetle and wedge made it listen to reason,--there are just such
straight-grained and just such knotty men and women.  All this passes
through my mind while Biddy, whose parlor-name is Angela, contents
herself with exclaiming "egh!*******!"

How different distances were in those young days of which I am
thinking!  From the old house to the old yellow meeting-house, where
the head of the family preached and the limbs of the family listened,
was not much more than two or three times the width of Commonwealth
Avenue.  But of a hot summer's afternoon, after having already heard
one sermon, which could not in the nature of things have the charm of
novelty of presentation to the members of the home circle, and the
theology of which was not too clear to tender apprehensions; with
three hymns more or less lugubrious, rendered by a village-choir, got
into voice by many preliminary snuffles and other expiratory efforts,
and accompanied by the snort of a huge bassviol which wallowed
through the tune like a hippopotamus, with other exercises of the
customary character,--after all this in the forenoon, the afternoon
walk to the meeting-house in the hot sun counted for as much, in my
childish dead-reckoning, as from old Israel Porter's in Cambridge to
the Exchange Coffeehouse in Boston did in after years.  It takes a
good while to measure the radius of the circle that is about us, for
the moon seems at first as near as the watchface.  Who knows but
that, after a certain number of ages, the planet we live on may seem
to us no bigger than our neighbor Venus appeared when she passed
before the sun a few months ago, looking as if we could take her
between our thumb and finger, like a bullet or a marble?  And time,
too; how long was it from the serious sunrise to the joyous "sun-
down" of an old-fashioned, puritanical, judaical first day of the
week, which a pious fraud christened "the Sabbath"?  Was it a
fortnight, as we now reckon duration, or only a week?  Curious
entities, or non-entities, space and tithe?  When you see a
metaphysician trying to wash his hands of them and get rid of these
accidents, so as to lay his dry, clean palm on the absolute, does
it not remind you of the hopeless task of changing the color of the
blackamoor by a similar proceeding?  For space is the fluid in which
he is washing, and time is the soap which he is using up in the
process, and he cannot get free from them until he can wash himself
in a mental vacuum.

In my reference to the old house in a former paper, published years
ago, I said,

"By and by the stony foot of the great University will plant itself
on this whole territory, and the private recollections which clung so
tenaciously to the place and its habitations will have died with
those who cherished them."

What strides the great University has taken since those words were
written!  During all my early years our old Harvard Alma Mater sat
still and lifeless as the colossi in the Egyptian desert.  Then all
at once, like the statue in Don Giovanni, she moved from her
pedestal.  The fall of that "stony foot" has effected a miracle like
the harp that Orpheus played, like the teeth which Cadmus sowed.  The
plain where the moose and the bear were wandering while Shakespeare
was writing Hamlet, where a few plain dormitories and other needed
buildings were scattered about in my school-boy days, groans under
the weight of the massive edifices which have sprung up all around
them, crowned by the tower of that noble structure which stands in
full view before me as I lift my eyes from the portfolio on the back
of which I am now writing.

For I must be permitted to remind you that I have not yet opened it.
I have told you that I have just finished a long memoir, and that it
has cost me no little labor to overcome some of its difficulties,--if
I have overcome them, which others must decide.  And I feel exactly
as honest Dobbin feels when his harness is slipped off after a long
journey with a good deal of up-hill work.  He wants to rest a little,
then to feed a little; then, if you will turn him loose in the
pasture, he wants to roll.  I have left my starry and ethereal
companionship,--not for a long time, I hope, for it has lifted me
above my common self, but for a while.  And now I want, so to speak,
to roll in the grass and among the dandelions with the other
pachyderms.  So I have kept to the outside of the portfolio as yet,
and am disporting myself in reminiscences, and fancies, and vagaries,
and parentheses.

How well I understand the feeling which led the Pisans to load their
vessels with earth from the Holy Land, and fill the area of the Campo
Santo with that sacred soil!  The old house stood upon about as
perverse a little patch of the planet as ever harbored a half-starved
earth-worm.  It was as sandy as Sahara and as thirsty as Tantalus.
The rustic aid-de-camps of the household used to aver that all
fertilizing matters "leached" through it.  I tried to disprove their
assertion by gorging it with the best of terrestrial nourishment,
until I became convinced that I was feeding the tea-plants of China,
and then I gave over the attempt.  And yet I did love, and do love,
that arid patch of ground.  I wonder if a single flower could not be
made to grow in a pot of earth from that Campo Santo of my childhood!
One noble product of nature did not refuse to flourish there,--the
tall, stately, beautiful, soft-haired, many-jointed, generous maize
or Indian corn, which thrives on sand and defies the blaze of our
shrivelling summer.  What child but loves to wander in its forest-
like depths, amidst the rustling leaves and with the lofty tassels
tossing their heads high above him!  There are two aspects of the
cornfield which always impress my imagination: the first when it has
reached its full growth, and its ordered ranks look like an army on
the march with its plumed and bannered battalions; the second when,
after the battle of the harvest, the girdled stacks stand on the
field of slaughter like so many ragged Niobes,--say rather like the
crazy widows and daughters of the dead soldiery.

Once more let us come back to the old house.  It was far along in its
second century when the edict went forth that it must stand no
longer.

The natural death of a house is very much like that of one of its
human tenants.  The roof is the first part to show the distinct signs
of age.  Slates and tiles loosen and at last slide off, and leave
bald the boards that supported them; shingles darken and decay, and
soon the garret or the attic lets in the rain and the snow; by and by
the beams sag, the floors warp, the walls crack, the paper peels
away, the ceilings scale off and fall, the windows are crusted with
clinging dust, the doors drop from their rusted hinges, the winds
come in without knocking and howl their cruel death-songs through the
empty rooms and passages, and at last there comes a crash, a great
cloud of dust rises, and the home that had been the shelter of
generation after generation finds its grave in its own cellar.  Only
the chimney remains as its monument.  Slowly, little by little, the
patient solvents that find nothing too hard for their chemistry pick
out the mortar from between the bricks; at last a mighty wind roars
around it and rushes against it, and the monumental relic crashes
down among the wrecks it has long survived.  So dies a human
habitation left to natural decay, all that was seen above the surface
of the soil sinking gradually below it,

     Till naught remains the saddening tale to tell
     Save home's last wrecks, the cellar and the well.

But if this sight is saddening, what is it to see a human dwelling
fall by the hand of violence!  The ripping off of the shelter that
has kept out a thousand storms, the tearing off of the once
ornamental woodwork, the wrench of the inexorable crowbar, the
murderous blows of the axe, the progressive ruin, which ends by
rending all the joints asunder and flinging the tenoned and mortised
timbers into heaps that will be sawed and split to warm some new
habitation as firewood,--what a brutal act of destruction it seems!

Why should I go over the old house again, having already described it
more than ten years ago?  Alas!  how many remember anything they read
but once, and so long ago as that?  How many would find it out if one
should say over in the same words that which he said in the last
decade?  But there is really no need of telling the story a second
time, for it can be found by those who are curious enough to look it
up in a volume of which it occupies the opening chapter.

In order, however, to save any inquisitive reader that trouble, let
me remind him that the old house was General Ward's headquarters at
the breaking out of the Revolution; that the plan for fortifying
Bunker's Hill was laid, as commonly believed, in the southeast lower
room, the floor of which was covered with dents, made, it was
alleged, by the butts of the soldiers' muskets.  In that house, too,
General Warren probably passed the night before the Bunker Hill
battle, and over its threshold must the stately figure of Washington
have often cast its shadow.

But the house in which one drew his first breath, and where he one
day came into the consciousness that he was a personality, an ego, a
little universe with a sky over him all his own, with a persistent
identity, with the terrible responsibility of a separate,
independent, inalienable existence,--that house does not ask for any
historical associations to make it the centre of the earth for him.

If there is any person in the world to be envied, it is the one who
is born to an ancient estate, with a long line of family traditions
and the means in his hands of shaping his mansion and his domain to
his own taste, without losing sight of all the characteristic
features which surrounded his earliest years.  The American is, for
the most part, a nomad, who pulls down his house as the Tartar pulls
up his tent-poles.  If I had an ideal life to plan for him it would
be something like this:

His grandfather should be a wise, scholarly, large-brained, large-
hearted country minister, from whom he should inherit the temperament
that predisposes to cheerfulness and enjoyment, with the finer
instincts which direct life to noble aims and make it rich with the
gratification of pure and elevated tastes and the carrying out of
plans for the good of his neighbors and his fellow-creatures.  He
should, if possible, have been born, at any rate have passed some of
his early years, or a large part of them, under the roof of the good
old minister.  His father should be, we will say, a business man in
one of our great cities,--a generous manipulator of millions, some of
which have adhered to his private fortunes, in spite of his liberal
use of his means.  His heir, our ideally placed American, shall take
possession of the old house, the home of his earliest memories, and
preserve it sacredly, not exactly like the Santa Casa, but, as nearly
as may be, just as he remembers it.  He can add as many acres as he
will to the narrow house-lot.  He can build a grand mansion for
himself, if he chooses, in the not distant neighborhood.  But the old
house, and all immediately round it, shall be as he recollects it
when be had to stretch his little arm up to reach the door-handles.
Then, having well provided for his own household, himself included,
let him become the providence of the village or the town where be
finds himself during at least a portion of every year.  Its schools,
its library, its poor,--and perhaps the new clergyman who has
succeeded his grandfather's successor may be one of them,--all its
interests, he shall make his own.  And from this centre his
beneficence shall radiate so far that all who hear of his wealth
shall also hear of him as a friend to his race.

Is not this a pleasing programme?  Wealth is a steep hill, which the
father climbs slowly and the son often tumbles down precipitately;
but there is a table-land on a level with it, which may be found by
those who do not lose their head in looking down from its sharply
cloven summit.---Our dangerously rich men can make themselves hated,
held as enemies of the race, or beloved and recognized as its
benefactors.  The clouds of discontent are threatening, but if the
gold-pointed lightning-rods are rightly distributed the destructive
element may be drawn off silently and harmlessly.  For it cannot be
repeated too often that the safety of great wealth with us lies in
obedience to the new version of the Old World axiom, RICHESS oblige.






THE NEW PORTFOLIO: FIRST OPENING.




A MORTAL ANTIPATHY.



I

GETTING READY.

It is impossible to begin a story which must of necessity tax the
powers of belief of readers unacquainted with the class of facts to
which its central point of interest belongs without some words in the
nature of preparation.  Readers of Charles Lamb remember that Sarah
Battle insisted on a clean-swept hearth before sitting down to her
favorite game of whist.

The narrator wishes to sweep the hearth, as it were, in these opening
pages, before sitting down to tell his story.  He does not intend to
frighten the reader away by prolix explanation, but he does mean to
warn him against hasty judgments when facts are related which are not
within the range of every-day experience.  Did he ever see the
Siamese twins, or any pair like them?  Probably not, yet he feels
sure that Chang and Eng really existed; and if he has taken the
trouble to inquire, he has satisfied himself that similar cases have
been recorded by credible witnesses, though at long intervals and in
countries far apart from each other.

This is the first sweep of the brush, to clear the hearth of the
skepticism and incredulity which must be got out of the way before we
can begin to tell and to listen in peace with ourselves and each
other.

One more stroke of the brush is needed before the stage will be ready
for the chief characters and the leading circumstances to which the
reader's attention is invited.  If the principal personages made
their entrance at once, the reader would have to create for himself
the whole scenery of their surrounding conditions.  In point of fact,
no matter how a story is begun, many of its readers have already
shaped its chief actors out of any hint the author may have dropped,
and provided from their own resources a locality and a set of outward
conditions to environ these imagined personalities.  These are all to
be brushed away, and the actual surroundings of the subject of the
narrative represented as they were, at the risk of detaining the
reader a little while from the events most likely to interest him.
The choicest egg that ever was laid was not so big as the nest that
held it.  If a story were so interesting that a maiden would rather
hear it than listen to the praise of her own beauty, or a poet would
rather read it than recite his own verses, still it would have to be
wrapped in some tissue of circumstance, or it would lose half its
effectiveness.

It may not be easy to find the exact locality referred to in this
narrative by looking into the first gazetteer that is at hand.
Recent experiences have shown that it is unsafe to be too exact in
designating places and the people who live in them.  There are, it
may be added, so many advertisements disguised under the form of
stories and other literary productions that one naturally desires to
avoid the suspicion of being employed by the enterprising proprietors
of this or that celebrated resort to use his gifts for their especial
benefit.  There are no doubt many persons who remember the old sign
and the old tavern and its four chief personages presently to be
mentioned.  It is to be hoped that they will not furnish the public
with a key to this narrative, and perhaps bring trouble to the writer
of it, as has happened to other authors.  If the real names are a
little altered, it need not interfere with the important facts
relating to those who bear them.  It might not be safe to tell a
damaging story about John or James Smythe; but if the slight change
is made of spelling the name Smith, the Smythes would never think of
bringing an action, as if the allusion related to any of them.  The
same gulf of family distinction separates the Thompsons with a p from
the Thomsons without that letter.

There are few pleasanter places in the Northern States for a summer
residence than that known from the first period of its settlement by
the name of Arrowhead Village.  The Indians had found it out, as the
relics they left behind them abundantly testified.  The commonest of
these were those chipped stones which are the medals of barbarism,
and from Which the place took its name,--the heads of arrows, of
various sizes, material, and patterns: some small enough for killing
fish and little birds, some large enough for such game as the moose
and the bear, to say nothing of the hostile Indian and the white
settler; some of flint, now and then one of white quartz, and others
of variously colored jasper.  The Indians must have lived here for
many generations, and it must have been a kind of factory village of
the stone age,--which lasted up to near the present time, if we may
judge from the fact that many of these relics are met with close to
the surface of the ground.

No wonder they found this a pleasant residence, for it is to-day one
of the most attractive of all summer resorts; so inviting, indeed,
that those who know it do not like to say too much about it, lest the
swarms of tourists should make it unendurable to those who love it
for itself, and not as a centre of fashionable display and extramural
cockneyism.

There is the lake, in the first place,--Cedar Lake,--about five miles
long, and from half a mile to a mile and a half wide, stretching from
north to south.  Near the northern extremity are the buildings of
Stoughton University, a flourishing young college with an ambitious
name, but well equipped and promising, the grounds of which reach the
water.  At the southern end of the lake are the edifices of the
Corinna Institute, a favorite school for young ladies, where large
numbers of the daughters of America are fitted, so far as education
can do it, for all stations in life, from camping out with a husband
at the mines in Nevada to acting the part of chief lady of the land
in the White House at Washington.

Midway between the two extremities, on the eastern shore of the lake,
is a valley between two hills, which come down to the very edge of
the lake, leaving only room enough for a road between their base and
the water.  This valley, half a mile in width, has been long settled,
and here for a century or more has stood the old Anchor Tavern.  A
famous place it was so long as its sign swung at the side of the
road: famous for its landlord, portly, paternal, whose welcome to a
guest that looked worthy of the attention was like that of a parent
to a returning prodigal, and whose parting words were almost as good
as a marriage benediction; famous for its landlady, ample in person,
motherly, seeing to the whole household with her own eyes, mistress
of all culinary secrets that Northern kitchens are most proud of;
famous also for its ancient servant, as city people would call her,
--help, as she was called in the tavern and would have called
herself,--the unchanging, seemingly immortal Miranda, who cared for
the guests as if she were their nursing mother, and pressed the
specially favorite delicacies on their attention as a connoisseur
calls the wandering eyes of an amateur to the beauties of a picture.
Who that has ever been at the old Anchor Tavern forgets Miranda's

     "A little of this fricassee?-it is ver-y nice;"

or

     "Some of these cakes?  You will find them ver-y good."

Nor would it be just to memory to forget that other notable and noted
member of the household,--the unsleeping, unresting, omnipresent
Pushee, ready for everybody and everything, everywhere within the
limits of the establishment at all hours of the day and night.  He
fed, nobody could say accurately when or where.  There were rumors of
a "bunk," in which he lay down with his clothes on, but he seemed to
be always wide awake, and at the service of as many guest, at once as
if there had been half a dozen of him.

So much for old reminiscences.

The landlord of the Anchor Tavern had taken down his sign.  He had
had the house thoroughly renovated and furnished it anew, and kept it
open in summer for a few boarders.  It happened more than once that
the summer boarders were so much pleased with the place that they
stayed on through the autumn, and some of them through the winter.
The attractions of the village were really remarkable.  Boating in
summer, and skating in winter; ice-boats, too, which the wild ducks
could hardly keep up with; fishing, for which the lake was renowned;
varied and beautiful walks through the valley and up the hillsides;
houses sheltered from the north and northeasterly winds, and
refreshed in the hot summer days by the breeze which came over the
water,--all this made the frame for a pleasing picture of rest and
happiness.  But there was a great deal more than this.  There was a
fine library in the little village, presented and richly endowed by a
wealthy native of the place.  There was a small permanent population
of a superior character to that of an everyday country town; there
was a pretty little Episcopal church, with a good-hearted rector,
broad enough for the Bishop of the diocese to be a little afraid of,
and hospitable to all outsiders, of whom, in the summer season, there
were always some who wanted a place of worship to keep their religion
from dying out during the heathen months, while the shepherds of the
flocks to which they belonged were away from their empty folds.

What most helped to keep the place alive all through the year was the
frequent coming together of the members of a certain literary
association.  Some time before the tavern took down its sign the
landlord had built a hall, where many a ball had been held, to which
the young folks of all the country round had resorted.  It was still
sometimes used for similar occasions, but it was especially notable
as being the place of meeting of the famous PANSOPHIAN SOCIETY.

This association, the name of which might be invidiously interpreted
as signifying that its members knew everything, had no such
pretensions, but, as its Constitution said very plainly and modestly,
held itself open to accept knowledge on any and all subjects from
such as had knowledge to impart.  Its President was the rector of the
little chapel, a man who, in spite of the Thirty-Nine Articles, could
stand fire from the widest-mouthed heretical blunderbuss without
flinching or losing his temper.  The hall of the old Anchor Tavern
was a convenient place of meeting for the students and instructors of
the University and the Institute.  Sometimes in boat-loads, sometimes
in carriage-loads, sometimes in processions of skaters, they came to
the meetings in Pansophian Hall, as it was now commonly called.

These meetings had grown to be occasions of great interest.  It was
customary to have papers written by members of the Society, for the
most part, but now and then by friends of the members, sometimes by
the students of the College or the Institute, and in rarer instances
by anonymous personages, whose papers, having been looked over and
discussed by the Committee appointed for that purpose, were thought
worth listening to.  The variety of topics considered was very great.
The young ladies of the village and the Institute had their favorite
subjects, the young gentlemen a different set of topics, and the
occasional outside contributors their own; so that one who happened
to be admitted to a meeting never knew whether he was going to hear
an account of recent arctic discoveries, or an essay on the freedom
of the will, or a psychological experience, or a story, or even a
poem.

Of late there had been a tendency to discuss the questions relating
to the true status and the legitimate social functions of woman.  The
most conflicting views were held on the subject.  Many of the young
ladies and some of the University students were strong in defence of
all the "woman's rights" doctrines.  Some of these young people were
extreme in their views.  They had read about Semiramis and Boadicea
and Queen Elizabeth, until they were ready, if they could get the
chance, to vote for a woman as President of the United States or as
General of the United States Army.  They were even disposed to assert
the physical equality of woman to man, on the strength of the rather
questionable history of the Amazons, and especially of the story,
believed to be authentic, of the female body-guard of the King of
Dahomey,--females frightful enough to need no other weapon than their
looks to scare off an army of Cossacks.

Miss Lurida Vincent, gold medallist of her year at the Corinna
Institute, was the leader of these advocates of virile womanhood.  It
was rather singular that she should have elected to be the apostle of
this extreme doctrine, for she was herself far better equipped with
brain than muscles.  In fact, she was a large-headed, large-eyed,
long-eyelashed, slender-necked, slightly developed young woman;
looking almost like a child at an age when many of the girls had
reached their full stature and proportions.  In her studies she was
so far in advance of her different classes that there was always a
wide gap between her and the second scholar.  So fatal to all rivalry
had she proved herself that she passed under the school name of The
Terror.  She learned so easily that she undervalued her own
extraordinary gifts, and felt the deepest admiration for those of her
friends endowed with faculties of an entirely different and almost
opposite nature.  After sitting at her desk until her head was hot
and her feet were like ice, she would go and look at the blooming
young girls exercising in the gymnasium of the school, and feel as if
she would give all her knowledge, all her mathematics and strange
tongues and history, all those accomplishments that made her the
encyclopaedia of every class she belonged to, if she could go through
the series of difficult and graceful exercises in which she saw her
schoolmates delighting.

One among them, especially, was the object of her admiration, as she
was of all who knew her exceptional powers in the line for which
nature had specially organized her.  All the physical perfections
which Miss Lurida had missed had been united in Miss Euthymia Tower,
whose school name was The Wonder.  Though of full womanly stature,
there were several taller girls of her age.  While all her contours
and all her movements betrayed a fine muscular development, there was
no lack of proportion, and her finely shaped hands and feet showed
that her organization was one of those carefully finished
masterpieces of nature which sculptors are always in search of, and
find it hard to detect among the imperfect products of the living
laboratory.

This girl of eighteen was more famous than she cared to be for her
performances in the gymnasium.  She commonly contented herself with
the same exercises that her companions were accustomed to.  Only her
dumb-bells, with which she exercised easily and gracefully, were too
heavy for most of the girls to do more with than lift them from the
floor.  She was fond of daring feats on the trapeze, and had to be
checked in her indulgence in them.  The Professor of gymnastics at
the University came over to the Institute now and then, and it was a
source of great excitement to watch some of the athletic exercises in
which the young lady showed her remarkable muscular strength and
skill in managing herself in the accomplishment of feats which looked
impossible at first sight.  How often The Terror had thought to
herself that she would gladly give up all her knowledge of Greek and
the differential and integral calculus if she could only perform the
least of those feats which were mere play to The Wonder!  Miss
Euthymia was not behind the rest in her attainments in classical or
mathematical knowledge, and she was one of the very best students in
the out-door branches,--botany, mineralogy, sketching from nature,--
to be found among the scholars of the Institute.

There was an eight-oared boat rowed by a crew of the young ladies, of
which Miss Euthymia was the captain and pulled the bow oar.  Poor
little Lurida could not pull an oar, but on great occasions, when
there were many boats out, she was wanted as coxswain, being a mere
feather-weight, and quick-witted enough to serve well in the
important office where brains are more needed than muscle.

There was also an eight-oared boat belonging to the University, and
rowed by a picked crew of stalwart young fellows.  The bow oar and
captain of the University crew was a powerful young man, who, like
the captain of the girls' boat, was a noted gymnast.  He had had one
or two quiet trials with Miss Euthymia, in which, according to the
ultras of the woman's rights party, he had not vindicated the
superiority of his sex in the way which might have been expected.
Indeed, it was claimed that he let a cannon-ball drop when he ought
to have caught it, and it was not disputed that he had been
ingloriously knocked over by a sand-bag projected by the strong arms
of the young maiden.  This was of course a story that was widely told
and laughingly listened to, and the captain of the University crew
had become a little sensitive on the subject.  When there was a talk,
therefore, about a race between the champion boats of the two
institutions there was immense excitement in both of them, as well as
among the members of the Pansophian Society and all the good people
of the village.

There were many objections to be overcome.  Some thought it
unladylike for the young maidens to take part in a competition which
must attract many lookers-on, and which it seemed to them very
hoidenish to venture upon.  Some said it was a shame to let a crew of
girls try their strength against an equal number of powerful young
men.  These objections were offset by the advocates of the race by
the following arguments.  They maintained that it was no more
hoidenish to row a boat than it was to take a part in the calisthenic
exercises, and that the girls had nothing to do with the young men's
boat, except to keep as much ahead of it as possible.  As to
strength, the woman's righters believed that, weight for weight,
their crew was as strong as the other, and of course due allowance
would be made for the difference of weight and all other accidental
hindrances.  It was time to test the boasted superiority of masculine
muscle.  Here was a chance.  If the girls beat, the whole country
would know it, and after that female suffrage would be only a
question of time.  Such was the conclusion, from rather insufficient
premises, it must be confessed; but if nature does nothing per
saltum,--by jumps,--as the old adage has it, youth is very apt to
take long leaps from a fact to a possible sequel or consequence.  So
it had come about that a contest between the two boat-crews was
looked forward to with an interest almost equal to that with which
the combat between the Horatii and Curiatii was regarded.

The terms had been at last arranged between the two crews, after
cautious protocols and many diplomatic discussions.  It was so novel
in its character that it naturally took a good deal of time to adjust
it in such a way as to be fair to both parties.  The course must not
be too long for the lighter and weaker crew, for the staying power of
the young persons who made it up could not be safely reckoned upon.
A certain advantage must be allowed them at the start, and this was a
delicate matter to settle.  The weather was another important
consideration.  June would be early enough, in all probability, and
if the lake should be tolerably smooth the grand affair might come
off some time in that month.  Any roughness of the water would be
unfavorable to the weaker crew.  The rowing-course was on the eastern
side of the lake, the starting-point being opposite the Anchor
Tavern; from that three quarters of a mile to the south, where the
turning-stake was fixed, so that the whole course of one mile and a
half would bring the boats back to their starting-point.

The race was to be between the Algonquin, eight-oared boat with
outriggers, rowed by young men, students of Stoughton University, and
the Atalanta, also eight-oared and outrigger boat, by young ladies
from the Corinna Institute.  Their boat was three inches wider than
the other, for various sufficient reasons, one of which was to make
it a little less likely to go over and throw its crew into the water,
which was a sound precaution, though all the girls could swim, and
one at least, the bow oar, was a famous swimmer, who had pulled a
drowning man out of the water after a hard struggle to keep him from
carrying her down with him.

Though the coming trial had not been advertised in the papers, so as
to draw together a rabble of betting men and ill-conditioned lookers-
on, there was a considerable gathering, made up chiefly of the
villagers and the students of the two institutions.  Among them were
a few who were disposed to add to their interest in the trial by
small wagers.  The bets were rather in favor of the "Quins," as the
University boat was commonly called, except where the natural
sympathy of the young ladies or the gallantry of some of the young
men led them to risk their gloves or cigars, or whatever it might be,
on the Atalantas.  The elements of judgment were these: average
weight of the Algonquins one hundred and sixty-five pounds; average
weight of the Atalantas, one hundred and forty-eight pounds; skill in
practice about equal; advantage of the narrow boat equal to three
lengths; whole distance allowed the Atalantas eight lengths,--a long
stretch to be made up in a mile and a half.

And so both crews began practising for the grand trial.




II

THE BOAT-RACE.

The 10th of June was a delicious summer day, rather warm, but still
and bright.  The water was smooth, and the crews were in the best
possible condition.  All was expectation, and for some time nothing
but expectation.  No boat-race or regatta ever began at the time
appointed for the start.  Somebody breaks an oar, or somebody fails
to appear in season, or something is the matter with a seat or an
outrigger; or if there is no such excuse, the crew of one or both or
all the boats to take part in the race must paddle about to get
themselves ready for work, to the infinite weariness of all the
spectators, who naturally ask why all this getting ready is not
attended to beforehand.  The Algonquins wore plain gray flannel suits
and white caps.  The young ladies were all in dark blue dresses,
touched up with a red ribbon here and there, and wore light straw
hats.  The little coxswain of the Atalanta was the last to step on
board.  As she took her place she carefully deposited at her feet a
white handkerchief wrapped about something or other, perhaps a
sponge, in case the boat should take in water.

At last the Algonquin shot out from the little nook where she lay,--
long, narrow, shining, swift as a pickerel when he darts from the
reedy shore.  It was a beautiful sight to see the eight young fellows
in their close-fitting suits, their brown muscular arms bare, bending
their backs for the stroke and recovering, as if they were parts of a
single machine.

"The gals can't stan' it agin them fellers," said the old blacksmith
from the village.

"You wait till the gals get a-goin'," said the carpenter, who had
often worked in the gymnasium of the Corinna Institute, and knew
something of their muscular accomplishments.  "Y' ought to see 'em
climb ropes, and swing dumb-bells, and pull in them rowin'-machines.
Ask Jake there whether they can't row a mild in double-quick time,--
he knows all abaout it."

Jake was by profession a fisherman, and a freshwater fisherman in a
country village is inspector-general of all that goes on out-of-
doors, being a lazy, wandering sort of fellow, whose study of the
habits and habitats of fishes gives him a kind of shrewdness of
observation, just as dealing in horses is an education of certain
faculties, and breeds a race of men peculiarly cunning, suspicious,
wary, and wide awake, with a rhetoric of appreciation and
depreciation all its own.

Jake made his usual preliminary signal, and delivered himself to the
following effect:

"Wahl, I don' know jest what to say.  I've seed 'em both often enough
when they was practisin', an' I tell ye the' wa'n't no slouch abaout
neither on 'em.  But them bats is all-fired long, 'n' eight on 'em
stretched in a straight line eendways makes a consid'able piece aout
'f a mile 'n' a haaf.  I'd bate on them gals if it wa'n't that them
fellers is naterally longer winded, as the gals 'll find aout by the
time they git raound the stake 'n' over agin the big ellum.  I'll go
ye a quarter on the pahnts agin the petticoats."

The fresh-water fisherman had expressed the prevailing belief that
the young ladies were overmatched.  Still there were not wanting
those who thought the advantage allowed the "Lantas," as they called
the Corinna boatcrew, was too great, and that it would be impossible
for the "Quins" to make it up and go by them.

The Algonquins rowed up and down a few times before the spectators.
They appeared in perfect training, neither too fat nor too fine,
mettlesome as colts, steady as draught-horses, deep-breathed as oxen,
disciplined to work together as symmetrically as a single sculler
pulls his pair of oars.  The fisherman offered to make his quarter
fifty cents.  No takers.

Five minutes passed, and all eyes were strained to the south, looking
for the Atalanta.  A clump of trees hid the edge of the lake along
which the Corinna's boat was stealing towards the starting-point.
Presently the long shell swept into view, with its blooming rowers,
who, with their ample dresses, seemed to fill it almost as full as
Raphael fills his skiff on the edge of the Lake of Galilee.  But how
steadily the Atalanta came on!---no rocking, no splashing, no
apparent strain; the bow oar turning to look ahead every now and
then, and watching her course, which seemed to be straight as an
arrow, the beat of the strokes as true and regular as the pulse of
the healthiest rower among them all.  And if the sight of the other
boat and its crew was beautiful, how lovely was the look of this!
Eight young girls,--young ladies, for those who prefer that more
dignified and less attractive expression,--all in the flush of youth,
all in vigorous health; every muscle taught its duty; each rower
alert, not to be a tenth of a second out of time, or let her oar
dally with the water so as to lose an ounce of its propelling virtue;
every eye kindling with the hope of victory.  Each of the boats was
cheered as it came in sight, but the cheers for the Atalanta were
naturally the loudest, as the gallantry of one sex and the clear,
high voices of the other gave it life and vigor.

"Take your places!" shouted the umpire, five minutes before the half
hour.  The two boats felt their way slowly and cautiously to their
positions, which had been determined by careful measurement.  After a
little backing and filling they got into line, at the proper distance
from each other, and sat motionless, their bodies bent forward, their
arms outstretched, their oars in the water, waiting for the word.

"Go!" shouted the umpire.

Away sprang the Atalanta, and far behind her leaped the Algonquin,
her oars bending like so many long Indian bows as their blades
flashed through the water.

"A stern chase is a long chase," especially when one craft is a great
distance behind the other.  It looked as if it would be impossible
for the rear boat to overcome the odds against it.  Of course the
Algonquin kept gaining, but could it possibly gain enough?  That was
the question.  As the boats got farther and farther away, it became
more and more difficult to determine what change there was in the
interval between them.  But when they came to rounding the stake it
was easier to guess at the amount of space which had been gained.  It
was clear that something like half the distance, four lengths, as
nearly as could be estimated, had been made up in rowing the first
three quarters of a mile.  Could the Algonquins do a little better
than this in the second half of the race-course, they would be sure
of winning.

The boats had turned the stake, and were coming in rapidly.  Every
minute the University boat was getting nearer the other.

"Go it, Quins!" shouted the students.

"Pull away, Lantas!" screamed the girls, who were crowding down to
the edge of the water.

Nearer,--nearer,--the rear boat is pressing the other more and more
closely,--a few more strokes, and they will be even, for there is but
one length between them, and thirty rods will carry them to the line.
It looks desperate for the Atalantas.  The bow oar of the Algonquin
turns his head.  He sees the little coxswain leaning forward at every
stroke, as if her trivial weight were of such mighty consequence,--
but a few ounces might turn the scale of victory.  As he turned he
got a glimpse of the stroke oar of the Atalanta.  What a flash of
loveliness it was!  Her face was like the reddest of June roses, with
the heat and the strain and the passion of expected triumph.  The
upper button of her close-fitting flannel suit had strangled her as
her bosom heaved with exertion, and it had given way before the
fierce clutch she made at it.  The bow oar was a staunch and steady
rower, but he was human.  The blade of his oar lingered in the water;
a little more and he would have caught a crab, and perhaps lost the
race by his momentary bewilderment.

The boat, which seemed as if it had all the life and nervousness of a
Derby three-year-old, felt the slight check, and all her men bent
more vigorously to their oars.  The Atalantas saw the movement, and
made a spurt to keep their lead and gain upon it if they could.  It
was of no use.  The strong arms of the young men were too much for
the young maidens; only a few lengths remained to be rowed, and they
would certainly pass the Atalanta before she could reach the line.

The little coxswain saw that it was all up with the girls' crew if
she could not save them by some strategic device.

     "Dolus an virtus quis in hoste requirat?"

she whispered to herself,--for The Terror remembered her Virgil as
she did everything else she ever studied.  As she stooped, she lifted
the handkerchief at her feet, and took from it a flaming bouquet.
"Look!" she cried, and flung it just forward of the track of the
Algonquin.  The captain of the University boat turned his head, and
there was the lovely vision which had a moment before bewitched him.
The owner of all that loveliness must, he thought, have flung the
bouquet.  It was a challenge: how could he be such a coward as to
decline accepting it

He was sure he could win the race now, and he would sweep past the
line in triumph with the great bunch of flowers at the stem of his
boat, proud as Van Tromp in the British channel with the broom at his
mast-head.

He turned the boat's head a little by backing water.  He came up with
the floating flowers, and near enough to reach them.  He stooped and
snatched them up, with the loss perhaps of a second in all,--no more.
He felt sure of his victory.

How can one tell the story of the finish in cold-blooded preterites?
Are we not there ourselves?  Are not our muscles straining with those
of these sixteen young creatures, full of hot, fresh blood, their
nerves all tingling like so many tight-strained harp-strings, all
their life concentrating itself in this passionate moment of supreme
effort?  No!  We are seeing, not telling about what somebody else
once saw!

--The bow of the Algonquin passes the stern of the Atalanta!

--The bow of the Algonquin is on a level with the middle of the
Atalanta!

--Three more lengths' rowing and the college crew will pass the
girls!

--"Hurrah for the Quins!" The Algonquin ranges up alongside of the
Atalanta!

"Through with her!  "shouts the captain of the Algonquin.

"Now, girls!" shrieks the captain of the Atalanta.

They near the line, every rower straining desperately, almost madly.

--Crack goes the oar of the Atalanta's captain, and up flash its
splintered fragments, as the stem of her boat springs past the line,
eighteen inches at least ahead of the Algonquin.

Hooraw for the Lantas!  Hooraw for the Girls!  Hooraw for the
Institoot!  shout a hundred voices.

"Hurrah for woman's rights and female suffrage!" pipes the small
voice of The Terror, and there is loud laughing and cheering all
round.

She had not studied her classical dictionary and her mythology for
nothing.  "I have paid off one old score," she said.  "Set down my
damask roses against the golden apples of Hippomenes!"

It was that one second lost in snatching up the bouquet which gave
the race to the Atalantas.




III

THE WHITE CANOE.

While the two boats were racing, other boats with lookers-on in them
were rowing or sailing in the neighborhood of the race-course.  The
scene on the water was a gay one, for the young people in the boats
were, many of them, acquainted with each other.  There was a good
deal of lively talk until the race became too exciting.  Then many
fell silent, until, as the boats neared the line, and still more as
they crossed it, the shouts burst forth which showed how a cramp of
attention finds its natural relief in a fit of convulsive
exclamation.

But far away, on the other side of the lake, a birchbark canoe was to
be seen, in which sat a young man, who paddled it skillfully and
swiftly.  It was evident enough that he was watching the race
intently, but the spectators could see little more than that.  One of
them, however, who sat upon the stand, had a powerful spy-glass, and
could distinguish his motions very minutely and exactly.  It was seen
by this curious observer that the young man had an opera-glass with
him, which he used a good deal at intervals.  The spectator thought
he kept it directed to the girls' boat, chiefly, if not exclusively.
He thought also that the opera-glass was more particularly pointed
towards the bow of the boat, and came to the natural conclusion that
the bow oar, Miss Euthymia Tower, captain of the Atalantas, "The
Wonder" of the Corinna Institute, was the attraction which determined
the direction of the instrument.

"Who is that in the canoe over there?" asked the owner of the spy-
glass.

"That's just what we should like to know," answered the old
landlord's wife.  "He and his man boarded with us when they first
came, but we could never find out anything about him only just his
name and his ways of living.  His name is Kirkwood, Maurice Kirkwood,
Esq., it used to come on his letters.  As for his ways of living, he
was the solitariest human being that I ever came across.  His man
carried his meals up to him.  He used to stay in his room pretty much
all day, but at night he would be off, walking, or riding on
horseback, or paddling about in the lake, sometimes till nigh
morning.  There's something very strange about that Mr. Kirkwood.
But there don't seem to be any harm in him.  Only nobody can guess
what his business is.  They got up a story about him at one time.
What do you think?  They said he was a counterfeiter!  And so they
went one night to his room, when he was out, and that man of his was
away too, and they carried keys, and opened pretty much everything;
and they found--well, they found just nothing at all except writings
and letters,--letters from places in America and in England, and some
with Italian postmarks: that was all.  Since that time the sheriff
and his folks have let him alone and minded their own business.  He
was a gentleman,--anybody ought to have known that; and anybody that
knew about his nice ways of living and behaving, and knew the kind of
wear he had for his underclothing, might have known it.  I could have
told those officers that they had better not bother him.  I know the
ways of real gentlemen and real ladies, and I know those fellows in
store clothes that look a little too fine,--outside.  Wait till
washing-day comes!"

The good lady had her own standards for testing humanity, and they
were not wholly unworthy of consideration; they were quite as much to
be relied on as the judgments of the travelling phrenologist, who
sent his accomplice on before him to study out the principal
personages in the village, and in the light of these revelations
interpreted the bumps, with very little regard to Gall and Spurzheim,
or any other authorities.

Even with the small amount of information obtained by the search
among his papers and effects, the gossips of the village had
constructed several distinct histories for the mysterious stranger.
He was an agent of a great publishing house; a leading contributor to
several important periodicals; the author of that anonymously
published novel which had made so much talk; the poet of a large
clothing establishment; a spy of the Italian, some said the Russian,
some said the British, Government; a proscribed refugee from some
country where he had been plotting; a school-master without a school,
a minister without a pulpit, an actor without an engagement; in
short, there was no end to the perfectly senseless stories that were
told about him, from that which made him out an escaped convict to
the whispered suggestion that he was the eccentric heir to a great
English title and estate.

The one unquestionable fact was that of his extraordinary seclusion.
Nobody in the village, no student in the University, knew his
history.  No young lady in the Corinna Institute had ever had a word
from him.  Sometimes, as the boats of the University or the Institute
were returning at dusk, their rowers would see the canoe stealing
into the shadows as they drew near it.  Sometimes on a moonlight
night, when a party of the young ladies were out upon the lake, they
would see the white canoe gliding ghost-like in the distance.  And it
had happened more than once that when a boat's crew had been out with
singers among them, while they were in the midst of a song, the white
canoe would suddenly appear and rest upon the water,--not very near
them, but within hearing distance,--and so remain until the singing
was over, when it would steal away and be lost sight of in some inlet
or behind some jutting rock.

Naturally enough, there was intense curiosity about this young man.
The landlady had told her story, which explained nothing.  There was
nobody to be questioned about him except his servant, an Italian,
whose name was Paolo, but who to the village was known as Mr. Paul.

Mr. Paul would have seemed the easiest person in the world to worm a
secret out of.  He was good-natured, child-like as a Heathen Chinee,
talked freely with everybody in such English as he had at command,
knew all the little people of the village, and was followed round by
them partly from his personal attraction for them, and partly because
he was apt to have a stick of candy or a handful of peanuts or other
desirable luxury in his pocket for any of his little friends he met
with.  He had that wholesome, happy look, so uncommon in our arid
countrymen,--a look hardly to be found except where figs and oranges
ripen in the open air.  A kindly climate to grow up in, a religion
which takes your money and gives you a stamped ticket good at Saint
Peter's box office, a roomy chest and a good pair of lungs in it, an
honest digestive apparatus, a lively temperament, a cheerful
acceptance of the place in life assigned to one by nature and
circumstance,--these are conditions under which life may be quite
comfortable to endure, and certainly is very pleasant to contemplate.
All these conditions were united in Paolo.  He was the easiest;
pleasantest creature to talk with that one could ask for a companion.
His southern vivacity, his amusing English, his simplicity and
openness, made him friends everywhere.

It seemed as if it would be a very simple matter to get the history
of his master out of this guileless and unsophisticated being.  He
had been tried by all the village experts.  The rector had put a
number of well-studied careless questions, which failed of their
purpose.  The old librarian of the town library had taken note of all
the books he carried to his master, and asked about his studies and
pursuits.  Paolo found it hard to understand his English, apparently,
and answered in the most irrelevant way.  The leading gossip of the
village tried her skill in pumping him for information.  It was all
in vain.

His master's way of life was peculiar,--in fact, eccentric.  He had
hired rooms in an old-fashioned three-story house.  He had two rooms
in the second and third stories of this old wooden building: his
study in the second, his sleeping-room in the one above it.  Paolo
lived in the basement, where he had all the conveniences for cooking,
and played the part of chef for his master and himself.  This was
only a part of his duty, for he was a man-of-all-work, purveyor,
steward, chambermaid,--as universal in his services for one man as
Pushee at the Anchor Tavern used to be for everybody.

It so happened that Paolo took a severe cold one winter's day, and
had such threatening symptoms that he asked the baker, when he
called, to send the village physician to see him.  In the course of
his visit the doctor naturally inquired about the health of Paolo's
master.

"Signor Kirkwood well,--molto bene," said Paolo.  "Why does he keep
out of sight as he does?" asked the doctor.

"He always so," replied Paolo.  "Una antipatia."

Whether Paolo was off his guard with the doctor, whether he revealed
it to him as to a father confessor, or whether he thought it time
that the reason of his master's seclusion should be known, the doctor
did not feel sure.  At any rate, Paolo was not disposed to make any
further revelations.  Una antipatia,--an antipathy,--that was all the
doctor learned.  He thought the matter over, and the more he
reflected the more he was puzzled.  What could an antipathy be that
made a young man a recluse!  Was it a dread of blue sky and open air,
of the smell of flowers, or some electrical impression to which be
was unnaturally sensitive?

Dr. Butts carried these questions home with him.  His wife was a
sensible, discreet woman, whom he could trust with many professional
secrets.  He told her of Paolo's revelation, and talked it over with
her in the light of his experience and her own; for she had known
some curious cases of constitutional likes and aversions.

Mrs.  Butts buried the information in the grave of her memory, where
it lay for nearly a week.  At the end of that time it emerged in a
confidential whisper to her favorite sister-in-law, a perfectly safe
person.  Twenty-four hours later the story was all over the village
that Maurice Kirkwood was the subject of a strange, mysterious,
unheard-of antipathy to something, nobody knew what; and the whole
neighborhood naturally resolved itself into an unorganized committee
of investigation.




IV

What is a country village without its mysterious personage?  Few are
now living who can remember the advent of the handsome young man who
was the mystery of our great university town "sixty years since,"--
long enough ago for a romance to grow out of a narrative, as Waverley
may remind us.  The writer of this narrative remembers him well, and
is not sure that he has not told the strange story in some form or
other to the last generation, or to the one before the last.  No
matter: if he has told it they have forgotten it,--that is, if they
have ever read it; and whether they have or have not, the story is
singular enough to justify running the risk of repetition.

This young man, with a curious name of Scandinavian origin, appeared
unheralded in the town, as it was then, of Cantabridge.  He wanted
employment, and soon found it in the shape of manual labor, which he
undertook and performed cheerfully.  But his whole appearance showed
plainly enough that he was bred to occupations of a very different
nature, if, in deed, he had been accustomed to any kind of toil for
his living.  His aspect was that of one of gentle birth.  His hands
were not those of a laborer, and his features were delicate and
refined, as well as of remarkable beauty.  Who he was, where he came
from, why he had come to Cantabridge, was never clearly explained.
He was alone, without friends, except among the acquaintances he had
made in his new residence.  If he had any correspondents, they were
not known to the neighborhood where he was living.  But if he had
neither friends nor correspondents, there was some reason for
believing that he had enemies.  Strange circumstances occurred which
connected themselves with him in an ominous and unaccountable way.  A
threatening letter was slipped under the door of a house where he was
visiting.  He had a sudden attack of illness, which was thought to
look very much like the effect of poison.  At one time he
disappeared, and was found wandering, bewildered, in a town many
miles from that where he was residing.  When questioned how he came
there; he told a coherent story that he had been got, under some
pretext, or in some not incredible way, into a boat, from which, at a
certain landing-place, he had escaped and fled for his life, which he
believed was in danger from his kidnappers.

Whoever his enemies may have been,--if they really existed,--he did
not fall a victim to their plots, so far as known to or remembered by
this witness.

Various interpretations were put upon his story.  Conjectures were as
abundant as they were in the case of Kaspar Hauser.  That he was of
good family seemed probable; that he was of distinguished birth, not
impossible; that he was the dangerous rival of a candidate for a
greatly coveted position in one of the northern states of Europe was
a favorite speculation of some of the more romantic young persons.
There was no dramatic ending to this story,--at least none is
remembered by the present writer.

"He left a name," like the royal Swede, of whose lineage he may have
been for aught that the village people knew, but not a name at which
anybody "grew pale;" for he had swindled no one, and broken no
woman's heart with false vows.  Possibly some withered cheeks may
flush faintly as they recall the handsome young man who came before
the Cantabridge maidens fully equipped for a hero of romance when the
century was in its first quarter.

The writer has been reminded of the handsome Swede by the incidents
attending the advent of the unknown and interesting stranger who had
made his appearance at Arrowhead Village.

It was a very insufficient and unsatisfactory reason to assign for
the young man's solitary habits that he was the subject of an
antipathy.  For what do we understand by that word?  When a young
lady screams at the sight of a spider, we accept her explanation that
she has a natural antipathy to the creature.  When a person expresses
a repugnance to some wholesome article of food, agreeable to most
people, we are satisfied if he gives the same reason.  And so of
various odors, which are pleasing to some persons and repulsive to
others.  We do not pretend to go behind the fact.  It is an
individual, and it may be a family, peculiarity.  Even between
different personalities there is an instinctive elective dislike as
well as an elective affinity.  We are not bound to give a reason why
Dr. Fell is odious to us any more than the prisoner who peremptorily
challenges a juryman is bound to say why he does it; it is enough
that he "does not like his looks."

There was nothing strange, then, that Maurice Kirkwood should have
his special antipathy; a great many other people have odd likes and
dislikes.  But it was a very curious thing that this antipathy should
be alleged as the reason for his singular mode of life.  All sorts of
explanations were suggested, not one of them in the least
satisfactory, but serving to keep the curiosity of inquirers active
until they were superseded by a new theory.  One story was that
Maurice had a great fear of dogs.  It grew at last to a connected
narrative, in which a fright in childhood from a rabid mongrel was
said to have given him such a sensitiveness to the near presence of
dogs that he was liable to convulsions if one came close to him.

This hypothesis had some plausibility.  No other creature would be so
likely to trouble a person who had an antipathy to it.  Dogs are very
apt to make the acquaintance of strangers, in a free and easy way.
They are met with everywhere,--in one's daily walk, at the thresholds
of the doors one enters, in the gentleman's library, on the rug of my
lady's sitting-room and on the cushion of her carriage.  It is true
that there are few persons who have an instinctive repugnance to this
"friend of man."  But what if this so-called antipathy were only a
fear, a terror, which borrowed the less unmanly name?  It was a fair
question, if, indeed, the curiosity of the public had a right to ask
any questions at all about a harmless individual who gave no offence,
and seemed entitled to the right of choosing his way of living to
suit himself, without being submitted to espionage.

There was no positive evidence bearing on the point as yet.  But one
of the village people had a large Newfoundland dog, of a very
sociable disposition, with which he determined to test the question.
He watched for the time when Maurice should leave his house for the
woods or the lake, and started with his dog to meet him.  The animal
walked up to the stranger in a very sociable fashion, and began
making his acquaintance, after the usual manner of well-bred dogs;
that is, with the courtesies and blandishments by which the canine
Chesterfield is distinguished from the ill-conditioned cur.  Maurice
patted him in a friendly way, and spoke to him as one who was used to
the fellowship of such companions.  That idle question and foolish
story were disposed of, therefore, and some other solution must be
found, if possible.

A much more common antipathy is that which is entertained with regard
to cats.  This has never been explained.  It is not mere aversion to
the look of the creature, or to any sensible quality known to the
common observer.  The cat is pleasing in aspect, graceful in
movement, nice in personal habits, and of amiable disposition.  No
cause of offence is obvious, and yet there are many persons who
cannot abide the presence of the most innocent little kitten.  They
can tell, in some mysterious way, that there is a cat in the room
when they can neither see nor hear the creature.  Whether it is an
electrical or quasi-magnetic phenomenon, or whatever it may be, of
the fact of this strange influence there are too many well-
authenticated instances to allow its being questioned.  But suppose
Maurice Kirkwood to be the subject of this antipathy in its extremest
degree, it would in no manner account for the isolation to which he
had condemned himself.  He might shun the firesides of the old women
whose tabbies were purring by their footstools, but these worthy
dames do not make up the whole population.

These two antipathies having been disposed of, a new suggestion was
started, and was talked over with a curious sort of half belief, very
much as ghost stories are told in a circle of moderately instructed
and inquiring persons.  This was that Maurice was endowed with the
unenviable gift of the evil eye.  He was in frequent communication
with Italy, as his letters showed, and had recently been residing in
that country, as was learned from Paolo.  Now everybody knows that
the evil eye is not rarely met with in Italy.  Everybody who has ever
read Mr. Story's "Roba di Roma" knows what a terrible power it is
which the owner of the evil eye exercises.  It can blight and destroy
whatever it falls upon.  No person's life or limb is safe if the
jettatura, the withering glance of the deadly organ, falls upon him.
It must be observed that this malign effect may follow a look from
the holiest personages, that is, if we may assume that a monk is such
as a matter of course.  Certainly we have a right to take it for
granted that the late Pope, Pius Ninth, was an eminently holy man,
and yet he had the name of dispensing the mystic and dreaded
jettatura as well as his blessing.  If Maurice Kirkwood carried that
destructive influence, so that his clear blue eyes were more to be
feared than the fascinations of the deadliest serpent, it could
easily be understood why he kept his look away from all around him
whom he feared he might harm.

No sensible person in Arrowhead Village really believed in the evil
eye, but it served the purpose of a temporary hypothesis, as do many
suppositions which we take as a nucleus for our observations without
putting any real confidence in them.  It was just suited to the
romantic notions of the more flighty persons in the village, who had
meddled more or less with Spiritualism, and were ready for any new
fancy, if it were only wild enough.

The riddle of the young stranger's peculiarity did not seem likely to
find any very speedy solution.  Every new suggestion furnished talk
for the gossips of the village and the babble of the many tongues in
the two educational institutions.  Naturally, the discussion was
liveliest among the young ladies.  Here is an extract from a letter
of one of these young ladies, who, having received at her birth the
ever-pleasing name of Mary, saw fit to have herself called Mollie in
the catalogue and in her letters.  The old postmaster of the town to
which her letter was directed took it up to stamp, and read on the
envelope the direction to "Miss Lulu Pinrow."  He brought the stamp
down with a vicious emphasis, coming very near blotting out the
nursery name, instead of cancelling the postage-stamp.  "Lulu!" he
exclaimed.  "I should like to know if that great strapping girl isn't
out of her cradle yet!  I suppose Miss Louisa will think that belongs
to her, but I saw her christened and I heard the name the minister
gave her, and it was n't 'Lulu,' or any such baby nonsense."  And so
saying, he gave it a fling to the box marked P, as if it burned his
fingers.  Why a grown-up young woman allowed herself to be cheapened
in the way so many of them do by the use of names which become them
as well as the frock of a ten-year-old schoolgirl would become a
graduate of the Corinna Institute, the old postmaster could not
guess.  He was a queer old man.

The letter thus scornfully treated runs over with a young girl's
written loquacity:

"Oh, Lulu, there is such a sensation as you never saw or heard of
'in all your born days,' as mamma used to say.  He has been at the
village for some time, but lately we have had--oh, the weirdest
stories about him!  'The Mysterious Stranger is the name some give
him, but we girls call him the Sachem, because he paddles about in an
Indian canoe.  If I should tell you all the things that are said
about him I should use up all my paper ten times over.  He has never
made a visit to the Institute, and none of the girls have ever spoken
to him, but the people at the village say he is very, very handsome.
We are dying to get a look at him, of course--though there is a
horrid story about him--that he has the evil eye did you ever hear
about the evil eye?  If a person who is born with it looks at you,
you die, or something happens--awful--is n't it?

"The rector says he never goes to church, but then you know a good
many of the people that pass the summer at the village never do--they
think their religion must have vacations--that's what I've heard they
say--vacations, just like other hard work--it ought not to be hard
work, I'm sure, but I suppose they feel so about it.  Should you feel
afraid to have him look at you?  Some of the girls say they would n't
have him for the whole world, but I shouldn't mind it--especially if
I had on my eyeglasses.  Do you suppose if there is anything in the
evil eye it would go through glass?  I don't believe it.  Do you
think blue eye-glasses would be better than common ones?  Don't laugh
at me--they tell such weird stories!  The Terror--Lurida Vincent, you
know-makes fun of all they say about it, but then she 'knows
everything and doesn't believe anything,' the girls say--Well, I
should be awfully scared, I know, if anybody that had the evil eye
should look at me--but--oh, I don't know--but if it was a young man--
and if he was very--very good-looking--I think--perhaps I would run
the risk--but don't tell anybody I said any such horrid thing--and
burn this letter right up--there 's a dear good girl."

It is to be hoped that no reader will doubt the genuineness of this
letter.  There are not quite so many "awfuls" and "awfullys" as one
expects to find in young ladies' letters, but there are two "weirds,"
which may be considered a fair allowance.  How it happened that
"jolly" did not show itself can hardly be accounted for; no doubt it
turns up two or three times at least in the postscript.

Here is an extract from another letter.  This was from one of the
students of Stoughton University to a friend whose name as it was
written on the envelope was Mr. Frank Mayfield.  The old postmaster
who found fault with Miss "Lulu's" designation would probably have
quarrelled with this address, if it had come under his eye.  "Frank"
is a very pretty, pleasant-sounding name, and it is not strange that
many persons use it in common conversation all their days when
speaking of a friend.  Were they really christened by that name, any
of these numerous Franks?  Perhaps they were, and if so there is
nothing to be said.  But if not, was the baptismal name Francis or
Franklin?  The mind is apt to fasten in a very perverse and
unpleasant way upon this question, which too often there is no
possible way of settling.  One might hope, if he outlived the bearer
of the appellation, to get at the fact; but since even gravestones
have learned to use the names belonging to childhood and infancy in
their solemn record, the generation which docks its Christian names
in such an un-Christian way will bequeath whole churchyards full of
riddles to posterity.  How it will puzzle and distress the historians
and antiquarians of a coming generation to settle what was the real
name of Dan and Bert and Billy, which last is legible on a white
marble slab, raised in memory of a grown person, in a certain burial-
ground in a town in Essex County, Massachusetts!

But in the mean time we are forgetting the letter directed to Mr.
Frank Mayfield.


"DEAR FRANK,--Hooray! Hurrah!  Rah!

"I have made the acquaintance of 'The Mysterious Stranger'!  It
happened by a queer sort of accident, which came pretty near
relieving you of the duty of replying to this letter.  I was out in
my little boat, which carries a sail too big for her, as I know and
ought to have remembered.  One of those fitful flaws of wind to which
the lake is so liable struck the sail suddenly, and over went my
boat.  My feet got tangled in the sheet somehow, and I could not get
free.  I had hard work to keep my head above water, and I struggled
desperately to escape from my toils; for if the boat were to go down
I should be dragged down with her.  I thought of a good many things
in the course of some four or five minutes, I can tell you, and I got
a lesson about time better than anything Kant and all the rest of
them have to say of it.  After I had been there about an ordinary
lifetime, I saw a white canoe making toward me, and I knew that our
shy young gentleman was coming to help me, and that we should become
acquainted without an introduction.  So it was, sure enough.  He saw
what the trouble was, managed to disentangle my feet without drowning
me in the process or upsetting his little flimsy craft, and, as I was
somewhat tired with my struggle, took me in tow and carried me to the
landing where he kept his canoe.  I can't say that there is anything
odd about his manners or his way of talk.  I judge him to be a native
of one of our Northern States,--perhaps a New Englander.  He has
lived abroad during some parts of his life.  He is not an artist, as
it was at one time thought he might be.  He is a good-looking fellow,
well developed, manly in appearance, with nothing to excite special
remark unless it be a certain look of anxiety or apprehension which
comes over him from time to time.  You remember our old friend Squire
B., whose companion was killed by lightning when he was standing
close to him.  You know the look he had whenever anything like a
thundercloud came up in the sky.  Well, I should say there was a look
like that came over this Maurice Kirkwood's face every now and then.
I noticed that he looked round once or twice as if to see whether
some object or other was in sight.  There was a little rustling in
the grass as if of footsteps, and this look came over his features.
A rabbit ran by us, and I watched to see if he showed any sign of
that antipathy we have heard so much of, but he seemed to be pleased
watching the creature.

"If you ask me what my opinion is about this Maurice Kirkwood, I
think he is eccentric in his habit of life, but not what they call a
'crank' exactly.  He talked well enough about such matters as we
spoke of,--the lake, the scenery in general, the climate.  I asked
him to come over and take a look at the college.  He did n't promise,
but I should not be surprised if I should get him over there some
day.  I asked him why he did n't go to the Pansophian meetings.  He
did n't give any reason, but he shook his head in a very peculiar
way, as much as to say that it was impossible.

"On the whole, I think it is nothing more than the same feeling of
dread of human society, or dislike for it, which under the name of
religion used to drive men into caves and deserts.  What a pity that
Protestantism does not make special provision for all the freaks of
individual character!  If we had a little more faith and a few more
caverns, or convenient places for making them, we should have hermits
in these holes as thick as woodchucks or prairie dogs.  I should like
to know if you never had the feeling,

     "'Oh, that the desert were my dwelling-place!'

"I know what your answer will be, of course.  You will say,
'Certainly,

     "'With one fair spirit for my minister;"'

"but I mean alone,--all alone.  Don't you ever feel as if you should
like to have been a pillar-saint in the days when faith was as strong
as lye (spelt with a y), instead of being as weak as dish-water?
(Jerry is looking over my shoulder, and says this pun is too bad to
send, and a disgrace to the University--but never mind.) I often feel
as if I should like to roost on a pillar a hundred feet high,--yes,
and have it soaped from top to bottom.  Wouldn't it be fun to look
down at the bores and the duns?  Let us get up a pillar-roosters'
association.  (Jerry--still looking over says there is an absurd
contradiction in the idea.)

"What a matter-of-fact idiot Jerry is!

"How do you like looking over, Mr. Inspector general?"

The reader will not get much information out of this lively young
fellow's letter, but he may get a little.  It is something to know
that the mysterious resident of Arrowhead Village did not look nor
talk like a crazy person; that he was of agreeable aspect and
address, helpful when occasion offered, and had nothing about him, so
far as yet appeared, to prevent his being an acceptable member of
society.

Of course the people in the village could never be contented without
learning everything there was to be learned about their visitor.  All
the city papers were examined for advertisements.  If a cashier had
absconded, if a broker had disappeared, if a railroad president was
missing, some of the old stories would wake up and get a fresh
currency, until some new circumstance gave rise to a new hypothesis.
Unconscious of all these inquiries and fictions, Maurice Kirkwood
lived on in his inoffensive and unexplained solitude, and seemed
likely to remain an unsolved enigma.  The "Sachem" of the boating
girls became the "Sphinx" of the village ramblers, and it was agreed
on all hands that Egypt did not hold any hieroglyphics harder to make
out than the meaning of this young man's odd way of living.




V

THE ENIGMA STUDIED.

It was a curious, if it was not a suspicious, circumstance that a
young man, seemingly in good health, of comely aspect, looking as if
made for companionship, should keep himself apart from all the world
around him in a place where there was a general feeling of good
neighborhood and a pleasant social atmosphere.  The Public Library
was a central point which brought people together.  The Pansophian
Society did a great deal to make them acquainted with each other for
many of the meetings were open to outside visitors, and the subjects
discussed in the meetings furnished the material for conversation in
their intervals.  A card of invitation had been sent by the Secretary
to Maurice, in answer to which Paolo carried back a polite note of
regret.  The paper had a narrow rim of black, implying apparently
some loss of relative or friend, but not any very recent and crushing
bereavement.  This refusal to come to the meetings of the society was
only what was expected.  It was proper to ask him, but his declining
the invitation showed that he did not wish for attentions or
courtesies.  There was nothing further to be done to bring him out of
his shell, and seemingly nothing more to be learned about him at
present.

In this state of things it was natural that all which had been
previously gathered by the few who had seen or known anything of him
should be worked over again.  When there is no new ore to be dug, the
old refuse heaps are looked over for what may still be found in them.
The landlord of the Anchor Tavern, now the head of the boarding-
house, talked about Maurice, as everybody in the village did at one
time or another.  He had not much to say, but he added a fact or two.

The young gentleman was good pay,--so they all said.  Sometimes he
paid in gold; sometimes in fresh bills, just out of the bank.  He
trusted his man, Mr. Paul, with the money to pay his bills.  He knew
something about horses; he showed that by the way he handled that
colt,--the one that threw the hostler and broke his collar-bone.
"Mr. Paul come down to the stable.  'Let me see that cult you all
'fraid of,' says he.  'My master, he ride any hoss,' says Paul.  'You
saddle him,' says be; and so they did, and Paul, he led that colt--
the kickinest and ugliest young beast you ever see in your life--up
to the place where his master, as he calls him, and he lives.  What
does that Kirkwood do but clap on a couple of long spurs and jump on
to that colt's back, and off the beast goes, tail up, heels flying,
standing up on end, trying all sorts of capers, and at last going it
full run for a couple of miles, till he'd got about enough of it.
That colt went off as ferce as a wild-cat, and come back as quiet as
a cosset lamb.  A man that pays his bills reg'lar, in good money, and
knows how to handle a hoss is three quarters of a gentleman, if he is
n't a whole one,--and most likely he is a whole one."

So spake the patriarch of the Anchor Tavern.  His wife had already
given her favorable opinion of her former guest.  She now added
something to her description as a sequel to her husband's remarks.

"I call him," she said, "about as likely a young gentleman as ever I
clapped my eyes on.  He is rather slighter than I like to see a young
man of his age; if he was my sun, I should like to see him a little
more fleshy.  I don't believe he weighs more than a hundred and
thirty or forty pounds.  Did y' ever look at those eyes of his,
M'randy?  Just as blue as succory flowers.  I do like those light-
complected young fellows, with their fresh cheeks and their curly
hair; somehow, curly hair doos set off anybody's face.  He is n't any
foreigner, for all that he talks Italian with that Mr. Paul that's
his help.  He looks just like our kind of folks, the college kind,
that's brought up among books, and is handling 'em, and reading of
'em, and making of 'em, as like as not, all their lives.  All that
you say about his riding the mad colt is just what I should think he
was up to, for he's as spry as a squirrel; you ought to see him go
over that fence, as I did once.  I don't believe there's any harm in
that young gentleman,--I don't care what people say.  I suppose he
likes this place just as other people like it, and cares more for
walking in the woods and paddling about in the water than he doos for
company; and if he doos, whose business is it, I should like to
know?"

The third of the speakers was Miranda, who had her own way of judging
people.

"I never see him but two or three times," Miranda said.  "I should
like to have waited on him, and got a chance to look stiddy at him
when he was eatin' his vittles.  That 's the time to watch folks,
when their jaws get a-goin' and their eyes are on what's afore 'em.
Do you remember that chap the sheriff come and took away when we kep'
tahvern?  Eleven year ago it was, come nex' Thanksgivin' time.  A
mighty grand gentleman from the City he set up for.  I watched him,
and I watched him.  Says I, I don't believe you're no gentleman,
says I.  He eat with his knife, and that ain't the way city folks
eats.  Every time I handed him anything I looked closeter and
closeter.  Them whiskers never grooved on them cheeks, says I to
myself.  Them 's paper collars, says I.  That dimun in your shirt-
front hain't got no life to it, says I.  I don't believe it's
nothiri' more 'n a bit o' winderglass.  So says I to Pushee, 'You
jes' step out and get the sheriff to come in and take a look at that
chap.' I knowed he was after a fellah.  He come right in, an' he goes
up to the chap.  'Why, Bill,' says he, 'I'm mighty glad to see yer.
We've had the hole in the wall you got out of mended, and I want your
company to come and look at the old place,' says he, and he pulls out
a couple of handcuffs and has 'em on his wrists in less than no time,
an' off they goes together!  I know one thing about that young
gentleman, anyhow,--there ain't no better judge of what's good eatin'
than he is.  I cooked him some maccaroni myself one day, and he sends
word to me by that Mr. Paul, 'Tell Miss Miranda,' says he, I that the
Pope o' Rome don't have no better cooked maccaroni than what she sent
up to me yesterday,' says he.  I don' know much about the Pope o'
Rome except that he's a Roman Catholic, and I don' know who cooks for
him, whether it's a man or a woman; but when it comes to a dish o'
maccaroni, I ain't afeard of their shefs, as they call 'em,--them he-
cooks that can't serve up a cold potater without callin' it by some
name nobody can say after 'em.  But this gentleman knows good
cookin', and that's as good a sign of a gentleman as I want to tell
'em by."




VI

STILL AT FAULT.

The house in which Maurice Kirkwood had taken up his abode was not a
very inviting one.  It was old, and had been left in a somewhat
dilapidated and disorderly condition by the tenants who had lived in
the part which Maurice now occupied.  They had piled their packing-
boxes in the cellar, with broken chairs, broken china, and other
household wrecks.  A cracked mirror lay on an old straw mattress, the
contents of which were airing themselves through wide rips and rents.
A lame clothes-horse was saddled with an old rug fringed with a
ragged border, out of which all the colors had been completely
trodden.  No woman would have gone into a house in such a condition.
But the young man did not trouble himself much about such matters,
and was satisfied when the rooms which were to be occupied by himself
and his servant were made decent and tolerably comfortable.  During
the fine season all this was not of much consequence, and if Maurice
made up his mind to stay through the winter he would have his choice
among many more eligible places.

The summer vacation of the Corinna Institute had now arrived, and the
young ladies had scattered to their homes.  Among the graduates of
the year were Miss Euthymia Tower and Miss Lurida Vincent, who had
now returned to their homes in Arrowhead Village.  They were both
glad to rest after the long final examinations and the exercises of
the closing day, in which each of them had borne a conspicuous part.
It was a pleasant life they led in the village, which was lively
enough at this season.  Walking, riding, driving, boating, visits to
the Library, meetings of the Pansophian Society, hops, and picnics
made the time pass very cheerfully, and soon showed their restoring
influences.  The Terror's large eyes did not wear the dull, glazed
look by which they had too often betrayed the after effects of over-
excitement of the strong and active brain behind them.  The Wonder
gained a fresher bloom, and looked full enough of life to radiate
vitality into a statue of ice.  They had a boat of their own, in
which they passed many delightful hours on the lake, rowing,
drifting, reading, telling of what had been, dreaming of what might
be.

The Library was one of the chief centres of the fixed population, and
visited often by strangers.  The old Librarian was a peculiar
character, as these officials are apt to be.  They have a curious
kind of knowledge, sometimes immense in its way.  They know the backs
of books, their title-pages, their popularity or want of it, the
class of readers who call for particular works, the value of
different editions, and a good deal besides.  Their minds catch up
hints from all manner of works on all kinds of subjects.  They will
give a visitor a fact and a reference which they are surprised to
find they remember and which the visitor might have hunted for a
year.  Every good librarian, every private book-owner, who has grown
into his library, finds he has a bunch of nerves going to every
bookcase, a branch to every shelf, and a twig to every book.  These
nerves get very sensitive in old librarians, sometimes, and they do
not like to have a volume meddled with any more than they would like
to have their naked eyes handled.  They come to feel at last that the
books of a great collection are a part, not merely of their own
property, though they are only the agents for their distribution, but
that they are, as it were, outlying portions of their own
organization.  The old Librarian was getting a miserly feeling about
his books, as he called them.  Fortunately, he had a young lady for
his assistant, who was never so happy as when she could find the work
any visitor wanted and put it in his hands,--or her hands, for there
were more readers among the wives and--daughters, and especially
among the aunts, than there were among their male relatives.  The old
Librarian knew the books, but the books seemed to know the young
assistant; so it looked, at least, to the impatient young people who
wanted their services.

Maurice had a good many volumes of his own,--a great many, according
to Paolo's account; but Paolo's ideas were limited, and a few well-
filled shelves seemed a very large collection to him.  His master
frequently sent him to the Public Library for books, which somewhat
enlarged his notions; still, the Signor was a very learned man, he
was certain, and some of his white books (bound in vellum and richly
gilt) were more splendid, according to Paolo, than anything in the
Library.

There was no little curiosity to know what were the books that
Maurice was in the habit of taking out, and the Librarian's record
was carefully searched by some of the more inquisitive investigators.
The list proved to be a long and varied one.  It would imply a
considerable knowledge of modern languages and of the classics; a
liking for mathematics and physics, especially all that related to
electricity and magnetism; a fancy for the occult sciences, if there
is any propriety in coupling these words; and a whim for odd and
obsolete literature, like the Parthenologia of Fortunius Licetus, the
quaint treatise 'De Sternutatione,' books about alchemy, and
witchcraft, apparitions, and modern works relating to Spiritualism.
With these were the titles of novels and now and then of books of
poems; but it may be taken for granted that his own shelves held the
works he was most frequently in the habit of reading or consulting.
Not much was to be made out of this beyond the fact of wide
scholarship,--more or less deep it might be, but at any rate implying
no small mental activity; for he appeared to read very rapidly, at
any rate exchanged the books he had taken out for new ones very
frequently.  To judge by his reading, he was a man of letters.  But
so wide-reading a man of letters must have an object, a literary
purpose in all probability.  Why should not he be writing a novel?
Not a novel of society, assuredly, for a hermit is not the person to
report the talk and manners of a world which he has nothing to do
with.  Novelists and lawyers understand the art of "cramming" better
than any other persons in the world.  Why should not this young man
be working up the picturesque in this romantic region to serve as a
background for some story with magic, perhaps, and mysticism, and
hints borrowed from science, and all sorts of out-of-the-way
knowledge which his odd and miscellaneous selection of books
furnished him?  That might be, or possibly he was only reading for
amusement.  Who could say?

The funds of the Public Library of Arrowhead Village allowed the
managers to purchase many books out of the common range of reading.
The two learned people of the village were the rector and the doctor.
These two worthies kept up the old controversy between the
professions, which grows out of the fact that one studies nature from
below upwards, and the other from above downwards.  The rector
maintained that physicians contracted a squint which turns their eyes
inwardly, while the muscles which roll their eyes upward become
palsied.  The doctor retorted that theological students developed a
third eyelid,--the nictitating membrane, which is so well known in
birds, and which serves to shut out, not all light, but all the light
they do not want.  Their little skirmishes did not prevent their
being very good friends, who had a common interest in many things and
many persons.  Both were on the committee which had the care of the
Library and attended to the purchase of books.  Each was scholar
enough to know the wants of scholars, and disposed to trust the
judgment of the other as to what books should be purchased.
Consequently, the clergyman secured the addition to the Library of a
good many old theological works which the physician would have called
brimstone divinity, and held to be just the thing to kindle fires
with,--good books still for those who know how to use them,
oftentimes as awful examples of the extreme of disorganization the
whole moral system may undergo when a barbarous belief has strangled
the natural human instincts.  The physician, in the mean time,
acquired for the collection some of those medical works where one may
find recorded various rare and almost incredible cases, which may not
have their like for a whole century, and then repeat themselves, so
as to give a new lease of credibility to stories which had come to be
looked upon as fables.

Both the clergyman and the physician took a very natural interest in
the young man who had come to reside in their neighborhood for the
present, perhaps for a long period.  The rector would have been glad
to see him at church.  He would have liked more especially to have
had him hear his sermon on the Duties of Young Men to Society.  The
doctor, meanwhile, was meditating on the duties of society to young
men, and wishing that he could gain the young man's confidence, so as
to help him out of any false habit of mind or any delusion to which
he might be subject, if he had the power of being useful to him.

Dr. Butts was the leading medical practitioner, not only of Arrowhead
Village, but of all the surrounding region.  He was an excellent
specimen of the country doctor, self-reliant, self-sacrificing,
working a great deal harder for his living than most of those who
call themselves the laboring classes,--as if none but those whose
hands were hardened by the use of farming or mechanical implements
had any work to do.  He had that sagacity without which learning is a
mere incumbrance, and he had also a fair share of that learning
without which sagacity is like a traveller with a good horse, but who
cannot read the directions on the guideboards.  He was not a man to
be taken in by names.  He well knew that oftentimes very innocent-
sounding words mean very grave disorders; that all, degrees of
disease and disorder are frequently confounded under the same term;
that "run down" may stand for a fatigue of mind or body from which a
week or a month of rest will completely restore the over-worked
patient, or an advanced stage of a mortal illness; that "seedy" may
signify the morning's state of feeling, after an evening's over-
indulgence, which calls for a glass of soda-water and a cup of
coffee, or a dangerous malady which will pack off the subject of it,
at the shortest notice, to the south of France.  He knew too well
that what is spoken lightly of as a "nervous disturbance" may imply
that the whole machinery of life is in a deranged condition, and that
every individual organ would groan aloud if it had any other language
than the terrible inarticulate one of pain by which to communicate
with the consciousness.

When, therefore, Dr. Butts heard the word antipatia he did not smile,
and say to himself that this was an idle whim, a foolish fancy, which
the young man had got into his head.  Neither was he satisfied to set
down everything to the account of insanity, plausible as that
supposition might seem.  He was prepared to believe in some
exceptional, perhaps anomalous, form of exaggerated sensibility,
relating to what class of objects he could not at present conjecture,
but which was as vital to the subject of it as the insulating
arrangement to a piece of electrical machinery.  With this feeling he
began to look into tho history of antipathies as recorded in all the
books and journals on which he could lay his hands.

               ------------------------------

The holder of the Portfolio asks leave to close it for a brief
interval.  He wishes to say a few words to his readers, before
offering them some verses which have no connection with the narrative
now in progress.

If one could have before him a set of photographs taken annually,
representing the same person as he or she appeared for thirty or
forty or fifty years, it would be interesting to watch the gradual
changes of aspect from the age of twenty, or even of thirty or forty,
to that of threescore and ten.  The face might be an uninteresting
one; still, as sharing the inevitable changes wrought by time, it
would be worth looking at as it passed through the curve of life,--
the vital parabola, which betrays itself in the symbolic changes of
the features.  An inscription is the same thing, whether we read it
on slate-stone, or granite, or marble.  To watch the lights and
shades, the reliefs and hollows, of a countenance through a lifetime,
or a large part of it, by the aid of a continuous series of
photographs would not only be curious; it would teach us much more
about the laws of physiognomy than we could get from casual and
unconnected observations.

The same kind of interest, without any assumption of merit to be
found in them, I would claim for a series of annual poems, beginning
in middle life and continued to what many of my correspondents are
pleased to remind me--as if I required to have the fact brought to my
knowledge--is no longer youth.  Here is the latest of a series of
annual poems read during the last thirty-four years.  There seems to
have been one interruption, but there may have been other poems not
recorded or remembered.  This, the latest poem of the series, was
listened to by the scanty remnant of what was a large and brilliant
circle of classmates and friends when the first of the long series
was read before them, then in the flush of ardent manhood:--


     THE OLD SONG.

The minstrel of the classic lay
Of love and wine who sings
Still found the fingers run astray
That touched the rebel strings.

Of Cadmus he would fair have sung,
Of Atreus and his line;
But all the jocund echoes rung
With songs of love and wine.

Ah, brothers!  I would fair have caught
Some fresher fancy's gleam;
My truant accents find, unsought,
The old familiar theme.

Love, Love! but not the sportive child
With shaft and twanging bow,
Whose random arrows drove us wild
Some threescore years ago;

Not Eros, with his joyous laugh,
The urchin blind and bare,
But Love, with spectacles and staff,
And scanty, silvered hair.

Our heads with frosted locks are white,
Our roofs are thatched with snow,
But red, in chilling winter's spite,
Our hearts and hearthstones glow.

Our old acquaintance, Time, drops in,
And while the running sands
Their golden thread unheeded spin,
He warms his frozen hands.

Stay, winged hours, too swift, too sweet,
And waft this message o'er
To all we miss, from all we meet
On life's fast-crumbling shore:

Say that to old affection true
We hug the narrowing chain
That binds our hearts,--alas, how few
The links that yet remain!

The fatal touch awaits them all
That turns the rocks to dust;
From year to year they break and fall,
They break, but never rust.

Say if one note of happier strain
This worn-out harp afford,--
One throb that trembles, not in vain,
Their memory lent its chord.

Say that when Fancy closed her wings
And Passion quenched his fire,
Love, Love, still echoed from the strings
As from Anacreon's lyre!

January 8, 1885.




VII

A RECORD OF ANTIPATHIES

In thinking the whole matter over, Dr. Butts felt convinced that,
with care and patience and watching his opportunity, he should get at
the secret, which so far bad yielded nothing but a single word.  It
might be asked why he was so anxious to learn what, from all
appearances, the young stranger was unwilling to explain.  He may
have been to some extent infected by the general curiosity of the
persons around him, in which good Mrs. Butts shared, and which she
had helped to intensify by revealing the word dropped by Paolo.  But
this was not really his chief motive.  He could not look upon this
young man, living a life of unwholesome solitude, without a natural
desire to do all that his science and his knowledge of human nature
could help him to do towards bringing him into healthy relations with
the world about him.  Still, he would not intrude upon him in any
way.  He would only make certain general investigations, which might
prove serviceable in case circumstances should give him the right to
counsel the young man as to his course of life.  The first thing to
be done was to study systematically the whole subject of antipathies.
Then, if any further occasion offered itself, he would be ready to
take advantage of it.  The resources of the Public Library of the
place and his own private collection were put in requisition to
furnish him the singular and widely scattered facts of which he was
in search.

It is not every reader who will care to follow Dr. Butts in his study
of the natural history of antipathies.  The stories told about them
are, however, very curious; and if some of them may be questioned,
there is no doubt that many of the strangest are true, and
consequently take away from the improbability of others which we are
disposed to doubt.

But in the first place, what do we mean by an antipathy?  It is an
aversion to some object, which may vary in degree from mere dislike
to mortal horror.  What the cause of this aversion is we cannot say.
It acts sometimes through the senses, sometimes through the
imagination, sometimes through an unknown channel.  The relations
which exist between the human being and all that surrounds him vary
in consequence of some adjustment peculiar to each individual.  The
brute fact is expressed in the phrase "One man's meat is another
man's poison."

In studying the history of antipathies the doctor began with those
referable to the sense of taste, which are among the most common.  In
any collection of a hundred persons there will be found those who
cannot make use of certain articles of food generally acceptable.
This may be from the disgust they occasion or the effects they have
been found to produce.  Every one knows individuals who cannot
venture on honey, or cheese, or veal, with impunity.  Carlyle, for
example, complains of having veal set before him,--a meat he could
not endure.  There is a whole family connection in New England, and
that a very famous one, to many of whose members, in different
generations, all the products of the dairy are the subjects of a
congenital antipathy.  Montaigne says there are persons who dread the
smell of apples more than they would dread being exposed to a fire of
musketry.  The readers of the charming story "A Week in a French
Country-House" will remember poor Monsieur Jacque's piteous cry in
the night: "Ursula, art thou asleep?  Oh, Ursula, thou sleepest, but
I cannot close my eyes.  Dearest Ursula, there is such a dreadful
smell!  Oh, Ursula, it is such a smell!  I do so wish thou couldst
smell it!  Good-night, my angel!----Dearest!  I have found them!
They are apples!  "The smell of roses, of peonies, of lilies, has
been known to cause faintness.  The sight of various objects has had
singular effects on some persons.  A boar's head was a favorite dish
at the table of great people in Marshal d'Albret's time; yet he used
to faint at the sight of one.  It is not uncommon to meet with
persons who faint at the sight of blood.  One of the most
inveterately pugnacious of Dr. Butts's college-mates confessed that
he had this infirmity.  Stranger and far more awkward than this is
the case mentioned in an ancient collection, where the subject of the
antipathy fainted at the sight of any object of a red color.  There
are sounds, also, which have strange effects on some individuals.
Among the obnoxious noises are the crumpling of silk stuffs, the
sound of sweeping, the croaking of frogs.  The effects in different
cases have been spasms, a sense of strangling, profuse sweating,--all
showing a profound disturbance of the nervous system.

All these effects were produced by impressions on the organs of
sense, seemingly by direct agency on certain nerve centres.  But
there is another series of cases in which the imagination plays a
larger part in the phenomena.  Two notable examples are afforded in
the lives of two very distinguished personages.

Peter the Great was frightened, when an infant, by falling from a
bridge into the water.  Long afterward, when he had reached manhood,
this hardy and resolute man was so affected by the sound of wheels
rattling over a bridge that he had to discipline himself by listening
to the sound, in spite of his dread of it, in order to overcome his
antipathy.  The story told by Abbe Boileau of Pascal is very similar
to that related of Peter.  As he was driving in his coach and four
over the bridge at Neuilly, his horses took fright and ran away, and
the leaders broke from their harness and sprang into the river,
leaving the wheel-horses and the carriage on the bridge.  Ever after
this fright it is said that Pascal had the terrifying sense that he
was just on the edge of an abyss, ready to fall over.

What strange early impression was it which led a certain lady always
to shriek aloud if she ventured to enter a church, as it is recorded?
The old and simple way of accounting for it would be the scriptural
one, that it was an unclean spirit who dwelt in her, and who, when
she entered the holy place and brought her spiritual tenant into the
presence of the sacred symbols, "cried with a loud voice, and came
out of" her.  A very singular case, the doctor himself had recorded,
and which the reader may accept as authentic, is the following: At
the head of the doctor's front stairs stood, and still stands, a tall
clock, of early date and stately presence.  A middle-aged visitor,
noticing it as he entered the front door, remarked that he should
feel a great unwillingness to pass that clock.  He could not go near
one of those tall timepieces without a profound agitation, which he
dreaded to undergo.  This very singular idiosyncrasy he attributed to
a fright when he was an infant in the arms of his nurse.

She was standing near one of those tall clocks, when the cord which
supported one of its heavy leaden weights broke, and the weight came
crashing down to the bottom of the case.  Some effect must have been
produced upon the pulpy nerve centres from which they never
recovered.  Why should not this happen, when we know that a sudden
mental shock may be the cause of insanity?  The doctor remembered the
verse of "The Ancient Mariner:"

    "I moved my lips; the pilot shrieked
     And fell down in a fit;
     The holy hermit raised his eyes
     And prayed where he did sit.
     I took the oars; the pilot's boy,
     Who now doth crazy go,
     Laughed loud and long, and all the while
     His eyes went to and fro."

This is only poetry, it is true, but the poet borrowed the
description from nature, and the records of our asylums could furnish
many cases where insanity was caused by a sudden fright.

More than this, hardly a year passes that we do not read of some
person, a child commonly, killed outright by terror,--scared to
death, literally.  Sad cases they often are, in which, nothing but a
surprise being intended, the shock has instantly arrested the
movements on which life depends.  If a mere instantaneous impression
can produce effects like these, such an impression might of course be
followed by consequences less fatal or formidable, but yet serious in
their nature.  If here and there a person is killed, as if by
lightning, by a sudden startling sight or sound, there must be more
numerous cases in which a terrible shock is produced by similar
apparently insignificant causes,--a shock which falls short of
overthrowing the reason and does not destroy life, yet leaves a
lasting effect upon the subject of it.

This point, then, was settled in the mind of Dr. Butts, namely, that,
as a violent emotion caused by a sudden shock can kill or craze a
human being, there is no perversion of the faculties, no prejudice,
no change of taste or temper, no eccentricity, no antipathy, which
such a cause may not rationally account for.  He would not be
surprised, he said to himself, to find that some early alarm, like
that which was experienced by Peter the Great or that which happened
to Pascal, had broken some spring in this young man's nature, or so
changed its mode of action as to account for the exceptional
remoteness of his way of life.  But how could any conceivable
antipathy be so comprehensive as to keep a young man aloof from all
the world, and make a hermit of him?  He did not hate the human race;
that was clear enough.  He treated Paolo with great kindness, and the
Italian was evidently much attached to him.  He had talked naturally
and pleasantly with the young man he had helped out of his dangerous
situation when his boat was upset.  Dr. Butts heard that he had once
made a short visit to this young man, at his rooms in the University.
It was not misanthropy, therefore, which kept him solitary.  What
could be broad enough to cover the facts of the case?  Nothing that
the doctor could think of, unless it were some color, the sight of
which acted on him as it did on the individual before mentioned, who
could not look at anything red without fainting.  Suppose this were a
case of the same antipathy.  How very careful it would make the
subject of it as to where he went and with whom he consorted!  Time
and patience would be pretty sure to bring out new developments, and
physicians, of all men in the world, know how to wait as well as how
to labor.

Such were some of the crude facts as Dr. Butts found them in books or
gathered them from his own experience.  He soon discovered that the
story had got about the village that Maurice Kirkwood was the victim
of an "antipathy," whatever that word might mean in the vocabulary of
the people of the place.  If he suspected the channel through which
it had reached the little community, and, spreading from that centre,
the country round, he did not see fit to make out of his suspicions a
domestic casus belli.  Paolo might have mentioned it to others as
well as to himself.  Maurice might have told some friend, who had
divulged it.  But to accuse Mrs. Butts, good Mrs. Butts, of petit
treason in telling one of her husband's professional secrets was too
serious a matter to be thought of.  He would be a little more
careful, he promised himself, the next time, at any rate; for he had
to concede, in spite of every wish to be charitable in his judgment,
that it was among the possibilities that the worthy lady had
forgotten the rule that a doctor's patients must put their tongues
out, and a doctor's wife must keep her tongue in.




VIII

THE PANSOPHIAN SOCIETY.

The Secretary of this association was getting somewhat tired of the
office, and the office was getting somewhat tired of him.  It
occurred to the members of the Society that a little fresh blood
infused into it might stir up the general vitality of the
organization.  The woman suffragists saw no reason why the place of
Secretary need as a matter of course be filled by a person of the
male sex.  They agitated, they made domiciliary visits, they wrote
notes to influential citizens, and finally announced as their
candidate the young lady who had won and worn the school name of "The
Terror," who was elected.  She was just the person for the place:
wide awake, with all her wits about her, full of every kind of
knowledge, and, above all, strong on points of order and details of
management, so that she could prompt the presiding officer, to do
which is often the most essential duty of a Secretary.  The
President, the worthy rector, was good at plain sailing in the track
of the common moralities and proprieties, but was liable to get
muddled if anything came up requiring swift decision and off-hand
speech.  The Terror had schooled herself in the debating societies of
the Institute, and would set up the President, when he was floored by
an awkward question, as easily as if he were a ninepin which had been
bowled over.

It has been already mentioned that the Pansophian Society received
communications from time to time from writers outside of its own
organization.  Of late these had been becoming more frequent.  Many
of them were sent in anonymously, and as there were numerous visitors
to the village, and two institutions not far removed from it, both
full of ambitious and intelligent young persons, it was often
impossible to trace the papers to their authors.  The new Secretary
was alive with curiosity, and as sagacious a little body as one might
find if in want of a detective.  She could make a pretty shrewd guess
whether a paper was written by a young or old person, by one of her
own sex or the other, by an experienced hand or a novice.

Among the anonymous papers she received was one which exercised her
curiosity to an extraordinary degree.  She felt a strong suspicion
that "the Sachem," as the boat-crews used to call him, "the Recluse,"
"the Night-Hawk," "the Sphinx," as others named him, must be the
author of it.  It appeared to her the production of a young person of
a reflective, poetical turn of mind.  It was not a woman's way of
writing; at least, so thought the Secretary.  The writer had
travelled much; had resided in Italy, among other places.  But so had
many of the summer visitors and residents of Arrowhead Village.  The
handwriting was not decisive; it had some points of resemblance with
the pencilled orders for books which Maurice sent to the Library, but
there were certain differences, intentional or accidental, which
weakened this evidence.  There was an undertone in the essay which
was in keeping with the mode of life of the solitary stranger.  It
might be disappointment, melancholy, or only the dreamy sadness of a
young person who sees the future he is to climb, not as a smooth
ascent, but as overhanging him like a cliff, ready to crush him, with
all his hopes and prospects.  This interpretation may have been too
imaginative, but here is the paper, and the reader can form his own
opinion:

                    MY THREE COMPANIONS.

"I have been from my youth upwards a wanderer.  I do not mean
constantly flitting from one place to another, for my residence has
often been fixed for considerable periods.  From time to time I have
put down in a notebook the impressions made upon me by the scenes
through which I have passed.  I have long hesitated whether to let
any of my notes appear before the public.  My fear has been that they
were too subjective, to use the metaphysician's term,--that I have
seen myself reflected in Nature, and not the true aspects of Nature
as she was meant to be understood.  One who should visit the Harz
Mountains would see--might see, rather his own colossal image shape
itself on the morning mist.  But if in every mist that rises from the
meadows, in every cloud that hangs upon the mountain, he always finds
his own reflection, we cannot accept him as an interpreter of the
landscape.

"There must be many persons present at the meetings of the Society to
which this paper is offered who have had experiences like that of its
author.  They have visited the same localities, they have had many of
the same thoughts and feelings.  Many, I have no doubt.  Not all,--
no, not all.  Others have sought the companionship of Nature; I have
been driven to it.  Much of my life has been passed in that
communion.  These pages record some of the intimacies I have formed
with her under some of her various manifestations.

"I have lived on the shore of the great ocean, where its waves broke
wildest and its voice rose loudest.

"I have passed whole seasons on the banks of mighty and famous
rivers.

"I have dwelt on the margin of a tranquil lake, and floated through
many a long, long summer day on its clear waters.

"I have learned the 'various language' of Nature, of which poetry has
spoken,--at least, I have learned some words and phrases of it.  I
will translate some of these as I best may into common speech.

"The OCEAN says to the dweller on its shores:--

"You are neither welcome nor unwelcome.  I do not trouble myself with
the living tribes that come down to my waters.  I have my own people,
of an older race than yours, that grow to mightier dimensions than
your mastodons and elephants; more numerous than all the swarms that
fill the air or move over the thin crust of the earth.  Who are you
that build your palaces on my margin?  I see your white faces as
I saw the dark faces of the tribes that came before you, as I shall
look upon the unknown family of mankind that will come after you.
And what is your whole human family but a parenthesis in a single
page of my history?  The raindrops stereotyped themselves on my
beaches before a living creature left his footprints there.  This
horseshoe-crab I fling at your feet is of older lineage than your
Adam,--perhaps, indeed, you count your Adam as one of his
descendants.  What feeling have I for you?  Not scorn, not hatred,--
not love,--not loathing.  No!---indifference,--blank indifference to
you and your affairs that is my feeling, say rather absence of
feeling, as regards you.---Oh yes, I will lap your feet, I will cool
you in the hot summer days, I will bear you up in my strong arms, I
will rock you on my rolling undulations, like a babe in his cradle.
Am I not gentle?  Am I not kind?  Am I not harmless?  But hark!  The
wind is rising, and the wind and I are rough playmates!  What do you
say to my voice now?  Do you see my foaming lips?  Do you feel the
rocks tremble as my huge billows crash against them?  Is not my anger
terrible as I dash your argosy, your thunder-bearing frigate, into
fragments, as you would crack an eggshell?--No, not anger; deaf,
blind, unheeding indifference,--that is all.  Out of me all things
arose; sooner or later, into me all things subside.  All changes
around me; I change not.  I look not at you, vain man, and your frail
transitory concerns, save in momentary glimpses: I look on the white
face of my dead mistress, whom I follow as the bridegroom follows the
bier of her who has changed her nuptial raiment for the shroud.

"Ye whose thoughts are of eternity, come dwell at my side.
Continents and islands grow old, and waste and disappear.  The
hardest rock crumbles; vegetable and animal kingdoms come into being,
wax great, decline, and perish, to give way to others, even as human
dynasties and nations and races come and go.  Look on me!  "Time
writes no wrinkle" on my forehead.  Listen to me!  All tongues are
spoken on my shores, but I have only one language: the winds taught
me their vowels the crags and the sands schooled me in my rough or
smooth consonants.  Few words are mine but I have whispered them and
sung them and shouted them to men of all tribes from the time when
the first wild wanderer strayed into my awful presence.  Have you a
grief that gnaws at your heart-strings?  Come with it to my shore, as
of old the priest of far-darting Apollo carried his rage and anguish
to the margin of the loud-roaring sea.  There, if anywhere you will
forget your private and short-lived woe, for my voice speaks to the
infinite and the eternal in your consciousness.'


"To him who loves the pages of human history, who listens to the
voices of the world about him, who frequents the market and the
thoroughfare, who lives in the study of time and its accidents rather
than in the deeper emotions, in abstract speculation and spiritual
contemplation, the RIVER addresses itself as his natural companion.

"Come live with me.  I am active, cheerful, communicative, a natural
talker and story-teller.  I am not noisy, like the ocean, except
occasionally when I am rudely interrupted, or when I stumble and get
a fall.  When I am silent you can still have pleasure in watching my
changing features.  My idlest babble, when I am toying with the
trifles that fall in my way, if not very full of meaning, is at least
musical.  I am not a dangerous friend, like the ocean; no highway is
absolutely safe, but my nature is harmless, and the storms that strew
the beaches with wrecks cast no ruins upon my flowery borders.  Abide
with me, and you shall not die of thirst, like the forlorn wretches
left to the mercies of the pitiless salt waves.  Trust yourself to
me, and I will carry you far on your journey, if we are travelling to
the same point of the compass.  If I sometimes run riot and overflow
your meadows, I leave fertility behind me when I withdraw to my
natural channel.  Walk by my side toward the place of my destination.
I will keep pace with you, and you shall feel my presence with you as
that of a self-conscious being like yourself.  You will find it hard
to be miserable in my company; I drain you of ill-conditioned
thoughts as I carry away the refuse of your dwelling and its grounds."


But to him whom the ocean chills and crushes with its sullen
indifference, and the river disturbs with its never-pausing and
never-ending story, the silent LAKE shall be a refuge and a place of
rest for his soul.

"'Vex not yourself with thoughts too vast for your limited
faculties,' it says; 'yield not yourself to the babble of the running
stream.  Leave the ocean, which cares nothing for you or any living
thing that walks the solid earth; leave the river, too busy with its
own errand, too talkative about its own affairs, and find peace with
me, whose smile will cheer you, whose whisper will soothe you.  Come
to me when the morning sun blazes across my bosom like a golden
baldric; come to me in the still midnight, when I hold the inverted
firmament like a cup brimming with jewels, nor spill one star of all
the constellations that float in my ebon goblet.  Do you know the
charm of melancholy?  Where will you find a sympathy like mine in
your hours of sadness?  Does the ocean share your grief?  Does the
river listen to your sighs?  The salt wave, that called to you from
under last month's full moon, to-day is dashing on the rocks of
Labrador; the stream, that ran by you pure and sparkling, has
swallowed the poisonous refuse of a great city, and is creeping to
its grave in the wide cemetery that buries all things in its tomb of
liquid crystal.  It is true that my waters exhale and are renewed
from one season to another; but are your features the same,
absolutely the same, from year to year?  We both change, but we know
each other through all changes.  Am I not mirrored in those eyes of
yours?  And does not Nature plant me as an eye to behold her beauties
while she is dressed in the glories of leaf and flower, and draw the
icy lid over my shining surface when she stands naked and ashamed in
the poverty of winter?'

"I have had strange experiences and sad thoughts in the course of a
life not very long, but with a record which much longer lives could
not match in incident.  Oftentimes the temptation has come over me
with dangerous urgency to try a change of existence, if such change
is a part of human destiny,--to seek rest, if that is what we gain by
laying down the burden of life.  I have asked who would be the friend
to whom I should appeal for the last service I should have need of.
Ocean was there, all ready, asking no questions, answering none.
What strange voyages, downward through its glaucous depths, upwards
to its boiling and frothing surface, wafted by tides, driven by
tempests, disparted by rude agencies; one remnant whitening on the
sands of a northern beach, one perhaps built into the circle of a
coral reef in the Pacific, one settling to the floor of the vast
laboratory where continents are built, to emerge in far-off ages!
What strange companions for my pall-bearers!  Unwieldy sea-monsters,
the stories of which are counted fables by the spectacled collectors
who think their catalogues have exhausted nature; naked-eyed
creatures, staring, glaring, nightmare-like spectres of the ghastly-
green abysses; pulpy islands, with life in gelatinous immensity,--
what a company of hungry heirs at every ocean funeral!  No!  No!
Ocean claims great multitudes, but does not invite the solitary who
would fain be rid of himself.

"Shall I seek a deeper slumber at the bottom of the lake I love than
I have ever found when drifting idly over its surface?  No, again.  I
do not want the sweet, clear waters to know me in the disgrace of
nature, when life, the faithful body-servant, has ceased caring for
me.  That must not be.  The mirror which has pictured me so often
shall never know me as an unwelcome object.

"If I must ask the all-subduing element to be my last friend, and
lead me out of my prison, it shall be the busy, whispering, not
unfriendly, pleasantly companionable river.

"But Ocean and River and Lake have certain relations to the periods
of human life which they who are choosing their places of abode
should consider.  Let the child play upon the seashore.  The wide
horizon gives his imagination room to grow in, untrammelled.  That
background of mystery, without which life is a poor mechanical
arrangement, is shaped and colored, so far as it can have outline, or
any hue but shadow, on a vast canvas, the contemplation of which
enlarges and enriches the sphere of consciousness.  The mighty ocean
is not too huge to symbolize the aspirations and ambitions of the yet
untried soul of the adolescent.

"The time will come when his indefinite mental horizon has found a
solid limit, which shuts his prospect in narrower bounds than he
would have thought could content him in the years of undefined
possibilities.  Then he will find the river a more natural intimate
than the ocean.  It is individual, which the ocean, with all its
gulfs and inlets and multitudinous shores, hardly seems to be.  It
does not love you very dearly, and will not miss you much when you
disappear from its margin; but it means well to you, bids you good-
morning with its coming waves, and good-evening with those which are
leaving.  It will lead your thoughts pleasantly away, upwards to its
source, downwards to the stream to which it is tributary, or the wide
waters in which it is to lose itself.  A river, by choice, to live by
in middle age.

"In hours of melancholy reflection, in those last years of life which
have little left but tender memories, the still companionship of the
lake, embosomed in woods, sheltered, fed by sweet mountain brooks and
hidden springs, commends itself to the wearied and saddened spirit.
I am not thinking of those great inland seas, which have many of the
features and much of the danger that belong to the ocean, but of
those 'ponds,' as our countrymen used to call them until they were
rechristened by summer visitors; beautiful sheets of water from a
hundred to a few thousand acres in extent, scattered like raindrops
over the map of our Northern sovereignties.  The loneliness of
contemplative old age finds its natural home in the near neighborhood
of one of these tranquil basins."

Nature does not always plant her poets where they belong, but if we
look carefully their affinities betray themselves.  The youth will
carry his Byron to the rock which overlooks the ocean the poet loved
so well.  The man of maturer years will remember that the sonorous
couplets of Pope which ring in his ears were written on the banks of
the Thames.  The old man, as he nods over the solemn verse of
Wordsworth, will recognize the affinity between the singer and the
calm sheet that lay before him as he wrote,--the stainless and sleepy
Windermere.

"The dwellers by Cedar Lake may find it an amusement to compare their
own feelings with those of one who has lived by the Atlantic and the
Mediterranean, by the Nile and the Tiber, by Lake Leman and by one of
the fairest sheets of water that our own North America embosoms in
its forests."


Miss Lurida Vincent, Secretary of the Pansophian Society, read this
paper, and pondered long upon it.  She was thinking very seriously of
studying medicine, and had been for some time in frequent
communication with Dr. Butts, under whose direction she had begun
reading certain treatises, which added to such knowledge of the laws
of life in health and in disease as she had brought with her from the
Corinna Institute.  Naturally enough, she carried the anonymous paper
to the doctor, to get his opinion about it, and compare it with her
own.  They both agreed that it was probably, they would not say
certainly, the work of the solitary visitor.  There was room for
doubt, for there were visitors who might well have travelled to all
the places mentioned, and resided long enough on the shores of the
waters the writer spoke of to have had all the experiences mentioned
in the paper.  The Terror remembered a young lady, a former
schoolmate, who belonged to one of those nomadic families common in
this generation, the heads of which, especially the female heads, can
never be easy where they are, but keep going between America and
Europe, like so many pith-balls in the electrical experiment,
alternately attracted and repelled, never in contented equilibrium.
Every few years they pull their families up by the roots, and by the
time they have begun to take hold a little with their radicles in the
spots to which they have been successively transplanted up they come
again, so that they never get a tap-root anywhere.  The Terror
suspected the daughter of one of these families of sending certain
anonymous articles of not dissimilar character to the one she had
just received.  But she knew the style of composition common among
the young girls, and she could hardly believe that it was one of them
who had sent this paper.  Could a brother of this young lady have
written it?  Possibly; she knew nothing more than that the young lady
had a brother, then a student at the University.  All the chances
were that Mr. Maurice Kirkwood was the author.  So thought Lurida,
and so thought Dr. Butts.

Whatever faults there were in this essay, it interested them both.
There was nothing which gave the least reason to suspect insanity on
the part of the writer, whoever he or she might be.  There were
references to suicide, it is true, but they were of a purely
speculative nature, and did not look to any practical purpose in that
direction.  Besides, if the stranger were the author of the paper, he
certainly would not choose a sheet of water like Cedar Lake to
perform the last offices for him, in case he seriously meditated
taking unceremonious leave of life and its accidents.  He could find
a river easily enough, to say nothing of other methods of effecting
his purpose; but he had committed himself as to the impropriety of
selecting a lake, so they need not be anxious about the white canoe
and its occupant, as they watched it skimming the surface of the deep
waters.

The holder of the Portfolio would never have ventured to come before
the public if he had not counted among his resources certain papers
belonging to the records of the Pansophian Society, which he can make
free use of, either for the illustration of the narrative, or for a
diversion during those intervals in which the flow of events is
languid, or even ceases for the time to manifest any progress.  The
reader can hardly have failed to notice that the old Anchor Tavern
had become the focal point where a good deal of mental activity
converged.  There were the village people, including a number of
cultivated families; there were the visitors, among them many
accomplished and widely travelled persons; there was the University,
with its learned teachers and aspiring young men; there was the
Corinna Institute, with its eager, ambitious, hungry-souled young
women, crowding on, class after class coming forward on the broad
stream of liberal culture, and rounding the point which, once passed,
the boundless possibilities of womanhood opened before them.  All
this furnished material enough and to spare for the records and the
archives of the society.

The new Secretary infused fresh life into the meetings.  It may be
remembered that the girls had said of her, when she was The Terror,
that "she knew everything and didn't believe anything."  That was
just the kind of person for a secretary of such an association.
Properly interpreted, the saying meant that she knew a great deal,
and wanted to know a great deal more, and was consequently always on
the lookout for information; that she believed nothing without
sufficient proof that it was true, and therefore was perpetually
asking for evidence where, others took assertions on trust.

It was astonishing to see what one little creature like The Terror
could accomplish in the course of a single season.  She found out
what each member could do and wanted to do.  She wrote to the outside
visitors whom she suspected of capacity, and urged them to speak at
the meetings, or send written papers to be read.  As an official,
with the printed title at the head of her notes, PANSOPHIAN SOCIETY,
she was a privileged personage.  She begged the young persons who had
travelled to tell something of their experiences.  She had
contemplated getting up a discussion on the woman's rights question,
but being a wary little body, and knowing that the debate would
become a dispute and divide the members into two hostile camps, she
deferred this project indefinitely.  It would be time enough after
she had her team well in hand, she said to herself,--had felt their
mouths and tried their paces.  This expression, as she used it in her
thoughts, seems rather foreign to her habits, but there was room in
her large brain for a wide range of illustrations and an ample
vocabulary.  She could not do much with her own muscles, but she had
known the passionate delight of being whirled furiously over the road
behind four scampering horses, in a rocking stage-coach, and thought
of herself in the Secretary's chair as not unlike the driver on his
box.  A few weeks of rest had allowed her nervous energy to store
itself up, and the same powers which had distanced competition in the
classes of her school had of necessity to expend themselves in
vigorous action in her new office.


Her appeals had their effect.  A number of papers were very soon sent
in; some with names, some anonymously.  She looked these papers over,
and marked those which she thought would be worth reading and
listening to at the meetings.  One of them has just been presented to
the reader.  As to the authorship of the following one there were
many conjectures.  A well-known writer, who had spent some weeks at
Arrowhead Village, was generally suspected of being its author.
Some, however, questioned whether it was not the work of a new hand,
who wrote, not from experience, but from his or her ideas of the
condition to which a story-teller, a novelist, must in all
probability be sooner or later reduced.  The reader must judge for
himself whether this first paper is the work of an old hand or a
novice.


               SOME EXPERIENCES OF A NOVELIST.

"I have written a frightful number of stories, forty or more, I
think.  Let me see.  For twelve years two novels a year regularly:
that makes twenty-four.  In three different years I have written
three stories annually: that makes thirty-three.  In five years one a
year,--thirty-eight.  That is all, is n't it?  Yes.  Thirty-eight,
not forty.  I wish I could make them all into one composite story, as
Mr. Galton does his faces.

"Hero--heroine--mamma--papa--uncle--sister, and so on.  Love--
obstacles--misery--tears--despair--glimmer of hope--unexpected
solution of difficulties--happy finale.

"Landscape for background according to season.  Plants of each month
got up from botanical calendars.

"I should like much to see the composite novel.  Why not apply Mr.
Galton's process, and get thirty-eight stories all in one?  All the
Yankees would resolve into one Yankee, all the P---- West Britons
into one Patrick, etc., what a saving of time it would be!

"I got along pretty well with my first few stories.  I had some
characters around me which, a little disguised, answered well enough.
There was the minister of the parish, and there was an old
schoolmaster either of them served very satisfactorily for
grandfathers and old uncles.  All I had to do was to shift some of
their leading peculiarities, keeping the rest.  The old minister wore
knee-breeches.  I clapped them on to the schoolmaster.  The
schoolmaster carried a tall gold-headed cane.  I put this in the
minister's hands.  So with other things,--I shifted them round, and
got a set of characters who, taken together, reproduced the chief
persons of the village where I lived, but did not copy any individual
exactly.  Thus it went on for a while; but by and by my stock company
began to be rather too familiarly known, in spite of their change of
costume, and at last some altogether too sagacious person published
what he called a 'key' to several of my earlier stories, in which I
found the names of a number of neighbors attached to aliases of my
own invention.  All the 'types,' as he called them, represented by
these personages of my story had come to be recognized, each as
standing for one and the same individual of my acquaintance.  It had
been of no use to change the costume.  Even changing the sex did no
good.  I had a famous old gossip in one of my tales,--a much-babbling
Widow Sertingly.  'Sho!' they all said, that 's old Deacon Spinner,
the same he told about in that other story of his,--only the deacon's
got on a petticoat and a mob-cap,--but it's the same old sixpence.'
So I said to myself, I must have some new characters.  I had no
trouble with young characters; they are all pretty much alike,--dark-
haired or light-haired, with the outfits belonging to their
complexion, respectively.  I had an old great-aunt, who was a tip-top
eccentric.  I had never seen anything just like her in books.  So I
said, I will have you, old lady, in one of my stories; and, sure
enough, I fitted her out with a first-rate odd-sounding name, which I
got from the directory, and sent her forth to the world, disguised,
as I supposed, beyond the possibility of recognition.  The book sold
well, and the eccentric personage was voted a novelty.  A few weeks
after it was published a lawyer called upon me, as the agent of the
person in the directory, whose family name I had used, as he
maintained, to his and all his relatives' great damage, wrong, loss,
grief, shame, and irreparable injury, for which the sum of blank
thousand dollars would be a modest compensation.  The story made the
book sell, but not enough to pay blank thousand dollars.  In the mean
time a cousin of mine had sniffed out the resemblance between the
character in my book and our great-aunt.  We were rivals in her good
graces.  'Cousin Pansie' spoke to her of my book and the trouble it
was bringing on me,--she was so sorry about it!  She liked my story,
--only those personalities, you know.  'What personalities?' says old
granny-aunt.  'Why, auntie, dear, they do say that he has brought in
everybody we know,--did n't anybody tell you about--well,--I suppose
you ought to know it,--did n't anybody tell you you were made fun of
in that novel?'  Somebody--no matter who--happened to hear all this,
and told me.  She said granny-aunt's withered old face had two red
spots come to it, as if she had been painting her cheeks from a pink
saucer.  No, she said, not a pink saucer, but as if they were two
coals of fire.  She sent out and got the book, and made her (the
somebody that I was speaking of) read it to her.  When she had heard
as much as she could stand,--for 'Cousin Pansie' explained passages
to her,--explained, you know,--she sent for her lawyer, and that same
somebody had to be a witness to a new will she had drawn up.  It was
not to my advantage.  'Cousin Pansie' got the corner lot where the
grocery is, and pretty much everything else.  The old woman left me a
legacy.  What do you think it was?  An old set of my own books, that
looked as if it had been bought out of a bankrupt circulating
library.

"After that I grew more careful.  I studied my disguises much more
diligently.  But after all, what could I do?  Here I was, writing
stories for my living and my reputation.  I made a pretty sum enough,
and worked hard enough to earn it.  No tale, no money.  Then every
story that went from my workshop had to come up to the standard of my
reputation, and there was a set of critics,--there is a set of
critics now and everywhere,--that watch as narrowly for the decline
of a man's reputation as ever a village half drowned out by an
inundation watched for the falling of the waters.  The fame I had
won, such as it was, seemed to attend me,--not going before me in the
shape of a woman with a trumpet, but rather following me like one of
Actaeon's hounds, his throat open, ready to pull me down and tear me.
What a fierce enemy is that which bays behind us in the voice of our
proudest bygone achievement!

"But, as I said above, what could I do?  I must write novels, and I
must have characters.  'Then why not invent them?' asks some novice.
Oh, yes!  Invent them!  You can invent a human being that in certain
aspects of humanity will answer every purpose for which your
invention was intended.  A basket of straw, an old coat and pair of
breeches, a hat which has been soaked, sat upon, stuffed a broken
window, and had a brood of chickens raised in it,--these elements,
duly adjusted to each other, will represent humanity so truthfully
that the crows will avoid the cornfield when your scarecrow displays
his personality.  Do you think you can make your heroes and
heroines,--nay, even your scrappy supernumeraries,--out of refuse
material, as you made your scarecrow?  You can't do it.  You must
study living people and reproduce them.  And whom do you know so well
as your friends?  You will show up your friends, then, one after
another.  When your friends give out, who is left for you?  Why,
nobody but your own family, of course.  When you have used up your
family, there is nothing left for you but to write your
autobiography.

"After my experience with my grand-aunt, I be came more cautious,
very naturally.  I kept traits of character, but I mixed ages as well
as sexes.  In this way I continued to use up a large amount of
material, which looked as if it were as dangerous as dynamite to
meddle with.  Who would have expected to meet my maternal uncle in
the guise of a schoolboy?  Yet I managed to decant his
characteristics as nicely as the old gentleman would have decanted a
bottle of Juno Madeira through that long siphon which he always used
when the most sacred vintages were summoned from their crypts to
render an account of themselves on his hospitable board.  It was a
nice business, I confess, but I did it, and I drink cheerfully to
that good uncle's memory in a glass of wine from his own cellar,
which, with many other more important tokens of his good will, I call
my own since his lamented demise.

"I succeeded so well with my uncle that I thought I would try a
course of cousins.  I had enough of them to furnish out a whole
gallery of portraits.  There was cousin 'Creeshy,' as we called her;
Lucretia, more correctly.  She was a cripple.  Her left lower limb
had had something happen to it, and she walked with a crutch.  Her
patience under her trial was very pathetic and picturesque, so to
speak,--I mean adapted to the tender parts of a story; nothing could
work up better in a melting paragraph.  But I could not, of course,
describe her particular infirmity; that would point her out at once.
I thought of shifting the lameness to the right lower limb, but even
that would be seen through.  So I gave the young woman that stood for
her in my story a lame elbow, and put her arm in a sling, and made
her such a model of uncomplaining endurance that my grandmother cried
over her as if her poor old heart would break.  She cried very
easily, my grandmother; in fact, she had such a gift for tears that I
availed myself of it, and if you remember old Judy, in my novel
"Honi Soit" (Honey Sweet, the booksellers called it),--old Judy, the
black-nurse,--that was my grandmother.  She had various other
peculiarities, which I brought out one by one, and saddled on to
different characters.  You see she was a perfect mine of
singularities and idiosyncrasies.  After I had used her up pretty
well, I came dawn upon my poor relations.  They were perfectly fair
game; what better use could I put them to?  I studied them up very
carefully, and as there were a good many of them I helped myself
freely.  They lasted me, with occasional intermissions, I should say,
three or four years.  I had to be very careful with my poor
relations,--they were as touchy as they could be; and as I felt bound
to send a copy of my novel, whatever it might be, to each one of
them,--there were as many as a dozen,--I took care to mix their
characteristic features, so that, though each might suspect I meant
the other, no one should think I meant him or her.  I got through all
my relations at last except my father and mother.  I had treated my
brothers and sisters pretty fairly, all except Elisha and Joanna.
The truth is they both had lots of odd ways,--family traits, I
suppose, but were just different enough from each other to figure
separately in two different stories.  These two novels made me some
little trouble; for Elisha said he felt sure that I meant Joanna in
one of them, and quarrelled with me about it; and Joanna vowed and
declared that Elnathan, in the other, stood for brother 'Lisha, and
that it was a real mean thing to make fun of folks' own flesh and
blood, and treated me to one of her cries.  She was n't handsome when
she cried, poor, dear Joanna; in fact, that was one of the personal
traits I had made use of in the story that Elisha found fault with.

"So as there was nobody left but my father and mother, you see for
yourself I had no choice.  There was one great advantage in dealing
with them,--I knew them so thoroughly.  One naturally feels a certain
delicacy it handling from a purely artistic point of view persons who
have been so near to him.  One's mother, for instance: suppose some
of her little ways were so peculiar that the accurate delineation of
them would furnish amusement to great numbers of readers; it would
not be without hesitation that a writer of delicate sensibility would
draw her portrait, with all its whimsicalities, so plainly that it
should be generally recognized.  One's father is commonly of tougher
fibre than one's mother, and one would not feel the same scruples,
perhaps, in using him professionally as material in a novel; still,
while you are employing him as bait,--you see I am honest and plain-
spoken, for your characters are baits to catch readers with,--I would
follow kind Izaak Walton's humane counsel about the frog you are
fastening to your fish-hook: fix him artistically, as he directs, but
in so doing I use him as though you loved him.'

"I have at length shown up, in one form and another, all my townsmen
who have anything effective in their bodily or mental make-up, all my
friends, all my relatives; that is, all my blood relatives.  It has
occurred to me that I might open a new field in the family connection
of my father-in-law and mother-in-law.  We have been thinking of
paying them a visit, and I shall have an admirable opportunity of
studying them and their relatives and visitors.  I have long wanted a
good chance for getting acquainted with the social sphere several
grades below that to which I am accustomed, and I have no doubt that
I shall find matter for half a dozen new stories among those
connections of mine.  Besides, they live in a Western city, and one
doesn't mind much how he cuts up the people of places he does n't
himself live in.  I suppose there is not really so much difference in
people's feelings, whether they live in Bangor or Omaha, but one's
nerves can't be expected to stretch across the continent.  It is all
a matter of greater or less distance.  I read this morning that a
Chinese fleet was sunk, but I did n't think half so much about it as
I did about losing my sleeve button, confound it!  People have
accused me of want of feeling; they misunderstand the artist-nature,
--that is all.  I obey that implicitly; I am sorry if people don't
like my descriptions, but I have done my best.  I have pulled to
pieces all the persons I am acquainted with, and put them together
again in my characters.  The quills I write with come from live
geese, I would have you know.  I expect to get some first-rate
pluckings from those people I was speaking of, and I mean to begin my
thirty-ninth novel as soon as I have got through my visit."




IX

THE SOCIETY AND ITS NEW SECRETARY.

There is no use in trying to hurry the natural course of events, in a
narrative like this.  June passed away, and July, and August had
come, and as yet the enigma which had completely puzzled Arrowhead
Village and its visitors remained unsolved.  The white canoe still
wandered over the lake, alone, ghostly, always avoiding the near
approach of the boats which seemed to be coming in its direction.
Now and then a circumstance would happen which helped to keep inquiry
alive.  Good horsemanship was not so common among the young men of
the place and its neighborhood that Maurice's accomplishment in that
way could be overlooked.  If there was a wicked horse or a wild colt
whose owner was afraid of him, he would be commended to Maurice's
attention.  Paolo would lead him to his master with all due
precaution,--for he had no idea of risking his neck on the back of
any ill-conditioned beast,--and Maurice would fasten on his long
spurs, spring into the saddle, and very speedily teach the creature
good behavior.  There soon got about a story that he was what the
fresh-water fisherman called "one o' them whisperers."  It is a
common legend enough, coming from the Old World, but known in
American horse-talking circles, that some persons will whisper
certain words in a horse's ear which will tame him if he is as wild
and furious as ever Cruiser was.  All this added to the mystery which
surrounded the young man.  A single improbable or absurd story
amounts to very little, but when half a dozen such stories are told
about the same individual or the same event, they begin to produce
the effect of credible evidence.  If the year had been 1692 and the
place had been Salem Village, Maurice Kirkwood would have run the
risk of being treated like the Reverend George Burroughs.

Miss Lurida Vincent's curiosity had been intensely excited with
reference to the young man of whom so many stories were told.  She
had pretty nearly convinced herself that he was the author of the
paper on Ocean, Lake, and River, which had been read at one of the
meetings of the Pansophian Society.  She was very desirous of meeting
him, if it were possible.  It seemed as if she might, as Secretary of
the Society, request the cooperation of any of the visitors, without
impropriety.  So, after much deliberation, she wrote a careful note,
of which the following is an exact copy.  Her hand was bold, almost
masculine, a curious contrast to that of Euthymia, which was
delicately feminine.


PANSOPHIAN SOCIETY.

ARROWHEAD VILLAGE, August 3, 18-.

MAURICE KIRKWOOD, ESQ.

DEAR SIR,--You have received, I trust, a card of invitation to the
meetings of our Society, but I think we have not yet had the pleasure
of seeing you at any of them.  We have supposed that we might be
indebted to you for a paper read at the last meeting, and listened to
with much interest.  As it was anonymous, we do not wish to be
inquisitive respecting its authorship; but we desire to say that any
papers kindly sent us by the temporary residents of our village will
be welcome, and if adapted to the wants of our Association will be
read at one of its meetings or printed in its records, or perhaps
both read and printed.  May we not hope for your presence at the
meeting, which is to take place next Wednesday evening?
Respectfully yours,

LURIDA VINCENT,
Secretary of the Pansophian Society.


To this note the Secretary received the following reply:

MISS LURIDA VINCENT,

ARROWHEAD VILLAGE, August 4, 18-.

Secretary of the Pansophian Society:

DEAR MISS VINCENT,--I have received the ticket you refer to, and
desire to express my acknowledgments for the polite attention.  I
regret that I have not been and I fear shall not be able to attend
the meetings of the Society; but if any subject occurs to me on which
I feel an inclination to write, it will give me pleasure to send a
paper, to be disposed of as the Society may see fit.

Very respectfully yours,

MAURICE KIRKWOOD.


"He says nothing about the authorship of the paper that was read the
other evening," the Secretary said to herself.  "No matter,--he
wrote it,--there is no mistaking his handwriting.  We know something
about him, now, at any rate.  But why doesn't he come to our
meetings?  What has his antipathy to do with his staying away?  I
must find out what his secret is, and I will.  I don't believe it's
harder than it was to solve that prize problem which puzzled so many
teachers, or than beating Crakowitz, the great chess-player."

To this enigma, then, The Terror determined to bend all the faculties
which had excited the admiration and sometimes the amazement of those
who knew her in her school-days.  It was a very delicate piece of
business; for though Lurida was an intrepid woman's rights advocate,
and believed she was entitled to do almost everything that men dared
to, she knew very well there were certain limits which a young woman
like herself must not pass.

In the mean time Maurice had received a visit from the young student
at the University,--the same whom he had rescued from his dangerous
predicament in the lake.  With him had called one of the teachers,--
an instructor in modern languages, a native of Italy.  Maurice and
the instructor exchanged a few words in Italian.  The young man spoke
it with the ease which implied long familiarity with its use.

After they left, the instructor asked many curious questions about
him,--who he was, how long he had been in the village, whether
anything was known of his history,--all these inquiries with an
eagerness which implied some special and peculiar reason for the
interest they evinced.

"I feel satisfied," the instructor said, "that I have met that young
man in my own country.  It was a number of years ago, and of course
he has altered in appearance a good deal; but there is a look about
him of--what shall I call it?---apprehension,--as if he were fearing
the approach of something or somebody.  I think it is the way a man
would look that was haunted; you know what I mean,--followed by a
spirit or ghost.  He does not suggest the idea of a murderer,--very
far from it; but if he did, I should think he was every minute in
fear of seeing the murdered man's spirit."

The student was curious, in his turn, to know all the instructor
could recall.  He had seen him in Rome, he thought, at the Fountain
of Trevi, where so many strangers go before leaving the city.  The
youth was in the company of a man who looked like a priest.  He could
not mistake the peculiar expression of his countenance, but that was
all he now remembered about his appearance.  His attention had been
called to this young man by seeing that some of the bystanders were
pointing at him, and noticing that they were whispering with each
other as if with reference to him.  He should say that the youth was
at that time fifteen or sixteen years old, and the time was about ten
years ago.

After all, this evidence was of little or no value.  Suppose the
youth were Maurice; what then?  We know that he had been in Italy,
and had been there a good while,--or at least we infer so much from
his familiarity with the language, and are confirmed in the belief by
his having an Italian servant, whom he probably brought from Italy
when he returned.  If he wrote the paper which was read the other
evening, that settles it, for the writer says he had lived by the
Tiber.  We must put this scrap of evidence furnished by the Professor
with the other scraps; it may turn out of some consequence, sooner or
later.  It is like a piece of a dissected map; it means almost
nothing by itself, but when we find the pieces it joins with we may
discover a very important meaning in it.

In a small, concentrated community like that which centred in and
immediately around Arrowhead Village, every day must have its local
gossip as well as its general news.  The newspaper tells the small
community what is going on in the great world, and the busy tongues
of male and female, especially the latter, fill in with the
occurrences and comments of the ever-stirring microcosm.  The fact
that the Italian teacher had, or thought he had, seen Maurice ten
years before was circulated and made the most of,--turned over and
over like a cake, until it was thoroughly done on both sides and all
through.  It was a very small cake, but better than nothing.  Miss
Vincent heard this story, as others did, and talked about it with her
friend, Miss Tower.  Here was one more fact to help along.

The two young ladies who had recently graduated at the Corinna
Institute remained, as they had always been, intimate friends.  They
were the natural complements of each other.  Euthymia represented a
complete, symmetrical womanhood.  Her outward presence was only an
index of a large, wholesome, affluent life.  She could not help being
courageous, with such a firm organization.  She could not help being
generous, cheerful, active.  She had been told often enough that she
was fair to look upon.  She knew that she was called The Wonder by
the schoolmates who were dazzled by her singular accomplishments, but
she did not overvalue them.  She rather tended to depreciate her own
gifts, in comparison with those of her friend, Miss Lurida Vincent.
The two agreed all the better for differing as they did.  The octave
makes a perfect chord, when shorter intervals jar more or less on the
ear.  Each admired the other with a heartiness which if they had been
less unlike, would have been impossible.

It was a pleasant thing to observe their dependence on each other.
The Terror of the schoolroom was the oracle in her relations with her
friend.  All the freedom of movement which The Wonder showed in her
bodily exercises The Terror manifested in the world of thought.  She
would fling open a book, and decide in a swift glance whether it had
any message for her.  Her teachers had compared her way of reading to
the taking of an instantaneous photograph.  When she took up the
first book on Physiology which Dr. Butts handed her, it seemed to him
that if she only opened at any place, and gave one look, her mind
drank its meaning up, as a moist sponge absorbs water.  "What can I
do with such a creature as this?" he said to himself.  "There is
only one way to deal with her, treat her as one treats a silkworm:
give it its mulberry leaf, and it will spin its own cocoon.  Give her
the books, and she will spin her own web of knowledge."

"Do you really think of studying medicine?" said Dr. Butts to her.

"I have n't made up my mind about that," she answered, "but I want to
know a little more about this terrible machinery of life and death we
are all tangled in.  I know something about it, but not enough.  I
find some very strange beliefs among the women I meet with, and I
want to be able to silence them when they attempt to proselyte me to
their whims and fancies.  Besides, I want to know everything."

"They tell me you do, already," said Dr. Butts.

"I am the most ignorant little wretch that draws the breath of life!"
exclaimed The Terror.

The doctor smiled.  He knew what it meant.  She had reached that
stage of education in which the vast domain of the unknown opens its
illimitable expanse before the eyes of the student.  We never know
the extent of darkness until it is partially illuminated.

"You did not leave the Institute with the reputation of being the
most ignorant young lady that ever graduated there," said the doctor.
"They tell me you got the highest marks of any pupil on their record
since the school was founded."

"What a grand thing it was to be the biggest fish in our small
aquarium, to be sure!" answered The Terror.  "He was six inches long,
the monster,--a little too big for bait to catch a pickerel with!
What did you hand me that schoolbook for?  Did you think I did n't
know anything about the human body?"

"You said you were such an ignorant creature I thought I would try
you with an easy book, by way of introduction."

The Terror was not confused by her apparent self-contradiction.

"I meant what I said, and I mean what I say.  When I talk about my
ignorance, I don't measure myself with schoolgirls, doctor.  I don't
measure myself with my teachers, either.  You must talk to me as if I
were a man, a grown man, if you mean to teach me anything.  Where is
your hat, doctor?  Let me try it on."

The doctor handed her his wide-awake.  The Terror's hair was not
naturally abundant, like Euthymia's, and she kept it cut rather
short.  Her head used to get very hot when she studied hard.  She
tried to put the hat on.

"Do you see that?" she said.  "I could n't wear it--it would squeeze
my eyes out of my head.  The books told me that women's brains were
smaller than men's: perhaps they are,--most of them,--I never
measured a great many.  But when they try to settle what women are
good for, by phrenology, I like to have them put their tape round my
head.  I don't believe in their nonsense, for all that.  You might as
well tell me that if one horse weighs more than another horse he is
worth more,--a cart-horse that weighs twelve or fourteen hundred
pounds better than Eclipse, that may have weighed a thousand.  Give
me a list of the best books you can think of, and turn me loose in
your library.  I can find what I want, if you have it; and what I
don't find there I will get at the Public Library.  I shall want to
ask you a question now and then."

The doctor looked at her with a kind of admiration, but thoughtfully,
as if he feared she was thinking of a task too formidable for her
slight constitutional resource.

She returned, instinctively, to the apparent contradiction in her
statements about herself.

"I am not a fool, if I am ignorant.  Yes, doctor, I sail on a wide
sea of ignorance, but I have taken soundings of some of its shallows
and some of its depths.  Your profession deals with the facts of life
that interest me most just now, and I want to know something of it.
Perhaps I may find it a calling such as would suit me."

"Do you seriously think of becoming a practitioner of medicine?" said
the doctor.

"Certainly, I seriously think of it as a possibility, but I want to
know something more about it first.  Perhaps I sha'n't believe in
medicine enough to practise it.  Perhaps I sha'n't like it well
enough.  No matter about that.  I wish to study some of your best
books on some of the subjects that most interest me.  I know about
bones and muscles and all that, and about digestion and respiration
and such things.  I want to study up the nervous system, and learn
all about it.  I am of the nervous temperament myself, and perhaps
that is the reason.  I want to read about insanity and all that
relates to it."

A curious expression flitted across the doctor's features as The
Terror said this.

"Nervous system.  Insanity.  She has headaches, I know,--all those
large-headed, hard-thinking girls do, as a matter of course; but what
has set her off about insanity and the nervous system?  I wonder if
any of her more remote relatives are subject to mental disorder.
Bright people very often have crazy relations.  Perhaps some of her
friends are in that way.  I wonder whether"--the doctor did not speak
any of these thoughts, and in fact hardly shaped his "whether," for
The Terror interrupted his train of reflection, or rather struck into
it in a way which startled him.

"Where is the first volume of this Medical Cyclopaedia?" she asked,
looking at its empty place on the shelf.

"On my table," the doctor answered.  "I have been consulting it."

Lurida flung it open, in her eager way, and turned the pages rapidly
until she came to the one she wanted.  The doctor cast his eye on the
beading of the page, and saw the large letters A N T.

"I thought so," he said to himself.  "We shall know everything there
is in the books about antipathies now, if we never did before.  She
has a special object in studying the nervous system, just as I
suspected.  I think she does not care to mention it at this time; but
if she finds out anything of interest she will tell me, if she does
anybody.  Perhaps she does not mean to tell anybody.  It is a rather
delicate business,--a young girl studying the natural history of a
young man.  Not quite so safe as botany or palaeontology!"

Lurida, lately The Terror, now Miss Vincent, had her own plans, and
chose to keep them to herself, for the present, at least.  Her hands
were full enough, it might seem, without undertaking the solution of
the great Arrowhead Village enigma.  But she was in the most perfect
training, so far as her intelligence was concerned; and the summer
rest had restored her bodily vigor, so that her brain was like an
overcharged battery which will find conductors somewhere to carry off
its crowded energy.

At this time Arrowhead Village was enjoying the most successful
season it had ever known.  The Pansophian Society flourished to an
extraordinary degree under the fostering care of the new Secretary.
The rector was a good figure-head as President, but the Secretary was
the life of the Society.  Communications came in abundantly: some
from the village and its neighborhood, some from the University and
the Institute, some from distant and unknown sources.  The new
Secretary was very busy with the work of examining these papers.
After a forenoon so employed, the carpet of her room looked like a
barn floor after a husking-match.  A glance at the manuscripts
strewed about, or lying in heaps, would have frightened any young
writer away from the thought of authorship as a business.  If the
candidate for that fearful calling had seen the process of selection
and elimination, he would have felt still more desperately.  A paper
of twenty pages would come in, with an underscored request to please
read through, carefully.  That request alone is commonly sufficient
to condemn any paper, and prevent its having any chance of a hearing;
but the Secretary was not hardened enough yet for that kind of
martial law in dealing with manuscripts.  The looker-on might have
seen her take up the paper, cast one flashing glance at its title,
read the first sentence and the last, dip at a venture into two or
three pages, and decide as swiftly as the lightning calculator would
add up a column of figures what was to be its destination.  If
rejected, it went into the heap on the left; if approved, it was laid
apart, to be submitted to the Committee for their judgment.  The
foolish writers who insist on one's reading through their manuscript
poems and stories ought to know how fatal the request is to their
prospects.  It provokes the reader, to begin with.  The reading of
manuscript is frightful work, at the best; the reading of worthless
manuscript--and most of that which one is requested to read through
is worthless--would add to the terrors of Tartarus, if any infernal
deity were ingenious enough to suggest it as a punishment.

If a paper was rejected by the Secretary, it did not come before the
Committee, but was returned to the author, if he sent for it, which
he commonly did.  Its natural course was to try for admission into
some one of the popular magazines: into "The Sifter," the most
fastidious of them all; if that declined it, into "The Second Best;"
and if that returned it, into "The Omnivorous."  If it was refused
admittance at the doors of all the magazines, it might at length find
shelter in the corner of a newspaper, where a good deal of very
readable verse is to be met with nowadays, some of which has been, no
doubt, presented to the Pansophian Society, but was not considered up
to its standard.




X

A NEW ARRIVAL.

There was a recent accession to the transient population of the
village which gave rise to some speculation.  The new-comer was a
young fellow, rather careless in his exterior, but apparently as much
at home as if he owned Arrowhead Village and everything in it.  He
commonly had a cigar in his mouth, carried a pocket pistol, of the
non-explosive sort, and a stick with a bulldog's bead for its knob;
wore a soft bat, a coarse check suit, a little baggy, and gaiterboots
which had been half-soled,--a Bohemian-looking personage, altogether.

This individual began making explorations in every direction.  He was
very curious about the place and all the people in it.  He was
especially interested in the Pansophian Society, concerning which he
made all sorts of inquiries.  This led him to form a summer
acquaintance with the Secretary, who was pleased to give him whatever
information he asked for; being proud of the Society, as she had a
right to be, and knowing more about it than anybody else.

The visitor could not have been long in the village without hearing
something of Maurice Kirkwood, and the stories, true and false,
connected with his name.  He questioned everybody who could tell him
anything about Maurice, and set down the answers in a little note-
book he always had with him.

All this naturally excited the curiosity of the village about this
new visitor.  Among the rest, Miss Vincent, not wanting in an
attribute thought to belong more especially to her sex, became
somewhat interested to know more exactly who this inquiring, note-
taking personage, who seemed to be everywhere and to know everybody,
might himself be.  Meeting him at the Public Library at a fortunate
moment, when there was nobody but the old Librarian, who was hard of
hearing, to interfere with their conversation, the little Secretary
had a chance to try to find out something about him.

"This is a very remarkable library for a small village to possess,"
he remarked to Miss Lurida.

"It is, indeed," she said.  "Have you found it well furnished with
the books you most want?"

"Oh, yes,--books enough.  I don't care so much for the books as I do
for the Newspapers.  I like a Review well enough,--it tells you all
there is in a book; but a good abstract of the Review in a Newspaper
saves a fellow the trouble of reading it."

"You find the papers you want, here, I hope," said the young lady.

"Oh, I get along pretty well.  It's my off-time, and I don't do much
reading or writing.  Who is the city correspondent of this place?"

"I don't think we have any one who writes regularly.  Now and then,
there is a letter, with the gossip of the place in it, or an account
of some of the doings at our Society.  The city papers are always
glad to get the reports of our meetings, and to know what is going on
in the village."

"I suppose you write about the Society to the papers, as you are the
Secretary."

This was a point-blank shot.  She meant to question the young man
about his business, and here she was on the witness-stand.  She
ducked her head, and let the question go over her.

"Oh, there are plenty of members who are willing enough to write,--
especially to give an account of their own papers.  I think they like
to have me put in the applause, when they get any.  I do that
sometimes."  (How much more, she did not say.)

"I have seen some very well written articles, which, from what they
tell me of the Secretary, I should have thought she might have
written herself."

He looked her straight in the eyes.

"I have transmitted some good papers," she said, without winking, or
swallowing, or changing color, precious little color she had to
change; her brain wanted all the blood it could borrow or steal, and
more too.  "You spoke of Newspapers," she said, without any change of
tone or manner: "do you not frequently write for them yourself?"

"I should think I did," answered the young man.  "I am a regular
correspondent of 'The People's Perennial and Household Inquisitor.'"

"The regular correspondent from where?"

"Where!  Oh, anywhere,--the place does not make much difference.  I
have been writing chiefly from Naples and St. Petersburg, and now and
then from Constantinople."

"How long since your return to this country, may I ask?"

"My return?  I have never been out of this country.  I travel with a
gazetteer and some guide-books.  It is the cheapest way, and you can
get the facts much better from them than by trusting your own
observation.  I have made the tour of Europe by the help of them and
the newspapers.  But of late I have taken to interviewing.  I find
that a very pleasant specialty.  It is about as good sport as trout-
tickling, and much the same kind of business.  I should like to send
the Society an account of one of my interviews.  Don't you think they
would like to hear it?"

"I have no doubt they would.  Send it to me, and I will look it over;
and if the Committee approve it, we will have it at the next meeting.
You know everything has to be examined and voted on by the
Committee," said the cautious Secretary.

"Very well,--I will risk it.  After it is read, if it is read, please
send it back to me, as I want to sell it to 'The Sifter,' or 'The
Second Best,' or some of the paying magazines."

This is the paper, which was read at the next meeting of the
Pansophian Society.


"I was ordered by the editor of the newspaper to which I am attached,
'The People's Perennial and Household Inquisitor,' to make a visit to
a certain well-known writer, and obtain all the particulars I could
concerning him and all that related to him.  I have interviewed a
good many politicians, who I thought rather liked the process; but I
had never tried any of these literary people, and I was not quite
sure how this one would feel about it.  I said as much to the chief,
but he pooh-poohed my scruples.  'It is n't our business whether they
like it or not,' said he; 'the public wants it, and what the public
wants it's bound to have, and we are bound to furnish it.  Don't be
afraid of your man; he 's used to it,--he's been pumped often enough
to take it easy, and what you've got to do is to pump him dry.  You
need n't be modest,--ask him what you like; he is n't bound to
answer, you know.'

"As he lived in a rather nice quarter of the town, I smarted myself up
a little, put on a fresh collar and cuffs, and got a five-cent shine
on my best high-lows.  I said to myself, as I was walking towards the
house where he lived, that I would keep very shady for a while and
pass for a visitor from a distance; one of those 'admiring strangers'
who call in to pay their respects, to get an autograph, and go home
and say that they have met the distinguished So and So, which gives
them a certain distinction in the village circle to which they
belong.

"My man, the celebrated writer, received me in what was evidently his
reception-room.  I observed that he managed to get the light full on
my face, while his own was in the shade.  I had meant to have his
face in the light, but he knew the localities, and had arranged
things so as to give him that advantage.  It was like two frigates
manoeuvring,--each trying to get to windward of the other.  I never
take out my note-book until I and my man have got engaged in artless
and earnest conversation,--always about himself and his works, of
course, if he is an author.

"I began by saying that he must receive a good many callers.  Those
who had read his books were naturally curious to see the writer of
them.

"He assented, emphatically, to this statement.  He had, he said, a
great many callers.

"I remarked that there was a quality in his books which made his
readers feel as if they knew him personally, and caused them to
cherish a certain attachment to him.

"He smiled, as if pleased.  He was himself disposed to think so, he
said.  In fact, a great many persons, strangers writing to him, had
told him so.

"My dear sir, I said, there is nothing wonderful in the fact you
mention.  You reach a responsive chord in many human breasts.

     'One touch of Nature makes the whole world kin.'

"Everybody feels as if he, and especially she (his eyes sparkled),
were your blood relation.  Do they not name their children after you
very frequently?

"He blushed perceptibly.  'Sometimes,' he answered.  'I hope they
will all turn out well.'

"I am afraid I am taking up too much of your time, I said.

"No, not at all,' he replied.  'Come up into my library; it is warmer
and pleasanter there.'

"I felt confident that I had him by the right handle then; for an
author's library, which is commonly his working-room, is, like a
lady's boudoir, a sacred apartment.

"So we went upstairs, and again he got me with the daylight on my
face, when I wanted it on has.

"You have a fine library, I remarked.  There were books all round the
room, and one of those whirligig square book-cases.  I saw in front a
Bible and a Concordance, Shakespeare and Mrs. Cowden Clarke's book,
and other classical works and books of grave aspect.  I contrived to
give it a turn, and on the side next the wall I got a glimpse of
Barnum's Rhyming Dictionary, and several Dictionaries of Quotations
and cheap compends of knowledge.  Always twirl one of those revolving
book-cases when you visit a scholar's library.  That is the way to
find out what books he does n't want you to see, which of course are
the ones you particularly wish to see.

"Some may call all this impertinent and inquisitive.  What do you
suppose is an interviewer's business?  Did you ever see an oyster
opened?  Yes?  Well, an interviewer's business is the same thing.
His man is his oyster, which he, not with sword, but with pencil and
note-book, must open.  Mark how the oysterman's thin blade insinuates
itself,--how gently at first, how strenuously when once fairly
between the shells!

"And here, I said, you write your books,--those books which have
carried your name to all parts of the world, and will convey it down
to posterity!  Is this the desk at which you write?  And is this the
pen you write with?

"'It is the desk and the very pen,' he replied.

"He was pleased with my questions and my way of putting them.  I took
up the pen as reverentially as if it had been made of the feather
which the angel I used to read about in Young's "Night Thoughts"
ought to have dropped, and did n't.

"Would you kindly write your autograph in my note-book, with that
pen?  I asked him.  Yes, he would, with great pleasure.

"So I got out my note-book.

"It was a spick and span new one, bought on purpose for this
interview.  I admire your bookcases, said I.  Can you tell me just
how high they are?

"'They are about eight feet, with the cornice.'

"I should like to have some like those, if I ever get rich enough,
said I.  Eight feet,--eight feet, with the cornice.  I must put that
down.

"So I got out my pencil.

"I sat there with my pencil and note-book in my hand, all ready, but
not using them as yet.

"I have heard it said, I observed, that you began writing poems at a
very early age.  Is it taking too great a liberty to ask how early
you began to write in verse?

"He was getting interested, as people are apt to be when they are
themselves the subjects of conversation.

"'Very early,--I hardly know how early.  I can say truly, as Louise
Colet said,

     "'Je fis mes premiers vers sans savoir les ecrire.'"

"I am not a very good French scholar, said I; perhaps you will be
kind enough to translate that line for me.

"'Certainly.  With pleasure.  I made my first
verses without knowing how to write them.'

"How interesting!  But I never heard of Louise Colet.  Who was she?

"My man was pleased to gi-ve me a piece of literary information.

"'Louise the lioness!  Never heard of her?  You have heard of
Alphonse Karr?'

"Why,--yes,--more or less.  To tell the truth, I am not very well up
in French literature.  What had he to do with your lioness?

"'A good deal.  He satirized her, and she waited at his door with a
case-knife in her hand, intending to stick him with it.  By and by he
came down, smoking a cigarette, and was met by this woman flourishing
her case-knife.  He took it from her, after getting a cut in his
dressing-gown, put it in his pocket, and went on with his cigarette.
He keeps it with an inscription:


     "Donne a Alphonse Karr
     Par Madame Louise Colet....
     Dans le dos.

"Lively little female!'

"I could n't help thinking that I should n't have cared to interview
the lively little female.  He was evidently tickled with the interest
I appeared to take in the story he told me.  That made him feel
amiably disposed toward me.

"I began with very general questions, but by degrees I got at
everything about his family history and the small events of his
boyhood.  Some of the points touched upon were delicate, but I put a
good bold face on my most audacious questions, and so I wormed out a
great deal that was new concerning my subject.  He had been written
about considerably, and the public wouldn't have been satisfied
without some new facts; and these I meant to have, and I got.  No
matter about many of them now, but here are some questions and
answers that may be thought worth reading or listening to:

"How do you enjoy being what they call 'a celebrity,' or a celebrated
man?

"'So far as one's vanity is concerned it is well enough.  But self-
love is a cup without any bottom, and you might pour the Great Lakes
all through it, and never fill it up.  It breeds an appetite for more
of the same kind.  It tends to make the celebrity a mere lump of
egotism.  It generates a craving for high-seasoned personalities
which is in danger of becoming slavery, like that following the abuse
of alcohol, or opium, or tobacco.  Think of a man's having every day,
by every post, letters that tell him he is this and that and the
other, with epithets and endearments, one tenth part of which would
have made him blush red hot before he began to be what you call a
celebrity!'

"Are there not some special inconveniences connected with what is
called celebrity?

"'I should think so!  Suppose you were obliged every day of your life
to stand and shake hands, as the President of the United States has
to after his inauguration: how do you think your hand would feel
after a few months' practice of that exercise?  Suppose you had given
you thirty-five millions of money a year, in hundred-dollar coupons,
on condition that you cut them all off yourself in the usual manner:
how do you think you should like the look of a pair of scissors at
the end of a year, in which you had worked ten hours a day every day
but Sunday, cutting off a hundred coupons an hour, and found you had
not finished your task, after all?  Yon have addressed me as what you
are pleased to call "a literary celebrity."  I won't dispute with you
as to whether or not I deserve that title.  I will take it for
granted I am what you call me, and give you some few hints on my
experience.

"'You know there was formed a while ago an Association of Authors for
Self-Protection.  It meant well, and it was hoped that something
would come of it in the way of relieving that oppressed class, but I
am sorry to say that it has not effected its purpose.'

"I suspected he had a hand in drawing up the Constitution and Laws of
that Association.  Yes, I said, an admirable Association it was, and
as much needed as the one for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
I am sorry to hear that it has not proved effectual in putting a stop
to the abuse of a deserving class of men.  It ought to have done it;
it was well conceived, and its public manifesto was a masterpiece.
(I saw by his expression that he was its author.)

"'I see I can trust you,' he said.  'I will unbosom myself freely of
some of the grievances attaching to the position of the individual to
whom you have applied the term "Literary Celebrity."

"'He is supposed to be a millionaire, in virtue of the immense sales
of his books, all the money from which, it is taken for granted, goes
into his pocket.  Consequently, all subscription papers are handed to
him for his signature, and every needy stranger who has heard his
name comes to him for assistance.

"'He is expected to subscribe for all periodicals, and is goaded by
receiving blank formulae, which, with their promises to pay, he is
expected to fill up.

"'He receives two or three books daily, with requests to read and
give his opinion about each of them, which opinion, if it has a word
which can be used as an advertisement, he will find quoted in all the
newspapers.

"'He receives thick masses of manuscript, prose and verse, which he
is called upon to examine and pronounce on their merits; these
manuscripts having almost invariably been rejected by the editors to
whom they have been sent, and having as a rule no literary value
whatever.

"'He is expected to sign petitions, to contribute to journals, to
write for fairs, to attend celebrations, to make after-dinner
speeches, to send money for objects he does not believe in to places
he never heard of.

"'He is called on to keep up correspondences with unknown admirers,
who begin by saying they have no claim upon his time, and then
appropriate it by writing page after page, if of the male sex; and
sheet after sheet, if of the other.

"'If a poet, it is taken for granted that he can sit down at any
moment and spin off any number of verses on any subject which may be
suggested to him; such as congratulations to the writer's great-
grandmother on her reaching her hundredth year, an elegy on an infant
aged six weeks, an ode for the Fourth of July in a Western township
not to be found in Lippincott's last edition, perhaps a valentine for
some bucolic lover who believes that wooing in rhyme is the way to
win the object of his affections.'

"Is n't it so?  I asked the Celebrity.

"'I would bet on the prose lover.  She will show the verses to him,
and they will both have a good laugh over them.'

"I have only reported a small part of the conversation I had with the
Literary Celebrity.  He was so much taken up with his pleasing self-
contemplation, while I made him air his opinions and feelings and
spread his characteristics as his laundress spreads and airs his
linen on the clothes-line, that I don't believe it ever occurred to
him that he had been in the hands of an interviewer until he found
himself exposed to the wind and sunshine in full dimensions in the
columns of The People's Perennial and Household Inquisitor.'"

After the reading of this paper, much curiosity was shown as to who
the person spoken of as the "Literary Celebrity" might be.  Among the
various suppositions the startling idea was suggested that he was
neither more nor less than the unexplained personage known in the
village as Maurice Kirkwood.  Why should that be his real name?  Why
should not he be the Celebrity, who had taken this name and fled to
this retreat to escape from the persecutions of kind friends, who
were pricking him and stabbing him nigh to death with their daggers
of sugar candy?

The Secretary of the Pansophian Society determined to question the
Interviewer the next time she met him at the Library, which happened
soon after the meeting when his paper was read.

"I do not know," she said, in the course of a conversation in which
she had spoken warmly of his contribution to the literary
entertainment of the Society, "that you mentioned the name of the
Literary Celebrity whom you interviewed so successfully."

"I did not mention him, Miss Vincent," he answered, "nor do I think
it worth while to name him.  He might not care to have the whole
story told of how he was handled so as to make him communicative.
Besides, if I did, it would bring him a new batch of sympathetic
letters, regretting that he was bothered by those horrid
correspondents, full of indignation at the bores who presumed to
intrude upon him with their pages of trash, all the writers of which
would expect answers to their letters of condolence."

The Secretary asked the Interviewer if he knew the young gentleman
who called himself Maurice Kirkwood.

"What," he answered, "the man that paddles a birch canoe, and rides
all the wild horses of the neighborhood?  No, I don't know him, but I
have met him once or twice, out walking.  A mighty shy fellow, they
tell me.  Do you know anything particular about him?"

"Not much.  None of us do, but we should like to.  The story is that
be has a queer antipathy to something or to somebody, nobody knows
what or whom."

"To newspaper correspondents, perhaps," said the interviewer.  "What
made you ask me about him?  You did n't think he was my 'Literary
Celebrity,' did you?"

"I did not know.  I thought he might be.  Why don't you interview
this mysterious personage?  He would make a good sensation for your
paper, I should think."

"Why, what is there to be interviewed in him?  Is there any story of
crime, or anything else to spice a column or so, or even a few
paragraphs, with?  If there is, I am willing to handle him
professionally."

"I told you he has what they call an antipathy.  I don't know how
much wiser you are for that piece of information."

"An antipathy!  Why, so have I an antipathy.  I hate a spider, and as
for a naked caterpillar,--I believe I should go into a fit if I had
to touch one.  I know I turn pale at the sight of some of those great
green caterpillars that come down from the elm-trees in August and
early autumn."

"Afraid of them?" asked the young lady.

"Afraid?  What should I be afraid of?  They can't bite or sting.  I
can't give any reason.  All I know is that when I come across one of
these creatures in my path I jump to one side, and cry out,--
sometimes using very improper words.  The fact is, they make me crazy
for the moment."

"I understand what you mean," said Miss Vincent.  "I used to have the
same feeling about spiders, but I was ashamed of it, and kept a
little menagerie of spiders until I had got over the feeling; that
is, pretty much got over it, for I don't love the creatures very
dearly, though I don't scream when I see one."

"What did you tell me, Miss Vincent, was this fellow's particular
antipathy?"

That is just the question.  I told you that we don't know and we
can't guess what it is.  The people here are tired out with trying to
discover some good reason for the young man's keeping out of the way
of everybody, as he does.  They say he is odd or crazy, and they
don't seem to be able to tell which.  It would make the old ladies of
the village sleep a great deal sounder,--yes, and some of the young
ladies, too,--if they could find out what this Mr. Kirkwood has got
into his head, that he never comes near any of the people here."

"I think I can find out," said the Interviewer, whose professional
ambition was beginning to be excited.  "I never came across anybody
yet that I could n't get something out of.  I am going to stay here a
week or two, and before I go I will find out the secret, if there is
any, of this Mr. Maurice Kirkwood."

We must leave the Interviewer to his contrivances until they present
us with some kind of result, either in the shape of success or
failure.




XI

THE INTERVIEWER ATTACKS THE SPHINX.

When Miss Euthymia Tower sent her oar off in flashing splinters, as
she pulled her last stroke in the boat-race, she did not know what a
strain she was putting upon it.  She did know that she was doing her
best, but how great the force of her best was she was not aware until
she saw its effects.  Unconsciousness belonged to her robust nature,
in all its manifestations.  She did not pride herself on her
knowledge, nor reproach herself for her ignorance.  In every way she
formed a striking contrast to her friend, Miss Vincent.  Every word
they spoke betrayed the difference between them: the sharp tones of
Lurida's head-voice, penetrative, aggressive, sometimes irritating,
revealed the corresponding traits of mental and moral character; the
quiet, conversational contralto of Euthymia was the index of a nature
restful and sympathetic.

The friendships of young girls prefigure the closer relations which
will one day come in and dissolve their earlier intimacies.  The
dependence of two young friends may be mutual, but one will always
lean more heavily than the other; the masculine and feminine elements
will be as sure to assert themselves as if the friends were of
different sexes.

On all common occasions Euthymia looked up to her friend as her
superior.  She fully appreciated all her varied gifts and knowledge,
and deferred to her opinion in every-day matters, not exactly as an
oracle, but as wiser than herself or any of her other companions.  It
was a different thing, however, when the graver questions of life
came up.  Lurida was full of suggestions, plans, projects, which were
too liable to run into whims before she knew where they were tending.
She would lay out her ideas before Euthymia so fluently and
eloquently that she could not help believing them herself, and
feeling as if her friend must accept them with an enthusiasm like her
own.  Then Euthymia would take them up with her sweet, deliberate
accents, and bring her calmer judgment to bear on them.

Lurida was in an excited condition, in the midst of all her new
interests and occupations.  She was constantly on the lookout for
papers to be read at the meetings of her Society,--for she made it
her own in great measure, by her zeal and enthusiasm,--and in the
mean time she was reading in various books which Dr. Butts selected
for her, all bearing on the profession to which, at least as a
possibility, she was looking forward.  Privately and in a very still
way, she was occupying herself with the problem of the young
stranger, the subject of some delusion, or disease, or obliquity of
unknown nature, to which the vague name of antipathy had been
attached.  Euthymia kept an eye upon her, partly in the fear that
over-excitement would produce some mental injury, and partly from
anxiety lest she should compromise her womanly dignity in her desire
to get at the truth of a very puzzling question.

"How do you like the books I see you reading?" said Euthymia to
Lurida, one day, as they met at the Library.

"Better than all the novels I ever read," she answered.  "I have been
reading about the nervous system, and it seems to me I have come
nearer the springs of life than ever before in all my studies.  I
feel just as if I were a telegraph operator.  I was sure that I had a
battery in my head, for I know my brain works like one; but I did not
know how many centres of energy there are, and how they are played
upon by all sorts of influences, external and internal.  Do you know,
I believe I could solve the riddle of the 'Arrowhead Village Sphinx,'
as the paper called him, if he would only stay here long enough?"

"What paper has had anything about it, Lurida?  I have not seen or
heard of its being mentioned in any of the papers."

"You know that rather queer-looking young man who has been about here
for some time,--the same one who gave the account of his interview
with a celebrated author?  Well, he has handed me a copy of a paper
in which he writes, 'The People's Perennial and Household
Inquisitor.' He talks about this village in a very free and easy way.
He says there is a Sphinx here, who has mystified us all."

"And you have been chatting with that fellow!  Don't you know that
he'll have you and all of us in his paper?  Don't you know that
nothing is safe where one of those fellows gets in with his note-book
and pencil?  Oh, Lurida, Lurida, do be careful!"  What with this
mysterious young man and this very questionable newspaper-paragraph
writer, you will be talked about, if you don't mind, before you know
it.  You had better let the riddle of the Sphinx alone.  If you must
deal with such dangerous people, the safest way is to set one of them
to find out the other.--I wonder if we can't get this new man to
interview the visitor you have so much curiosity about.  That might
be managed easily enough without your having anything to do with it.
Let me alone, and I will arrange it.  But mind, now, you must not
meddle; if you do, you will spoil everything, and get your name in
the 'Household Inquisitor' in a way you won't like."

"Don't be frightened about me, Euthymia.  I don't mean to give him a
chance to work me into his paper, if I can help it.  But if you can
get him to try his skill upon this interesting personage and his
antipathy, so much the better.  I am very curious about it, and
therefore about him.  I want to know what has produced this strange
state of feeling in a young man who ought to have all the common
instincts of a social being.  I believe there are unexplained facts
in the region of sympathies and antipathies which will repay study
with a deeper insight into the mysteries of life than we have dreamed
of hitherto.  I often wonder whether there are not heart-waves and
soul-waves as well as 'brain-waves,' which some have already
recognized."

Euthymia wondered, as well she might, to hear this young woman
talking the language of science like an adept.  The truth is, Lurida
was one of those persons who never are young, and who, by way of
compensation, will never be old.  They are found in both sexes.  Two
well-known graduates of one of our great universities are living
examples of this precocious but enduring intellectual development.
If the readers of this narrative cannot pick them out, they need not
expect the writer of it to help them.  If they guess rightly who they
are, they will recognize the fact that just such exceptional
individuals as the young woman we are dealing with are met with from
time to time in families where intelligence has been cumulative for
two or three generations.

Euthymia was very willing that the questioning and questionable
visitor should learn all that was known in the village about the
nebulous individual whose misty environment all the eyes in the
village were trying to penetrate, but that he should learn it from
some other informant than Lurida.

The next morning, as the Interviewer took his seat on a bench outside
his door, to smoke his after-breakfast cigar, a bright-looking and
handsome youth, whose features recalled those of Euthymia so
strikingly that one might feel pretty sure he was her brother, took a
seat by his side.  Presently the two were engaged in conversation.
The Interviewer asked all sorts of questions about everybody in the
village.  When he came to inquire about Maurice, the youth showed a
remarkable interest regarding him.  The greatest curiosity, he said,
existed with reference to this personage.  Everybody was trying to
find out what his story was,--for a story, and a strange one, he must
surely have,--and nobody had succeeded.

The Interviewer began to be unusually attentive.  The young man told
him the various antipathy stories, about the evil-eye hypothesis,
about his horse-taming exploits, his rescuing the student whose boat
was overturned, and every occurrence he could recall which would help
out the effect of his narrative.

The Interviewer was becoming excited.  "Can't find out anything about
him, you said, did n-'t you?  How do you know there's anything to
find?  Do you want to know what I think he is?  I'll tell you.  I
think he is an actor,--a fellow from one of the city theatres.  Those
fellows go off in their summer vacation, and like to puzzle the
country folks.  They are the very same chaps, like as not, the
visitors have seen in plays at the city theatres; but of course they
don't know 'em in plain clothes.  Kings and Emperors look pretty
shabby off the stage sometimes, I can tell you."

The young man followed the Interviewer's lead.  "I shouldn't wonder
if you were right," he said.  "I remember seeing a young fellow in
Romeo that looked a good deal like this one.  But I never met the
Sphinx, as they call him, face to face.  He is as shy as a woodchuck.
I believe there are people here that would give a hundred dollars to
find out who he is, and where he came from, and what he is here for,
and why he does n't act like other folks.  I wonder why some of those
newspaper men don't come up here and get hold of this story.  It
would be just the thing for a sensational writer."

To all this the Interviewer listened with true professional interest.
Always on the lookout for something to make up a paragraph or a
column about; driven oftentimes to the stalest of repetitions,--to
the biggest pumpkin story, the tall cornstalk, the fat ox, the live
frog from the human stomach story, the third set of teeth and reading
without spectacles at ninety story, and the rest of the marvellous
commonplaces which are kept in type with e o y  or  e 6 m (every
other year or every six months) at the foot; always in want of a
fresh incident, a new story, an undescribed character, an unexplained
mystery, it is no wonder that the Interviewer fastened eagerly upon
this most tempting subject for an inventive and emotional
correspondent.

He had seen Paolo several times, and knew that he was Maurice's
confidential servant, but had never spoken to him.  So he said to
himself that he must make Paolo's acquaintance, to begin with.  In
the summer season many kinds of small traffic were always carried on
in Arrowhead Village.  Among the rest, the sellers of fruits--
oranges, bananas, and others, according to the seasons--did an active
business.  The Interviewer watched one of these fruit-sellers, and
saw that his hand-cart stopped opposite the house where, as he knew,
Maurice Kirkwood was living.  Presently Paolo came out of the door,
and began examining the contents of the hand-cart.  The Interviewer
saw his opportunity.  Here was an introduction to the man, and the
man must introduce him to the master.

He knew very well how to ingratiate himself with the man,--there was
no difficulty about that.  He had learned his name, and that he was
an Italian whom Maurice had brought to this country with him.

"Good morning, Mr. Paul," he said.  "How do you like the look of
these oranges?"

"They pretty fair," said Paolo: "no so good as them las' week; no
sweet as them was."

"Why, how do you know without tasting them?" said the Interviewer.

"I know by his look,--I know by his smell,--he no good yaller,--he no
smell ripe,--I know orange ever since my head no bigger than he is,"
and Paolo laughed at his own comparison.

The Interviewer laughed louder than Paolo.

"Good!" said he,--"first-rate!  Of course you know all about 'em.
Why can't you pick me out a couple of what you think are the best of
'em?  I shall be greatly obliged to you.  I have a sick friend, and I
want to get two nice sweet ones for him."

Paolo was pleased.  His skill and judgment were recognized.  He felt
grateful to the stranger, who had given him, an opportunity of
conferring a favor.  He selected two, after careful examination and
grave deliberation.  The Interviewer had sense and tact enough not to
offer him an orange, and so shift the balance of obligation.

"How is Mr. Kirkwood, to-day?" he asked.

"Signor?  He very well.  He always well.  Why you ask?  Anybody tell
you he sick?"

"No, nobody said he was sick.  I have n't seen him going about for a
day or two, and I thought be might have something the matter with
him.  Is he in the house now?"

"No: he off riding.  He take long, long rides, sometime gone all day.
Sometime he go on lake, paddle, paddle in the morning, very, very
early,--in night when the moon shine; sometime stay in house, and
read, and study, and write,--he great scholar, Misser Kirkwood."

"A good many books, has n't he?"

"He got whole shelfs full of books.  Great books, little books, old
books, new books, all sorts of books.  He great scholar, I tell you."

"Has n't he some curiosities,--old figures, old jewelry, old coins,
or things of that sort?"

Paolo looked at the young man cautiously, almost suspiciously.
"He don't keep no jewels nor no money in his chamber.  He got some
old things,--old jugs, old brass figgers, old money, such as they
used to have in old times: she don't pass now."  Paolo's genders were
apt to be somewhat indiscriminately distributed.

A lucky thought struck the Interviewer.  "I wonder if he would
examine some old coins of mine?" said he, in a modestly tentative
manner.

"I think he like to see anything curious.  When he come home I ask
him.  Who will I tell him wants to ask him about old coin?"

"Tell him a gentleman visiting Arrowhead Village would like to call
and show him some old pieces of money, said to be Roman ones."

The Interviewer had just remembered that he had two or three old
battered bits of copper which he had picked up at a tollman's, where
they had been passed off for cents.  He had bought them as
curiosities.  One had the name of Gallienus upon it, tolerably
distinct,--a common little Roman penny; but it would serve his
purpose of asking a question, as would two or three others with less
legible legends.  Paolo told him that if he came the next morning he
would stand a fair chance of seeing Mr. Kirkwood.  At any rate, he
would speak to his master.

The Interviewer presented himself the next morning, after finishing
his breakfast and his cigar, feeling reasonably sure of finding Mr.
Kirkwood at home, as he proved to be.  He had told Paolo to show the
stranger up to his library,--or study, as he modestly called it.

It was a pleasant room enough, with a lookout on the lake in one
direction, and the wooded hill in another.  The tenant had fitted it
up in scholarly fashion.  The books Paolo spoke of were conspicuous,
many of them, by their white vellum binding and tasteful gilding,
showing that probably they had been bound in Rome, or some other
Italian city.  With these were older volumes in their dark original
leather, and recent ones in cloth or paper.  As the Interviewer ran
his eye over them, he found that he could make very little out of
what their backs taught him.  Some of the paper-covered books, some
of the cloth-covered ones, had names which he knew; but those on the
backs of many of the others were strange to his eyes.  The classics
of Greek and Latin and Italian literature were there; and he saw
enough to feel convinced that he had better not attempt to display
his erudition in the company of this young scholar.

The first thing the Interviewer had to do was to account for his
visiting a person who had not asked to make his acquaintance, and who
was living as a recluse.  He took out his battered coppers, and
showed them to Maurice.

"I understood that you were very skilful in antiquities, and had a
good many yourself.  So I took the liberty of calling upon you,
hoping that you could tell me something about some ancient coins I
have had for a good while."  So saying, he pointed to the copper with
the name of Gallienus.

"Is this very rare and valuable?  I have heard that great prices have
been paid for some of these ancient coins,--ever so many guineas,
sometimes.  I suppose this is as much as a thousand years old."

"More than a thousand years old," said Maurice.

"And worth a great deal of money?" asked the Interviewer.

"No, not a great deal of money," answered Maurice.

"How much, should you say?" said the Interviewer.

Maurice smiled.  "A little more than the value of its weight in
copper,--I am afraid not much more.  There are a good many of these
coins of Gallienus knocking about.  The peddlers and the shopkeepers
take such pieces occasionally, and sell them, sometimes for five or
ten cents, to young collectors.  No, it is not very precious in money
value, but as a relic any piece of money that was passed from hand to
hand a thousand or fifteen hundred years ago is interesting.  The
value of such relics is a good deal a matter of imagination."

"And what do you say to these others?" asked the Interviewer.  Poor
old worn-out things they were, with a letter or two only, and some
faint trace of a figure on one or two of them.

"Very interesting, always, if they carry your imagination back to the
times when you may suppose they were current.  Perhaps Horace tossed
one of them to a beggar.  Perhaps one of these was the coin that was
brought when One said to those about Him, 'Bring me a penny, that I
may see it.'  But the market price is a different matter.  That
depends on the beauty and preservation, and above all the rarity, of
the specimen.  Here is a coin, now,"--he opened a small cabinet, and
took one from it.  "Here is a Syracusan decadrachm with the head of
Persephone, which is at once rare, well preserved, and beautiful.  I
am afraid to tell what I paid for it."

The Interviewer was not an expert in numismatics.  He cared very
little more for an old coin than he did for an old button, but he had
thought his purchase at the tollman's might prove a good speculation.
No matter about the battered old pieces: he had found out, at any
rate, that Maurice must have money and could be extravagant, or what
he himself considered so; also that he was familiar with ancient
coins.  That would do for a beginning.

"May I ask where you picked up the coin you are showing me?" he said

"That is a question which provokes a negative answer.  One does not
'pick up' first-class coins or paintings, very often, in these times.
I bought this of a great dealer in Rome."

"Lived in Rome once?" said the Interviewer.

"For some years.  Perhaps you have been there yourself?"

The Interviewer said he had never been there yet, but he hoped he
should go there, one of these years.  "suppose you studied art and
antiquities while you were there?" he continued.

"Everybody who goes to Rome must learn something of art and
antiquities.  Before you go there I advise you to review Roman
history and the classic authors.  You had better make a study of
ancient and modern art, and not have everything to learn while you
are going about among ruins, and churches, and galleries.  You know
your Horace and Virgil well, I take it for granted?"

The Interviewer hesitated.  The names sounded as if he had heard
them.  "Not so well as I mean to before going to Rome," he answered.
"May I ask how long you lived in Rome?"

"Long enough to know something of what is to be seen in it.  No one
should go there without careful preparation beforehand.  You are
familiar with Vasari, of course?"

The Interviewer felt a slight moisture on his forehead.  He took out
his handkerchief.  "It is a warm day," he said.  "I have not had time
to read all--the works I mean to.  I have had too much writing to do,
myself, to find all the time for reading and study I could have
wished."

"In what literary occupation have you been engaged, if you will
pardon my inquiry?  said Maurice.

"I am connected with the press.  I understood that you were a man of
letters, and I hoped I might have the privilege of hearing from your
own lips some account of your literary experiences."

"Perhaps that might be interesting, but I think I shall reserve it
for my autobiography.  You said you were connected with the press.
Do I understand that you are an author?"

By this time the Interviewer had come to the conclusion that it was a
very warm day.  He did not seem to be getting hold of his pitcher by
the right handle, somehow.  But he could not help answering Maurice's
very simple question.

"If writing for a newspaper gives one a right to be called an author,
I may call myself one.  I write for the "People's Perennial and
Household Inquisitor.'"

"Are you the literary critic of that well-known journal, or do you
manage the political column?"

"I am a correspondent from different places and on various matters of
interest."

"Places you have been to, and people you have known?"

"Well, yes,-generally, that is.  Sometimes I have to compile my
articles."

"Did you write the letter from Rome, published a few weeks ago?"

The Interviewer was in what he would call a tight place.  However, he
had found that his man was too much for him, and saw that the best
thing he could do was to submit to be interviewed himself.  He
thought that he should be able to pick up something or other which he
could work into his report of his visit.

"Well, I--prepared that article for our columns.  You know one does
not have to see everything he describes.  You found it accurate, I
hope, in its descriptions?"

"Yes, Murray is generally accurate.  Sometimes he makes mistakes, but
I can't say how far you have copied them.  You got the Ponte Molle--
the old Milvian bridge--a good deal too far down the stream, if I
remember.  I happened to notice that, but I did not read the article
carefully.  May I ask whether you propose to do me the honor of
reporting this visit and the conversation we have had, for the
columns of the newspaper with which you are connected?"

The Interviewer thought he saw an opening.  "If you have no
objections," he said, "I should like very much to ask a few
questions."  He was recovering his professional audacity.

"You can ask as many questions as you consider proper and discreet,--
after you have answered one or two of mine: Who commissioned you to
submit me to examination?"

"The curiosity of the public wishes to be gratified, and I am the
humble agent of its investigations."

"What has the public to do with my private affairs?"

"I suppose it is a question of majority and minority.  That settles
everything in this country.  You are a minority of one opposed to a
large number of curious people that form a majority against you.
That is the way I've heard the chief put it."

Maurice could not help smiling at the quiet assumption of the
American citizen.  The Interviewer smiled, too, and thought he had
his man, sure, at last.  Maurice calmly answered, "There is nothing
left for minorities, then, but the right of rebellion.  I don't care
about being made the subject of an article for your paper.  I am here
for my pleasure, minding my own business, and content with that
occupation.  I rebel against your system of forced publicity.
Whenever I am ready I shall tell the public all it has any right to
know about me.  In the mean time I shall request to be spared reading
my biography while I am living.  I wish you a good-morning."

The Interviewer had not taken out his note-book and pencil.  In his
next communication from Arrowhead Village he contented himself with a
brief mention of the distinguished and accomplished gentleman now
visiting the place, whose library and cabinet of coins he had had the
privilege of examining, and whose courtesy was equalled only by the
modesty that shunned the public notoriety which the organs of popular
intelligence would otherwise confer upon him.

The Interviewer had attempted the riddle of the Sphinx, and had
failed to get the first hint of its solution.

The many tongues of the village and its visitors could not remain
idle.  The whole subject of antipathies had been talked over, and the
various cases recorded had become more or less familiar to the
conversational circles which met every evening in the different
centres of social life.  The prevalent hypothesis for the moment was
that Maurice had a congenital aversion to some color, the effects of
which upon him were so painful or disagreeable that he habitually
avoided exposure to it.  It was known, and it has already been
mentioned, that such cases were on record.  There had been a great
deal of discussion, of late, with reference to a fact long known to a
few individuals, but only recently made a matter of careful
scientific observation and brought to the notice of the public.  This
was the now well-known phenomenon of color-blindness.  It did not
seem very strange that if one person in every score or two could not
tell red from green there might be other curious individual
peculiarities relating to color.  A case has already been referred to
where the subject of observation fainted at the sight of any red
object.  What if this were the trouble with Maurice Kirkwood?  It
will be seen at once how such a congenital antipathy would tend to
isolate the person who was its unfortunate victim.  It was an
hypothesis not difficult to test, but it was a rather delicate
business to be experimenting on an inoffensive stranger.  Miss
Vincent was thinking it over, but said nothing, even to Euthymia, of
any projects she might entertain.




XII

MISS VINCENT AS A MEDICAL STUDENT.

The young lady whom we have known as The Terror, as Lurida, as Miss
Vincent, Secretary of the Pansophian Society, had been reading
various works selected for her by Dr. Butts,--works chiefly relating
to the nervous system and its different affections.  She thought it
was about time to talk over the general subject of the medical
profession with her new teacher,--if such a self-directing person as
Lurida could be said to recognize anybody as teacher.

She began at the beginning.  "What is the first book you would put in
a student's hands, doctor?" she said to him one day.  They were in
his study, and Lurida had just brought back a thick volume on
Insanity, one of Bucknill and Puke's, which she had devoured as if it
had been a pamphlet.

"Not that book, certainly," he said.  "I am afraid it will put all
sorts of notions into your head.  Who or what set you to reading
that, I should like to know?"

"I found it on one of your shelves, and as I thought I might perhaps
be crazy some time or other, I felt as if I should like to know what
kind of a condition insanity is.  I don't believe they were ever very
bright, those insane people, most of them.  I hope I am not stupid
enough ever to lose my wits."

"There is no telling, my dear, what may happen if you overwork that
busy brain of yours.  But did n't it make you nervous, reading about
so many people possessed with such strange notions?"

"Nervous?  Not a bit.  I could n't help thinking, though, how many
people I had known that had a little touch of craziness about them.
Take that poor woman that says she is Her Majesty's Person,--not Her
Majesty, but Her Majesty's Person,--a very important distinction,
according to her: how she does remind me of more than one girl I have
known!  She would let her skirts down so as to make a kind of train,
and pile things on her head like a sort of crown, fold her arms and
throw her head back, and feel as grand as a queen.  I have seen more
than one girl act very much in that way.  Are not most of us a little
crazy, doctor,--just a little?  I think so.  It seems to me I never
saw but one girl who was free from every hint of craziness."

"And who was that, pray?"

"Why, Euthymia,--nobody else, of course.  She never loses her head,--
I don't believe she would in an earthquake.  Whenever we were at work
with our microscopes at the Institute I always told her that her mind
was the only achromatic one I ever looked into,--I did n't say looked
through.---But I did n't come to talk about that.  I read in one of
your books that when Sydenham was asked by a student what books he
should read, the great physician said, 'Read "Don Quixote."' I want
you to explain that to me; and then I want you to tell me what is the
first book, according to your idea, that a student ought to read."

"What do you say to my taking your question as the subject of a paper
to be read before the Society?  I think there may be other young
ladies at the meeting, besides yourself, who are thinking of pursuing
the study of medicine.  At any rate, there are a good many who are
interested in the subject; in fact, most people listen readily to
anything doctors tell them about their calling."

"I wish you would, doctor.  I want Euthymia to hear it, and I don't
doubt there will be others who will be glad to hear everything you
have to say about it.  But oh, doctor, if you could only persuade
Eutbymia to become a physician!  What a doctor she would make!  So
strong, so calm, so full of wisdom!  I believe she could take the
wheel of a steamboat in a storm, or the hose of a fire-engine in a
conflagration, and handle it as well as the captain of the boat or of
the fire-company."

"Have you ever talked with her about studying medicine?"

"Indeed I have.  Oh, if she would only begin with me!  What good
times we would have studying together!"

"I don't doubt it.  Medicine is a very pleasant study.  But how do
you think practice would be?  How would you like being called up to
ride ten miles in a midnight snow-storm, just when one of your raging
headaches was racking you?"

"Oh, but we could go into partnership, and Euthymia is n't afraid of
storms or anything else.  If she would only study medicine with me!"

"Well, what does she say to it?"

"She does n't like the thought of it.  She does n't believe in women
doctors.  She thinks that now and then a woman may be fitted for it
by nature, but she does n't think there are many who are.  She gives
me a good many reasons against their practising medicine, you know
what most of them are, doctor,--and ends by saying that the same
woman who would be a poor sort of doctor would make a first-rate
nurse; and that, she thinks, is a woman's business, if her instinct
carries her to the hospital or sick-chamber.  I can't argue her ideas
out of her."

"Neither can I argue you out of your feeling about the matter; but I
am disposed to agree with your friend, that you will often spoil a
good nurse to make a poor doctor.  Doctors and side-saddles don't
seem to me to go together.  Riding habits would be awkward things for
practitioners.  But come, we won't have a controversy just now.  I am
for giving women every chance for a good education, and if they think
medicine is one of their proper callings let them try it.  I think
they will find that they had better at least limit themselves to
certain specialties, and always have an expert of the other sex to
fall back upon.  The trouble is that they are so impressible and
imaginative that they are at the mercy of all sorts of fancy systems.
You have only to see what kinds of instruction they very commonly
flock to in order to guess whether they would be likely to prove
sensible practitioners.  Charlatanism always hobbles on two crutches,
the tattle of women, and the certificates of clergymen, and I am
afraid that half the women doctors will be too much under both those
influences."

Lurida believed in Dr. Butts, who, to use the common language of the
village, had "carried her through" a fever, brought on by over-
excitement and exhausting study.  She took no offence at his
reference to nursery gossip, which she had learned to hold cheap.
Nobody so despises the weaknesses of women as the champion of woman's
rights.  She accepted the doctor's concession of a fair field and
open trial of the fitness of her sex for medical practice, and did
not trouble herself about his suggested limitations.  As to the
imaginative tendencies of women, she knew too well the truth of the
doctor's remark relating to them to wish to contradict it.

"Be sure you let me have your paper in season for the next meeting,
doctor," she said; and in due season it came, and was of course
approved for reading.




XIII

DR. BUTTS READS A PAPER.

"Next to the interest we take in all that relates to our immortal
souls is that which we feel for our mortal bodies.  I am afraid my
very first statement may be open to criticism.  The care of the body
is the first thought with a great many,--in fact, with the larger
part of the world.  They send for the physician first, and not until
he gives them up do they commonly call in the clergyman.  Even the
minister himself is not so very different from other people.  We must
not blame him if he is not always impatient to exchange a world of
multiplied interests and ever-changing sources of excitement for that
which tradition has delivered to us as one eminently deficient in the
stimulus of variety.  Besides, these bodily frames, even when worn
and disfigured by long years of service, hang about our consciousness
like old garments.  They are used to us, and we are used to them.
And all the accidents of our lives,--the house we dwell in, the
living people round us, the landscape we look over, all, up to the
sky that covers us like a bell glass,--all these are but looser
outside garments which we have worn until they seem a part of us, and
we do not like the thought of changing them for a new suit which we
have never yet tried on.  How well I remember that dear ancient lady,
who lived well into the last decade of her century, as she repeated
the verse which, if I had but one to choose, I would select from that
string of pearls, Gray's 'Elegy'!

    "'For who to dumb forgetfulness a prey
     This pleasing, anxious being e'er resigned,
     Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,
     Nor cast one longing, lingering look behind?'

"Plotinus was ashamed of his body, we are told.  Better so, it may be,
than to live solely for it, as so many do.  But it may be well
doubted if there is any disciple of Plotinus in this Society.  On the
contrary, there are many who think a great deal of their bodies, many
who have come here to regain the health they have lost in the wear
and tear of city life, and very few who have not at some time or
other of their lives had occasion to call in the services of a
physician.

"There is, therefore, no impropriety in my offering to the members
some remarks upon the peculiar difficulties which beset the medical
practitioner in the discharge of his laborious and important duties.

"A young friend of mine, who has taken an interest in medical
studies, happened to meet with a very familiar story about one of the
greatest and most celebrated of all English physicians, Thomas
Sydenham.  The story is that, when a student asked him what books he
should read, the great doctor told him to read 'Don Quixote.'

"This piece of advice has been used to throw contempt upon the study
of books, and furnishes a convenient shield for ignorant pretenders.
But Sydenham left many writings in which he has recorded his medical
experience, and he surely would not have published them if he had not
thought they would be better reading for the medical student than the
story of Cervantes.  His own works are esteemed to this day, and he
certainly could not have supposed that they contained all the wisdom
of all the past.  No remedy is good, it was said of old, unless
applied at the right time in the right way.  So we may say of all
anecdotes, like this which I have told you about Sydenham and the
young man.  It is very likely that he carried him to the bedside of
some patients, and talked to him about the cases he showed him,
instead of putting a Latin volume in his hand.  I would as soon begin
in that way as any other, with a student who had already mastered the
preliminary branches,--who knew enough about the structure and
functions of the body in health.

"But if you ask me what reading I would commend to the medical
student of a philosophical habit of mind, you may be surprised to
hear me say it would be certain passages in 'Rasselas.'  They are the
ones where the astronomer gives an account to Imlac of his management
of the elements, the control of which, as he had persuaded himself,
had been committed to him.  Let me read you a few sentences from this
story, which is commonly bound up with the 'Vicar of Wakefield,' like
a woollen lining to a silken mantle, but is full of stately wisdom in
processions of paragraphs which sound as if they ought to have a
grammatical drum-major to march before their tramping platoons.

"The astronomer has taken Imlac into his confidence, and reveals to
him the secret of his wonderful powers:--

"'Hear, Imlac, what thou wilt not without difficulty credit.  I have
possessed for five years the regulation of the weather and the
distribution of the seasons the sun has listened to my dictates, and
passed from tropic to tropic by my direction; the clouds, at my call,
have poured their waters, and the Nile has overflowed at my command;
I have restrained the rage of the dog-star, and mitigated the fervors
of the crab.  The winds alone, of all the elemental powers, have
hitherto eluded my authority, and multitudes have perished by
equinoctial tempests, which I found myself unable to prohibit or
restrain.'

"The reader naturally wishes to know how the astronomer, a sincere,
devoted, and most benevolent man, for forty years a student of the
heavens, came to the strange belief that he possessed these
miraculous powers.  This is his account:

"'One day, as I was looking on the fields withering with heat, I felt
in my mind a sudden wish that I could send rain on the southern
mountains, and raise the Nile to an inundation.  In the hurry of my
imagination I commanded rain to fall, and by comparing the time of my
command with that of the inundation I found that the clouds had
listened to my lips.'

"'Might not some other cause,' said I, 'produce this concurrence?
The Nile does not always rise on the same day.'

"'Do not believe,' said he, with impatience, I that such objections
could escape me: I reasoned long against my own conviction, and
labored against truth with the utmost obstinacy.  I sometimes
suspected myself of madness, and should not have dared to impart this
secret but to a man like you, capable of distinguishing the wonderful
from the impossible and the incredible from the false.'

"The good old astronomer gives his parting directions to Imlac, whom
he has adopted as his successor in the government of the elements and
the seasons, in these impressive words:

"Do not, in the administration of the year, indulge thy pride by
innovation; do not please thyself with thinking that thou canst make
thyself renowned to all future ages by disordering the seasons.  The
memory of mischief is no desirable fame.  Much less will it become
thee to let kindness or interest prevail.  Never rob other countries
of rain to pour it on thine own.  For us the Nile is sufficient.'

"Do you wonder, my friends, why I have chosen these passages, in
which the delusions of an insane astronomer are related with all the
pomp of the Johnsonian vocabulary, as the first lesson for the young
person about to enter on the study of the science and art of healing?
Listen to me while I show you the parallel of the story of the
astronomer in the history of medicine.

"This history is luminous with intelligence, radiant with
benevolence, but all its wisdom and all its virtue have had to
struggle with the ever-rising mists of delusion.  The agencies which
waste and destroy the race of mankind are vast and resistless as the
elemental forces of nature; nay, they are themselves elemental
forces.  They may be to some extent avoided, to some extent diverted
from their aim, to some extent resisted.  So may the changes of the
seasons, from cold that freezes to heats that strike with sudden
death, be guarded against.  So may the tides be in some small measure
restrained in their inroads.  So may the storms be breasted by walls
they cannot shake from their foundations.  But the seasons and the
tides and the tempests work their will on the great scale upon
whatever stands in their way; they feed or starve the tillers of the
soil; they spare or drown the dwellers by the shore; they waft the
seaman to his harbor or bury him in the angry billows.

"The art of the physician can do much to remove its subjects from
deadly and dangerous influences, and something to control or arrest
the effects of these influences.  But look at the records of the
life-insurance offices, and see how uniform is the action of nature's
destroying agencies.  Look at the annual reports of the deaths in any
of our great cities, and see how their regularity approaches the
uniformity of the tides, and their variations keep pace with those of
the seasons.  The inundations of the Nile are not more certainly to
be predicted than the vast wave of infantile disease which flows in
upon all our great cities with the growing heats of July,--than the
fevers and dysenteries which visit our rural districts in the months
of the falling leaf.

"The physician watches these changes as the astronomer watched the
rise of the great river.  He longs to rescue individuals, to protect
communities from the inroads of these destroying agencies.  He uses
all the means which experience has approved, tries every rational
method which ingenuity can suggest.  Some fortunate recovery leads
him to believe he has hit upon a preventive or a cure for a malady
which had resisted all known remedies.  His rescued patient sounds
his praises, and a wide circle of his patient's friends joins in a
chorus of eulogies.  Self-love applauds him for his sagacity.  Self-
interest congratulates him on his having found the road to fortune;
the sense of having proved a benefactor of his race smooths the
pillow on which he lays his head to dream of the brilliant future
opening before him.  If a single coincidence may lead a person of
sanguine disposition to believe that he has mastered a disease which
had baffled all who were before his time, and on which his
contemporaries looked in hopeless impotence, what must be the effect
of a series of such coincidences even on a mind of calmer temper!
Such series of coincidences will happen, and they may well deceive
the very elect.  Think of Dr. Rush,--you know what a famous man he
was, the very head and front of American medical science in his day,
--and remember how he spoke about yellow fever, which he thought he
had mastered!

"Thus the physician is entangled in the meshes of a wide conspiracy,
in which he and his patient and their friends, and-Nature herself,
are involved.  What wonder that the history of Medicine should be to
so great an extent a record of self-delusion!

"If this seems a dangerous concession to the enemies of the true
science and art of healing, I will remind you that it is all implied
in the first aphorism of Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine.  Do not
draw a wrong inference from the frank statement of the difficulties
which beset the medical practitioner.  Think rather, if truth is so
hard of attainment, how precious are the results which the consent of
the wisest and most experienced among the healers of men agrees in
accepting.  Think what folly it is to cast them aside in favor of
palpable impositions stolen from the records of forgotten
charlatanism, or of fantastic speculations spun from the squinting
brains of theorists as wild as the Egyptian astronomer.

"Begin your medical studies, then, by reading the fortieth and the
following four chapters of 'Rasselas.' Your first lesson will teach
you modesty and caution in the pursuit of the most deceptive of all
practical branches of knowledge.  Faith will come later, when you
learn how much medical science and art have actually achieved for the
relief of mankind, and how great are the promises it holds out of
still larger triumphs over the enemies of human health and
happiness."

After the reading of this paper there was a lively discussion, which
we have no room to report here, and the Society adjourned.




XIV

MISS VINCENT'S STARTLING DISCOVERY.

The sober-minded, sensible, well-instructed Dr. Butts was not a
little exercised in mind by the demands made upon his knowledge by
his young friend, and for the time being his pupil, Miss Lurida
Vincent.

"I don't wonder they called her The Terror," he said to himself.
"She is enough to frighten anybody.  She has taken down old books
from my shelves that I had almost forgotten the backs of, and as to
the medical journals, I believe the girl could index them from
memory.  She is in pursuit of some special point of knowledge, I feel
sure, and I cannot doubt what direction she is working in, but her
wonderful way of dealing with books amazes me."

What marvels those "first scholars" in the classes of our great
universities and colleges are, to be sure!  They are not, as a rule,
the most distinguished of their class in the long struggle of life.
The chances are that "the field" will beat "the favorite" over the
long race-course.  Others will develop a longer stride and more
staying power.  But what fine gifts those "first scholars" have
received from nature!  How dull we writers, famous or obscure, are in
the acquisition of knowledge as compared with them!  To lead their
classmates they must have quick apprehension, fine memories, thorough
control of their mental faculties, strong will, power of
concentration, facility of expression,--a wonderful equipment of
mental faculties.  I always want to take my hat off to the first
scholar of his year.

Dr. Butts felt somewhat in the same way as he contemplated The
Terror.  She surprised him so often with her knowledge that he was
ready to receive her without astonishment when she burst in upon him
one allay with a cry of triumph, "Eureka! Eureka!"

"And what have you found, my dear?" said the doctor.

Lurida was flushed and panting with the excitement of her new
discovery.

"I do believe that I have found the secret of our strange visitor's
dread of all human intercourse!"

The seasoned practitioner was not easily thrown off his balance.

"Wait a minute and get your breath," said the doctor.  "Are you not a
little overstating his peculiarity?  It is not quite so bad as that.
He keeps a man to serve him, he was civil with the people at the Old
Tavern, he was affable enough, I understand, with the young fellow he
pulled out of the water, or rescued somehow,--I don't believe be
avoids the whole human race.  He does not look as if he hated them,
so far as I have remarked his expression.  I passed a few words with
him when his man was ailing, and found him polite enough.  No, I
don't believe it is much more than an extreme case of shyness,
connected, perhaps, with some congenital or other personal repugnance
to which has been given the name of an antipathy."

Lurida could hardly keep still while the doctor was speaking.  When
he finished, she began the account of her discovery:

"I do certainly believe I have found an account of his case in an
Italian medical journal of about fourteen years ago.  I met with a
reference which led me to look over a file of the Giornale degli
Ospitali lying among the old pamphlets in the medical section of the
Library.  I have made a translation of it, which you must read and
then tell me if you do not agree with me in my conclusion."

"Tell me what your conclusion is, and I will read your paper and see
for myself whether I think the evidence justifies the conviction you
seem to have reached."

Lurida's large eyes showed their whole rounds like the two halves of
a map of the world, as she said,

"I believe that Maurice Kirkwood is suffering from the effects of the
bite of a TARANTULA!"

The doctor drew a long breath.  He remembered in a vague sort of way
the stories which used to be told of the terrible Apulian spider, but
he had consigned them to the limbo of medical fable where so many
fictions have clothed themselves with a local habitation and a name.
He looked into the round eyes and wide pupils a little anxiously, as
if he feared that she was in a state of undue excitement, but, true
to his professional training, he waited for another symptom, if
indeed her mind was in any measure off its balance.

"I know what you are thinking," Lurida said, "but it is not so.  'I
am not mad, most noble Festus.'  You shall see the evidence and judge
for yourself.  Read the whole case,--you can read my hand almost as
if it were print, and tell me if you do not agree with me that this
young man is in all probability the same person as the boy described
in the Italian journal,

"One thing you might say is against the supposition.  The young
patient is spoken of as Signorino M .  .  .  Ch.  .  .  .  But you
must remember that ch is pronounced hard in Italian, like k, which
letter is wanting in the Italian alphabet; and it is natural enough
that the initial of the second name should have got changed in the
record to its Italian equivalent."

Before inviting the reader to follow the details of this
extraordinary case as found in a medical journal, the narrator wishes
to be indulged in a few words of explanation, in order that he may
not have to apologize for allowing the introduction of a subject
which may be thought to belong to the professional student rather
than to the readers of this record.  There is a great deal in medical
books which it is very unbecoming to bring before the general
public,--a great deal to repel, to disgust, to alarm, to excite
unwholesome curiosity.  It is not the men whose duties have made them
familiar with this class of subjects who are most likely to offend by
scenes and descriptions which belong to the physician's private
library, and not to the shelves devoted to polite literature.
Goldsmith and even Smollett, both having studied and practised
medicine, could not by any possibility have outraged all the natural
feelings of delicacy and decency as Swift and Zola have outraged
them.  But without handling doubtful subjects, there are many curious
medical experiences which have interest for every one as extreme
illustrations of ordinary conditions with which all are acquainted.
No one can study the now familiar history of clairvoyance profitably
who has not learned something of the vagaries of hysteria.  No one
can read understandingly the life of Cowper and that of Carlyle
without having some idea of the influence of hypochondriasis and of
dyspepsia upon the disposition and intellect of the subjects of these
maladies.  I need not apologize, therefore, for giving publicity to
that part of this narrative which deals with one of the most singular
maladies to be found in the records of bodily and mental infirmities.

The following is the account of the case as translated by Miss
Vincent.  For obvious reasons the whole name was not given in the
original paper, and for similar reasons the date of the event and the
birthplace of the patient are not precisely indicated here.

[Giornale degli Ospitali, Luglio 21, 18-.]

REMARKABLE CASE OF TARANTISM.

"The great interest attaching to the very singular and exceptional
instance of this rare affection induces us to give a full account of
the extraordinary example of its occurrence in a patient who was the
subject of a recent medical consultation in this city.

"Signorino M .  .  .  Ch .  .  .  is the only son of a gentleman
travelling in Italy at this time.  He is eleven years of age, of
sanguine-nervous temperament, light hair, blue eyes, intelligent
countenance, well grown, but rather slight in form, to all appearance
in good health, but subject to certain peculiar and anomalous nervous
symptoms, of which his father gives this history.

"Nine years ago, the father informs us, he was travelling in Italy
with his wife, this child, and a nurse.  They were passing a few days
in a country village near the city of Bari, capital of the province
of the same name in the division (compartamento) of Apulia.  The
child was in perfect health and had never been affected by any
serious illness.  On the 10th of July he was playing out in the field
near the house where the family was staying when he was heard to
scream suddenly and violently.  The nurse rushing to him found him in
great pain, saying that something had bitten him in one of his feet.
A laborer, one Tommaso, ran up at the moment and perceived in the
grass, near where the boy was standing, an enormous spider, which he
at once recognized as a tarantula.  He managed to catch the creature
in a large leaf, from which he was afterwards transferred to a wide-
mouthed bottle, where he lived without any food for a month or more.
The creature was covered with short hairs, and had a pair of nipper-
like jaws, with which he could inflict an ugly wound.  His body
measured about an inch in length, and from the extremity of one of
the longest limbs to the other was between two and three inches.
Such was the account given by the physician to whom the peasant
carried the great spider.

"The boy who had been bitten continued screaming violently while his
stocking was being removed and the foot examined.  The place of the
bite was easily found and the two marks of the claw-like jaws already
showed the effects of the poison, a small livid circle extending
around them, with some puffy swelling.  The distinguished Dr. Amadei
was immediately sent for, and applied cups over the wounds in the
hope of drawing forth the poison.  In vain all his skill and efforts!
Soon, ataxic (irregular) nervous symptoms declared themselves, and it
became plain that the system had been infected by the poison.

"The symptoms were very much like those of malignant fever, such as
distress about the region of the heart, difficulty of breathing,
collapse of all the vital powers, threatening immediate death.  From
these first symptoms the child rallied, but his entire organism had
been profoundly affected by the venom circulating through it.  His
constitution has never thrown off the malady resulting from this
toxic (poisonous) agent.  The phenomena which have been observed in
this young patient correspond so nearly with those enumerated in the
elaborate essay of the celebrated Baglivi that one might think they
had been transcribed from his pages.

"He is very fond of solitude,--of wandering about in churchyards and
other lonely places.  He was once found hiding in an empty tomb,
which had been left open.  His aversion to certain colors is
remarkable.  Generally speaking, he prefers bright tints to darker
ones, but his likes and dislikes are capricious, and with regard to
some colors his antipathy amounts to positive horror.  Some shades
have such an effect upon him that he cannot remain in the room with
them, and if he meets any one whose dress has any of that particular
color he will turn away or retreat so as to avoid passing that
person.  Among these, purple and dark green are the least endurable.
He cannot explain the sensations which these obnoxious colors produce
except by saying that it is like the deadly feeling from a blow on
the epigastrium (pit of the stomach).

"About the same season of the year at which the tarantular poisoning
took place he is liable to certain nervous seizures, not exactly like
fainting or epilepsy, but reminding the physician of those
affections.  All the other symptoms are aggravated at this time.

"In other respects than those mentioned the boy is in good health.
He is fond of riding, and has a pony on which he takes a great deal
of exercise, which seems to do him more good than any other remedy.

"The influence of music, to which so much has been attributed by
popular belief and even by the distinguished Professor to whom we
shall again refer, has not as yet furnished any satisfactory results.
If the graver symptoms recur while the patient is under our
observation, we propose to make use of an agency discredited by
modern skepticism, but deserving of a fair trial as an exceptional
remedy for an exceptional disease.

"The following extracts from the work of the celebrated Italian
physician of the last century are given by the writer of the paper in
the Giornale in the original Latin, with a translation into Italian,
subjoined.  Here are the extracts, or rather here is a selection from
them, with a translation of them into English.

"After mentioning the singular aversion to certain colors shown by
the subject of Tarantism, Baglivi writes as follows:
"'Et si astantes incedant vestibus eo colore difusis, qui Tarantatis
ingrates est, necesse est ut ab illorum aspectu recedant; nam ad
intuitum molesti coloris angore cordis, et symptomatum recrudescantia
stating corripiuntur.' (G.  Baglivi, Op.  Omnia, page 614.  Lugduni,
1745.)

"That is, 'if the persons about the patient wear dresses of the color
which is offensive to him, he must get away from the sight of them,
for on seeing the obnoxious color he is at once seized with distress
in the region of the heart, and a renewal of his symptoms.'

"As to the recurrence of the malady, Baglivi says:
"'Dam calor solis ardentius exurere incip at, quod contingit circa
initia Julii et Augusti, Tarantati lente venientem recrudescentiam
veneni percipiunt.' (Ibid., page 619.)

"Which I render, 'When the heat of the sun begins to burn more
fiercely, which happens about the beginning of July and August, the
subjects of Tarantism perceive the gradually approaching
recrudescence (returning symptoms) of the poisoning.  Among the
remedies most valued by this illustrious physician is that mentioned
in the following sentence:

"'Laudo magnopere equitationes in aere rusticano factas singulis
diebus, hord potissimum matutina, quibus equitationibus morbos
chronicos pene incurabiles protanus eliminavi.'

"Or in translation,
"'I commend especially riding on horseback in country air, every day,
by preference in the morning hours, by the aid of which horseback
riding I have driven off chronic diseases which were almost
incurable.'"

Miss Vincent read this paper aloud to Dr. Butts, and handed it to him
to examine and consider.  He listened with a grave countenance and
devout attention.

As she finished reading her account, she exclaimed in the passionate
tones of the deepest conviction,

"There, doctor!  Have n't I found the true story of this strange
visitor?  Have n't I solved the riddle of the Sphinx?  Who can this
man be but the boy of that story?  Look at the date of the journal
when he was eleven years old, it would make him twenty-five now, and
that is just about the age the people here think he must be of.  What
could account so entirely for his ways and actions as that strange
poisoning which produces the state they call Tarantism?  I am just as
sure it must be that as I am that I am alive.  Oh, doctor, doctor, I
must be right,--this Signprino M .  .  .  Ch .  .  .  was the boy
Maurice Kirkwood, and the story accounts for everything,--his
solitary habits, his dread of people,--it must be because they wear
the colors he can't bear.  His morning rides on horseback, his coming
here just as the season was approaching which would aggravate all his
symptoms, does n't all this prove that I must be right in my
conjecture,--no, my conviction?"

The doctor knew too much to interrupt the young enthusiast, and so he
let her run on until she ran down.  He was more used to the rules of
evidence than she was, and could not accept her positive conclusion
so readily as she would have liked to have him.  He knew that
beginners are very apt to make what they think are discoveries.  But
he had been an angler and knew the meaning of a yielding rod and an
easy-running reel.  He said quietly,

"You are a most sagacious young lady, and a very pretty prima facie
case it is that you make out.  I can see no proof that Mr. Kirkwood
is not the same person as the M .  .  .  Ch .  .  .  of the medical
journal,--that is, if I accept your explanation of the difference in
the initials of these two names.  Even if there were a difference,
that would not disprove their identity, for the initials of patients
whose cases are reported by their physicians are often altered for
the purpose of concealment.  I do not know, however, that Mr.
Kirkwood has shown any special aversion to any particular color.  It
might be interesting to inquire whether it is so, but it is a
delicate matter.  I don't exactly see whose business it is to
investigate Mr. Maurice Kirkwood's idiosyncrasies and constitutional
history.  If he should have occasion to send for me at any time, he
might tell me all about himself, in confidence, you know.  These old
accounts from Baglivi are curious and interesting, but I am cautious
about receiving any stories a hundred years old, if they involve an
improbability, as his stories about the cure of the tarantula bite by
music certainly do.  I am disposed to wait for future developments,
bearing in mind, of course, the very singular case you have
unearthed.  It wouldn't be very strange if our young gentleman had to
send for me before the season is over.  He is out a good deal before
the dew is off the grass, which is rather risky in this neighborhood
as autumn comes on.  I am somewhat curious, I confess, about the
young man, but I do not meddle where I am not asked for or wanted,
and I have found that eggs hatch just as well if you let them alone
in the nest as if you take them out and shake them every day.  This
is a wonderfully interesting supposition of yours, and may prove to
be strictly in accordance with the facts.  But I do not think we have
all the facts in this young man's case.  If it were proved that he
had an aversion to any color, it would greatly strengthen your case.
His 'antipatia,' as his man called it, must be one which covers a
wide ground, to account for his self-isolation,--and the color
hypothesis seems as plausible as any.  But, my dear Miss Vincent,
I think you had better leave your singular and striking hypothesis in
my keeping for a while, rather than let it get abroad in a community
like this, where so many tongues are in active exercise.  I will
carefully study this paper, if you will leave it with me, and we will
talk the whole matter over.  It is a fair subject for speculation,
only we must keep quiet about it."

This long speech gave Lurida's perfervid brain time to cool off a
little.  She left the paper with the doctor, telling him she would
come for it the next day, and went off to tell the result of this
visit to her bosom friend, Miss Euthymia Tower.




XV

DR. BUTTS CALLS ON EUTHYMIA.

The doctor was troubled in thinking over his interview with the young
lady.  She was fully possessed with the idea that she had discovered
the secret which had defied the most sagacious heads of the village.
It was of no use to oppose her while her mind was in an excited
state.  But he felt it his duty to guard her against any possible
results of indiscretion into which her eagerness and her theory of
the equality, almost the identity, of the sexes might betray her.
Too much of the woman in a daughter of our race leads her to forget
danger.  Too little of the woman prompts her to defy it.  Fortunately
for this last class of women, they are not quite so likely to be
perilously seductive as their more emphatically feminine sisters.

Dr. Butts had known Lurida and her friend from the days of their
infancy.  He had watched the development of Lurida's intelligence
from its precocious nursery-life to the full vigor of its trained
faculties.  He had looked with admiration on the childish beauty of
Euthymia, and had seen her grow up to womanhood, every year making
her more attractive.  He knew that if anything was to be done with
his self-willed young scholar and friend, it would be more easily
effected through the medium of Euthymia than by direct advice to the
young lady herself.  So the thoughtful doctor made up his mind to
have a good talk with Euthymia, and put her on her guard, if Lurida
showed any tendency to forget the conventionalities in her eager
pursuit of knowledge.

For the doctor's horse and chaise to stop at the door of Miss
Euthymia Tower's parental home was an event strange enough to set all
the tongues in the village going.  This was one of those families
where illness was hardly looked for among the possibilities of life.
There were other families where a call from the doctor was hardly
more thought of than a call from the baker.  But here he was a
stranger, at least on his professional rounds, and when he asked for
Miss Euthymia the servant, who knew his face well, stared as if he
had held in his hand a warrant for her apprehension.

Euthymia did not keep the doctor waiting very long while she made
ready to meet him.  One look at her glass to make sure that a lock
had not run astray, or a ribbon got out of place, and her toilet for
a morning call was finished.  Perhaps if Mr. Maurice Kirkwood had
been announced, she might have taken a second look, but with the good
middle-aged, married doctor one was enough for a young lady who had
the gift of making all the dresses she wore look well, and had no
occasion to treat her chamber like the laboratory where an actress
compounds herself.

Euthymia welcomed the doctor very heartily.  She could not help
suspecting his errand, and she was very glad to have a chance to talk
over her friend's schemes and fancies with him.

The doctor began without any roundabout prelude.

"I want to confer with you about our friend Lurida.  Does she tell
you all her plans and projects?"

"Why, as to that, doctor, I can hardly say, positively, but I do not
believe she keeps back anything of importance from me.  I know what
she has been busy with lately, and the queer idea she has got into
her head.  What do you think of the Tarantula business?  She has
shown you the paper, she has written, I suppose."

"Indeed she has.  It is a very curious case she has got hold of, and
I do not wonder at all that she should have felt convinced that she
had come at the true solution of the village riddle.  It may be that
this young man is the same person as the boy mentioned in the Italian
medical journal.  But it is very far from clear that he is so.  You
know all her reasons, of course, as you have read the story.  The
times seem to agree well enough.  It is easy to conceive that Ch
might be substituted for K in the report.  The singular solitary
habits of this young man entirely coincide with the story.  If we
could only find out whether he has any of those feelings with
reference to certain colors, we might guess with more chance of
guessing right than we have at present.  But I don't see exactly how
we are going to submit him to examination on this point.  If he were
only a chemical compound, we could analyze him.  If he were only a
bird or a quadruped, we could find out his likes and dislikes.  But
being, as he is, a young man, with ways of his own, and a will of his
own, which he may not choose to have interfered with, the problem
becomes more complicated.  I hear that a newspaper correspondent has
visited him so as to make a report to his paper,--do you know what he
found out?"

"Certainly I do, very well.  My brother has heard his own story,
which was this: He found out he had got hold of the wrong person to
interview.  The young gentleman, he says, interviewed him, so that he
did not learn much about the Sphinx.  But the newspaper man told
Willy about the Sphinx's library and a cabinet of coins he had; and
said he should make an article out of him, anyhow.  I wish the man
would take himself off.  I am afraid Lurida's love of knowledge will
get her into trouble!"

"Which of the men do you wish would take himself off?"

"I was thinking of the newspaper man."

She blushed a little as she said, "I can't help feeling a strange
sort of interest about the other, Mr. Kirkwood.  Do you know that I
met him this morning, and had a good look at him, full in the face?"

"Well, to be sure!  That was an interesting experience.  And how did
you like his looks?"

"I thought his face a very remarkable one.  But he looked very pale
as he passed me, and I noticed that he put his hand to his left side
as if he had a twinge of pain, or something of that sort,--spasm or
neuralgia,--I don't know what.  I wondered whether he had what you
call angina pectoris.  It was the same kind of look and movement, I
remember, as you trust, too, in my uncle who died with that
complaint."

The doctor was silent for a moment.  Then he asked, "Were you dressed
as you are now?"

"Yes, I was, except that I had a thin mantle over my shoulders.  I
was out early, and I have always remembered your caution."

"What color was your mantle?"

"It was black.  I have been over all this with Lucinda.  A black
mantle on a white dress.  A straw hat with an old faded ribbon.
There can't be much in those colors to trouble him, I should think,
for his man wears a black coat and white linen,--more or less white,
as you must have noticed, and he must have seen ribbons of all colors
often enough.  But Lurida believes it was the ribbon, or something in
the combination of colors.  Her head is full of Tarantulas and
Tarantism.  I fear that she will never be easy until the question is
settled by actual trial.  And will you believe it? the girl is
determined in some way to test her supposition!"

"Believe it, Euthymia?  I can believe almost anything of Lurida.  She
is the most irrepressible creature I ever knew.  You know as well as
I do what a complete possession any ruling idea takes of her whole
nature.  I have had some fears lest her zeal might run away with her
discretion.  It is a great deal easier to get into a false position
than to get out of it."

"I know it well enough.  I want you to tell me what you think about
the whole business.  I don't like the look of it at all, and yet I
can do nothing with the girl except let her follow her fancy, until I
can show her plainly that she will get herself into trouble in some
way or other.  But she is ingenious,--full of all sorts of devices,
innocent enough in themselves, but liable to be misconstrued.  You
remember how she won us the boat-race?"

"To be sure I do.  It was rather sharp practice, but she felt she was
paying off an old score.  The classical story of Atalanta, told, like
that of Eve, as illustrating the weakness of woman, provoked her to
make trial of the powers of resistance in the other sex.  But it was
audacious.  I hope her audacity will not go too far.  You must watch
her.  Keep an eye on her correspondence."

The doctor had great confidence in the good sense of Lurida's friend.
He felt sure that she would not let Lurida commit herself by writing
foolish letters to the subject of her speculations, or similar
indiscreet performances.  The boldness of young girls, who think no
evil, in opening correspondence with idealized personages is
something quite astonishing to those who have had an opportunity of
knowing the facts.  Lurida had passed the most dangerous age, but her
theory of the equality of the sexes made her indifferent to the
by-laws of social usage.  She required watching, and her two
guardians were ready to check her, in case of need.




XVI

MISS VINCENT WRITES A LETTER.

Euthymia noticed that her friend had been very much preoccupied for
two or three days.  She found her more than once busy at her desk,
with a manuscript before her, which she turned over and placed inside
the desk, as Euthymia entered.

This desire of concealment was not what either of the friends
expected to see in the other.  It showed that some project was under
way, which, at least in its present stage, the Machiavellian young
lady did not wish to disclose.  It had cost her a good deal of
thought and care, apparently, for her waste-basket was full of scraps
of paper, which looked as if they were the remains of a manuscript
like that at which she was at work.  "Copying and recopying,
probably," thought Euthymia, but she was willing to wait to learn
what Lurida was busy about, though she had a suspicion that it was
something in which she might feel called upon to interest herself.

"Do you know what I think?" said Euthymia to the doctor, meeting him
as he left his door.  "I believe Lurida is writing to this man, and I
don't like the thought of her doing such a thing.  Of course she is
not like other girls in many respects, but other people will judge
her by the common rules of life."

"I am glad that you spoke of it," answered the doctor; "she would
write to him just as quickly as to any woman of his age.  Besides,
under the cover of her office, she has got into the way of writing to
anybody.  I think she has already written to Mr. Kirkwood, asking him
to contribute a paper for the Society.  She can find a pretext easily
enough if she has made up her mind to write.  In fact, I doubt if she
would trouble herself for any pretext at all if she decided to write.
Watch her well.  Don't let any letter go without seeing it, if you
can help it."

Young women are much given to writing letters to persons whom they
only know indirectly, for the most part through their books, and
especially to romancers and poets.  Nothing can be more innocent and
simple-hearted than most of these letters.  They are the spontaneous
outflow of young hearts easily excited to gratitude for the pleasure
which some story or poem has given them, and recognizing their own
thoughts, their own feelings, in those expressed by the author, as if
on purpose for them to read.  Undoubtedly they give great relief to
solitary young persons, who must have some ideal reflection of
themselves, and know not where to look since Protestantism has taken
away the crucifix and the Madonna.  The recipient of these letters
sometimes wonders, after reading through one of them, how it is that
his young correspondent has managed to fill so much space with her
simple message of admiration or of sympathy.

Lurida did not belong to this particular class of correspondents, but
she could not resist the law of her sex, whose thoughts naturally
surround themselves with superabundant drapery of language, as their
persons float in a wide superfluity of woven tissues.  Was she indeed
writing to this unknown gentleman?  Euthymia questioned her point-
blank.

"Are you going to open a correspondence with Mr. Maurice Kirkwood,
Lurida?  You seem to be so busy writing, I can think of nothing else.
Or are you going to write a novel, or a paper for the Society,--do
tell me what you are so much taken up with."

"I will tell you, Euthymia, if you will promise not to find fault
with me for carrying out my plan as I have made up my mind to do.
You may read this letter before I seal it, and if you find anything
in it you don't like you can suggest any change that you think will
improve it.  I hope you will see that it explains itself.  I don't
believe that you will find anything to frighten you in it."

This is the letter, as submitted to Miss Tower by her friend.  The
bold handwriting made it look like a man's letter, and gave it
consequently a less dangerous expression than that which belongs to
the tinted and often fragrant sheet with its delicate thready
characters, which slant across the page like an April shower with a
south wind chasing it.


ARROWHEAD VILLAGE, August--, 18--.

MY DEAR SIR,--You will doubtless be surprised at the sight of a
letter like this from one whom you only know as the Secretary of the
Pansophian Society.  There is a very common feeling that it is
unbecoming in one of my sex to address one of your own with whom she
is unacquainted, unless she has some special claim upon his
attention.  I am by no means disposed to concede to the vulgar
prejudice on this point.  If one human being has anything to
communicate to another,--anything which deserves being communicated,
--I see no occasion for bringing in the question of sex.  I do not
think the homo sum of Terence can be claimed for the male sex as its
private property on general any more than on grammatical grounds,

I have sometimes thought of devoting myself to the noble art of
healing.  If I did so, it would be with the fixed purpose of giving
my whole powers to the service of humanity.  And if I should carry
out that idea, should I refuse my care and skill to a suffering
fellow-mortal because that mortal happened to be a brother, and not a
sister?  My whole nature protests against such one-sided humanity!
No! I am blind to all distinctions when my eyes are opened to any
form of suffering, to any spectacle of want.

You may ask me why I address you, whom I know little or nothing of,
and to whom such an advance may seem presumptuous and intrusive.  It
is because I was deeply impressed by the paper which I attributed to
you,--that on Ocean, River, and Lake, which was read at one of our
meetings.  I say that I was deeply impressed, but I do not mean this
as a compliment to that paper.  I am not bandying compliments now,
but thinking of better things than praises or phrases.  I was
interested in the paper, partly because I recognized some of the
feelings expressed in it as my own,--partly because there was an
undertone of sadness in all the voices of nature as you echoed them
which made me sad to hear, and which I could not help longing to
cheer and enliven.  I said to myself, I should like to hold communion
with the writer of that paper.  I have had my lonely hours and days,
as he has had.  I have had some of his experiences in my intercourse
with nature.  And oh! if I could draw him into those better human
relations which await us all, if we come with the right dispositions,
I should blush if I stopped to inquire whether I violated any
conventional rule or not.

You will understand me, I feel sure.  You believe, do you not? in the
insignificance of the barrier which divides the sisterhood from the
brotherhood of mankind.  You believe, do you not? that they should be
educated side by side, that they should share the same pursuits, due
regard being had to the fitness of the particular individual for hard
or light work, as it must always be, whether we are dealing with the
"stronger" or the "weaker" sex.  I mark these words because,
notwithstanding their common use, they involve so much that is not
true.  Stronger!  Yes, to lift a barrel of flour, or a barrel of
cider,--though there have been women who could do that, and though
when John Wesley was mobbed in Staffordshire a woman knocked down
three or four men, one after another, until she was at last
overpowered and nearly murdered.  Talk about the weaker sex!  Go and
see Miss Euthymia Tower at the gymnasium!  But no matter about which
sex has the strongest muscles.  Which has most to suffer, and which
has most endurance and vitality?  We go through many ordeals which
you are spared, but we outlast you in mind and body.  I have been led
away into one of my accustomed trains of thought, but not so far away
from it as you might at first suppose.

My brother!  Are you not ready to recognize in me a friend, an equal,
a sister, who can speak to you as if she had been reared under the
same roof?  And is not the sky that covers us one roof, which makes
us all one family?  You are lonely, you must be longing for some
human fellowship.  Take me into your confidence.  What is there that
you can tell me to which I cannot respond with sympathy?  What
saddest note in your spiritual dirges which will not find its chord
in mine?

I long to know what influence has cast its shadow over your
existence.  I myself have known what it is to carry a brain that
never rests in a body that is always tired.  I have defied its
infirmities, and forced it to do my bidding.  You have no such
hindrance, if we may judge by your aspect and habits.  You deal with
horses like a Homeric hero.  No wild Indian could handle his bark
canoe more dexterously or more vigorously than we have seen you
handling yours.  There must be some reason for your seclusion which
curiosity has not reached, and into which it is not the province of
curiosity to inquire.  But in the irresistible desire which I have to
bring you into kindly relations with those around you, I must run the
risk of giving offence that I may know in what direction to look for
those restorative influences which the sympathy of a friend and
sister can offer to a brother in need of some kindly impulse to
change the course of a life which is not, which cannot be, in
accordance with his true nature.

I have thought that there may be something in the conditions with
which you are here surrounded which is repugnant to your feelings,--
something which can be avoided only by keeping yourself apart from
the people whose acquaintance you would naturally have formed.  There
can hardly be anything in the place itself, or you would not have
voluntarily sought it as a residence, even for a single season.
there might be individuals here whom you would not care to meet,
there must be such, but you cannot have a personal aversion to
everybody.  I have heard of cases in which certain sights and sounds,
which have no particular significance for most persons, produced
feelings of distress or aversion that made, them unbearable to the
subjects of the constitutional dislike.  It has occurred to me that
possibly you might have some such natural aversion to the sounds of
the street, or such as are heard in most houses, especially where a
piano is kept, as it is in fact in almost all of those in the
village.  Or it might be, I imagined, that some color in the dresses
of women or the furniture of our rooms affected you unpleasantly.  I
know that instances of such antipathy have been recorded, and they
would account for the seclusion of those who are subject to it.

If there is any removable condition which interferes with your free
entrance into and enjoyment of the social life around you, tell me, I
beg of you, tell me what it is, and it shall be eliminated.  Think it
not strange, O my brother, that I thus venture to introduce myself
into the hidden chambers of your life.  I will never suffer myself to
be frightened from the carrying out of any thought which promises to
be of use to a fellow-mortal by a fear lest it should be considered
"unfeminine."  I can bear to be considered unfeminine, but I cannot
endure to think of myself as inhuman.  Can I help you, my brother'?

Believe me your most sincere well-wisher,

LURIDA VINCENT.


Euthymia had carried off this letter and read it by herself.  As she
finished it, her feelings found expression in an old phrase of her
grandmother's, which came up of itself, as such survivals of early
days are apt to do, on great occasions.

"Well, I never!"

Then she loosened some button or string that was too tight, and went
to the window for a breath of outdoor air.  Then she began at the
beginning and read the whole letter all over again.

What should she do about it?  She could not let this young girl send
a letter like that to a stranger of whose character little was known
except by inference,--to a young man, who would consider it a most
extraordinary advance on the part of the sender.  She would have
liked to tear it into a thousand pieces, but she had no right to
treat it in that way.  Lurida meant to send it the next morning, and
in the mean time Euthymia had the night to think over what she should
do about it.

There is nothing like the pillow for an oracle.  There is no voice
like that which breaks the silence--of the stagnant hours of the
night with its sudden suggestions and luminous counsels.  When
Euthymia awoke in the morning, her course of action was as clear
before her as if it bad been dictated by her guardian angel.  She
went straight over to the home of Lurida, who was just dressed for
breakfast.

She was naturally a little surprised at this early visit.  She was
struck with the excited look of Euthymia, being herself quite calm,
and contemplating her project with entire complacency.

Euthymia began, in tones that expressed deep anxiety.

"I have read your letter, my dear, and admired its spirit and force.
It is a fine letter, and does you great credit as an expression of
the truest human feeling.  But it must not be sent to Mr. Kirkwood.
If you were sixty years old, perhaps if you were fifty, it might be
admissible to send it.  But if you were forty, I should question its
propriety; if you were thirty, I should veto it, and you are but a
little more than twenty.  How do you know that this stranger will not
show your letter to anybody or everybody?  How do you know that he
will not send it to one of the gossiping journals like the 'Household
Inquisitor'?  But supposing he keeps it to himself, which is more
than you have a right to expect, what opinion is he likely to form of
a young lady who invades his privacy with such freedom?  Ten to one
he will think curiosity is at the bottom of it,--and,--come, don't be
angry at me for suggesting it,--may there not be a little of that
same motive mingled with the others?  No, don't interrupt me quite
yet; you do want to know whether your hypothesis is correct.  You are
full of the best and kindest feelings in the world, but your desire
for knowledge is the ferment under them just now, perhaps more than
you know."

Lurida's pale cheeks flushed and whitened more than once while her
friend was speaking.  She loved her too sincerely and respected her
intelligence too much to take offence at her advice, but she could
not give up her humane and sisterly intentions merely from the fear
of some awkward consequences to herself.  She had persuaded herself
that she was playing the part of a Protestant sister of charity, and
that the fact of her not wearing the costume of these ministering
angels made no difference in her relations to those who needed her
aid.

"I cannot see your objections in the light in which they appear to
you," she said gravely.  "It seems to me that I give up everything
when I hesitate to help a fellow-creature because I am a woman.  I am
not afraid to send this letter and take all the consequences."

"Will you go with me to the doctor's, and let him read it in our
presence?  And will you agree to abide by his opinion, if it
coincides with mine?"

Lurida winced a little at this proposal.  "I don't quite like," she
said, "showing this letter to--to" she hesitated, but it had to come
out--"to a man, that is, to another man than the one for whom it was
intended."

The neuter gender business had got a pretty damaging side-hit.

"Well, never mind about letting him read the letter.  Will you go
over to his house with me at noon, when he comes back after his
morning visits, and have a talk over the whole matter with him?  You
know I have sometimes had to say must to you, Lurida, and now I say
you must go to the doctor's with me and carry that letter."

There was no resisting the potent monosyllable as the sweet but firm
voice delivered it.  At noon the two maidens rang at the doctor's
door.  The servant said he had been at the house after his morning
visits, but found a hasty summons to Mr. Kirkwood, who had been taken
suddenly ill and wished to see him at once.  Was the illness
dangerous?  The servant-maid did n't know, but thought it was pretty
bad, for Mr. Paul came in as white as a sheet, and talked all sorts
of languages which she couldn't understand, and took on as if he
thought Mr. Kirkwood was going to die right off.

And so the hazardous question about sending the letter was disposed
of, at least for the present.




XVII

Dr. BUTTS'S PATIENT.

The physician found Maurice just regaining his heat after a chill of
a somewhat severe character.  He knew too well what this meant, and
the probable series of symptoms of which it was the prelude.  His
patient was not the only one in the neighborhood who was attacked in
this way.  The autumnal fevers to which our country towns are
subject, in the place of those "agues," or intermittents, so largely
prevalent in the South and West, were already beginning, and Maurice,
who had exposed himself in the early and late hours of the dangerous
season, must be expected to go through the regular stages of this
always serious and not rarely fatal disease.

Paolo, his faithful servant, would fain have taken the sole charge of
his master during his illness.  But the doctor insisted that he must
have a nurse to help him in his task, which was likely to be long and
exhausting.

At the mention of the word "nurse" Paolo turned white, and exclaimed
in an agitated and thoroughly frightened way,

"No! no nuss!  no woman!  She kill him!  I stay by him day and night,
but don' let no woman come near him,--if you do, he die!"

The doctor explained that he intended to send a man who was used to
taking care of sick people, and with no little effort at last
succeeded in convincing Paolo that, as he could not be awake day and
night for a fortnight or three weeks, it was absolutely necessary to
call in some assistance from without.  And so Mr. Maurice Kirkwood
was to play the leading part in that drama of nature's composing
called a typhoid fever, with its regular bedchamber scenery, its
properties of phials and pill-boxes, its little company of stock
actors, its gradual evolution of a very simple plot, its familiar
incidents, its emotional alternations, and its denouement, sometimes
tragic, oftener happy.

It is needless to say that the sympathies of all the good people of
the village, residents and strangers, were actively awakened for the
young man about whom they knew so little and conjectured so much.
Tokens of their kindness came to him daily: flowers from the woods
and from the gardens; choice fruit grown in the open air or under
glass, for there were some fine houses surrounded by well-kept
grounds, and greenhouses and graperies were not unknown in the small
but favored settlement.

On all these luxuries Maurice looked with dull and languid eyes.  A
faint smile of gratitude sometimes struggled through the stillness of
his features, or a murmured word of thanks found its way through his
parched lips, and he would relapse into the partial stupor or the
fitful sleep in which, with intervals of slight wandering, the slow
hours dragged along the sluggish days one after another.  With no
violent symptoms, but with steady persistency, the disease moved on
in its accustomed course.  It was at no time immediately threatening,
but the experienced physician knew its uncertainties only too well.
He had known fever patients suddenly seized with violent internal
inflammation, and carried off with frightful rapidity.  He remembered
the case of a convalescent, a young woman who had been attacked while
in apparently vigorous general health, who, on being lifted too
suddenly to a sitting position, while still confined to her bed,
fainted, and in a few moments ceased to breathe.  It may well be
supposed that he took every possible precaution to avert the
accidents which tend to throw from its track a disease the regular
course of which is arranged by nature as carefully as the route of a
railroad from one city to another.  The most natural interpretation
which the common observer would put upon the manifestations of one of
these autumnal maladies would be that some noxious combustible
element had found its way into the system which must be burned to
ashes before the heat which pervades the whole body can subside.
Sometimes the fire may smoulder and seem as if it were going out, or
were quite extinguished, and again it will find some new material to
seize upon, and flame up as fiercely as ever.  Its coming on most
frequently at the season when the brush fires which are consuming the
dead branches, and withered leaves, and all the refuse of vegetation
are sending up their smoke is suggestive.  Sometimes it seems as if
the body, relieved of its effete materials, renewed its youth after
one of these quiet, expurgating, internal fractional cremations.
Lean, pallid students have found themselves plump and blooming, and
it has happened that one whose hair was straight as gnat of an Indian
has been startled to behold himself in his mirror with a fringe of
hyacinthine curls about his rejuvenated countenance.

There was nothing of what medical men call malignity in the case of
Maurice Kirkwood.  The most alarming symptom was a profound
prostration, which at last reached such a point that he lay utterly
helpless, as unable to move without aid as the feeblest of
paralytics.  In this state he lay for many days, not suffering pain,
but with the sense of great weariness, and the feeling that he should
never rise from his bed again.  For the most part his intellect was
unclouded when his attention was aroused.  He spoke only in whispers,
a few words at a time.  The doctor felt sure, by the expression which
passed over his features from time to time, that something was
worrying and oppressing him; something which he wished to
communicate, and had not the force, or the tenacity of purpose, to
make perfectly clear.  His eyes often wandered to a certain desk, and
once he had found strength to lift his emaciated arm and point to it.
The doctor went towards it as if to fetch it to him, but he slowly
shook his head.  He had not the power to say at that time what he
wished.  The next day he felt a little less prostrated; and succeeded
in explaining to the doctor what he wanted.  His words, so far as the
physician could make them out, were these which follow.  Dr. Butts
looked upon them as possibly expressing wishes which would be his
last, and noted them down carefully immediately after leaving his
chamber.

"I commit the secret of my life to your charge.  My whole story is
told in a paper locked in that desk.  The key is--put your hand under
my pillow.  If I die, let the story be known.  It will show that I
was--human--and save my memory from reproach."

He was silent for a little time.  A single tear stole down his hollow
cheek.  The doctor turned his head away, for his own eyes were full.
But he said to himself, "It is a good sign; I begin to feel strong
hopes that he will recover."

Maurice spoke once more.  "Doctor, I put full trust in you.  You are
wise and kind.  Do what you will with this paper, but open it at once
and read.  I want you to know the story of my life before it is
finished--if the end is at hand.  Take it with you and read it before
you sleep."  He was exhausted and presently his eyes closed, but the
doctor saw a tranquil look on his features which added encouragement
to his hopes.




XVIII

MAURICE KIRKWOOD'S STORY OF HIS LIFE.

I am an American by birth, but a large part of my life has been
passed in foreign lands.  My father was a man of education, possessed
of an ample fortune; my mother was considered, a very accomplished
and amiable woman.  I was their first and only child.  She died while
I was yet an infant.  If I remember her at all it is as a vision,
more like a glimpse of a pre-natal existence than as a part of my
earthly life.  At the death of my mother I was left in the charge of
the old nurse who had enjoyed her perfect confidence.  She was
devoted to me, and I became absolutely dependent on her, who had for
me all the love and all the care of a mother.  I was naturally the
object of the attentions and caresses of the family relatives.  I
have been told that I was a pleasant, smiling infant, with nothing to
indicate any peculiar nervous susceptibility; not afraid of
strangers, but on the contrary ready to make their acquaintance.  My
father was devoted to me and did all in his power to promote my
health and comfort.


I was still a babe, often carried in arms, when the event happened
which changed my whole future and destined me to a strange and lonely
existence.  I cannot relate it even now without a sense of terror.  I
must force myself to recall the circumstances as told me and vaguely
remembered, for I am not willing that my doomed and wholly
exceptional life should pass away unrecorded, unexplained,
unvindicated.  My nature is, I feel sure, a kind and social one, but
I have lived apart, as if my heart were filled with hatred of my
fellow-creatures.  If there are any readers who look without pity,
without sympathy, upon those who shun the fellowship of their fellow
men and women, who show by their downcast or averted eyes that they
dread companionship and long for solitude, I pray them, if this paper
ever reaches them, to stop at this point.  Follow me no further, for
you will not believe my story, nor enter into the feelings which I am
about to reveal.  But if there are any to whom all that is human is
of interest, who have felt in their own consciousness some stirrings
of invincible attraction to one individual and equally invincible
repugnance to another, who know by their own experience that elective
affinities have as their necessary counterpart, and, as it were,
their polar opposites, currents not less strong of elective
repulsions, let them read with unquestioning faith the story of a
blighted life I am about to relate, much of it, of course, received
from the lips of others.

My cousin Laura, a girl of seventeen, lately returned from Europe,
was considered eminently beautiful.  It was in my second summer that
she visited my father's house, where he was living with his servants
and my old nurse, my mother having but recently left him a widower.
Laura was full of vivacity, impulsive, quick in her movements,
thoughtless occasionally, as it is not strange that a young girl of
her age should be.  It was a beautiful summer day when she saw me for
the first time.  My nurse had me in her arms, walking back and
forward on a balcony with a low railing, upon which opened the
windows of the second story of my father's house.  While the nurse
was thus carrying me, Laura came suddenly upon the balcony.  She no
sooner saw me than with all the delighted eagerness of her youthful
nature she rushed toward me, and, catching me from the nurse's arms,
began tossing me after the fashion of young girls who have been so
lately playing with dolls that they feel as if babies were very much
of the same nature.  The abrupt seizure frightened me; I sprang from
her arms in my terror, and fell over the railing of the balcony.  I
should probably enough have been killed on the spot but for the fact
that a low thorn-bush grew just beneath the balcony, into which I
fell and thus had the violence of the shock broken.  But the thorns
tore my tender flesh, and I bear to this day marks of the deep wounds
they inflicted.

That dreadful experience is burned deep into my memory.  The sudden
apparition of the girl; the sense of being torn away from the
protecting arms around me; the frantic effort to escape; the shriek
that accompanied my fall through what must have seemed unmeasurable
space; the cruel lacerations of the piercing and rending thorns,--all
these fearful impressions blended in one paralyzing terror.

When I was taken up I was thought to be dead.  I was perfectly white,
and the physician who first saw me said that no pulse was
perceptible.  But after a time consciousness returned; the wounds,
though painful, were none of them dangerous, and the most alarming
effects of the accident passed away.  My old nurse cared for me
tenderly day and night, and my father, who had been almost distracted
in the first hours which followed the injury, hoped and believed
that no permanent evil results would be found to result from it.  My
cousin Laura was of course deeply distressed to feel that her
thoughtlessness had been the cause of so grave an accident.  As soon
as I had somewhat recovered she came to see me, very penitent, very
anxious to make me forget the alarm she had caused me, with all its
consequences.  I was in the nursery sitting up in my bed, bandaged,
but not in any pain, as it seemed, for I was quiet and to all
appearance in a perfectly natural state of feeling.  As Laura came
near me I shrieked and instantly changed color.  I put my hand upon
my heart as if I had been stabbed, and fell over, unconscious.  It
was very much the same state as that in which I was found immediately
after my fall.

The cause of this violent and appalling seizure was but too obvious.
The approach of the young girl and the dread that she was about to
lay her hand upon me had called up the same train of effects which
the moment of terror and pain had already occasioned.  The old nurse
saw this in a moment.  "Go!  go!" she cried to Laura, "go, or the
child will die!  "Her command did not have to be repeated.  After
Laura had gone I lay senseless, white and cold as marble, for some
time.  The doctor soon came, and by the use of smart rubbing and
stimulants the color came back slowly to my cheeks and the arrested
circulation was again set in motion.

It was hard to believe that this was anything more than a temporary
effect of the accident.  There could be little doubt, it was thought
by the doctor and by my father, that after a few days I should
recover from this morbid sensibility and receive my cousin as other
infants receive pleasant-looking young persons.  The old nurse shook
her head.  "The girl will be the death of the child," she said, "if
she touches him or comes near him.  His heart stopped beating just as
when the girl snatched him out of my arms, and he fell over the
balcony railing."  Once more the experiment was tried, cautiously,
almost insidiously.  The same alarming consequences followed.  It was
too evident that a chain of nervous disturbances had been set up in
my system which repeated itself whenever the original impression gave
the first impulse.  I never saw my cousin Laura after this last
trial.  Its result had so distressed her that she never ventured
again to show herself to me.

If the effect of the nervous shock had stopped there, it would have
been a misfortune for my cousin and myself, but hardly a calamity.
The world is wide, and a cousin or two more or less can hardly be
considered an essential of existence.  I often heard Laura's name
mentioned, but never by any one who was acquainted with all the
circumstances, for it was noticed that I changed color and caught at
my breast as if I wanted to grasp my heart in my hand whenever that
fatal name was mentioned.

Alas! this was not all.  While I was suffering from the effects of my
fall among the thorns I was attended by my old nurse, assisted by
another old woman, by a physician, and my father, who would take his
share in caring for me.  It was thought best to keep--me perfectly
quiet, and strangers and friends were alike excluded from my nursery,
with one exception, that my old grandmother came in now and then.
With her it seems that I was somewhat timid and shy, following her
with rather anxious eyes, as if not quite certain whether or not she
was dangerous.  But one day, when I was far advanced towards
recovery, my father brought in a young lady, a relative of his, who
had expressed a great desire to see me.  She was, as I have been
told, a very handsome girl, of about the same age as my cousin Laura,
but bearing no personal resemblance to her in form, features, or
complexion.  She had no sooner entered the room than the same sudden
changes which had followed my cousin's visit began to show
themselves, and before she had reached my bedside I was in a state of
deadly collapse, as on the occasions already mentioned.

Some time passed before any recurrence of these terrifying seizures.
A little girl of five or six years old was allowed to come into the
nursery one day and bring me some flowers.  I took them from her
hand, but turned away and shut my eyes.  There was no seizure, but
there was a certain dread and aversion, nothing more than a feeling
which it might be hoped that time would overcome.  Those around me
were gradually finding out the circumstances which brought on the
deadly attack to which I was subject.

The daughter of one of our near neighbors was considered the
prettiest girl of the village where we were passing the summer.  She
was very anxious to see me, and as I was now nearly well it was
determined that she should be permitted to pay me a short visit.  I
had always delighted in seeing her and being caressed by her.  I was
sleeping when she entered the nursery and came and took a seat at my
side in perfect silence.  Presently I became restless, and a moment
later I opened my eyes and saw her stooping over me.  My hand went to
my left breast,--the color faded from my cheeks,--I was again the
cold marble image so like death that it had well-nigh been mistaken
for it.

Could it be possible that the fright which had chilled my blood had
left me with an unconquerable fear of woman at the period when she is
most attractive not only to adolescents, but to children of tender
age, who feel the fascination of her flowing locks, her bright eyes,
her blooming cheeks, and that mysterious magnetism of sex which draws
all life into its warm and potently vitalized atmosphere?  So it did
indeed seem.  The dangerous experiment could not be repeated
indefinitely.  It was not intentionally tried again, but accident
brought about more than one renewal of it during the following years,
until it became fully recognized that I was the unhappy subject of a
mortal dread of woman,--not absolutely of the human female, for I had
no fear of my old nurse or of my grandmother, or of any old wrinkled
face, and I had become accustomed to the occasional meeting of a
little girl or two, whom I nevertheless regarded with a certain ill-
defined feeling that there was danger in their presence.  I was sent
to a boys' school very early, and during the first ten or twelve
years of my life I had rarely any occasion to be reminded of my
strange idiosyncrasy.

As I grew out of boyhood into youth, a change came over the feelings
which had so long held complete possession of me.  This was what my
father and his advisers had always anticipated, and was the ground of
their confident hope in my return to natural conditions before I
should have grown to mature manhood.

How shall I describe the conflicts of those dreamy, bewildering,
dreadful years?  Visions of loveliness haunted me sleeping and
waking.  Sometimes a graceful girlish figure would so draw my eyes
towards it that I lost sight of all else, and was ready to forget all
my fears and find myself at her side, like other youths by the side
of young maidens,--happy in their cheerful companionship, while I,--
I, under the curse of one blighting moment, looked on, hopeless.
Sometimes the glimpse of a fair face or the tone of a sweet voice
stirred within me all the instincts that make the morning of life
beautiful to adolescence.  I reasoned with myself:

Why should I not have outgrown that idle apprehension which had been
the nightmare of my earlier years?  Why should not the rising tide of
life have drowned out the feeble growths that infested the shallows
of childhood?  How many children there are who tremble at being left
alone in the dark, but who, a few years later, will smile at their
foolish terrors and brave all the ghosts of a haunted chamber!  Why
should I any longer be the slave of a foolish fancy that has grown
into a half insane habit of mind?  I was familiarly acquainted with
all the stories of the strange antipathies and invincible repugnances
to which others, some of them famous men, had been subject.  I said
to myself, Why should not I overcome this dread of woman as Peter the
Great fought down his dread of wheels rolling over a bridge?  Was I,
alone of all mankind, to be doomed to perpetual exclusion from the
society which, as it seemed to me, was all that rendered existence
worth the trouble and fatigue of slavery to the vulgar need of
supplying the waste of the system and working at the task of
respiration like the daughters of Danaus,--toiling day and night as
the worn-out sailor labors at the pump of his sinking vessel?

Why did I not brave the risk of meeting squarely, and without regard
to any possible danger, some one of those fair maidens whose far-off
smile, whose graceful movements, at once attracted and agitated me?
I can only answer this question to the satisfaction of any really
inquiring reader by giving him the true interpretation of the
singular phenomenon of which I was the subject.  For this I shall
have to refer to a paper of which I have made a copy, and which will
be found included with this manuscript.  It is enough to say here,
without entering into the explanation of the fact, which will be
found simple enough as seen by the light of modern physiological
science, that the "nervous disturbance" which the presence of a woman
in the flower of her age produced in my system was a sense of
impending death, sudden, overwhelming, unconquerable, appalling.  It
was a reversed action of the nervous centres,--the opposite of that
which flushes the young lover's cheek and hurries his bounding pulses
as he comes into the presence of the object of his passion.  No one
who has ever felt the sensation can have failed to recognize it as an
imperative summons, which commands instant and terrified submission.

It was at this period of my life that my father determined to try the
effect of travel and residence in different localities upon my bodily
and mental condition.  I say bodily as well as mental, for I was too
slender for my height and subject to some nervous symptoms which were
a cause of anxiety.  That the mind was largely concerned in these
there was no doubt, but the mutual interactions of mind and body are
often too complex to admit of satisfactory analysis.  Each is in part
cause and each also in part effect.

We passed some years in Italy, chiefly in Rome, where I was placed in
a school conducted by priests, and where of course I met only those
of my own sex.  There I had the opportunity of seeing the influences
under which certain young Catholics, destined for the priesthood, are
led to separate themselves from all communion with the sex associated
in their minds with the most subtle dangers to which the human soul
can be exposed.  I became in some degree reconciled to the thought of
exclusion from the society of women by seeing around me so many who
were self-devoted to celibacy.  The thought sometimes occurred to me
whether I should not find the best and the only natural solution of
the problem of existence, as submitted to myself, in taking upon me
the vows which settle the whole question and raise an impassable
barrier between the devotee and the object of his dangerous
attraction.

How often I talked this whole matter over with the young priest who
was at once my special instructor and my favorite companion!  But
accustomed as I had become to the forms of the Roman Church, and
impressed as I was with the purity and excellence of many of its
young members with whom I was acquainted, my early training rendered
it impossible for me to accept the credentials which it offered me as
authoritative.  My friend and instructor had to set me down as a case
of "invincible ignorance."  This was the loop-hole through which he
crept out of the prison-house of his creed, and was enabled to look
upon me without the feeling of absolute despair with which his
sterner brethren would, I fear, have regarded me.

I have said that accident exposed me at times to the influence which
I had such reasons for dreading.  Here is one example of such an
occurrence, which I relate as simply as possible, vividly as it is
impressed upon my memory.  A young friend whose acquaintance I had
made in Rome asked me one day to come to his rooms and look at a
cabinet of gems and medals which he had collected.  I had been but a
short time in his library when a vague sense of uneasiness came over
me.  My heart became restless,--I could feel it stirring irregularly,
as if it were some frightened creature caged in my breast.  There was
nothing that I could see to account for it.  A door was partly open,
but not so that I could see into the next room.  The feeling grew
upon me of some influence which was paralyzing my circulation.  I
begged my friend to open a window.  As be did so, the door swung in
the draught, and I saw a blooming young woman,--it was my friend's
sister, who had been sitting with a book in her hand, and who rose at
the opening of the door.  Something had warned me of the presence of
a woman, that occult and potent aura of individuality, call it
personal magnetism, spiritual effluence, or reduce it to a simpler
expression if you will; whatever it was, it had warned me of the
nearness of the dread attraction which allured at a distance and
revealed itself with all the terrors of the Lorelei if approached too
recklessly.  A sign from her brother caused her to withdraw at once,
but not before I had felt the impression which betrayed itself in my
change of color, anxiety about the region of the heart, and sudden
failure as if about to fall in a deadly fainting-fit.

Does all this seem strange and incredible to the reader of my
manuscript?  Nothing in the history of life is so strange or
exceptional as it seems to those who have not made a long study of
its mysteries.  I have never known just such a case as my own, and
yet there must have been such, and if the whole history of mankind
were unfolded I cannot doubt that there have been many like it.  Let
my reader suspend his judgment until he has read the paper I have
referred to, which was drawn up by a Committee of the Royal Academy
of the Biological Sciences.  In this paper the mechanism of the
series of nervous derangements to which I have been subject since the
fatal shock experienced in my infancy is explained in language not
hard to understand.  It will be seen that such a change of polarity
in the nervous centres is only a permanent form and an extreme degree
of an emotional disturbance, which as a temporary and comparatively
unimportant personal accident is far from being uncommon,--is so
frequent, in fact, that every one must have known instances of it,
and not a few must have had more or less serious experiences of it in
their own private history.

It must not be supposed that my imagination dealt with me as I am now
dealing with the reader.  I was full of strange fancies and wild
superstitions.  One of my Catholic friends gave me a silver medal
which had been blessed by the Pope, and which I was to wear next my
body.  I was told that this would turn black after a time, in virtue
of a power which it possessed of drawing out original sin, or certain
portions of it, together with the evil and morbid tendencies which
had been engrafted on the corrupt nature.  I wore the medal
faithfully, as directed, and watched it carefully.  It became
tarnished and after a time darkened, but it wrought no change in my
unnatural condition.

There was an old gypsy who had the reputation of knowing more of
futurity than she had any right to know.  The story was that she had
foretold the assassination of Count Rossi and the death of Cavour.

However that may have been, I was persuaded to let her try her black
art upon my future.  I shall never forget the strange, wild look of
the wrinkled hag as she took my hand and studied its lines and fixed
her wicked old eyes on my young countenance.  After this examination
she shook her head and muttered some words, which as nearly as I
could get them would be in English like these:

     Fair lady cast a spell on thee,
     Fair lady's hand shall set thee free.

Strange as it may seem, these words of a withered old creature, whose
palm had to be crossed with silver to bring forth her oracular
response, have always clung to my memory as if they were destined to
fulfilment.  The extraordinary nature of the affliction to which I
was subject disposed me to believe the incredible with reference to
all that relates to it.  I have never ceased to have the feeling
that, sooner or later, I should find myself freed from the blight
laid upon me in my infancy.  It seems as if it would naturally come
through the influence of some young and fair woman, to whom that
merciful errand should be assigned by the Providence that governs our
destiny.  With strange hopes, with trembling fears, with mingled
belief and doubt, wherever I have found myself I have sought with
longing yet half-averted eyes for the "elect lady," as I have learned
to call her, who was to lift the curse from my ruined life.

Three times I have been led to the hope, if not the belief, that I
had found the object of my superstitious belief.--Singularly enough
it was always on the water that the phantom of my hope appeared
before my bewildered vision.  Once it was an English girl who was a
fellow passenger with me in one of my ocean voyages.  I need not say
that she was beautiful, for she was my dream realized.  I heard her
singing, I saw her walking the deck on some of the fair days when
sea-sickness was forgotten.  The passengers were a social company
enough, but I had kept myself apart, as was my wont.  At last the
attraction became too strong to resist any longer.  "I will venture
into the charmed circle if it kills me," I said to my father.  I did
venture, and it did not kill me, or I should not be telling this
story.  But there was a repetition of the old experiences.  I need
not relate the series of alarming consequences of my venture.  The
English girl was very lovely, and I have no doubt has made some one
supremely happy before this, but she was not the "elect lady" of the
prophecy and of my dreams.

A second time I thought myself for a moment in the presence of the
destined deliverer who was to restore me to my natural place among my
fellow men and women.  It was on the Tiber that I met the young
maiden who drew me once more into that inner circle which surrounded
young womanhood with deadly peril for me, if I dared to pass its
limits.  I was floating with the stream in the little boat in which I
passed many long hours of reverie when I saw another small boat with
a boy and a young girl in it.  The boy had been rowing, and one of
his oars had slipped from his grasp.  He did not know how to paddle
with a single oar, and was hopelessly rowing round and round, his oar
all the time floating farther away from him.  I could not refuse my
assistance.  I picked up the oar and brought my skiff alongside of
the boat.  When I handed the oar to the boy the young girl lifted her
veil and thanked me in the exquisite music of the language which

     'Sounds as if it should be writ on satin.'

She was a type of Italian beauty,--a nocturne in flesh and blood, if
I may borrow a term certain artists are fond of; but it was her voice
which captivated me and for a moment made me believe that I was no
longer shut off from all relations with the social life of my race.
An hour later I was found lying insensible on the floor of my boat,
white, cold, almost pulseless.  It cost much patient labor to bring
me back to consciousness.  Had not such extreme efforts been made, it
seems probable that I should never have waked from a slumber which
was hardly distinguishable from that of death.


Why should I provoke a catastrophe which appears inevitable if I
invite it by exposing myself to its too well ascertained cause?  The
habit of these deadly seizures has become a second nature.  The
strongest and the ablest men have found it impossible to resist the
impression produced by the most insignificant object, by the most
harmless sight or sound to which they had a congenital or acquired
antipathy.  What prospect have I of ever being rid of this long and
deep-seated infirmity?  I may well ask myself these questions, but my
answer is that I will never give up the hope that time will yet bring
its remedy.  It may be that the wild prediction which so haunts me
shall find itself fulfilled.  I have had of late strange
premonitions, to which if I were superstitious I could not help
giving heed.  But I have seen too much of the faith that deals in
miracles to accept the supernatural in any shape,--assuredly when it
comes from an old witch-like creature who takes pay for her
revelations of the future.  Be it so: though I am not superstitious,
I have a right to be imaginative, and my imagination will hold to
those words of the old zingara with an irresistible feeling that,
sooner or later, they will prove true.

Can it be possible that her prediction is not far from its
realization?  I have had both waking and sleeping visions within
these last months and weeks which have taken possession of me and
filled my life with new thoughts, new hopes, new resolves.

Sometimes on the bosom of the lake by which I am dreaming away this
season of bloom and fragrance, sometimes in the fields or woods in a
distant glimpse, once in a nearer glance, which left me pale and
tremulous, yet was followed by a swift reaction, so that my cheeks
flushed and my pulse bounded, I have seen her who--how do I dare to
tell it so that my own eyes can read it?---I cannot help believing is
to be my deliverer, my saviour.

I have been warned in the most solemn and impressive language by the
experts most deeply read in the laws of life and the history of its
disturbing and destroying influences, that it would be at the
imminent risk of my existence if I should expose myself to the
repetition of my former experiences.  I was reminded that unexplained
sudden deaths were of constant, of daily occurrence; that any emotion
is liable to arrest the movements of life: terror, joy, good news or
bad news,--anything that reaches the deeper nervous centres.  I had
already died once, as Sir Charles Napier said of himself; yes, more
than once, died and been resuscitated.  The next time, I might very
probably fail to get my return ticket after my visit to Hades.  It
was a rather grim stroke of humor, but I understood its meaning full
well, and felt the force of its menace.

After all, what had I to live for if the great primal instinct which
strives to make whole the half life of lonely manhood is defeated,
suppressed, crushed out of existence?  Why not as well die in the
attempt to break up a wretched servitude to a perverted nervous
movement as in any other way?  I am alone in the world,--alone save
for my faithful servant, through whom I seem to hold to the human
race as it were by a single filament.  My father, who was my
instructor, my companion, my dearest and best friend through all my
later youth and my earlier manhood, died three years ago and left me
my own master, with the means of living as might best please my
fancy.  This season shall decide my fate.  One more experiment, and I
shall find myself restored to my place among my fellow-beings, or, as
I devoutly hope, in a sphere where all our mortal infirmities are
past and forgotten.

I have told the story of a blighted life without reserve, so that
there shall not remain any mystery or any dark suspicion connected
with my memory if I should be taken away unexpectedly.  It has cost
me an effort to do it, but now that my life is on record I feel more
reconciled to my lot, with all its possibilities, and among these
possibilities is a gleam of a better future.  I have been told by my
advisers, some of them wise, deeply instructed, and kind-hearted men,
that such a life-destiny should be related by the subject of it for
the instruction of others, and especially for the light it throws on
certain peculiarities of human character often wrongly interpreted as
due to moral perversion, when they are in reality the results of
misdirected or reversed actions in some of the closely connected
nervous centres.

For myself I can truly say that I have very little morbid sensibility
left with reference to the destiny which has been allotted to me.  I
have passed through different stages of feeling with reference to it,
as I have developed from infancy to manhood.  At first it was mere
blind instinct about which I had no thought, living like other
infants the life of impressions without language to connect them in
series.  In my boyhood I began to be deeply conscious of the
infirmity which separated me from those around me.  In youth began
that conflict of emotions and impulses with the antagonistic
influence of which I have already spoken, a conflict which has never
ceased, but to which I have necessarily become to a certain degree
accustomed; and against the dangers of which I have learned to guard
myself habitually.  That is the meaning of my isolation.  You, young
man,--if at any time your eyes shall look upon my melancholy record,
--you at least will understand me.  Does not your heart throb, in the
presence of budding or blooming womanhood, sometimes as if it "were
ready to crack" with its own excess of strain?  What if instead of
throbbing it should falter, flutter, and stop as if never to beat
again?  You, young woman, who with ready belief and tender sympathy
will look upon these pages, if they are ever spread before you, know
what it is when your breast heaves with uncontrollable emotion and
the grip of the bodice seems unendurable as the embrace of the iron
virgin of the Inquisition.  Think what it would be if the grasp were
tightened so that no breath of air could enter your panting chest!

Does your heart beat in the same way, young man, when your honored
friend, a venerable matron of seventy years, greets you with her
kindly smile as it does in the presence of youthful loveliness?  When
a pretty child brings you her doll and looks into your eyes with
artless grace and trustful simplicity, does your pulse quicken, do
you tremble, does life palpitate through your whole being, as when
the maiden of seventeen meets your enamored sight in the glow of her
rosebud beauty?  Wonder not, then, if the period of mystic attraction
for you should be that of agitation, terror, danger, to one in whom
the natural current of the instincts has had its course changed as
that of a stream is changed by a convulsion of nature, so that the
impression which is new life to you is death to him.

I am now twenty-five years old.  I have reached the time of life
which I have dreamed, nay even ventured to hope, might be the limit
of the sentence which was pronounced upon me in my infancy.  I can
assign no good reason for this anticipation.  But in writing this
paper I feel as if I were preparing to begin a renewed existence.
There is nothing for me to be ashamed of in the story I have told.
There is no man living who would not have yielded to the sense of
instantly impending death which seized upon me under the conditions I
have mentioned.  Martyrs have gone singing to their flaming shrouds,
but never a man could hold his breath long enough to kill himself; he
must have rope or water, or some mechanical help, or nature will make
him draw in a breath of air, and would make him do so though he knew
the salvation of the human race would be forfeited by that one gasp.

This paper may never reach the eye of any one afflicted in the same
way that I have been.  It probably never will; but for all that,
there are many shy natures which will recognize tendencies in
themselves in the direction of my unhappy susceptibility.  Others, to
whom such weakness seems inconceivable, will find their scepticism
shaken, if not removed, by the calm, judicial statement of the Report
drawn up for the Royal Academy.  It will make little difference to me
whether my story is accepted unhesitatingly or looked upon as largely
a product of the imagination.  I am but a bird of passage that lights
on the boughs of different nationalities.  I belong to no flock; my
home may be among the palms of Syria, the olives of Italy, the oaks
of England, the elms that shadow the Hudson or the Connecticut; I
build no nest; to-day I am here, to-morrow on the wing.

If I quit my native land before the trees have dropped their leaves I
shall place this manuscript in the safe hands of one whom I feel sure
that I can trust; to do with it as he shall see fit.  If it is only
curious and has no bearing on human welfare, he may think it well to
let it remain unread until I shall have passed away.  If in his
judgment it throws any light on one of the deeper mysteries of our
nature,--the repulsions which play such a formidable part in social
life, and which must be recognized as the correlatives of the
affinities that distribute the individuals governed by them in the
face of impediments which seem to be impossibilities,--then it may be
freely given to the world.

But if I am here when the leaves are all fallen, the programme of my
life will have changed, and this story of the dead past will be
illuminated by the light of a living present which will irradiate all
its saddening features.  Who would not pray that my last gleam of
light and hope may be that of dawn and not of departing day?

The reader who finds it hard to accept the reality of a story so far
from the common range of experience is once more requested to suspend
his judgment until he has read the paper which will next be offered
for his consideration.


THE REPORT OF THE BIOLOGICAL COMMITTEE.

Perhaps it is too much to expect a reader who wishes to be
entertained, excited, amused, and does not want to work his passage
through pages which he cannot understand without some effort of his
own, to read the paper which follows and Dr. Butts's reflections upon
it.  If he has no curiosity in the direction of these chapters, he
can afford to leave them to such as relish a slight flavor of
science.  But if he does so leave them he will very probably remain
sceptical as to the truth of the story to which they are meant to
furnish him with a key.

Of course the case of Maurice Kirkwood is a remarkable and
exceptional one, and it is hardly probable that any reader's
experience will furnish him with its parallel.  But let him look back
over all his acquaintances, if he has reached middle life, and see if
he cannot recall more than one who, for some reason or other, shunned
the society of young women, as if they had a deadly fear of their
company.  If he remembers any such, he can understand the simple
statements and natural reflections which are laid before him.

One of the most singular facts connected with the history of Maurice
Kirkwood was the philosophical equanimity with which he submitted to
the fate which had fallen upon him.  He did not choose to be pumped
by the Interviewer, who would show him up in the sensational columns
of his prying newspaper.  He lived chiefly by himself, as the easiest
mode of avoiding those meetings to which he would be exposed in
almost every society into which he might venture.  But he had learned
to look upon himself very much as he would upon an intimate not
himself,--upon a different personality.  A young man will naturally
enough be ashamed of his shyness.  It is something which others
believe, and perhaps he himself thinks, he might overcome.  But in
the case of Maurice Kirkwood there was no room for doubt as to the
reality and gravity of the long enduring effects of his first
convulsive terror.  He had accepted the fact as he would have
accepted the calamity of losing his sight or his hearing.  When he
was questioned by the experts to whom his case was submitted, he told
them all that he knew about it almost without a sign of emotion.
Nature was so peremptory with him,--saying in language that had no
double meaning: "If you violate the condition on which you hold my
gift of existence I slay you on the spot,"--that he became as
decisive in his obedience as she was in her command, and accepted his
fate without repining.

Yet it must not be thought for a moment,--it cannot be supposed,--
that he was insensible because he looked upon himself with the
coolness of an enforced philosophy.  He bore his burden manfully,
hard as it was to live under it, for he lived, as we have seen, in
hope.  The thought of throwing it off with his life, as too grievous
to be borne, was familiar to his lonely hours, but he rejected it as
unworthy of his manhood.  How he had speculated and dreamed about it
is plain enough from the paper the reader may remember on Ocean,
River, and Lake.

With these preliminary hints the paper promised is submitted to such
as may find any interest in them.


               ACCOUNT OF A CASE OF GYNOPHOBIA.

                         WITH REMARKS.

Being the Substance of a Report to the Royal Academy of the Biological
Sciences by a Committee of that Institution.

"The singular nature of the case we are about to narrate and comment
upon will, we feel confident, arrest the attention of those who have
learned the great fact that Nature often throws the strongest light
upon her laws by the apparent exceptions and anomalies which from
time to time are observed.  We have done with the lusus naturae of
earlier generations.  We pay little attention to the stories of
'miracles,' except so far as we receive them ready-made at the hands
of the churches which still hold to them.  Not the less do we meet
with strange and surprising facts, which a century or two ago would
have been handled by the clergy and the courts, but today are calmly
recorded and judged by the best light our knowledge of the laws of
life can throw upon them.  It must be owned that there are stories
which we can hardly dispute, so clear and full is the evidence in
their support, which do, notwithstanding, tax our faith and sometimes
leave us sceptical in spite of all the testimony which supports them.

" In this category many will be disposed to place the case we commend
to the candid attention of the Academy.  If one were told that a
young man, a gentleman by birth and training, well formed, in
apparently perfect health, of agreeable physiognomy and manners,
could not endure the presence of the most attractive young woman, but
was seized with deadly terror and sudden collapse of all the powers
of life, if he came into her immediate presence; if it were added
that this same young man did not shrink from the presence of an old
withered crone; that he had a certain timid liking for little maidens
who had not yet outgrown the company of their dolls, the listener
would be apt to smile, if he did not laugh, at the absurdity of the
fable.  Surely, he would say, this must be the fiction of some
fanciful brain, the whim of some romancer, the trick of some
playwright.  It would make a capital farce, this idea, carried out.
A young man slighting the lovely heroine of the little comedy and
making love to her grandmother!  This would, of course, be
overstating the truth of the story, but to such a misinterpretation
the plain facts lend themselves too easily.  We will relate the
leading circumstances of the case, as they were told us with perfect
simplicity and frankness by the subject of an affection which, if
classified, would come under the general head of Antipathy, but to
which, if we give it a name, we shall have to apply the term
Gynophobia, or Fear of Woman."

Here follows the account furnished to the writer of the paper, which
is in all essentials identical with that already laid before the
reader.

" Such is the case offered to our consideration.  Assuming its
truthfulness in all its particulars, it remains to see in the first
place whether or not it is as entirely exceptional and anomalous as
it seems at first sight, or whether it is only the last term of a
series of cases which in their less formidable aspect are well known
to us in literature, in the records of science, and even in our
common experience.

"To most of those among us the explanations we are now about to give
are entirely superfluous.  But there are some whose chief studies
have been in different directions, and who will not complain if
certain facts are mentioned which to the expert will seem
rudimentary, and which hardly require recapitulation to those who are
familiarly acquainted with the common text-books.

"The heart is the centre of every living movement in the higher
animals, and in man, furnishing in varying amount, or withholding to
a greater or less extent, the needful supplies to all parts of the
system.  If its action is diminished to a certain degree, faintness
is the immediate consequence; if it is arrested, loss of
consciousness; if its action is not soon restored, death, of which
fainting plants the white flag, remains in possession of the system.

"How closely the heart is under the influence of the emotions we need
not go to science to learn, for all human experience and all
literature are overflowing with evidence that shows the extent of
this relation.  Scripture is full of it; the heart in Hebrew poetry
represents the entire life, we might almost say.  Not less forcible
is the language of Shakespeare, as for instance, in 'Measure for
Measure:'

   "'Why does my blood thus muster to my heart,
     Making it both unable for itself
     And dispossessing all my other parts
     Of necessary fitness?'

"More especially is the heart associated in every literature with the
passion of love.  A famous old story is that of Galen, who was called
to the case of a young lady long ailing, and wasting away from some
cause the physicians who had already seen her were unable to make
out.  The shrewd old practitioner suspected that love was at the
bottom of the young lady's malady.  Many relatives and friends of
both sexes, all of them ready with their sympathy, came to see her.
The physician sat by her bedside during one of these visits, and in
an easy, natural way took her hand and placed a finger on her pulse.
It beat quietly enough until a certain comely young gentleman entered
the apartment, when it suddenly rose infrequency, and at the same
moment her hurried breathing, her changing color, pale and flushed by
turns, betrayed the profound agitation his presence excited.  This
was enough for the sagacious Greek; love was the disease, the cure of
which by its like may be claimed as an anticipation of homoeopathy.
In the frontispiece to the fine old 'Junta' edition of the works of
Galen, you may find among the wood-cuts a representation of the
interesting scene, with the title Amantas Dignotio,--the diagnosis,
or recognition, of the lover.

"Love has many languages, but the heart talks through all of them.
The pallid or burning cheek tells of the failing or leaping fountain
which gives it color.  The lovers at the 'Brookside' could hear each
other's hearts beating.  When Genevieve, in Coleridge's poem, forgot
herself, and was beforehand with her suitor in her sudden embrace,

   "'T was partly love and partly fear,
     And partly 't was a bashful art,
     That I might rather feel than see
     The swelling of her heart'

"Always the heart, whether its hurried action is seen, or heard, or
felt.  But it is not always in this way that the 'deceitful' organ
treats the lover.

    "'Faint heart never won fair lady.'

"This saying was not meant, perhaps, to be taken literally, but it has
its literal truth.  Many a lover has found his heart sink within
him,--lose all its force, and leave him weak as a child in his
emotion at the sight of the object of his affections.  When Porphyro
looked upon Madeline at her prayers in the chapel, it was too much
for him:

   "'She seemed a splendid angel, newly drest,
     Save wings, for heaven:--Porphyro grew faint,
     She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from earthly taint.'

"And in Balzac's novel, 'Cesar Birotteau,' the hero of the story
'fainted away for-joy at the moment when, under a linden-tree, at
Sceaux, Constance-Barbe-Josephine accepted him as her future
husband.'

"One who faints is dead if he does not I come to,' and nothing is
more likely than that too susceptible lovers have actually gone off
in this way.  Everything depends on how the heart behaves itself in
these and similar trying moments.  The mechanism of its actions
becomes an interesting subject, therefore, to lovers of both sexes,
and to all who are capable of intense emotions.

"The heart is a great reservoir, which distributes food, drink, air,
and heat to every part of the system, in exchange for its waste
material.  It knocks at the gate of every organ seventy or eighty
times in a minute, calling upon it to receive its supplies and unload
its refuse.  Between it and the brain there is the closest relation.
The emotions, which act upon it as we have seen, govern it by a
mechanism only of late years thoroughly understood.  This mechanism
can be made plain enough to the reader who is not afraid to believe
that he can understand it.

"The brain, as all know, is the seat of ideas, emotions, volition.
It is the great central telegraphic station with which many lesser
centres are in close relation, from which they receive, and to which
they transmit, their messages.  The heart has its own little brains,
so to speak,--small collections of nervous substance which govern its
rhythmical motions under ordinary conditions.  But these lesser
nervous centres are to a large extent dominated by influences
transmitted from certain groups of nerve-cells in the brain and its
immediate dependencies.

"There are two among the special groups of nerve-cells which produce
directly opposite effects.  One of these has the power of
accelerating the action of the heart, while the other has the power
of retarding or arresting this action.  One acts as the spur, the
other as the bridle.  According as one or the other predominates, the
action of the heart will be stimulated or restrained.  Among the
great modern discoveries in physiology is that of the existence of a
distinct centre of inhibition, as the restraining influence over the
heart is called.

"The centre of inhibition plays a terrible part in the history of
cowardice and of unsuccessful love.  No man can be brave without
blood to sustain his courage, any more than he can think, as the
German materialist says, not absurdly, without phosphorus.  The
fainting lover must recover his circulation, or his lady will lend
him her smelling-salts and take a gallant with blood in his cheeks.
Porphyro got over his faintness before he ran away with Madeline, and
Cesar Birotteau was an accepted lover when he swooned with happiness:
but many an officer has been cashiered, and many a suitor has been
rejected, because the centre of inhibition has got the upper hand of
the centre of stimulation.

"In the well-known cases of deadly antipathy which have been
recorded, the most frequent cause has been the disturbed and
depressing influence of the centre of inhibition.  Fainting at the
sight of blood is one of the commonest examples of this influence.  A
single impression, in a very early period of atmospheric existence,--
perhaps, indirectly, before that period, as was said to have happened
in the case of James the First of England,--may establish a
communication between this centre and the heart which will remain
open ever afterwards.  How does a footpath across a field establish
itself?  Its curves are arbitrary, and what we call accidental, but
one after another follows it as if he were guided by a chart on which
it was laid down.  So it is with this dangerous transit between the
centre of inhibition and the great organ of life.  If once the path
is opened by the track of some profound impression, that same
impression, if repeated, or a similar one, is likely to find the old
footmarks and follow them.  Habit only makes the path easier to
traverse, and thus the unreasoning terror of a child, of an infant,
may perpetuate itself in a timidity which shames the manhood of its
subject.

"The case before us is an exceptional and most remarkable example of
the effect of inhibition on the heart.

"We will not say that we believe it to be unique in the history of
the human race; on the contrary, we do not doubt that there have been
similar cases, and that in some rare instances sudden death has been
the consequence of seizures like that of the subject of this Report.
The case most like it is that of Colone Townsend, which is too well
known to require any lengthened description in this paper.  It is
enough to recall the main facts.  He could by a voluntary effort
suspend the action of his heart for a considerable period, during
which he lay like one dead, pulseless, and without motion.  After a
time the circulation returned, and he does not seem to have been the
worse for his dangerous, or seemingly dangerous, experiment.  But in
his case it was by an act of the will that the heart's action was
suspended.  In the case before us it is an involuntary impulse
transmitted from the brain to the inhibiting centre, which arrests
the cardiac movements.

"What is like to be the further history of the case?

"The subject of this anomalous affliction is now more than twenty
years old.  The chain of nervous actions has become firmly
established.  It might have been hoped that the changes of
adolescence would have effected a transformation of the perverted
instinct.  On the contrary, the whole force of this instinct throws
itself on the centre of inhibition, instead of quickening the heart-
beats, and sending the rush of youthful blood with fresh life through
the entire system to the throbbing finger-tips.

"Is it probable that time and circumstances will alter a habit of
nervous interactions so long established?  We are disposed to think
that there is a chance of its being broken up.  And we are not afraid
to say that we suspect the old gypsy woman, whose prophecy took such
hold of the patient's imagination, has hit upon the way in which the
"spell,' as she called it, is to be dissolved.  She must, in all
probability, have had a hint of the 'antipatia' to which the youth
before her was a victim, and its cause, and if so, her guess as to
the probable mode in which the young man would obtain relief from his
unfortunate condition was the one which would naturally suggest
itself.

"If once the nervous impression which falls on the centre of
inhibition can be made to change its course, so as to follow its
natural channel, it will probably keep to that channel ever
afterwards.  And this will, it is most likely, be effected by some
sudden, unexpected impression.  If he were drowning, and a young
woman should rescue him, it is by no means impossible that the change
in the nervous current we have referred to might be brought about as
rapidly, as easily, as the reversal of the poles in a magnet, which
is effected in an instant.  But he cannot be expected to throw
himself into the water just at the right moment when the 'fair lady'
of the gitana's prophecy is passing on the shore.  Accident may
effect the cure which art seems incompetent to perform.  It would not
be strange if in some future seizure he should never come back to
consciousness.  But it is quite conceivable, on the other hand, that
a happier event may occur, that in a single moment the nervous
polarity may be reversed, the whole course of his life changed, and
his past terrible experiences be to him like a scarce-remembered
dream.

"This is one, of those cases in which it is very hard to determine
the wisest course to be pursued.  The question is not unlike that
which arises in certain cases of dislocation of the bones of the
neck.  Shall the unfortunate sufferer go all his days with his face
turned far round to the right or the left, or shall an attempt be
made to replace the dislocated bones?  an attempt which may succeed,
or may cause instant death.  The patient must be consulted as to
whether he will take the chance.  The practitioner may be unwilling
to risk it, if the patient consents.  Each case must be judged on its
own special grounds.  We cannot think that this young man is doomed
to perpetual separation from the society of womanhood during the
period of its bloom and attraction.  But to provoke another seizure
after his past experiences would be too much like committing suicide.
We fear that we must trust to the chapter of accidents.  The strange
malady--for such it is--has become a second nature, and may require
as energetic a shock to displace it as it did to bring it into
existence.  Time alone can solve this question, on which depends the
well-being and, it may be, the existence of a young man every way
fitted to be happy, and to give happiness, if restored to his true
nature."




XX.

DR. BUTTS REFLECTS.

Dr. Butts sat up late at night reading these papers and reflecting
upon them.  He was profoundly impressed and tenderly affected by the
entire frankness, the absence of all attempt at concealment, which
Maurice showed in placing these papers at his disposal.  He believed
that his patient would recover from this illness for which he had
been taking care of him.  He thought deeply and earnestly of what he
could do for him after he should have regained his health and
strength.

There were references, in Maurice's own account of himself, which the
doctor called to mind with great interest after reading his brief
autobiography.  Some one person--some young woman, it must be--had
produced a singular impression upon him since those earlier perilous
experiences through which he had passed.  The doctor could not help
thinking of that meeting with Euthymia of which she had spoken to
him.  Maurice, as she said, turned pale,--he clapped his hand to his
breast.  He might have done so if be had met her chambermaid, or any
straggling damsel of the village.  But Euthymia was not a young woman
to be looked upon with indifference.  She held herself like a queen,
and walked like one, not a stage queen, but one born and bred to
self-reliance, and command of herself as well as others.  One could
not pass her without being struck with her noble bearing and spirited
features.  If she had known how Maurice trembled as he looked upon
her, in that conflict of attraction and uncontrollable dread,--if she
had known it!  But what, even then, could she have done?  Nothing but
get away from him as fast as she could.  As it was, it was a long
time before his agitation subsided, and his heart beat with its
common force and frequency.

Dr. Butts was not a male gossip nor a matchmaking go-between.  But he
could not help thinking what a pity it was that these two young
persons could not come together as other young people do in the
pairing season, and find out whether they cared for and were fitted
for each other.  He did not pretend to settle this question in his
own mind, but the thought was a natural one.  And here was a gulf
between them as deep and wide as that between Lazarus and Dives.
Would it ever be bridged over?  This thought took possession of the
doctor's mind, and he imagined all sorts of ways of effecting some
experimental approximation between Maurice and Euthymia.  From this
delicate subject he glanced off to certain general considerations
suggested by the extraordinary history he had been reading.  He began
by speculating as to the possibility of the personal presence of an
individual making itself perceived by some channel other than any of
the five senses.  The study of the natural sciences teaches those who
are devoted to them that the most insignificant facts may lead the
way to the discovery of the most important, all-pervading laws of the
universe.  From the kick of a frog's hind leg to the amazing triumphs
which began with that seemingly trivial incident is a long, a very
long stride if Madam Galvani had not been in delicate health, which
was the occasion of her having some frog-broth prepared for her, the
world of to-day might not be in possession of the electric telegraph
and the light which blazes like the sun at high noon.  A common-
looking occurrence, one seemingly unimportant, which had hitherto
passed unnoticed with the ordinary course of things, was the means of
introducing us to a new and vast realm of closely related phenomena.
It was like a key that we might have picked up, looking so simple
that it could hardly fit any lock but one of like simplicity, but
which should all at once throw back the bolts of the one lock which
had defied the most ingenious of our complex implements and open our
way into a hitherto unexplored territory.

It certainly was not through the eye alone that Maurice felt the
paralyzing influence.  He could contemplate Euthymia from a distance,
as he did on the day of the boat-race, without any nervous
disturbance.  A certain proximity was necessary for the influence to
be felt, as in the case of magnetism and electricity.  An atmosphere
of danger surrounded every woman he approached during the period when
her sex exercises its most powerful attractions.  How far did that
atmosphere extend, and through what channel did it act?

The key to the phenomena of this case, he believed, was to be found
in a fact as humble as that which gave birth to the science of
galvanism and its practical applications.  The circumstances
connected with the very common antipathy to cats were as remarkable
in many points of view as the similar circumstances in the case of
Maurice Kirkwood.  The subjects of that antipathy could not tell what
it was which disturbed their nervous system.  All they knew was that
a sense of uneasiness, restlessness, oppression, came over them in
the presence of one of these animals.  He remembered the fact already
mentioned, that persons sensitive to this impression can tell by
their feelings if a cat is concealed in the apartment in which they
may happen to be.  It may be through some emanation.  It may be
through the medium of some electrical disturbance.  What if the
nerve-thrills passing through the whole system of the animal
propagate themselves to a certain distance without any more regard to
intervening solids than is shown by magnetism?  A sieve lets sand
pass through it; a filter arrests sand, but lets fluids pass, glass
holds fluids, but lets light through; wood shuts out light, but
magnetic attraction goes through it as sand went through the sieve.
No good reasons can be given why the presence of a cat should not
betray itself to certain organizations, at a distance, through the
walls of a box in which the animal is shut up.  We need not
disbelieve the stories which allege such an occurrence as a fact and
a not very infrequent one.

If the presence of a cat can produce its effects under these
circumstances, why should not that of a human being under similar
conditions, acting on certain constitutions, exercise its specific
influence?  The doctor recalled a story told him by one of his
friends, a story which the friend himself heard from the lips of the
distinguished actor, the late Mr. Fechter.  The actor maintained that
Rachel had no genius as an actress.  It was all Samson's training and
study, according to him, which explained the secret of her wonderful
effectiveness on the stage.  But magnetism, he said,--magnetism, she
was full of.  He declared that he was made aware of her presence on
the stage, when he could not see her or know of her presence
otherwise, by this magnetic emanation.  The doctor took the story for
what it was worth.  There might very probably be exaggeration,
perhaps high imaginative coloring about it, but it was not a whit
more unlikely than the cat-stories, accepted as authentic.  He
continued this train of thought into further developments.  Into this
series of reflections we will try to follow him.

What is the meaning of the halo with which artists have surrounded
the heads of their pictured saints, of the aureoles which wraps them
like a luminous cloud?  Is it not a recognition of the fact that
these holy personages diffuse their personality in the form of a
visible emanation, which reminds us of Milton's definition of light:

    "Bright effluence of bright essence increate"?

The common use of the term influence would seem to imply the
existence of its correlative, effluence.  There is no good reason
that I can see, the doctor said to himself, why among the forces
which work upon the nervous centres there should not be one which
acts at various distances from its source.  It may not be visible
like the "glory" of the painters, it may not be appreciable by any
one of the five senses, and yet it may be felt by the person reached
by it as much as if it were a palpable presence,--more powerfully,
perhaps, from the mystery which belongs to its mode of action.

Why should not Maurice have been rendered restless and anxious by the
unseen nearness of a young woman who was in the next room to him,
just as the persons who have the dread of cats are made conscious of
their presence through some unknown channel?  Is it anything strange
that the larger and more powerful organism should diffuse a
consciousness of its presence to some distance as well as the
slighter and feebler one?  Is it strange that this mysterious
influence or effluence should belong especially or exclusively to the
period of complete womanhood in distinction from that of immaturity
or decadence?  On the contrary, it seems to be in accordance with all
the analogies of nature,--analogies too often cruel in the sentence
they pass upon the human female.

Among the many curious thoughts which came up in the doctor's mind
was this, which made him smile as if it were a jest, but which he
felt very strongly had its serious side, and was involved with the
happiness or suffering of multitudes of youthful persons who die
without telling their secret:

How many young men have a mortal fear of woman, as woman, which they
never overcome, and in consequence of which the attraction which
draws man towards her, as strong in them as in others,--oftentimes,
in virtue of their peculiarly sensitive organizations, more potent in
them than in others of like age and conditions,--in consequence of
which fear, this attraction is completely neutralized, and all the
possibilities of doubled and indefinitely extended life depending
upon it are left unrealized!  Think what numbers of young men in
Catholic countries devote themselves to lives of celibacy.  Think how
many young men lose all their confidence in the presence of the young
woman to whom they are most attracted, and at last steal away from a
companionship which it is rapture to dream of and torture to endure,
so does the presence of the beloved object paralyze all the powers of
expression.  Sorcerers have in all time and countries played on the
hopes and terrors of lovers.  Once let loose a strong impulse on the
centre of inhibition, and the warrior who had faced bayonets and
batteries becomes a coward whom the well-dressed hero of the ball-
room and leader of the German will put to ignominious flight in five
minutes of easy, audacious familiarity with his lady-love.

Yes, the doctor went on with his reflections, I do not know that I
have seen the term Gynophobia before I opened this manuscript, but I
have seen the malady many times.  Only one word has stood between
many a pair of young people and their lifelong happiness, and that
word has got as far as the lips, but the lips trembled and would not,
could not, shape that little word.  All young women are not like
Coleridge's Genevieve, who knew how to help her lover out of his
difficulty, and said yes before he had asked for an answer.  So the
wave which was to have wafted them on to the shore of Elysium has
just failed of landing them, and back they have been drawn into the
desolate ocean to meet no more on earth.

Love is the master-key, he went on thinking, love is the master-key
that opens the gates of happiness, of hatred, of jealousy, and, most
easily of all, the gate of fear.  How terrible is the one fact of
beauty!--not only the historic wonder of beauty, that "burnt the
topless towers of Ilium "for the smile of Helen, and fired the
palaces of Babylon by the hand of Thais, but the beauty which springs
up in all times and places, and carries a torch and wears a serpent
for a wreath as truly as any of the Eumenides.  Paint Beauty with her
foot upon a skull and a dragon coiled around her.

The doctor smiled at his own imposing classical allusions and
pictorial imagery.  Drifting along from thought to thought, he
reflected on the probable consequences of the general knowledge of
Maurice Kirkwood's story, if it came before the public.

What a piece of work it would make among the lively youths of the
village, to be sure!  What scoffing, what ridicule, what
embellishments, what fables, would follow in the trail of the story!
If the Interviewer got hold of it, how "The People's Perennial and
Household Inquisitor" would blaze with capitals in its next issue!
The young fellows' of the place would be disposed to make fun of the
whole matter.  The young girls-the doctor hardly dared to think what
would happen when the story got about among them.  "The Sachem" of
the solitary canoe, the bold horseman, the handsome hermit,--handsome
so far as the glimpses they had got of him went,--must needs be an
object of tender interest among them, now that he was ailing,
suffering, in danger of his life, away from friends,--poor fellow!
Little tokens of their regard had reached his sick-chamber; bunches
of flowers with dainty little notes, some of them pinkish, some
three-cornered, some of them with brief messages, others "criss-
crossed," were growing more frequent as it was understood that the
patient was likely to be convalescent before many days had passed.
If it should come to be understood that there was a deadly obstacle
to their coming into any personal relations with him, the doctor had
his doubts whether there were not those who would subject him to the
risk; for there were coquettes in the village,--strangers, visitors,
let us hope,--who would sacrifice anything or anybody to their vanity
and love of conquest.




XXI

AN INTIMATE CONVERSATION.

The illness from which Maurice had suffered left him in a state of
profound prostration.  The doctor, who remembered the extreme danger
of any overexertion in such cases, hardly allowed him to lift his
head from the pillow.  But his mind was gradually recovering its
balance, and he was able to hold some conversation with those about
him.  His faithful Paolo had grown so thin in waiting upon him and
watching with him that the village children had to take a second look
at his face when they passed him to make sure that it was indeed
their old friend and no other.  But as his master advanced towards
convalescence and the doctor assured him that he was going in all
probability to get well, Paolo's face began to recover something of
its old look and expression, and once more his pockets filled
themselves with comfits for his little circle of worshipping three
and four year old followers.

How is Mr. Kirkwood?" was the question with which he was always
greeted.  In the worst periods of the fever be rarely left his
master.  When he did, and the question was put to him, he would shake
his head sadly, sometimes without a word, sometimes with tears and
sobs and faltering words,--more like a brokenhearted child than a
stalwart man as he was, such a man as soldiers are made of in the
great Continental armies.

"He very bad,--he no eat nothing,--he--no say nothing,--he never be
no better," and all his Southern nature betrayed itself in a
passionate burst of lamentation.  But now that he began to feel easy
about his master, his ready optimism declared itself no less
transparently.

"He better every day now.  He get well in few weeks, sure.  You see
him on hoss in little while."  The kind-hearted creature's life was
bound up in that of his "master," as he loved to call him, in
sovereign disregard of the comments of the natives, who held
themselves too high for any such recognition of another as their
better.  They could not understand how he, so much their superior in
bodily presence, in air and manner, could speak of the man who
employed him in any other way than as "Kirkwood," without even
demeaning himself so far as to prefix a "Mr."  to it.  But "my
master" Maurice remained for Paolo in spite of the fact that all men
are born free and equal.  And never was a servant more devoted to a
master than was Paolo to Maurice during the days of doubt and danger.
Since his improvement Maurice insisted upon his leaving his chamber
and getting out of the house, so as to breathe the fresh air of which
he was in so much need.  It worried him to see his servant returning
after too short an absence.  The attendant who had helped him in the
care of the patient was within call, and Paolo was almost driven out
of the house by the urgency of his master's command that he should
take plenty of exercise in the open air.

Notwithstanding the fact of Maurice's improved condition, although
the force of the disease had spent itself, the state of weakness to
which he had been reduced was a cause of some anxiety, and required
great precautions to be taken.  He lay in bed, wasted, enfeebled to
such a degree that he had to be cared for very much as a child is
tended.  Gradually his voice was coming back to him, so that he could
hold some conversation, as was before mentioned, with those about
him.  The doctor waited for the right moment to make mention of the
manuscript which Maurice had submitted to him.  Up to this time,
although it had been alluded to and the doctor had told him of the
intense interest with which he had read it, he had never ventured to
make it the subject of any long talk, such as would be liable to
fatigue his patient.  But now he thought the time had come.

"I have been thinking," the doctor said, "of the singular seizures to
which you are liable, and as it is my business not merely to think
about such cases, but to do what I can to help any who may be capable
of receiving aid from my art, I wish to have some additional facts
about your history.  And in the first place, will you allow me to ask
what led you to this particular place?  It is so much less known to
the public at large than many other resorts that we naturally ask,
What brings this or that new visitor among us?  We have no ill-
tasting, natural spring of bad water to be analyzed by the state
chemist and proclaimed as a specific.  We have no great gambling-
houses, no racecourse (except that fox boats on the lake); we have no
coaching-club, no great balls, few lions of any kind, so we ask, What
brings this or that stranger here?  And I think I may venture to ask
you whether any, special motive brought you among us, or whether it
was accident that determined your coming to this place."

"Certainly, doctor," Maurice answered, "I will tell you with great
pleasure.  Last year I passed on the border of a great river.  The
year before I lived in a lonely cottage at the side of the ocean.  I
wanted this year to be by a lake.  You heard the paper read at the
meeting of your society, or at least you heard of it,--for such
matters are always talked over in a village like this.  You can judge
by that paper, or could, if it were before you, of the frame of mind
in which I came here.  I was tired of the sullen indifference of the
ocean and the babbling egotism of the river, always hurrying along on
its own private business.  I wanted the dreamy stillness of a large,
tranquil sheet of water that had nothing in particular to do, and
would leave me to myself and my thoughts.  I had read somewhere about
the place, and the old Anchor Tavern, with its paternal landlord and
motherly landlady and old-fashioned household, and that, though it
was no longer open as a tavern, I could find a resting-place there
early in the season, at least for a few days, while I looked about me
for a quiet place in which I might pass my summer.  I have found this
a pleasant residence.  By being up early and out late I have kept
myself mainly in the solitude which has become my enforced habit of
life.  The season has gone by too swiftly for me since my dream has
become a vision."

The doctor was sitting with his hand round Maurice's wrist, three
fingers on his pulse.  As he spoke these last words he noticed that
the pulse fluttered a little,--beat irregularly a few times;
intermitted; became feeble and thready; while his cheek grew whiter
than the pallid bloodlessness of his long illness had left it.

"No more talk, now," he said.  "You are too tired to be using your
voice.  I will hear all the rest another time."

The doctor had interrupted Maurice at an interesting point.  What did
he mean by saying that his dream had become a vision?  This is what
the doctor was naturally curious, and professionally anxious, to
know.  But his hand was still on his patient's pulse, which told him
unmistakably that the heart had taken the alarm and was losing its
energy under the depressing nervous influence.  Presently, however,
it recovered its natural force and rhythm, and a faint flush came
back to the pale cheek.  The doctor remembered the story of Galen,
and the young maiden whose complaint had puzzled the physicians.

The next day his patient was well enough to enter once more into
conversation.

"You said something about a dream of yours which had become a
vision," said the doctor, with his fingers on his patient's wrist, as
before.  He felt the artery leap, under his pressure, falter a
little, stop, then begin again, growing fuller in its beat.  The
heart had felt the pull of the bridle, but the spur had roused it to
swift reaction.

"You know the story of my past life, doctor," Maurice answered; "and,
I will tell you what is the vision which has taken the place of my
dreams.  You remember the boat-race?  I watched it from a distance,
but I held a powerful opera-glass in my hand, which brought the whole
crew of the young ladies' boat so close to me that I could see the
features, the figures, the movements, of every one of the rowers.  I
saw the little coxswain fling her bouquet in the track of the other
boat,--you remember how the race was lost and won,--but I saw one
face among those young girls which drew me away from all the rest.
It was that of the young lady who pulled the bow oar, the captain of
the boat's crew.  I have since learned her name, you know it well,--I
need not name her.  Since that day I have had many distant glimpses
of her; and once I met her so squarely that the deadly sensation came
over me, and I felt that in another moment I should fall senseless at
her feet.  But she passed on her way and I on mine, and the spasm
which had clutched my heart gradually left it, and I was as well as
before.  You know that young lady, doctor?"

"I do; and she is a very noble creature.  You are not the first young
man who has been fascinated, almost at a glance, by Miss Euthymia
Tower.  And she is well worth knowing more intimately."

The doctor gave him a full account of the young lady, of her early
days, her character, her accomplishments.  To all this he listened
devoutly, and when the doctor left him he said to himself,
"I will see her and speak with her, if it costs me my life."




XXII

EUTHYMIA.

"The Wonder" of the Corinna Institute had never willingly made a show
of her gymnastic accomplishments.  Her feats, which were so much
admired, were only her natural exercise.  Gradually the dumb-bells
others used became too light for her, the ropes she climbed too
short, the clubs she exercised with seemed as if they were made of
cork instead of being heavy wood, and all the tests and meters of
strength and agility had been strained beyond the standards which the
records of the school had marked as their historic maxima.  It was
not her fault that she broke a dynamometer one day; she apologized
for it, but the teacher said he wished he could have a dozen broken
every year in the same way.  The consciousness of her bodily strength
had made her very careful in her movements.  The pressure of her hand
was never too hard for the tenderest little maiden whose palm was
against her own.  So far from priding herself on her special gifts,
she was disposed to be ashamed of them.  There were times and places
in which she could give full play to her muscles without fear or
reproach.  She had her special costume for the boat and for the
woods.  She would climb the rugged old hemlocks now and then for the
sake of a wide outlook, or to peep into the large nest where a hawk,
or it may be an eagle, was raising her little brood of air-pirates.

There were those who spoke of her wanderings in lonely places as an
unsafe exposure.  One sometimes met doubtful characters about the
neighborhood, and stories were--told of occurrences which might well
frighten a young girl, and make her cautious of trusting herself
alone in the wild solitudes which surrounded the little village..
Those who knew Euthymia thought her quite equal to taking care of
herself.  Her very look was enough to ensure the respect of any
vagabond who might cross her path, and if matters came to the worst
she would prove as dangerous as a panther.

But it was a pity to associate this class of thoughts with a noble
specimen of true womanhood.  Health, beauty, strength, were fine
qualities, and in all these she was rich.  She enjoyed all her
natural gifts, and thought little about them.  Unwillingly, but over-
persuaded by some of her friends, she had allowed her arm and hand to
be modelled.  The artists who saw the cast wondered if it would be
possible to get the bust of the maiden from whom it was taken.
Nobody would have dared to suggest such an idea to her except Lurida.
For Lurida sex was a trifling accident, to be disregarded not only in
the interests of humanity, but for the sake of art.

"It is a shame," she said to Euthymia, "that you will not let your
exquisitely moulded form be perpetuated in marble.  You have no right
to withhold such a model from the contemplation of your fellow-
creatures.  Think how rare it is to see a woman who truly represents
the divine idea!  You belong to your race, and not to yourself,--at
least, your beauty is a gift not to be considered as a piece of
private property.  Look at the so-called Venus of Milo.  Do you
suppose the noble woman who was the original of that divinely chaste
statue felt any scruple about allowing the sculptor to reproduce her
pure, unblemished perfections?"

Euthymia was always patient with her imaginative friend.  She
listened to her eloquent discourse, but she could not help blushing,
used as she was to Lurida's audacities.  "The Terror's" brain had run
away with a large share of the blood which ought to have gone to the
nourishment of her general system.  She could not help admiring,
almost worshipping, a companion whose being was rich in the womanly
developments with which nature had so economically endowed herself.
An impoverished organization carries with it certain neutral
qualities which make its subject appear, in the presence of complete
manhood and womanhood, like a deaf-mute among speaking persons.  The
deep blush which crimsoned Euthymia's cheek at Lurida's suggestion
was in a strange contrast to her own undisturbed expression.  There
was a range of sensibilities of which Lurida knew far less than she
did of those many and difficult studies which had absorbed her vital
forces.  She was startled to see what an effect her proposal had
produced, for Euthymia was not only blushing, but there was a flame
in her eyes which she had hardly ever seen before.

"Is this only your own suggestion?" Euthymia said, "or has some one
been putting the idea into your head?"  The truth was that she had
happened to meet the Interviewer at the Library, one day, and she was
offended by the long, searching stare with which that individual had
honored her.  It occurred to her that he, or some such visitor to the
place, might have spoken of her to Lurida, or to some other person
who had repeated what was said to Lurida, as a good subject for the
art of the sculptor, and she felt all her maiden sensibilities
offended by the proposition.  Lurida could not understand her
excitement, but she was startled by it.  Natures which are
complementary of each other are liable to these accidental collisions
of feeling.  They get along very well together, none the worse for
their differences, until all at once the tender spot of one or the
other is carelessly handled in utter unconsciousness on the part of
the aggressor, and the exclamation, the outcry, or the explosion
explains the situation altogether too emphatically.  Such scenes did
not frequently occur between the two friends, and this little flurry
was soon over; but it served to warn Lurida that Miss Euthymia Tower
was not of that class of self-conscious beauties who would be ready
to dispute the empire of the Venus of Milo on her own ground, in
defences as scanty and insufficient as those of the marble divinity.

Euthymia had had admirers enough, at a distance, while at school, and
in the long vacations, near enough to find out that she was anything
but easy to make love to.  She fairly frightened more than one rash
youth who was disposed to be too sentimental in her company.  They
overdid flattery, which she was used to and tolerated, but which
cheapened the admirer in her estimation, and now and then betrayed
her into an expression which made him aware of the fact, and was a
discouragement to aggressive amiability.  The real difficulty was
that not one of her adorers had ever greatly interested her.  It
could not be that nature had made her insensible.  It must have been
because the man who was made for her had never yet shown himself.
She was not easy to please, that was certain; and she was one of
those young women who will not accept as a lover one who but half
pleases them.  She could not pick up the first stick that fell in her
way and take it to shape her ideal out of.  Many of the good people
of the village doubted whether Euthymia would ever be married.

"There 's nothing good enough for her in this village," said the old
landlord of what had been the Anchor Tavern.

"She must wait till a prince comes along," the old landlady said in
reply.  "She'd make as pretty a queen as any of them that's born to
it.  Wouldn't she be splendid with a gold crown on her head, and
di'monds a glitterin' all over her!  D' you remember how handsome she
looked in the tableau, when the fair was held for the Dorcas Society?
She had on an old dress of her grandma's,--they don't make anything.
half so handsome nowadays,--and she was just as pretty as a pictur'.
But what's the use of good looks if they scare away folks?  The young
fellows think that such a handsome girl as that would cost ten times
as much to keep as a plain one.  She must be dressed up like an
empress,--so they seem to think.  It ain't so with Euthymy: she'd
look like a great lady dressed anyhow, and she has n't got any more
notions than the homeliest girl that ever stood before a glass to
look at herself."

In the humbler walks of Arrowhead Village society, similar opinions
were entertained of Miss Euthymia.  The fresh-water fisherman
represented pretty well the average estimate of the class to which he
belonged.  "I tell ye," said he to another gentleman of leisure,
whose chief occupation was to watch the coming and going of the
visitors to Arrowhead Village,--"I tell ye that girl ain't a gon to
put up with any o' them slab-sided fellahs that you see hangin'
raound to look at her every Sunday when she comes aout o' meetin'.
It's one o' them big gents from Boston or New York that'll step up
an' kerry her off."

In the mean time nothing could be further from the thoughts of
Euthymia than the prospect of an ambitious worldly alliance.  The
ideals of young women cost them many and great disappointments, but
they save them very often from those lifelong companionships which
accident is constantly trying to force upon them, in spite of their
obvious unfitness.  The higher the ideal, the less likely is the
commonplace neighbor who has the great advantage of easy access, or
the boarding-house acquaintance who can profit by those vacant hours
when the least interesting of visitors is better than absolute
loneliness,--the less likely are these undesirable personages to be
endured, pitied, and, if not embraced, accepted, for want of
something better.  Euthymia found so much pleasure in the
intellectual companionship of Lurida, and felt her own prudence and
reserve so necessary to that independent young lady, that she had
been contented, so far, with friendship, and thought of love only in
an abstract sort of way.  Beneath her abstractions there was a
capacity of loving which might have been inferred from the expression
of her features, the light that shone in her eyes, the tones of her
voice, all of which were full of the language which belongs to
susceptible natures.  How many women never say to themselves that
they were born to love, until all at once the discovery opens upon
them, as the sense that he was born a painter is said to have dawned
suddenly upon Correggio!

Like all the rest of the village and its visitors, she could not help
thinking a good deal about the young man lying ill amongst strangers.
She was not one of those who had sent him the three-cornered notes or
even a bunch of flowers.  She knew that he was receiving abounding
tokens of kindness and sympathy from different quarters, and a
certain inward feeling restrained her from joining in these
demonstrations.  If he had been suffering from some deadly and
contagious malady she would have risked her life to help him, without
a thought that there was any wonderful heroism in such self-devotion.
Her friend Lurida might have been capable of the same sacrifice, but
it would be after reasoning with herself as to the obligations which
her sense of human rights and duties laid upon her, and fortifying
her courage with the memory of noble deeds recorded of women in
ancient and modern history.  With Euthymia the primary human
instincts took precedence of all reasoning or reflection about them.
All her sympathies were excited by the thought of this forlorn
stranger in his solitude, but she felt the impossibility of giving
any complete expression to them.  She thought of Mungo Park in the
African desert, and she envied the poor negress who not only pitied
him, but had the blessed opportunity of helping and consoling him.
How near were these two human creatures, each needing the other!  How
near in bodily presence, how far apart in their lives, with a barrier
seemingly impassable between them!




XXIII

THE MEETING OF MAURICE AND EUTHYMIA.

These autumnal fevers, which carry off a large number of our young
people every year, are treacherous and deceptive diseases.  Not only
are they liable, as has been mentioned, to various accidental
complications which may prove suddenly fatal, but too often, after
convalescence seems to be established, relapses occur which are more
serious than the disease had appeared to be in its previous course.
One morning Dr. Butts found Maurice worse instead of better, as he
had hoped and expected to find him.  Weak as he was, there was every
reason to fear the issue of this return of his threatening symptoms.
There was not much to do besides keeping up the little strength which
still remained.  It was all needed.

Does the reader of these pages ever think of the work a sick man as
much as a well one has to perform while he is lying on his back and
taking what we call his "rest"?  More than a thousand times an hour,
between a hundred and fifty and two hundred thousand times a week, he
has to lift the bars of the cage in which his breathing organs are
confined, to save himself from asphyxia.  Rest!  There is no rest
until the last long sigh tells those who look upon the dying that the
ceaseless daily task, to rest from which is death, is at last
finished.  We are all galley-slaves, pulling at the levers of
respiration,--which, rising and falling like so many oars, drive us
across an unfathomable ocean from one unknown shore to another.  No!
Never was a galley-slave so chained as we are to these four and
twenty oars, at which we must tug day and night all our life long

The doctor could not find any accidental cause to account for this
relapse.  It presently occurred to him that there might be some local
source of infection which had brought on the complaint, and was still
keeping up the symptoms which were the ground of alarm.  He
determined to remove Maurice to his own house, where he could be sure
of pure air, and where he himself could give more constant attention
to his patient during this critical period of his disease.  It was a
risk to take, but he could be carried on a litter by careful men, and
remain wholly passive during the removal.  Maurice signified his
assent, as he could hardly help doing,--for the doctor's suggestion
took pretty nearly the form of a command.  He thought it a matter of
life and death, and was gently urgent for his patient's immediate
change of residence.  The doctor insisted on having Maurice's books
and other movable articles carried to his own house, so that he
should be surrounded by familiar sights, and not worry himself about
what might happen to objects which he valued, if they were left
behind him.

All these dispositions were quickly and quietly made, and everything
was ready for the transfer of the patient to the house of the
hospitable physician.  Paolo was at the doctor's, superintending the
arrangement of Maurice's effects and making all ready for his master.
The nurse in attendance, a trustworthy man enough in the main,
finding his patient in a tranquil sleep, left his bedside for a
little fresh air.  While he was at the door he heard a shouting which
excited his curiosity, and he followed the sound until he found
himself at the border of the lake.  It was nothing very wonderful
which had caused the shouting.  A Newfoundland dog had been showing
off his accomplishments, and some of the idlers were betting as to
the time it would take him to bring back to his master the various
floating objects which had been thrown as far from the shore as
possible.  He watched the dog a few minutes, when his attention was
drawn to a light wherry, pulled by one young lady and steered by
another.  It was making for the shore, which it would soon reach.
The attendant remembered all at once, that he had left his charge,
and just before the boat came to land he turned and hurried back to
the patient.  Exactly how long he had been absent he could not have
said,--perhaps a quarter of an hour, perhaps longer; the time
appeared short to him, wearied with long sitting and watching.

It had seemed, when he stole away from Maurice's bedside, that he was
not in the least needed.  The patient was lying perfectly quiet, and
to all appearance wanted nothing more than letting alone.  It was
such a comfort to look at something besides the worn features of a
sick man, to hear something besides his labored breathing and faint,
half-whispered words, that the temptation to indulge in these
luxuries for a few minutes had proved irresistible.

Unfortunately, Maurice's slumbers did not remain tranquil during the
absence of the nurse.  He very soon fell into a dream, which began
quietly enough, but in the course of the sudden transitions which
dreams are in the habit of undergoing became successively anxious,
distressing, terrifying.  His earlier and later experiences came up
before him, fragmentary, incoherent, chaotic even, but vivid as
reality.  He was at the bottom of a coal-mine in one of those long,
narrow galleries, or rather worm-holes, in which human beings pass a
large part of their lives, like so many larvae boring their way into
the beams and rafters of some old building.  How close the air was in
the stifling passage through which he was crawling!  The scene
changed, and he was climbing a slippery sheet of ice with desperate
effort, his foot on the floor of a shallow niche, his hold an icicle
ready to snap in an instant, an abyss below him waiting for his foot
to slip or the icicle to break.  How thin the air seemed, how
desperately hard to breathe!  He was thinking of Mont Blanc, it may
be, and the fearfully rarefied atmosphere which he remembered well as
one of the great trials in his mountain ascents.  No, it was not Mont
Blanc,--it was not any one of the frozen Alpine summits; it was Hecla
that he was climbing

The smoke of the burning mountain was wrapping itself around him; he
was choking with its dense fumes; he heard the flames roaring around
him, he felt the hot lava beneath his feet, he uttered a faint cry,
and awoke.

The room was full of smoke.  He was gasping for breath, strangling in
the smothering oven which his chamber had become.

The house was on fire!

He tried to call for help, but his voice failed him, and died away in
a whisper.  He made a desperate effort, and rose so as to sit up in
the bed for an instant, but the effort was too much for him, and he
sank back upon his pillow, helpless.  He felt that his hour had come,
for he could not live in this dreadful atmosphere, and he was left
alone.  He could hear the crackle of fire as the flame crept along
from one partition to another.  It was a cruel fate to be left to
perish in that way,--the fate that many a martyr had had to face,--to
be first strangled and then burned.  Death had not the terror for him
that it has for most young persons.  He was accustomed to thinking of
it calmly, sometimes wistfully, even to such a degree that the
thought of self-destruction had come upon him as a temptation.  But
here was death in an unexpected and appalling shape.  He did not know
before how much he cared to live.  All his old recollections came
before him as it were in one long, vivid flash.  The closed vista of
memory opened to its far horizon-line, and past and present were
pictured in a single instant of clear vision.  The dread moment which
had blighted his life returned in all its terror.  He felt the
convulsive spring in the form of a faint, impotent spasm,--the rush
of air,--the thorns of the stinging and lacerating cradle into which
he was precipitated.  One after another those paralyzing seizures
which had been like deadening blows on the naked heart seemed to
repeat themselves, as real as at the moment of their occurrence.  The
pictures passed in succession with such rapidity that they appeared
almost as if simultaneous.  The vision of the "inward eye" was so
intensified in this moment of peril that an instant was like an hour
of common existence.  Those who have been very near drowning know
well what this description means.  The development of a photograph
may not explain it, but it illustrates the curious and familiar fact
of the revived recollections of the drowning man's experience.  The
sensitive plate has taken one look at a scene, and remembers it all,


Every little circumstance is there,--the hoof in air, the wing in
flight, the leaf as it falls, the wave as it breaks.  All there, but
invisible; potentially present, but impalpable, inappreciable, as if
not existing at all.  A wash is poured over it, and the whole scene
comes out in all its perfection of detail.  In those supreme moments
when death stares a man suddenly in the face the rush of unwonted
emotion floods the undeveloped pictures of vanished years, stored
away in the memory, the vast panorama of a lifetime, and in one swift
instant the past comes out as vividly as if it were again the
present.  So it was at this moment with the sick man, as he lay
helpless and felt that he was left to die.  For he saw no hope of
relief: the smoke was drifting in clouds into the room; the flames
were very near; if he was not reached and rescued immediately it was
all over with him.

His past life had flashed before him.  Then all at once rose the
thought of his future,--of all its possibilities, of the vague hopes
which he had cherished of late that his mysterious doom would be
lifted from him.  There was something, then, to be lived for,
something!  There was a new life, it might be, in store for him, and
such a new life!  He thought of all he was losing.  Oh, could he but
have lived to know the meaning of love!  And the passionate desire of
life came over him,--not the dread of death, but the longing for what
the future might yet have of happiness for him.

All this took place in the course of a very few moments.  Dreams and
visions have little to do with measured time, and ten minutes,
possibly fifteen or twenty, were all that had passed since the
beginning of those nightmare terrors which were evidently suggested
by the suffocating air he was breathing.

What had happened?  In the confusion of moving books and other
articles to the doctor's house, doors and windows had been forgotten.
Among the rest a window opening into the cellar, where some old
furniture had been left by a former occupant, had been left unclosed.
One of the lazy natives, who had lounged by the house smoking a bad
cigar, had thrown the burning stump in at this open window.  He had
no particular intention of doing mischief, but he had that
indifference to consequences which is the next step above the
inclination to crime.  The burning stump happened to fall among the
straw of an old mattress which had been ripped open.  The smoker went
his way without looking behind him, and it so chanced that no other
person passed the house for some time.  Presently the straw was in a
blaze, and from this the fire extended to the furniture, to the
stairway leading up from the cellar, and was working its way along
the entry under the stairs leading up to the apartment where Maurice
was lying.

The blaze was fierce and swift, as it could not help being with such
a mass of combustibles,--loose straw from the mattress, dry old
furniture, and old warped floors which had been parching and
shrinking for a score or two of years.  The whole house was, in the
common language of the newspaper reports, "a perfect tinder-box," and
would probably be a heap of ashes in half an hour.  And there was
this unfortunate deserted sick man lying between life and death,
beyond all help unless some unexpected assistance should come to his
rescue.

As the attendant drew near the house where Maurice was lying, he was
horror-struck to see dense volumes of smoke pouring out of the lower
windows.  It was beginning to make its way through the upper windows,
also, and presently a tongue of fire shot out and streamed upward
along the side of the house.  The man shrieked Fire!  Fire!  with all
his might, and rushed to the door of the building to make his way to
Maurice's room and save him.  He penetrated but a short distance
when, blinded and choking with the smoke, he rushed headlong down the
stairs with a cry of despair that roused every man, woman, and child
within reach of a human voice.  Out they came from their houses in
every quarter of the village.  The shout of Fire!  Fire!  was the
chief aid lent by many of the young and old.  Some caught up pails
and buckets: the more thoughtful ones filling them; the hastier
snatching them up empty, trusting to find water nearer the burning
building.

Is the sick man moved?

This was the awful question first asked,--for in the little village
all knew that Maurice was about being transferred to the doctor's
house.  The attendant, white as death, pointed to the chamber where
he had left him, and gasped out,

"He is there!"

A ladder!  A ladder!  was the general cry, and men and boys rushed
off in search of one.  But a single minute was an age now, and there
was no ladder to be had without a delay of many minutes.  The sick
man was going to be swallowed up in the flames before it could
possibly arrive.  Some were going for a blanket or a coverlet, in the
hope that the young man might have strength enough to leap from the
window and be safely caught in it.  The attendant shook his head, and
said faintly,

"He cannot move from his bed."

One of the visitors at the village,--a millionaire, it was said,--a
kind-hearted man, spoke in hoarse, broken tones:

"A thousand dollars to the man that will bring him from his chamber!"

The fresh-water fisherman muttered, "I should like to save the man
and to see the money, but it ain't a thaousan' dollars, nor ten
thaousan' dollars, that'll pay a fellah for burnin' to death,--or
even chokin' to death, anyhaow."

The carpenter, who knew the framework of every house in the village,
recent or old, shook his head.

"The stairs have been shored up," he said, "and when the fists that
holds 'em up goes, down they'll come.  It ain't safe for no man to go
over them stairs.  Hurry along your ladder,--that's your only
chance."

All was wild confusion around the burning house.  The ladder they had
gone for was missing from its case,--a neighbor had carried it off
for the workmen who were shingling his roof.  It would never get
there in time.  There was a fire-engine, but it was nearly half a
mile from the lakeside settlement.  Some were throwing on water in an
aimless, useless way; one was sending a thin stream through a garden
syringe: it seemed like doing something, at least.  But all hope of
saving Maurice was fast giving way, so rapid was the progress of the
flames, so thick the cloud of smoke that filled the house and poured
from the windows.  Nothing was heard but confused cries, shrieks of
women, all sorts of orders to do this and that, no one knowing what
was to be done.  The ladder!  The ladder! Five minutes more and it
will be too late!

In the mean time the alarm of fire had reached Paolo, and he had
stopped his work of arranging Maurice's books in the same way as that
in which they had stood in his apartment, and followed in the
direction of the sound, little thinking that his master was lying
helpless in the burning house.  "Some chimney afire," he said to
himself; but he would go and take a look, at any rate.

Before Paolo had reached the scene of destruction and impending
death, two young women, in boating dresses of decidedly Bloomerish
aspect, had suddenly joined the throng.  "The Wonder" and "The
Terror" of their school-days--Miss Euthymia rower and Miss Lurida
Vincent had just come from the shore, where they had left their
wherry.  A few hurried words told them the fearful story.  Maurice
Kirkwood was lying in the chamber to which every eye was turned,
unable to move, doomed to a dreadful death.  All that could be hoped
was that he would perish by suffocation rather than by the flames,
which would soon be upon him.  The man who had attended him had just
tried to reach his chamber, but had reeled back out of the door,
almost strangled by the smoke.  A thousand dollars had been offered
to any one who would rescue the sick man, but no one had dared to
make the attempt; for the stairs might fall at any moment, if the
smoke did not blind and smother the man who passed them before they
fell.

The two young women looked each other in the face for one swift
moment.

"How can he be reached?" asked Lurida.  "Is there nobody that will
venture his life to save a brother like that?"

"I will venture mine," said Euthymia.

"No!  no!" shrieked Lurida,--"not you! not you!  It is a man's work,
not yours!  You shall not go!"  Poor Lurida had forgotten all her
theories in this supreme moment.  But Euthymia was not to be held
back.  Taking a handkerchief from her neck, she dipped it in a pail
of water and bound it about her head.  Then she took several deep
breaths of air, and filled her lungs as full as they would hold.  She
knew she must not take a single breath in the choking atmosphere if
she could possibly help it, and Euthymia was noted for her power of
staying under water so long that more than once those who saw her
dive thought she would never come up again.  So rapid were her
movements that they paralyzed the bystanders, who would forcibly have
prevented her from carrying out her purpose.  Her imperious
determination was not to be resisted.  And so Euthymia, a willing
martyr, if martyr she was to be, and not saviour, passed within the
veil that hid the sufferer.

Lurida turned deadly pale, and sank fainting to the ground.  She was
the first, but not the only one, of her sex that fainted as Euthymia
disappeared in the smoke of the burning building.  Even the rector
grew very white in the face,--so white that one of his vestry-men
begged him to sit down at once, and sprinkled a few drops of water on
his forehead, to his great disgust and manifest advantage.  The old
landlady was crying and moaning, and her husband was wiping his eyes
and shaking his head sadly.

"She will nevar come out alive," he said solemnly.

"Nor dead, neither," added the carpenter.  "Ther' won't be nothing
left of neither of 'em but ashes."  And the carpenter hid his face in
his hands.

The fresh-water fisherman had pulled out a rag which he called a
"hangkercher,"--it had served to carry bait that morning,--and was
making use of its best corner to dry the tears which were running
down his cheeks.  The whole village was proud of Euthymia, and with
these more quiet signs of grief were mingled loud lamentations,
coming alike from old and young.

All this was not so much like a succession of events as it was like a
tableau.  The lookers-on were stunned with its suddenness, and before
they had time to recover their bewildered senses all was lost, or
seemed lost.  They felt that they should never look again on either
of those young faces.

The rector, not unfeeling by nature, but inveterately professional by
habit, had already recovered enough to be thinking of a text for the
funeral sermon.  The first that occurred to him was this,--vaguely,
of course, in the background of consciousness:

"Then Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego came forth of the midst of the
fire."

The village undertaker was of naturally sober aspect and reflective
disposition.  He had always been opposed to cremation, and here was a
funeral pile blazing before his eyes.  He, too, had his human
sympathies, but in the distance his imagination pictured the final
ceremony, and how he himself should figure in a spectacle where the
usual centre piece of attraction would be wanting,--perhaps his own
services uncalled for.

Blame him not, you whose garden-patch is not watered with the tears
of mourners.  The string of self-interest answers with its chord to
every sound; it vibrates with the funeral-bell, it finds itself
trembling to the wail of the De Profundis.  Not always,--not always;
let us not be cynical in our judgments, but common human nature, we
may safely say, is subject to those secondary vibrations under the
most solemn and soul-subduing influences.

It seems as if we were doing great wrong to the scene we are
contemplating in delaying it by the description of little
circumstances and individual thoughts and feelings.  But linger as we
may, we cannot compress into a chapter--we could not crowd into a
volume--all that passed through the minds and stirred the emotions of
the awe-struck company which was gathered about the scene of danger
and of terror.  We are dealing with an impossibility: consciousness
is a surface; narrative is a line.

Maurice had given himself up for lost.  His breathing was becoming
every moment more difficult, and he felt that his strength could hold
out but a few minutes longer.

"Robert!" he called in faint accents.  But the attendant was not
there to answer.

"Paolo!  Paolo!" But the faithful servant, who would have given his
life for his master, had not yet reached the place where the crowd
was gathered.

"Oh, for a breath of air!  Oh, for an arm to lift me from this bed!
Too late!  Too late!" he gasped, with what might have seemed his
dying expiration.

"Not too late!" The soft voice reached his obscured consciousness as
if it had come down to him from heaven.

In a single instant he found himself rolled in a blanket and in the
arms of--a woman!

Out of the stifling chamber,--over the burning stairs,--close by the
tongues of fire that were lapping up all they could reach,--out into
the open air, he was borne swiftly and safely,--carried as easily as
if he had been a babe, in the strong arms of "The Wonder" of the
gymnasium, the captain of the Atalanta, who had little dreamed of the
use she was to make of her natural gifts and her school-girl
accomplishments.

Such a cry as arose from the crowd of on-lookers!  It was a sound
that none of them had ever heard before or could expect ever to hear
again, unless he should be one of the last boat-load rescued from a
sinking vessel.  Then, those who had resisted the overflow of their
emotion, who had stood in white despair as they thought of these two
young lives soon to be wrapped in their burning shroud,--those stern
men--the old sea-captain, the hard-faced, moneymaking, cast-iron
tradesmen of the city counting-room--sobbed like hysteric women; it
was like a convulsion that overcame natures unused to those deeper
emotions which many who are capable of experiencing die without ever
knowing.

This was the scene upon which the doctor and Paolo suddenly appeared
at the same moment.

As the fresh breeze passed over the face of the rescued patient, his
eyes opened wide, and his consciousness returned in almost
supernatural lucidity.  Euthymia had sat down upon a bank, and was
still supporting him.  His head was resting on her bosom.  Through
his awakening senses stole the murmurs of the living cradle which
rocked him with the wavelike movements of respiration, the soft
susurrus of the air that entered with every breath, the double beat
of the heart which throbbed close to his ear.  And every sense, and
every instinct, and every reviving pulse told him in language like a
revelation from another world that a woman's arms were around
him, and that it was life, and not death, which her embrace had
brought him.

She would have disengaged him from her protecting hold, but the
doctor made her a peremptory sign, which he followed by a sharp
command:--

"Do not move him a hair's breadth," he said.  "Wait until the litter
comes.  Any sudden movement might be dangerous.  Has anybody a brandy
flask about him?"

One or two members of the local temperance society looked rather
awkward, but did not come forward.

The fresh-water fisherman was the first who spoke.

"I han't got no brandy," he said, "but there's a drop or two of old
Medford rum in this here that you're welcome to, if it'll be of any
help.  I alliz kerry a little on 't in case o' gettin' wet 'n'
chilled."

So saying he held forth a flat bottle with the word Sarsaparilla
stamped on the green glass, but which contained half a pint or more
of the specific on which he relied in those very frequent exposures
which happen to persons of his calling.

The doctor motioned back Paolo, who would have rushed at once to the
aid of Maurice, and who was not wanted at that moment.  So poor
Paolo, in an agony of fear for his master, was kept as quiet as
possible, and had to content himself with asking all sorts of
questions and repeating all the prayers he could think of to Our Lady
and to his holy namesake the Apostle.

The doctor wiped the mouth of the fisherman's bottle very carefully.
"Take a few drops of this cordial," he said, as he held it to his
patient's lips.  "Hold him just so, Euthymia, without stirring.  I
will watch him, and say when he is ready to be moved.  The litter is
near by, waiting."  Dr. Butts watched Maurice's pulse and color.  The
"Old Medford" knew its business.  It had knocked over its tens of
thousands; it had its redeeming virtue, and helped to set up a poor
fellow now and then.  It did this for Maurice very effectively.  When
he seemed somewhat restored, the doctor had the litter brought to his
side, and Euthymia softly resigned her helpless burden, which Paolo
and the attendant Robert lifted with the aid of the doctor, who
walked by the patient as he was borne to the home where Mrs. Butts
had made all ready for his reception.

As for poor Lurida, who had thought herself equal to the sanguinary
duties of the surgeon, she was left lying on the grass with an old
woman over her, working hard with fan and smelling-salts to bring her
back from her long fainting fit.




XXIV

THE INEVITABLE.

Why should not human nature be the same in Arrowhead Village as
elsewhere?  It could not seem strange to the good people of that
place and their visitors that these two young persons, brought
together under circumstances that stirred up the deepest emotions of
which the human soul is capable, should become attached to each
other.  But the bond between them was stronger than any knew, except
the good doctor, who had learned the great secret of Maurice's life.
For the first time since his infancy he had fully felt the charm
which the immediate presence of youthful womanhood carries with it.
He could hardly believe the fact when he found himself no longer the
subject of the terrifying seizures of which he had had many and
threatening experiences.

It was the doctor's business to save his patient's life, if he could
possibly do it.  Maurice had been reduced to the most perilous state
of debility by the relapse which had interrupted his convalescence.
Only by what seemed almost a miracle had he survived the exposure to
suffocation and the mental anguish through which he had passed.  It
was perfectly clear to Dr. Butts that if Maurice could see the young
woman to whom he owed his life, and, as the doctor felt assured, the
revolution in his nervous system which would be the beginning of a
new existence, it would be of far more value as a restorative agency
than any or all of the drugs in the pharmacopoeia.  He told this to
Euthymia, and explained the matter to her parents and friends.  She
must go with him on some of his visits.  Her mother should go with
her, or her sister; but this was a case of life and death, and no
maidenly scruples must keep her from doing her duty.

The first of her visits to the sick, perhaps dying, man presented a
scene not unlike the picture before spoken of on the title-page of
the old edition of Galen.  The doctor was perhaps the most agitated
of the little group.  He went before the others, took his seat by the
bedside, and held the patient's wrist with his finger on the pulse.
As Euthymia entered it gave a single bound, fluttered for an instant
as if with a faint memory of its old habit, then throbbed full and
strong, comparatively, as if under the spur of some powerful
stimulus.  Euthymia's task was a delicate one, but she knew how to
disguise its difficulty.

"Here is a flower I have brought you, Mr. Kirkwood," she said, and
handed him a white chrysanthemum.  He took it from her hand, and
before she knew it he took her hand into his own, and held it with a
gentle constraint.  What could she do?  Here was the young man whose
life she had saved, at least for the moment, and who was yet in
danger from the disease which had almost worn out his powers of
resistance.

"Sit down by Mr. Kirkwood's side," said the doctor.  "He wants to
thank you, if he has strength to do it, for saving him from the death
which seemed inevitable."

Not many words could Maurice command.  He was weak enough for womanly
tears, but their fountains no longer flowed; it was with him as with
the dying, whose eyes may light up, but rarely shed a tear.

The river which has found a new channel widens and deepens--it; it
lets the old water-course fill up, and never returns to its forsaken
bed.  The tyrannous habit was broken.  The prophecy of the gitana had
verified itself, and the ill a fair woman had wrought a fairer woman
bad conquered and abolished.

The history of Maurice Kirkwood loses its exceptional character from
the time of his restoration to his natural conditions.  His
convalescence was very slow and gradual, but no further accident
interrupted its even progress.  The season was over, the summer
visitors had left Arrowhead Village; the chrysanthemums were going
out of flower, the frosts had come, and Maurice was still beneath the
roof of the kind physician.  The relation between him and his
preserver was so entirely apart from all common acquaintances and
friendships that no ordinary rules could apply to it.  Euthymia
visited him often during the period of his extreme prostration.

"You must come every day," the doctor said.  "He gains with every
visit you make him; he pines if you miss him for a single day."  So
she came and sat by him, the doctor or good Mrs. Butts keeping her
company in his presence.  He grew stronger,--began to sit up in bed;
and at last Euthymia found him dressed as in health, and beginning to
walk about the room.  She was startled.  She had thought of herself
as a kind of nurse, but the young gentleman could hardly be said to
need a nurse any longer.  She had scruples about making any further
visits.  She asked Lurida what she thought about it.

"Think about it?" said Lurida.  "Why should n't you go to see a
brother as well as a sister, I should like to know?  If you are
afraid to go to see Maurice Kirkwood, I am not afraid, at any rate.
If you would rather have me go than go yourself, I will do it, and
let people talk just as much as they want to.  Shall I go instead of
you?"

Euthymia was not quite sure that this would be the best thing for the
patient.  The doctor had told her he thought there were special
reasons for her own course in coming daily to see him.  "I am
afraid," she said, "you are too bright to be safe for him in his
weak state.  Your mind is such a stimulating one, you know.  A dull
sort of person like myself is better for him just now.  I will
continue visiting him as long as the doctor says it is important that
I should; but you must defend me, Lurida,--I know you can explain it
all so that people will not blame me."

Euthymia knew full well what the effect of Lurida's penetrating head-
voice would be in a convalescent's chamber.  She knew how that active
mind of hers would set the young man's thoughts at work, when what he
wanted was rest of every faculty.  Were not these good and sufficient
reasons for her decision?  What others could there be?

So Euthymia kept on with her visits, until she blushed to see that
she was continuing her charitable office for one who was beginning to
look too well to be called an invalid.  It was a dangerous condition
of affairs, and the busy tongues of the village gossips were free in
their comments.  Free, but kindly, for the story of the rescue had
melted every heart; and what could be more natural than that these
two young people whom God had brought together in the dread moment of
peril should find it hard to tear themselves asunder after the hour
of danger was past?  When gratitude is a bankrupt, love only can pay
his debts; and if Maurice gave his heart to Euthymia, would not she
receive it as payment in full?

The change which had taken place in the vital currents of Maurice
Kirkwood's system was as simple and solid a fact as the change in a
magnetic needle when the boreal becomes the austral pole, and the
austral the boreal.  It was well, perhaps, that this change took
place while he was enfeebled by the wasting effects of long illness.
For all the long-defeated, disturbed, perverted instincts had found
their natural channel from the centre of consciousness to the organ
which throbs in response to every profound emotion.  As his health
gradually returned, Euthymia could not help perceiving a flush in his
cheek, a glitter in his eyes, a something in the tone of his voice,
which altogether were a warning to the young maiden that the highway
of friendly intercourse was fast narrowing to a lane, at the head of
which her woman's eye could read plainly enough, "Dangerous passing."

"You look so much better to-day, Mr. Kirkwood," she said, "that I
think I had better not play Sister of Charity any longer.  The next
time we meet I hope you will be strong enough to call on me."

She was frightened to see how pale he turned,--he was weaker than she
thought.  There was a silence so profound and so long that Mrs. Butts
looked up from the stocking she was knitting.  They had forgotten the
good woman's presence.

Presently Maurice spoke,--very faintly, but Mrs. Butts dropped a
stitch at the first word, and her knitting fell into her lap as she
listened to what followed.

"No! you must not leave me.  You must never leave me.  You saved my
life.  But you have done more than that,--more than you know or can
ever know.  To you I owe it that I am living; with you I live
henceforth, if I am to live at all.  All I am, all I hope,--will you
take this poor offering from one who owes you everything, whose lips
never touched those of woman or breathed a word of love before you?"

What could Euthymia reply to this question, uttered with all the
depth of a passion which had never before found expression.

Not one syllable of answer did listening Mrs. Butts overhear.  But
she told her husband afterwards that there was nothing in the
tableaux they had had in September to compare with what she then saw.
It was indeed a pleasing picture which those two young heads
presented as Euthymia gave her inarticulate but infinitely expressive
answer to the question of Maurice Kirkwood.  The good-hearted woman
thought it time to leave the young people.  Down went the stocking
with the needles in it; out of her lap tumbled the ball of worsted,
rolling along the floor with its yarn trailing after it, like some
village matron who goes about circulating from hearth to hearth,
leaving all along her track the story of the new engagement or of the
arrival of the last "little stranger."

Not many suns had set before it was told all through Arrowhead
Village that Maurice Kirkwood was the accepted lover of Euthymia
Tower.




POSTSCRIPT: AFTER-GLIMPSES.


MISS LURIDA VINCENT TO MRS. EUTHYMIA KIRKWOOD.
ARROWHEAD VILLAGE, May 18.

MY DEAREST EUTHYMIA,--Who would have thought, when you broke your oar
as the Atalanta flashed by the Algonquin, last June, that before the
roses came again you would find yourself the wife of a fine scholar
and grand gentleman, and the head of a household such as that of
which you are the mistress?  You must not forget your old Arrowhead
Village friends.  What am I saying?---you forget them!  No, dearest,
I know your heart too well for that!  You are not one of those who
lay aside their old friendships as they do last years bonnet when
they get a new one.  You have told me all about yourself and your
happiness, and now you want me to tell you about myself and what is
going on in our little place.

And first about myself.  I have given up the idea of becoming a
doctor.  I have studied mathematics so much that I have grown fond of
certainties, of demonstrations, and medicine deals chiefly in
probabilities.  The practice of the art is so mixed up with the
deepest human interests that it is hard to pursue it with that even
poise of the intellect which is demanded by science.  I want
knowledge pure and simple,--I do not fancy having it mixed.  Neither
do I like the thought of passing my life in going from one scene of
suffering to another; I am not saintly enough for such a daily
martyrdom, nor callous enough to make it an easy occupation.  I
fainted at the first operation I saw, and I have never wanted to see
another.  I don't say that I wouldn't marry a physician, if the right
one asked me, but the young doctor is not forthcoming at present.
Yes, I think I might make a pretty good doctor's wife.  I could teach
him a good deal about headaches and backaches and all sorts of
nervous revolutions, as the doctor says the French women call their
tantrums.  I don't know but I should be willing to let him try his
new medicines on me.  If he were a homeopath, I know I should; for if
a billionth of a grain of sugar won't begin to sweeten my tea or
coffee, I don't feel afraid that a billionth of a grain of anything
would poison me,--no, not if it were snake-venom; and if it were not
disgusting, I would swallow a handful of his lachesis globules, to
please my husband.  But if I ever become a doctor's wife, my husband
will not be one of that kind of practitioners, you may be sure of
that, nor an "eclectic," nor a "faith-cure man."  On the whole, I
don't think I want to be married at all.  I don't like the male
animal very well (except such noble specimens as your husband).  They
are all tyrants,--almost all,--so far as our sex is concerned, and I
often think we could get on better without them.

However, the creatures are useful in the Society.  They send us
papers, some of them well worth reading.  You have told me so often
that you would like to know how the Society is getting on, and to
read some of the papers sent to it if they happened to be
interesting, that I have laid aside one or two manuscripts expressly
for your perusal.  You will get them by and by.

I am delighted to know that you keep Paolo with you.  Arrowhead
Village misses him dreadfully, I can tell you.  That is the reason
people become so attached to these servants with Southern sunlight in
their natures?  I suppose life is not long enough to cool their blood
down to our Northern standard.  Then they are so child-like, whereas
the native of these latitudes is never young after he is ten or
twelve years old.  Mother says,--you know mother's old-fashioned
notions, and how shrewd and sensible she is in spite of them,--mother
says that when she was a girl families used to import young men and
young women from the country towns, who called themselves "helps,"
not servants,--no, that was Scriptural; "but they did n't know
everything down in Judee," and it is not good American language.  She
says that these people would live in the same household until they
were married, and the women often remain in the same service until
they died or were old and worn out, and then, what with the money
they had saved and the care and assistance they got from their former
employers, would pass a decent and comfortable old age, and be buried
in the family lot.  Mother has made up her mind to the change, but
grandmother is bitter about it.  She says there never was a country
yet where the population was made up of "ladies" and "gentlemen," and
she does n't believe there can be; nor that putting a spread eagle on
a copper makes a gold dollar of it.  She is a pessimist after her own
fashion.  She thinks all sentiment is dying out of our people.  No
loyalty for the sovereign, the king-post of the political edifice,
she says; no deep attachment between employer and employed; no
reverence of the humbler members of a household for its heads; and to
make sure of continued corruption and misery, what she calls
"universal suffrage" emptying all the sewers into the great aqueduct
we all must drink from.  "Universal suffrage!"  I suppose we women
don't belong to the universe!  Wait until we get a chance at the
ballot-box, I tell grandma, and see if we don't wash out the sewers
before they reach the aqueduct!  But my pen has run away with men I
was thinking of Paolo, and what a pleasant thing it is to have one of
those child-like, warm-hearted, attachable, cheerful, contented,
humble, faithful, companionable, but never presuming grownup children
of the South waiting on one, as if everything he could do for one was
a pleasure, and carrying a look of content in his face which makes
every one who meets him happier for a glimpse of his features.

It does seem a shame that the charming relation of master and
servant, intelligent authority and cheerful obedience, mutual
interest in each other's welfare, thankful recognition of all the
advantages which belong to domestic service in the better class of
families, should be almost wholly confined to aliens and their
immediate descendants.  Why should Hannah think herself so much
better than Bridget?  When they meet at the polls together, as they
will before long, they will begin to feel more of an equality than is
recognized at present.  The native female turns her nose up at the
idea of "living out;" does she think herself so much superior to the
women of other nationalities?  Our women will have to come to it,--so
grandmother says,--in another generation or two, and in a hundred
years, according to her prophecy, there will be a new set of old
"Miss Pollys" and "Miss Betseys" who have lived half a century in
the same families, respectful and respected, cherished, cared for in
time of need (citizens as well as servants, holding a ballot as well
as a broom, I tell her), and bringing back to us the lowly, underfoot
virtues of contentment and humility, which we do so need to carpet
the barren and hungry thoroughfare of our unstratified existence.

There, I have got a-going, and am forgetting all the news I have to
tell you.  There is an engagement you will want to know all about.
It came to pass through our famous boat-race, which you and I
remember, and shall never forget as long as we live.  It seems that
the young fellow who pulled the bow oar of that men's college boat
which we had the pleasure of beating got some glimpses of Georgina,
our handsome stroke oar.  I believe he took it into his head that it
was she who threw the bouquet that won the race for us.  He was, as
you know, greatly mistaken, and ought to have made love to me, only
he did n't.  Well, it seems he came posting down to the Institute
just before the vacation was over, and there got a sight of Georgina.
I wonder whether she told him she didn't fling the bouquet!  Anyhow,
the acquaintance began in that way, and now it seems that this young
fellow, good-looking and a bright scholar, but with a good many
months more to pass in college, is her captive.  It was too bad.
Just think of my bouquet's going to another girl's credit!  No
matter, the old Atalanta story was paid off, at any rate.

You want to know all about dear Dr. Butts.  They say he has just been
offered a Professorship in one of the great medical colleges.  I
asked him about it, and he did not say that he had or had not.
"But," said be, "suppose that I had been offered such a place; do you
think I ought to accept it and leave Arrowhead Village?  Let us talk
it over," said he, "just as if I had had such an offer."  I told him
he ought to stay.  There are plenty of men that can get into a
Professor's chair, I said, and talk like Solomons to a class of
wondering pupils: but once get a really good doctor in a place, a man
who knows all about everybody, whether they have this or that
tendency, whether when they are sick they have a way of dying or a
way of getting well, what medicines agree with them and what drugs
they cannot take, whether they are of the sort that think nothing is
the matter with them until they are dead as smoked herring, or of the
sort that send for the minister if they get a stomach-ache from
eating too many cucumbers,--who knows all about all the people within
half a dozen miles (all the sensible ones, that is, who employ a
regular practitioner),--such a man as that, I say, is not to be
replaced like a missing piece out of a Springfield musket or a
Waltham watch.  Don't go!  said I.  Stay here and save our precious
lives, if you can, or at least put us through in the proper way, so
that we needn't be ashamed of ourselves for dying, if we must die.
Well, Dr. Butts is not going to leave us.  I hope you will have no
unwelcome occasion for his services,--you are never ill, you know,--
but, anyhow, he is going to be here, and no matter what happens he
will be on hand.

The village news is not of a very exciting character.  Item 1.  A new
house is put up over the ashes of the one in which your husband lived
while he was here.  It was planned by one of the autochthonous
inhabitants with the most ingenious combination of inconveniences
that the natural man could educe from his original perversity of
intellect.  To get at any one room you must pass through every other.
It is blind, or nearly so, on the only side which has a good
prospect, and commands a fine view of the barn and pigsty through
numerous windows.  Item 2.  We have a small fire-engine near the new
house which can be worked by a man or two, and would be equal to the
emergency of putting out a bunch of fire-crackers.  Item 3.  We have
a new ladder, in a bog, close to the new fire-engine, so if the new
house catches fire, like its predecessor, and there should happen to,
be a sick man on an upper floor, he can be got out without running
the risk of going up and down a burning staircase.  What a blessed
thing it was that there was no fire-engine near by and no ladder at
hand on the day of the great rescue!  If there had been, what a
change in your programme of life!  You remember that "cup of tea
spilt on Mrs. Masham's apron," which we used to read of in one of
Everett's Orations, and all its wide-reaching consequences in the
affairs of Europe.  I hunted up that cup of tea as diligently as ever
a Boston matron sought for the last leaves in her old caddy after the
tea-chests had been flung overboard at Griffin's wharf,--but no
matter about that, now.  That is the way things come about in this
world.  I must write a lecture on lucky mishaps, or, more elegantly,
fortunate calamities.  It will be just the converse of that odd essay
of Swift's we read together, the awkward and stupid things done with
the best intentions.  Perhaps I shall deliver the lecture in your
city: you will come and hear it, and bring him, won't
you, dearest?
Always, your loving

LURIDA.




MISS LURIDA VINCENT TO MRS. EUTHYMIA KIRKWOOD.

It seems forever since you left us, dearest Euthymia!  And are you,
and is your husband, and Paolo,--good Paolo,--are you all as well and
happy as you have been and as you ought to be?  I suppose our small
village seems a very quiet sort of place to pass the winter in, now
that you have become accustomed to the noise and gayety of a great
city.  For all that, it is a pretty busy place this winter, I can
tell you.  We have sleighing parties,--I never go to them, myself,
because I can't keep warm, and my mind freezes up when my blood cools
down below 95 or 96 deg. Fahrenheit.  I had a great deal rather sit
by a good fire and read about Arctic discoveries.  But I like very
well to hear the bells' jingling and to see the young people trying
to have a good time as hard as they do at a picnic.  It may be that
they do, but to me a picnic is purgatory and a sleigh-ride that other
place, where, as my favorite Milton says, "frost performs the effect
of fire."  I believe I have quoted him correctly; I ought to, for I
could repeat half his poems from memory once, if I cannot now.

You must have plenty of excitement in your city life.  I suppose you
recognized yourself in one of the society columns of the "Household
Inquisitor:" "Mrs. E.  K., very beautiful, in an elegant," etc., etc,
"with pearls," etc., etc.,--as if you were not the ornament of all
that you wear, no matter what it is!

I am so glad that you have married a scholar!  Why should not
Maurice--you both tell me to call him so--take the diplomatic office
which has been offered him?  It seems to me that he would find
himself in exactly the right place.  He can talk in two or three
languages, has good manners, and a wife who--well, what shall I say
of Mrs. Kirkwood but that "she would be good company for a queen," as
our old friend the quondam landlady of the Anchor Tavern used to say?
I should so like to see you presented at Court!  It seems to me that
I should be willing to hold your train for the sake of seeing you in
your court feathers and things.

As for myself, I have been thinking of late that I would become
either a professional lecturer or head mistress of a great school or
college for girls.  I have tried the first business a little.  Last
month I delivered a lecture on Quaternions.  I got three for my
audience; two came over from the Institute, and one from that men's
college which they try to make out to be a university, and where no
female is admitted unless she belongs among the quadrupeds.  I
enjoyed lecturing, but the subject is a difficult one, and I don't
think any one of them had any very clear notion of what I was talking
about, except Rhodora,--and I know she did n't.  To tell the truth, I
was lecturing to instruct myself.  I mean to try something easier
next time.  I have thought of the Basque language and literature.
What do you say to that?

The Society goes on famously.  We have had a paper presented and read
lately which has greatly amused some of us and provoked a few of the
weaker sort.  The writer is that crabbed old Professor of Belles-
Lettres at that men's college over there.  He is dreadfully hard on
the poor "poets," as they call themselves.  It seems that a great
many young persons, and more especially a great many young girls, of
whom the Institute has furnished a considerable proportion, have
taken to sending him their rhymed productions to be criticised,--
expecting to be praised, no doubt, every one of them.  I must give
you one of the sauciest extracts from his paper in his own words:

"It takes half my time to read the 'poems' sent me by young people of
both sexes.  They would be more shy of doing it if they knew that I
recognize a tendency to rhyming as a common form of mental weakness,
and the publication of a thin volume of verse as prima facie evidence
of ambitious mediocrity, if not inferiority.  Of course there are
exceptions to this rule of judgment, but I maintain that the
presumption is always against the rhymester as compared with the less
pretentious persons about him or her, busy with some useful calling,
--too busy to be tagging rhymed commonplaces together.  Just now
there seems to be an epidemic of rhyming as bad as the dancing mania,
or the sweating sickness.  After reading a certain amount of
manuscript verse one is disposed to anathematize the inventor of
homophonous syllabification.  [This phrase made a great laugh when it
was read.] This, that is rhyming, must have been found out very
early,

     "'Where are you, Adam?'

     "'Here am I, Madam;'

"but it can never have been habitually practised until after the Fall.
The intrusion of tintinnabulating terminations into the
conversational intercourse of men and angels would have spoiled
Paradise itself.  Milton would not have them even in Paradise Lost,
you remember.  For my own part, I wish certain rhymes could be
declared contraband of written or printed language.  Nothing should
be allowed to be hurled at the world or whirled with it, or furled
upon it or curled over it; all eyes should be kept away from the
skies, in spite of os homini sublime dedit; youth should be coupled
with all the virtues except truth; earth should never be reminded of
her birth; death should never be allowed to stop a mortal's breath,
nor the bell to sound his knell, nor flowers from blossoming bowers
to wave over his grave or show their bloom upon his tomb.  We have
rhyming dictionaries,--let us have one from which all rhymes are
rigorously excluded.  The sight of a poor creature grubbing for
rhymes to fill up his sonnet, or to cram one of those voracious,
rhyme-swallowing rigmaroles which some of our drudging poetical
operatives have been exhausting themselves of late to satiate with
jingles, makes my head ache and my stomach rebel.  Work, work of some
kind, is the business of men and women, not the making of jingles!
No,--no,--no!  I want to see the young people in our schools and
academies and colleges, and the graduates of these institutions,
lifted up out of the little Dismal Swamp of self-contemplating and
self-indulging and self-commiserating emotionalism which is
surfeiting the land with those literary sandwiches,--thin slices of
tinkling sentimentality between two covers looking like hard-baked
gilt gingerbread.  But what faces these young folks make up at my
good advice!  They get tipsy on their rhymes.  Nothing intoxicates
one like his--or her--own verses, and they hold on to their metre-
ballad-mongering as the fellows that inhale nitrous oxide hold on to
the gas-bag."

We laughed over this essay of the old Professor; though it hit us
pretty hard.  The best part of the joke is that the old man himself
published a thin volume of poems when he was young, which there is
good reason to think he is not very proud of, as they say he buys up
all the copies he can find in the shops.  No matter what they say, I
can't help agreeing with him about this great flood of "poetry," as
it calls itself, and looking at the rhyming mania much as he does.

How I do love real poetry!  That is the reason hate rhymes which have
not a particle of it in them.  The foolish scribblers that deal in
them are like bad workmen in a carpenter's shop.  They not only turn
out bad jobs of work, but they spoil the tools for better workmen.
There is hardly a pair of rhymes in the English language that is not
so dulled and hacked and gapped by these 'prentice hands that a
master of the craft hates to touch them, and yet he cannot very well
do without them.  I have not been besieged as the old Professor has
been with such multitudes of would-be-poetical aspirants that he
could not even read their manuscripts, but I have had a good many
letters containing verses, and I have warned the writers of the
delusion under which they were laboring.

You may like to know that I have just been translating some extracts
from the Greek Anthology.  I send you a few specimens of my work,
with a Dedication to the Shade of Sappho.  I hope you will find
something of the Greek rhythm in my versions, and that I have caught
a spark of inspiration from the impassioned Lesbian.  I have found
great delight in this work, at any rate, and am never so happy as
when I read from my manuscript or repeat from memory the lines into
which I have transferred the thought of the men and women of two
thousand years ago, or given rhythmical expression to my own
rapturous feelings with regard to them.  I must read you my
Dedication to the Shade of Sappho.  I cannot help thinking that you
will like it better than either of my last two, The Song of the
Roses, or The Wail of the Weeds.

How I do miss you, dearest!  I want you: I want you to listen to what
I have written; I want you to hear all about my plans for the future;
I want to look at you, and think how grand it must be to feel one's
self to be such a noble and beautiful-creature; I want to wander in
the woods with you, to float on the lake, to share your life and talk
over every day's doings with you.  Alas!  I feel that we have parted
as two friends part at a port of embarkation: they embrace, they kiss
each other's cheeks, they cover their faces and weep, they try to
speak good-by to each other, they watch from the pier and from the
deck; the two forms grow less and less, fainter and fainter in the
distance, two white handkerchiefs flutter once and again, and yet
once more, and the last visible link of the chain which binds them
has parted.  Dear, dear, dearest Euthymia, my eyes are running over
with tears when I think that we may never, never meet again.

Don't you want some more items of village news?  We are threatened
with an influx of stylish people: "Buttons" to answer the door-bell,
in place of the chamber-maid; "butler," in place of the "hired man;"
footman in top-boots and breeches, cockade on hat, arms folded a la
Napoleon; tandems, "drags," dogcarts, and go-carts of all sorts.  It
is rather amusing to look at their ambitious displays, but it takes
away the good old country flavor of the place.

I don't believe you mean to try to astonish us when you come back to
spend your summers here.  I suppose you must have a large house, and
I am sure you will have a beautiful one.  I suppose you will have
some fine horses, and who would n't be glad to?  But I do not believe
you will try to make your old Arrowhead Village friends stare their
eyes out of their heads with a display meant to outshine everybody
else that comes here.  You can have a yacht on the lake, if you like,
but I hope you will pull a pair of oars in our old boat once in a
while, with me to steer you.  I know you will be just the same dear-
Euthymia you always were and always must be.  How happy you must make
such a man as Maurice Kirkwood!  And how happy you ought to be with
him!--a man who knows what is in books, and who has seen for himself,
what is in men.  If he has not seen so much of women, where could he
study all that is best in womanhood as he can in his own wife?  Only
one thing that dear Euthymia lacks.  She is not quite pronounced
enough in her views as to the rights and the wrongs of the sex.  When
I visit you, as you say I shall, I mean to indoctrinate Maurice with
sound views on that subject.  I have written an essay for the
Society, which I hope will go a good way towards answering all the
objections to female suffrage.  I mean to read it to your husband, if
you will let me, as I know you will, and perhaps you would like to
hear it,--only you know my thoughts on the subject pretty well
already.

With all sorts of kind messages to your dear husband, and love to
your precious self,
I am ever your

LURIDA.




DR. BUTTS TO MRS. EUTHYMIA KIRKWOOD.

MY DEAR EUTHYMIA,--My pen refuses to call you by any other name.
Sweet-souled you are, and your Latinized Greek name is--the one which
truly designates you.  I cannot tell you how we have followed you,
with what interest and delight through your travels, as you have told
their story in your letters to your mother.  She has let us have the
privilege of reading them, and we have been with you in steamer,
yacht, felucca, gondola, Nile-boat; in all sorts of places, from
crowded capitals to "deserts where no men abide,"--everywhere keeping
company with you in your natural and pleasant descriptions of your
experiences.  And now that you have returned to your home in the
great city I must write you a few lines of welcome, if nothing more.

You will find Arrowhead Village a good deal changed since you left
it.  We are discovered by some of those over-rich people who make the
little place upon which they swarm a kind of rural city.  When this
happens the consequences are striking,--some of them desirable and
some far otherwise.  The effect of well-built, well-furnished, well-
kept houses and of handsome grounds always maintained in good order
about them shows itself in a large circuit around the fashionable
centre.  Houses get on a new coat of paint, fences are kept in better
order, little plots of flowers show themselves where only ragged
weeds had rioted, the inhabitants present themselves in more comely
attire and drive in handsomer vehicles with more carefully groomed
horses.  On the other hand, there is a natural jealousy on the part
of the natives of the region suddenly become fashionable.  They have
seen the land they sold at farm prices by the acre coming to be
valued by the foot, like the corner lots in a city.  Their simple and
humble modes of life look almost poverty-stricken in the glare of
wealth and luxury which so outshines their plain way of living.  It
is true that many of them have found them selves richer than in
former days, when the neighborhood lived on its own resources.  They
know how to avail themselves of their altered position, and soon
learn to charge city prices for country products; but nothing can
make people feel rich who see themselves surrounded by men whose
yearly income is many times their own whole capital.  I think it
would be better if our rich men scattered themselves more than they
do,--buying large country estates, building houses and stables which
will make it easy to entertain their friends, and depending for
society on chosen guests rather than on the mob of millionaires who
come together for social rivalry.  But I do not fret myself about it.
Society will stratify itself according to the laws of social
gravitation.  It will take a generation or two more, perhaps, to
arrange the strata by precipitation and settlement, but we can always
depend on one principle to govern the arrangement of the layers.
People interested in the same things will naturally come together.
The youthful heirs of fortunes who keep splendid yachts have little
to talk about with the oarsman who pulls about on the lake or the
river.  What does young Dives, who drives his four-in-hand and keeps
a stable full of horses, care about Lazarus, who feels rich in the
possession of a horse-railroad ticket?  You know how we live at our
house, plainly, but with a certain degree of cultivated propriety.
We make no pretensions to what is called "style."  We are still in
that social stratum where the article called "a napkin-ring" is
recognized as admissible at the dinner-table.  That fact sufficiently
defines our modest pretensions.  The napkin-ring is the boundary mark
between certain classes.  But one evening Mrs. Butts and I went out
to a party given by the lady of a worthy family, where the napkin
itself was a newly introduced luxury.  The conversation of the
hostess and her guests turned upon details of the kitchen and the
laundry; upon the best mode of raising bread, whether with "emptins"
(emptyings, yeast) or baking powder; about "bluing" and starching and
crimping, and similar matters.  Poor Mrs. Butts!  She knew nothing
more about such things than her hostess did about Shakespeare and the
musical glasses.  What was the use of trying to enforce social
intercourse under such conditions?  Incompatibility of temper has
been considered ground for a divorce; incompatibility of interests is
a sufficient warrant for social separation.  The multimillionaires
have so much that is common among themselves, and so little that they
share with us of moderate means, that they will naturally form a
specialized class, and in virtue of their palaces, their picture-
galleries, their equipages, their yachts, their large hospitality,
constitute a kind of exclusive aristocracy.  Religion, which ought to
be the great leveller, cannot reduce these elements to the same
grade.  You may read in the parable, "Friend, how camest thou in
hither not having a wedding garment?"  The modern version would be,
"How came you at Mrs. Billion's ball not having a dress on your back
which came from Paris?"

The little church has got a new stained window, a saint who reminds
me of Hamlet's uncle,--a thing "of shreds and patches," but rather
pretty to look at, with an inscription under it which is supposed to
be the name of the person in whose honor the window was placed in the
church.  Smith was a worthy man and a faithful churchwarden, and I
hope posterity will be able to spell out his name on his monumental
window; but that old English lettering would puzzle Mephistopheles
himself, if he found himself before this memorial tribute, on the
inside,--you know he goes to church sometimes, if you remember your
Faust.

The rector has come out, in a quiet way, as an evolutionist.  He has
always been rather "broad" in his views, but cautious in their
expression.  You can tell the three branches of the mother-island
church by the way they carry their heads.  The low-church clergy look
down, as if they felt themselves to be worms of the dust; the high-
church priest drops his head on one side, after the pattern of the
mediaeval saints; the broad-church preacher looks forward and round
about him, as if he felt himself the heir of creation.  Our rector
carries his head in the broad-church aspect, which I suppose is the
least open to the charge of affectation,--in fact, is the natural and
manly way of carrying it.

The Society has justified its name of Pansophian of late as never
before.  Lurida has stirred up our little community and its
neighbors, so that we get essays on all sorts of subjects, poems and
stories in large numbers.  I know all about it, for she often
consults me as to the merits of a particular contribution.

What is to be the fate of Lurida?  I often think, with no little
interest and some degree of anxiety, about her future.  Her body is
so frail and her mind so excessively and constantly active that I am
afraid one or the other will give way.  I do not suppose she thinks
seriously of ever being married.  She grows more and more zealous in
behalf of her own sex, and sterner in her judgment of the other.  She
declares that she never would marry any man who was not an advocate
of female suffrage, and as these gentlemen are not very common
hereabouts the chance is against her capturing any one of the hostile
sex.

What do you think?  I happened, just as I was writing the last
sentence, to look out of my window, and whom should I see but Lurida,
with a young man in tow, listening very eagerly to her conversation,
according to all appearance!  I think he must be a friend of the
rector, as I have seen a young man like this one in his company.  Who
knows?

Affectionately yours, etc.




DR. BUTTS TO MRS. BUTTS.

MY BELOVED WIFE,--This letter will tell you more news than you would
have thought could have been got together in this little village
during the short time you have been staying away from it.

Lurida Vincent is engaged!  He is a clergyman with a mathematical
turn.  The story is that he put a difficult problem into one of the
mathematical journals, and that Lurida presented such a neat solution
that the young man fell in love with her on the strength of it.  I
don't think the story is literally true, nor do I believe that other
report that he offered himself to her in the form of an equation
chalked on the blackboard; but that it was an intellectual rather
than a sentimental courtship I do not doubt.  Lurida has given up the
idea of becoming a professional lecturer,--so she tells me,--thinking
that her future husband's parish will find her work enough to do.  A
certain amount of daily domestic drudgery and unexciting intercourse
with simple-minded people will be the best thing in the world for
that brain of hers, always simmering with some new project in its
least fervid condition.

All our summer visitors have arrived.  Euthymia Mrs. Maurice
Kirkwood and her husband and little Maurice are here in their
beautiful house looking out on the lake.  They gave a grand party the
other evening.  You ought to have been there, but I suppose you could
not very well have left your sister in the middle of your visit: All
the grand folks were there, of course.  Lurida and her young man--
Gabriel is what she calls him--were naturally the objects of special
attention.  Paolo acted as major-domo, and looked as if he ought to
be a major-general.  Nothing could be pleasanter than the way in
which Mr. and Mrs. Kirkwood received their plain country neighbors;
that is, just as they did the others of more pretensions, as if they
were really glad to see them, as I am sure they were.  The old
landlord and his wife had two arm-chairs to themselves, and I saw
Miranda with the servants of the household looking in at the dancers
and out at the little groups in the garden, and evidently enjoying it
as much as her old employers.  It was a most charming and successful
party.  We had two sensations in the course of the evening.  One was
pleasant and somewhat exciting, the other was thrilling and of
strange and startling interest.

You remember how emaciated poor Maurice Kirkwood was left after his
fever, in that first season when he was among us.  He was out in a
boat one day, when a ring slipped off his thin finger and sunk in a
place where the water was rather shallow.  "Jake"--you know Jake,--
everybody knows Jake--was rowing him.  He promised to come to the
spot and fish up the ring if he could possibly find it.  He was seen
poking about with fish-hooks at the end of a pole, but nothing was
ever heard from him about the ring.  It was an antique intaglio stone
in an Etruscan setting,--a wild goose flying over the Campagna.  Mr.
Kirkwood valued it highly, and regretted its loss very much.

While we were in the garden, who should appear at the gate but Jake,
with a great basket, inquiring for Mr. Kirkwood.  "Come," said
Maurice to me, "let us see what our old friend the fisherman has
brought us.  What have you got there, Jake?"

"What I 've got?  Wall, I 'll tell y' what I've got: I 've got the
biggest pickerel that's been ketched in this pond for these ten year.
An' I 've got somethin' else besides the pickerel.  When I come to
cut him open, what do you think I faound in his insides but this here
ring o' yourn,"--and he showed the one Maurice had lost so long
before.  There it was, as good as new, after having tried Jonah's
style of housekeeping for all that time.  There are those who
discredit Jake's story about finding the ring in the fish; anyhow,
there was the ring and there was the pickerel.  I need not say that
Jake went off well paid for his pickerel and the precious contents of
its stomach.  Now comes the chief event of the evening.  I went early
by special invitation.  Maurice took me into his library, and we sat
down together.

"I have something of great importance," he said, "to say to you.  I
learned within a few days that my cousin Laura is staying with a
friend in the next town to this.  You know, doctor, that we have
never met since the last, almost fatal, experience of my early years.
I have determined to defy the strength of that deadly chain of
associations connected with her presence, and I have begged her to
come this evening with the friends with whom she is staying.  Several
letters passed between us, for it was hard to persuade her that there
was no longer any risk in my meeting her.  Her imagination was almost
as deeply impressed as mine had been at those alarming interviews,
and I had to explain to her fully that I had become quite indifferent
to the disturbing impressions of former years.  So, as the result of
our correspondence, Laura is coming this evening, and I wish you to
be present at our meeting.  There is another reason why I wish you to
be here.  My little boy is not far from the--age at which I received
my terrifying, almost disorganizing shock.  I mean to have little
Maurice brought into the presence of Laura, who is said to be still a
very handsome woman, and see if he betrays any hint of that peculiar
sensitiveness which showed itself in my threatening seizure.  It
seemed to me not impossible that he might inherit some tendency of
that nature, and I wanted you to be at hand if any sign of danger
should declare itself.  For myself I have no fear.  Some radical
change has taken place in my nervous system.  I have been born again,
as it were, in my susceptibilities, and am in certain respects a new
man.  But I must know how it is with my little Maurice."

Imagine with what interest I looked forward to this experiment; for
experiment it was, and not without its sources of anxiety, as it
seemed to me.  The evening wore along; friends and neighbors came in,
but no Laura as yet.  At last I heard the sound of wheels, and a
carriage stopped at the door.  Two ladies and a gentleman got out,
and soon entered the drawing room.

"My cousin Laura!" whispered Maurice to me, and went forward to meet
her.  A very handsome woman, who might well have been in the
thirties,--one of those women so thoroughly constituted that they
cannot help being handsome at every period of life.  I watched them
both as they approached each other.  Both looked pale at first, but
Maurice soon recovered his usual color, and Laura's natural, rich
bloom came back by degrees.  Their emotion at meeting was not to be
wondered at, but there was no trace in it of the paralyzing influence
on the great centres of life which had once acted upon its fated
victim like the fabled head which turned the looker-on into a stone.

"Is the boy still awake?" said Maurice to Paolo, who, as they used to
say of Pushee at the old Anchor Tavern, was everywhere at once on
that gay and busy evening.

"What!  Mahser Maurice asleep an' all this racket going on?  I hear
him crowing like young cockerel when he fus' smell daylight."

"Tell the nurse to bring him down quietly to the little room that
leads out of the library."

The child was brought down in his night-clothes, wide awake,
wondering apparently at the noise he heard, which he seemed to think
was for his special amusement.

"See if he will go to that lady," said his father.  Both of us held
our breath as Laura stretched her arms towards little Maurice.

The child looked for an instant searchingly, but fearlessly, at her
glowing cheeks, her bright eyes, her welcoming smile, and met her
embrace as she clasped him to her bosom as if he had known her all
his days.

The mortal antipathy had died out of the soul and the blood of
Maurice Kirkwood at that supreme moment when he found himself
snatched from the grasp of death and cradled in the arms of Euthymia.


                    --------------------------


In closing the New Portfolio I remember that it began with a prefix
which the reader may by this time have forgotten, namely, the First
Opening.  It was perhaps presumptuous to thus imply the probability
of a second opening.

I am reminded from time to time by the correspondents who ask a
certain small favor of me that, as I can only expect to be with my
surviving contemporaries a very little while longer, they would be
much obliged if I would hurry up my answer before it is too late.
They are right, these delicious unknown friends of mine, in reminding
me of a fact which I cannot gainsay and might suffer to pass from my
recollection.  I thank them for recalling my attention to a truth
which I shall be wiser, if not more hilarious, for remembering.

No, I had no right to say the First Opening.  How do I know that I
shall have a chance to open it again?  How do I know that anybody
will want it to be opened a second time?  How do I know that I shall
feel like opening it?  It is safest neither to promise to open the
New Portfolio once more, nor yet to pledge myself to keep it closed
hereafter.  There are many papers potentially existent in it, some of
which might interest a reader here and there.  The Records of the
Pansophian Society contain a considerable number of essays, poems,
stories, and hints capable of being expanded into presentable
dimensions.  In the mean time I will say with Prospero, addressing my
old readers, and my new ones, if such I have,

    "If you be pleased, retire into my cell
     And there repose: a turn or two I'll walk,
     To still my beating mind."

When it has got quiet I may take up the New Portfolio again, and
consider whether it is worth while to open it.





End of Project Gutenberg Etext A Mortal Antipathy, by Oliver W. Holmes






PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE

A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS


By Oliver Wendell Holmes




CONTENTS:
     BREAD AND THE NEWSPAPER
     MY HUNT AFTER "THE CAPTAIN"
     THE INEVITABLE TRIAL
     CINDERS FROM ASHES
     THE PULPIT AND THE PEW




BREAD AND THE NEWSPAPER.

(September, 1861.)

This is the new version of the Panem et Circenses of the Roman
populace.  It is our ultimatum, as that was theirs.  They must have
something to eat, and the circus-shows to look at.  We must have
something to eat, and the papers to read.

Everything else we can give up.  If we are rich, we can lay down our
carriages, stay away from Newport or Saratoga, and adjourn the trip
to Europe sine die.  If we live in a small way, there are at least
new dresses and bonnets and every-day luxuries which we can dispense
with.  If the young Zouave of the family looks smart in his new
uniform, its respectable head is content, though he himself grow
seedy as a caraway-umbel late in the season.  He will cheerfully calm
the perturbed nap of his old beaver by patient brushing in place of
buying a new one, if only the Lieutenant's jaunty cap is what it
should be.  We all take a pride in sharing the epidemic economy of
the time.  Only bread and the newspaper we must have, whatever else
we do without.

How this war is simplifying our mode of being!  We live on our
emotions, as the sick man is said in the common speech to be
nourished by his fever.  Our ordinary mental food has become
distasteful, and what would have been intellectual luxuries at other
times, are now absolutely repulsive.

All this change in our manner of existence implies that we have
experienced some very profound impression, which will sooner or later
betray itself in permanent effects on the minds and bodies of many
among us.  We cannot forget Corvisart's observation of the frequency
with which diseases of the heart were noticed as the consequence of
the terrible emotions produced by the scenes of the great French
Revolution.  Laennec tells the story of a convent, of which he was
the medical director, where all the nuns were subjected to the
severest penances and schooled in the most painful doctrines.  They
all became consumptive soon after their entrance, so that, in the
course of his ten years' attendance, all the inmates died out two or
three times, and were replaced by new ones.  He does not hesitate to
attribute the disease from which they suffered to those depressing
moral influences to which they were subjected.

So far we have noticed little more than disturbances of the nervous
system as a consequence of the war excitement in non-combatants.
Take the first trifling example which comes to our recollection.  A
sad disaster to the Federal army was told the other day in the
presence of two gentlemen and a lady.  Both the gentlemen complained
of a sudden feeling at the epigastrium, or, less learnedly, the pit
of the stomach, changed color, and confessed to a slight tremor about
the knees.  The lady had a "grande revolution," as French patients
say,--went home, and kept her bed for the rest of the day.  Perhaps
the reader may smile at the mention of such trivial indispositions,
but in more sensitive natures death itself follows in some cases from
no more serious cause.  An old, gentleman fell senseless in fatal
apoplexy, on hearing of Napoleon's return from Elba.  One of our
early friends, who recently died of the same complaint, was thought
to have had his attack mainly in consequence of the excitements of
the time.

We all know what the war fever is in our young men,--what a devouring
passion it becomes in those whom it assails.  Patriotism is the fire
of it, no doubt, but this is fed with fuel of all sorts.  The love of
adventure, the contagion of example, the fear of losing the chance of
participating in the great events of the time, the desire of personal
distinction, all help to produce those singular transformations which
we often witness, turning the most peaceful of our youth into the
most ardent of our soldiers.  But something of the same fever in a
different form reaches a good many non-combatants, who have no
thought of losing a drop of precious blood belonging to themselves or
their families.  Some of the symptoms we shall mention are almost
universal; they are as plain in the people we meet everywhere as the
marks of an influenza, when that is prevailing.

The first is a nervous restlessness of a very peculiar character.
Men cannot think, or write, or attend to their ordinary business.
They stroll up and down the streets, or saunter out upon the public
places.  We confessed to an illustrious author that we laid down the
volume of his work which we were reading when the war broke out.  It
was as interesting as a romance, but the romance of the past grew
pale before the red light of the terrible present.  Meeting the same
author not long afterwards, he confessed that he had laid down his
pen at the same time that we had closed his book.  He could not write
about the sixteenth century any more than we could read about it,
while the nineteenth was in the very agony and bloody sweat of its
great sacrifice.

Another most eminent scholar told us in all simplicity that he had
fallen into such a state that he would read the same telegraphic
dispatches over and over again in different papers, as if they were
new, until he felt as if he were an idiot.  Who did not do just the
same thing, and does not often do it still, now that the first flush
of the fever is over?  Another person always goes through the side
streets on his way for the noon extra,--he is so afraid somebody will
meet him and tell the news he wishes to read, first on the bulletin-
board, and then in the great capitals and leaded type of the
newspaper.

When any startling piece of war-news comes, it keeps repeating itself
in our minds in spite of all we can do.  The same trains of thought
go tramping round in circle through the brain, like the
supernumeraries that make up the grand army of a stage-show.  Now, if
a thought goes round through the brain a thousand times in a day, it
will have worn as deep a track as one which has passed through it
once a week for twenty years.  This accounts for the ages we seem to
have lived since the twelfth of April last, and, to state it more
generally, for that ex post facto operation of a great calamity, or
any very powerful impression, which we once illustrated by the image
of a stain spreading backwards from the leaf of life open before as
through all those which we have already turned.

Blessed are those who can sleep quietly in times like these!  Yet,
not wholly blessed, either; for what is more painful than the awaking
from peaceful unconsciousness to a sense that there is something
wrong, we cannot at first think what,--and then groping our way about
through the twilight of our thoughts until we come full upon the
misery, which, like some evil bird, seemed to have flown away, but
which sits waiting for us on its perch by our pillow in the gray of
the morning?

The converse of this is perhaps still more painful.  Many have the
feeling in their waking hours that the trouble they are aching with
is, after all, only a dream,--if they will rub their eyes briskly
enough and shake themselves, they will awake out of it, and find all
their supposed grief is unreal.  This attempt to cajole ourselves out
of an ugly fact always reminds us of those unhappy flies who have
been indulging in the dangerous sweets of the paper prepared for
their especial use.

Watch one of them.  He does not feel quite well,--at least, he
suspects himself of indisposition.  Nothing serious,--let us just rub
our fore-feet together, as the enormous creature who provides for us
rubs his hands, and all will be right.  He rubs them with that
peculiar twisting movement of his, and pauses for the effect.  No!
all is not quite right yet.  Ah!  it is our head that is not set on
just as it ought to be.  Let us settle that where it should be, and
then we shall certainly be in good trim again.  So he pulls his head
about as an old lady adjusts her cap, and passes his fore-paw over it
like a kitten washing herself.  Poor fellow!  It is not a fancy, but
a fact, that he has to deal with.  If he could read the letters at
the head of the sheet, he would see they were Fly-Paper.--So with
us, when, in our waking misery, we try to think we dream!  Perhaps
very young persons may not understand this; as we grow older, our
waking and dreaming life run more and more into each other.

Another symptom of our excited condition is seen in the breaking up
of old habits.  The newspaper is as imperious as a Russian Ukase; it
will be had, and it will be read.  To this all else must give place.
If we must go out at unusual hours to get it, we shall go, in spite
of after-dinner nap or evening somnolence.  If it finds us in
company, it will not stand on ceremony, but cuts short the compliment
and the story by the divine right of its telegraphic dispatches.

War is a very old story, but it is a new one to this generation of
Americans.  Our own nearest relation in the ascending line remembers
the Revolution well.  How should she forget it?  Did she not lose her
doll, which was left behind, when she was carried out of Boston,
about that time growing uncomfortable by reason of cannon-balls
dropping in from the neighboring heights at all hours,--in token of
which see the tower of Brattle Street Church at this very day?  War
in her memory means '76.  As for the brush of 1812, "we did not think
much about that"; and everybody knows that the Mexican business did
not concern us much, except in its political relations.  No!  war is
a new thing to all of us who are not in the last quarter of their
century.  We are learning many strange matters from our fresh
experience.  And besides, there are new conditions of existence which
make war as it is with us very different from war as it has been.

The first and obvious difference consists in the fact that the whole
nation is now penetrated by the ramifications of a network of iron
nerves which flash sensation and volition backward and forward to and
from towns and provinces as if they were organs and limbs of a single
living body.  The second is the vast system of iron muscles which, as
it were, move the limbs of the mighty organism one upon another.
What was the railroad-force which put the Sixth Regiment in Baltimore
on the 19th of April but a contraction and extension of the arm of
Massachusetts with a clenched fist full of bayonets at the end of it?

This perpetual intercommunication, joined to the power of
instantaneous action, keeps us always alive with excitement.  It is
not a breathless courier who comes back with the report from an army
we have lost sight of for a month, nor a single bulletin which tells
us all we are to know for a week of some great engagement, but almost
hourly paragraphs, laden with truth or falsehood as the case may be,
making us restless always for the last fact or rumor they are
telling.  And so of the movements of our armies.  To-night the stout
lumbermen of Maine are encamped under their own fragrant pines.  In a
score or two of hours they are among the tobacco-fields and the
slave-pens of Virginia.  The war passion burned like scattered coals
of fire in the households of Revolutionary times; now it rushes all
through the land like a flame over the prairie.  And this instant
diffusion of every fact and feeling produces another singular effect
in the equalizing and steadying of public opinion.  We may not be
able to see a month ahead of us; but as to what has passed a week
afterwards it is as thoroughly talked out and judged as it would have
been in a whole season before our national nervous system was
organized.

    "As the wild tempest wakes the slumbering sea,
     Thou only teachest all that man can be!"

We indulged in the above apostrophe to War in a Phi Beta Kappa poem
of long ago, which we liked better before we read Mr. Cutler's
beautiful prolonged lyric delivered at the recent anniversary of that
Society.

Oftentimes, in paroxysms of peace and good-will towards all mankind,
we have felt twinges of conscience about the passage,--especially
when one of our orators showed us that a ship of war costs as much to
build and keep as a college, and that every port-hole we could stop
would give us a new professor.  Now we begin to think that there was
some meaning in our poor couplet.  War has taught us, as nothing else
could, what we can be and are.  It has exalted our manhood and our
womanhood, and driven us all back upon our substantial human
qualities, for a long time more or less kept out of sight by the
spirit of commerce, the love of art, science, or literature, or other
qualities not belonging to all of us as men and women.

It is at this very moment doing more to melt away the petty social
distinctions which keep generous souls apart from each other, than
the preaching of the Beloved Disciple himself would do.  We are
finding out that not only "patriotism is eloquence," but that heroism
is gentility.  All ranks are wonderfully equalized under the fire of
a masked battery.  The plain artisan or the rough fireman, who faces
the lead and iron like a man, is the truest representative we can
show of the heroes of Crecy and Agincourt.  And if one of our fine
gentlemen puts off his straw-colored kids and stands by the other,
shoulder to shoulder, or leads him on to the attack, he is as
honorable in our eyes and in theirs as if he were ill-dressed and his
hands were soiled with labor.

Even our poor "Brahmins,"--whom a critic in ground-glass spectacles
(the same who grasps his statistics by the blade and strikes at his
supposed antagonist with the handle) oddly confounds with the,
"bloated aristocracy;" whereas they are very commonly pallid,
undervitalized, shy, sensitive creatures, whose only birthright is an
aptitude for learning,--even these poor New England Brahmins of ours,
subvirates of an organizable base as they often are, count as full
men, if their courage is big enough for the uniform which hangs so
loosely about their slender figures.

A young man was drowned not very long ago in the river running under
our windows.  A few days afterwards a field piece was dragged to the
water's edge, and fired many times over the river.  We asked a
bystander, who looked like a fisherman, what that was for.  It was to
"break the gall," he said, and so bring the drowned person to the
surface.  A strange physiological fancy and a very odd non sequitur;
but that is not our present point.  A good many extraordinary objects
do really come to the surface when the great guns of war shake the
waters, as when they roared over Charleston harbor.

Treason came up, hideous, fit only to be huddled into its
dishonorable grave.  But the wrecks of precious virtues, which had
been covered with the waves of prosperity, came up also.  And all
sorts of unexpected and unheard-of things, which had lain unseen
during our national life of fourscore years, came up and are coming
up daily, shaken from their bed by the concussions of the artillery
bellowing around us.

It is a shame to own it, but there were persons otherwise respectable
not unwilling to say that they believed the old valor of
Revolutionary times had died out from among us.  They talked about
our own Northern people as the English in the last centuries used to
talk about the French,--Goldsmith's old soldier, it may be
remembered, called one Englishman good for five of them.  As Napoleon
spoke of the English, again, as a nation of shopkeepers, so these
persons affected to consider the multitude of their countrymen as
unwarlike artisans,--forgetting that Paul Revere taught himself the
value of liberty in working upon gold, and Nathaniel Greene fitted
himself to shape armies in the labor of forging iron.
These persons have learned better now.  The bravery of our free
working-people was overlaid, but not smothered; sunken, but not
drowned.  The hands which had been busy conquering the elements had
only to change their weapons and their adversaries, and they were as
ready to conquer the masses of living force opposed to them as they
had been to build towns, to dam rivers, to hunt whales, to harvest
ice, to hammer brute matter into every shape civilization can ask
for.

Another great fact came to the surface, and is coming up every day in
new shapes,--that we are one people.  It is easy to say that a man is
a man in Maine or Minnesota, but not so easy to feel it, all through
our bones and marrow.  The camp is deprovincializing us very fast.
Brave Winthrop, marching with the city elegants, seems to have been a
little startled to find how wonderfully human were the hard-handed
men of the Eighth Massachusetts.  It takes all the nonsense out of
everybody, or ought to do it, to see how fairly the real manhood of a
country is distributed over its surface.  And then, just as we are
beginning to think our own soil has a monopoly of heroes as well as
of cotton, up turns a regiment of gallant Irishmen, like the Sixty-
ninth, to show us that continental provincialism is as bad as that of
Coos County, New Hampshire, or of Broadway, New York.

Here, too, side by side in the same great camp, are half a dozen
chaplains, representing half a dozen modes of religious belief.  When
the masked battery opens, does the "Baptist" Lieutenant believe in
his heart that God takes better care of him than of his
"Congregationalist" Colonel?  Does any man really suppose, that, of a
score of noble young fellows who have just laid down their lives for
their country, the Homoousians are received to the mansions of bliss,
and the Homoousians translated from the battle-field to the abodes of
everlasting woe?  War not only teaches what man can be, but it
teaches also what he must not be.  He must not be a bigot and a fool
in the presence of that day of judgment proclaimed by the trumpet
which calls to battle, and where a man should have but two thoughts:
to do his duty, and trust his Maker.  Let our brave dead come back
from the fields where they have fallen for law and liberty, and if
you will follow them to their graves, you will find out what the
Broad Church means; the narrow church is sparing of its exclusive
formulae over the coffins wrapped in the flag which the fallen heroes
had defended!  Very little comparatively do we hear at such times of
the dogmas on which men differ; very much of the faith and trust in
which all sincere Christians can agree.  It is a noble lesson, and
nothing less noisy than the voice of cannon can teach it so that it
shall be heard over all the angry cries of theological disputants.

Now, too, we have a chance to test the sagacity of our friends, and
to get at their principles of judgment.  Perhaps most, of us, will
agree that our faith in domestic prophets has been diminished by the
experience of the last six months.  We had the notable predictions
attributed to the Secretary of State, which so unpleasantly refused
to fulfil themselves.  We were infested at one time with a set of
ominous-looking seers, who shook their heads and muttered obscurely
about some mighty preparations that were making to substitute the
rule of the minority for that of the majority.  Organizations were
darkly hinted at; some thought our armories would be seized; and
there are not wanting ancient women in the neighboring University
town who consider that the country was saved by the intrepid band of
students who stood guard, night after night, over the G. R. cannon
and the pile of balls in the Cambridge Arsenal.

As a general rule, it is safe to say that the best prophecies are
those which the sages remember after the event prophesied of has come
to pass, and remind us that they have made long ago.  Those who, are
rash enough to predict publicly beforehand commonly give us what they
hope, or what they fear, or some conclusion from an abstraction of
their own, or some guess founded on private information not half so
good as what everybody gets who reads the papers,--never by any
possibility a word that we can depend on, simply because there are
cobwebs of contingency between every to-day and to-morrow that no
field-glass can penetrate when fifty of them lie woven one over
another.  Prophesy as much as you like, but always hedge.  Say that
you think the rebels are weaker than is commonly supposed, but, on
the other hand, that they may prove to be even stronger than is
anticipated.  Say what you like,--only don't be too peremptory and
dogmatic; we know that wiser men than you have been notoriously
deceived in their predictions in this very matter.

     Ibis et redibis nunquam in bello peribis.

Let that be your model; and remember, on peril of your reputation as
a prophet, not to put a stop before or after the nunquam.

There are two or three facts connected with time, besides that
already referred to, which strike us very forcibly in their relation
to the great events passing around us.  We spoke of the long period
seeming to have elapsed since this war began.  The buds were then
swelling which held the leaves that are still green.  It seems as old
as Time himself.  We cannot fail to observe how the mind brings
together the scenes of to-day and those of the old Revolution.  We
shut up eighty years into each other like the joints of a pocket-
telescope.  When the young men from Middlesex dropped in Baltimore
the other day, it seemed to bring Lexington and the other Nineteenth
of April close to us.  War has always been the mint in which the
world's history has been coined, and now every day or week or month
has a new medal for us.  It was Warren that the first impression bore
in the last great coinage; if it is Ellsworth now, the new face
hardly seems fresher than the old.  All battle-fields are alike in
their main features.  The young fellows who fell in our earlier
struggle seemed like old men to us until within these few months; now
we remember they were like these fiery youth we are cheering as they
go to the fight; it seems as if the grass of our bloody hillside was
crimsoned but yesterday, and the cannon-ball imbedded in the church-
tower would feel warm, if we laid our hand upon it.

Nay, in this our quickened life we feel that all the battles from
earliest time to our own day, where Right and Wrong have grappled,
are but one great battle, varied with brief pauses or hasty bivouacs
upon the field of conflict.  The issues seem to vary, but it is
always a right against a claim, and, however the struggle of the hour
may go, a movement onward of the campaign, which uses defeat as well
as victory to serve its mighty ends.  The very implements of our
warfare change less than we think.  Our bullets and cannonballs have
lengthened into bolts like those which whistled out of old arbalests.
Our soldiers fight with weapons, such as are pictured on the walls of
Theban tombs, wearing a newly invented head-gear as old as the days
of the Pyramids.

Whatever miseries this war brings upon us, it is making us wiser,
and, we trust, better.  Wiser, for we are learning our weakness, our
narrowness, our selfishness, our ignorance, in lessons of sorrow and
shame.  Better, because all that is noble in men and women is
demanded by the time, and our people are rising to the standard the
time calls for.  For this is the question the hour is putting to each
of us: Are you ready, if need be, to sacrifice all that you have and
hope for in this world, that the generations to follow you may
inherit a whole country whose natural condition shall be peace, and
not a broken province which must live under the perpetual threat, if
not in the constant presence, of war and all that war brings with it?
If we are all ready for this sacrifice, battles may be lost, but the
campaign and its grand object must be won.

Heaven is very kind in its way of putting questions to mortals.  We
are not abruptly asked to give up all that we most care for, in view
of the momentous issues before us.  Perhaps we shall never be asked
to give up all, but we have already been called upon to part with
much that is dear to us, and should be ready to yield the rest as it
is called for.  The time may come when even the cheap public print
shall be a burden our means cannot support, and we can only listen in
the square that was once the marketplace to the voices of those who
proclaim defeat or victory.  Then there will be only our daily food
left.  When we have nothing to read and nothing to eat, it will be a
favorable moment to offer a compromise.  At present we have all that
nature absolutely demands,--we can live on bread and the newspaper.






MY HUNT AFTER "THE CAPTAIN."

In the dead of the night which closed upon the bloody field of
Antietam, my household was startled from its slumbers by the loud
summons of a telegraphic messenger.  The air had been heavy all day
with rumors of battle, and thousands and tens of thousands had walked
the streets with throbbing hearts, in dread anticipation of the
tidings any hour might bring.

We rose hastily, and presently the messenger was admitted.  I took
the envelope from his hand, opened it, and read:


HAGERSTOWN 17th

To__________ H ______

Capt H______ wounded shot through the neck thought not mortal at
Keedysville

WILLIAM G. LEDUC


Through the neck,--no bullet left in wound.  Windpipe, food-pipe,
carotid, jugular, half a dozen smaller, but still formidable vessels,
a great braid of nerves, each as big as a lamp-wick, spinal cord,--
ought to kill at once, if at all.  Thought not mortal, or not thought
mortal,--which was it?  The first; that is better than the second
would be.--"Keedysville, a post-office, Washington Co., Maryland."
Leduc?  Leduc?  Don't remember that name.  The boy is waiting for his
money.  A dollar and thirteen cents.  Has nobody got thirteen cents?
Don't keep that boy waiting,--how do we know what messages he has got
to carry?

The boy had another message to carry.  It was to the father of
Lieutenant-Colonel Wilder Dwight, informing him that his son was
grievously wounded in the same battle, and was lying at Boonsborough,
a town a few miles this side of Keedysville.  This I learned the next
morning from the civil and attentive officials at the Central
Telegraph Office.

Calling upon this gentleman, I found that he meant to leave in the
quarter past two o'clock train, taking with him Dr. George H. Gay, an
accomplished and energetic surgeon, equal to any difficult question
or pressing emergency.  I agreed to accompany them, and we met in the
cars.  I felt myself peculiarly fortunate in having companions whose
society would be a pleasure, whose feelings would harmonize with my
own, and whose assistance I might, in case of need, be glad to claim.

It is of the journey which we began together, and which I finished
apart, that I mean to give my "Atlantic" readers an account.  They
must let me tell my story in my own way, speaking of many little
matters that interested or amused me, and which a certain leisurely
class of elderly persons, who sit at their firesides and never
travel, will, I hope, follow with a kind of interest.  For, besides
the main object of my excursion, I could not help being excited by
the incidental sights and occurrences of a trip which to a commercial
traveller or a newspaper-reporter would seem quite commonplace and
undeserving of record.  There are periods in which all places and
people seem to be in a conspiracy to impress us with their
individuality, in which every ordinary locality seems to assume a
special significance and to claim a particular notice, in which every
person we meet is either an old acquaintance or a character; days in
which the strangest coincidences are continually happening, so that
they get to be the rule, and not the exception.  Some might naturally
think that anxiety and the weariness of a prolonged search after a
near relative would have prevented my taking any interest in or
paying any regard to the little matters around me.  Perhaps it had
just the contrary effect, and acted like a diffused stimulus upon the
attention.  When all the faculties are wide-awake in pursuit of a
single object, or fixed in the spasm of an absorbing emotion, they
are oftentimes clairvoyant in a marvellous degree in respect to many
collateral things, as Wordsworth has so forcibly illustrated in his
sonnet on the Boy of Windermere, and as Hawthorne has developed with
such metaphysical accuracy in that chapter of his wondrous story
where Hester walks forth to meet her punishment.

Be that as it may,--though I set out with a full and heavy heart,
though many times my blood chilled with what were perhaps needless
and unwise fears, though I broke through all my habits without
thinking about them, which is almost as hard in certain circumstances
as for one of our young fellows to leave his sweetheart and go into a
Peninsular campaign, though I did not always know when I was hungry
nor discover that I was thirsting, though I had a worrying ache and
inward tremor underlying all the outward play of the senses and the
mind, yet it is the simple truth that I did look out of the car-
windows with an eye for all that passed, that I did take cognizance
of strange sights and singular people, that I did act much as persons
act from the ordinary promptings of curiosity, and from time to time
even laugh very much as others do who are attacked with a convulsive
sense of the ridiculous, the epilepsy of the diaphragm.

By a mutual compact, we talked little in the cars.  A communicative
friend is the greatest nuisance to have at one's side during a
railroad journey, especially if his conversation is stimulating and
in itself agreeable.  "A fast train and a 'slow' neighbor," is my
motto.  Many times, when I have got upon the cars, expecting to be
magnetized into an hour or two of blissful reverie, my thoughts
shaken up by the vibrations into all sorts of new and pleasing
patterns, arranging themselves in curves and nodal points, like the
grains of sand in Chladni's famous experiment,--fresh ideas coming up
to the surface, as the kernels do when a measure of corn is jolted in
a farmer's wagon,--all this without volition, the mechanical impulse
alone keeping the thoughts in motion, as the mere act of carrying
certain watches in the pocket keeps them wound up,--many times, I
say, just as my brain was beginning to creep and hum with this
delicious locomotive intoxication, some dear detestable friend,
cordial, intelligent, social, radiant, has come up and sat down by me
and opened a conversation which has broken my day-dream, unharnessed
the flying horses that were whirling along my fancies and hitched on
the old weary omnibus-team of every-day associations, fatigued my
hearing and attention, exhausted my voice, and milked the breasts of
my thought dry during the hour when they should have been filling
themselves full of fresh juices.  My friends spared me this trial.

So, then, I sat by the window and enjoyed the slight tipsiness
produced by short, limited, rapid oscillations, which I take to be
the exhilarating stage of that condition which reaches hopeless
inebriety in what we know as sea-sickness.  Where the horizon opened
widely, it pleased me to watch the curious effect of the rapid
movement of near objects contrasted with the slow motion of distant
ones.  Looking from a right-hand window, for instance, the fences
close by glide swiftly backward, or to the right, while the distant
hills not only do not appear to move backward, but look by contrast
with the fences near at hand as if they were moving forward, or to
the left; and thus the whole landscape becomes a mighty wheel
revolving about an imaginary axis somewhere in the middle-distance.

My companions proposed to stay at one of the best-known and longest-
established of the New-York caravansaries, and I accompanied them.
We were particularly well lodged, and not uncivilly treated.  The
traveller who supposes that he is to repeat the melancholy experience
of Shenstone, and have to sigh over the reflection that he has found
"his warmest welcome at an inn," has something to learn at the
offices of the great city hotels.  The unheralded guest who is
honored by mere indifference may think himself blessed with singular
good-fortune.  If the despot of the Patent-Annunciator is only mildly
contemptuous in his manner, let the victim look upon it as a personal
favor.  The coldest welcome that a threadbare curate ever got at the
door of a bishop's palace, the most icy reception that a country
cousin ever received at the city mansion of a mushroom millionaire,
is agreeably tepid, compared to that which the Rhadamanthus who dooms
you to the more or less elevated circle of his inverted Inferno
vouchsafes, as you step up to enter your name on his dog's-eared
register.  I have less hesitation in unburdening myself of this
uncomfortable statement, as on this particular trip I met with more
than one exception to the rule.  Officials become brutalized, I
suppose, as a matter of course.  One cannot expect an office clerk to
embrace tenderly every stranger who comes in with a carpet-bag, or a
telegraph operator to burst into tears over every unpleasant message
he receives for transmission.  Still, humanity is not always totally
extinguished in these persons.  I discovered a youth in a telegraph
office of the Continental Hotel, in Philadelphia, who was as pleasant
in conversation, and as graciously responsive to inoffensive
questions, as if I had been his childless opulent uncle and my will
not made.

On the road again the next morning, over the ferry, into the cars
with sliding panels and fixed windows, so that in summer the whole
side of the car maybe made transparent.  New Jersey is, to the
apprehension of a traveller, a double-headed suburb rather than a
State.  Its dull red dust looks like the dried and powdered mud of a
battle-field.  Peach-trees are common, and champagne-orchards.
Canal-boats, drawn by mules, swim by, feeling their way along like
blind men led by dogs.  I had a mighty passion come over me to be the
captain of one,--to glide back and forward upon a sea never roughened
by storms,--to float where I could not sink,--to navigate where there
is no shipwreck,--to lie languidly on the deck and govern the huge
craft by a word or the movement of a finger: there was something of
railroad intoxication in the fancy: but who has not often envied a
cobbler in his stall?

The boys cry the "N'-York Heddle," instead of "Herald"; I remember
that years ago in Philadelphia; we must be getting near the farther
end of the dumb-bell suburb.  A bridge has been swept away by a rise
of the waters, so we must approach Philadelphia by the river.  Her
physiognomy is not distinguished; nez camus, as a Frenchman would
say; no illustrious steeple, no imposing tower; the water-edge of the
town looking bedraggled, like the flounce of a vulgar rich woman's
dress that trails on the sidewalk.  The New Ironsides lies at one of
the wharves, elephantine in bulk and color, her sides narrowing as
they rise, like the walls of a hock-glass.

I went straight to the house in Walnut Street where the Captain would
be heard of, if anywhere in this region.  His lieutenant-colonel was
there, gravely wounded; his college-friend and comrade in arms, a son
of the house, was there, injured in a similar way; another soldier,
brother of the last, was there, prostrate with fever.  A fourth bed
was waiting ready for the Captain, but not one word had been heard of
him, though inquiries had been made in the towns from and through
which the father had brought his two sons and the lieutenant-colonel.
And so my search is, like a "Ledger" story, to be continued.

I rejoined my companions in time to take the noon-train for
Baltimore.  Our company was gaining in number as it moved onwards.
We had found upon the train from New York a lovely, lonely lady, the
wife of one of our most spirited Massachusetts officers, the brave
Colonel of the __th Regiment, going to seek her wounded husband at
Middletown, a place lying directly in our track.  She was the light
of our party while we were together on our pilgrimage, a fair,
gracious woman, gentle, but courageous,


          ---"ful plesant and amiable of port,
              ---estatelich of manere,
          And to ben holden digne of reverence."

On the road from Philadelphia, I found in the same car with our party
Dr.  William Hunt of Philadelphia, who had most kindly and faithfully
attended the Captain, then the Lieutenant, after a wound received at
Ball's Bluff, which came very near being mortal.  He was going upon
an errand of mercy to the wounded, and found he had in his
memorandum-book the name of our lady's husband, the Colonel, who had
been commended to his particular attention.

Not long after leaving Philadelphia, we passed a solitary sentry
keeping guard over a short railroad bridge.  It was the first
evidence that we were approaching the perilous borders, the marches
where the North and the South mingle their angry hosts, where the
extremes of our so-called civilization meet in conflict, and the
fierce slave-driver of the Lower Mississippi stares into the stern
eyes of the forest-feller from the banks of the Aroostook.  All the
way along, the bridges were guarded more or less strongly.  In a vast
country like ours, communications play a far more complex part than
in Europe, where the whole territory available for strategic purposes
is so comparatively limited.  Belgium, for instance, has long been
the bowling-alley where kings roll cannon-balls at each other's
armies; but here we are playing the game of live ninepins without any
alley.

We were obliged to stay in Baltimore over night, as we were too late
for the train to Frederick.  At the Eutaw House, where we found both
comfort and courtesy, we met a number of friends, who beguiled the
evening hours for us in the most agreeable manner.  We devoted some
time to procuring surgical and other articles, such as might be
useful to our friends, or to others, if our friends should not need
them.  In the morning, I found myself seated at the breakfast-table
next to General Wool.  It did not surprise me to find the General
very far from expansive.  With Fort McHenry on his shoulders and
Baltimore in his breeches-pocket, and the weight of a military
department loading down his social safety-valves, I thought it a
great deal for an officer in his trying position to select so very
obliging and affable an aid as the gentleman who relieved him of the
burden of attending to strangers.

We left the Eutaw House, to take the cars for Frederick.  As we stood
waiting on the platform, a telegraphic message was handed in silence
to my companion.  Sad news: the lifeless body of the son he was
hastening to see was even now on its way to him in Baltimore.  It was
no time for empty words of consolation: I knew what he had lost, and
that now was not the time to intrude upon a grief borne as men bear
it, felt as women feel it.

Colonel Wilder Dwight was first made known to me as the friend of a
beloved relative of my own, who was with him during a severe illness
in Switzerland; and for whom while living, and for whose memory when
dead, he retained the warmest affection.  Since that the story of his
noble deeds of daring, of his capture and escape, and a brief visit
home before he was able to rejoin his regiment, had made his name
familiar to many among us, myself among the number.  His memory has
been honored by those who had the largest opportunity of knowing his
rare promise, as a man of talents and energy of nature.  His
abounding vitality must have produced its impression on all who met
him; there was a still fire about him which any one could see would
blaze up to melt all difficulties and recast obstacles into
implements in the mould of an heroic will.  These elements of his
character many had the chance of knowing; but I shall always
associate him with the memory of that pure and noble friendship which
made me feel that I knew him before I looked upon his face, and added
a personal tenderness to the sense of loss which I share with the
whole community.

Here, then, I parted, sorrowfully, from the companions with whom I
set out on my journey.

In one of the cars, at the same station, we met General Shriver of
Frederick, a most loyal Unionist, whose name is synonymous with a
hearty welcome to all whom he can aid by his counsel and his
hospitality.  He took great pains to give us all the information we
needed, and expressed the hope, which was afterwards fulfilled, to
the great gratification of some of us, that we should meet again when
he should return to his home.

There was nothing worthy of special note in the trip to Frederick,
except our passing a squad of Rebel prisoners, whom I missed seeing,
as they flashed by, but who were said to be a most forlorn-looking
crowd of scarecrows.  Arrived at the Monocacy River, about three
miles this side of Frederick, we came to a halt, for the railroad
bridge had been blown up by the Rebels, and its iron pillars and
arches were lying in the bed of the river.  The unfortunate wretch
who fired the train was killed by the explosion, and lay buried hard
by, his hands sticking out of the shallow grave into which he had
been huddled.  This was the story they told us, but whether true or
not I must leave to the correspondents of "Notes and Queries" to
settle.

There was a great confusion of carriages and wagons at the stopping-
place of the train, so that it was a long time before I could get
anything that would carry us.  At last I was lucky enough to light on
a sturdy wagon, drawn by a pair of serviceable bays, and driven by
James Grayden, with whom I was destined to have a somewhat continued
acquaintance.  We took up a little girl who had been in Baltimore
during the late Rebel inroad.  It made me think of the time when my
own mother, at that time six years old, was hurried off from Boston,
then occupied by the British soldiers, to Newburyport, and heard the
people saying that "the redcoats were coming, killing and murdering
everybody as they went along."  Frederick looked cheerful for a place
that had so recently been in an enemy's hands.  Here and there a
house or shop was shut up, but the national colors were waving in all
directions, and the general aspect was peaceful and contented.  I saw
no bullet-marks or other sign of the fighting which had gone on in
the streets.  The Colonel's lady was taken in charge by a daughter of
that hospitable family to which we had been commended by its head,
and I proceeded to inquire for wounded officers at the various
temporary hospitals.

At the United States Hotel, where many were lying, I heard mention of
an officer in an upper chamber, and, going there, found Lieutenant
Abbott, of the Twentieth Massachusetts Volunteers, lying ill with
what looked like typhoid fever.  While there, who should come in but
the almost ubiquitous Lieutenant Wilkins, of the same Twentieth, whom
I had met repeatedly before on errands of kindness or duty, and who
was just from the battle-ground.  He was going to Boston in charge of
the body of the lamented Dr. Revere, the Assistant Surgeon of the
regiment, killed on the field.  From his lips I learned something of
the mishaps of the regiment.  My Captain's wound he spoke of as less
grave than at first thought; but he mentioned incidentally having
heard a story recently that he was killed,--a fiction, doubtless,--a
mistake,--a palpable absurdity,--not to be remembered or made any
account of.  Oh no! but what dull ache is this in that obscurely
sensitive region, somewhere below the heart, where the nervous centre
called the semilunar ganglion lies unconscious of itself until a
great grief or a mastering anxiety reaches it through all the non-
conductors which isolate it from ordinary impressions?  I talked
awhile with Lieutenant Abbott, who lay prostrate, feeble, but
soldier-like and uncomplaining, carefully waited upon by a most
excellent lady, a captain's wife, New England born, loyal as the
Liberty on a golden ten-dollar piece, and of lofty bearing enough to
have sat for that goddess's portrait.  She had stayed in Frederick
through the Rebel inroad, and kept the star-spangled banner where it
would be safe, to unroll it as the last Rebel hoofs clattered off
from the pavement of the town.

Near by Lieutenant Abbott was an unhappy gentleman, occupying a small
chamber, and filling it with his troubles.  When he gets well and
plump, I know he will forgive me if I confess that I could not help
smiling in the midst of my sympathy for him.  He had been a well-
favored man, he said, sweeping his hand in a semicircle, which
implied that his acute-angled countenance had once filled the goodly
curve he described.  He was now a perfect Don Quixote to look upon.
Weakness had made him querulous, as it does all of us, and he piped
his grievances to me in a thin voice, with that finish of detail
which chronic invalidism alone can command.  He was starving,--he
could not get what he wanted to eat.  He was in need of stimulants,
and he held up a pitiful two-ounce phial containing three
thimblefuls--of brandy,--his whole stock of that encouraging article.
Him I consoled to the best of my ability, and afterwards, in some
slight measure, supplied his wants.  Feed this poor gentleman up, as
these good people soon will, and I should not know him, nor he
himself.  We are all egotists in sickness and debility.  An animal
has been defined as "a stomach ministered to by organs;" and the
greatest man comes very near this simple formula after a month or two
of fever and starvation.

James Grayden and his team pleased me well enough, and so I made a
bargain with him to take us, the lady and myself, on our further
journey as far as Middletown.  As we were about starting from the
front of the United States Hotel, two gentlemen presented themselves
and expressed a wish to be allowed to share our conveyance.  I looked
at them and convinced myself that they were neither Rebels in
disguise, nor deserters, nor camp-followers, nor miscreants, but
plain, honest men on a proper errand.  The first of them I will pass
over briefly.  He was a young man of mild and modest demeanor,
chaplain to a Pennsylvania regiment, which he was going to rejoin.
He belonged to the Moravian Church, of which I had the misfortune to
know little more than what I had learned from Southey's "Life of
Wesley."  and from the exquisite hymns we have borrowed from its
rhapsodists.  The other stranger was a New Englander of respectable
appearance, with a grave, hard, honest, hay-bearded face, who had
come to serve the sick and wounded on the battle-field and in its
immediate neighborhood.  There is no reason why I should not mention
his name, but I shall content myself with calling him the
Philanthropist.

So we set forth, the sturdy wagon, the serviceable bays, with James
Grayden their driver, the gentle lady, whose serene patience bore up
through all delays and discomforts, the Chaplain, the Philanthropist,
and myself, the teller of this story.

And now, as we emerged from Frederick, we struck at once upon the
trail from the great battle-field.  The road was filled with
straggling and wounded soldiers.  All who could travel on foot,--
multitudes with slight wounds of the upper limbs, the head, or face,
--were told to take up their beds,--alight burden or none at all,--
and walk.  Just as the battle-field sucks everything into its red
vortex for the conflict, so does it drive everything off in long,
diverging rays after the fierce centripetal forces have met and
neutralized each other.  For more than a week there had been sharp
fighting all along this road.  Through the streets of Frederick,
through Crampton's Gap, over South Mountain, sweeping at last the
hills and the woods that skirt the windings of the Antietam, the long
battle had travelled, like one of those tornadoes which tear their
path through our fields and villages.  The slain of higher condition,
"embalmed" and iron-cased, were sliding off on the railways to their
far homes; the dead of the rank and file were being gathered up and
committed hastily to the earth; the gravely wounded were cared for
hard by the scene of conflict, or pushed a little way along to the
neighboring villages; while those who could walk were meeting us, as
I have said, at every step in the road.  It was a pitiable sight,
truly pitiable, yet so vast, so far beyond the possibility of relief,
that many single sorrows of small dimensions have wrought upon my
feelings more than the sight of this great caravan of maimed
pilgrims.  The companionship of so many seemed to make a joint-stock
of their suffering; it was next to impossible to individualize it,
and so bring it home, as one can do with a single broken limb or
aching wound.  Then they were all of the male sex, and in the
freshness or the prime of their strength.  Though they tramped so
wearily along, yet there was rest and kind nursing in store for them.
These wounds they bore would be the medals they would show their
children and grandchildren by and by.  Who would not rather wear his
decorations beneath his uniform than on it?

Yet among them were figures which arrested our attention and
sympathy.  Delicate boys, with more spirit than strength, flushed
with fever or pale with exhaustion or haggard with suffering, dragged
their weary limbs along as if each step would exhaust their slender
store of strength.  At the roadside sat or lay others, quite spent
with their journey.  Here and there was a house at which the
wayfarers would stop, in the hope, I fear often vain, of getting
refreshment; and in one place was a clear, cool spring, where the
little bands of the long procession halted for a few moments, as the
trains that traverse the desert rest by its fountains.  My companions
had brought a few peaches along with them, which the Philanthropist
bestowed upon the tired and thirsty soldiers with a satisfaction
which we all shared.  I had with me a small flask of strong waters,
to be used as a medicine in case of inward grief.  From this, also,
he dispensed relief, without hesitation, to a poor fellow who looked
as if he needed it.  I rather admired the simplicity with which he
applied my limited means of solace to the first-comer who wanted it
more than I; a genuine benevolent impulse does not stand on ceremony,
and had I perished of colic for want of a stimulus that night, I
should not have reproached my friend the Philanthropist, any more
than I grudged my other ardent friend the two dollars and more which
it cost me to send the charitable message he left in my hands.

It was a lovely country through which we were riding.  The hillsides
rolled away into the distance, slanting up fair and broad to the sun,
as one sees them in the open parts of the Berkshire Valley, at
Lanesborough, for instance, or in the many-hued mountain chalice at
the bottom of which the Shaker houses of Lebanon have shaped
themselves like a sediment of cubical crystals.  The wheat was all
garnered, and the land ploughed for a new crop.  There was Indian
corn standing, but I saw no pumpkins warming their yellow carapaces
in the sunshine like so many turtles; only in a single instance did I
notice some wretched little miniature specimens in form and hue not
unlike those colossal oranges of our cornfields.  The rail fences
were somewhat disturbed, and the cinders of extinguished fires showed
the use to which they had been applied.  The houses along the road
were not for the most part neatly kept; the garden fences were poorly
built of laths or long slats, and very rarely of trim aspect.  The
men of this region seemed to ride in the saddle very generally,
rather than drive.  They looked sober and stern, less curious and
lively than Yankees, and I fancied that a type of features familiar
to us in the countenance of the late John Tyler, our accidental
President, was frequently met with.  The women were still more
distinguishable from our New England pattern.  Soft, sallow,
succulent, delicately finished about the mouth and firmly shaped
about the chin, dark-eyed, full-throated, they looked as if they had
been grown in a land of olives.  There was a little toss in their
movement, full of muliebrity.  I fancied there was something more of
the duck and less of the chicken about them, as compared with the
daughters of our leaner soil; but these are mere impressions caught
from stray glances, and if there is any offence in them, my fair
readers may consider them all retracted.

At intervals, a dead horse lay by the roadside, or in the fields,
unburied, not grateful to gods or men.  I saw no bird of prey, no
ill-omened fowl, on my way to the carnival of death, or at the place
where it had been held.  The vulture of story, the crow of Talavera,
the "twa corbies" of the ghastly ballad, are all from Nature,
doubtless; but no black wing was spread over these animal ruins, and
no call to the banquet pierced through the heavy-laden and sickening
air.

Full in the middle of the road, caring little for whom or what they
met, came long strings of army wagons, returning empty from the front
after supplies.  James Grayden stated it as his conviction that they
had a little rather run into a fellow than not.  I liked the looks of
these equipages and their drivers; they meant business.  Drawn by
mules mostly, six, I think, to a wagon, powdered well with dust,
wagon, beast, and driver, they came jogging along the road, turning
neither to right nor left,--some driven by bearded, solemn white men,
some by careless, saucy-looking negroes, of a blackness like that of
anthracite or obsidian.  There seemed to be nothing about them, dead
or alive, that was not serviceable.  Sometimes a mule would give out
on the road; then he was left where he lay, until by and by he would
think better of it, and get up, when the first public wagon that came
along would hitch him on, and restore him to the sphere of duty.

It was evening when we got to Middletown.  The gentle lady who had
graced our homely conveyance with her company here left us.  She
found her husband, the gallant Colonel, in very comfortable quarters,
well cared for, very weak from the effects of the fearful operation
he had been compelled to undergo, but showing calm courage to endure
as he had shown manly energy to act.  It was a meeting full of
heroism and tenderness, of which I heard more than there is need to
tell.  Health to the brave soldier, and peace to the household over
which so fair a spirit presides!

Dr. Thompson, the very active and intelligent surgical director of
the hospitals of the place, took me in charge.  He carried me to the
house of a worthy and benevolent clergyman of the German Reformed
Church, where I was to take tea and pass the night.  What became of
the Moravian chaplain I did not know; but my friend the
Philanthropist had evidently made up his mind to adhere to my
fortunes.  He followed me, therefore, to the house of the "Dominie."
as a newspaper correspondent calls my kind host, and partook of the
fare there furnished me.  He withdrew with me to the apartment
assigned for my slumbers, and slept sweetly on the same pillow where
I waked and tossed.  Nay, I do affirm that he did, unconsciously, I
believe, encroach on that moiety of the couch which I had flattered
myself was to be my own through the watches of the night, and that I
was in serious doubt at one time whether I should not be gradually,
but irresistibly, expelled from the bed which I had supposed destined
for my sole possession.  As Ruth clave unto Naomi, so my friend the
Philanthropist clave unto me.  "Whither thou goest, I will go; and
where thou lodgest, I will lodge."  A really kind, good man, full of
zeal, determined to help somebody, and absorbed in his one thought,
he doubted nobody's willingness to serve him, going, as he was, on a
purely benevolent errand.  When he reads this, as I hope he will, let
him be assured of my esteem and respect; and if he gained any
accommodation from being in my company, let me tell him that I
learned a lesson from his active benevolence.  I could, however, have
wished to hear him laugh once before we parted, perhaps forever.  He
did not, to the best of my recollection, even smile during the whole
period that we were in company.  I am afraid that a lightsome
disposition and a relish for humor are not so common in those whose
benevolence takes an active turn as in people of sentiment, who are
always ready with their tears and abounding in passionate expressions
of sympathy.  Working philanthropy is a practical specialty,
requiring not a mere impulse, but a talent, with its peculiar
sagacity for finding its objects, a tact for selecting its agencies,
an organizing and art ranging faculty, a steady set of nerves, and a
constitution such as Sallust describes in Catiline, patient of cold,
of hunger, and of watching.  Philanthropists are commonly grave,
occasionally grim, and not very rarely morose.  Their expansive
social force is imprisoned as a working power, to show itself only
through its legitimate pistons and cranks.  The tighter the boiler,
the less it whistles and sings at its work.  When Dr. Waterhouse, in
1780, travelled with Howard, on his tour among the Dutch prisons and
hospitals, he found his temper and manners very different from what
would have been expected.

My benevolent companion having already made a preliminary exploration
of the hospitals of the place, before sharing my bed with him, as
above mentioned, I joined him in a second tour through them.  The
authorities of Middletown are evidently leagued with the surgeons of
that place, for such a break-neck succession of pitfalls and chasms I
have never seen in the streets of a civilized town.  It was getting
late in the evening when we began our rounds.  The principal
collections of the wounded were in the churches.  Boards were laid
over the tops of the pews, on these some straw was spread, and on
this the wounded lay, with little or no covering other than such
scanty clothes as they had on.  There were wounds of all degrees of
severity, but I heard no groans or murmurs.  Most of the sufferers
were hurt in the limbs, some had undergone amputation, and all had, I
presume, received such attention as was required.  Still, it was but
a rough and dreary kind of comfort that the extemporized hospitals
suggested.  I could not help thinking the patients must be cold; but
they were used to camp life, and did not complain.  The men who
watched were not of the soft-handed variety of the race.  One of them
was smoking his pipe as he went from bed to bed.  I saw one poor
fellow who had been shot through the breast; his breathing was
labored, and he was tossing, anxious and restless.  The men were
debating about the opiate he was to take, and I was thankful that I
happened there at the right moment to see that he was well narcotized
for the night.  Was it possible that my Captain could be lying on the
straw in one of these places?  Certainly possible, but not probable;
but as the lantern was held over each bed, it was with a kind of
thrill that I looked upon the features it illuminated.  Many times as
I went from hospital to hospital in my wanderings, I started as some
faint resemblance,-the shade of a young man's hair, the outline of
his half-turned face,--recalled the presence I was in search of.  The
face would turn towards me, and the momentary illusion would pass
away, but still the fancy clung to me.  There was no figure huddled
up on its rude couch, none stretched at the roadside, none toiling
languidly along the dusty pike, none passing in car or in ambulance,
that I did not scrutinize, as if it might be that for which I was
making my pilgrimage to the battlefield.

"There are two wounded Secesh,"  said my companion.  I walked to the
bedside of the first, who was an officer, a lieutenant, if I remember
right, from North Carolina.  He was of good family, son of a judge in
one of the higher courts of his State, educated, pleasant, gentle,
intelligent.  One moment's intercourse with such an enemy, lying
helpless and wounded among strangers, takes away all personal
bitterness towards those with whom we or our children have been but a
few hours before in deadly strife.  The basest lie which the
murderous contrivers of this Rebellion have told is that which tries
to make out a difference of race in the men of the North and South.
It would be worth a year of battles to abolish this delusion, though
the great sponge of war that wiped it out were moistened with the
best blood of the land.  My Rebel was of slight, scholastic habit,
and spoke as one accustomed to tread carefully among the parts of
speech.  It made my heart ache to see him, a man finished in the
humanities and Christian culture, whom the sin of his forefathers and
the crime of his rulers had set in barbarous conflict against others
of like training with his own,--a man who, but for the curse which
our generation is called on to expiate, would have taken his part in
the beneficent task of shaping the intelligence and lifting the moral
standard of a peaceful and united people.

On Sunday morning, the twenty-first, having engaged James Grayden and
his team, I set out with the Chaplain and the Philanthropist for
Keedysville.  Our track lay through the South Mountain Gap, and led
us first to the town of Boonsborough, where, it will be remembered,
Colonel Dwight had been brought after the battle.  We saw the
positions occupied in the battle of South Mountain, and many traces
of the conflict.  In one situation a group of young trees was marked
with shot, hardly one having escaped.  As we walked by the side of
the wagon, the Philanthropist left us for a while and climbed a hill,
where, along the line of a fence, he found traces of the most
desperate fighting.  A ride of some three hours brought us to
Boonsborough, where I roused the unfortunate army surgeon who had
charge of the hospitals, and who was trying to get a little sleep
after his fatigues and watchings.  He bore this cross very
creditably, and helped me to explore all places where my soldier
might be lying among the crowds of wounded.  After the useless
search, I resumed my journey, fortified with a note of introduction
to Dr. Letterman; also with a bale of oakum which I was to carry to
that gentleman, this substance being employed as a substitute for
lint.  We were obliged also to procure a pass to Keedysville from the
Provost Marshal of Boonsborough.  As we came near the place, we
learned that General McClellan's head quarters had been removed from
this village some miles farther to the front.

On entering the small settlement of Keedysville, a familiar face and
figure blocked the way, like one of Bunyan's giants.  The tall form
and benevolent countenance, set off by long, flowing hair, belonged
to the excellent Mayor Frank B. Fay of Chelsea, who, like my
Philanthropist, only still more promptly, had come to succor the
wounded of the great battle.  It was wonderful to see how his single
personality pervaded this torpid little village; he seemed to be the
centre of all its activities.  All my questions he answered clearly
and decisively, as one who knew everything that was going on in the
place.  But the one question I had come five hundred miles to ask,--
Where is Captain H.?--he could not answer.  There were some thousands
of wounded in the place, he told me, scattered about everywhere.  It
would be a long job to hunt up my Captain; the only way would be to
go to every house and ask for him.  Just then a medical officer came
up.

"Do you know anything of Captain H. of the Massachusetts Twentieth?"

"Oh yes; he is staying in that house.  I saw him there, doing very
well."

A chorus of hallelujahs arose in my soul, but I kept them to myself.
Now, then, for our twice-wounded volunteer, our young centurion whose
double-barred shoulder-straps we have never yet looked upon.  Let us
observe the proprieties, however; no swelling upward of the mother,--
no hysterica passio,  we do not like scenes.  A calm salutation,
--then swallow and hold hard.  That is about the programme.

A cottage of squared logs, filled in with plaster, and whitewashed.
A little yard before it, with a gate swinging.  The door of the
cottage ajar,--no one visible as yet.  I push open the door and
enter.  An old woman, Margaret Kitzmuller her name proves to be, is
the first person I see.

"Captain H. here?"

"Oh no, sir,--left yesterday morning for Hagerstown,--in a milk-
cart."

The Kitzmuller is a beady-eyed, cheery-looking ancient woman, answers
questions with a rising inflection, and gives a good account of the
Captain, who got into the vehicle without assistance, and was in
excellent spirits.  Of course he had struck for Hagerstown as the
terminus of the Cumberland Valley Railroad, and was on his way to
Philadelphia, via Chambersburg and Harrisburg, if he were not already
in the hospitable home of Walnut Street, where his friends were
expecting him.

I might follow on his track or return upon my own; the distance was
the same to Philadelphia through Harrisburg as through Baltimore.
But it was very difficult, Mr. Fay told me, to procure any kind of
conveyance to Hagerstown; and, on the other hand, I had James Grayden
and his wagon to carry me back to Frederick.  It was not likely that
I should overtake the object of my pursuit with nearly thirty-six
hours start, even if I could procure a conveyance that day.  In the
mean time James was getting impatient to be on his return, according
to the direction of his employers.  So I decided to go back with him.

But there was the great battle-field only about three miles from
Keedysville, and it was impossible to go without seeing that.  James
Grayden's directions were peremptory, but it was a case for the
higher law.  I must make a good offer for an extra couple of hours,
such as would satisfy the owners of the wagon, and enforce it by a
personal motive.  I did this handsomely, and succeeded without
difficulty.  To add brilliancy to my enterprise, I invited the
Chaplain and the Philanthropist to take a free passage with me.

We followed the road through the village for a space, then turned off
to the right, and wandered somewhat vaguely, for want of precise
directions, over the hills.  Inquiring as we went, we forded a wide
creek in which soldiers were washing their clothes, the name of which
we did not then know, but which must have been the Antietam.  At one
point we met a party, women among them, bringing off various trophies
they had picked up on the battlefield.  Still wandering along, we
were at last pointed to a hill in the distance, a part of the summit
of which was covered with Indian corn.  There, we were told, some of
the fiercest fighting of the day had been done.  The fences were
taken down so as to make a passage across the fields, and the tracks
worn within the last few days looked like old roads.  We passed a
fresh grave under a tree near the road.  A board was nailed to the
tree, bearing the name, as well as I could make it out, of Gardiner,
of a New Hampshire regiment.

On coming near the brow of the hill, we met a party carrying picks
and spades.  "How many?"  "Only one." The dead were nearly all buried,
then, in this region of the field of strife.  We stopped the wagon,
and, getting out, began to look around us.  Hard by was a large pile
of muskets, scores, if not hundreds, which had been picked up, and
were guarded for the Government.  A long ridge of fresh gravel rose
before us.  A board stuck up in front of it bore this inscription,
the first part of which was, I believe, not correct: "The Rebel
General Anderson and 80 Rebels are buried in this hole."  Other
smaller ridges were marked with the number of dead lying under them.
The whole ground was strewed with fragments of clothing, haversacks,
canteens, cap-boxes, bullets, cartridge-boxes, cartridges, scraps of
paper, portions of bread and meat.  I saw two soldiers' caps that
looked as though their owners had been shot through the head.  In
several places I noticed dark red patches where a pool of blood had
curdled and caked, as some poor fellow poured his life out on the
sod.  I then wandered about in the cornfield.  It surprised me to
notice, that, though there was every mark of hard fighting having
taken place here, the Indian corn was not generally trodden down.
One of our cornfields is a kind of forest, and even when fighting,
men avoid the tall stalks as if they were trees.  At the edge of this
cornfield lay a gray horse, said to have belonged to a Rebel colonel,
who was killed near the same place.  Not far off were two dead
artillery horses in their harness.  Another had been attended to by a
burying-party, who had thrown some earth over him but his last bed-
clothes were too short, and his legs stuck out stark and stiff from
beneath the gravel coverlet.  It was a great pity that we had no
intelligent guide to explain to us the position of that portion of
the two armies which fought over this ground.  There was a shallow
trench before we came to the cornfield, too narrow for a road, as I
should think, too elevated for a water-course, and which seemed to
have been used as a rifle-pit.  At any rate, there had been hard
fighting in and about it.  This and the cornfield may serve to
identify the part of the ground we visited, if any who fought there
should ever look over this paper.  The opposing tides of battle must
have blended their waves at this point, for portions of gray uniform
were mingled with the "garments rolled in blood" torn from our own
dead and wounded soldiers.  I picked up a Rebel canteen, and one of
our own,--but there was something repulsive about the trodden and
stained relics of the stale battle-field.  It was like the table of
some hideous orgy left uncleared, and one turned away disgusted from
its broken fragments and muddy heeltaps.  A bullet or two, a button,
a brass plate from a soldier's belt, served well enough for mementos
of my visit, with a letter which I picked up, directed to Richmond,
Virginia, its seal unbroken.  "N. C. Cleveland County.  E. Wright to
J. Wright."  On the other side, "A few lines from W. L. Vaughn."  who
has just been writing for the wife to her husband, and continues on
his own account.  The postscript, "tell John that nancy's folks are
all well and has a verry good Little Crop of corn a growing."  I
wonder, if, by one of those strange chances of which I have seen so
many, this number or leaf of the "Atlantic" will not sooner or later
find its way to Cleveland County, North Carolina, and E. Wright,
widow of James Wright, and Nancy's folks, get from these sentences
the last glimpse of husband and friend as he threw up his arms and
fell in the bloody cornfield of Antietam?  I will keep this stained
letter for them until peace comes back, if it comes in my time, and
my pleasant North Carolina Rebel of the Middletown Hospital will,
perhaps look these poor people up, and tell them where to send for
it.

On the battle-field I parted with my two companions, the Chaplain and
the Philanthropist.  They were going to the front, the one to find
his regiment, the other to look for those who needed his assistance.
We exchanged cards and farewells, I mounted the wagon, the horses'
heads were turned homewards, my two companions went their way, and I
saw them no more.  On my way back, I fell into talk with James
Grayden.  Born in England, Lancashire; in this country since be was
four years old.  Had nothing to care for but an old mother; didn't
know what he should do if he lost her.  Though so long in this
country, he had all the simplicity and childlike lightheartedness
which belong to the Old World's people.  He laughed at the smallest
pleasantry, and showed his great white English teeth; he took a joke
without retorting by an impertinence; he had a very limited curiosity
about all that was going on; he had small store of information; he
lived chiefly in his horses, it seemed to me.  His quiet animal
nature acted as a pleasing anodyne to my recurring fits of anxiety,
and I liked his frequent "'Deed I don't know, sir."  better than I
have sometimes relished the large discourse of professors and other
very wise men.

I have not much to say of the road which we were travelling for the
second time.  Reaching Middletown, my first call was on the wounded
Colonel and his lady.  She gave me a most touching account of all the
suffering he had gone through with his shattered limb before he
succeeded in finding a shelter; showing the terrible want of proper
means of transportation of the wounded after the battle.  It occurred
to me, while at this house, that I was more or less famished, and for
the first time in my life I begged for a meal, which the kind family
with whom the Colonel was staying most graciously furnished me.

After tea, there came in a stout army surgeon, a Highlander by birth,
educated in Edinburgh, with whom I had pleasant, not unstimulating
talk.  He had been brought very close to that immane and nefandous
Burke-and-Hare business which made the blood of civilization run cold
in the year 1828, and told me, in a very calm way, with an occasional
pinch from the mull, to refresh his memory, some of the details of
those frightful murders, never rivalled in horror until the wretch
Dumollard, who kept a private cemetery for his victims, was dragged
into the light of day.  He had a good deal to say, too, about the
Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh, and the famous preparations,
mercurial and the rest, which I remember well having seen there,--the
"sudabit multum."  and others,--also of our New York Professor
Carnochan's handiwork, a specimen of which I once admired at the New
York College.  But the doctor was not in a happy frame of mind, and
seemed willing to forget the present in the past: things went wrong,
somehow, and the time was out of joint with him.

Dr. Thompson, kind, cheerful, companionable, offered me half his own
wide bed, in the house of Dr. Baer, for my second night in
Middletown.  Here I lay awake again another night.  Close to the
house stood an ambulance in which was a wounded Rebel officer,
attended by one of their own surgeons.  He was calling out in a loud
voice, all night long, as it seemed to me, "Doctor!  Doctor!  Driver!
Water!" in loud, complaining tones, I have no doubt of real
suffering, but in strange contrast with the silent patience which was
the almost universal rule.

The courteous Dr. Thompson will let me tell here an odd coincidence,
trivial, but having its interest as one of a series.  The Doctor and
myself lay in the bed, and a lieutenant, a friend of his, slept on
the sofa, At night, I placed my match-box, a Scotch one, of the
Macpherson-plaid pattern, which I bought years ago, on the bureau,
just where I could put my hand upon it.  I was the last of the three
to rise in the morning, and on looking for my pretty match-box, I
found it was gone.  This was rather awkward,--not on account of the
loss, but of the unavoidable fact that one of my fellow-lodgers must
have taken it.  I must try to find out what it meant.

"By the way, Doctor, have you seen anything of a little plaid-pattern
match-box?"

The Doctor put his hand to his pocket, and, to his own huge surprise
and my great gratification, pulled out two match-boxes exactly alike,
both printed with the Macpherson plaid.  One was his, the other mine,
which he had seen lying round, and naturally took for his own,
thrusting it into his pocket, where it found its twin-brother from
the same workshop.  In memory of which event, we exchanged boxes,
like two Homeric heroes.

This curious coincidence illustrates well enough some supposed cases
of plagiarism of which I will mention one where my name figured.
When a little poem called "The Two Streams" was first printed, a
writer in the New York "Evening Post" virtually accused the author of
it of borrowing the thought from a baccalaureate sermon of President
Hopkins of Williamstown, and printed a quotation from that discourse,
which, as I thought, a thief or catch-poll might well consider as
establishing a fair presumption that it was so borrowed.  I was at
the same time wholly unconscious of ever having met with the
discourse or the sentence which the verses were most like, nor do I
believe I ever had seen or heard either.  Some time after this,
happening to meet my eloquent cousin, Wendell Phillips, I mentioned
the fact to him, and he told me that he had once used the special
image said to be borrowed, in a discourse delivered at Williamstown.
On relating this to my friend Mr. Buchanan Read, he informed me that
he too, had used the image,--perhaps referring to his poem called
"The Twins."  He thought Tennyson had used it also.  The parting of
the streams on the Alps is poetically elaborated in a passage
attributed to "M. Loisne," printed in the "Boston Evening Transcript"
for October 23, 1859.  Captain, afterwards Sir Francis Head, speaks
of the showers parting on the Cordilleras, one portion going to the
Atlantic, one to the Pacific.  I found the image running loose in my
mind, without a halter.  It suggested itself as an illustration of
the will, and I worked the poem out by the aid of Mitchell's School
Atlas.--The spores of a great many ideas are floating about in the
atmosphere.  We no more know where all the growths of our mind came
from, than where the lichens which eat the names off from the
gravestones borrowed the germs that gave them birth.  The two match-
boxes were just alike, but neither was a plagiarism.

In the morning I took to the same wagon once more, but, instead of
James Grayden, I was to have for my driver a young man who spelt his
name "Phillip Ottenheimer" and whose features at once showed him to
be an Israelite.  I found him agreeable enough, and disposed to talk.
So I asked him many questions about his religion, and got some
answers that sound strangely in Christian ears.  He was from
Wittenberg, and had been educated in strict Jewish fashion.  From his
childhood he had read Hebrew, but was not much of a scholar
otherwise.  A young person of his race lost caste utterly by marrying
a Christian.  The Founder of our religion was considered by the
Israelites to have been "a right smart man and a great doctor."  But
the horror with which the reading of the New Testament by any young
person of their faith would be regarded was as great, I judged by his
language, as that of one of our straitest sectaries would be, if he
found his son or daughter perusing the "Age of Reason."

In approaching Frederick, the singular beauty of its clustered spires
struck me very much, so that I was not surprised to find "Fair-View"
laid down about this point on a railroad map.  I wish some wandering
photographer would take a picture of the place, a stereoscopic one,
if possible, to show how gracefully, how charmingly, its group of
steeples nestles among the Maryland hills.  The town had a poetical
look from a distance, as if seers and dreamers might dwell there.
The first sign I read, on entering its long street, might perhaps be
considered as confirming my remote impression.  It bore these words:
"Miss Ogle, Past, Present, and Future."  On arriving, I visited
Lieutenant Abbott, and the attenuated unhappy gentleman, his
neighbor, sharing between them as my parting gift what I had left of
the balsam known to the Pharmacopoeia as Spiritus Vini Gallici.  I
took advantage of General Shriver's always open door to write a
letter home, but had not time to partake of his offered hospitality.
The railroad bridge over the Monocacy had been rebuilt since I passed
through Frederick, and we trundled along over the track toward
Baltimore.

It was a disappointment, on reaching the Eutaw House, where I had
ordered all communications to be addressed, to find no telegraphic
message from Philadelphia or Boston, stating that Captain H. had
arrived at the former place, "wound doing well in good spirits
expects to leave soon for Boston."  After all, it was no great
matter; the Captain was, no doubt, snugly lodged before this in the
house called Beautiful, at * * * * Walnut Street, where that "grave
and beautiful damsel named Discretion" had already welcomed him,
smiling, though "the water stood in her eyes," and had "called out
Prudence, Piety, and Charity, who, after a little more discourse with
him, had him into the family."

The friends I had met at the Eutaw House had all gone but one, the
lady of an officer from Boston, who was most amiable and agreeable,
and whose benevolence, as I afterwards learned, soon reached the
invalids I had left suffering at Frederick.  General Wool still
walked the corridors, inexpansive, with Fort McHenry on his
shoulders, and Baltimore in his breeches-pocket, and his courteous
aid again pressed upon me his kind offices.  About the doors of the
hotel the news-boys cried the papers in plaintive, wailing tones, as
different from the sharp accents of their Boston counterparts as a
sigh from the southwest is from a northeastern breeze.  To understand
what they said was, of course, impossible to any but an educated ear,
and if I made out "Starr" and "Clipp'rr," it was because I knew
beforehand what must be the burden of their advertising coranach.

I set out for Philadelphia on the morrow, Tuesday the twenty-third,
there beyond question to meet my Captain, once more united to his
brave wounded companions under that roof which covers a household of
as noble hearts as ever throbbed with human sympathies.  Back River,
Bush River, Gunpowder Creek,--lives there the man with soul so dead
that his memory has cerements to wrap up these senseless names in the
same envelopes with their meaningless localities?  But the
Susquehanna,--the broad, the beautiful, the historical, the poetical
Susquehanna,--the river of Wyoming and of Gertrude, dividing the
shores where

    "Aye those sunny mountains half-way down
     Would echo flageolet from some romantic town,"--

did not my heart renew its allegiance to the poet who has made it
lovely to the imagination as well as to the eye, and so identified
his fame with the noble stream that it "rolls mingling with his fame
forever?"  The prosaic traveller perhaps remembers it better from the
fact that a great sea-monster, in the shape of a steamboat, takes
him, sitting in the car, on its back, and swims across with him like
Arion's dolphin,--also that mercenary men on board offer him canvas-
backs in the season, and ducks of lower degree at other periods.

At Philadelphia again at last!  Drive fast, O colored man and
brother, to the house called Beautiful, where my Captain lies sore
wounded, waiting for the sound of the chariot wheels which bring to
his bedside the face and the voice nearer than any save one to his
heart in this his hour of pain and weakness!  Up a long street with
white shutters and white steps to all the houses.  Off at right
angles into another long street with white shutters and white steps
to all the houses.  Off again at another right angle into still
another long street with white shutters and white steps to all the
houses.  The natives of this city pretend to know one street from
another by some individual differences of aspect; but the best way
for a stranger to distinguish the streets he has been in from others
is to make a cross or other mark on the white shutters.

This corner-house is the one.  Ring softly,--for the Lieutenant-
Colonel lies there with a dreadfully wounded arm, and two sons of the
family, one wounded like the Colonel, one fighting with death in the
fog of a typhoid fever, will start with fresh pangs at the least
sound you can make.  I entered the house, but no cheerful smile met
me.  The sufferers were each of them thought to be in a critical
condition.  The fourth bed, waiting its tenant day after day, was
still empty.  Not a word from my Captain.

Then, foolish, fond body that I was, my heart sank within me.  Had he
been taken ill on the road, perhaps been attacked with those
formidable symptoms which sometimes come on suddenly after wounds
that seemed to be doing well enough, and was his life ebbing away in
some lonely cottage, nay, in some cold barn or shed, or at the
wayside, unknown, uncared for?  Somewhere between Philadelphia and
Hagerstown, if not at the latter town, he must be, at any rate.  I
must sweep the hundred and eighty miles between these places as one
would sweep a chamber where a precious pearl had been dropped.  I
must have a companion in my search, partly to help me look about, and
partly because I was getting nervous and felt lonely.  Charley said
he would go with me,--Charley, my Captain's beloved friend, gentle,
but full of spirit and liveliness, cultivated, social, affectionate,
a good talker, a most agreeable letter-writer, observing, with large
relish of life, and keen sense of humor.  He was not well enough to
go, some of the timid ones said; but he answered by packing his
carpet-bag, and in an hour or two we were on the Pennsylvania Central
Railroad in full blast for Harrisburg.

I should have been a forlorn creature but for the presence of my
companion.  In his delightful company I half forgot my anxieties,
which, exaggerated as they may seem now, were not unnatural after
what I had seen of the confusion and distress that had followed the
great battle, nay, which seem almost justified by the recent
statement that "high officers" were buried after that battle whose
names were never ascertained.  I noticed little matters, as usual.
The road was filled in between the rails with cracked stones, such as
are used for macadamizing streets.  They keep the dust down, I
suppose, for I could not think of any other use for them.  By and by
the glorious valley which stretches along through Chester and
Lancaster Counties opened upon us.  Much as I had heard of the
fertile regions of Pennsylvania, the vast scale and the uniform
luxuriance of this region astonished me.  The grazing pastures were
so green, the fields were under such perfect culture, the cattle
looked so sleek, the houses were so comfortable, the barns so ample,
the fences so well kept, that I did not wonder, when I was told that
this region was called the England of Pennsylvania.  The people whom
we saw were, like the cattle, well nourished; the young women looked
round and wholesome.

"Grass makes girls."  I said to my companion, and left him to work
out my Orphic saying, thinking to myself, that as guano makes grass,
it was a legitimate conclusion that Ichaboe must be a nursery of
female loveliness.

As the train stopped at the different stations, I inquired at each if
they had any wounded officers.  None as yet; the red rays of the
battle-field had not streamed off so far as this.  Evening found us
in the cars; they lighted candles in spring-candle-sticks; odd enough
I thought it in the land of oil-wells and unmeasured floods of
kerosene.  Some fellows turned up the back of a seat so as to make it
horizontal, and began gambling, or pretending to gamble; it looked as
if they were trying to pluck a young countryman; but appearances are
deceptive, and no deeper stake than "drinks for the crowd" seemed at
last to be involved.  But remembering that murder has tried of late
years to establish itself as an institution in the cars, I was less
tolerant of the doings of these "sportsmen" who tried to turn our
public conveyance into a travelling Frascati.  They acted as if they
were used to it, and nobody seemed to pay much attention to their
manoeuvres.

We arrived at Harrisburg in the course of the evening, and attempted
to find our way to the Jones House, to which we had been commended.
By some mistake, intentional on the part of somebody, as it may have
been, or purely accidental, we went to the Herr House instead.  I
entered my name in the book, with that of my companion.  A plain,
middle-aged man stepped up, read it to himself in low tones, and
coupled to it a literary title by which I have been sometimes known.
He proved to be a graduate of Brown University, and had heard a
certain Phi Beta Kappa poem delivered there a good many years ago.
I remembered it, too; Professor Goddard, whose sudden and singular
death left such lasting regret, was the Orator.  I recollect that
while I was speaking a drum went by the church, and how I was
disgusted to see all the heads near the windows thrust out of them,
as if the building were on fire.  Cedat armis toga.  The clerk in the
office, a mild, pensive, unassuming young man, was very polite in his
manners, and did all he could to make us comfortable.  He was of a
literary turn, and knew one of his guests in his character of author.
At tea, a mild old gentleman, with white hair and beard, sat next us.
He, too, had come hunting after his son, a lieutenant in a
Pennsylvania regiment.  Of these, father and son, more presently.

After tea we went to look up Dr. Wilson, chief medical officer of the
hospitals in the place, who was staying at the Brady House.  A
magnificent old toddy-mixer, Bardolphian in hue, and stern of aspect,
as all grog-dispensers must be, accustomed as they are to dive
through the features of men to the bottom of their souls and pockets
to see whether they are solvent to the amount of sixpence, answered
my question by a wave of one hand, the other being engaged in
carrying a dram to his lips.  His superb indifference gratified my
artistic feeling more than it wounded my personal sensibilities.
Anything really superior in its line claims my homage, and this man
was the ideal bartender, above all vulgar passions, untouched by
commonplace sympathies, himself a lover of the liquid happiness he
dispenses, and filled with a fine scorn of all those lesser
felicities conferred by love or fame or wealth or any of the
roundabout agencies for which his fiery elixir is the cheap, all-
powerful substitute.

Dr. Wilson was in bed, though it was early in the evening, not having
slept for I don't know how many nights.

"Take my card up to him, if you please."  "This way, sir."

A man who has not slept for a fortnight or so is not expected to be
as affable, when attacked in his bed, as a French Princess of old
time at her morning receptions.  Dr. Wilson turned toward me, as I
entered, without effusion, but without rudeness.  His thick, dark
moustache was chopped off square at the lower edge of the upper lip,
which implied a decisive, if not a peremptory, style of character.

I am Dr. So-and-So of Hubtown, looking after my wounded son.  (I gave
my name and said Boston, of course, in reality.)

Dr. Wilson leaned on his elbow and looked up in my face, his features
growing cordial.  Then he put out his hand, and good-humoredly
excused his reception of me.  The day before, as he told me, he had
dismissed from the service a medical man hailing from ******,
Pennsylvania, bearing my last name, preceded by the same two
initials; and he supposed, when my card came up, it was this
individual who was disturbing his slumbers.  The coincidence was so
unlikely a priori, unless some forlorn parent without antecedents had
named, a child after me, that I could not help cross-questioning the
Doctor, who assured me deliberately that the fact was just as he had
said, even to the somewhat unusual initials.  Dr. Wilson very kindly
furnished me all the information in his power, gave me directions for
telegraphing to Chambersburg, and showed every disposition to serve
me.

On returning to the Herr House, we found the mild, white-haired old
gentleman in a very happy state.  He had just discovered his son, in
a comfortable condition, at the United States Hotel.  He thought that
he could probably give us some information which would prove
interesting.  To the United States Hotel we repaired, then, in
company with our kind-hearted old friend, who evidently wanted to see
me as happy as himself.  He went up-stairs to his son's chamber, and
presently came down to conduct us there.

Lieutenant P________ , of the Pennsylvania __th, was a very fresh,
bright-looking young man, lying in bed from the effects of a recent
injury received in action.  A grape-shot, after passing through a
post and a board, had struck him in the hip, bruising, but not
penetrating or breaking.  He had good news for me.

That very afternoon, a party of wounded officers had passed through
Harrisburg, going East.  He had conversed in the bar-room of this
hotel with one of them, who was wounded about the shoulder (it might
be the lower part of the neck), and had his arm in a sling.  He
belonged to the Twentieth Massachusetts; the Lieutenant saw that be
was a Captain, by the two bars on his shoulder-strap.  His name was
my family-name; he was tall and youthful, like my Captain.  At four
o'clock he left in the train for Philadelphia.  Closely questioned,
the Lieutenant's evidence was as round, complete, and lucid as a
Japanese sphere of rock-crystal.

TE DEUM LAUDAMUS!  The Lord's name be praised!  The dead pain in the
semilunar ganglion (which I must remind my reader is a kind of
stupid, unreasoning brain, beneath the pit of the stomach, common to
man and beast, which aches in the supreme moments of life, as when
the dam loses her young ones, or the wild horse is lassoed) stopped
short.  There was a feeling as if I had slipped off a tight boot, or
cut a strangling garter,--only it was all over my system.  What more
could I ask to assure me of the Captain's safety?  As soon as the
telegraph office opens tomorrow morning we will send a message to our
friends in Philadelphia, and get a reply, doubtless, which will
settle the whole matter.

The hopeful morrow dawned at last, and the message was sent
accordingly.  In due time, the following reply was received:
"Phil Sept 24 I think the report you have heard that W [the Captain]
has gone East must be an error we have not seen or heard of him here
M L H"

DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI!  He could not have passed through Philadelphia
without visiting the house called Beautiful, where he had been so
tenderly cared for after his wound at Ball's Bluff, and where those
whom he loved were lying in grave peril of life or limb.  Yet he did
pass through Harrisburg, going East, going to Philadelphia, on his
way home.  Ah, this is it!  He must have taken the late night-train
from Philadelphia for New York, in his impatience to reach home.
There is such a train, not down in the guide-book, but we were
assured of the fact at the Harrisburg depot.  By and by came the
reply from Dr. Wilson's telegraphic message: nothing had been heard
of the Captain at Chambersburg.  Still later, another message came
from our Philadelphia friend, saying that he was seen on Friday last
at the house of Mrs.  K________, a well-known Union lady in
Hagerstown.  Now this could not be true, for he did not leave
Keedysville until Saturday; but the name of the lady furnished a clew
by which we could probably track him.  A telegram was at once sent to
Mrs.  K_______, asking information.  It was transmitted immediately,
but when the answer would be received was uncertain, as the
Government almost monopolized the line.  I was, on the whole, so well
satisfied that the Captain had gone East, that, unless something were
heard to the contrary, I proposed following him in the late train
leaving a little after midnight for Philadelphia.

This same morning we visited several of the temporary hospitals,
churches and school-houses, where the wounded were lying.  In one of
these, after looking round as usual, I asked aloud, "Any
Massachusetts men here?"  Two bright faces lifted themselves from
their pillows and welcomed me by name.  The one nearest me was
private John B. Noyes of Company B, Massachusetts Thirteenth, son of
my old college class-tutor, now the reverend and learned Professor of
Hebrew, etc., in Harvard University.  His neighbor was Corporal
Armstrong of the same Company.  Both were slightly wounded, doing
well.  I learned then and since from Mr. Noyes that they and their
comrades were completely overwhelmed by the attentions of the good
people of Harrisburg,--that the ladies brought them fruits and
flowers, and smiles, better than either,--and that the little boys of
the place were almost fighting for the privilege of doing their
errands.  I am afraid there will be a good many hearts pierced in
this war that will have no bulletmark to show.

There were some heavy hours to get rid of, and we thought a visit to
Camp Curtin might lighten some of them.  A rickety wagon carried us
to the camp, in company with a young woman from Troy, who had a
basket of good things with her for a sick brother.  "Poor boy! he
will be sure to die," she said.  The rustic sentries uncrossed their
muskets and let us in.  The camp was on a fair plain, girdled with
hills, spacious, well kept apparently, but did not present any
peculiar attraction for us.  The visit would have been a dull one,
had we not happened to get sight of a singular-looking set of human
beings in the distance.  They were clad in stuff of different hues,
gray and brown being the leading shades, but both subdued by a
neutral tint, such as is wont to harmonize the variegated apparel of
travel-stained vagabonds.  They looked slouchy, listless, torpid,--an
ill-conditioned crew, at first sight, made up of such fellows as an
old woman would drive away from her hen-roost with a broomstick.  Yet
these were estrays from the fiery army which has given our generals
so much trouble,--"Secesh prisoners," as a bystander told us.  A talk
with them might be profitable and entertaining.  But they were
tabooed to the common visitor, and it was necessary to get inside of
the line which separated us from them.

A solid, square captain was standing near by, to whom we were
referred.  Look a man calmly through the very centre of his pupils
and ask him for anything with a tone implying entire conviction that
he will grant it, and he will very commonly consent to the thing
asked, were it to commit hari-kari.  The Captain acceded to my
postulate, and accepted my friend as a corollary.  As one string of
my own ancestors was of Batavian origin, I may be permitted to say
that my new friend was of the Dutch type, like the Amsterdam galiots,
broad in the beam, capacious in the hold, and calculated to carry a
heavy cargo rather than to make fast time.  He must have been in
politics at some time or other, for he made orations to all the
"Secesh," in which he explained to them that the United States
considered and treated them like children, and enforced upon them the
ridiculous impossibility of the Rebels attempting to do anything
against such a power as that of the National Government.

Much as his discourse edified them and enlightened me, it interfered
somewhat with my little plans of entering into frank and friendly
talk with some of these poor fellows, for whom I could not help
feeling a kind of human sympathy, though I am as venomous a hater of
the Rebellion as one is like to find under the stars and stripes.  It
is fair to take a man prisoner.  It is fair to make speeches to a
man.  But to take a man prisoner and then make speeches to him while
in durance is not fair.

I began a few pleasant conversations, which would have come to
something but for the reason assigned.

One old fellow had a long beard, a drooping eyelid, and a black clay
pipe in his mouth.  He was a Scotchman from Ayr, dour enough, and
little disposed to be communicative, though I tried him with the "Twa
Briggs," and, like all Scotchmen, he was a reader of "Burrns."  He
professed to feel no interest in the cause for which he was fighting,
and was in the army, I judged, only from compulsion.  There was a
wild-haired, unsoaped boy, with pretty, foolish features enough, who
looked as if he might be about seventeen, as he said he was.  I give
my questions and his answers literally.

"What State do you come from?"

"Georgy."

"What part of Georgia?"

"Midway."

--[How odd that is!  My father was settled for seven years as pastor
over the church at Midway, Georgia, and this youth is very probably a
grandson or great grandson of one of his parishioners.]

"Where did you go to church when you were at home?"

"Never went inside 'f a church b't once in m' life."

"What did you do before you became a soldier?"

"Nothin'."

"What do you mean to do when you get back?"

"Nothin'."

Who could have any other feeling than pity for this poor human weed,
this dwarfed and etiolated soul, doomed by neglect to an existence
but one degree above that of the idiot?

With the group was a lieutenant, buttoned close in his gray coat,--
one button gone, perhaps to make a breastpin for some fair traitorous
bosom.  A short, stocky man, undistinguishable from one of the
"subject race" by any obvious meanderings of the sangre azul on his
exposed surfaces.  He did not say much, possibly because he was
convinced by the statements and arguments of the Dutch captain.  He
had on strong, iron-heeled shoes, of English make, which he said cost
him seventeen dollars in Richmond.

I put the question, in a quiet, friendly way, to several of the
prisoners, what they were fighting for.  One answered, "For our
homes."  Two or three others said they did not know, and manifested
great indifference to the whole matter, at which another of their
number, a sturdy fellow, took offence, and muttered opinions strongly
derogatory to those who would not stand up for the cause they had
been fighting for.  A feeble; attenuated old man, who wore the Rebel
uniform, if such it could be called, stood by without showing any
sign of intelligence.  It was cutting very close to the bone to carve
such a shred of humanity from the body politic to make a soldier of.

We were just leaving, when a face attracted me, and I stopped the
party.  "That is the true Southern type," I said to my companion.  A
young fellow, a little over twenty, rather tall, slight, with a
perfectly smooth, boyish cheek, delicate, somewhat high features, and
a fine, almost feminine mouth, stood at the opening of his tent, and
as we turned towards him fidgeted a little nervously with one hand at
the loose canvas, while he seemed at the same time not unwilling to
talk.  He was from Mississippi, he said, had been at Georgetown
College, and was so far imbued with letters that even the name of the
literary humility before him was not new to his ears.  Of course I
found it easy to come into magnetic relation with him, and to ask him
without incivility what he was fighting for.  "Because I like the
excitement of it,"  he answered.  I know those fighters with women's
mouths and boys' cheeks.  One such from the circle of my own friends,
sixteen years old, slipped away from his nursery, and dashed in
under, an assumed name among the red-legged Zouaves, in whose company
he got an ornamental bullet-mark in one of the earliest conflicts of
the war.

"Did you ever see a genuine Yankee?" said my Philadelphia friend to
the young Mississippian.

"I have shot at a good many of them,"  he replied, modestly, his
woman's mouth stirring a little, with a pleasant, dangerous smile.

The Dutch captain here put his foot into the conversation, as his
ancestors used to put theirs into the scale, when they were buying
furs of the Indians by weight,--so much for the weight of a hand, so
much for the weight of a foot.  It deranged the balance of our
intercourse; there was no use in throwing a fly where a paving-stone
had just splashed into the water, and I nodded a good-by to the boy-
fighter, thinking how much pleasanter it was for my friend the
Captain to address him with unanswerable arguments and crushing
statements in his own tent than it would be to meet him upon some
remote picket station and offer his fair proportions to the quick eye
of a youngster who would draw a bead on him before he had time to say
dunder and blixum.

We drove back to the town.  No message.  After dinner still no
message.  Dr. Cuyler, Chief Army Hospital Inspector, is in town, they
say.  Let us hunt him up,--perhaps he can help us.

We found him at the Jones House.  A gentleman of large proportions,
but of lively temperament, his frame knit in the North, I think, but
ripened in Georgia, incisive, prompt but good-humored, wearing his
broad-brimmed, steeple-crowned felt hat with the least possible tilt
on one side,--a sure sign of exuberant vitality in a mature and
dignified person like him, business-like in his ways, and not to be
interrupted while occupied with another, but giving himself up
heartily to the claimant who held him for the time.  He was so
genial, so cordial, so encouraging, that it seemed as if the clouds,
which had been thick all the morning, broke away as we came into his
presence, and the sunshine of his large nature filled the air all
around us.  He took the matter in hand at once, as if it were his own
private affair.  In ten minutes he had a second telegraphic message
on its way to Mrs. K at Hagerstown, sent through the Government
channel from the State Capitol,--one so direct and urgent that I
should be sure of an answer to it, whatever became of the one I had
sent in the morning.

While this was going on, we hired a dilapidated barouche, driven by
an odd young native, neither boy nor man, "as a codling when 't is
almost an apple,"  who said wery for very, simple and sincere, who
smiled faintly at our pleasantries, always with a certain reserve of
suspicion, and a gleam of the shrewdness that all men get who live in
the atmosphere of horses.  He drove us round by the Capitol grounds,
white with tents, which were disgraced in my eyes by unsoldierly
scrawls in huge letters, thus: THE SEVEN BLOOMSBURY BROTHERS, DEVIL'S
HOLE, and similar inscriptions.  Then to the Beacon Street of
Harrisburg, which looks upon the Susquehanna instead of the Common,
and shows a long front of handsome houses with fair gardens.  The
river is pretty nearly a mile across here, but very shallow now.  The
codling told us that a Rebel spy had been caught trying its fords a
little while ago, and was now at Camp Curtin with a heavy ball
chained to his leg,--a popular story, but a lie, Dr. Wilson said.  A
little farther along we came to the barkless stump of the tree to
which Mr. Harris, the Cecrops of the city named after him, was tied
by the Indians for some unpleasant operation of scalping or roasting,
when he was rescued by friendly savages, who paddled across the
stream to save him.  Our youngling pointed out a very respectable-
looking stone house as having been "built by the Indians" about those
times.  Guides have queer notions occasionally.

I was at Niagara just when Dr. Rae arrived there with his companions
and dogs and things from his Arctic search after the lost navigator.

"Who are those?" I said to my conductor.

"Them?" he answered.  "Them's the men that's been out West, out to
Michig'n, aft' Sir Ben Franklin."

Of the other sights of Harrisburg the Brant House or Hotel, or
whatever it is called, seems most worth notice.  Its facade is
imposing, with a row of stately columns, high above which a broad
sign impends, like a crag over the brow of a lofty precipice.  The
lower floor only appeared to be open to the public.  Its tessellated
pavement and ample courts suggested the idea of a temple where great
multitudes might kneel uncrowded at their devotions; but from
appearances about the place where the altar should be, I judged,
that, if one asked the officiating priest for the cup which cheers
and likewise inebriates, his prayer would not be unanswered.  The
edifice recalled to me a similar phenomenon I had once looked upon,--
the famous Caffe Pedrocchi at Padua.  It was the same thing in Italy
and America: a rich man builds himself a mausoleum, and calls it a
place of entertainment.  The fragrance of innumerable libations and
the smoke of incense-breathing cigars and pipes shall ascend day and
night through the arches of his funereal monument.  What are the poor
dips which flare and flicker on the crowns of spikes that stand at
the corners of St. Genevieve's filigree-cased sarcophagus to this
perpetual offering of sacrifice?

Ten o'clock in the evening was approaching.  The telegraph office
would presently close, and as yet there were no tidings from
Hagerstown.  Let us step over and see for ourselves.  A message!  A
message!

"Captain H.  still here leaves seven to-morrow for Harrisburg Penna
Is doing well
Mrs HK--."

A note from Dr. Cuyler to the same effect came soon afterwards to the
hotel.

We shall sleep well to-night; but let us sit awhile with nubiferous,
or, if we may coin a word, nepheligenous accompaniment, such as shall
gently narcotize the over-wearied brain and fold its convolutions for
slumber like the leaves of a lily at nightfall.  For now the over-
tense nerves are all unstraining themselves, and a buzz, like that
which comes over one who stops after being long jolted upon an uneasy
pavement, makes the whole frame alive with a luxurious languid sense
of all its inmost fibres.  Our cheerfulness ran over, and the mild,
pensive clerk was so magnetized by it that he came and sat down with
us.  He presently confided to me, with infinite naivete and
ingenuousness, that, judging from my personal appearance, he should
not have thought me the writer that he in his generosity reckoned me
to be.  His conception, so far as I could reach it, involved a huge,
uplifted forehead, embossed with protuberant organs of the
intellectual faculties, such as all writers are supposed to possess
in abounding measure.  While I fell short of his ideal in this
respect, he was pleased to say that he found me by no means the
remote and inaccessible personage he had imagined, and that I had
nothing of the dandy about me, which last compliment I had a modest
consciousness of most abundantly deserving.

Sweet slumbers brought us to the morning of Thursday.  The train from
Hagerstown was due at 11.15 A. M: We took another ride behind the
codling, who showed us the sights of yesterday over again.  Being in
a gracious mood of mind, I enlarged on the varying aspects of the
town-pumps and other striking objects which we had once inspected, as
seen by the different lights of evening and morning.  After this, we
visited the school-house hospital.  A fine young fellow, whose arm
had been shattered, was just falling into the spasms of lock-jaw.
The beads of sweat stood large and round on his flushed and
contracted features.  He was under the effect of opiates,--why not
(if his case was desperate, as it seemed to be considered) stop his
sufferings with chloroform?  It was suggested that it might shorten
life.  "What then?" I said.  "Are a dozen additional spasms worth
living for?"

The time approached for the train to arrive from Hagerstown, and we
went to the station.  I was struck, while waiting there, with what
seemed to me a great want of care for the safety of the people
standing round.  Just after my companion and myself had stepped off
the track, I noticed a car coming quietly along at a walk, as one may
say, without engine, without visible conductor, without any person
heralding its approach, so silently, so insidiously, that I could not
help thinking how very near it came to flattening out me and my
match-box worse than the Ravel pantomimist and his snuff-box were
flattened out in the play.  The train was late,--fifteen minutes,
half an hour late, and I began to get nervous, lest something had
happened.  While I was looking for it, out started a freight-train,
as if on purpose to meet the cars I was expecting, for a grand smash-
up.  I shivered at the thought, and asked an employee of the road,
with whom I had formed an acquaintance a few minutes old, why there
should not be a collision of the expected train with this which was
just going out.  He smiled an official smile, and answered that they
arranged to prevent that, or words to that effect.

Twenty-four hours had not passed from that moment when a collision
did occur, just out of the city, where I feared it, by which at least
eleven persons were killed, and from forty to sixty more were maimed
and crippled!

To-day there was the delay spoken of, but nothing worse.  The
expected train came in so quietly that I was almost startled to see
it on the track.  Let us walk calmly through the cars, and look
around us.

In the first car, on the fourth seat to the right, I saw my Captain;
there saw I him, even my first-born, whom I had sought through many
cities.

"How are you, Boy?"

"How are you, Dad?"


Such are the proprieties of life, as they are observed among us
Anglo-Saxons of the nineteenth century, decently disguising those
natural impulses that made Joseph, the Prime Minister of Egypt, weep
aloud so that the Egyptians and the house of Pharaoh heard, nay,
which had once overcome his shaggy old uncle Esau so entirely that he
fell on his brother's neck and cried like a baby in the presence of
all the women.  But the hidden cisterns of the soul may be filling
fast with sweet tears, while the windows through which it looks are
undimmed by a drop or a film of moisture.

These are times in which we cannot live solely for selfish joys or
griefs.  I had not let fall the hand I held, when a sad, calm voice
addressed me by name.  I fear that at the moment I was too much
absorbed in my own feelings; for certainly at any other time.
I should have yielded myself without stint to the sympathy which this
meeting might well call forth.

"You remember my son, Cortland Saunders, whom I brought to see you
once in Boston?"

"I do remember him well."

"He was killed on Monday, at Shepherdstown.  I am carrying his body
back with me on this train.  He was my only child.  If you could come
to my house,--I can hardly call it my home now,--it would be a
pleasure to me."

This young man, belonging in Philadelphia, was the author of a "New
System of Latin Paradigms," a work showing extraordinary scholarship
and capacity.  It was this book which first made me acquainted with
him, and I kept him in my memory, for there was genius in the youth.
Some time afterwards he came to me with a modest request to be
introduced to President Felton, and one or two others, who would aid
him in a course of independent study he was proposing to himself.  I
was most happy to smooth the way for him, and he came repeatedly
after this to see me and express his satisfaction in the
opportunities for study he enjoyed at Cambridge.  He was a dark,
still, slender person, always with a trance-like remoteness, a mystic
dreaminess of manner, such as I never saw in any other youth.
Whether he heard with difficulty, or whether his mind reacted slowly
on an alien thought, I could not say; but his answer would often be
behind time, and then a vague, sweet smile, or a few words spoken
under his breath, as if he had been trained in sick men's chambers.
For such a young man, seemingly destined for the inner life of
contemplation, to be a soldier seemed almost unnatural.  Yet he spoke
to me of his intention to offer himself to his country, and his blood
must now be reckoned among the precious sacrifices which will make
her soil sacred forever.  Had he lived, I doubt not that he would
have redeemed the rare promise of his earlier years.  He has done
better, for he has died that unborn generations may attain the hopes
held out to our nation and to mankind.

So, then, I had been within ten miles of the place where my wounded
soldier was lying, and then calmly turned my back upon him to come
once more round by a journey of three or four hundred miles to the
same region I had left!  No mysterious attraction warned me that the
heart warm with the same blood as mine was throbbing so near my own.
I thought of that lovely, tender passage where Gabriel glides
unconsciously by Evangeline upon the great river.  Ah, me! if that
railroad crash had been a few hours earlier, we two should never have
met again, after coming so close to each other!

The source of my repeated disappointments was soon made clear enough.
The Captain had gone to Hagerstown, intending to take the cars at
once for Philadelphia, as his three friends actually did, and as I
took it for granted he certainly would.  But as he walked languidly
along, some ladies saw him across the street, and seeing, were moved
with pity, and pitying, spoke such soft words that he was tempted to
accept their invitation and rest awhile beneath their hospitable
roof.  The mansion was old, as the dwellings of gentlefolks should
be; the ladies were some of them young, and all were full of
kindness; there were gentle cares, and unasked luxuries, and pleasant
talk, and music-sprinklings from the piano, with a sweet voice to
keep them company,--and all this after the swamps of the
Chickahominy, the mud and flies of Harrison's Landing, the dragging
marches, the desperate battles, the fretting wound, the jolting
ambulance, the log-house, and the rickety milk--cart!  Thanks,
uncounted thanks to the angelic ladies whose charming attentions
detained him from Saturday to Thursday, to his great advantage and my
infinite bewilderment!  As for his wound, how could it do otherwise
than well under such hands?  The bullet had gone smoothly through,
dodging everything but a few nervous branches, which would come right
in time and leave him as well as ever.

At ten that evening we were in Philadelphia, the Captain at the house
of the friends so often referred to, and I the guest of Charley, my
kind companion.  The Quaker element gives an irresistible attraction
to these benignant Philadelphia households.  Many things reminded me
that I was no longer in the land of the Pilgrims.  On the table were
Kool Slaa and Schmeer Kase, but the good grandmother who dispensed
with such quiet, simple grace these and more familiar delicacies was
literally ignorant of Baked Beans, and asked if it was the Lima bean
which was employed in that marvellous dish of animalized leguminous
farina!

Charley was pleased with my comparing the face of the small Ethiop
known to his household as "Tines" to a huckleberry with features.  He
also approved my parallel between a certain German blonde young
maiden whom we passed in the street and the "Morris White" peach.
But he was so good-humored at times, that, if one scratched a
lucifer, he accepted it as an illumination.

A day in Philadelphia left a very agreeable impression of the outside
of that great city, which has endeared itself so much of late to all
the country by its most noble and generous care of our soldiers.
Measured by its sovereign hotel, the Continental, it would stand at
the head of our economic civilization.  It provides for the comforts
and conveniences, and many of the elegances of life, more
satisfactorily than any American city, perhaps than any other city
anywhere.  Many of its characteristics are accounted for to some
extent by its geographical position.  It is the great neutral centre
of the Continent, where the fiery enthusiasms of the South and the
keen fanaticisms of the North meet at their outer limits, and result
in a compound which neither turns litmus red nor turmeric brown.  It
lives largely on its traditions, of which, leaving out Franklin and
Independence Hall, the most imposing must be considered its famous
water-works.  In my younger days I visited Fairmount, and it was with
a pious reverence that I renewed my pilgrimage to that perennial
fountain.  Its watery ventricles were throbbing with the same systole
and diastole as when, the blood of twenty years bounding in my own
heart, I looked upon their giant mechanism.  But in the place of
"Pratt's Garden" was an open park, and the old house where Robert
Morris held his court in a former generation was changing to a public
restaurant.  A suspension bridge cobwebbed itself across the
Schuylkill where that audacious arch used to leap the river at a
single bound,--an arch of greater span, as they loved to tell us,
than was ever before constructed.  The Upper Ferry Bridge was to the
Schuylkill what the Colossus was to the harbor of Rhodes.  It had an
air of dash about it which went far towards redeeming the dead level
of respectable average which flattens the physiognomy of the
rectangular city.  Philadelphia will never be herself again until
another Robert Mills and another Lewis Wernwag have shaped her a new
palladium.  She must leap the Schuylkill again, or old men will sadly
shake their heads, like the Jews at the sight of the second temple,
remembering the glories of that which it replaced.

There are times when Ethiopian minstrelsy can amuse, if it does not
charm, a weary soul, and such a vacant hour there was on this same
Friday evening.  The "opera-house" was spacious and admirably
ventilated.  As I was listening to the merriment of the sooty
buffoons, I happened to cast my eyes up to the ceiling, and through
an open semicircular window a bright solitary star looked me calmly
in the eyes.  It was a strange intrusion of the vast eternities
beckoning from the infinite spaces.  I called the attention of one of
my neighbors to it, but "Bones" was irresistibly droll, and Arcturus,
or Aldebaran, or whatever the blazing luminary may have been, with
all his revolving worlds, sailed uncared-for down the firmament.

On Saturday morning we took up our line of march for New York.
Mr. Felton, President of the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore
Railroad, had already called upon me, with a benevolent and sagacious
look on his face which implied that he knew how to do me a service
and meant to do it.  Sure enough, when we got to the depot, we found
a couch spread for the Captain, and both of us were passed on to New
York with no visits, but those of civility, from the conductor.  The
best thing I saw on the route was a rustic fence, near Elizabethtown,
I think, but I am not quite sure.  There was more genius in it than
in any structure of the kind I have ever seen,--each length being of
a special pattern, ramified, reticulated, contorted, as the limbs of
the trees had grown.  I trust some friend will photograph or
stereograph this fence for me, to go with the view of the spires of
Frederick, already referred to, as mementos of my journey.

I had come to feeling that I knew most of the respectably dressed
people whom I met in the cars, and had been in contact with them at
some time or other.  Three or four ladies and gentlemen were near us,
forming a group by themselves.  Presently one addressed me by name,
and, on inquiry, I found him to be the gentleman who was with me in
the pulpit as Orator on the occasion of another Phi Beta Kappa poem,
one delivered at New Haven.  The party were very courteous and
friendly, and contributed in various ways to our comfort.

It sometimes seems to me as if there were only about a thousand
people in the world, who keep going round and round behind the scenes
and then before them, like the "army" in a beggarly stage-show.
Suppose that I should really wish; some time or other, to get away
from this everlasting circle of revolving supernumeraries, where
should I buy a ticket the like of which was not in some of their
pockets, or find a seat to which some one of them was not a neighbor.

A little less than a year before, after the Ball's Bluff accident,
the Captain, then the Lieutenant, and myself had reposed for a night
on our homeward journey at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, where we were
lodged on the ground-floor, and fared sumptuously.  We were not so
peculiarly fortunate this time, the house being really very full.
Farther from the flowers and nearer to the stars,--to reach the
neighborhood of which last the per ardua of three or four flights of
stairs was formidable for any mortal, wounded or well.

The "vertical railway" settled that for us, however.  It is a giant
corkscrew forever pulling a mammoth cork, which, by some divine
judgment, is no sooner drawn than it is replaced in its position.
This ascending and descending stopper is hollow, carpeted, with
cushioned seats, and is watched over by two condemned souls, called
conductors, one of whom is said to be named Igion, and the other
Sisyphus.

I love New York, because, as in Paris, everybody that lives in it
feels that it is his property,--at least, as much as it is anybody's.
My Broadway, in particular, I love almost as I used to love my
Boulevards.  I went, therefore, with peculiar interest, on the day
that we rested at our grand hotel, to visit some new pleasure-grounds
the citizens had been arranging for us, and which I had not yet seen.
The Central Park is an expanse of wild country, well crumpled so as
to form ridges which will give views and hollows that will hold
water.  The hips and elbows and other bones of Nature stick out here
and there in the shape of rocks which give character to the scenery,
and an unchangeable, unpurchasable look to a landscape that without
them would have been in danger of being fattened by art and money out
of all its native features.  The roads were fine, the sheets of water
beautiful, the bridges handsome, the swans elegant in their
deportment, the grass green and as short as a fast horse's winter
coat.  I could not learn whether it was kept so by clipping or
singeing.  I was delighted with my new property,--but it cost me four
dollars to get there, so far was it beyond the Pillars of Hercules of
the fashionable quarter.  What it will be by and by depends on
circumstances; but at present it is as much central to New York as
Brookline is central to Boston.

The question is not between Mr. Olmsted's admirably arranged, but
remote pleasure-ground and our Common, with its batrachian pool, but
between his Excentric Park and our finest suburban scenery, between
its artificial reservoirs and the broad natural sheet of Jamaica
Pond.  I say this not invidiously, but in justice to the beauties
which surround our own metropolis.  To compare the situations of any
dwellings in either of the great cities with those which look upon
the Common, the Public Garden, the waters of the Back Bay, would be
to take an unfair advantage of Fifth Avenue and Walnut Street.
St. Botolph's daughter dresses in plainer clothes than her more
stately sisters, but she wears an emerald on her right hand and a
diamond on her left that Cybele herself need not be ashamed of.

On Monday morning, the twenty-ninth of September, we took the cars
for home.  Vacant lots, with Irish and pigs; vegetable-gardens;
straggling houses; the high bridge; villages, not enchanting; then
Stamford: then NORWALK.  Here, on the sixth of May, 1853, I passed
close on the heels of the great disaster.  But that my lids were
heavy on that morning, my readers would probably have had no further
trouble with me.  Two of my friends saw the car in which they rode
break in the middle and leave them hanging over the abyss.  From
Norwalk to Boston, that day's journey of two hundred miles was a long
funeral procession.

Bridgeport, waiting for Iranistan to rise from its ashes with all its
phoenix-egg domes,--bubbles of wealth that broke, ready to be blown
again; iridescent as ever, which is pleasant, for the world likes
cheerful Mr. Barnum's success; New Haven, girt with flat marshes that
look like monstrous billiard-tables, with hay-cocks lying about for
balls,--romantic with West Rock and its legends,--cursed with a
detestable depot, whose niggardly arrangements crowd the track so
murderously close to the wall that the peine forte et dare must be
the frequent penalty of an innocent walk on its platform,--with its
neat carriages, metropolitan hotels, precious old college-
dormitories, its vistas of elms and its dishevelled weeping-willows;
Hartford, substantial, well-bridged, many--steepled city,--every
conical spire an extinguisher of some nineteenth-century heresy; so
onward, by and across the broad, shallow Connecticut,--dull red road
and dark river woven in like warp and woof by the shuttle of the
darting engine; then Springfield, the wide-meadowed, well-feeding,
horse-loving, hot-summered, giant-treed town,--city among villages,
village among cities; Worcester, with its Daedalian labyrinth of
crossing railroad-bars, where the snorting Minotaurs, breathing fire
and smoke and hot vapors, are stabled in their dens; Framingham, fair
cup-bearer, leaf-cinctured Hebe of the deep-bosomed Queen sitting by
the seaside on the throne of the Six Nations.  And now I begin to
know the road, not by towns, but by single dwellings; not by miles,
but by rods.  The poles of the great magnet that draws in all the
iron tracks through the grooves of all the mountains must be near at
hand, for here are crossings, and sudden stops, and screams of
alarmed engines heard all around.  The tall granite obelisk comes
into view far away on the left, its bevelled cap-stone sharp against
the sky; the lofty chimneys of Charlestown and East Cambridge flaunt
their smoky banners up in the thin air; and now one fair bosom of the
three-pilled city, with its dome-crowned summit, reveals itself, as
when many-breasted Ephesian Artemis appeared with half-open chlamys
before her worshippers.

Fling open the window-blinds of the chamber that looks out on the
waters and towards the western sun!  Let the joyous light shine in
upon the pictures that hang upon its walls and the shelves thick-set
with the names of poets and philosophers and sacred teachers, in
whose pages our boys learn that life is noble only when it is held
cheap by the side of honor and of duty.  Lay him in his own bed, and
let him sleep off his aches and weariness.  So comes down another
night over this household, unbroken by any messenger of evil
tidings,--a night of peaceful rest and grateful thoughts; for this
our son and brother was dead and is alive again, and was lost and is
found.






THE INEVITABLE TRIAL

[An Oration delivered before the City Authorities of Boston, on the
4th of July, 1863.]

It is our first impulse, upon this returning day of our nation's
birth, to recall whatever is happiest and noblest in our past
history, and to join our voices in celebrating the statesmen and the
heroes, the men of thought and the men of action, to whom that
history owes its existence.  In other years this pleasing office may
have been all that was required of the holiday speaker.  But to-day,
when the very life of the nation is threatened, when clouds are thick
about us, and men's hearts are throbbing with passion, or failing
with fear, it is the living question of the hour, and not the dead
story of the past, which forces itself into all minds, and will find
unrebuked debate in all assemblies.

In periods of disturbance like the present, many persons who
sincerely love their country and mean to do their duty to her
disappoint the hopes and expectations of those who are actively
working in her cause.  They seem to have lost whatever moral force
they may have once possessed, and to go drifting about from one
profitless discontent to another, at a time when every citizen is
called upon for cheerful, ready service.  It is because their minds
are bewildered, and they are no longer truly themselves.  Show them
the path of duty, inspire them with hope for the future, lead them
upwards from the turbid stream of events to the bright, translucent
springs of eternal principles, strengthen their trust in humanity and
their faith in God, and you may yet restore them to their manhood and
their country.

At all times, and especially on this anniversary of glorious
recollections and kindly enthusiasms, we should try to judge the weak
and wavering souls of our brothers fairly and generously.  The
conditions in which our vast community of peace-loving citizens find
themselves are new and unprovided for.  Our quiet burghers and
farmers are in the position of river-boats blown from their moorings
out upon a vast ocean, where such a typhoon is raging as no mariner
who sails its waters ever before looked upon.  If their beliefs
change with the veering of the blast, if their trust in their fellow-
men, and in the course of Divine Providence, seems well-nigh
shipwrecked, we must remember that they were taken unawares, and
without the preparation which could fit them to struggle with these
tempestuous elements.  In times like these the faith is the man; and
they to whom it is given in larger measure owe a special duty to
those who for want of it are faint at heart, uncertain in speech,
feeble in effort, and purposeless in aim.

Assuming without argument a few simple propositions,--that self-
government is the natural condition of an adult society, as
distinguished from the immature state, in which the temporary
arrangements of monarchy and oligarchy are tolerated as conveniences;
that the end of all social compacts is, or ought to be, to give every
child born into the world the fairest chance to make the most and the
best of itself that laws can give it; that Liberty, the one of the
two claimants who swears that her babe shall not be split in halves
and divided between them, is the true mother of this blessed Union;
that the contest in which we are engaged is one of principles
overlaid by circumstances; that the longer we fight, and the more we
study the movements of events and ideas, the more clearly we find the
moral nature of the cause at issue emerging in the field and in the
study; that all honest persons with average natural sensibility, with
respectable understanding, educated in the school of northern
teaching, will have eventually to range themselves in the armed or
unarmed host which fights or pleads for freedom, as against every
form of tyranny; if not in the front rank now, then in the rear rank
by and by;--assuming these propositions, as many, perhaps most of us,
are ready to do, and believing that the more they are debated before
the public the more they will gain converts, we owe it to the timid
and the doubting to keep the great questions of the time in unceasing
and untiring agitation.  They must be discussed, in all ways
consistent with the public welfare, by different classes of thinkers;
by priests and laymen; by statesmen and simple voters; by moralists
and lawyers; by men of science and uneducated hand-laborers; by men
of facts and figures, and by men of theories and aspirations; in the
abstract and in the concrete; discussed and rediscussed every month,
every week, every day, and almost every hour, as the telegraph tells
us of some new upheaval or subsidence of the rocky base of our
political order.

Such discussions may not be necessary to strengthen the convictions
of the great body of loyal citizens.  They may do nothing toward
changing the views of those, if such there be, as some profess to
believe, who follow politics as a trade.  They may have no hold upon
that class of persons who are defective in moral sensibility, just as
other persons are wanting in an ear for music.  But for the honest,
vacillating minds, the tender consciences supported by the tremulous
knees of an infirm intelligence, the timid compromisers who are
always trying to curve the straight lines and round the sharp angles
of eternal law, the continual debate of these living questions is the
one offered means of grace and hope of earthly redemption.  And thus
a true, unhesitating patriot may be willing to listen with patience
to arguments which he does not need, to appeals which have no special
significance for him, in the hope that some less clear in mind or
less courageous in temper may profit by them.

As we look at the condition in which we find ourselves on this fourth
day of July, 1863, at the beginning of the Eighty-eighth Year of
American Independence, we may well ask ourselves what right we have
to indulge in public rejoicings.  If the war in which we are engaged
is an accidental one, which might have been avoided but for our
fault; if it is for any ambitious or unworthy purpose on our part; if
it is hopeless, and we are madly persisting in it; if it is our duty
and in our power to make a safe and honorable peace, and we refuse to
do it; if our free institutions are in danger of becoming subverted,
and giving place to an irresponsible tyranny; if we are moving in the
narrow circles which are to ingulf us in national ruin,--then we had
better sing a dirge, and leave this idle assemblage, and hush the
noisy cannon which are reverberating through the air, and tear down
the scaffolds which are soon to blaze with fiery symbols; for it is
mourning and not joy that should cover the land; there should be
silence, and not the echo of noisy gladness, in our streets; and the
emblems with which we tell our nation's story and prefigure its
future should be traced, not in fire, but in ashes.

If, on the other hand, this war is no accident, but an inevitable
result of long incubating causes; inevitable as the cataclysms that
swept away the monstrous births of primeval nature; if it is for no
mean, unworthy end, but for national life, for liberty everywhere,
for humanity, for the kingdom of God on earth; if it is not hopeless,
but only growing to such dimensions that the world shall remember the
final triumph of right throughout all time; if there is no safe and
honorable peace for us but a peace proclaimed from the capital of
every revolted province in the name of the sacred, inviolable Union;
if the fear of tyranny is a phantasm, conjured up by the imagination
of the weak, acted on by the craft of the cunning; if so far from
circling inward to the gulf of our perdition, the movement of past
years is reversed, and every revolution carries us farther and
farther from the centre of the vortex, until, by God's blessing, we
shall soon find ourselves freed from the outermost coil of the
accursed spiral; if all these things are true; if we may hope to make
them seem true, or even probable, to the doubting soul, in an hour's
discourse, then we may join without madness in the day's exultant
festivities; the bells may ring, the cannon may roar, the incense of
our harmless saltpetre fill the air, and the children who are to
inherit the fruit of these toiling, agonizing years, go about
unblamed, making day and night vocal with their jubilant patriotism.

The struggle in which we are engaged was inevitable; it might have
come a little sooner, or a little later, but it must have come.  The
disease of the nation was organic, and not functional, and the rough
chirurgery of war was its only remedy.

In opposition to this view, there are many languid thinkers who lapse
into a forlorn belief that if this or that man had never lived, or if
this or that other man had not ceased to live, the country might have
gone on in peace and prosperity, until its felicity merged in the
glories of the millennium.  If Mr. Calhoun had never proclaimed his
heresies; if Mr. Garrison had never published his paper; if Mr.
Phillips, the Cassandra in masculine shape of our long prosperous
Ilium, had never uttered his melodious prophecies; if the silver
tones of Mr. Clay had still sounded in the senate-chamber to smooth
the billows of contention; if the Olympian brow of Daniel Webster had
been lifted from the dust to fix its awful frown on the darkening
scowl of rebellion,--we might have been spared this dread season of
convulsion.  All this is but simple Martha's faith, without the
reason she could have given: "If Thou hadst been here, my brother had
not died."

They little know the tidal movements of national thought and feeling,
who believe that they depend for existence on a few swimmers who ride
their waves.  It is not Leviathan that leads the ocean from continent
to continent, but the ocean which bears his mighty bulk as it wafts
its own bubbles.  If this is true of all the narrower manifestations
of human progress, how much more must it be true of those broad
movements in the intellectual and spiritual domain which interest all
mankind?  But in the more limited ranges referred to, no fact is more
familiar than that there is a simultaneous impulse acting on many
individual minds at once, so that genius comes in clusters, and
shines rarely as a single star.  You may trace a common motive and
force in the pyramid-builders of the earliest recorded antiquity, in
the evolution of Greek architecture, and in the sudden springing up
of those wondrous cathedrals of the twelfth and following centuries,
growing out of the soil with stem and bud and blossom, like flowers
of stone whose seeds might well have been the flaming aerolites cast
over the battlements of heaven.  You may see the same law showing
itself in the brief periods of glory which make the names of Pericles
and Augustus illustrious with reflected splendors; in the painters,
the sculptors, the scholars of "Leo's golden days"; in the authors of
the Elizabethan time; in the poets of the first part of this century
following that dreary period, suffering alike from the silence of
Cowper and the song of Hayley.  You may accept the fact as natural,
that Zwingli and Luther, without knowing each other, preached the
same reformed gospel; that Newton, and Hooke, and Halley, and Wren
arrived independently of each other at the great law of the
diminution of gravity with the square of the distance; that Leverrier
and Adams felt their hands meeting, as it were, as they stretched
them into the outer darkness beyond the orbit of Uranus, in search of
the dim, unseen Planet; that Fulton and Bell, that Wheatstone and
Morse, that Daguerre and Niepce, were moving almost simultaneously in
parallel paths to the same end.  You see why Patrick Henry, in
Richmond, and Samuel Adams, in Boston, were startling the crown
officials with the same accents of liberty, and why the Mecklenburg
Resolutions had the very ring of the Protest of the Province of
Massachusetts.  This law of simultaneous intellectual movement,
recognized by all thinkers, expatiated upon by Lord Macaulay and by
Mr. Herbert Spencer among recent writers, is eminently applicable to
that change of thought and feeling which necessarily led to the
present conflict.

The antagonism of the two sections of the Union was not the work of
this or that enthusiast or fanatic.  It was the consequence of a
movement in mass of two different forms of civilization in different
directions, and the men to whom it was attributed were only those who
represented it most completely, or who talked longest and loudest
about it.  Long before the accents of those famous statesmen referred
to ever resounded in the halls of the Capitol, long before the
"Liberator" opened its batteries, the controversy now working itself
out by trial of battle was foreseen and predicted.  Washington warned
his countrymen of the danger of sectional divisions, well knowing the
line of cleavage that ran through the seemingly solid fabric.
Jefferson foreshadowed the judgment to fall upon the land for its
sins against a just God.  Andrew Jackson announced a quarter of a
century beforehand that the next pretext of revolution would be
slavery.  De Tocqueville recognized with that penetrating insight
which analyzed our institutions and conditions so keenly, that the
Union was to be endangered by slavery, not through its interests, but
through the change of character it was bringing about in the people
of the two sections, the same fatal change which George Mason, more
than half a century before, had declared to be the most pernicious
effect of the system, adding the solemn warning, now fearfully
justifying itself in the sight of his descendants, that "by an
inevitable chain of causes and effects, Providence punishes national
sins by national calamities."  The Virginian romancer pictured the
far-off scenes of the conflict which he saw approaching as the
prophets of Israel painted the coming woes of Jerusalem, and the
strong iconoclast of Boston announced the very year when the curtain
should rise on the yet unopened drama.

The wise men of the past, and the shrewd men of our own time, who
warned us of the calamities in store for our nation, never doubted
what was the cause which was to produce first alienation and finally
rupture.  The descendants of the men "daily exercised in tyranny,"
the "petty tyrants" as their own leading statesmen called them long
ago, came at length to love the institution which their fathers had
condemned while they tolerated.  It is the fearful realization of
that vision of the poet where the lost angels snuff up with eager
nostrils the sulphurous emanations of the bottomless abyss,--so have
their natures become changed by long breathing the atmosphere of the
realm of darkness.

At last, in the fulness of time, the fruits of sin ripened in a
sudden harvest of crime.  Violence stalked into the senate-chamber,
theft and perjury wound their way into the cabinet, and, finally,
openly organized conspiracy, with force and arms, made burglarious
entrance into a chief stronghold of the Union.  That the principle
which underlay these acts of fraud and violence should be irrevocably
recorded with every needed sanction, it pleased God to select a chief
ruler of the false government to be its Messiah to the listening
world.  As with Pharaoh, the Lord hardened his heart, while he opened
his mouth, as of old he opened that of the unwise animal ridden by
cursing Balaam.  Then spake Mr. "Vice-President" Stephens those
memorable words which fixed forever the theory of the new social
order.  He first lifted a degraded barbarism to the dignity of a
philosophic system.  He first proclaimed the gospel of eternal
tyranny as the new revelation which Providence had reserved for the
western Palestine.  Hear, O heavens! and give ear, O earth!
The corner-stone of the new-born dispensation is the recognized
inequality of races; not that the strong may protect the weak, as men
protect women and children, but that the strong may claim the
authority of Nature and of God to buy, to sell, to scourge, to hunt,
to cheat out of the reward of his labor, to keep in perpetual
ignorance, to blast with hereditary curses throughout all time, the
bronzed foundling of the New World, upon whose darkness has dawned
the star of the occidental Bethlehem!

After two years of war have consolidated the opinion of the Slave
States, we read in the "Richmond Examiner":  "The establishment of
the Confederacy is verily a distinct reaction against the whole
course of the mistaken civilization of the age.  For  'Liberty,
Equality, Fraternity,' we have deliberately substituted Slavery,
Subordination, and Government."

A simple diagram, within the reach of all, shows how idle it is to
look for any other cause than slavery as having any material agency
in dividing the country.  Match the two broken pieces of the Union,
and you will find the fissure that separates them zigzagging itself
half across the continent like an isothermal line, shooting its
splintery projections, and opening its reentering angles, not merely
according to the limitations of particular States, but as a county or
other limited section of ground belongs to freedom or to slavery.
Add to this the official statement made in 1862, that "there is not
one regiment or battalion, or even company of men, which was
organized in or derived from the Free States or Territories,
anywhere, against the Union"; throw in gratuitously Mr. Stephens's
explicit declaration in the speech referred to, and we will consider
the evidence closed for the present on this count of the indictment.

In the face of these predictions, these declarations, this line of
fracture, this precise statement, testimony from so many sources,
extending through several generations, as to the necessary effect of
slavery, a priori, and its actual influence as shown by the facts,
few will suppose that anything we could have done would have stayed
its course or prevented it from working out its legitimate effects on
the white subjects of its corrupting dominion.  Northern acquiescence
or even sympathy may have sometimes helped to make it sit more easily
on the consciences of its supporters.  Many profess to think that
Northern fanaticism, as they call it, acted like a mordant in fixing
the black dye of slavery in regions which would but for that have
washed themselves free of its stain in tears of penitence.  It is a
delusion and a snare to trust in any such false and flimsy reasons
where there is enough and more than enough in the institution itself
to account for its growth.  Slavery gratifies at once the love of
power, the love of money, and the love of ease; it finds a victim for
anger who cannot smite back his oppressor; and it offers to all,
without measure, the seductive privileges which the Mormon gospel
reserves for the true believers on earth, and the Bible of Mahomet
only dares promise to the saints in heaven.

Still it is common, common even to vulgarism, to hear the remark that
the same gallows-tree ought to bear as its fruit the arch-traitor and
the leading champion of aggressive liberty.  The mob of Jerusalem was
not satisfied with its two crucified thieves; it must have a cross
also for the reforming Galilean, who interfered so rudely with its
conservative traditions!  It is asserted that the fault was quite as
much on our side as on the other; that our agitators and abolishers
kindled the flame for which the combustibles were all ready on the
other side of the border.  If these men could have been silenced, our
brothers had not died.

Who are the persons that use this argument?  They are the very ones
who are at the present moment most zealous in maintaining the right
of free discussion.  At a time when every power the nation can summon
is needed to ward off the blows aimed at its life, and turn their
force upon its foes,--when a false traitor at home may lose us a
battle by a word, and a lying newspaper may demoralize an army by its
daily or weekly stillicidium of poison, they insist with loud acclaim
upon the liberty of speech and of the press; liberty, nay license, to
deal with government, with leaders, with every measure, however
urgent, in any terms they choose, to traduce the officer before his
own soldiers, and assail the only men who have any claim at all to
rule over the country, as the very ones who are least worthy to be
obeyed.  If these opposition members of society are to have their way
now, they cannot find fault with those persons who spoke their minds
freely in the past on that great question which, as we have agreed,
underlies all our present dissensions.

It is easy to understand the bitterness which is often shown towards
reformers.  They are never general favorites.  They are apt to
interfere with vested rights and time-hallowed interests.  They often
wear an unlovely, forbidding aspect.  Their office corresponds to
that of Nature's sanitary commission for the removal of material
nuisances.  It is not the butterfly, but the beetle, which she
employs for this duty.  It is not the bird of paradise and the
nightingale, but the fowl of dark plumage and unmelodious voice, to
which is entrusted the sacred duty of eliminating the substances that
infect the air.  And the force of obvious analogy teaches us not to
expect all the qualities which please the general taste in those
whose instincts lead them to attack the moral nuisances which poison
the atmosphere of society.  But whether they please us in all their
aspects or not, is not the question.  Like them or not, they must and
will perform their office, and we cannot stop them.  They may be
unwise, violent, abusive, extravagant, impracticable, but they are
alive, at any rate, and it is their business to remove abuses as soon
as they are dead, and often to help them to die.  To quarrel with
them because they are beetles, and not butterflies, is natural, but
far from profitable.  They grow none the less vigorously for being
trodden upon, like those tough weeds that love to nestle between the
stones of court-yard pavements.  If you strike at one of their heads
with the bludgeon of the law, or of violence, it flies open like the
seedcapsule of a snap-weed, and fills the whole region with seminal
thoughts which will spring up in a crop just like the original
martyr.  They chased one of these enthusiasts, who attacked slavery,
from St. Louis, and shot him at Alton in 1837; and on the 23d of June
just passed, the Governor of Missouri, chairman of the Committee on
Emancipation, introduced to the Convention an Ordinance for the final
extinction of Slavery!  They hunted another through the streets of a
great Northern city in 1835; and within a few weeks a regiment of
colored soldiers, many of them bearing the marks of the slave-
driver's whip on their backs, marched out before a vast multitude
tremulous with newly-stirred sympathies, through the streets of the
same city, to fight our battles in the name of God and Liberty!

The same persons who abuse the reformers, and lay all our troubles at
their door, are apt to be severe also on what they contemptuously
emphasize as "sentiments" considered as motives of action.  It is
charitable to believe that they do not seriously contemplate or truly
understand the meaning of the words they use, but rather play with
them, as certain so-called "learned" quadrupeds play with the printed
characters set before them.  In all questions involving duty, we act
from sentiments.  Religion springs from them, the family order rests
upon them, and in every community each act involving a relation
between any two of its members implies the recognition or the denial
of a sentiment.  It is true that men often forget them or act against
their bidding in the keen competition of business and politics.  But
God has not left the hard intellect of man to work out its devices
without the constant presence of beings with gentler and purer
instincts.  The breast of woman is the ever-rocking cradle of the
pure and holy sentiments which will sooner or later steal their way
into the mind of her sterner companion; which will by and by emerge
in the thoughts of the world's teachers, and at last thunder forth in
the edicts of its law-givers and masters.  Woman herself borrows half
her tenderness from the sweet influences of maternity; and childhood,
that weeps at the story of suffering, that shudders at the picture of
wrong, brings down its inspiration "from God, who is our home."  To
quarrel, then, with the class of minds that instinctively attack
abuses, is not only profitless but senseless; to sneer at the
sentiments which are the springs of all just and virtuous actions, is
merely a display of unthinking levity, or of want of the natural
sensibilities.

With the hereditary character of the Southern people moving in one
direction, and the awakened conscience of the North stirring in the
other, the open conflict of opinion was inevitable, and equally
inevitable its appearance in the field of national politics.  For
what is meant by self-government is, that a man shall make his
convictions of what is right and expedient regulate the community so
far as his fractional share of the government extends.  If one has
come to the conclusion, be it right or wrong, that any particular
institution or statute is a violation of the sovereign law of God, it
is to be expected that he will choose to be represented by those who
share his belief, and who will in their wider sphere do all they
legitimately can to get rid of the wrong in which they find
themselves and their constituents involved.  To prevent opinion from
organizing itself under political forms may be very desirable, but it
is not according to the theory or practice of self-government.  And
if at last organized opinions become arrayed in hostile shape against
each other, we shall find that a just war is only the last inevitable
link in a chain of closely connected impulses of which the original
source is in Him who gave to tender and humble and uncorrupted souls
the sense of right and wrong, which, after passing through various
forms, has found its final expression in the use of material force.
Behind the bayonet is the law-giver's statute, behind the statute the
thinker's argument, behind the argument is the tender
conscientiousness of woman, woman, the wife, the mother,--who looks
upon the face of God himself reflected in the unsullied soul of
infancy.  "Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings hast thou
ordained strength, because of thine enemies."

The simplest course for the malcontent is to find fault with the
order of Nature and the Being who established it.  Unless the law of
moral progress were changed, or the Governor of the Universe were
dethroned, it would be impossible to prevent a great uprising of the
human conscience against a system, the legislation relating to which,
in the words of so calm an observer as De Tocqueville, the
Montesquieu of our laws, presents "such unparalleled atrocities as to
show that the laws of humanity have been totally perverted."  Until
the infinite selfishness of the powers that hate and fear the
principles of free government swallowed up their convenient virtues,
that system was hissed at by all the old-world civilization.  While
in one section of our land the attempt has been going on to lift it
out of the category of tolerated wrongs into the sphere of the
world's beneficent agencies, it was to be expected that the protest
of Northern manhood and womanhood would grow louder and stronger
until the conflict of principles led to the conflict of forces.  The
moral uprising of the North came with the logical precision of
destiny; the rage of the "petty tyrants" was inevitable; the plot to
erect a slave empire followed with fated certainty; and the only
question left for us of the North was, whether we should suffer the
cause of the Nation to go by default, or maintain its existence by
the argument of cannon and musket, of bayonet and sabre.

The war in which we are engaged is for no meanly ambitious or
unworthy purpose.  It was primarily, and is to this moment, for the
preservation of our national existence.  The first direct movement
towards it was a civil request on the part of certain Southern
persons, that the Nation would commit suicide, without making any
unnecessary trouble about it.  It was answered, with sentiments of
the highest consideration, that there were constitutional and other
objections to the Nation's laying violent hands upon itself.  It was
then requested, in a somewhat peremptory tone, that the Nation would
be so obliging as to abstain from food until the natural consequences
of that proceeding should manifest themselves.  All this was done as
between a single State and an isolated fortress; but it was not South
Carolina and Fort Sumter that were talking; it was a vast conspiracy
uttering its menace to a mighty nation; the whole menagerie of
treason was pacing its cages, ready to spring as soon as the doors
were opened; and all that the tigers of rebellion wanted to kindle
their wild natures to frenzy, was the sight of flowing blood.

As if to show how coldly and calmly all this had been calculated
beforehand by the conspirators, to make sure that no absence of
malice aforethought should degrade the grand malignity of settled
purpose into the trivial effervescence of transient passion, the
torch which was literally to launch the first missile, figuratively,
to "fire the southern heart" and light the flame of civil war, was
given into the trembling hand of an old white-headed man, the
wretched incendiary whom history will handcuff in eternal infamy with
the temple-burner of ancient Ephesus.  The first gun that spat its
iron insult at Fort Sumter, smote every loyal American full in the
face.  As when the foul witch used to torture her miniature image,
the person it represented suffered all that she inflicted on his
waxen counterpart, so every buffet that fell on the smoking fortress
was felt by the sovereign nation of which that was the
representative.  Robbery could go no farther, for every loyal man of
the North was despoiled in that single act as much as if a footpad
had laid hands upon him to take from him his father's staff and his
mother's Bible.  Insult could go no farther, for over those battered
walls waved the precious symbol of all we most value in the past and
most hope for in the future,--the banner under which we became a
nation, and which, next to the cross of the Redeemer, is the dearest
object of love and honor to all who toil or march or sail beneath its
waving folds of glory.

Let us pause for a moment to consider what might have been the course
of events if under the influence of fear, or of what some would name
humanity, or of conscientious scruples to enter upon what a few
please themselves and their rebel friends by calling a "wicked war";
if under any or all these influences we had taken the insult and the
violence of South Carolina without accepting it as the first blow of
a mortal combat, in which we must either die or give the last and
finishing stroke.

By the same title which South Carolina asserted to Fort Sumter,
Florida would have challenged as her own the Gibraltar of the Gulf,
and Virginia the Ehrenbreitstein of the Chesapeake.  Half our navy
would have anchored under the guns of these suddenly alienated
fortresses, with the flag of the rebellion flying at their peaks.
"Old Ironsides" herself would have perhaps sailed out of Annapolis
harbor to have a wooden Jefferson Davis shaped for her figure-head at
Norfolk,--for Andrew Jackson was a hater of secession, and his was no
fitting effigy for the battle-ship of the red-handed conspiracy.
With all the great fortresses, with half the ships and warlike
material, in addition to all that was already stolen, in the
traitors' hands, what chance would the loyal men in the Border States
have stood against the rush of the desperate fanatics of the now
triumphant faction?  Where would Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri,
Tennessee,--saved, or looking to be saved, even as it is, as by
fire,--have been in the day of trial?  Into whose hands would the
Capital, the archives, the glory, the name, the very life of the
nation as a nation, have fallen, endangered as all of them were, in
spite of the volcanic outburst of the startled North which answered
the roar of the first gun at Sumter?  Worse than all, are we
permitted to doubt that in the very bosom of the North itself there
was a serpent, coiled but not sleeping, which only listened for the
first word that made it safe to strike, to bury its fangs in the
heart of Freedom, and blend its golden scales in close embrace with
the deadly reptile of the cotton-fields.  Who would not wish that he
were wrong in such a suspicion? yet who can forget the mysterious
warnings that the allies of the rebels were to be found far north of
the fatal boundary line; and that it was in their own streets,
against their own brothers, that the champions of liberty were to
defend her sacred heritage?

Not to have fought, then, after the supreme indignity and outrage we
had suffered, would have been to provoke every further wrong, and to
furnish the means for its commission.  It would have been to placard
ourselves on the walls of the shattered fort, as the spiritless race
the proud labor-thieves called us.  It would have been to die as a
nation of freemen, and to have given all we had left of our rights
into the hands of alien tyrants in league with home-bred traitors.

Not to have fought would have been to be false to liberty everywhere,
and to humanity.  You have only to see who are our friends and who
are our enemies in this struggle, to decide for what principles we
are combating.  We know too well that the British aristocracy is not
with us.  We know what the West End of London wishes may be result of
this controversy.  The two halves of this Union are the two blades of
the shears, threatening as those of Atropos herself, which will
sooner or later cut into shreds the old charters of tyranny.  How
they would exult if they could but break the rivet that makes of the
two blades one resistless weapon!  The man who of all living
Americans had the best opportunity of knowing how the fact stood,
wrote these words in March, 1862: "That Great Britain did, in the
most terrible moment of our domestic trial in struggling with a
monstrous social evil she had earnestly professed to abhor, coldly
and at once assume our inability to master it, and then become the
only foreign nation steadily contributing in every indirect way
possible to verify its pre-judgment, will probably be the verdict
made up against her by posterity, on a calm comparison of the
evidence."

So speaks the wise, tranquil statesman who represents the nation at
the Court of St. James, in the midst of embarrassments perhaps not
less than those which vexed his illustrious grandfather, when he
occupied the same position as the Envoy of the hated, newborn
Republic.

"It cannot be denied,"--says another observer, placed on one of our
national watch-towers in a foreign capital,--"it cannot be denied
that the tendency of European public opinion, as delivered from high
places, is more and more unfriendly to our cause"; "but the people,"
he adds, "everywhere sympathize with us, for they know that our cause
is that of free institutions,--that our struggle is that of the
people against an oligarchy."  These are the words of the Minister to
Austria, whose generous sympathies with popular liberty no homage
paid to his genius by the class whose admiring welcome is most
seductive to scholars has ever spoiled; our fellow-citizen, the
historian of a great Republic which infused a portion of its life
into our own,--John Lothrop Motley.

It is a bitter commentary on the effects of European, and especially
of British institutions, that such men should have to speak in such
terms of the manner in which our struggle has been regarded.  We had,
no doubt, very generally reckoned on the sympathy of England, at
least, in a strife which, whatever pretexts were alleged as its
cause, arrayed upon one side the supporters of an institution she was
supposed to hate in earnest, and on the other its assailants.  We had
forgotten what her own poet, one of the truest and purest of her
children, had said of his countrymen, in words which might well have
been spoken by the British Premier to the American Ambassador asking
for some evidence of kind feeling on the part of his government:

    "Alas I expect it not.  We found no bait
     To tempt us in thy country.  Doing good,
     Disinterested good, is not our trade."

We know full well by this time what truth there is in these honest
lines.  We have found out, too, who our European enemies are, and why
they are our enemies.  Three bending statues bear up that gilded
seat, which, in spite of the time-hallowed usurpations and
consecrated wrongs so long associated with its history, is still
venerated as the throne.  One of these supports is the pensioned
church; the second is the purchased army; the third is the long-
suffering people.  Whenever the third caryatid comes to life and
walks from beneath its burden, the capitals of Europe will be filled
with the broken furniture of palaces.  No wonder that our ministers
find the privileged orders willing to see the ominous republic split
into two antagonistic forces, each paralyzing the other, and standing
in their mighty impotence a spectacle to courts and kings; to be
pointed at as helots who drank themselves blind and giddy out of that
broken chalice which held the poisonous draught of liberty!

We know our enemies, and they are the enemies of popular rights.  We
know our friends, and they are the foremost champions of political
and social progress.  The eloquent voice and the busy pen of John
Bright have both been ours, heartily, nobly, from the first; the man
of the people has been true to the cause of the people.  That deep
and generous thinker, who, more than any of her philosophical
writers, represents the higher thought of England, John Stuart Mill,
has spoken for us in tones to which none but her sordid hucksters and
her selfish land-graspers can refuse to listen.  Count Gasparin and
Laboulaye have sent us back the echo from liberal France; France, the
country of ideas, whose earlier inspirations embodied themselves for
us in the person of the youthful Lafayette.  Italy,--would you know
on which side the rights of the people and the hopes of the future
are to be found in this momentous conflict, what surer test, what
ampler demonstration can you ask--than the eager sympathy of the
Italian patriot whose name is the hope of the toiling many, and the
dread of their oppressors, wherever it is spoken, the heroic
Garibaldi?

But even when it is granted that the war was inevitable; when it is
granted that it is for no base end, but first for the life of the
nation, and more and more, as the quarrel deepens, for the welfare of
mankind, for knowledge as against enforced ignorance, for justice as
against oppression, for that kingdom of God on earth which neither
the unrighteous man nor the extortioner can hope to inherit, it may
still be that the strife is hopeless, and must therefore be
abandoned.  Is it too much to say that whether the war is hopeless or
not for the North depends chiefly on the answer to the question,
whether the North has virtue and manhood enough to persevere in the
contest so long as its resources hold out?  But how much virtue and
manhood it has can never be told until they are tried, and those who
are first to doubt the prevailing existence of these qualities are
not commonly themselves patterns of either.  We have a right to trust
that this people is virtuous and brave enough not to give up a just
and necessary contest before its end is attained, or shown to be
unattainable for want of material agencies.  What was the end to be
attained by accepting the gage of battle?  It was to get the better
of our assailants, and, having done so, to take exactly those steps
which we should then consider necessary to our present and future
safety.  The more obstinate the resistance, the more completely must
it be subdued.  It may not even have been desirable, as Mr.  Mill
suggested long since, that the victory over the rebellion should have
been easily and speedily won, and so have failed to develop the true
meaning of the conflict, to bring out the full strength of the
revolted section, and to exhaust the means which would have served it
for a still more desperate future effort.  We cannot complain that
our task has proved too easy.  We give our Southern army,--for we
must remember that it is our army, after all, only in a state of
mutiny,--we give our Southern army credit for excellent spirit and
perseverance in the face of many disadvantages.  But we have a few
plain facts which show the probable course of events; the gradual but
sure operation of the blockade; the steady pushing back of the
boundary of rebellion, in spite of resistance at many points, or even
of such aggressive inroads as that which our armies are now meeting
with their long lines of bayonets,--may God grant them victory!--the
progress of our arms down the Mississippi; the relative value of gold
and currency at Richmond and Washington.  If the index-hands of force
and credit continue to move in the ratio of the past two years, where
will the Confederacy be in twice or thrice that time?

Either all our statements of the relative numbers, power, and wealth
of the two sections of the country signify nothing, or the resources
of our opponents in men and means must be much nearer exhaustion than
our own.  The running sand of the hour-glass gives no warning, but
runs as freely as ever when its last grains are about to fall.  The
merchant wears as bold a face the day before he is proclaimed a
bankrupt, as he wore at the height of his fortunes.  If Colonel
Grierson found the Confederacy "a mere shell," so far as his
equestrian excursion carried him, how can we say how soon the shell
will collapse?  It seems impossible that our own dissensions can
produce anything more than local disturbances, like the Morristown
revolt, which Washington put down at once by the aid of his faithful
Massachusetts soldiers.  But in a rebellious state dissension is
ruin, and the violence of an explosion in a strict ratio to the
pressure on every inch of the containing surface.  Now we know the
tremendous force which has compelled the "unanimity" of the Southern
people.  There are men in the ranks of the Southern army, if we can
trust the evidence which reaches us, who have been recruited with
packs of blood-hounds, and drilled, as it were, with halters around
their necks.  We know what is the bitterness of those who have
escaped this bloody harvest of the remorseless conspirators; and from
that we can judge of the elements of destruction incorporated with
many of the seemingly solid portions of the fabric of the rebellion.
The facts are necessarily few, but we can reason from the laws of
human nature as to what must be the feelings of the people of the
South to their Northern neighbors.  It is impossible that the love of
the life which they have had in common, their glorious recollections,
their blended histories, their sympathies as Americans, their mingled
blood, their birthright as born under the same flag and protected by
it the world over, their worship of the same God, under the same
outward form, at least, and in the folds of the same ecclesiastical
organizations, should all be forgotten, and leave nothing but hatred
and eternal alienation.  Men do not change in this way, and we may be
quite sure that the pretended unanimity of the South will some day or
other prove to have been a part of the machinery of deception which
the plotters have managed with such consummate skill.  It is hardly
to be doubted that in every part of the South, as in New Orleans, in
Charleston, in Richmond, there are multitudes who wait for the day of
deliverance, and for whom the coming of "our good friends, the
enemies," as Beranger has it, will be like the advent of the angels
to the prison-cells of Paul and Silas.  But there is no need of
depending on the aid of our white Southern friends, be they many or
be they few; there is material power enough in the North, if there be
the will to use it, to overrun and by degrees to recolonize the
South, and it is far from impossible that some such process may be a
part of the mechanism of its new birth, spreading from various
centres of organization, on the plan which Nature follows when she
would fill a half-finished tissue with blood-vessels or change a
temporary cartilage into bone.

Suppose, however, that the prospects of the war were, we need not say
absolutely hopeless,--because that is the unfounded hypothesis of
those whose wish is father to their thought,--but full of
discouragement.  Can we make a safe and honorable peace as the
quarrel now stands?  As honor comes before safety, let us look at
that first.  We have undertaken to resent a supreme insult, and have
had to bear new insults and aggressions, even to the direct menace of
our national capital.  The blood which our best and bravest have shed
will never sink into the ground until our wrongs are righted, or the
power to right them is shown to be insufficient.  If we stop now, all
the loss of life has been butchery; if we carry out the intention
with which we first resented the outrage, the earth drinks up the
blood of our martyrs, and the rose of honor blooms forever where it
was shed.  To accept less than indemnity for the past, so far as the
wretched kingdom of the conspirators can afford it, and security for
the future, would discredit us in our own eyes and in the eyes of
those who hate and long to be able to despise us.  But to reward the
insults and the robberies we have suffered, by the surrender of our
fortresses along the coast, in the national gulf, and on the banks of
the national river,--and this and much more would surely be demanded
of us,--would place the United Fraction of America on a level with
the Peruvian guano-islands, whose ignoble but coveted soil is open to
be plundered by all comers!

If we could make a peace without dishonor, could we make one that
would be safe and lasting?  We could have an armistice, no doubt,
long enough for the flesh of our wounded men to heal and their broken
bones to knit together.  But could we expect a solid, substantial,
enduring peace, in which the grass would have time to grow in the
war-paths, and the bruised arms to rust, as the old G. R. cannon
rusted in our State arsenal, sleeping with their tompions in their
mouths, like so many sucking lambs?  It is not the question whether
the same set of soldiers would be again summoned to the field.  Let
us take it for granted that we have seen enough of the miseries of
warfare to last us for a while, and keep us contented with militia
musters and sham-fights.  The question is whether we could leave our
children and our children's children with any secure trust that they
would not have to go through the very trials we are enduring,
probably on a more extended scale and in a more aggravated form.

It may be well to look at the prospects before us, if a peace is
established on the basis of Southern independence, the only peace
possible, unless we choose to add ourselves to the four millions who
already call the Southern whites their masters.  We know what the
prevailing--we do not mean universal--spirit and temper of those
people have been for generations, and what they are like to be after
a long and bitter warfare.  We know what their tone is to the people
of the North; if we do not, De Bow and Governor Hammond are
schoolmasters who will teach us to our heart's content.  We see how
easily their social organization adapts itself to a state of warfare.
They breed a superior order of men for leaders, an ignorant
commonalty ready to follow them as the vassals of feudal times
followed their lords; and a race of bondsmen, who, unless this war
changes them from chattels to human beings, will continue to add
vastly to their military strength in raising their food, in building
their fortifications, in all the mechanical work of war, in fact,
except, it may be, the handling of weapons.  The institution
proclaimed as the corner-stone of their government does violence not
merely to the precepts of religion, but to many of the best human
instincts, yet their fanaticism for it is as sincere as any tribe of
the desert ever manifested for the faith of the Prophet of Allah.
They call themselves by the same name as the Christians of the North,
yet there is as much difference between their Christianity and that
of Wesley or of Channing, as between creeds that in past times have
vowed mutual extermination.  Still we must not call them barbarians
because they cherish an institution hostile to civilization.  Their
highest culture stands out all the more brilliantly from the dark
background of ignorance against which it is seen; but it would be
injustice to deny that they have always shone in political science,
or that their military capacity makes them most formidable
antagonists, and that, however inferior they may be to their Northern
fellow-countrymen in most branches of literature and science, the
social elegances and personal graces lend their outward show to the
best circles among their dominant class.

Whom have we then for our neighbors, in case of separation,--our
neighbors along a splintered line of fracture extending for thousands
of miles,--but the Saracens of the Nineteenth Century; a fierce,
intolerant, fanatical people, the males of which will be a perpetual
standing army; hating us worse than the Southern Hamilcar taught his
swarthy boy to hate the Romans; a people whose existence as a hostile
nation on our frontier is incompatible with our peaceful development?
Their wealth, the proceeds of enforced labor, multiplied by the
breaking up of new cottonfields, and in due time by the reopening of
the slave-trade, will go to purchase arms, to construct fortresses,
to fit out navies.  The old Saracens, fanatics for a religion which
professed to grow by conquest, were a nation of predatory and
migrating warriors.  The Southern people, fanatics for a system
essentially aggressive, conquering, wasting, which cannot remain
stationary, but must grow by alternate appropriations of labor and of
land, will come to resemble their earlier prototypes.  Already, even,
the insolence of their language to the people of the North is a close
imitation of the style which those proud and arrogant Asiatics
affected toward all the nations of Europe.  What the "Christian dogs"
were to the followers of Mahomet, the "accursed Yankees," the
"Northern mud-sills" are to the followers of the Southern Moloch.
The accomplishments which we find in their choicer circles were
prefigured in the court of the chivalric Saladin, and the long train
of Painim knights who rode forth to conquest under the Crescent.  In
all branches of culture, their heathen predecessors went far beyond
them.  The schools of mediaeval learning were filled with Arabian
teachers.  The heavens declare the glory of the Oriental astronomers,
as Algorab and Aldebaran repeat their Arabic names to the students of
the starry firmament.  The sumptuous edifice erected by the Art of
the nineteenth century, to hold the treasures of its Industry, could
show nothing fairer than the court which copies the Moorish palace
that crowns the summit of Granada.  Yet this was the power which
Charles the Hammer, striking for Christianity and civilization, had
to break like a potter's vessel; these were the people whom Spain had
to utterly extirpate from the land where they had ruled for centuries

Prepare, then, if you unseal the vase which holds this dangerous
Afrit of Southern nationality, for a power on your borders that will
be to you what the Saracens were to Europe before the son of Pepin
shattered their armies, and flung the shards and shivers of their
broken strength upon the refuse heap of extinguished barbarisms.
Prepare for the possible fate of Christian Spain; for a slave-market
in Philadelphia; for the Alhambra of a Southern caliph on the grounds
consecrated by the domestic virtues of a long line of Presidents and
their exemplary families.  Remember the ages of border warfare
between England and Scotland, closed at last by the union of the two
kingdoms.  Recollect the hunting of the deer on the Cheviot hills,
and all that it led to; then think of the game which the dogs will
follow open-mouthed across our Southern border, and all that is like
to follow which the child may rue that is unborn; think of these
possibilities, or probabilities, if you will, and say whether you are
ready to make a peace which will give you such a neighbor; which may
betray your civilization as that of half the Peninsula was given up
to the Moors; which may leave your fair border provinces to be
crushed under the heel of a tyrant, as Holland was left to be trodden
down by the Duke of Alva!

No!  no!  fellow-citizens!  We must fight in this quarrel until one
side or the other is exhausted.  Rather than suffer all that we have
poured out of our blood, all that we have lavished of our substance,
to have been expended in vain, and to bequeath an unsettled question,
an unfinished conflict, an unavenged insult, an unrighted wrong, a
stained escutcheon, a tarnished shield, a dishonored flag, an
unheroic memory to the descendants of those who have always claimed
that their fathers were heroes; rather than do all this, it were
hardly an American exaggeration to say, better that the last man and
the last dollar should be followed by the last woman and the last
dime, the last child and the last copper!

There are those who profess to fear that our government is becoming a
mere irresponsible tyranny.  If there are any who really believe that
our present Chief Magistrate means to found a dynasty for himself and
family, that a coup d'etat is in preparation by which he is to become
ABRAHAM, DEI GRATIA REX,--they cannot have duly pondered his letter
of June 12th, in which he unbosoms himself with the simplicity of a
rustic lover called upon by an anxious parent to explain his
intentions.  The force of his argument is not at all injured by the
homeliness of his illustrations.  The American people are not much
afraid that their liberties will be usurped.  An army of legislators
is not very likely to throw away its political privileges, and the
idea of a despotism resting on an open ballot-box, is like that of
Bunker Hill Monument built on the waves of Boston Harbor.  We know
pretty well how much of sincerity there is in the fears so
clamorously expressed, and how far they are found in company with
uncompromising hostility to the armed enemies of the nation.  We have
learned to put a true value on the services of the watch-dog who bays
the moon, but does not bite the thief!

The men who are so busy holy-stoning the quarterdeck, while all hands
are wanted to keep the ship afloat, can no doubt show spots upon it
that would be very unsightly in fair weather.  No thoroughly loyal
man, however, need suffer from any arbitrary exercise of power, such
as emergencies always give rise to.  If any half-loyal man forgets
his code of half-decencies and half-duties so far as to become
obnoxious to the peremptory justice which takes the place of slower
forms in all centres of conflagration, there is no sympathy for him
among the soldiers who are risking their lives for us; perhaps there
is even more satisfaction than when an avowed traitor is caught and
punished.  For of all men who are loathed by generous natures, such
as fill the ranks of the armies of the Union, none are so thoroughly
loathed as the men who contrive to keep just within the limits of the
law, while their whole conduct provokes others to break it; whose
patriotism consists in stopping an inch short of treason, and whose
political morality has for its safeguard a just respect for the
jailer and the hangman!  The simple preventive against all possible
injustice a citizen is like to suffer at the hands of a government
which in its need and haste must of course commit many errors, is to
take care to do nothing that will directly or indirectly help the
enemy, or hinder the government in carrying on the war.  When the
clamor against usurpation and tyranny comes from citizens who can
claim this negative merit, it may be listened to.  When it comes from
those who have done what they could to serve their country, it will
receive the attention it deserves.  Doubtless there may prove to be
wrongs which demand righting, but the pretence of any plan for
changing the essential principle of our self-governing system is a
figment which its contrivers laugh over among themselves.  Do the
citizens of Harrisburg or of Philadelphia quarrel to-day about the
strict legality of an executive act meant in good faith for their
protection against the invader?  We are all citizens of Harrisburg,
all citizens of Philadelphia, in this hour of their peril, and with
the enemy at work in our own harbors, we begin to understand the
difference between a good and bad citizen; the man that helps and the
man that hinders; the man who, while the pirate is in sight,
complains that our anchor is dragging in his mud, and the man who
violates the proprieties, like our brave Portland brothers, when they
jumped on board the first steamer they could reach, cut her cable,
and bore down on the corsair, with a habeas corpus act that lodged
twenty buccaneers in Fort Preble before sunset!

We cannot, then, we cannot be circling inward to be swallowed up in
the whirlpool of national destruction.  If our borders are invaded,
it is only as the spur that is driven into the courser's flank to
rouse his slumbering mettle.  If our property is taxed, it is only to
teach us that liberty is worth paying for as well as fighting for.
We are pouring out the most generous blood of our youth and manhood;
alas! this is always the price that must be paid for the redemption
of a people.  What have we to complain of, whose granaries are
choking with plenty, whose streets are gay with shining robes and
glittering equipages, whose industry is abundant enough to reap all
its overflowing harvest, yet sure of employment and of its just
reward, the soil of whose mighty valleys is an inexhaustible mine of
fertility, whose mountains cover up such stores of heat and power,
imprisoned in their coal measures, as would warm all the inhabitants
and work all the machinery of our planet for unnumbered ages, whose
rocks pour out rivers of oil, whose streams run yellow over beds of
golden sand,--what have we to complain of?

Have we degenerated from our English fathers, so that we cannot do
and bear for our national salvation what they have done and borne
over and over again for their form of government?  Could England, in
her wars with Napoleon, bear an income-tax of ten per cent., and must
we faint under the burden of an income-tax of three per cent.?  Was
she content to negotiate a loan at fifty-three for the hundred, and
that paid in depreciated paper, and can we talk about financial ruin
with our national stocks ranging from one to eight or nine above par,
and the "five-twenty" war loan eagerly taken by our own people to the
amount of nearly two hundred millions, without any check to the flow
of the current pressing inwards against the doors of the Treasury?
Except in those portions of the country which are the immediate seat
of war, or liable to be made so, and which, having the greatest
interest not to become the border states of hostile nations, can best
afford to suffer now, the state of prosperity and comfort is such as
to astonish those who visit us from other countries.  What are war
taxes to a nation which, as we are assured on good authority, has
more men worth a million now than it had worth ten thousand dollars
at the close of the Revolution,--whose whole property is a hundred
times, and whose commerce, inland and foreign, is five hundred times,
what it was then?  But we need not study Mr. Still's pamphlet and
"Thompson's Bank-Note Reporter" to show us what we know well enough,
that, so far from having occasion to tremble in fear of our impending
ruin, we must rather blush for our material prosperity.  For the
multitudes who are unfortunate enough to be taxed for a million or
more, of course we must feel deeply, at the same time suggesting that
the more largely they report their incomes to the tax-gatherer, the
more consolation they will find in the feeling that they have served
their country.  But,--let us say it plainly,--it will not hurt our
people to be taught that there are other things to be cared for
besides money-making and money-spending; that the time has come when
manhood must assert itself by brave deeds and noble thoughts; when
womanhood must assume its most sacred office, "to warn, to comfort,"
and, if need be, "to command," those whose services their country
calls for.  This Northern section of the land has become a great
variety shop, of which the Atlantic cities are the long-extended
counter.  We have grown rich for what?  To put gilt bands on
coachmen's hats?  To sweep the foul sidewalks with the heaviest silks
which the toiling artisans of France can send us?  To look through
plate-glass windows, and pity the brown soldiers,--or sneer at the
black ones? to reduce the speed of trotting horses a second or two
below its old minimum?  to color meerschaums?  to flaunt in laces,
and sparkle in diamonds?  to dredge our maidens' hair with gold-dust?
to float through life, the passive shuttlecocks of fashion, from the
avenues to the beaches, and back again from the beaches to the
avenues?  Was it for this that the broad domain of the Western
hemisphere was kept so long unvisited by civilization?--for this,
that Time, the father of empires, unbound the virgin zone of this
youngest of his daughters, and gave her, beautiful in the long veil
of her forests, to the rude embrace of the adventurous Colonist?  All
this is what we see around us, now, now while we are actually
fighting this great battle, and supporting this great load of
indebtedness.  Wait till the diamonds go back to the Jews of
Amsterdam; till the plate-glass window bears the fatal announcement,
For Sale or to Let; till the voice of our Miriam is obeyed, as she
sings,

    "Weave no more silks, ye Lyons looms!"

till the gold-dust is combed from the golden locks, and hoarded to
buy bread; till the fast-driving youth smokes his clay-pipe on the
platform of the horse-cars; till the music-grinders cease because
none will pay them; till there are no peaches in the windows at
twenty-four dollars a dozen, and no heaps of bananas and pine-apples
selling at the street-corners; till the ten-flounced dress has but
three flounces, and it is felony to drink champagne; wait till these
changes show themselves, the signs of deeper wants, the preludes of
exhaustion and bankruptcy; then let us talk of the Maelstrom;--but
till then, let us not be cowards with our purses, while brave men are
emptying their hearts upon the earth for us; let us not whine over
our imaginary ruin, while the reversed current of circling events is
carrying us farther and farther, every hour, out of the influence of
the great failing which was born of our wealth, and of the deadly sin
which was our fatal inheritance!

Let us take a brief general glance at the wide field of discussion we
are just leaving.

On Friday, the twelfth day of the month of April, in the year of our
Lord eighteen hundred and sixty-one, at half-past four of the clock
in the morning, a cannon was aimed and fired by the authority of
South Carolina at the wall of a fortress belonging to the United
States.  Its ball carried with it the hatreds, the rages of thirty
years, shaped and cooled in the mould of malignant deliberation.  Its
wad was the charter of our national existence.  Its muzzle was
pointed at the stone which bore the symbol of our national
sovereignty.  As the echoes of its thunder died away, the telegraph
clicked one word through every office of the land.  That word was
WAR!

War is a child that devours its nurses one after another, until it is
claimed by its true parents.  This war has eaten its way backward
through all the technicalities of lawyers learned in the
infinitesimals of ordinances and statutes; through all the
casuistries of divines, experts in the differential calculus of
conscience and duty; until it stands revealed to all men as the
natural and inevitable conflict of two incompatible forms of
civilization, one or the other of which must dominate the central
zone of the continent, and eventually claim the hemisphere for its
development.

We have reached the region of those broad principles and large axioms
which the wise Romans, the world's lawgivers, always recognized as
above all special enactments.  We have come to that solid substratum
acknowledged by Grotius in his great Treatise:  "Necessity itself
which reduces things to the mere right of Nature."  The old rules
which were enough for our guidance in quiet times, have become as
meaningless "as moonlight on the dial of the day."  We have followed
precedents as long as they could guide us; now we must make
precedents for the ages which are to succeed us.

If we are frightened from our object by the money we have spent, the
current prices of United States stocks show that we value our
nationality at only a small fraction of our wealth.  If we feel that
we are paying too dearly for it in the blood of our people, let us
recall those grand words of Samuel Adams:

"I should advise persisting in our struggle for liberty, though it
were revealed from heaven that nine hundred and ninety-nine were to
perish, and only one of a thousand were to survive and retain his
liberty!"

What we want now is a strong purpose; the purpose of Luther, when he
said, in repeating his Pater Noster, fiat voluntas MEA,--let my will
be done; though he considerately added, quia Tua,--because my will is
Thine.  We want the virile energy of determination which made the
oath of Andrew Jackson sound so like the devotion of an ardent saint
that the recording angel might have entered it unquestioned among the
prayers of the faithful.

War is a grim business.  Two years ago our women's fingers were busy
making "Havelocks."  It seemed to us then as if the Havelock made
half the soldier; and now we smile to think of those days of
inexperience and illusion.  We know now what War means, and we cannot
look its dull, dead ghastliness in the face unless we feel that there
is some great and noble principle behind it.  It makes little
difference what we thought we were fighting for at first; we know
what we are fighting for now, and what we are fighting against.

We are fighting for our existence.  We say to those who would take
back their several contributions to that undivided unity which we
call the Nation; the bronze is cast; the statue is on its pedestal;
you cannot reclaim the brass you flung into the crucible!  There are
rights, possessions, privileges, policies, relations, duties,
acquired, retained, called into existence in virtue of the principle
of absolute solidarity,--belonging to the United States as an organic
whole, which cannot be divided, which none of its constituent parties
can claim as its own, which perish out of its living frame when the
wild forces of rebellion tear it limb from limb, and which it must
defend, or confess self-government itself a failure.

We are fighting for that Constitution upon which our national
existence reposes, now subjected by those who fired the scroll on
which it was written from the cannon at Fort Sumter, to all those
chances which the necessities of war entail upon every human
arrangement, but still the venerable charter of our wide Republic.

We cannot fight for these objects without attacking the one mother
cause of all the progeny of lesser antagonisms.  Whether we know it
or not, whether we mean it or not, we cannot help fighting against
the system that has proved the source of all those miseries which the
author of the Declaration of Independence trembled to anticipate.
And this ought to make us willing to do and to suffer cheerfully.
There were Holy Wars of old, in which it was glory enough to die,
wars in which the one aim was to rescue the sepulchre of Christ from
the hands of infidels.  The sepulchre of Christ is not in Palestine!
He rose from that burial-place more than eighteen hundred years ago.
He is crucified wherever his brothers are slain without cause; he
lies buried wherever man, made in his Maker's image, is entombed in
ignorance lest he should learn the rights which his Divine Master
gave him!  This is our Holy War, and we must fight it against that
great General who will bring to it all the powers with which he
fought against the Almighty before he was cast down from heaven.  He
has retained many a cunning advocate to recruit for him; he has
bribed many a smooth-tongued preacher to be his chaplain; he has
engaged the sordid by their avarice, the timid by their fears, the
profligate by their love of adventure, and thousands of nobler
natures by motives which we can all understand; whose delusion we
pity as we ought always to pity the error of those who know not what
they do.  Against him or for him we are all called upon to declare
ourselves.  There is no neutrality for any single true-born American.
If any seek such a position, the stony finger of Dante's awful muse
points them to their place in the antechamber of the Halls of
Despair,--

              "--With that ill band
     Of angels mixed, who nor rebellious proved,
     Nor yet were true to God, but for themselves
     Were only."

              "--Fame of them the world hath none
     Nor suffers; mercy and justice scorn them both.
     Speak not of them, but look, and pass them by."

We must use all the means which God has put into our hands to serve
him against the enemies of civilization.  We must make and keep the
great river free, whatever it costs us; it is strapping up the
forefoot of the wild, untamable rebellion.  We must not be too nice
in the choice of our agents.  Non eget Mauri jaculis,--no African
bayonets wanted,--was well enough while we did not yet know the might
of that desperate giant we had to deal with; but Tros, Tyriusve,--
white or black,--is the safer motto now; for a good soldier, like a
good horse, cannot be of a bad color.  The iron-skins, as well as the
iron-clads, have already done us noble service, and many a mother
will clasp the returning boy, many a wife will welcome back the war-
worn husband, whose smile would never again have gladdened his home,
but that, cold in the shallow trench of the battle-field, lies the
half-buried form of the unchained bondsman whose dusky bosom sheathes
the bullet which would else have claimed that darling as his
country's sacrifice

We shall have success if we truly will success, not otherwise.  It
may be long in coming,--Heaven only knows through what trials and
humblings we may have to pass before the full strength of the nation
is duly arrayed and led to victory.  We must be patient, as our
fathers were patient; even in our worst calamities, we must remember
that defeat itself may be a gain where it costs our enemy more in
relation to his strength than it costs ourselves.  But if, in the
inscrutable providence of the Almighty, this generation is
disappointed in its lofty aspirations for the race, if we have not
virtue enough to ennoble our whole people, and make it a nation of
sovereigns, we shall at least hold in undying honor those who
vindicated the insulted majesty of the Republic, and struck at her
assailants so long as a drum-beat summoned them to the field of duty.

Citizens of Boston, sons and daughters of New England, men and women
of the North, brothers and sisters in the bond of the American Union,
you have among you the scarred and wasted soldiers who have shed
their blood for your temporal salvation.  They bore your nation's
emblems bravely through the fire and smoke of the battle-field; nay,
their own bodies are starred with bullet-wounds and striped with
sabre-cuts, as if to mark them as belonging to their country until
their dust becomes a portion of the soil which they defended.  In
every Northern graveyard slumber the victims of this destroying
struggle.  Many whom you remember playing as children amidst the
clover-blossoms of our Northern fields, sleep under nameless mounds
with strange Southern wild-flowers blooming over them.  By those
wounds of living heroes, by those graves of fallen martyrs, by the
hopes of your children, and the claims of your children's children
yet unborn, in the name of outraged honor, in the interest of
violated sovereignty, for the life of an imperilled nation, for the
sake of men everywhere and of our common humanity, for the glory of
God and the advancement of his kingdom on earth, your country calls
upon you to stand by her through good report and through evil
report, in triumph and in defeat, until she emerges from the great
war of Western civilization, Queen of the broad continent, Arbitress
in the councils of earth's emancipated peoples; until the flag that
fell from the wall of Fort Sumter floats again inviolate, supreme,
over all her ancient inheritance, every fortress, every capital,
every ship, and this warring land is once more a, United Nation!






CINDERS FROM THE ASHES.

The personal revelations contained in my report of certain breakfast-
table conversations were so charitably listened to and so good-
naturedly interpreted, that I may be in danger of becoming over-
communicative.  Still, I should never have ventured to tell the
trivial experiences here thrown together, were it not that my brief
story is illuminated here and there by a glimpse of some shining
figure that trod the same path with me for a time, or crossed it,
leaving a momentary or lasting brightness in its track.  I remember
that, in furnishing a chamber some years ago, I was struck with its
dull aspect as I looked round on the black-walnut chairs and bedstead
and bureau.  "Make me a large and handsomely wrought gilded handle to
the key of that dark chest of drawers," I said to the furnisher.  It
was done, and that one luminous point redeemed the sombre apartment
as the evening star glorifies the dusky firmament.  So, my loving
reader,--and to none other can such table-talk as this be addressed,-
-I hope there will be lustre enough in one or other of the names with
which I shall gild my page to redeem the dulness of all that is
merely personal in my recollections.

After leaving the school of Dame Prentiss, best remembered by
infantine loves, those pretty preludes of more serious passions; by
the great forfeit-basket, filled with its miscellaneous waifs and
deodauds, and by the long willow stick by the aid of which the good
old body, now stricken in years and unwieldy in person could
stimulate the sluggish faculties or check the mischievous sallies of
the child most distant from his ample chair,--a school where I think
my most noted schoolmate was the present Bishop of Delaware, became
the pupil of Master William Biglow.  This generation is not familiar
with his title to renown, although he fills three columns and a half
in Mr. Duyckinck's "Cyclopaedia of American Literature."  He was a
humorist hardly robust enough for more than a brief local
immortality. I am afraid we were an undistinguished set, for I do not
remember anybody near a bishop in dignity graduating from our
benches.

At about ten years of age I began going to what we always called the
"Port School," because it was kept at Cambridgeport, a mile from the
College.  This suburb was at that time thinly inhabited, and, being
much of it marshy and imperfectly reclaimed, had a dreary look as
compared with the thriving College settlement. The tenants of the
many beautiful mansions that have sprung up along Main Street,
Harvard Street, and Broadway can hardly recall the time when, except
the "Dana House" and the "Opposition House" and the "Clark House,"
these roads were almost all the way bordered by pastures until we
reached the "stores" of Main Street, or were abreast of that forlorn
"First Row" of Harvard Street.  We called the boys of that locality
"Port-chucks."  They called us "Cambridge-chucks," but we got along
very well together in the main.

Among my schoolmates at the Port School was a young girl of singular
loveliness. I once before referred to her as "the golden blonde," but
did not trust myself to describe her charms.  The day of her
appearance in the school was almost as much a revelation to us boys
as the appearance of Miranda was to Caliban.  Her abounding natural
curls were so full of sunshine, her skin was so delicately white, her
smile and her voice were so all-subduing, that half our heads were
turned.  Her fascinations were everywhere confessed a few years
afterwards; and when I last met her, though she said she was a
grandmother, I questioned her statement, for her winning looks and
ways would still have made her admired in any company.

Not far from the golden blonde were two small boys, one of them very
small, perhaps the youngest boy in school, both ruddy, sturdy, quiet,
reserved, sticking loyally by each other, the oldest, however,
beginning to enter into social relations with us of somewhat maturer
years.  One of these two boys was destined to be widely known, first
in literature, as author of one of the most popular books of its time
and which is freighted for a long voyage; then as an eminent lawyer;
a man who, if his countrymen are wise, will yet be prominent in the
national councils.  Richard Henry Dana, Junior, is the name he bore
and bears; he found it famous, and will bequeath it a fresh renown.

Sitting on the girls' benches, conspicuous among the school-girls of
unlettered origin by that look which rarely fails to betray
hereditary and congenital culture, was a young person very nearly of
my own age.  She came with the reputation of being "smart," as we
should have called it, clever as we say nowadays.  This was Margaret
Fuller, the only one among us who, like "Jean Paul," like "The Duke,"
like "Bettina," has slipped the cable of the more distinctive name to
which she was anchored, and floats on the waves of speech as
"Margaret."  Her air to her schoolmates was marked by a certain
stateliness and distance, as if she had other thoughts than theirs
and was not of them.  She was a great student and a great reader of
what she used to call "naw-vels."  I remember her so well as she
appeared at school and later, that I regret that she had not been
faithfully given to canvas or marble in the day of her best looks.
None know her aspect who have not seen her living.  Margaret, as I
remember her at school and afterwards, was tall, fair complexioned,
with a watery, aqua-marine lustre in her light eyes, which she used
to make small, as one does who looks at the sunshine.  A remarkable
point about her was that long, flexile neck, arching and undulating
in strange sinuous movements, which one who loved her would compare
to those of a swan, and one who loved her not to those of the
ophidian who tempted our common mother.  Her talk was affluent,
magisterial, de haut en bas, some would say euphuistic, but
surpassing the talk of women in breadth and audacity.  Her face
kindled and reddened and dilated in every feature as she spoke, and,
as I once saw her in a fine storm of indignation at the supposed ill-
treatment of a relative, showed itself capable of something
resembling what Milton calls the viraginian aspect.

Little incidents bear telling when they recall anything of such a
celebrity as Margaret.  I remember being greatly awed once, in our
school-days, with the maturity of one of her expressions.  Some
themes were brought home from the school for examination by my
father, among them one of hers.  I took it up with a certain emulous
interest (for I fancied at that day that I too had drawn a prize, say
a five-dollar one, at least, in the great intellectual life-lottery)
and read the first words.

"It is a trite remark," she began.

I stopped.  Alas! I did not know what trite meant.  How could I ever
judge Margaret fairly after such a crushing discovery of her
superiority?  I doubt if I ever did; yet oh, how pleasant it would
have been, at about the age, say, of threescore and ten, to rake over
these ashes for cinders with her,--she in a snowy cap, and I in a
decent peruke!

After being five years at the Port School, the time drew near when I
was to enter college.  It seemed advisable to give me a year of
higher training, and for that end some public school was thought to
offer advantages.  Phillips Academy at Andover was well known to us.
We had been up there, my father and myself, at anniversaries.  Some
Boston boys of well-known and distinguished parentage had been
scholars there very lately, Master Edmund Quincy, Master Samuel Hurd
Walley, Master Nathaniel Parker Willis,--all promising youth, who
fulfilled their promise.

I do not believe there was any thought of getting a little respite of
quiet by my temporary absence, but I have wondered that there was
not.  Exceptional boys of fourteen or fifteen make home a heaven, it
is true; but I have suspected, late in life, that I was not one of
the exceptional kind.  I had tendencies in the direction of
flageolets and octave flutes.  I had a pistol and a gun, and popped
at everything that stirred, pretty nearly, except the house-cat.
Worse than this, I would buy a cigar and smoke it by instalments,
putting it meantime in the barrel of my pistol, by a stroke of
ingenuity which it gives me a grim pleasure to recall; for no
maternal or other female eyes would explore the cavity of that dread
implement in search of contraband commodities.

It was settled, then, that I should go to Phillips Academy, and
preparations were made that I might join the school at the beginning
of the autumn.

In due time I took my departure in the old carriage, a little
modernized from the pattern of my Lady Bountiful's, and we jogged
soberly along,--kind parents and slightly nostalgic boy,--towards the
seat of learning, some twenty miles away.  Up the old West Cambridge
road, now North Avenue; past Davenport's tavern, with its sheltering
tree and swinging sign; past the old powder-house, looking like a
colossal conical ball set on end; past the old Tidd House, one of the
finest of the ante-Revolutionary mansions; past Miss Swan's great
square boarding-school, where the music of girlish laughter was
ringing through the windy corridors; so on to Stoneham, town of the
bright lake, then darkened with the recent memory of the barbarous
murder done by its lonely shore; through pleasant Reading, with its
oddly named village centres, "Trapelo," "Read'nwoodeend," as rustic
speech had it, and the rest; through Wilmington, then renowned for
its hops; so at last into the hallowed borders of the academic town.

It was a shallow, two-story white house before which we stopped, just
at the entrance of the central village, the residence of a very
worthy professor in the theological seminary,--learned, amiable,
exemplary, but thought by certain experts to be a little questionable
in the matter of homoousianism, or some such doctrine.  There was a
great rock that showed its round back in the narrow front yard.  It
looked cold and hard; but it hinted firmness and indifference to the
sentiments fast struggling to get uppermost in my youthful bosom; for
I was not too old for home-sickness,--who is: The carriage and my
fond companions had to leave me at last.  I saw it go down the
declivity that sloped southward, then climb the next ascent, then
sink gradually until the window in the back of it disappeared like an
eye that shuts, and leaves the world dark to some widowed heart.

Sea-sickness and home-sickness are hard to deal with by any remedy
but time.  Mine was not a bad case, but it excited sympathy.  There
was an ancient, faded old lady in the house, very kindly, but very
deaf, rustling about in dark autumnal foliage of silk or other
murmurous fabric, somewhat given to snuff, but a very worthy
gentlewoman of the poor-relation variety.  She comforted me, I well
remember, but not with apples, and stayed me, but not with flagons.
She went in her benevolence, and, taking a blue and white soda-
powder, mingled the same in water, and encouraged me to drink the
result.  It might be a specific for seasickness, but it was not for
home-sickness.  The fiz was a mockery, and the saline refrigerant
struck a colder chill to my despondent heart.  I did not disgrace
myself, however, and a few days cured me, as a week on the water
often cures seasickness.

There was a sober-faced boy of minute dimensions in the house, who
began to make some advances to me, and who, in spite of all the
conditions surrounding him, turned out, on better acquaintance, to be
one of the most amusing, free-spoken, mocking little imps I ever met
in my life.  My room-mate came later.  He was the son of a clergyman
in a neighboring town,--in fact I may remark that I knew a good many
clergymen's sons at Andover.  He and I went in harness together as
well as most boys do, I suspect; and I have no grudge against him,
except that once, when I was slightly indisposed, he administered to
me,--with the best intentions, no doubt,--a dose of Indian pills,
which effectually knocked me out of time, as Mr.  Morrissey would
say,--not quite into eternity, but so near it that I perfectly
remember one of the good ladies told me (after I had come to my
senses a little, and was just ready for a sip of cordial and a word
of encouragement), with that delightful plainness of speech which so
brings realities home to the imagination, that "I never should look
any whiter when I was laid out as a corpse."  After my room-mate and
I had been separated twenty-five years, fate made us fellow-townsmen
and acquaintances once more in Berkshire, and now again we are close
literary neighbors; for I have just read a very pleasant article,
signed by him, in the last number of the "Galaxy."  Does it not
sometimes seem as if we were all marching round and round in a
circle, like the supernumeraries who constitute the "army" of a
theatre, and that each of us meets and is met by the same and only
the same people, or their doubles, twice, thrice, or a little
oftener, before the curtain drops and the "army" puts off its
borrowed clothes?

The old Academy building had a dreary look, with its flat face, bare
and uninteresting as our own "University Building" at Cambridge,
since the piazza which relieved its monotony was taken away, and, to
balance the ugliness thus produced, the hideous projection was added
to "Harvard Hall."  Two masters sat at the end of the great room,--
the principal and his assistant.  Two others presided in separate
rooms, one of them the late Rev. Samuel Horatio Stearns, an excellent
and lovable man, who looked kindly on me, and for whom I always
cherished a sincere regard, a clergyman's son, too, which privilege I
did not always find the warrant of signal virtues; but no matter
about that here, and I have promised myself to be amiable.

On the side of the long room was a large clock-dial, bearing these
words:

          YOUTH IS THE SEED-TIME OF LIFE.

I had indulged in a prejudice, up to that hour, that youth was the
budding time of life, and this clock-dial, perpetually twitting me
with its seedy moral, always had a forbidding look to my vernal
apprehension.

I was put into a seat with an older and much bigger boy, or youth,
with a fuliginous complexion, a dilating and whitening nostril, and a
singularly malignant scowl.  Many years afterwards he committed an
act of murderous violence, and ended by going to finish his days in a
madhouse.  His delight was to kick my shins with all his might, under
the desk, not at all as an act of hostility, but as a gratifying and
harmless pastime.  Finding this, so far as I was concerned, equally
devoid of pleasure and profit, I managed to get a seat by another
boy, the son of a very distinguished divine.  He was bright enough,
and more select in his choice of recreations, at least during school
hours, than my late homicidal neighbor.  But the principal called me
up presently, and cautioned me against him as a dangerous companion.
Could it be so?  If the son of that boy's father could not be
trusted, what boy in Christendom could?  It seemed like the story of
the youth doomed to be slain by a lion before reaching a certain age,
and whose fate found him out in the heart of the tower where his
father had shut him up for safety.  Here was I, in the very dove's
nest of Puritan faith, and out of one of its eggs a serpent had been
hatched and was trying to nestle in my bosom!  I parted from him,
however, none the worse for his companionship so far as I can
remember.

Of the boys who were at school with me at Andover one has acquired
great distinction among the scholars of the land.  One day I observed
a new boy in a seat not very far from my own.  He was a little
fellow, as I recollect him, with black hair and very bright black
eyes, when at length I got a chance to look at them.  Of all the new-
comers during my whole year he was the only one whom the first glance
fixed in my memory, but there he is now, at this moment, just as he
caught my eye on the morning of his entrance.  His head was between
his hands (I wonder if he does not sometimes study in that same
posture nowadays!) and his eyes were fastened to his book as if he
had been reading a will that made him heir to a million.  I feel sure
that Professor Horatio Balch Hackett will not find fault with me for
writing his name under this inoffensive portrait.  Thousands of faces
and forms that I have known more or less familiarly have faded from
my remembrance, but this presentment of the youthful student, sitting
there entranced over the page of his text-book,--the child-father of
the distinguished scholar that was to be,--is not a picture framed
and hung up in my mind's gallery, but a fresco on its walls, there to
remain so long as they hold together.

My especial intimate was a fine, rosy-faced boy, not quite so free of
speech as myself, perhaps, but with qualities that promised a noble
manhood, and ripened into it in due season.  His name was Phinehas
Barnes, and, if he is inquired after in Portland or anywhere in the
State of Maine, something will be heard to his advantage from any
honest and intelligent citizen of that Commonwealth who answers the
question.  This was one of two or three friendships that lasted.
There were other friends and classmates, one of them a natural
humorist of the liveliest sort, who would have been quarantined in
any Puritan port, his laugh was so potently contagious.

Of the noted men of Andover the one whom I remember best was
Professor Moses Stuart.  His house was nearly opposite the one in
which I resided and I often met him and listened to him in the chapel
of the Seminary.  I have seen few more striking figures in my life
than his, as I remember it.  Tall, lean, with strong, bold features,
a keen, scholarly, accipitrine nose, thin, expressive lips, great
solemnity and impressiveness of voice and manner, he was my early
model of a classic orator.  His air was Roman, his neck long and bare
like Cicero's, and his toga,--that is his broadcloth cloak,--was
carried on his arm, whatever might have been the weather, with such a
statue-like rigid grace that he might have been turned into marble as
he stood, and looked noble by the side of the antiques of the
Vatican.

Dr. Porter was an invalid, with the prophetic handkerchief bundling
his throat, and his face "festooned"--as I heard Hillard say once,
speaking of one of our College professors--in folds and wrinkles.
Ill health gives a certain common character to all faces, as Nature
has a fixed course which she follows in dismantling a human
countenance: the noblest and the fairest is but a death's-head
decently covered over for the transient ceremony of life, and the
drapery often falls half off before the procession has passed.

Dr. Woods looked his creed more decidedly, perhaps, than any of the
Professors.  He had the firm fibre of a theological athlete, and
lived to be old without ever mellowing, I think, into a kind of half-
heterodoxy, as old ministers of stern creed are said to do now and
then,--just as old doctors grow to be sparing of the more
exasperating drugs in their later days.  He had manipulated the
mysteries of the Infinite so long and so exhaustively, that he would
have seemed more at home among the mediaeval schoolmen than amidst
the working clergy of our own time.

All schools have their great men, for whose advent into life the
world is waiting in dumb expectancy.  In due time the world seizes
upon these wondrous youth, opens the shell of their possibilities
like the valves of an oyster, swallows them at a gulp, and they are
for the most part heard of no more.  We had two great men, grown up
both of them.  Which was the more awful intellectual power to be
launched upon society, we debated.  Time cut the knot in his rude
fashion by taking one away early, and padding the other with
prosperity so that his course was comparatively noiseless and
ineffective.  We had our societies, too; one in particular, "The
Social Fraternity," the dread secrets of which I am under a lifelong
obligation never to reveal.  The fate of William Morgan, which the
community learned not long after this time, reminds me of the danger
of the ground upon which I am treading.

There were various distractions to make the time not passed in study
a season of relief.  One good lady, I was told, was in the habit of
asking students to her house on Saturday afternoons and praying with
and for them.  Bodily exercise was not, however, entirely superseded
by spiritual exercises, and a rudimentary form of base-ball and the
heroic sport of football were followed with some spirit.

A slight immature boy finds his materials of though and enjoyment in
very shallow and simple sources.  Yet a kind of romance gilds for me
the sober tableland of that cold New England hill where I came in
contact with a world so strange to me, and destined to leave such
mingled and lasting impressions.  I looked across the valley to the
hillside where Methuen hung suspended, and dreamed of its wooded
seclusion as a village paradise.  I tripped lightly down the long
northern slope with facilis descensus on my lips, and toiled up
again, repeating sed revocare gradum.  I wandered' in the autumnal
woods that crown the "Indian Ridge," much wondering at that vast
embankment, which we young philosophers believed with the vulgar to
be of aboriginal workmanship, not less curious, perhaps, since we
call it an escar, and refer it to alluvial agencies.  The little
Shawshine was our swimming-school, and the great Merrimack, the right
arm of four toiling cities, was within reach of a morning stroll.  At
home we had the small imp to make us laugh at his enormities, for he
spared nothing in his talk, and was the drollest little living
protest against the prevailing solemnities of the locality.  It did
not take much to please us, I suspect, and it is a blessing that this
is apt to be so with young people.  What else could have made us
think it great sport to leave our warm beds in the middle of winter
and "camp out,"--on the floor of our room,--with blankets disposed
tent-wise, except the fact that to a boy a new discomfort in place of
an old comfort is often a luxury.

More exciting occupation than any of these was to watch one of the
preceptors to see if he would not drop dead while he was praying.  He
had a dream one night that he should, and looked upon it as a
warning, and told it round very seriously, and asked the boys to come
and visit him in turn, as one whom they were soon to lose.  More than
one boy kept his eye on him during his public devotions, possessed by
the same feeling the man had who followed Van Amburgh about with the
expectation, let us not say the hope, of seeing the lion bite his
head off sooner or later.

Let me not forget to recall the interesting visit to Haverhill with
my room-mate, and how he led me to the mighty bridge over the
Merrimack which defied the ice-rafts of the river; and to the old
meetinghouse, where, in its porch, I saw the door of the ancient
parsonage, with the bullet-hole in it through which Benjamin Rolfe,
the minister, was shot by the Indians on the 29th of August, 1708.
What a vision it was when I awoke in the morning to see the fog on
the river seeming as if it wrapped the towers and spires of a great
city!--for such was my fancy, and whether it was a mirage of youth or
a fantastic natural effect I hate to inquire too nicely.

My literary performances at Andover, if any reader who may have
survived so far cares to know, included a translation from Virgil,
out of which I remember this couplet, which had the inevitable
cockney rhyme of beginners:

    "Thus by the power of Jove's imperial arm
     The boiling ocean trembled into calm."

Also a discussion with Master Phinehas Barnes on the case of Mary,
Queen of Scots, which he treated argumentatively and I rhetorically
and sentimentally.  My sentences were praised and his conclusions
adopted.  Also an Essay, spoken at the great final exhibition, held
in the large hall up-stairs, which hangs oddly enough from the roof,
suspended by iron rods.  Subject, Fancy.  Treatment, brief but
comprehensive, illustrating the magic power of that brilliant faculty
in charming life into forgetfulness of all the ills that flesh is
heir to,--the gift of Heaven to every condition and every clime, from
the captive in his dungeon to the monarch on his throne; from the
burning sands of the desert to the frozen icebergs of the poles,
from--but I forget myself.

This was the last of my coruscations at Andover.  I went from the
Academy to Harvard College, and did not visit the sacred hill again
for a long time.

On the last day of August, 1867, not having been at Andover, for
many years, I took the cars at noon, and in an hour or a little more
found myself at the station,--just at the foot of the hill.  My first
pilgrimage was to the old elm, which I remembered so well as standing
by the tavern, and of which they used to tell the story that it held,
buried in it by growth, the iron rings put round it in the old time
to keep the Indians from chopping it with their tomahawks.  I then
began the once familiar toil of ascending the long declivity.
Academic villages seem to change very slowly.  Once in a hundred
years the library burns down with all its books.  A new edifice or
two may be put up, and a new library begun in the course of the same
century; but these places are poor, for the most part, and cannot
afford to pull down their old barracks.

These sentimental journeys to old haunts must be made alone.  The
story of them must be told succinctly.  It is like the opium-smoker's
showing you the pipe from which he has just inhaled elysian bliss,
empty of the precious extract which has given him his dream.

I did not care much for the new Academy building on my right, nor for
the new library building on my left.  But for these it was surprising
to see how little the scene I remembered in my boyhood had changed.
The Professors' houses looked just as they used to, and the stage-
coach landed its passengers at the Mansion House as of old.  The pale
brick seminary buildings were behind me on the left, looking as if
"Hollis" and "Stoughton" had been transplanted from Cambridge,--
carried there in the night by orthodox angels, perhaps, like the
Santa Casa.  Away to my left again, but abreast of me, was the bleak,
bare old Academy building; and in front of me stood unchanged the
shallow oblong white house where I lived a year in the days of James
Monroe and of John Quincy Adams.

The ghost of a boy was at my side as I wandered among the places he
knew so well.  I went to the front of the house.  There was the great
rock showing its broad back in the front yard.  I used to crack nuts
on that, whispered the small ghost.  I looked in at the upper window
in the farther part of the house.  I looked out of that on four long
changing seasons, said the ghost.  I should have liked to explore
farther, but, while I was looking, one came into the small garden, or
what used to be the garden, in front of the house, and I desisted
from my investigation and went on my way.  The apparition that put me
and my little ghost to flight had a dressing-gown on its person and a
gun in its hand.  I think it was the dressing-gown, and not the gun,
which drove me off.

And now here is the shop, or store, that used to be Shipman's, after
passing what I think used to be Jonathan Leavitt's bookbindery, and
here is the back road that will lead me round by the old Academy
building.

Could I believe my senses when I found that it was turned into a
gymnasium, and heard the low thunder of ninepin balls, and the crash
of tumbling pins from those precincts?  The little ghost said, Never!
It cannot be.  But it was.  "Have they a billiard-room in the upper
story?" I asked myself.  "Do the theological professors take a hand
at all-fours or poker on weekdays, now and then, and read the secular
columns of the 'Boston Recorder' on Sundays?" I was demoralized for
the moment, it is plain; but now that I have recovered from the
shock, I must say that the fact mentioned seems to show a great
advance in common sense from the notions prevailing in my time.

I sauntered,--we, rather, my ghost and I,--until we came to a broken
field where there was quarrying and digging going on,--our old base-
ball ground, hard by the burial-place.  There I paused; and if any
thoughtful boy who loves to tread in the footsteps that another has
sown with memories of the time when he was young shall follow my
footsteps, I need not ask him to rest here awhile, for he will be
enchained by the noble view before him.  Far to the north and west
the mountains of New Hampshire lifted their summits in along
encircling ridge of pale blue waves.  The day was clear, and every
mound and peak traced its outline with perfect definition against the
sky.  This was a sight which had more virtue and refreshment in it
than any aspect of nature that I had looked upon, I am afraid I must
say for years.  I have been by the seaside now and then, but the sea
is constantly busy with its own affairs, running here and there,
listening to what the winds have to say and getting angry with them,
always indifferent, often insolent, and ready to do a mischief to
those who seek its companionship.  But these still, serene,
unchanging mountains,--Monadnock, Kearsarge,--what memories that name
recalls!--and the others, the dateless Pyramids of New England, the
eternal monuments of her ancient race, around which cluster the homes
of so many of her bravest and hardiest children,--I can never look at
them without feeling that, vast and remote and awful as they are,
there is a kind of inward heat and muffled throb in their stony
cores, that brings them into a vague sort of sympathy with human
hearts.  It is more than a year since I have looked on those blue
mountains, and they "are to me as a feeling" now, and have been ever
since.

I had only to pass a wall and I was in the burial-ground.  It was
thinly tenanted as I remember it, but now populous with the silent
immigrants of more than a whole generation.  There lay the dead I had
left, the two or three students of the Seminary; the son of the
worthy pair in whose house I lived, for whom in those days hearts
were still aching, and by whose memory the house still seemed
haunted.  A few upright stones were all that I recollect.  But now,
around them were the monuments of many of the dead whom I remembered
as living.  I doubt if there has been a more faithful reader of these
graven stones than myself for many a long day.  I listened to more
than one brief sermon from preachers whom I had often heard as they
thundered their doctrines down upon me from the throne-like desk.
Now they spoke humbly out of the dust, from a narrower pulpit, from
an older text than any they ever found in Cruden's Concordance, but
there was an eloquence in their voices the listening chapel had never
known.  There were stately monuments and studied inscriptions, but
none so beautiful, none so touching, as that which hallows the
resting-place of one of the children of the very learned Professor
Robinson: "Is it well with the child?  And she answered, It is well."

While I was musing amidst these scenes in the mood of Hamlet, two old
men, as my little ghost called them, appeared on the scene to answer
to the gravedigger and his companion.  They christened a mountain or
two for me, "Kearnsarge" among the rest, and revived some old
recollections, of which the most curious was "Basil's Cave."  The
story was recent, when I was there, of one Basil, or Bezill, or
Buzzell, or whatever his name might have been, a member of the
Academy, fabulously rich, Orientally extravagant, and of more or less
lawless habits.  He had commanded a cave to be secretly dug, and
furnished it sumptuously, and there with his companions indulged in
revelries such as the daylight of that consecrated locality had never
looked upon.  How much truth there was in it all I will not pretend
to say, but I seem to remember stamping over every rock that sounded
hollow, to question if it were not the roof of what was once Basil's
Cave.

The sun was getting far past the meridian, and I sought a shelter
under which to partake of the hermit fare I had brought with me.
Following the slope of the hill northward behind the cemetery, I
found a pleasant clump of trees grouped about some rocks, disposed so
as to give a seat, a table, and a shade.  I left my benediction on
this pretty little natural caravansera, and a brief record on one of
its white birches, hoping to visit it again on some sweet summer or
autumn day.

Two scenes remained to look upon,--the Shawshine River and the Indian
Ridge.  The streamlet proved to have about the width with which it
flowed through my memory.  The young men and the boys were bathing in
its shallow current, or dressing and undressing upon its banks as in
the days of old; the same river, only the water changed; "The same
boys, only the names and the accidents of local memory different," I
whispered to my little ghost.

The Indian Ridge more than equalled what I expected of it.  It is
well worth a long ride to visit.  The lofty wooded bank is a mile and
a half in extent, with other ridges in its neighborhood, in general
running nearly parallel with it, one of them still longer.  These
singular formations are supposed to have been built up by the eddies
of conflicting currents scattering sand and gravel and stones as they
swept over the continent.  But I think they pleased me better when I
was taught that the Indians built them; and while I thank Professor
Hitchcock, I sometimes feel as if I should like to found a chair to
teach the ignorance of what people do not want to know.

"Two tickets to Boston."  I said to the man at the station.

But the little ghost whispered, "When you leave this place you leave
me behind you."

"One ticket to Boston, if you please.  Good by, little ghost."

I believe the boy-shadow still lingers around the well-remembered
scenes I traversed on that day, and that, whenever I revisit them, I
shall find him again as my companion.






THE PULPIT AND THE PEW.

The priest is dead for the Protestant world.  Luther's inkstand did
not kill the devil, but it killed the priest, at least for us: He is
a loss in many respects to be regretted.  He kept alive the spirit of
reverence.  He was looked up to as possessing qualities superhuman in
their nature, and so was competent to be the stay of the weak and
their defence against the strong.  If one end of religion is to make
men happier in this world as well as in the next, mankind lost a
great source of happiness when the priest was reduced to the common
level of humanity, and became only a minister.  Priest, which was
presbyter, corresponded to senator, and was a title to respect and
honor.  Minister is but the diminutive of magister, and implies an
obligation to render service.

It was promised to the first preachers that in proof of their divine
mission they should have the power of casting out devils and talking
in strange tongues; that they should handle serpents and drink
poisons with impunity; that they should lay hands on the sick and
they should recover.  The Roman Church claims some of these powers
for its clergy and its sacred objects to this day.  Miracles, it is
professed, are wrought by them, or through them, as in the days of
the apostles.  Protestantism proclaims that the age of such
occurrences as the apostles witnessed is past.  What does it know
about miracles?  It knows a great many records of miracles, but this
is a different kind of knowledge.

The minister may be revered for his character, followed for his
eloquence, admired for his learning, loved for his amiable qualities,
but he can never be what the priest was in past ages, and is still,
in the Roman Church.  Dr. Arnold's definition may be found fault
with, but it has a very real meaning.  "The essential point in the
notion of a priest is this: that he is a person made necessary to our
intercourse with God, without being necessary or beneficial to us
morally,--an unreasonable, immoral, spiritual necessity."  He did not
mean, of course, that the priest might not have all the qualities
which would recommend him as a teacher or as a man, but that he had a
special power, quite independent of his personal character, which
could act, as it were, mechanically; that out of him went a virtue,
as from the hem of his Master's raiment, to those with whom his
sacred office brought him in contact.

It was a great comfort to poor helpless human beings to have a
tangible personality of like nature with themselves as a mediator
between them and the heavenly powers.  Sympathy can do much for the
sorrowing, the suffering, the dying, but to hear God himself speaking
directly through human lips, to feel the touch of a hand which is the
channel of communication with the unseen Omnipotent, this was and is
the privilege of those who looked and those who still look up to a
priesthood.  It has been said, and many who have walked the hospitals
or served in the dispensaries can bear witness to the truth of the
assertion, that the Roman Catholics know how to die.  The same thing
is less confidently to be said of Protestants.  How frequently is the
story told of the most exemplary Protestant Christians, nay, how
common is it to read in the lives of the most exemplary Protestant
ministers, that they were beset with doubts and terrors in their last
days!  The blessing of the viaticum is unknown to them.  Man is
essentially an idolater,--that is, in bondage to his imagination,--
for there is no more harm in the Greek word eidolon than in the Latin
word imago.  He wants a visible image to fix his thought, a scarabee
or a crux ansata, or the modern symbols which are to our own time
what these were to the ancient Egyptians.  He wants a vicegerent of
the Almighty to take his dying hand and bid him godspeed on his last
journey.  Who but such an immediate representative of the Divinity
would have dared to say to the monarch just laying his head on the
block, "Fils de Saint Louis, monte au ciel"?

It has been a long and gradual process to thoroughly republicanize
the American Protestant descendant of the ancient priesthood.  The
history of the Congregationalists in New England would show us how
this change has gone on, until we have seen the church become a hall
open to all sorts of purposes, the pulpit come down to the level of
the rostrum, and the clergyman take on the character of a popular
lecturer who deals with every kind of subject, including religion.

Whatever fault we may find with many of their beliefs, we have a
right to be proud of our Pilgrim and Puritan fathers among the
clergy.  They were ready to do and to suffer anything for their
faith, and a faith which breeds heroes is better than an unbelief
which leaves nothing worth being a hero for.  Only let us be fair,
and not defend the creed of Mohammed because it nurtured brave men
and enlightened scholars, or refrain from condemning polygamy in our
admiration of the indomitable spirit and perseverance of the Pilgrim
Fathers of Mormonism, or justify an inhuman belief, or a cruel or
foolish superstition, because it was once held or acquiesced in by
men whose nobility of character we heartily recognize.  The New
England clergy can look back to a noble record, but the pulpit has
sometimes required a homily from the pew, and may sometimes find it
worth its while to listen to one even in our own days.

From the settlement of the country to the present time, the ministers
have furnished the highest type of character to the people among whom
they have lived.  They have lost to a considerable extent the
position of leaders, but if they are in our times rather to be looked
upon as representatives of their congregations, they represent what
is best among those of whom they are the speaking organs.  We have a
right to expect them to be models as well as teachers of all that
makes the best citizens for this world and the next, and they have
not been, and are not in these later days unworthy of their high
calling.  They have worked hard for small earthly compensation.  They
have been the most learned men the country had to show, when learning
was a scarce commodity.  Called by their consciences to self-denying
labors, living simply, often half-supported by the toil of their own
hands, they have let the light, such light as shone for them, into
the minds of our communities as the settler's axe let the sunshine
into their log-huts and farm-houses.

Their work has not been confined to their professional duties, as a
few instances will illustrate.  Often, as was just said, they toiled
like day-laborers, teasing lean harvests out of their small
inclosures of land, for the New England soil is not one that "laughs
when tickled with a hoe," but rather one that sulks when appealed to
with that persuasive implement.  The father of the eminent Boston
physician whose recent loss is so deeply regretted, the Reverend Pitt
Clarke, forty-two years pastor of the small fold in the town of
Norton, Massachusetts, was a typical example of this union of the two
callings, and it would be hard to find a story of a more wholesome
and useful life, within a limited and isolated circle, than that
which the pious care of one of his children commemorated.  Sometimes
the New England minister, like worthy Mr. Ward of Stratford-on-Avon,
in old England, joined the practice of medicine to the offices of his
holy profession.  Michael Wigglesworth, the poet of "The Day of
Doom," and Charles Chauncy, the second president of Harvard College,
were instances of this twofold service.  In politics their influence
has always been felt, and in many cases their drums ecclesiastic have
beaten the reveille as vigorously, and to as good purpose, as it ever
sounded in the slumbering camp.  Samuel Cooper sat in council with
the leaders of the Revolution in Boston.  The three Northampton-born
brothers Allen, Thomas, Moses, and Solomon, lifted their voices, and,
when needed, their armed hands, in the cause of liberty.  In later
days, Elijah Parish and David Osgood carried politics into their
pulpits as boldly as their antislavery successors have done in times
still more recent.

The learning, the personal character, the sacredness of their office,
tended, to give the New England clergy of past generations a kind of
aristocratic dignity, a personal grandeur, much more felt in the days
when class distinctions were recognized less unwillingly than at
present.  Their costume added to the effect of their bodily presence,
as the old portraits illustrate for us, as those of us who remember
the last of the "fair, white, curly" wigs, as it graced the imposing
figure of the Reverend Dr. Marsh of Wethersfield, Connecticut, can
testify.  They were not only learned in the history of the past, but
they were the interpreters of the prophecy, and announced coming
events with a confidence equal to that with which the weather-bureau
warns us of a coming storm.  The numbers of the book of Daniel and
the visions of the Revelation were not too hard for them.  In the
commonplace book of the Reverend Joel Benedict is to be found the
following record, made, as it appears, about the year 1773:
"Conversing with Dr. Bellamy upon the downfall of Antichrist, after
many things had been said upon the subject, the Doctor began to warm,
and uttered himself after this manner: 'Tell your children to tell
their children that in the year 1866 something notable will happen in
the church; tell them the old man says so.'"

The "old man" came pretty near hitting the mark, as we shall see if
we consider what took place in the decade from 1860 to 1870.  In 1864
the Pope issued the "Syllabus of Errors," which "must be considered
by Romanists--as an infallible official document, and which arrays
the papacy in open war against modern civilization and civil and
religious freedom."  The Vatican Council in 1870 declared the Pope to
be the bishop of bishops, and immediately after this began the
decisive movement of the party known as the "Old Catholics."  In the
exact year looked forward to by the New England prophet, 1866, the
evacuation of Rome by the French and the publication of "Ecce Homo"
appear to be the most remarkable events having Special relation to
the religious world.  Perhaps the National Council of the
Congregationalists, held at Boston in 1865, may be reckoned as one of
the occurrences which the oracle just missed.

The confidence, if not the spirit of prophecy, lasted down to a later
period.  "In half a century," said the venerable Dr. Porter of
Conway, New Hampshire, in 1822, "there will be no Pagans, Jews,
Mohammedans, Unitarians, or Methodists."  The half-century has more
than elapsed, and the prediction seems to stand in need of an
extension, like many other prophetic utterances.

The story is told of David Osgood, the shaggy-browed old minister of
Medford, that he had expressed his belief that not more than one soul
in two thousand would be saved.  Seeing a knot of his parishioners in
debate, he asked them what they were discussing, and was told that
they were questioning which of the Medford people was the elected
one, the population being just two thousand, and that opinion was
divided whether it would be the minister or one of his deacons.  The
story may or may not be literally true, but it illustrates the
popular belief of those days, that the clergyman saw a good deal
farther into the councils of the Almighty than his successors could
claim the power of doing.

The objects about me, as I am writing, call to mind the varied
accomplishments of some of the New England clergy.  The face of the
Revolutionary preacher, Samuel Cooper, as Copley painted it, looks
upon me with the pleasantest of smiles and a liveliness of expression
which makes him seem a contemporary after a hundred years' experience
of eternity.  The Plato on this lower shelf bears the inscription:"
Ezroe Stiles, 1766.  Olim e libris Rev. Jaredis Eliot de
Killingworth."  Both were noted scholars and philosophers.  The hand-
lens before me was imported, with other philosophical instruments, by
the Reverend John Prince of Salem, an earlier student of science in
the town since distinguished by the labors of the Essex Institute.
Jeremy Belknap holds an honored place in that unpretending row of
local historians.  And in the pages of his "History of New Hampshire"
may be found a chapter contributed in part by the most remarkable
man, in many respects, among all the older clergymen preacher,
lawyer, physician, astronomer, botanist, entomologist, explorer,
colonist, legislator in state and national governments, and only not
seated on the bench of the Supreme Court of a Territory because he
declined the office when Washington offered it to him.  This manifold
individual was the minister of Hamilton, a pleasant little town in
Essex County, Massachusetts,--the Reverend Manasseh Cutler.  These
reminiscences from surrounding objects came up unexpectedly, of
themselves: and have a right here, as showing how wide is the range
of intelligence in the clerical body thus accidentally represented in
a single library making no special pretensions.

It is not so exalted a claim to make for them, but it may be added
that they were often the wits and humorists of their localities.
Mather Byles's facetie are among the colonial classic reminiscences.
But these were, for the most part, verbal quips and quibbles.  True
humor is an outgrowth of character.  It is never found in greater
perfection than in old clergymen and old college professors.  Dr.
Sprague's "Annals of the American Pulpit" tells many stories of our
old ministers as good as Dean Ramsay's "Scottish Reminiscences."  He
has not recorded the following, which is to be found in Miss Larned's
excellent and most interesting History of Windham County,
Connecticut.  The Reverend Josiah Dwight was the minister of
Woodstock, Connecticut, about the year 1700.  He was not old, it is
true, but he must have caught the ways of the old ministers.  The
"sensational" pulpit of our own time could hardly surpass him in the
drollery of its expressions.  A specimen or two may dispose the
reader to turn over the pages which follow in a good-natured frame of
mind.  "If unconverted men ever got to heaven," he said, "they would
feel as uneasy as a shad up the crotch of a white-oak."  Some of his
ministerial associates took offence at his eccentricities, and called
on a visit of admonition to the offending clergyman.  "Mr. Dwight
received their reproofs with great meekness, frankly acknowledged his
faults, and promised amendment, but, in prayer at parting, after
returning thanks for the brotherly visit and admonition, 'hoped that
they might so hitch their horses on earth that they should never kick
in the stables of everlasting salvation.'"

It is a good thing to have some of the blood of one of these old
ministers in one's veins.  An English bishop proclaimed the fact
before an assembly of physicians the other day that he was not
ashamed to say that he had a son who was a doctor.  Very kind that
was in the bishop, and very proud his medical audience must have
felt.  Perhaps he was not ashamed of the Gospel of Luke, "the beloved
physician," or even of the teachings which came from the lips of one
who was a carpenter, and the son of a carpenter.  So a New-Englander,
even if he were a bishop, need not be ashamed to say that he
consented to have an ancestor who was a minister.  On the contrary,
he has a right to be grateful for a probable inheritance of good
instincts, a good name, and a bringing up in a library where he
bumped about among books from the time when he was hardly taller than
one of his father's or grandfather's folios.  What are the names of
ministers' sons which most readily occur to our memory as
illustrating these advantages?  Edward Everett, Joseph Stevens
Buckminster, Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Bancroft, Richard Hildreth,
James Russell Lowell, Francis Parkman, Charles Eliot Norton, were all
ministers' boys.  John Lothrop Motley was the grandson of the
clergyman after whom he was named.  George Ticknor was next door to
such a descent, for his father was a deacon.  This is a group which
it did not take a long or a wide search to bring together.

Men such as the ministers who have been described could not fail to
exercise a good deal of authority in the communities to which they
belonged.  The effect of the Revolution must have been to create a
tendency to rebel against spiritual dictation.  Republicanism levels
in religion as in everything.  It might have been expected,
therefore, that soon after civil liberty had been established there
would be conflicts between the traditional, authority of the minister
and the claims of the now free and independent congregation.  So it
was, in fact, as for instance in the case which follows, for which
the reader is indebted to Miss Lamed's book, before cited.

The ministerial veto allowed by the Saybrook Platform gave rise, in
the year 1792, to a fierce conflict in the town of Pomfret,
Connecticut.  Zephaniah Swift, a lawyer of Windham, came out in the
Windham "Herald," in all the vehemence of partisan phraseology, with
all the emphasis of italics and small capitals.  Was it not time, he
said, for people to look about them and see whether "such despotism
was founded in Scripture, in reason, in policy, or on the rights of
man!  A minister, by his vote, by his single voice, may negative the
unanimous vote of the church!  Are ministers composed of finer clay
than the rest of mankind, that entitles them to this preeminence?
Does a license to preach transform a man into a higher order of
beings and endow him with a natural quality to govern?  Are the laity
an inferior order of beings, fit only to be slaves and to be
governed?  Is it good policy for mankind to subject themselves to
such degrading vassalage and abject submission?  Reason, common
sense, and the Bible, with united voice, proclaim to all mankind that
they are all born free and equal; that every member of a church or
Christian congregation must be on the same footing in respect of
church government, and that the CONSTITUTION, which delegates to one
the power to negative the vote of all the rest, is SUBVERSIVE OF THE
NATURAL RIGHT OF MANKIND AND REPUGNANT TO THE WORD OF GOD."

The Reverend Mr.  Welch replied to the lawyer's attack, pronouncing
him to be "destitute of delicacy, decency, good manners, sound
judgment, honesty, manhood, and humanity; a poltroon, a cat's-paw,
the infamous tool of a party, a partisan, a political weathercock,
and a ragamuffin."

No Fourth-of-July orator would in our day rant like the lawyer, and
no clergyman would use such language as that of the Reverend Moses
Welch.  The clergy have been pretty well republicanized within that
last two or three generations, and are not likely to provoke quarrels
by assertion of their special dignities or privileges.  The public is
better bred than to carry on an ecclesiastical controversy in terms
which political brawlers would hardly think admissible.  The minister
of religion is generally treated with something more than respect; he
is allowed to say undisputed what would be sharply controverted in
anybody else.  Bishop Gilbert Haven, of happy memory, had been
discussing a religious subject with a friend who was not convinced by
his arguments.  "Wait till you hear me from the pulpit," he said;
"there you cannot answer me."  The preacher--if I may use an image
which would hardly have suggested itself to him--has his hearer's
head in chancery, and can administer punishment ad libitum.  False
facts, false reasoning, bad rhetoric, bad grammar, stale images,
borrowed passages, if not borrowed sermons, are listened to without a
word of comment or a look of disapprobation.

One of the ablest and most conscientiously laborious of our clergymen
has lately ventured to question whether all his professional brethren
invariably give utterance to their sincerest beliefs, and has been
sharply criticised for so doing.  The layman, who sits silent in his
pew, has his rights when out of it, and among them is the right of
questioning that which has been addressed to him from the privileged
eminence of the pulpit, or in any way sanctioned by his religious
teacher.  It is nearly two hundred years since a Boston layman wrote
these words: "I am not ignorant that the pious frauds of the ancient,
and the inbred fire (I do not call it pride) of many of our modern
divines, have precipitated them to propagate and maintain truth as
well as falsehoods, in such an unfair manner as has given advantage
to the enemy to suspect the whole doctrine these men have profest to
be nothing but a mere trick."

So wrote Robert Calef, the Boston merchant, whose book the Reverend
Increase Mather, president of Harvard College, burned publicly in the
college yard.  But the pity of it is that the layman had not cried
out earlier and louder, and saved the community from the horror of
those judicial murders for witchcraft, the blame of which was so
largely attributable to the clergy.

Perhaps no, laymen have given the clergy more trouble than the
doctors.  The old reproach against physicians, that where there were
three of them together there were two atheists, had a real
significance, but not that which was intended by the sharp-tongued
ecclesiastic who first uttered it.  Undoubtedly there is a strong
tendency in the pursuits of the medical profession to produce
disbelief in that figment of tradition and diseased human imagination
which has been installed in the seat of divinity by the priesthood of
cruel and ignorant ages.  It is impossible, or at least very
difficult, for a physician who has seen the perpetual efforts of
Nature--whose diary is the book he reads oftenest--to heal wounds, to
expel poisons, to do the best that can be done under the given
conditions,--it is very difficult for him to believe in a world where
wounds cannot heal, where opiates cannot give a respite from pain,
where sleep never comes with its sweet oblivion of suffering, where
the art of torture is the only science cultivated, and the capacity
for being tormented is the only faculty which remains to the children
of that same Father who cares for the falling sparrow.  The Deity has
often been pictured as Moloch, and the physician has, no doubt,
frequently repudiated him as a monstrosity.


On the other hand, the physician has often been renowned for piety as
well as for his peculiarly professional virtue of charity,--led
upward by what he sees to the source of all the daily marvels wrought
before his own eyes.  So it was that Galen gave utterance to that
psalm of praise which the sweet singer of Israel need not have been
ashamed of; and if this "heathen" could be lifted into such a strain
of devotion, we need not be surprised to find so many devout
Christian worshippers among the crowd of medical "atheists."

No two professions should come into such intimate and cordial
relations as those to which belong the healers of the body and the
headers of the mind.  There can be no more fatal mistake than that
which brings them into hostile attitudes with reference to each
other, both having in view the welfare of their fellow-creatures.
But there is a territory always liable to be differed about between
them.  There are patients who never tell their physician the grief
which lies at the bottom of their ailments.  He goes through his
accustomed routine with them, and thinks he has all the elements
needed for his diagnosis.  But he has seen no deeper into the breast
than the tongue, and got no nearer the heart than the wrist.  A wise
and experienced clergyman, coming to the patient's bedside,--not with
the professional look on his face which suggests the undertaker and
the sexton, but with a serene countenance and a sympathetic voice,
with tact, with patience, waiting for the right moment,--will
surprise the shy spirit into a confession of the doubt, the sorrow,
the shame, the remorse, the terror which underlies all the bodily
symptoms, and the unburdening of which into a loving and pitying soul
is a more potent anodyne than all the drowsy sirups of the world.
And, on the other hand, there are many nervous and over-sensitive
natures which have been wrought up by self-torturing spiritual
exercises until their best confessor would be a sagacious and
wholesome-minded physician.

Suppose a person to have become so excited by religious stimulants
that he is subject to what are known to the records of insanity as
hallucinations: that he hears voices whispering blasphemy in his
ears, and sees devils coming to meet him, and thinks he is going to
be torn in pieces, or trodden into the mire.  Suppose that his mental
conflicts, after plunging him into the depths of despondency, at last
reduce him to a state of despair, so that he now contemplates taking
his own life, and debates with himself whether it shall be by knife,
halter, or poison, and after much questioning is apparently making up
his mind to commit suicide.  Is not this a manifest case of insanity,
in the form known as melancholia?  Would not any prudent physician
keep such a person under the eye of constant watchers, as in a
dangerous state of, at least, partial mental alienation?  Yet this is
an exact transcript of the mental condition of Christian in
"Pilgrim's Progress," and its counterpart has been found in thousands
of wretched lives terminated by the act of self-destruction, which
came so near taking place in the hero of the allegory.  Now the
wonderful book from which this example is taken is, next to the Bible
and the Treatise of "De Imitatione Christi," the best-known religious
work of Christendom.  If Bunyan and his contemporary, Sydenham, had
met in consultation over the case of Christian at the time when be
was meditating self-murder, it is very possible that there might have
been a difference of judgment.  The physician would have one
advantage in such a consultation.  He would pretty certainly have
received a Christian education, while the clergyman would probably
know next to nothing of the laws or manifestations of mental or
bodily disease.  It does not seem as if any theological student was
really prepared for his practical duties until he had learned
something of the effects of bodily derangements, and, above all, had
become familiar with the gamut of mental discord in the wards of an
insane asylum.

It is a very thoughtless thing to say that the physician stands to
the divine in the same light as the divine stands to the physician,
so far as each may attempt to handle subjects belonging especially to
the other's profession.  Many physicians know a great deal more about
religious matters than they do about medicine.  They have read the
Bible ten times as much as they ever read any medical author.  They
have heard scores of sermons for one medical lecture to which they
have listened.  They often hear much better preaching than the
average minister, for he hears himself chiefly, and they hear abler
men and a variety of them.  They have now and then been distinguished
in theology as well as in their own profession.  The name of Servetus
might call up unpleasant recollections, but that of another medical
practitioner may be safely mentioned.  "It was not till the middle of
the last century that the question as to the authorship of the
Pentateuch was handled with anything like a discerning criticism.
The first attempt was made by a layman, whose studies we might have
supposed would scarcely have led him to such an investigation."  This
layman was "Astruc, doctor and professor of medicine in the Royal
College at Paris, and court physician to Louis XIV."  The quotation
is from the article "Pentateuch" in Smith's "Dictionary of the
Bible," which, of course, lies on the table of the least instructed
clergyman.  The sacred profession has, it is true, returned the favor
by giving the practitioner of medicine Bishop Berkeley's "Treatise on
Tar-water," and the invaluable prescription of that "aged clergyman
whose sands of life"----but let us be fair, if not generous, and
remember that Cotton Mather shares with Zabdiel Boylston the credit
of introducing the practice of inoculation into America.  The
professions should be cordial allies, but the church-going, Bible-
reading physician ought to know a great deal more of the subjects
included under the general name of theology than the clergyman can be
expected to know of medicine.  To say, as has been said not long
since, that a young divinity student is as competent to deal with the
latter as an old physician is to meddle with the former, suggests the
idea that wisdom is not an heirloom in the family of the one who says
it.  What a set of idiots our clerical teachers must have been and
be, if, after a quarter or half a century of their instruction, a
person of fair intelligence is utterly incompetent to form any
opinion about the subjects which they have been teaching, or trying
to teach him, so long!

A minister must find it very hard work to preach to hearers who do
not believe, or only half believe, what he preaches.  But pews
without heads in them are a still more depressing spectacle.  He may
convince the doubter and reform the profligate.  But he cannot
produce any change on pine and mahogany by his discourses, and the
more wood he sees as he looks along his floor and galleries, the less
his chance of being useful.  It is natural that in times like the
present changes of faith and of place of worship should be far from
infrequent.  It is not less natural that there should be regrets on
one side and gratification on the other, when such changes occur.  It
even happens occasionally that the regrets become aggravated into
reproaches, rarely from the side which receives the new accessions,
less rarely from the one which is left.  It is quite conceivable that
the Roman Church, which considers itself the only true one, should
look on those who leave its communion as guilty of a great offence.
It is equally natural that a church which considers Pope and Pagan a
pair of murderous giants, sitting at the mouths of their caves, alike
in their hatred to true Christians, should regard any of its members
who go over to Romanism as lost in fatal error.  But within the
Protestant fold there are many compartments, and it would seem that
it is not a deadly defection to pass from one to another.

So far from such exchanges between sects being wrong, they ought to
happen a great deal oftener than they do.  All the larger bodies of
Christians should be constantly exchanging members.  All men are born
with conservative or aggressive tendencies: they belong naturally
with the idol-worshippers or the idol-breakers.  Some wear their
fathers' old clothes, and some will have a new suit.  One class of
men must have their faith hammered in like a nail, by authority;
another class must have it worked in like a screw, by argument.
Members of one of these classes often find themselves fixed by
circumstances in the other.  The late Orestes A.  Brownson used to
preach at one time to a little handful of persons, in a small upper
room, where some of them got from him their first lesson about the
substitution of reverence for idolatry, in dealing with the books
they hold sacred.  But after a time Mr.  Brownson found he had
mistaken his church, and went over to the Roman Catholic
establishment, of which he became and remained to his dying day one
of the most stalwart champions.  Nature is prolific and ambidextrous.
While this strong convert was trying to carry us back to the ancient
faith, another of her sturdy children, Theodore Parker, was trying
just as hard to provide a new church for the future.  One was driving
the sheep into the ancient fold, while the other was taking down the
bars that kept them out of the new pasture.  Neither of these
powerful men could do the other's work, and each had to find the task
for which he was destined.

The "old gospel ship," as the Methodist song calls it, carries many
who would steer by the wake of their vessel.  But there are many
others who do not trouble themselves to look over the stern, having
their eyes fixed on the light-house in the distance before them.  In
less figurative language, there are multitudes of persons who are
perfectly contented with the old formulae of the church with which
they and their fathers before them have been and are connected, for
the simple reason that they fit, like old shoes, because they have
been worn so long, and mingled with these, in the most conservative
religious body, are here and there those who are restless in the
fetters of a confession of faith to which they have pledged
themselves without believing in it.  This has been true of the
Athanasian creed, in the Anglican Church, for two centuries more or
less, unless the Archbishop of Canterbury, Tillotson, stood alone in
wishing the church were well rid of it.  In fact, it has happened to
the present writer to hear the Thirty-nine Articles summarily
disposed of by one of the most zealous members of the American branch
of that communion, in a verb of one syllable, more familiar to the
ears of the forecastle than to those of the vestry.

But on the other hand, it is far from uncommon to meet with persons
among the so-called "liberal" denominations who are uneasy for want
of a more definite ritual and a more formal organization than they
find in their own body.  Now, the rector or the minister must be well
aware that there are such cases, and each of them must be aware that
there are individuals under his guidance whom he cannot satisfy by
argument, and who really belong by all their instincts to another
communion.  It seems as if a thoroughly honest, straight-collared
clergyman would say frankly to his restless parishioner: "You do not
believe the central doctrines of the church which you are in the
habit of attending.  You belong properly to Brother A.'s or Brother
B.'s fold, and it will be more manly and probably more profitable for
you to go there than to stay with us."  And, again, the rolling-
collared clergyman might be expected to say to this or that uneasy
listener: "You are longing for a church which will settle your
beliefs for you, and relieve you to a great extent from the task, to
which you seem to be unequal, of working out your own salvation with
fear and trembling.  Go over the way to Brother C.'s or Brother D.'s;
your spine is weak, and they will furnish you a back-board which will
keep you straight and make you comfortable."  Patients are not the
property of their physicians, nor parishioners of their ministers.

As for the children of clergymen, the presumption is that they will
adhere to the general belief professed by their fathers.  But they do
not lose their birthright or their individuality, and have the world
all before them to choose their creed from, like other persons.  They
are sometimes called to account for attacking the dogmas they are
supposed to have heard preached from their childhood.  They cannot
defend themselves, for various good reasons.  If they did, one would
have to say he got more preaching than was good for him, and came at
last to feel about sermons and their doctrines as confectioners'
children do about candy.  Another would have to own that he got his
religious belief, not from his father, but from his mother.  That
would account for a great deal, for the milk in a woman's veins
sweetens, or at least, dilutes an acrid doctrine, as the blood of the
motherly cow softens the virulence of small-pox, so that its mark
survives only as the seal of immunity.  Another would plead atavism,
and say he got his religious instincts from his great-grandfather, as
some do their complexion or their temper.  Others would be compelled
to confess that the belief of a wife or a sister had displaced that
which they naturally inherited.  No man can be expected to go thus
into the details of his family history, and, therefore, it is an ill-
bred and indecent thing to fling a man's father's creed in his face,
as if he had broken the fifth commandment in thinking for himself in
the light of a new generation.  Common delicacy would prevent him
from saying that he did not get his faith from his father, but from
somebody else, perhaps from his grandmother Lois and his mother
Eunice, like the young man whom the Apostle cautioned against total
abstinence.

It is always the right, and may sometimes be the duty, of the layman
to call the attention of the clergy to the short-comings and errors,
not only of their own time, but also of the preceding generations, of
which they are the intellectual and moral product.  This is
especially true when the authority of great names is fallen back upon
as a defence of opinions not in themselves deserving to be upheld.
It may be very important to show that the champions of this or that
set of dogmas, some of which are extinct or obsolete as beliefs,
while others retain their vitality, held certain general notions
which vitiated their conclusions.  And in proportion to the eminence
of such champions, and the frequency with which their names are
appealed to as a bulwark of any particular creed or set of doctrines,
is it urgent to show into what obliquities or extravagances or
contradictions of thought they have been betrayed.

In summing up the religious history of New England, it would be just
and proper to show the agency of the Mathers, father and son, in the
witchcraft delusion.  It would be quite fair to plead in their behalf
the common beliefs of their time.  It would be an extenuation of
their acts that, not many years before, the great and good
magistrate, Sir Matthew Hale, had sanctioned the conviction of
prisoners accused of witchcraft.  To fall back on the errors of the
time is very proper when we are trying our predecessors in foro
conscientace: The houses they dwelt in may have had some weak or
decayed beams and rafters, but they served for their shelter, at any
rate.  It is quite another matter when those rotten timbers are used
in holding up the roofs over our own heads.  Still more, if one of
our ancestors built on an unsafe or an unwholesome foundation, the
best thing we can do is to leave it and persuade others to leave it
if we can.  And if we refer to him as a precedent, it must be as a
warning and not as a guide.

Such was the reason of the present writer's taking up the writings of
Jonathan Edwards for examination in a recent essay.  The "Edwardsian"
theology is still recognized as a power in and beyond the
denomination to which he belonged.  One or more churches bear his
name, and it is thrown into the scale of theological belief as if it
added great strength to the party which claims him.  That he was a
man of extraordinary endowments and deep spiritual nature was not
questioned, nor that be was a most acute reasoner, who could unfold a
proposition into its consequences as patiently, as convincingly, as a
palaeontologist extorts its confession from a fossil fragment.  But
it was maintained that so many dehumanizing ideas were mixed up with
his conceptions of man, and so many diabolizing attributes embodied
in his imagination of the Deity, that his system of beliefs was
tainted throughout by them, and that the fact of his being so
remarkable a logician recoiled on the premises which pointed his
inexorable syllogisms to such revolting conclusions.  When he
presents us a God, in whose sight children, with certain not too
frequent exceptions, "are young vipers, and are infinitely more
hateful than vipers;" when he gives the most frightful detailed
description of infinite and endless tortures which it drives men and
women mad to think of prepared for "the bulk of mankind;" when he
cruelly pictures a future in which parents are to sing hallelujahs of
praise as they see their children driven into the furnace, where they
are to lie "roasting" forever,--we have a right to say that the man
who held such beliefs and indulged in such imaginations and
expressions is a burden and not a support in reference to the creed
with which his name is associated.  What heathenism has ever
approached the horrors of this conception of human destiny?  It is
not an abuse of language to apply to such a system of beliefs the
name of Christian pessimism.

If these and similar doctrines are so generally discredited as some
appear to think, we might expect to see the change showing itself in
catechisms and confessions of faith, to hear the joyful news of
relief from its horrors in all our churches, and no longer to read in
the newspapers of ministers rejected or put on trial for heresy
because they could not accept the most dreadful of these doctrines.
Whether this be so or not, it must be owned that the name of Jonathan
Edwards does at this day carry a certain authority with it for many
persons, so that anything he believed gains for them some degree of
probability from that circumstance.  It would, therefore, be of much
interest to know whether he was trustworthy in his theological
speculations, and whether he ever changed his belief with reference
to any of the great questions above alluded to.

Some of our readers may remember a story which got abroad many years
ago that a certain M. Babinet, a scientific Frenchman of note, had
predicted a serious accident soon to occur to the planet on which we
live by the collision with it of a great comet then approaching us,
or some such occurrence.  There is no doubt that this prediction
produced anxiety and alarm in many timid persons.  It became a very
interesting question with them who this M. Babinet might be.  Was he
a sound observer, who had made other observations and predictions
which had proved accurate?  Or was he one of those men who are always
making blunders for other people to correct?  Is he known to have
changed his opinion as to the approaching disastrous event?

So long as there were any persons made anxious by this prediction, so
long as there was even one who believed that he, and his family, and
his nation, and his race, and the home of mankind, with all its
monuments, were very soon to be smitten in mid-heaven and instantly
shivered into fragments, it was very desirable to find any evidence
that this prophet of evil was a man who held many extravagant and
even monstrous opinions.  Still more satisfactory would it be if it
could be shown that he had reconsidered his predictions, and declared
that he could not abide by his former alarming conclusions.  And we
should think very ill of any astronomer who would not rejoice for the
sake of his fellow-creatures, if not for his own, to find the
threatening presage invalidated in either or both of the ways just
mentioned, even though he had committed himself to M.  Babinet's dire
belief.

But what is the trivial, temporal accident of the wiping out of a
planet and its inhabitants to the infinite catastrophe which shall
establish a mighty world of eternal despair?  And which is it most
desirable for mankind to have disproved or weakened, the grounds of
the threat of M.  Babinet, or those of the other infinitely more
terrible comminations, so far as they rest on the authority of
Jonathan Edwards?

The writer of this paper had been long engaged in the study of the
writings of Edwards, with reference to the essay he had in
contemplation, when, on speaking of the subject to a very
distinguished orthodox divine, this gentleman mentioned the existence
of a manuscript of Edwards which had been held back from the public
on account of some opinions or tendencies it contained, or was
suspected of containing "High Arianism" was the exact expression he
used with reference to it.  On relating this fact to an illustrious
man of science, whose name is best known to botanists, but is justly
held in great honor by the orthodox body to which he belongs, it
appeared that he, too, had heard of such a manuscript, and the
questionable doctrine associated with it in his memory was
Sabellianism.  It was of course proper in the writer of an essay on
Jonathan Edwards to mention the alleged existence of such a
manuscript, with reference to which the same caution seemed to have
been exercised as that which led, the editor of his collected works
to suppress the language Edwards had used about children.

This mention led to a friendly correspondence between the writer and
one of the professors in the theological school at Andover, and
finally to the publication of a brief essay, which, for some reason,
had been withheld from publication for more than a century.  Its
title is "Observations concerning the Scripture OEconomy of the
Trinity and Covenant of Redemption.  By Jonathan Edwards."  It
contains thirty-six pages and a half, each small page having about
two hundred words.  The pages before the reader will be found to
average about three hundred and twenty-five words.  An introduction
and an appendix by the editor, Professor Egbert C. Smyth, swell the
contents to nearly a hundred pages, but these additions, and the
circumstance that it is bound in boards, must not lead us to overlook
the fact that the little volume is nothing more than a pamphlet in
book's clothing.

A most extraordinary performance it certainly is, dealing with the
arrangements entered into by the three persons of the Trinity, in as
bald and matter-of-fact language and as commercial a spirit as if the
author had been handling the adjustment of a limited partnership
between three retail tradesmen.  But, lest a layman's judgment might
be considered insufficient, the treatise was submitted by the writer
to one of the most learned of our theological experts,--the same who
once informed a church dignitary, who had been attempting to define
his theological position, that he was a Eutychian,--a fact which he
seems to have been no more aware of than M. Jourdain was conscious
that he had been speaking prose all his life.  The treatise appeared
to this professor anti-trinitarian, not in the direction of
Unitarianism, however, but of Tritheism.  Its anthropomorphism
affected him like blasphemy, and the paper produced in him the sense
of "great disgust," which its whole character might well excite in
the unlearned reader.

All this is, however, of little importance, for this is not the work
of Edwards referred to by the present writer in his previous essay.
The tract recently printed as a volume may be the one referred to by
Dr. Bushnell, in 1851, but of this reference by him the writer never
heard until after his own essay was already printed.  The manuscript
of the "Observations" was received by Professor Smyth, as he tells us
in his introduction, about fifteen years ago, from the late Reverend
William T. Dwight, D. D., to whom it was bequeathed by his brother,
the Reverend Dr. Sereno E. Dwight.

But the reference of the present writer was to another production of
the great logician, thus spoken of in a quotation from "the
accomplished editor of the Hartford 'Courant,'" to be found in
Professor Smyth's introduction:

"It has long been a matter of private information that Professor
Edwards A. Park, of Andover, had in his possession an published
manuscript of Edwards of considerable extent, perhaps two thirds as
long as his treatise on the will.  As few have ever seen the
manuscript, its contents are only known by vague reports....  It is
said that it contains a departure from his published views on the
Trinity and a modification of the view of original sin.  One account
of it says that the manuscript leans toward Sabellianism, and that it
even approaches Pelagianism."

It was to this "suppressed" manuscript the present writer referred,
and not to the slender brochure recently given to the public.  He is
bound, therefore, to say plainly that to satisfy inquirers who may be
still in doubt with reference to Edwards's theological views, it
would be necessary to submit this manuscript, and all manuscripts of
his which have been kept private, to their inspection, in print, if
possible, so that all could form their own opinion about it or them.

The whole matter may be briefly stated thus: Edwards believed in an
eternity of unimaginable horrors for "the bulk of mankind."  His
authority counts with many in favor of that belief, which affects
great numbers as the idea of ghosts affected Madame de Stall: "Je n'y
crois pas, mais je les crains."  This belief is one which it is
infinitely desirable to the human race should be shown to be
possibly, probably, or certainly erroneous.  It is, therefore,
desirable in the interest of humanity that any force the argument in
its favor may derive from Edwards's authority should be weakened by
showing that he was capable of writing most unwisely, and if it
should be proved that he changed his opinions, or ran into any
"heretical" vagaries, by using these facts against the validity of
his judgment.  That he was capable of writing most unwisely has been
sufficiently shown by the recent publication of his "Observations."
Whether he, anywhere contradicted what were generally accepted as his
theological opinions, or how far he may have lapsed into heresies,
the public will never rest satisfied until it sees and interprets for
itself everything that is open to question which may be contained in
his yet unpublished manuscripts.  All this is not in the least a
personal affair with the writer, who, in the course of his studies of
Edwards's works, accidentally heard, from the unimpeachable sources
sufficiently indicated, the reports, which it seems must have been
familiar to many, that there was unpublished matter bearing on the
opinions of the author through whose voluminous works he had been
toiling.  And if he rejoiced even to hope that so wise a man as
Edwards has been considered, so good a man as he is recognized to
have been, had, possibly in his changes of opinion, ceased to think
of children as vipers, and of parents as shouting hallelujahs while
their lost darlings were being driven into the flames, where is the
theologian who would not rejoice to hope so with him or who would be
willing to tell his wife or his daughter that he did not?

The real, vital division of the religious part of our Protestant
communities is into Christian optimists and Christian pessimists.
The Christian optimist in his fullest development is characterized by
a cheerful countenance, a voice in the major key, an undisguised
enjoyment of earthly comforts, and a short confession of faith.  His
theory of the universe is progress; his idea of God is that he is a
Father with all the true paternal attributes, of man that he is
destined to come into harmony with the key-note of divine order, of
this earth that it is a training school for a better sphere of
existence.  The Christian pessimist in his most typical manifestation
is apt to wear a solemn aspect, to speak, especially from the pulpit,
in the minor key, to undervalue the lesser enjoyments of life, to
insist on a more extended list of articles of belief.  His theory of
the universe recognizes this corner of it as a moral ruin; his idea
of the Creator is that of a ruler whose pardoning power is subject to
the veto of what is called "justice;" his notion of man is that he is
born a natural hater of God and goodness, and that his natural
destiny is eternal misery.  The line dividing these two great classes
zigzags its way through the religious community, sometimes following
denominational layers and cleavages, sometimes going, like a
geological fracture, through many different strata.  The natural
antagonists of the religious pessimists are the men of science,
especially the evolutionists, and the poets.  It was but a
conditioned prophecy, yet we cannot doubt what was in Milton's mind
when he sang, in one of the divinest of his strains, that

                    "Hell itself will pass away,
     And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day."

And Nature, always fair if we will allow her time enough, after
giving mankind the inspired tinker who painted the Christian's life
as that of a hunted animal, "never long at ease," desponding,
despairing, on the verge of self-murder,--painted it with an
originality, a vividness, a power and a sweetness, too, that rank him
with the great authors of all time,--kind Nature, after this gift,
sent as his counterpoise the inspired ploughman, whose songs have
done more to humanize the hard theology of Scotland than all the
rationalistic sermons that were ever preached.  Our own Whittier has
done and is doing the same thing, in a far holier spirit than Burns,
for the inherited beliefs of New England and the country to which New
England belongs.  Let me sweeten these closing paragraphs of an essay
not meaning to hold a word of bitterness with a passage or two from
the lay-preacher who is listened to by a larger congregation than any
man who speaks from the pulpit.  Who will not hear his words with
comfort and rejoicing when he speaks of "that larger hope which,
secretly cherished from the times of Origen and Duns Scotus to those
of Foster and Maurice, has found its fitting utterance in the noblest
poem of the age?"

It is Tennyson's "In Memoriam" to which he refers, and from which he
quotes four verses, of which this is the last:

    "Behold!  we know not anything
     I can but trust that good shall fall
     At last,--far off,--at last, to all,
     And every winter change to spring."

If some are disposed to think that the progress of civilization and
the rapidly growing change of opinion renders unnecessary any further
effort to humanize "the Gospel of dread tidings;" if any believe the
doctrines of the Longer and Shorter Catechism of the Westminster
divines are so far obsolete as to require no further handling; if
there are any who thank these subjects have lost their interest for
living souls ever since they themselves have learned to stay at home
on Sundays, with their cakes and ale instead of going to meeting,
--not such is Mr.  Whittier's opinion, as we may infer from his
recent beautiful poem, "The Minister's Daughter."  It is not science
alone that the old Christian pessimism has got to struggle with, but
the instincts of childhood, the affections of maternity, the
intuitions of poets, the contagious humanity of the philanthropist,
--in short, human nature and the advance of civilization.  The pulpit
has long helped the world, and is still one of the chief defences
against the dangers that threaten society, and it is worthy now, as
it always has been in its best representation, of all love and honor.
But many of its professed creeds imperatively demand revision, and
the pews which call for it must be listened to, or the preacher will
by and by find himself speaking to a congregation of bodiless echoes.





End of Project Gutenberg Passages from an Old Volume of Life, by Holmes






MEDICAL ESSAYS

By Oliver Wendell Holmes




1842-1882


CONTENTS:

I.   HOMEOPATHY AND ITS KINDRED DELUSIONS

II.  THE CONTAGIOUSNESS OF PUERPERAL FEVER

III. CURRENTS AND COUNTER-CURRENTS IN MEDICAL SCIENCE

IV.  BORDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE IN SOME PROVINCES OF MEDICAL SCIENCE

V.   SCHOLASTIC AND BEDSIDE TEACHING

VI.  THE MEDICAL PROFESSION IN MASSACHUSETTS

VII. THE YOUNG PRACTITIONER

VIII. MEDICAL LIBRARIES

IX.  SOME OF MY EARLY TEACHERS






PREFACE.

The character of the opposition which some of these papers have met
with suggests the inference that they contain really important, but
unwelcome truths.  Negatives multiplied into each other change their
sign and become positives.  Hostile criticisms meeting together are
often equivalent to praise, and the square of fault-finding turns out
to be the same thing as eulogy.

But a writer has rarely so many enemies as it pleases him to believe.
Self-love leads us to overrate the numbers of our negative
constituency.  The larger portion of my limited circle of readers
must be quite indifferent to, if not ignorant of, the adverse
opinions which have been expressed or recorded concerning any of
these Addresses or Essays now submitted to their own judgment.  It is
proper, however, to inform them, that some of the positions
maintained in these pages have been unsparingly attacked, with
various degrees of ability, scholarship, and good-breeding.  The tone
of criticism naturally changes with local conditions in different
parts of a country extended like our own, so that it is one of the
most convenient gauges of the partial movements in the direction of
civilization.  It is satisfactory to add, that the views assailed
have also been unflinchingly defended by unsought champions, among
the ablest of whom it is pleasant to mention, at this moment of
political alienation, the Editor of the Charleston Medical Journal.

"Currents and Counter-Currents" was written and delivered as an
Oration, a florid rhetorical composition, expressly intended to
secure the attention of an audience not easy to hold as listeners.
It succeeded in doing this, and also in being as curiously
misunderstood and misrepresented as if it had been a political
harangue.  This gave it more local notoriety than it might otherwise
have attained, so that, as I learn, one ingenious person made use of
its title as an advertisement to a production of his own.

The commonest mode of misrepresentation was this: qualified
propositions, the whole meaning of which depended on the
qualifications, were stripped of these and taken as absolute.  Thus,
the attempt to establish a presumption against giving poisons to sick
persons was considered as equivalent to condemning the use of these
substances.  The only important inference the writer has been able to
draw from the greater number of the refutations of his opinions which
have been kindly sent him, is that the preliminary education of the
Medical Profession is not always what it ought to be.

One concession he is willing to make, whatever sacrifice of pride it
may involve.  The story of Massasoit, which has furnished a coral, as
it were, for some teething critics, when subjected to a powerful
logical analysis, though correct in its essentials, proves to have
been told with exceptionable breadth of statement, and therefore (to
resume the metaphor) has been slightly rounded off at its edges, so
as to be smoother for any who may wish to bite upon it hereafter.  In
other respects the Discourse has hardly been touched.  It is only an
individual's expression, in his own way, of opinions entertained by
hundreds of the Medical Profession in every civilized country, and
has nothing in it which on revision the writer sees cause to retract
or modify.  The superstitions it attacks lie at the very foundation
of Homoeopathy, and of almost every form of medical charlatanism.
Still the mere routinists and unthinking artisans in most callings
dislike whatever shakes the dust out of their traditions, and it may
be unreasonable to expect that Medicine will always prove an
exception to the rule.  One half the opposition which the numerical
system of Louis has met with, as applied to the results of treatment,
has been owing to the fact that it showed the movements of disease to
be far more independent of the kind of practice pursued than was
agreeable to the pride of those whose self-confidence it abated.

The statement, that medicines are more sparingly used in physicians'
families than in most others, admits of a very natural explanation,
without putting a harsh construction upon it, which it was not
intended to admit.  Outside pressure is less felt in the physician's
own household; that is all.  If this does not sometimes influence him
to give medicine, or what seems to be medicine, when among those who
have more confidence in drugging than his own family commonly has,
the learned Professor Dunglison is hereby requested to apologize for
his definition of the word Placebo, or to expunge it from his Medical
Dictionary.

One thing is certain.  A loud outcry on a slight touch reveals the
weak spot in a profession, as well as in a patient.  It is a doubtful
policy to oppose the freest speech in those of our own number who are
trying to show us where they honestly believe our weakness lies.
Vast as are the advances of our Science and Art, may it not possibly
prove on examination that we retain other old barbarisms beside the
use of the astrological sign of Jupiter, with which we endeavor to
insure good luck to our prescriptions?  Is it the act of a friend or
a foe to try to point them out to our brethren when asked to address
them, and is the speaker to subdue the constitutional habit of his
style to a given standard, under penalty of giving offence to a grave
assembly?

"Homoeopathy and its Kindred Delusions" was published nearly twenty
years ago, and has been long out of print, so that the author tried
in vain to procure a copy until the kindness of a friend supplied him
with the only one he has had for years.  A foolish story reached his
ears that he was attempting to buy up stray copies for the sake of
suppressing it.  This edition was in the press at that very time.

Many of the arguments contained in the Lectures have lost whatever
novelty they may have possessed.  All its predictions have been
submitted to the formidable test of time.  They appear to have stood
it, so far, about as well as most uninspired prophecies; indeed, some
of them require much less accommodation than certain grave
commentators employ in their readings of the ancient Prophets.

If some statistics recently published are correct, Homoeopathy has
made very slow progress in Europe.

In all England, as it appears, there are hardly a fifth more
Homoeopathic practitioners than there are students attending Lectures
at the Massachusetts Medical College at the present time.  In America
it has undoubtedly proved more popular and lucrative, yet how loose a
hold it has on the public confidence is shown by the fact that, when
a specially valued life, which has been played with by one of its
agents, is seriously threatened, the first thing we expect to hear is
that a regular practitioner is by the patient's bed, and the
Homoeopathic counsellor overruled or discarded.  Again, how many of
the ardent and capricious persons who embraced Homoeopathy have run
the whole round of pretentious novelties;--have been boarded at
water-cure establishments, closeted with uterine and other
specialists, and finally wandered over seas to put themselves in
charge of foreign celebrities, who dosed them as lustily as they were
ever dosed before they took to globules!  It will surprise many to
learn to what a shadow of a shade Homoeopathy has dwindled in the
hands of many of its noted practitioners.  The itch-doctrine is
treated with contempt.  Infinitesimal doses are replaced by full ones
whenever the fancy-practitioner chooses.  Good Homoeopathic reasons
can be found for employing anything that anybody wants to employ.
Homoeopathy is now merely a name, an unproved theory, and a box of
pellets pretending to be specifics, which, as all of us know, fail
ignominiously in those cases where we would thankfully sacrifice all
our prejudices and give the world to have them true to their
promises.

Homoeopathy has not died out so rapidly as Tractoration.  Perhaps it
was well that it should not, for it has taught us a lesson of the
healing faculty of Nature which was needed, and for which many of us
have made proper acknowledgments.  But it probably does more harm
than good to medical science at the present time, by keeping up the
delusion of treating everything by specifics,--the old barbarous
notion that sick people should feed on poisons [Lachesis, arrow-
poison, obtained from a serpent (Pulte).  Crotalus horridus,
rattlesnake's venom (Neidhard).  The less dangerous Pediculus capitis
is the favorite remedy of Dr. Mure, the English "Apostle of
Homoeopathy."  These are examples of the retrograde current setting
towards barbarism] against which a part of the Discourse at the
beginning of this volume is directed.

The infinitesimal globules have not become a curiosity as yet, like
Perkins's Tractors.  But time is a very elastic element in Geology
and Prophecy.  If Daniel's seventy weeks mean four hundred and ninety
years, as the learned Prideaux and others have settled it that they
do, the "not many years" of my prediction may be stretched out a
generation or two beyond our time, if necessary, when the prophecy
will no doubt prove true.

It might be fitting to add a few words with regard to the Essay on
the Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever.  But the whole question I
consider to be now transferred from the domain of medical inquiry to
the consideration of Life Insurance agencies and Grand Juries.  For
the justification of this somewhat sharply accented language I must
refer the reader to the paper itself for details which I regret to
have been forced to place on permanent record.

BOSTON, January, 1861.




A SECOND PREFACE.

These Lectures and Essays are arranged in the order corresponding to
the date of their delivery or publication.  They must, of course, be
read with a constant reference to these dates, by such as care to
read them.  I have not attempted to modernize their aspect or
character in presenting them, in this somewhat altered connection, to
the public.  Several of them were contained in a former volume which
received its name from the Address called "Currents and Counter-
Currents."  Some of those contained in the former volume have been
replaced by others.  The Essay called "Mechanism of Vital Actions"
has been transferred to a distinct collection of Miscellaneous
essays, forming a separate volume.

I had some intention of including with these papers an Essay on
Intermittent Fever in New England, which received one of the Boylston
prizes in 1837, and was published in the following year.  But as this
was upon a subject of local interest, chiefly, and would have taken
up a good deal of room, I thought it best to leave it out, trusting
that the stray copies to be met with in musty book-shops would
sufficiently supply the not very extensive or urgent demand for a
paper almost half a century old.

Some of these papers created a little stir when they first fell from
the press into the pool of public consciousness.  They will slide in
very quietly now in this new edition, and find out for themselves
whether the waters are those of Lethe, or whether they are to live
for a time as not wholly unvalued reminiscences.

March 21, 1883.




PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION.

These Essays are old enough now to go alone without staff or crutch
in the shape of Prefaces.  A very few words may be a convenience to
the reader who takes up the book and wishes to know what he is likely
to find in it.


               HOMOEOPATHY AND ITS KINDRED DELUSIONS.

Homoeopathy has proved lucrative, and so long as it continues to be
so will surely exist,--as surely as astrology, palmistry, and other
methods of getting a living out of the weakness and credulity of
mankind and womankind.  Though it has no pretensions to be considered
as belonging among the sciences, it may be looked upon by a
scientific man as a curious object of study among the vagaries of the
human mind.  Its influence for good or the contrary may be made a
matter of calm investigation.  I have studied it in the Essay before
the reader, under the aspect of an extravagant and purely imaginative
creation of its founder.  Since that first essay was written, nearly
half a century ago, we have all had a chance to witness its practical
working.  Two opposite inferences may be drawn from its doctrines and
practice.  The first is that which is accepted by its disciples.
This is that all diseases are "cured" by drugs.  The opposite
conclusion is drawn by a much larger number of persons.  As they see
that patients are very commonly getting well under treatment by
infinitesimal drugging, which they consider equivalent to no
medication at all, they come to disbelieve in every form of drugging
and put their whole trust in "nature."  Thus experience,

          "From seeming evil still educing good,"

has shown that the dealers in this preposterous system of pseudo-
therapeutics have cooperated with the wiser class of practitioners in
breaking up the system of over-dosing and over-drugging which has
been one of the standing reproaches of medical practice.  While.
keeping up the miserable delusion that diseases were all to be
"cured" by drugging, Homoeopathy has been unintentionally showing
that they would very generally get well without any drugging at all.
In the mean time the newer doctrines of the "mind cure," the "faith
cure," and the rest are encroaching on the territory so long
monopolized by that most ingenious of the pseudo-sciences.  It would
not be surprising if its whole ground should be taken possession of
by these new claimants with their flattering appeals to the
imaginative class of persons open to such attacks.  Similia similabus
may prove fatally true for once, if Homoeopathy is killed out by its
new-born rivals.

It takes a very moderate amount of erudition to unearth a charlatan
like the supposed father of the infinitesimal dosing system.  The
real inventor of that specious trickery was an Irishman by the name
of Butler.  The whole story is to be found in the "Ortus Medicinm" of
Van Helmont.  I have given some account of his chapter "Butler" in
different articles, but I would refer the students of our
Homoeopathic educational institutions to the original, which they
will find very interesting and curious.


                    CURRENTS AND COUNTER-CURRENTS

My attack on over-drugging brought out some hostile comments and
treatment.  Thirty years ago I expressed myself with more vivacity
than I should show if I were writing on the same subjects today.
Some of my more lively remarks called out very sharp animadversion.
Thus my illustration of prevention as often better than treatment in
the mother's words to her child which had got a poisonous berry in
its mouth,--"Spit it out!" gave mortal offence to a well-known New
York practitioner and writer, who advised the Massachusetts Medical
Society to spit out the offending speaker.  Worse than this was my
statement of my belief that if a ship-load of miscellaneous drugs,
with certain very important exceptions,--drugs, many of which were
then often given needlessly and in excess, as then used "could be
sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind
and all the worse for the fishes."  This was too bad.  The sentence
was misquoted, quoted without its qualifying conditions, and
frightened some of my worthy professional brethren as much as if I
had told them to throw all physic to the dogs.  But for the
epigrammatic sting the sentiment would have been unnoticed as a
harmless overstatement at the very worst.

Since this lecture was delivered a great and, as I think, beneficial
change has taken place in the practice of medicine.  The habit of the
English "general practitioner" of making his profit out of the pills
and potions he administered was ruinous to professional advancement
and the dignity of the physician.  When a half-starving medical man
felt that he must give his patient draught and boluses for which he
could charge him, he was in a pitiable position and too likely to
persuade himself that his drugs were useful to his patient because
they were profitable to him.  This practice has prevailed a good deal
in America, and was doubtless the source in some measure of the
errors I combated.


               THE CONTAGIOUSNESS OF PUERPERAL FEVER.

This Essay was read before a small Association called "The Society
for Medical Improvement," and published in a Medical Journal which
lasted but a single year.  It naturally attracted less attention than
it would have done if published in such a periodical as the "American
Journal of Medical Sciences."  Still it had its effect, as I have
every reason to believe.  I cannot doubt that it has saved the lives
of many young mothers by calling attention to the existence and
propagation of "Puerperal Fever as a Private Pestilence," and laying
down rules for taking the necessary precautions against it.  The case
has long been decided in favor of the views I advocated, but, at the
time when I wrote two of the most celebrated professors of Obstetrics
in this country opposed my conclusions with all the weight of their
experience and position.

This paper was written in a great heat and with passionate
indignation.  If I touched it at all I might trim its rhetorical
exuberance, but I prefer to leave it all its original strength of
expression.  I could not, if I had tried, have disguised the feelings
with which I regarded the attempt to put out of sight the frightful
facts which I brought forward and the necessary conclusions to which
they led.  Of course the whole matter has been looked at in a new
point of view since the microbe as a vehicle of contagion has been
brought into light, and explained the mechanism of that which was
plain enough as a fact to all who were not blind or who did not shut
their eyes.

O.  W.  H.

BEVERLY Farms, Mass., August 3, 1891






HOMOEOPATHY AND ITS KINDRED DELUSIONS
[Two lectures delivered before the Boston Society for the Diffusion
of Useful Knowledge.  1842.]


[When a physician attempts to convince a person, who has fallen into
the Homoeopathic delusion, of the emptiness of its pretensions, he is
often answered by a statement of cases in which its practitioners are
thought to have effected wonderful cures.  The main object of the
first of these Lectures is to show, by abundant facts, that such
statements, made by persons unacquainted with the fluctuations of
disease and the fallacies of observation, are to be considered in
general as of little or no value in establishing the truth of a
medical doctrine or the utility of a method of practice.

Those kind friends who suggest to a person suffering from a tedious
complaint, that he "Had better try Homoeopathy," are apt to enforce
their suggestion by adding, that "at any rate it can do no harm."
This may or may not be true as regards the individual.  But it always
does very great harm to the community to encourage ignorance, error,
or deception in a profession which deals with the life and health of
our fellow-creatures.  Whether or not those who countenance
Homoeopathy are guilty of this injustice towards others, the second
of these Lectures may afford them some means of determining.

To deny that good effects may happen from the observance of diet and
regimen when prescribed by Homoeopathists as well as by others, would
be very unfair to them.  But to suppose that men with minds so
constituted as to accept such statements and embrace such doctrines
as make up the so-called science of Homoeopathy are more competent
than others to regulate the circumstances which influence the human
body in health and disease, would be judging very harshly the average
capacity of ordinary practitioners.

To deny that some patients may have been actually benefited through
the influence exerted upon their imaginations, would be to refuse to
Homoeopathy what all are willing to concede to every one of those
numerous modes of practice known to all intelligent persons by an
opprobrious title.

So long as the body is affected through the mind, no audacious
device, even of the most manifestly dishonest character, can fail of
producing occasional good to those who yield it an implicit or even a
partial faith.  The argument founded on this occasional good would be
as applicable in justifying the counterfeiter and giving circulation
to his base coin, on the ground that a spurious dollar had often
relieved a poor man's necessities.

Homoeopathy has come before our public at a period when the growing
spirit of eclecticism has prepared many ingenious and honest minds to
listen to all new doctrines with a candor liable to degenerate into
weakness.  It is not impossible that the pretended evolution of great
and mysterious virtues from infinitely attenuated atoms may have
enticed a few over-refining philosophers, who have slid into a vague
belief that matter subdivided grows less material, and approaches
nearer to a spiritual nature as it requires a more powerful
microscope for its detection.

However this may be, some persons seem disposed to take the ground of
Menzel that the Laity must pass formal judgment between the Physician
and the Homoeopathist, as it once did between Luther and the
Romanists.  The practitioner and the scholar must not, therefore,
smile at the amount of time and labor expended in these Lectures upon
this shadowy system; which, in the calm and serious judgment of many
of the wisest members of the medical profession, is not entitled by
anything it has ever said or done to the notoriety of a public
rebuke, still less to the honors of critical martyrdom.]


I

I have selected four topics for this lecture, the first three of
which I shall touch but slightly, the last more fully.  They are

1.  The Royal cure of the King's Evil, or Scrofula.

2.  The Weapon Ointment, and its twin absurdity, the Sympathetic
Powder.

3.  The Tar-water mania of Bishop Berkeley.

4.  The History of the Metallic Tractors, or Perkinism.

The first two illustrate the ease with which numerous facts are
accumulated to prove the most fanciful and senseless extravagances.

The third exhibits the entire insufficiency of exalted wisdom,
immaculate honesty, and vast general acquirements to make a good
physician of a great bishop.

The fourth shows us the intimate machinery of an extinct delusion,
which flourished only forty years ago; drawn in all its details, as
being a rich and comparatively recent illustration of the
pretensions, the arguments, the patronage, by means of which windy
errors have long been, and will long continue to be, swollen into
transient consequence.  All display in superfluous abundance the
boundless credulity and excitability of mankind upon subjects
connected with medicine.

From the time of Edward the Confessor to Queen Anne, the monarchs of
England were in the habit of touching those who were brought to them
suffering with the scrofula, for the cure of that distemper.  William
the Third had good sense enough to discontinue the practice, but Anne
resumed it, and, among her other patients, performed the royal
operation upon a child, who, in spite of his, disease, grew up at
last into Samuel Johnson.  After laying his hand upon the sufferers,
it was customary for the monarch to hang a gold piece around the neck
of each patient.  Very strict precautions were adopted to prevent
those who thought more of the golden angel hung round the neck by a
white ribbon, than of relief of their bodily infirmities, from making
too many calls, as they sometimes attempted to do.  According to the
statement of the advocates and contemporaries of this remedy, none
ever failed of receiving benefit unless their little faith and
credulity starved their merits.  Some are said to have been cured
immediately on the very touch, others did not so easily get rid of
their swellings, until they were touched a second time.  Several
cases are related, of persons who had been blind for several weeks,
and months, and obliged even to be led to Whitehall, yet recovered
their sight immediately upon being touched, so as to walk away
without any guide."  So widely, at one period, was the belief
diffused, that, in the course of twelve years, nearly a hundred
thousand persons were touched by Charles the Second.  Catholic
divines; in disputes upon the orthodoxy of their church, did not deny
that the power had descended to protestant princes;--Dr. Harpsfield,
in his "Ecclesiastical History of England," admitted it, and in
Wiseman's words, "when Bishop Tooker would make use of this Argument
to prove the Truth of our Church, Smitheus doth not thereupon go
about to deny the Matter of fact; nay, both he and Cope acknowledge
it."  "I myself," says Wiseman, the best English surgical writer of
his day,[Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, vol. iii. p. 103.]
--"I my self have been a frequent Eye-witness of many hundred of
Cures performed by his Majesties Touch alone, without any assistance
of Chirurgery; and those, many of them such as had tired out the
endeavours of able Chirurgeons before they came hither.  It were
endless to recite what I myself have seen, and what I have received
acknowledgments of by Letter, not only from the severall parts of
this Nation, but also from Ireland, Scotland, Jersey, Garnsey.  It is
needless also to remember what Miracles of this nature were performed
by the very Bloud of his late Majesty of Blessed memory, after whose
decollation by the inhuman Barbarity of the Regicides, the reliques
of that were gathered on Chips and in Handkerchieffs by the pious
Devotes, who could not but think so great a suffering in so
honourable and pious a Cause, would be attended by an extraordinary
assistance of God, and some more then ordinary a miracle: nor did
their Faith deceive them in this there point, being so many hundred
that found the benefit of it." [Severall Chirurgicall Treatises.
London.1676.  p.  246.]

Obstinate and incredulous men, as he tells us, accounted for these
cures in three ways: by the journey and change of air the patients
obtained in coming to London; by the influence of imagination; and
the wearing of gold.

To these objections he answers, 1st.  That many of those cured were
inhabitants of the city.  2d.  That the subjects of treatment were
frequently infants.  3d.  That sometimes silver was given, and
sometimes nothing, yet the patients were cured.

A superstition resembling this probably exists at the present time in
some ignorant districts of England and this country.  A writer in a
Medical Journal in the year 1807, speaks of a farmer in Devonshire,
who, being a ninth son of a ninth son, is thought endowed with
healing powers like those of ancient royalty, and who is accustomed
one day in every week to strike for the evil.

I remember that one of my schoolmates told me, when a boy, of a
seventh son of a seventh son, somewhere in Essex County, who touched
for the scrofula, and who used to hang a silver fourpence halfpenny
about the neck of those who came to him, which fourpence halfpenny it
was solemnly affirmed became of a remarkably black color after having
been some time worn, and that his own brother had been subjected to
this extraordinary treatment; but I must add that my schoolmate drew
a bow of remarkable length, strength, and toughness for his tender
years.

One of the most curious examples of the fallacy of popular belief and
the uncertainty of asserted facts in medical experience is to be
found in the history of the UNGUENTUM ARMARIUM, or WEAPON OINTMENT.

Fabricius Hildanus, whose name is familiar to every surgical
scholar, and Lord Bacon, who frequently dipped a little into
medicine, are my principal authorities for the few circumstances I
shall mention regarding it.  The Weapon Ointment was a preparation
used for the healing of wounds, but instead of its being applied to
them, the injured part was washed and bandaged, and the weapon with
which the wound was inflicted was carefully anointed with the
unguent.  Empirics, ignorant barbers, and men of that sort, are said
to have especially employed it.  Still there were not wanting some
among the more respectable members of the medical profession who
supported its claims.  The composition of this ointment was
complicated, in the different formulae given by different
authorities; but some substances addressed to the imagination, rather
than the wound or weapon, entered into all.  Such were portions of
mummy, of human blood, and of moss from the skull of a thief hung in
chains.

Hildanus was a wise and learned man, one of the best surgeons of his
time.  He was fully aware that a part of the real secret of the
Unguentum Armarium consisted in the washing and bandaging the wound
and then letting it alone.  But he could not resist the solemn
assertions respecting its efficacy; he gave way before the outcry of
facts, and therefore, instead of denying all their pretensions, he
admitted and tried to account for them upon supernatural grounds.  As
the virtue of those applications, he says, which are made to the
weapon cannot reach the wound, and as they can produce no effect
without contact, it follows, of necessity, that the Devil must have a
hand in the business; and as he is by far the most long headed and
experienced of practitioners, he cannot find this a matter of any
great difficulty.  Hildanus himself reports, in detail, the case of a
lady who had received a moderate wound, for which the Unguentum
Armarium was employed without the slightest use.  Yet instead of
receiving this flat case of failure as any evidence against the
remedy, he accounts for its not succeeding by the devout character of
the lady, and her freedom from that superstitious and over-
imaginative tendency which the Devil requires in those who are to be
benefited by his devices.

Lord Bacon speaks of the Weapon Ointment, in his Natural History, as
having in its favor the testimony of men of credit, though, in his
own language, he himself "as yet is not fully inclined to believe
it."  His remarks upon the asserted facts respecting it show a
mixture of wise suspicion and partial belief.  He does not like the
precise directions given as to the circumstances under which the
animals from which some of the materials were obtained were to be
killed; for he thought it looked like a provision for an excuse in
case of failure, by laying the fault to the omission of some of these
circumstances.  But he likes well that "they do not observe the
confecting of the Ointment under any certain constellation; which is
commonly the excuse of magical medicines, when they fail, that they
were not made under a fit figure of heaven."  [This was a mistake,
however, since the two recipes given by Hildanus are both very
explicit as to the aspect of the heavens required for different
stages of the process.]  "It was pretended that if the offending
weapon could not be had, it would serve the purpose to anoint a
wooden one made like it."  "This," says Bacon, "I should doubt to be a
device to keep this strange form of cure in request and use; because
many times you cannot come by the weapon itself."  And in closing his
remarks on the statements of the advocates of the ointment, he says,
"Lastly, it will cure a beast as well as a man, which I like best of
all the rest, because it subjecteth the matter to an easy trial."  It
is worth remembering, that more than two hundred years ago, when an
absurd and fantastic remedy was asserted to possess wonderful power,
and when sensible persons ascribed its pretended influence to
imagination, it was boldly answered that the cure took place when the
wounded party did not know of the application made to the weapon, and
even when a brute animal was the subject of the experiment, and that
this assertion, as we all know it was, came in such a shape as to
shake the incredulity of the keenest thinker of his time.  The very
same assertion has been since repeated in favor of Perkinism, and,
since that, of Homoeopathy.

The same essential idea as that of the Weapon Ointment reproduced
itself in the still more famous SYMPATHETIC POWDER.  This Powder was
said to have the faculty, if applied to the blood-stained garments of
a wounded person, to cure his injuries, even though he were at a
great distance at the time.  A friar, returning from the East,
brought the recipe to Europe somewhat before the middle of the
seventeenth century.  The Grand Duke of Florence, in which city the
friar was residing, heard of his cures, and tried, but without
success, to obtain his secret.  Sir Kenehn Digby, an Englishman well
known to fame, was fortunate enough to do him a favor, which wrought
upon his feelings and induced him to impart to his benefactor the
composition of his extraordinary Powder.  This English knight was at
different periods of his life an admiral, a theologian, a critic, a
metaphysician, a politician, and a disciple of Alchemy.  As is not
unfrequent with versatile and inflammable people, he caught fire at
the first spark of a new medical discovery, and no sooner got home to
England than he began to spread the conflagration.

An opportunity soon offered itself to try the powers of the famous
powder.  Mr. J. Howell, having been wounded in endeavoring to part
two of his friends who were fighting a duel, submitted himself to a
trial of the Sympathetic Powder.  Four days after he received his
wounds, Sir Kenehn dipped one of Mr. Howell's gaiters in a solution
of the Powder, and immediately, it is said, the wounds, which were
very painful, grew easy, although the patient, who was conversing in
a corner of the chamber, had not, the least idea of what was doing
with his garter.  He then returned home, leaving his garter in the
hands of Sir Kenelm, who had hung it up to dry, when Mr. Howell sent
his servant in a great hurry to tell him that his wounds were paining
him horribly; the garter was therefore replaced in the solution of
the Powder, "and the patient got well after five or six days of its
continued immersion."

King James First, his son Charles the First, the Duke of Buckingham,
then prime minister, and all the principal personages of the time,
were cognizant of this fact; and James himself, being curious to know
the secret of this remedy, asked it of Sir Kenelm, who revealed it to
him, and his Majesty had the opportunity of making several trials of
its efficacy, "which all succeeded in a surprising manner." [Dict.
des Sciences Medieales.]

The king's physician, Dr. Mayerne, was made master of the secret,
which he carried to France and communicated to the Duke of Mayenne,
who performed many cures by means of it, and taught it to his
surgeon, who, after the Duke's death, sold it to many distinguished
persons, by whose agency it soon ceased to be a secret.  What was
this wonderful substance which so astonished kings, princes, dukes,
knights, and doctors?  Nothing but powdered blue vitriol.  But it was
made to undergo several processes that conferred on it extraordinary
virtues.  Twice or thrice it was to be dissolved, filtered, and
crystallized.  The crystals were to be laid in the sun during the
months of June, July, and August, taking care to turn them carefully
that all should be exposed.  Then they were to be powdered,
triturated, and again exposed to the sun, again reduced to a very
fine powder, and secured in a vessel, while hot, from the sunshine.
If there seem anything remarkable in the fact of such astonishing
properties being developed by this process, it must be from our
short-sightedness, for common salt and charcoal develop powers quite
as marvellous after a certain number of thumps, stirs, and shakes,
from the hands of modern workers of miracles.  In fact the Unguentum
Armarium and Sympathetic Powder resemble some more recent
prescriptions; the latter consisting in an infinite dilution of the
common dose in which remedies are given, and the two former in an
infinite dilution of the common distance at which they are applied.

Whether philosophers, and more especially metaphysicians, have any
peculiar tendency to dabble in drugs and dose themselves with physic,
is a question which might suggest itself to the reader of their
biographies.

When Bishop Berkeley visited the illustrious Malebranche at Paris, he
found him in his cell, cooking in a small pipkin a medicine for an
inflammation of the lungs, from which he was suffering; and the
disease, being unfortunately aggravated by the vehemence of their
discussion, or the contents of the pipkin, carried him off in the
course of a few days.  Berkeley himself afforded a remarkable
illustration of a truth which has long been known to the members of
one of the learned professions, namely, that no amount of talent, or
of acquirements in other departments, can rescue from lamentable
folly those who, without something of the requisite preparation,
undertake to experiment with nostrums upon themselves and their
neighbors.  The exalted character of Berkeley is thus drawn by Sir
James Mackintosh: Ancient learning, exact science, polished society,
modern literature, and the fine arts, contributed to adorn and enrich
the mind of this accomplished man.  All his contemporaries agreed
with the satirist in ascribing

     "'To Berkeley every virtue under heaven.'

"Even the discerning, fastidious, and turbulent Atterbury said, after
an interview with him, 'So much understanding, so much knowledge, so
much innocence, and such humility, I did not think had been the
portion of any but angels, till I saw this gentleman.'"

But among the writings of this great and good man is an Essay of the
most curious character, illustrating his weakness upon the point in
question, and entitled, "Siris, a Chain of Philosophical Reflections
and Inquiries concerning the Virtues of TAR WATER, and divers other
Subjects,"--an essay which begins with a recipe for his favorite
fluid, and slides by gentle gradations into an examination of the
sublimest doctrines of Plato.  To show how far a man of honesty and
benevolence, and with a mind of singular acuteness and depth, may be
run away with by a favorite notion on a subject which his habits and
education do not fit him to investigate, I shall give a short account
of this Essay, merely stating that as all the supposed virtues of Tar
Water, made public in successive editions of his treatise by so
illustrious an author, have not saved it from neglect and disgrace,
it may be fairly assumed that they were mainly imaginary.

The bishop, as is usual in such cases, speaks of himself as
indispensably obliged, by the duty he owes to mankind, to make his
experience public.  Now this was by no means evident, nor does it
follow in general, that because a man has formed a favorable opinion
of a person or a thing he has not the proper means of thoroughly
understanding, he shall be bound to print it, and thus give currency
to his impressions, which may be erroneous, and therefore injurious.
He would have done much better to have laid his impressions before
some experienced physicians and surgeons, such as Dr. Mead and Mr.
Cheselden, to have asked them to try his experiment over again, and
have been guided by their answers.  But the good bishop got excited;
he pleased himself with the thought that he had discovered a great
panacea; and having once tasted the bewitching cup of self-quackery,
like many before and since his time, he was so infatuated with the
draught that he would insist on pouring it down the throats of his
neighbors and all mankind.

The precious fluid was made by stirring a gallon of water with a
quart of tar, leaving it forty-eight hours, and pouring off the clear
water.  Such was the specific which the great metaphysician
recommended for averting and curing all manner of diseases.  It was,
if he might be believed, a preventive of the small-pox, and of great
use in the course of the disease.  It was a cure for impurities of
the blood, coughs, pleurisy, peripneumony, erysipelas, asthma,
indigestion, carchexia, hysterics, dropsy, mortification, scurvy, and
hypochondria.  It was of great use in gout and fevers, and was an
excellent preservative of the teeth and gums; answered all the
purpose of Elixir Proprietatis, Stoughton's drops, diet drinks, and
mineral waters; was particularly to be recommended to sea-faring
persons, ladies, and men of studious and sedentary lives; could never
be taken too long, but, on the contrary, produced advantages which
sometimes did not begin to show themselves for two or three months.

"From my representing Tar Water as good for so many things," says
Berkeley, "some perhaps may conclude it is good for nothing.  But
charity obligeth me to say what I know, and what I think, however it
may be taken.  Men may censure and object as they please, but I
appeal to time and experiment.  Effects misimputed, cases wrong told,
circumstances overlooked, perhaps, too, prejudices and partialities
against truth, may for a time prevail and keep her at the bottom of
her well, from whence nevertheless she emergeth sooner or later, and
strikes the eyes of all who do not keep them shut."  I cannot resist
the temptation of illustrating the bishop's belief in the wonderful
powers of his remedy, by a few sentences from different parts of his
essay.  "The hardness of stubbed vulgar constitutions renders them
insensible of a thousand things that fret and gall those delicate
people, who, as if their skin was peeled off, feel to the quick
everything that touches them.  The tender nerves and low spirits of
such poor creatures would be much relieved by the use of Tar Water,
which might prolong and cheer their lives."  "It [the Tar Water] may
be made stronger for brute beasts, as horses, in whose disorders I
have found it very useful."  "This same water will also give
charitable relief to the ladies, who often want it more than the
parish poor; being many of them never able to make a good meal, and
sitting pale, puny, and forbidden, like ghosts, at their own table,
victims of vapors and indigestion."  It does not appear among the
virtues of Tar Water that "children cried for it," as for some of our
modern remedies, but the bishop says, "I have known children take it
for above six months together with great benefit, and without any
inconvenience; and after long and repeated experience I do esteem it
a most excellent diet drink, fitted to all seasons and ages."  After
mentioning its usefulness in febrile complaints, he says: "I have had
all this confirmed by my own experience in the late sickly season of
the year one thousand seven hundred and forty-one, having had twenty-
five fevers in my own family cured by this medicinal water, drunk
copiously."  And to finish these extracts with a most important
suggestion for the improvement of the British nation: "It is much to
be lamented that our Insulars who act and think so much for
themselves, should yet, from grossness of air and diet, grow stupid
or doat sooner than other people, who, by virtue of elastic air,
water-drinking, and light food, preserve their faculties to extreme
old age; an advantage which may perhaps be approached, if not
equaled, even in these regions, by Tar Water, temperance, and early
hours."

Berkeley died at the age of about seventy; he might have lived
longer, but his fatal illness was so sudden that there was not time
enough to stir up a quart of the panacea.  He was an illustrious man,
but he held two very odd opinions; that tar water was everything, and
that the whole material universe was nothing.

                   ---------------------------

Most of those present have at some time in their lives heard mention
made of the METALLIC TRACTORS, invented by one Dr. Perkins, an
American, and formerly enjoying great repute for the cure of various
diseases.  Many have seen or heard of a satirical poem, written by
one of our own countrymen also, about forty years since, and called
"Terrible Tractoration."  The Metallic Tractors are now so utterly
abandoned that I have only by good fortune fallen upon a single one
of a pair, to show for the sake of illustration.  For more than
thirty years this great discovery, which was to banish at least half
the evils which afflict humanity, has been sleeping undisturbed in
the grave of oblivion.  Not a voice has, for this long period, been
raised in its favor; its noble and learned patrons, its public
institutions, its eloquent advocates, its brilliant promises are all
covered with the dust of silent neglect; and of the generation which
has sprung up since the period when it flourished, very few know
anything of its history, and hardly even the title which in its palmy
days it bore of PERKINISM.  Taking it as settled, then, as no one
appears to answer for it, that Perkinism is entirely dead and gone,
that both in public and private, officially and individually, its
former adherents even allow it to be absolutely defunct, I select it
for anatomical examination.  If this pretended discovery was made
public; if it was long kept before the public; if it was addressed to
the people of different countries; if it was formally investigated by
scientific men, and systematically adopted by benevolent persons, who
did everything in their power to diffuse the knowledge and practice
of it; if various collateral motives, such as interest and vanity,
were embarked in its cause; if, notwithstanding all these things, it
gradually sickened and died, then the conclusion seems a fair one,
that it did not deserve to live.  Contrasting its failure with its
high pretensions, it is fair to call it an imposition; whether an
expressly fraudulent contrivance or not, some might be ready to
question.  Everything historically shown to have happened concerning
the mode of promulgation, the wide diffusion, the apparent success of
this delusion, the respectability and enthusiasm of its advocates, is
of great interest in showing to what extent and by what means a
considerable part of the community may be led into the belief of that
which is to be eventually considered' as an idle folly.  If there is
any existing folly, fraudulent or innocent in its origin, which
appeals to certain arguments for its support; provided that the very
same arguments can be shown to have been used for Perkinism with as
good reason, they will at once fall to the ground.  Still more, if it
shall appear that the general course of any existing delusion bears a
strong resemblance to that of Perkinism, that the former is most
frequently advocated by the same class of persons who were
conspicuous in behalf of the latter, and treated with contempt or
opposed by the same kind of persons who thus treated Perkinism; if
the facts in favor of both have a similar aspect; if the motives of
their originators and propagators may be presumed to have been
similar; then there is every reason to suppose that the existing
folly will follow in the footsteps of the past, and after displaying
a given amount of cunning and credulity in those deceiving and
deceived, will drop from the public view like a fruit which has
ripened into spontaneous rottenness, and be succeeded by the fresh
bloom of some other delusion required by the same excitable portion
of the community.

Dr. Elisha Perkins was born at Norwich, Connecticut, in the year
1740.  He had practised his profession with a good local reputation
for many years, when he fell upon a course of experiments, as it is
related, which led to his great discovery.  He conceived the idea
that metallic substances might have the effect of removing diseases,
if applied in a certain manner; a notion probably suggested by the
then recent experiments of Galvani, in which muscular contractions
were found to be produced by the contact of two metals with the
living fibre.  It was in 1796 that his discovery was promulgated in
the shape of the Metallic Tractors, two pieces of metal, one
apparently iron and the other brass, about three inches long, blunt
at one end and pointed at the other.  These instruments were applied
for the cure of different complaints, such as rheumatism, local
pains, inflammations, and even tumors, by drawing them over the
affected part very lightly for about twenty minutes.  Dr. Perkins
took out a patent for his discovery, and travelled about the country
to diffuse the new practice.  He soon found numerous advocates of his
discovery, many of them of high standing and influence.  In the year
1798 the tractors had crossed the Atlantic, and were publicly
employed in the Royal Hospital at Copenhagen.  About the same time
the son of the inventor, Mr. Benjamin Douglass Perkins, carried them
to London, where they soon attracted attention.  The Danish
physicians published an account of their cases, containing numerous
instances of alleged success, in a respectable octavo volume.  In the
year 1804 an establishment, honored with the name of the Perkinean
Institution, was founded in London.  The transactions of this
institution were published in pamphlets, the Perkinean Society had
public dinners at the Crown and Anchor, and a poet celebrated their
medical triumph in strains like these:

    "See, pointed metals, blest with power t' appease
     The ruthless rage of merciless disease,
     O'er the frail part a subtle fluid pour,
     Drenched with invisible Galvanic shower,
     Till the arthritic staff and crutch forego,
     And leap exulting like the bounding roe!"

While all these things were going on, Mr. Benjamin Douglass Perkins
was calmly pocketing money, so that after some half a dozen years he
left the country with more than ten thousand pounds, which had been
paid him by the believers in Great Britain.  But in spite of all this
success, and the number of those interested and committed in its
behalf, Perkinism soon began to decline, and in 1811 the Tractors are
spoken of by an intelligent writer as being almost forgotten.  Such
was the origin and duration of this doctrine and practice, into the
history of which we will now look a little more narrowly.

Let us see, then, by whose agency this delusion was established and
kept up; whether it was principally by those who were accustomed to
medical pursuits, or those whose habits and modes of reasoning were
different; whether it was with the approbation of those learned
bodies usually supposed to take an interest in scientific
discoveries, or only of individuals whose claims to distinction were
founded upon their position in society, or political station, or
literary eminence; whether the judicious or excitable classes entered
most deeply into it; whether, in short, the scientific men of that
time were deceived, or only intruded upon, and shouted down for the
moment by persons who had no particular call to invade their
precincts.

Not much, perhaps, was to be expected of the Medical Profession in
the way of encouragement.  One Dr. Fuller, who wrote in England,
himself a Perkinist, thus expressed his opinion: "It must be an
extraordinary exertion of virtue and humanity for a medical man,
whose livelihood depends either on the sale of drugs, or on receiving
a guinea for writing a prescription, which must relate to those
drugs, to say to his patient, 'You had better purchase a set of
Tractors to keep in your family; they will cure you without the
expense of my attendance, or the danger of the common medical
practice.'  For very obvious reasons medical men must never be
expected to recommend the use of Perkinism.  The Tractors must trust
for their patronage to the enlightened and philanthropic out of the
profession, or to medical men retired from practice, and who know of
no other interest than the luxury of relieving the distressed.  And I
do not despair of seeing the day when but very few of this
description as well as private families will be without them."

Whether the motives assigned by this medical man to his professional
brethren existed or not, it is true that Dr. Perkins did not gain a
great deal at their hands.  The Connecticut Medical Society expelled
him in 1797 for violating their law against the use of nostrums, or
secret remedies.  The leading English physicians appear to have
looked on with singular apathy or contempt at the miracles which it
was pretended were enacting in the hands of the apostles of the new
practice.  In looking over the reviews of the time, I have found
little beyond brief occasional notices of their pretensions; the
columns of these journals being occupied with subjects of more
permanent interest.  The state of things in London is best learned,
however, from the satirical poem to which I have already alluded as
having been written at the period referred to.  This was entitled,
"Terrible Tractoration!!  A Poetical Petition against Galvanizing
Trumpery and the Perkinistic Institution.  Most respectfully
addressed to the Royal College of Physicians, by Christopher Caustic,
M. D., LL. D., A. S. S., Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians,
Aberdeen, and Honorary Member of no less than nineteen very learned
Societies."  Two editions of this work were published in London in
the years 1803 and 1804, and one or two have been published in this
country.

"Terrible Tractoration" is supposed, by those who never read it, to
be a satire upon the follies of Perkins and his followers.  It is, on
the contrary, a most zealous defence of Perkinism, and a fierce
attack upon its opponents, most especially upon such of the medical
profession as treated the subject with neglect or ridicule.  The
Royal College of Physicians was the more peculiar object of the
attack, but with this body, the editors of some of the leading
periodicals, and several physicians distinguished at that time, and
even now remembered for their services to science and humanity, were
involved in unsparing denunciations.  The work is by no means of the
simply humorous character it might be supposed, but is overloaded
with notes of the most seriously polemical nature.  Much of the
history of the subject, indeed, is to be looked for in this volume.

It appears from this work that the principal members of the medical
profession, so far from hailing Mr. Benjamin Douglass Perkins as
another Harvey or Jenner, looked very coldly upon him and his
Tractors; and it is now evident that, though they were much abused
for so doing, they knew very well what they had to deal with, and
were altogether in the right.  The delusion at last attracted such an
amount of attention as to induce Dr. Haygarth and some others of
respectable standing to institute some experiments which I shall
mention in their proper place, the result of which might have seemed
sufficient to show the emptiness of the whole contrivance.

The Royal Society, that learned body which for ages has constituted
the best tribunal to which Britain can appeal in questions of
science, accepted Mr. Perkins's Tractors and the book written about
them, passed the customary vote of thanks, and never thought of
troubling itself further in the investigation of pretensions of such
an aspect.  It is not to be denied that a considerable number of
physicians did avow themselves advocates of the new practice; but out
of the whole catalogue of those who were publicly proclaimed as such,
no one has ever been known, so far as I am aware, to the scientific
world, except in connection with the short-lived notoriety of
Perkinism.  Who were the people, then, to whose activity, influence,
or standing with the community was owing all the temporary excitement
produced by the Metallic Tractors?

First, those persons who had been induced to purchase a pair of
Tractors.  These little bits of brass and iron, the intrinsic value
of which might, perhaps, amount to ninepence, were sold at five
guineas a pair!  A man who has paid twenty-five dollars for his
whistle is apt to blow it louder and longer than other people.  So it
appeared that when the "Perkinean Society" applied to the possessors
of Tractors in the metropolis to concur in the establishment of a
public institution for the use of these instruments upon the poor,
"it was found that only five out of above a hundred objected to
subscribe, on account of their want of confidence in the efficacy of
the practice; and these," the committee observes, "there is reason to
believe, never gave them a fair trial, probably never used them in
more than one case, and that perhaps a case in which the Tractors had
never been recommended as serviceable."  "Purchasers of the
Tractors," said one of their ardent advocates, "would be among the
last to approve of them if they had reason to suppose themselves
defrauded of five guineas."  He forgot poor Moses, with his "gross of
green spectacles, with silver rims and shagreen cases."  "Dear
mother," cried the boy, "why won't you listen to reason?  I had them
a dead bargain, or I should not have bought them.  The silver rims
alone will sell for double the money."

But it is an undeniable fact, that many persons of considerable
standing, and in some instances holding the most elevated positions
in society, openly patronized the new practice.  In a translation of
a work entitled "Experiments with the Metallic Tractors," originally
published in Danish, thence rendered successively into German and
English, Mr. Benjamin Perkins, who edited the English edition, has
given a copious enumeration of the distinguished individuals, both in
America and Europe, whose patronage he enjoyed.  He goes so far as to
signify that ROYALTY itself was to be included among the number.
When the Perkinean Institution was founded, no less a person than
Lord Rivers was elected President, and eleven other individuals of
distinction, among them Governor Franklin, son of Dr. Franklin,
figured as Vice-Presidents.  Lord Henniker, a member of the Royal
Society, who is spoken of as a man of judgment and talents,
condescended to patronize the astonishing discovery, and at different
times bought three pairs of Tractors.  When the Tractors were
introduced into Europe, a large number of testimonials accompanied
them from various distinguished characters in America, the list of
whom is given in the translation of the Danish work referred to as
follows:

"Those who have individually stated cases, or who have presented
their names to the public as men who approved of this remedy, and
acknowledged themselves instrumental in circulating the Tractors, are
fifty-six in number; thirty-four of whom are physicians and surgeons,
and many of them of the first eminence, thirteen clergymen, most of
whom are doctors of divinity, and connected with the literary
institutions of America; among the remainder are two members of
Congress, one professor of natural philosophy in a college, etc.,
etc."  It seemed to be taken rather hardly by Mr. Perkins that the
translators of the work which he edited, in citing the names of the
advocates of the Metallic Practice, frequently omitted the honorary
titles which should have been annexed.  The testimonials were
obtained by the Danish writer, from a pamphlet published in America,
in which these titles were given in full.  Thus one of these
testimonials is from "John Tyler, Esq., a magistrate in the county
of New London, and late Brigadier-General of the militia in that
State."  The "omission of the General's title" is the subject of
complaint, as if this title were sufficient evidence of the
commanding powers of one of the patrons of tractoration.  A similar
complaint is made when "Calvin Goddard, Esq., of Plainfield, Attorney
at Law, and a member of the Legislature of the State of Connecticut,"
is mentioned without his titular honors, and even on account of the
omission of the proper official titles belonging to "Nathan Pierce,
Esq., Governor and Manager of the Almshouse of Newburyport."  These
instances show the great importance to be attached to civil and
military dignities, in qualifying their holders to judge of
scientific subjects, a truth which has not been overlooked by the
legitimate successors of the Perkinists.  In Great Britain, the
Tractors were not less honored than in America, by the learned and
the illustrious.  The "Perkinistic Committee" made this statement in
their report: "Mr. Perkins has annually laid before the public a
large collection of new cases communicated to him for that purpose by
disinterested and intelligent characters, from almost every quarter
of Great Britain.  In regard to the competency of these vouchers, it
will be sufficient simply to state that, amongst others whose names
have been attached to their communications, are eight professors, in
four different universities, twenty-one regular Physicians, nineteen
Surgeons, thirty Clergymen, twelve of whom are Doctors of Divinity,
and numerous other characters of equal respectability."

It cannot but excite our notice and surprise that the number of
clergymen both in America and Great Britain who thrust forward their
evidence on this medical topic was singularly large in proportion to
that of the members of the medical profession.  Whole pages are
contributed by such worthies as the Rev. Dr. Trotter of Hans Place,
the Rear.  Waring Willett, Chaplain to the Earl of Dunmore, the Rev.
Dr. Clarke, Chaplain to the Prince of Wales.  The style of these
theologico-medical communications may be seen in the following from a
divine who was also professor in one of the colleges of New England.
"I have used the Tractors with success in several other cases in my
own family, and although, like Naaman the Syrian, I cannot tell why
the waters of Jordan should be better than Abana and Pharpar, rivers
of Damascus; yet since experience has proved them so, no reasoning
can change the opinion.  Indeed, the causes of all common facts are,
we think, perfectly well known to us; and it is very probable, fifty
or a hundred years hence, we shall as well know why the Metallic
Tractors should in a few minutes remove violent pains, as we now know
why cantharides and opium will produce opposite effects, namely, we
shall know very little about either excepting facts."  Fifty or a
hundred years hence! if he could have looked forward forty years, he
would have seen the descendants of the "Perkinistic" philosophers
swallowing infinitesimal globules, and knowing and caring as much
about the Tractors as the people at Saratoga Springs do about the
waters of Abana and Pharpar.

I trust it will not be thought in any degree disrespectful to a
profession which we all honor, that I have mentioned the great zeal
of many clergymen in the cause of Perkinism.  I hope, too, that I may
without offence suggest the causes which have often led them out of
their own province into one to which their education has no special
reference.  The members of that profession ought to be, and commonly
are, persons of benevolent character.  Their duties carry them into
the midst of families, and particularly at times when the members of
them are suffering from bodily illness.  It is natural enough that a
strong desire should be excited to alleviate sufferings which may
have defied the efforts of professional skill; as natural that any
remedy which recommends itself to the belief or the fancy of the
spiritual physician should be applied with the hope of benefit; and
perfectly certain that the weakness of human nature, from which no
profession is exempt, will lead him to take the most flattering view
of its effects upon the patient; his own sagacity and judgment being
staked upon the success of the trial.  The inventor of the Tractors
was aware of these truths.  He therefore sent the Tractors
gratuitously to many clergymen, accompanied with a formal certificate
that the holder had become entitled to their possession by the
payment of five guineas.  This was practised in our own neighborhood,
and I remember finding one of these certificates, so presented, which
proved that amongst the risks of infancy I had to encounter Perkins's
Tractors.  Two clergymen of Boston and the vicinity, both well known
to local fame, gave in their testimony to the value of the
instruments thus presented to them; an unusually moderate proportion,
when it is remembered that to the common motives of which I have
spoken was added the seduction of a gift for which the profane public
was expected to pay so largely.

It was remarkable, also, that Perkinism, which had so little success
with the medical and scientific part of the community, found great
favor in the eyes of its more lovely and less obstinate portion.
"The lady of Major Oxholin,"--I quote from Mr. Perkins's volume,--
"having been lately in America, had seen and heard much of the great
effects of Perkinism.  Influenced by a most benevolent disposition,
she brought these Tractors and the pamphlet with her to Europe, with
a laudable desire of extending their utility to her suffering
countrymen."  Such was the channel by which the Tractors were
conveyed to Denmark, where they soon became the ruling passion.
The workmen, says a French writer, could not manufacture them fast
enough.  Women carried them about their persons, and delighted in
bringing them into general use.  To what extent the Tractors were
favored with the patronage of English and American ladies, it is of
course not easy to say, except on general principles, as their names
were not brought before the public.  But one of Dr. Haygarth's
stories may lead us to conjecture that there was a class of female
practitioners who went about doing good with the Tractors in England
as well as in Denmark.  A certain lady had the misfortune to have a
spot as big as a silver penny at the corner of her eye, caused by a
bruise, or some such injury.  Another lady, who was a friend of hers,
and a strong believer in Perkinism, was very anxious to try the
effects of tractoration upon this unfortunate blemish.  The patient
consented; the lady "produced the instruments, and, after drawing
them four or five times over the spot, declared that it changed to a
paler color, and on repeating the use of them a few minutes longer,
that it had almost vanished, and was scarcely visible, and departed
in high triumph at her success."  The lady who underwent the
operation assured the narrator "that she looked in the glass
immediately after, and that not the least visible alteration had
taken place."

It would be a very interesting question, what was the intellectual
character of those persons most conspicuous in behalf of the
Perkinistic delusion?  Such an inquiry might bring to light some
principles which we could hereafter apply to the study of other
popular errors.  But the obscurity into which nearly all these
enthusiasts have subsided renders the question easier to ask than to
answer.  I believe it would have been found that most of these
persons were of ardent temperament and of considerable imagination,
and that their history would show that Perkinism was not the first
nor the last hobby-horse they rode furiously.  Many of them may very
probably have been persons of more than common talent, of active and
ingenious minds, of versatile powers and various acquirements.  Such,
for instance, was the estimable man to whom I have repeatedly
referred as a warm defender of tractoration, and a bitter assailant
of its enemies.  The story tells itself in the biographical preface
to his poem.  He went to London with the view of introducing a
hydraulic machine, which he and his Vermont friends regarded as a
very important invention.  He found, however, that the machine was
already in common use in that metropolis.  A brother Yankee, then in
London, had started the project of a mill, which was to be carried by
the water of the Thames.  He was sanguine enough to purchase one
fifth of this concern, which also proved a failure.  At about the
same period he wrote the work which proved the great excitement of
his mind upon the subject of the transient folly then before the
public.  Originally a lawyer, he was in succession a mechanician, a
poet, and an editor, meeting with far less success in each of these
departments than usually attends men of less varied gifts, but of
more tranquil and phlegmatic composition.  But who is ignorant that
there is a class of minds characterized by qualities like those I
have mentioned; minds with many bright and even beautiful traits; but
aimless and fickle as the butterfly; that settle upon every gayly-
colored illusion as it opens into flower, and flutter away to another
when the first has dropped its leaves, and stands naked in the icy
air of truth!

Let us now look at the general tenor of the arguments addressed by
believers to sceptics and opponents.  Foremost of all, emblazoned at
the head of every column, loudest shouted by every triumphant
disputant, held up as paramount to all other considerations,
stretched like an impenetrable shield to protect the weakest advocate
of the great cause against the weapons of the adversary, was that
omnipotent monosyllable which has been the patrimony of cheats and
the currency of dupes from time immemorial,--Facts! Facts! Facts!
First came the published cases of the American clergymen, brigadier-
generals, almshouse governors, representatives, attorneys, and
esquires.  Then came the published cases of the surgeons of
Copenhagen.  Then followed reports of about one hundred and fifty
cases published in England, "demonstrating the efficacy of the
metallic practice in a variety of complaints both upon the human body
and on horses, etc."  But the progress of facts in Great Britain did
not stop here.  Let those who rely upon the numbers of their
testimonials, as being alone sufficient to prove the soundness and
stability of a medical novelty, digest the following from the report
of the Perkinistic Committee.  "The cases published [in Great
Britain] amounted, in March last, the date of Mr. Perkins's last
publication, to about five thousand.  Supposing that not more than
one cure in three hundred which the Tractors have performed has been
published, and the proportion is probably much greater, it will be
seen that the number, to March last, will have exceeded one million
five hundred thousand!"

Next in order after the appeal to what were called facts, came a
series of arguments, which have been so long bruised and battered
round in the cause of every doctrine or pretension, new, monstrous,
or deliriously impossible, that each of them is as odiously familiar
to the scientific scholar as the faces of so many old acquaintances,
among the less reputable classes, to the officers of police.

No doubt many of my hearers will recognize, in the following
passages, arguments they may have heard brought forward with
triumphant confidence in behalf of some doctrine not yet extinct.  No
doubt some may have honestly thought they proved something; may have
used them with the purpose of convincing their friends, or of
silencing the opponents of their favorite doctrine, whatever that
might be.  But any train of arguments which was contrived for
Perkinism, which was just as applicable to it as to any other new
doctrine in the same branch of science, and which was fully employed
against its adversaries forty years since, might, in common charity,
be suffered to slumber in the grave of Perkinism.  Whether or not the
following sentences, taken literally from the work of Mr. Perkins,
were the originals of some of the idle propositions we hear bandied
about from time to time, let those who listen judge.

The following is the test assumed for the new practice: "If diseases
are really removed, as those persons who have practised extensively
with the Tractors declare, it should seem there would be but little
doubt of their being generally adopted; but if the numerous reports
of their efficacy which have been published are forgeries, or are
unfounded, the practice ought to be crushed."  To this I merely add,
it has been crushed.

The following sentence applies to that a priori judging and uncandid
class of individuals who buy their dinners without tasting all the
food there is in the market.  "On all discoveries there are persons
who, without descending to any inquiry into the truth, pretend to
know, as it were by intuition, that newly asserted facts are founded
in the grossest errors.  These were those who knew that Harvey's
report of the circulation of the blood was a preposterous and
ridiculous suggestion, and in latter later days there were others who
knew that Franklin deserved reproach for declaring that points were
preferable to balls for protecting buildings from lightning."

Again: "This unwarrantable mode of offering assertion for proof, so
unauthorized and even unprecedented except in the condemnation of a
Galileo, the persecution of a Copernicus, and a few other acts of
inquisitorial authority, in the times of ignorance and superstition,
affords but a lamentable instance of one of his remarks, that this is
far from being the Age of Reason."

"The most valuable medicines in the Materia Medica act on principles
of which we are totally ignorant.  None have ever yet been able to
explain how opium produces sleep, or how bark cures intermittent
fevers; and yet few, it is hoped, will be so absurd as to desist from
the use of these important articles because they know nothing of the
principle of their operations."  Or if the argument is preferred, in
the eloquent language of the Perkinistic poet:

    "What though the CAUSES may not be explained,
     Since these EFFECTS are duly ascertained,
     Let not self-interest, prejudice, or pride,
     Induce mankind to set the means aside;
     Means which, though simple, are by
     Heaven designed to alleviate the woes of human kind."

This course of argument is so often employed, that it deserves to be
expanded a little, so that its length and breadth may be fairly seen.
A series of what are called facts is brought forward to prove some
very improbable doctrine.  It is objected by judicious people, or
such as have devoted themselves to analogous subjects, that these
assumed facts are in direct opposition to all that is known of the
course of nature, that the universal experience of the past affords a
powerful presumption against their truth, and that in proportion to
the gravity of these objections, should be the number and competence
of the witnesses.  The answer is a ready one.  What do we know of the
mysteries of Nature?  Do we understand the intricate machinery of the
Universe?  When to this is added the never-failing quotation,

    "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
     Than are dreamt of in your philosophy,"--

the question is thought to be finally disposed of.

Take the case of astrology as an example.  It is in itself strange
and incredible that the relations of the heavenly bodies to each
other at a given moment of time, perhaps half a century ago, should
have anything to do with my success or misfortune in any undertaking
of to-day.  But what right have I to say it cannot be so?  Can I bind
the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion?  I do
not know by what mighty magic the planets roll in their fluid paths,
confined to circles as unchanging as if they were rings of steel, nor
why the great wave of ocean follows in a sleepless round upon the
skirts of moonlight; nor cam I say from any certain knowledge that
the phases of the heavenly bodies, or even the falling of the leaves
of the forest, or the manner in which the sands lie upon the sea-
shore, may not be knit up by invisible threads with the web of human
destiny.  There is a class of minds much more ready to believe that
which is at first sight incredible, and because it is incredible,
than what is generally thought reasonable.  Credo quia impossibile
est,--"I believe, because it is impossible,"--is an old paradoxical
expression which might be literally applied to this tribe of persons.
And they always succeed in finding something marvellous, to call out
the exercise of their robust faith.  The old Cabalistic teachers
maintained that there was not a verse, line, word, or even letter in
the Bible which had not a special efficacy either to defend the
person who rightly employed it, or to injure his enemies; always
provided the original Hebrew was made use of.  In the hands of modern
Cabalists every substance, no matter how inert, acquires wonderful
medicinal virtues, provided it be used in a proper state of purity
and subdivision.

I have already mentioned the motives attributed by the Perkinists to
the Medical Profession, as preventing its members from receiving the
new but unwelcome truths.  This accusation is repeated in different
forms and places, as, for instance, in the following passage:
"Will the medical man who has spent much money and labor in the
pursuit of the arcana of Physic, and on the exercise of which depends
his support in life, proclaim the inefficacy of his art, and
recommend a remedy to his patient which the most unlettered in
society can employ as advantageously as himself? and a remedy, too,
which, unlike the drops, the pills, the powders, etc., of the Materia
Medica, is inconsumable, and ever in readiness to be employed in
successive diseases?"

As usual with these people, much indignation was expressed at any
parallel between their particular doctrine and practice and those of
their exploded predecessors.  "The motives," says the disinterested
Mr. Perkins, "which must have impelled to this attempt at classing
the METALLIC PRACTICE with the most paltry of empyrical projects, are
but too thinly veiled to escape detection."

To all these arguments was added, as a matter of course, an appeal to
the feelings of the benevolent in behalf of suffering humanity, in
the shape of a notice that the poor would be treated gratis.  It is
pretty well understood that this gratuitous treatment of the poor
does not necessarily imply an excess of benevolence, any more than
the gratuitous distribution of a trader's shop-bills is an evidence
of remarkable generosity; in short, that it is one of those things
which honest men often do from the best motives, but which rogues and
impostors never fail to announce as one of their special
recommendations.  It is astonishing to see how these things brighten
up at the touch of Mr. Perkins's poet:

    "Ye worthy, honored, philanthropic few,
     The muse shall weave her brightest wreaths for you,
     Who in Humanity's bland cause unite,
     Nor heed the shaft by interest aimed or spite;
     Like the great Pattern of Benevolence,
     Hygeia's blessings to the poor dispense;
     And though opposed by folly's servile brood,
     ENJOY THE LUXURY OF DOING GOOD."

Having thus sketched the history of Perkinism in its days of
prosperity; having seen how it sprung into being, and by what means
it maintained its influence, it only remains to tell the brief story
of its discomfiture and final downfall.  The vast majority of the
sensible part of the medical profession were contented, so far as we
can judge, to let it die out of itself.  It was in vain that the
advocates of this invaluable discovery exclaimed over their perverse
and interested obstinacy,--in vain that they called up the injured
ghosts of Harvey, Galileo, and Copernicus to shame that unbelieving
generation; the Baillies and the Heberdens,--men whose names have
come down to us as synonymous with honor and wisdom,--bore their
reproaches in meek silence, and left them unanswered to their fate.
There were some others, however, who, believing the public to labor
under a delusion, thought it worth while to see whether the charm
would be broken by an open trial of its virtue, as compared with that
of some less hallowed formula.  It must be remembered that a peculiar
value was attached to the Metallic Tractors, as made and patented by
Mr. Perkins.  Dr. Haygarth, of Bath, performed various experiments
upon patients afflicted with different complaints,--the patients
supposing that the real five-guinea Tractors were employed.  Strange
to relate, he obtained equally wonderful effects with Tractors of
lead and of wood; with nails, pieces of bone, slate pencil, and
tobacco-pipe.  Dr. Alderson employed sham Tractors made of wood, and
produced such effects upon five patients that they returned solemn
thanks in church for their cures.  A single specimen of these cases
may stand for all of them.  Ann Hill had suffered for some months
from pain in the right arm and shoulder.  The Tractors (wooden ones)
were applied, and in the space of five minutes she expressed herself
relieved in the following apostrophe: "Bless me! why, who could have
thought it, that them little things could pull the pain from one.
Well, to be sure, the longer one lives, the more one sees; ah, dear!"

These experiments did not result in the immediate extinction of
Perkinism.  Doubtless they were a great comfort to many obstinate
unbelievers, and helped to settle some sceptical minds; but for the
real Perkinistic enthusiasts, it may be questioned whether they would
at that time have changed their opinion though one had risen from the
dead to assure them that it was an error.  It perished without
violence, by an easy and natural process.  Like the famous toy of
Mongolfier, it rose by means of heated air,--the fevered breath of
enthusiastic ignorance,--and when this grew cool, as it always does
in a little while, it collapsed and fell.

And now, on reviewing the whole subject, how shall we account for the
extraordinary prevalence of the belief in Perkinism among a portion
of what is supposed to be the thinking part of the community?

Could the cures have been real ones, produced by the principle of
ANIMAL MAGNETISM?  To this it may be answered that the Perkinists
ridiculed the idea of approximating Mesmer and the founder of their
own doctrine, that nothing like the somnambulic condition seems to
have followed the use of the Tractors, and that neither the exertion
of the will nor the powers of the individual who operated seem to
have been considered of any consequence.  Besides, the absolute
neglect into which the Tractors soon declined is good evidence that
they were incapable of affording any considerable and permanent
relief in the complaints for the cure of which they were applied.

Of course a large number of apparent cures were due solely to nature;
which is true under every form of treatment, orthodox or empirical.
Of course many persons experienced at least temporary relief from the
strong impression made upon their minds by this novel and marvellous
method of treatment.

Many, again, influenced by the sanguine hopes of those about them,
like dying people, who often say sincerely, from day to day, that
they are getting better, cheated themselves into a false and short-
lived belief that they were cured; and as happens in such cases, the
public never knew more than the first half of the story.

When it was said to the Perkinists, that whatever effects they
produced were merely through the imagination, they declared (like the
advocates of the ROYAL TOUCH and the UNGUENTUM ARMARIUM) that this
explanation was sufficiently disproved by the fact of numerous and
successful cures which had been witnessed in infants and brute
animals.  Dr. Haygarth replied to this, that "in these cases it is
not the Patient, but the Observer, who is deceived by his own
imagination," and that such may be the fact, we have seen in the case
of the good lady who thought she had conjured away the spot from her
friend's countenance, when it remained just as before.

As to the motives of the inventor and vender of the Tractors, the
facts must be allowed to speak for themselves.  But when two little
bits of brass and iron are patented, as an invention, as the result
of numerous experiments, when people are led, or even allowed, to
infer that they are a peculiar compound, when they are artfully
associated with a new and brilliant discovery (which then happened to
be Galvanism), when they are sold at many hundred times their value,
and the seller prints his opinion that a Hospital will suffer
inconvenience, "unless it possesses many sets of the Tractors, and
these placed in the hands of the patients to practise on each other,"
one cannot but suspect that they were contrived in the neighborhood
of a wooden nutmeg factory; that legs of ham in that region are not
made of the best mahogany; and that such as buy their cucumber seed
in that vicinity have to wait for the fruit as long as the Indians
for their crop of gunpowder.


                   ---------------------------

The succeeding lecture will be devoted to an examination of the
doctrines of Samuel Hahnemann and his disciples; doctrines which some
consider new and others old; the common title of which is variously
known as Ho-moeopathy, Homoe-op-athy, Homoeo-paith-y, or Hom'pathy,
and the claims of which are considered by some as infinitely
important, and by many as immeasurably ridiculous.

I wish to state, for the sake of any who may be interested in the
subject, that I shall treat it, not by ridicule, but by argument;
perhaps with great freedom, but with good temper and in peaceable
language; with very little hope of reclaiming converts, with no
desire of making enemies, but with a firm belief that its pretensions
and assertions cannot stand before a single hour of calm
investigation.




II.

It may be thought that a direct attack upon the pretensions of
HOMOEOPATHY is an uncalled-for aggression upon an unoffending
doctrine and its peaceful advocates.

But a little inquiry will show that it has long assumed so hostile a
position with respect to the Medical Profession, that any trouble I,
or any other member of that profession, may choose to bestow upon it
may be considered merely as a matter of self-defence.  It began with
an attempt to show the insignificance of all existing medical
knowledge.  It not only laid claim to wonderful powers of its own,
but it declared the common practice to be attended with the most
positively injurious effects, that by it acute diseases are
aggravated, and chronic diseases rendered incurable.  It has at
various times brought forward collections of figures having the air
of statistical documents, pretending to show a great proportional
mortality among the patients of the Medical Profession, as compared
with those treated according to its own rules.  Not contented with
choosing a name of classical origin for itself, it invented one for
the whole community of innocent physicians, assuring them, to their
great surprise, that they were all ALLOPATHISTS, whether they knew it
or not, and including all the illustrious masters of the past, from
Hippocrates down to Hunter, under the same gratuitous title.  The
line, then, has been drawn by the champions of the new doctrine; they
have lifted the lance, they have sounded the charge, and are
responsible for any little skirmishing which may happen.

But, independently of any such grounds of active resistance, the
subject involves interests so disproportioned to its intrinsic
claims, that it is no more than an act of humanity to give it a
public examination.  If the new doctrine is not truth, it is a
dangerous, a deadly error.  If it is a mere illusion, and acquires
the same degree of influence that we have often seen obtained by
other illusions, there is not one of my audience who may not have
occasion to deplore the fatal credulity which listened to its
promises.

I shall therefore undertake a sober examination of its principles,
its facts, and some points of its history.  The limited time at my
disposal requires me to condense as much as possible what I have to
say, but I shall endeavor to be plain and direct in expressing it.
Not one statement shall be made which cannot be supported by
unimpeachable reference: not one word shall be uttered which I am not
as willing to print as to speak.  I have no quibbles to utter, and I
shall stoop to answer none; but, with full faith in the sufficiency
of a plain statement of facts and reasons, I submit the subject to
the discernment of my audience.


The question may be asked in the outset,--Have you submitted the
doctrines you are professing to examine to the test of long-repeated
and careful experiment; have you tried to see whether they were true
or not?  To this I answer, that it is abundantly evident, from what
has often happened, that it would be of no manner of use for me to
allege the results of any experiments I might have instituted.  Again
and again have the most explicit statements been made by the most
competent persons of the utter failure of all their trials, and there
were the same abundant explanations offered as used to be for the
Unguentum Armarium arid the Metallic Tractors.  I could by no
possibility perform any experiments the result of which could not be
easily explained away so as to be of no conclusive significance.
Besides, as arguments in favor of Homoeopathy are constantly
addressed to the public in journals, pamphlets, and even lectures, by
inexperienced dilettanti, the same channel must be open to all its
opponents.

It is necessary, for the sake of those to whom the whole subject may
be new, to give in the smallest possible compass the substance of the
Homoeopathic Doctrine.  Samuel Hahnemann, its founder, is a German
physician, now living in Paris, [Hahnemann died in 1843.] at the age
of eighty-seven years.  In 1796 he published the first paper
containing his peculiar notions; in 1805 his first work on the
subject; in 1810 his somewhat famous "Organon of the Healing Art;"
the next year what he called the "Pure Materia Medica;" and in 1828
his last work, the "Treatise on Chronic Diseases."  He has therefore
been writing at intervals on his favorite subject for nearly half a
century.

The one great doctrine which constitutes the basis of Homoeopathy as
a system is expressed by the Latin aphorism,

               "SIMILIA SIBILIBUS CURANTUR,"

or like cures like, that is, diseases are cured by agents capable of
producing symptoms resembling those found in the disease under
treatment.  A disease for Hahnemann consists essentially in a group
of symptoms.  The proper medicine for any disease is the one which is
capable of producing a similar group of symptoms when given to a
healthy person.

It is of course necessary to know what are the trains of symptoms
excited by different substances, when administered to persons in
health, if any such can be shown to exist.  Hahnemann and his
disciples give catalogues of the symptoms which they affirm were
produced upon themselves or others by a large number of drugs which
they submitted to experiment.

The second great fact which Hahnemann professes to have established
is the efficacy of medicinal substances reduced to a wonderful degree
of minuteness or dilution.  The following account of his mode of
preparing his medicines is from his work on Chronic Diseases, which
has not, I believe, yet been translated into English.  A grain of the
substance, if it is solid, a drop if it is liquid, is to be added to
about a third part of one hundred grains of sugar of milk in an
unglazed porcelain capsule which has had the polish removed from the
lower part of its cavity by rubbing it with wet sand; they are to be
mingled for an instant with a bone or horn spatula, and then rubbed
together for six minutes; then the mass is to be scraped together
from the mortar and pestle, which is to take four minutes; then to be
again rubbed for six minutes.  Four minutes are then to be devoted to
scraping the powder into a heap, and the second third of the hundred
grains of sugar of milk to be added.  Then they are to be stirred an
instant and rubbed six minutes,--again to be scraped together four
minutes and forcibly rubbed six; once more scraped together for four
minutes, when the last third of the hundred grains of sugar of milk
is to be added and mingled by stirring with the spatula; six minutes
of forcible rubbing, four of scraping together, and six more
(positively the last six) of rubbing, finish this part of the
process.

Every grain of this powder contains the hundredth of a grain of the
medicinal substance mingled with the sugar of milk.  If, therefore, a
grain of the powder just prepared is mingled with another hundred
grains of sugar of milk, and the process just described repeated, we
shall have a powder of which every grain contains the hundredth of
the hundredth, or the ten thousandth part of a grain of the medicinal
substance.  Repeat the same process with the same quantity of fresh
sugar of milk, and every grain of your powder will contain the
millionth of a grain of the medicinal substance.  When the powder is
of this strength, it is ready to employ in the further solutions and
dilutions to be made use of in practice.

A grain of the powder is to be taken, a hundred drops of alcohol are
to be poured on it, the vial is to be slowly turned for a few
minutes, until the powder is dissolved, and two shakes are to be
given to it.  On this point I will quote Hahnemann's own words.
"A long experience and multiplied observations upon the sick lead me
within the last few years to prefer giving only two shakes to
medicinal liquids, whereas I formerly used to give ten."  The process
of dilution is carried on in the same way as the attenuation of the
powder was done; each successive dilution with alcohol reducing the
medicine to a hundredth part of the quantity of that which preceded
it.  In this way the dilution of the original millionth of a grain of
medicine contained in the grain of powder operated on is carried
successively to the billionth, trillionth, quadrillionth,
quintillionth, and very often much higher fractional divisions.  A
dose of any of these medicines is a minute fraction of a drop,
obtained by moistening with them one or more little globules of
sugar, of which Hahnemann says it takes about two hundred to weigh a
grain.

As an instance of the strength of the medicines prescribed by
Hahnemann, I will mention carbonate of lime.  He does not employ
common chalk, but prefers a little portion of the friable part of an
oystershell.  Of this substance, carried to the sextillionth degree,
so much as one or two globules of the size mentioned can convey is a
common dose.  But for persons of very delicate nerves it is proper
that the dilution should be carried to the decillionth degree.  That
is, an important medicinal effect is to be expected from the two
hundredth or hundredth part of the millionth of the millionth of the
millionth of the millionth of the millionth of the millionth of the
millionth of the millionth of the millionth of the millionth of a
grain of oyster-shell.  This is only the tenth degree of potency, but
some of his disciples profess to have obtained palpable effects from
"much higher dilutions."

The third great doctrine of Hahnemann is the following.  Seven
eighths at least of all chronic diseases are produced by the
existence in the system of that infectious disorder known in the
language of science by the appellation of PSORA, but to the less
refined portion of the community by the name of ITCH.  In the words
of Hahnemann's "Organon,"  "This Psora is the sole true and
fundamental cause that produces all the other countless forms of
disease, which, under the names of nervous debility, hysteria,
hypochondriasis, insanity, melancholy, idiocy, madness, epilepsy, and
spasms of all kinds, softening of the bones, or rickets, scoliosis
and cyphosis, caries, cancer, fungua haematodes, gout,--yellow
jaundice and cyanosis, dropsy,--"

["The degrees of DILUTION must not be confounded with those of
POTENCY.  Their relations may be seen by this table:

lst dilution,--One hundredth of a drop or grain.

2d       "      One ten thousandth.

3d       "      One millionth, marked I.

4th      "      One hundred millionth.

5th      "      One ten thousand millionth.

6th      "      One million millionth, or one billionth, marked II.

7th      "      One hundred billionth.

8th      "      One ten thousand billionth.

9th      "      One million billionth, or one trillionth, marked III.

10th     "      One hundred trillionth.

11th     "      One ten thousand trillionth.

12th     "      One million trillionth, or one quadrillionth, marked
                IV.,--and so on indefinitely.


The large figures denote the degrees of POTENCY.]


"gastralgia, epistaxis, haemoptysis,--asthma and suppuration of the
lungs,--megrim, deafness, cataract and amaurosis,--paralysis, loss of
sense, pains of every kind, etc., appear in our pathology as so many
peculiar, distinct, and independent diseases."

For the last three centuries, if the same authority may be trusted,
under the influence of the more refined personal habits which have
prevailed, and the application of various external remedies which
repel the affection from the skin; Psora has revealed itself in these
numerous forms of internal disease, instead of appearing, as in
former periods, under the aspect of an external malady.

These are the three cardinal doctrines of Hahnemann, as laid down in
those standard works of Homoeopathy, the "Organon" and the "Treatise
on Chronic Diseases."

Several other principles may be added, upon all of which he insists
with great force, and which are very generally received by his
disciples.

1.  Very little power is allowed to the curative efforts of nature.
Hahnemann goes so far as to say that no one has ever seen the simple
efforts of nature effect the durable recovery of a patient from a
chronic disease.  In general, the Homoeopathist calls every recovery
which happens under his treatment a cure.

2.  Every medicinal substance must be administered in a state of the
most perfect purity, and uncombined with any other.  The union of
several remedies in a single prescription destroys its utility, and,
according to the "Organon," frequently adds a new disease.

3.  A large number of substances commonly thought to be inert develop
great medicinal powers when prepared in the manner already described;
and a great proportion of them are ascertained to have specific
antidotes in case their excessive effects require to be neutralized.

4.  Diseases should be recognized, as far as possible, not by any of
the common names imposed upon them, as fever or epilepsy, but as
individual collections of symptoms, each of which differs from every
other collection.

5.  The symptoms of any complaint must be described with the most
minute exactness, and so far as possible in the patient's own words.
To illustrate the kind of circumstances the patient is expected to
record, I will mention one or two from the 313th page of the
"Treatise on Chronic Diseases,"--being the first one at which I
opened accidentally.

"After dinner, disposition to sleep; the patient winks."

"After dinner, prostration and feeling of weakness (nine days after
taking the remedy)."

This remedy was that same oyster-shell which is to be prescribed
"fractions of the sextillionth or decillionth degree."  According to
Hahnemann, the action of a single dose of the size mentioned does not
fully display itself in some cases until twenty-four or even thirty
days after it is taken, and in such instances has not exhausted its
good effects until towards the fortieth or fiftieth day,--before
which time it would be absurd and injurious to administer a new
remedy.

So much for the doctrines of Hahnemann, which have been stated
without comment, or exaggeration of any of their features, very much
as any adherent of his opinions might have stated them, if obliged to
compress them into so narrow a space.

Does Hahnemann himself represent Homoeopathy as it now exists?  He
certainly ought to be its best representative, after having created
it, and devoted his life to it for half a century.  He is spoken of
as the great physician of the time, in most, if not all Homoeopathic
works.  If he is not authority on the subject of his own doctrines,
who is?  So far as I am aware, not one tangible discovery in the
so-called science has ever been ascribed to any other observer; at
least, no general principle or law, of consequence enough to claim
any prominence in Homoeopathic works, has ever been pretended to have
originated with any of his illustrious disciples.  He is one of the
only two Homoeopathic writers with whom, as I shall mention, the
Paris publisher will have anything to do upon his own account.  The
other is Jahr, whose Manual is little more than a catalogue of
symptoms and remedies.  If any persons choose to reject Hahnemann as
not in the main representing Homoeopathy, if they strike at his
authority, if they wink out of sight his deliberate and formally
announced results, it is an act of suicidal rashness; for upon his
sagacity and powers of observation, and experience, as embodied in
his works, and especially in his Materia Medica, repose the
foundations of Homoeopathy as a practical system.

So far as I can learn from the conflicting statements made upon the
subject, the following is the present condition of belief.

1.  All of any note agree that the law Similia similibus is the only
fundamental principle in medicine.  Of course if any man does not
agree to this the name Homoeopathist can no longer be applied to him
with propriety.

2.  The belief in and employment of the infinitesimal doses is
general, and in some places universal, among the advocates of
Homoeopathy; but a distinct movement has been made in Germany to get
rid of any restriction to the use of these doses, and to employ
medicines with the same license as other practitioners.

3.  The doctrine of the origin of most chronic diseases in Psora,
notwithstanding Hahnemann says it cost him twelve years of study and
research to establish the fact and its practical consequences, has
met with great neglect and even opposition from very many of his own
disciples.

It is true, notwithstanding, that, throughout most of their writings
which I have seen, there runs a prevailing tone of great deference to
Hahnemann's opinions, a constant reference to his authority, a
general agreement with the minor points of his belief, and a pretence
of harmonious union in a common faith. [Those who will take the
trouble to look over Hull's Translation of Jahr's Manual may observe
how little comparative space is given to remedies resting upon any
other authority than that of Hahnemann.]

Many persons, and most physicians and scientific men, would be
satisfied with the statement of these doctrines, and examine them no
further.  They would consider it vastly more probable that any
observer in so fallacious and difficult a field of inquiry as
medicine had been led into error, or walked into it of his own
accord, than that such numerous and extraordinary facts had really
just come to light.  They would feel a right to exercise the same
obduracy towards them as the French Institute is in the habit of
displaying when memoirs or models are offered to it relating to the
squaring of the circle or perpetual motion; which it is the rule to
pass over without notice.  They would feel as astronomers and natural
philosophers must have felt when, some half a dozen years ago, an
unknown man came forward, and asked for an opportunity to demonstrate
to Arago and his colleagues that the moon and planets were at a
distance of a little more than a hundred miles from the earth.  And
so they would not even look into Homoeopathy, though all its
advocates should exclaim in the words of Mr. Benjamin Douglass
Perkins, vender of the Metallic Tractors, that "On all discoveries
there are persons who, without descending to any inquiry into the
truth, pretend to know, as it were by intuition, that newly asserted
facts are founded in the grossest errors."  And they would lay their
heads upon their pillows with a perfectly clear conscience, although
they were assured that they were behaving in the same way that people
of old did towards Harvey, Galileo, and Copernicus, the identical
great names which were invoked by Mr. Benjamin Douglass Perkins.

But experience has shown that the character of these assertions is
not sufficient to deter many, from examining their claims to belief.
I therefore lean but very slightly on the extravagance and extreme
apparent singularity of their pretensions.  I might have omitted
them, but on the whole it seemed more just to the claims of my
argument to suggest the vast complication of improbabilities involved
in the statements enumerated.  Every one must of course judge for
himself as to the weight of these objections, which are by no means
brought forward as a proof of the extravagance of Homoeopathy, but
simply as entitled to a brief consideration before the facts of the
case are submitted to our scrutiny.

The three great asserted discoveries of Hahnemann are entirely
unconnected with and independent of each other.  Were there any
natural relation between them it would seem probable enough that the
discovery of the first would have led to that of the others.  But
assuming it to be a fact that diseases are cured by remedies capable
of producing symptoms like their own, no manifest relation exists
between this fact and the next assertion, namely, the power of the
infinitesimal doses.  And allowing both these to be true, neither has
the remotest affinity to the third new doctrine, that which declares
seven eighths of all chronic diseases to be owing to Psora.

This want of any obvious relation between Hahnemann's three cardinal
doctrines appears to be self-evident upon inspection.  But if, as is
often true with his disciples, they prefer the authority of one of
their own number, I will refer them to Dr. Trinks's paper on the
present state of Homoeopathy in Europe, with which, of course, they
are familiar, as his name is mentioned as one of the most prominent
champions of their faith, in their American official organ.  It would
be a fact without a parallel in the history, not merely of medicine,
but of science, that three such unconnected and astonishing
discoveries, each of them a complete revolution of all that ages of
the most varied experience had been taught to believe, should spring
full formed from the brain of a single individual.

Let us look a moment at the first of his doctrines.  Improbable
though it may seem to some, there is no essential absurdity involved
in the proposition that diseases yield to remedies capable of
producing like symptoms.  There are, on the other hand, some
analogies which lend a degree of plausibility to the statement.
There are well-ascertained facts, known from the earliest periods of
medicine, showing that, under certain circumstances, the very
medicine which, from its known effects, one would expect to aggravate
the disease, may contribute to its relief.  I may be permitted to
allude, in the most general way, to the case in which the spontaneous
efforts of an overtasked stomach are quieted by the agency of a drug
which that organ refuses to entertain upon any terms.  But that every
cure ever performed by medicine should have been founded upon this
principle, although without the knowledge of a physician; that the
Homoeopathic axiom is, as Hahnemann asserts, "the sole law of nature
in therapeutics," a law of which nothing more than a transient
glimpse ever presented itself to the innumerable host of medical
observers, is a dogma of such sweeping extent, and pregnant novelty,
that it demands a corresponding breadth and depth of unquestionable
facts to cover its vast pretensions.

So much ridicule has been thrown upon the pretended powers of the
minute doses that I shall only touch upon this point for the purpose
of conveying, by illustrations, some shadow of ideas far transcending
the powers of the imagination to realize.  It must be remembered that
these comparisons are not matters susceptible of dispute, being
founded on simple arithmetical computations, level to the capacity of
any intelligent schoolboy.  A person who once wrote a very small
pamphlet made some show of objecting to calculations of thus kind, on
the ground that the highest dilutions could easily be made with a few
ounces of alcohol.  But he should have remembered that at every
successive dilution he lays aside or throws away ninety-nine
hundredths of the fluid on which he is operating, and that, although
he begins with a drop, he only prepares a millionth, billionth,
trillionth, and similar fractions of it, all of which, added
together, would constitute but a vastly minute portion of the drop
with which he began.  But now let us suppose we take one single drop
of the Tincture of Camomile, and that the whole of this were to be
carried through the common series of dilutions.

A calculation nearly like the following was made by Dr. Panvini, and
may be readily followed in its essential particulars by any one who
chooses.

For the first dilution it would take 100 drops of alcohol.

For the second dilution it would take 10;000 drops, or about a pint.

For the third dilution it would take 100 pints.

For the fourth dilution it would take 10,000 pints, or more than
1,000 gallons, and so on to the ninth dilution, which would take ten
billion gallons, which he computed would fill the basin of Lake
Agnano, a body of water two miles in circumference.  The twelfth
dilution would of course fill a million such lakes.  By the time the
seventeenth degree of dilution should be reached, the alcohol
required would equal in quantity the waters of ten thousand Adriatic
seas.  Trifling errors must be expected, but they are as likely to be
on one side as the other, and any little matter like Lake Superior or
the Caspian would be but a drop in the bucket.

Swallowers of globules, one of your little pellets, moistened in the
mingled waves of one million lakes of alcohol, each two miles in
circumference, with which had been blended that one drop of Tincture
of Camomile, would be of precisely the strength recommended for that
medicine in your favorite Jahr's Manual, "against the most sudden,
frightful, and fatal diseases!"  [In the French edition of 1834, the
proper doses of the medicines are mentioned, and Camomile is marked
IV.  Why are the doses omitted in Hull's Translation, except in three
instances out of the whole two hundred remedies, notwithstanding the
promise in the preface that "some remarks upon the doses used may be
found at the head of each medicine"?  Possibly because it makes no
difference whether they are employed in one Homoeopathic dose or
another; but then it is very singular that such precise directions
were formerly given in the same work, and that Hahnemann's
"experience" should have led him to draw the nice distinctions we
have seen in a former part of this Lecture (p. 44).]

And proceeding on the common data, I have just made a calculation
which shows that this single drop of Tincture of Camomile, given in
the quantity ordered by Jahr's Manual, would have supplied every
individual of the whole human family, past and present, with more
than five billion doses each, the action of each dose lasting about
four days.

Yet this is given only at the quadrillionth, or fourth degree of
potency, and various substances are frequently administered at the
decillionth or tenth degree, and occasionally at still higher
attenuations with professed medicinal results.  Is there not in this
as great an exception to all the hitherto received laws of nature as
in the miracle of the loaves and fishes?  Ask this question of a
Homoeopathist, and he will answer by referring to the effects
produced by a very minute portion of vaccine matter, or the
extraordinary diffusion of odors.  But the vaccine matter is one of
those substances called morbid poisons, of which it is a peculiar
character to multiply themselves, when introduced into the system, as
a seed does in the soil.  Therefore the hundredth part of a grain of
the vaccine matter, if no more than this is employed, soon increases
in quantity, until, in the course of about a week, it is a grain or
more, and can be removed in considerable drops.  And what is a very
curious illustration of Homoeopathy, it does not produce its most.
characteristic effects until it is already in sufficient quantity not
merely to be visible, but to be collected for further use.  The
thoughtlessness which can allow an inference to be extended from a
product of disease possessing this susceptibility of multiplication
when conveyed into the living body, to substances of inorganic
origin, such as silex or sulphur, would be capable of arguing that a
pebble may produce a mountain, because an acorn can become a forest.

As to the analogy to be found between the alleged action of the
infinitely attenuated doses, and the effects of some odorous
substances which possess the extraordinary power of diffusing their
imponderable emanations through a very wide space, however it may be
abused in argument, and rapidly as it evaporates on examination, it
is not like that just mentioned, wholly without meaning.  The fact of
the vast diffusion of some odors, as that of musk or the rose, for
instance, has long been cited as the most remarkable illustration of
the divisibility of matter, and the nicety of the senses.  And if
this were compared with the effects of a very minute dose of morphia
on the whole system, or the sudden and fatal impression of a single
drop of prussic acid, or, with what comes still nearer, the poisonous
influence of an atmosphere impregnated with invisible malaria, we
should find in each of these examples an evidence of the degree to
which nature, in some few instances, concentrates powerful qualities
in minute or subtile forms of matter.  But if a man comes to me with
a pestle and mortar in his hand, and tells me that he will take a
little speck of some substance which nobody ever thought to have any
smell at all, as, for instance, a grain of chalk or of charcoal, and
that he will, after an hour or two of rubbing and scraping, develop
in a portion of it an odor which, if the whole grain were used, would
be capable of pervading an apartment, a house, a village, a province,
an empire, nay, the entire atmosphere of this broad planet upon which
we tread; and that from each of fifty or sixty substances he can in
this way develop a distinct and hitherto unknown odor: and if he
tries to show that all this is rendered quite reasonable by the
analogy of musk and roses, I shall certainly be justified in
considering him incapable of reasoning, and beyond the reach of my
argument.  What if, instead of this, he professes to develop new and
wonderful medicinal powers from the same speck of chalk or charcoal,
in such proportions as would impregnate every pond, lake, river, sea,
and ocean of our globe, and appeals to the same analogy in favor of
the probability of his assertion.

All this may be true, notwithstanding these considerations.  But so
extraordinary would be the fact, that a single atom of substances
which a child might swallow without harm by the teaspoonful could, by
an easy mechanical process, be made to develop such inconceivable
powers, that nothing but the strictest agreement of the most cautious
experimenters, secured by every guaranty that they were honest and
faithful, appealing to repeated experiments in public, with every
precaution to guard against error, and with the most plain and
peremptory results, should induce us to lend any credence to such
pretensions.

The third doctrine, that Psora, the other name of which you remember,
is the cause of the great majority of chronic diseases, is a
startling one, to say the least.  That an affection always recognized
as a very unpleasant personal companion, but generally regarded as a
mere temporary incommodity, readily yielding to treatment in those
unfortunate enough to suffer from it, and hardly known among the
better classes of society, should be all at once found out by a
German physician to be the great scourge of mankind, the cause of
their severest bodily and mental calamities, cancer and consumption,
idiocy and madness, must excite our unqualified surprise.  And when
the originator of this singular truth ascribes, as in the page now
open before me, the declining health of a disgraced courtier, the
chronic malady of a bereaved mother, even the melancholy of the love-
sick and slighted maiden, to nothing more nor less than the
insignificant, unseemly, and almost unmentionable ITCH, does it not
seem as if the very soil upon which we stand were dissolving into
chaos, over the earthquake-heaving of discovery?

And when one man claims to have established these three independent
truths, which are about as remote from each other as the discovery of
the law of gravitation, the invention of printing, and that of the
mariner's compass, unless the facts in their favor are overwhelming
and unanimous, the question naturally arises, Is not this man
deceiving himself, or trying to deceive others?

I proceed to examine the proofs of the leading ideas of Hahnemann and
his school.


In order to show the axiom, similia similibus curantur (or like is
cured by like), to be the basis of the healing art,--"the sole law of
nature in therapeutics,"--it is necessary,

1.  That the symptoms produced by drugs in healthy persons should be
faithfully studied and recorded.

2.  That drugs should be shown to be always capable of curing those
diseases most like their own symptoms.

3.  That remedies should be shown not to cure diseases when they do
not produce symptoms resembling those presented in these diseases.


1.  The effects of drugs upon healthy persons have been studied by
Hahnemann and his associates.  Their results were made known in his
Materia Medica, a work in three large volumes in the French
translation, published about eight years ago.  The mode of
experimentation appears to have been, to take the substance on trial,
either in common or minute doses, and then to set down every little
sensation, every little movement of mind or body, which occurred
within many succeeding hours or days, as being produced solely by the
substance employed.  When I have enumerated some of the symptoms
attributed to the power of the drugs taken, you will be able to judge
how much value is to be ascribed to the assertions of such observers.

The following list was taken literally from the Materia Medica of
Hahnemann, by my friend M.  Vernois, for whose accuracy I am willing
to be responsible.  He has given seven pages of these symptoms, not
selected, but taken at hazard from the French translation of the
work.  I shall be very brief in my citations.

"After stooping some time, sense of painful weight about the head
upon resuming the erect posture."

"An itching, tickling sensation at the outer edge of the palm of the
left hand, which obliges the person to scratch."  The medicine was
acetate of lime, and as the action of the globule taken is said to
last twenty-eight days, you may judge how many such symptoms as the
last might be supposed to happen.

Among the symptoms attributed to muriatic acid are these: a catarrh,
sighing, pimples; "after having written a long time with the back a
little bent over, violent pain in the back and shoulder-blades, as if
from a strain,"--"dreams which are not remembered,--disposition to
mental dejection,--wakefulness before and after midnight."

I might extend this catalogue almost indefinitely.  I have not cited
these specimens with any view to exciting a sense of the ridiculous,
which many others of those mentioned would not fail to do, but to
show that the common accidents of sensation, the little bodily
inconveniences to which all of us are subject, are seriously and
systematically ascribed to whatever medicine may have been exhibited,
even in the minute doses I have mentioned, whole days or weeks
previously.

To these are added all the symptoms ever said by anybody, whether
deserving confidence or not, as I shall hereafter illustrate, to be
produced by the substance in question.

The effects of sixty-four medicinal substances, ascertained by one or
both of these methods, are enumerated in the Materia Medica of
Hahnemann, which may be considered as the basis of practical
Homoeopathy.  In the Manual of Jahr, which is the common guide, so
far as I know, of those who practise Homoeopathy in these regions,
two hundred remedies are enumerated, many of which, however, have
never been employed in practice.  In at least one edition there were
no means of distinguishing those which had been tried upon the sick
from the others.  It is true that marks have been added in the
edition employed here, which serve to distinguish them; but what are
we to think of a standard practical author on Materia Medica, who at
one time omits to designate the proper doses of his remedies, and at
another to let us have any means of knowing whether a remedy has ever
been tried or not, while he is recommending its employment in the
most critical and threatening diseases?

I think that, from what I have shown of the character of Hahnemann's
experiments, it would be a satisfaction to any candid inquirer to
know whether other persons, to whose assertions he could look with
confidence, confirm these pretended facts.  Now there are many
individuals, long and well known to the scientific world, who have
tried these experiments upon healthy subjects, and utterly deny that
their effects have at all corresponded to Hahnemann's assertions.

I will take, for instance, the statements of Andral (and I am not
referring to his well-known public experiments in his hospital) as
to the result of his own trials.  This distinguished physician is
Professor of Medicine in the School of Paris, and one of the most
widely known and valued authors upon practical and theoretical
subjects the profession can claim in any country.  He is a man of
great kindness of character, a most liberal eclectic by nature and
habit, of unquestioned integrity, and is called, in the leading
article of the first number of the "Homoepathic Examiner,"  "an
eminent and very enlightened allopathist."  Assisted by a number of
other persons in good health, he experimented on the effects of
cinchona, aconite, sulphur, arnica, and the other most highly
extolled remedies.  His experiments lasted a year, and he stated
publicly to the Academy of Medicine that they never produced the
slightest appearance of the symptoms attributed to them.  The results
of a man like this, so extensively known as one of the most
philosophical and candid, as well as brilliant of instructors, and
whose admirable abilities and signal liberality are generally
conceded, ought to be of great weight in deciding the question.

M. Double, a well-known medical writer and a physician of high
standing in Paris, had occasion so long ago as 1801, before he had
heard of Homoeopathy, to make experiments upon Cinchona, or Peruvian
bark.  He and several others took the drug in every kind of dose for
four months, and the fever it is pretended by Hahnemann to excite
never was produced.

M. Bonnet, President of the Royal Society of Medicine of Bordeaux,
had occasion to observe many soldiers during the Peninsular War, who
made use of Cinchona as a preservative against different diseases,
but he never found it to produce the pretended paroxysms.

If any objection were made to evidence of this kind, I would refer to
the express experiments on many of the Homoeopathic substances, which
were given to healthy persons with every precaution as to diet and
regimen, by M. Louis Fleury, without being followed by the slightest
of the pretended consequences.  And let me mention as a curious fact,
that the same quantity of arsenic given to one animal in the common
form of the unprepared powder, and to another after having been
rubbed up into six hundred globules, offered no particular difference
of activity in the two cases.

This is a strange contradiction to the doctrine of the development of
what they call dynamic power, by means of friction and subdivision.

In 1835 a public challenge was offered to the best known Homoeopathic
physician in Paris to select any ten substances asserted to produce
the most striking effects; to prepare them himself; to choose one by
lot without knowing which of them he had taken, and try it upon
himself or any intelligent and devoted Homoeopatbist, and, waiting
his own time, to come forward and tell what substance had been
employed.  The challenge was at first accepted, but the acceptance
retracted before the time of trial arrived.

From all this I think it fair to conclude that the catalogues of
symptoms attributed in Homoeopathic works to the influence of various
drugs upon healthy persons are not entitled to any confidence.


2.  It is necessary to show, in the next place, that medicinal
substances are always capable of curing diseases most like their own
symptoms.  For facts relating to this question we must look to two
sources; the recorded experience of the medical profession in
general, and the results of trials made according to Homoeopathic
principles, and capable of testing the truth of the doctrine.

No person, that I am aware of, has ever denied that in some cases
there exists a resemblance between the effects of a remedy and the
symptoms of diseases in which it is beneficial.  This has been
recognized, as Hahnemann himself has shown, from the time of
Hippocrates.  But according to the records of the medical profession,
as they have been hitherto interpreted, this is true of only a very
small proportion of useful remedies.  Nor has it ever been considered
as an established truth that the efficacy of even these few remedies
was in any definite ratio to their power of producing symptoms more
or less like those they cured.

Such was the state of opinion when Hahnemann came forward with the
proposition that all the cases of successful treatment found in the
works of all preceding medical writers were to be ascribed solely to
the operation of the Homoeopathic principle, which had effected the
cure, although without the physician's knowledge that this was the
real secret.  And strange as it may seem, he was enabled to give such
a degree of plausibility to this assertion, that any person not
acquainted somewhat with medical literature, not quite familiar, I
should rather say, with the relative value of medical evidence,
according to the sources whence it is derived, would be almost
frightened into the belief, at seeing the pages upon pages of Latin
names he has summoned as his witnesses.

It has hitherto been customary, when examining the writings of
authors of preceding ages, upon subjects as to which they were less
enlightened than ourselves, and which they were very liable to
misrepresent, to exercise some little discretion; to discriminate, in
some measure, between writers deserving confidence and those not
entitled to it.  But there is not the least appearance of any such
delicacy on the part of Hahnemann.  A large majority of the names of
old authors he cites are wholly unknown to science.  With some of
them I have been long acquainted, and I know that their accounts of
diseases are no more to be trusted than their contemporary Ambroise
Pare's stories of mermen, and similar absurdities.  But if my
judgment is rejected, as being a prejudiced one, I can refer to
Cullen, who mentioned three of Hahnemann's authors in one sentence,
as being "not necessarily bad authorities; but certainly such when
they delivered very improbable events;" and as this was said more
than half a century ago, it could not have had any reference to
Hahnemann.  But although not the slightest sign of discrimination is
visible in his quotations,--although for him a handful of chaff from
Schenck is all the same thing as a measure of wheat from Morgagni,--
there is a formidable display of authorities, and an abundant proof
of ingenious researches to be found in each of the great works of
Hahnemann with which I am familiar.  [Some painful surmises might
arise as to the erudition of Hahnemann's English Translator, who
makes two individuals of "Zacutus, Lucitanus," as well as respecting
that of the conductors of an American Homoeopathic periodical, who
suffer the name of the world-renowned Cardanus to be spelt Cardamus
in at least three places, were not this gross ignorance of course
attributable only to the printer.]

It is stated by Dr. Leo-Wolf, that Professor Joerg, of Leipsic, has
proved many of Hahnemann's quotations from old authors to be
adulterate and false.  What particular instances he has pointed out I
have no means of learning.  And it is probably wholly impossible on
this side of the Atlantic, and even in most of the public libraries
of Europe, to find anything more than a small fraction of the
innumerable obscure publications which the neglect of grocers and
trunkmakers has spared to be ransacked by the all-devouring genius of
Homoeopathy.  I have endeavored to verify such passages as my own
library afforded me the means of doing.  For some I have looked in
vain, for want, as I am willing to believe, of more exact references.
But this I am able to affirm, that, out of the very small number
which I have been able, to trace back to their original authors, I
have found two to be wrongly quoted, one of them being a gross
misrepresentation.

The first is from the ancient Roman author, Caelius Aurelianus; the
second from the venerable folio of Forestus.  Hahnemann uses the
following expressions,--if he is not misrepresented in the English
Translation of the 'Organon': "Asclepiades on one occasion cured an
inflammation of the brain by administering a small quantity of wine."
After correcting the erroneous reference of the Translator, I can
find no such case alluded to in the chapter.  But Caelius Aurelianus
mentions two modes of treatment employed by Asclepiades, into both of
which the use of wine entered, as being "in the highest degree
irrational and dangerous." [Caelius Aurel. De Morb. Acut. et
Chron. lib. I. cap. xv. not xvi.  Amsterdam.  Wetstein, 1755.]

In speaking of the oil of anise-seed, Hahnemann says that Forestus
observed violent colic caused by its administration.  But, as the
author tells the story, a young man took, by the counsel of a
surgeon, an acrid and virulent medicine, the name of which is not
given, which brought on a most cruel fit of the gripes and colic.
After this another surgeon was called, who gave him oil of anise-seed
and wine, "which increased his suffering." [Observ. et Curat. Med.
lib. XXI obs. xiii.  Frankfort, 1614.]  Now if this was the
Homoeopathic remedy, as Hahnemann pretends, it might be a fair
question why the young man was not cured by it.  But it is a much
graver question why a man who has shrewdness and learning enough to
go so far after his facts, should think it right to treat them with
such astonishing negligence or such artful unfairness.

Even if every word he had pretended to take from his old authorities
were to be found in them, even if the authority of every one of these
authors were beyond question, the looseness with which they are used
to prove whatever Hahnemann chooses is beyond the bounds of
credibility.  Let me give one instance to illustrate the character of
this man's mind.  Hahnemann asserts, in a note annexed to the 110th
paragraph of the "Organon," that the smell of the rose will cause
certain persons to faint.  And he says in the text that substances
which produce peculiar effects of this nature on particular
constitutions cure the same symptoms in people in general.  Then in
another note to the same paragraph he quotes the following fact from
one of the last sources one would have looked to for medical
information, the Byzantine Historians.

"It was by these means (i.e. Homoeopathically) that the Princess
Eudosia with rose-water restored a person who had fainted!"

Is it possible that a man who is guilty of such pedantic folly as
this,--a man who can see a confirmation of his doctrine in such a
recovery as this,--a recovery which is happening every day, from a
breath of air, a drop or two of water, untying a bonnet-string,
loosening a stay-lace, and which can hardly help happening, whatever
is done,--is it possible that a man, of whose pages, not here and
there one, but hundreds upon hundreds are loaded with such
trivialities, is the Newton, the Columbus, the Harvey of the
nineteenth century!

The whole process of demonstration he employs is this.  An experiment
is instituted with some drug upon one or more healthy persons.
Everything that happens for a number of days or weeks is, as we have
seen, set down as an effect of the medicine.  Old volumes are then
ransacked promiscuously, and every morbid sensation or change that
anybody ever said was produced by the drug in question is added to
the list of symptoms.  By one or both of these methods, each of the
sixty-four substances enumerated by Hahnemann is shown to produce a
very large number of symptoms, the lowest in his scale being ninety-
seven, and the highest fourteen hundred and ninety-one.  And having
made out this list respecting any drug, a catalogue which, as you may
observe in any Homoeopathic manual, contains various symptoms
belonging to every organ of the body, what can be easier than to find
alleged cures in every medical author which can at once be attributed
to the Homoeopathic principle; still more if the grave of
extinguished credulity is called upon to give up its dead bones as
living witnesses; and worst of all, if the monuments of the past are
to be mutilated in favor of "the sole law of Nature in therapeutics"?

There are a few familiar facts of which great use has been made as an
entering wedge for the Homoeopathic doctrine.  They have been
suffered to pass current so long that it is time they should be
nailed to the counter, a little operation which I undertake, with
perfect cheerfulness, to perform for them.

The first is a supposed illustration of the Homoeopathic law found in
the precept given for the treatment of parts which have been frozen,
by friction with snow or similar means.  But we deceive ourselves by
names, if we suppose the frozen part to be treated by cold, and not
by heat.  The snow may even be actually warmer than the part to which
it is applied.  But even if it were at the same temperature when
applied, it never did and never could do the least good to a frozen
part, except as a mode of regulating the application of what? of
heat.  But the heat must be applied gradually, just as food must be
given a little at a time to those perishing with hunger.  If the
patient were brought into a warm room, heat would be applied very
rapidly, were not something interposed to prevent this, and allow its
gradual admission.  Snow or iced water is exactly what is wanted; it
is not cold to the part; it is very possibly warm, on the contrary,
for these terms are relative, and if it does not melt and let the
heat in, or is not taken away, the part will remain frozen up until
doomsday.  Now the treatment of a frozen limb by heat, in large or
small quantities, is not Homoeopathy.

The next supposed illustration of the Homoeopathic law is the alleged
successful management of burns, by holding them to the fire.  This is
a popular mode of treating those burns which are of too little
consequence to require any more efficacious remedy, and would
inevitably get well of themselves, without any trouble being bestowed
upon them.  It produces a most acute pain in the part, which is
followed by some loss of sensibility, as happens with the eye after
exposure to strong light, and the ear after being subjected to very
intense sounds.  This is all it is capable of doing, and all further
notions of its efficacy must be attributed merely to the vulgar love
of paradox.  If this example affords any comfort to the
Homoeopathist, it seems as cruel to deprive him of it as it would be
to convince the mistress of the smoke-jack or the flatiron that the
fire does not literally "draw the fire out," which is her hypothesis.

But if it were true that frost-bites were cured by cold and burns by
heat, it would be subversive, so far as it went, of the great
principle of Homoeopathy.

For you will remember that this principle is that Like cures Like,
and not that Same cures Same; that there is resemblance and not
identity between the symptoms of the disease and those produced by
the drug which cures it, and none have been readier to insist upon
this distinction than the Homoeopathists themselves.  For if Same
cures Same, then every poison must be its own antidote,--which is
neither a part of their theory nor their so-called experience.  They
have been asked often enough, why it was that arsenic could not cure
the mischief which arsenic had caused, and why the infectious cause
of small-pox did not remedy the disease it had produced, and then
the; were ready enough to see the distinction I have pointed out.  O
no!  it was not the hair of the same dog, but only of one very much
like him!

A third instance in proof of the Homoeopathic law is sought for in
the acknowledged efficacy of vaccination.  And how does the law apply
to this?  It is granted by the advocates of Homoeopathy that there is
a resemblance between the effects of the vaccine virus on a person in
health and the symptoms of small-pox.  Therefore, according to the
rule, the vaccine virus will cure the small-pox, which, as everybody
knows, is entirely untrue.  But it prevents small-pox, say the
Homoeopathists.  Yes, and so does small-pox prevent itself from ever
happening again, and we know just as much of the principle involved
in the one case as in the other.  For this is only one of a series of
facts which we are wholly unable to explain.  Small-pox, measles,
scarlet-fever, hooping-cough, protect those who have them once from
future attacks; but nettle-rash and catarrh and lung fever, each of
which is just as Homoeopathic to itself as any one of the others,
have no such preservative power.  We are obliged to accept the fact,
unexplained, and we can do no more for vaccination than for the rest.


I come now to the most directly practical point connected with the
subject, namely,--

What is the state of the evidence as to the efficacy of the proper
Homoeopathic treatment in the cure of diseases.

As the treatment adopted by the Homoeopathists has been almost
universally by means of the infinitesimal doses, the question of
their efficacy is thrown open, in common with that of the truth of
their fundamental axiom, as both are tested in practice.

We must look for facts as to the actual working of Homoeopathy to
three sources.

1.  The statements of the unprofessional public.

2.  The assertions of Homoeopathic practitioners.

3.  The results of trials by competent and honest physicians, not
pledged to the system.

I think, after what we have seen of medical facts, as they are
represented by incompetent persons, we are disposed to attribute
little value to all statements of wonderful cures, coming from those
who have never been accustomed to watch the caprices of disease, and
have not cooled down their young enthusiasm by the habit of tranquil
observation.  Those who know nothing of the natural progress of a
malady, of its ordinary duration, of its various modes of
terminating, of its liability to accidental complications, of the
signs which mark its insignificance or severity, of what is to be
expected of it when left to itself, of how much or how little is to
be anticipated from remedies, those who know nothing or next to
nothing of all these things, and who are in a great state of
excitement from benevolence, sympathy, or zeal for a new medical
discovery, can hardly be expected to be sound judges of facts which
have misled so many sagacious men, who have spent their lives in the
daily study and observation of them.  I believe that, after having
drawn the portrait of defunct Perkinism, with its five thousand
printed cures, and its million and a half computed ones, its miracles
blazoned about through America, Denmark, and England; after relating
that forty years ago women carried the Tractors about in their
pockets, and workmen could not make them fast enough for the public
demand; and then showing you, as a curiosity, a single one of these
instruments, an odd one of a pair, which I obtained only by a lucky
accident, so utterly lost is the memory of all their wonderful
achievements; I believe, after all this, I need not waste time in
showing that medical accuracy is not to be looked for in the florid
reports of benevolent associations, the assertions of illustrious
patrons, the lax effusions of daily journals, or the effervescent
gossip of the tea-table.

Dr. Hering, whose name is somewhat familiar to the champions of
Homoeopathy, has said that "the new healing art is not to be judged
by its success in isolated cases only, but according to its success
in general, its innate truth, and the incontrovertible nature of its
innate principles."

We have seen something of "the incontrovertible nature of its innate
principles," and it seems probable, on the whole, that its success in
general must be made up of its success in isolated cases.  Some
attempts have been made, however, to finish the whole matter by
sweeping statistical documents, which are intended to prove its
triumphant success over the common practice.

It is well known to those who have had the good fortune to see the
"Homoeopathic Examiner," that this journal led off, in its first
number, with a grand display of everything the newly imported
doctrine had to show for itself.  It is well remarked, on the twenty-
third page of this article, that "the comparison of bills of
mortality among an equal number of sick, treated by divers methods,
is a most poor and lame way to get at conclusions touching principles
of the healing art."  In confirmation of which, the author proceeds
upon the twenty-fifth page to prove the superiority of the
Homoeopathic treatment of cholera, by precisely these very bills of
mortality.  Now, every intelligent physician is aware that the poison
of cholera differed so much in its activity at different times and,
places, that it was next to impossible to form any opinion as to the
results of treatment, unless every precaution was taken to secure the
most perfectly corresponding conditions in the patients treated, and
hardly even then.  Of course, then, a Russian Admiral, by the name of
Mordvinov, backed by a number of so-called physicians practising in
Russian villages, is singularly competent to the task of settling the
whole question of the utility of this or that kind of treatment; to
prove that, if not more than eight and a half per cent. of those
attacked with the disease perished, the rest owed their immunity to
Hahnemann.  I can remember when more than a hundred patients in a
public institution were attacked with what, I doubt not, many
Homoeopathic physicians (to say nothing of Homoeopathic admirals)
would have called cholera, and not one of them died, though treated
in the common way, and it is my firm belief that, if such a result
had followed the administration of the omnipotent globules, it would
have been in the mouth of every adept in Europe, from Quin of London
to Spohr of Gandersheim.  No longer ago than yesterday, in one of the
most widely circulated papers of this city, there was published an
assertion that the mortality in several Homoeopathic Hospitals was
not quite five in a hundred, whereas, in what are called by the
writer Allopathic Hospitals, it is said to be eleven in a hundred.
An honest man should be ashamed of such an argumentum ad ignorantiam.
The mortality of a hospital depends not merely on the treatment of
the patients, but on the class of diseases it is in the habit of
receiving, on the place where it is, on the season, and many other
circumstances.  For instance, there are many hospitals in the great
cities of Europe that receive few diseases of a nature to endanger
life, and, on the other hand, there are others where dangerous
diseases are accumulated out of the common proportion.  Thus, in the
wards of Louis, at the Hospital of La Pitie, a vast number of
patients in the last stages of consumption were constantly entering,
to swell the mortality of that hospital.  It was because he was known
to pay particular attention to the diseases of the chest that
patients laboring under those fatal affections to an incurable extent
were so constantly coming in upon him.  It is always a miserable
appeal to the thoughtlessness of the vulgar, to allege the naked fact
of the less comparative mortality in the practice of one hospital or
of one physician than another, as an evidence of the superiority of
their treatment.  Other things being equal, it must always be
expected that those institutions and individuals enjoying to the
highest degree the confidence of the community will lose the largest
proportion of their patients; for the simple reason that they will
naturally be looked to by those suffering from the gravest class of
diseases; that many, who know that they are affected with mortal
disease, will choose to die under their care or shelter, while the
subjects of trifling maladies, and merely troublesome symptoms, amuse
themselves to any extent among the fancy practitioners.  When,
therefore, Dr. Mublenbein, as stated in the "Homoeopathic Examiner,"
and quoted in yesterday's "Daily Advertiser," asserts that the
mortality among his patients is only one per cent. since he has
practised Homoeopathy, whereas it was six per cent. when he employed
the common mode of practice, I am convinced by this, his own
statement, that the citizens of Brunswick, whenever they are
seriously sick, take good care not to send for Dr. Muhlenbein!

It is evidently impossible that I should attempt, within the compass
of a single lecture, any detailed examination of the very numerous
cases reported in the Homoeopathic Treatises and Journals.  Having
been in the habit of receiving the French "Archives of Homoeopathic
Medicine" until the premature decease of that Journal, I have had the
opportunity of becoming acquainted somewhat with the style of these
documents, and experiencing whatever degree of conviction they were
calculated to produce.  Although of course I do not wish any value to
be assumed for my opinion, such as it is, I consider that you are
entitled to hear it.  So far, then, as I am acquainted with the
general character of the cases reported by the Homoeopathic
physicians, they would for the most part be considered as wholly
undeserving a place in any English, French, or American periodical of
high standing, if, instead of favoring the doctrine they were
intended to support, they were brought forward to prove the efficacy
of any common remedy administered by any common practitioner.  There
are occasional exceptions to this remark; but the general truth of it
is rendered probable by the fact that these cases are always, or
almost always, written with the single object of showing the efficacy
of the medicine used, or the skill of the practitioner, and it is
recognized as a general rule that such cases deserve very little
confidence.  Yet they may sound well enough, one at a time, to those
who are not fully aware of the fallacies of medical evidence.  Let me
state a case in illustration.  Nobody doubts that some patients
recover under every form of practice.  Probably all are willing to
allow that a large majority, for instance, ninety in a hundred, of
such cases as a physician is called to in daily practice, would
recover, sooner or later, with more or less difficulty, provided
nothing were done to interfere seriously with the efforts of nature.

Suppose, then, a physician who has a hundred patients prescribes to
each of them pills made of some entirely inert substance, as starch,
for instance.  Ninety of them get well, or if he chooses to use such
language, he cures ninety of them.  It is evident, according to the
doctrine of chances, that there must be a considerable number of
coincidences between the relief of the patient and the administration
of the remedy.  It is altogether probable that there will happen two
or three very striking coincidences out of the whole ninety cases, in
which it would seem evident that the medicine produced the relief,
though it had, as we assumed, nothing to do with it.  Now suppose
that the physician publishes these cases, will they not have a
plausible appearance of proving that which, as we granted at the
outset, was entirely false?  Suppose that instead of pills of starch
he employs microscopic sugarplums, with the five' million billion
trillionth part of a suspicion of aconite or pulsatilla, and then
publishes his successful cases, through the leaden lips of the press,
or the living ones of his female acquaintances,--does that make the
impression a less erroneous one?  But so it is that in Homoeopathic
works and journals and gossip one can never, or next to never, find
anything but successful cases, which might do very well as a proof of
superior skill, did it not prove as much for the swindling
advertisers whose certificates disgrace so many of our newspapers.
How long will it take mankind to learn that while they listen to "the
speaking hundreds and units, who make the world ring "with the
pretended triumphs they have witnessed, the "dumb millions" of
deluded and injured victims are paying the daily forfeit of their
misplaced confidence!

I am sorry to see, also, that a degree of ignorance as to the natural
course of diseases is often shown in these published cases, which,
although it may not be detected by the unprofessional reader, conveys
an unpleasant impression to those who are acquainted with the
subject.  Thus a young woman affected with jaundice is mentioned in
the German "Annals of Clinical Homoeopathy" as having been cured in
twenty-nine days by pulsatilla and nux vomica.  Rummel, a well-known
writer of the same school, speaks of curing a case of jaundice in
thirty-four days by Homoeopathic doses of pulsatilla, aconite, and
cinchona.  I happened to have a case in my own household, a few weeks
since, which lasted about ten days, and this was longer than I have
repeatedly seen it in hospital practice, so that it was nothing to
boast of.

Dr. Munneche of Lichtenburg in Saxony is called to a patient with
sprained ankle who had been a fortnight under the common treatment.
The patient gets well by the use of arnica in a little more than a
month longer, and this extraordinary fact is published in the French
"Archives of Homoeopathic Medicine."

In the same Journal is recorded the case of a patient who with
nothing more, so far as any proof goes, than inluenza, gets down to
her shop upon the sixth day.

And again, the cool way in which everything favorable in a case is
set down by these people entirely to their treatment, may be seen in
a case of croup reported in the "Homoeopathic Gazette" of Leipsic,
in which leeches, blistering, inhalation of hot vapor, and powerful
internal medicine had been employed, and yet the merit was all
attributed to one drop of some Homoeopathic fluid.

I need not multiply these quotations, which illustrate the grounds of
an opinion which the time does not allow me to justify more at
length; other such cases are lying open before me; there is no end to
them if more were wanted; for nothing is necessary but to look into
any of the numerous broken-down Journals of Homoeopathy, the volumes
of which may be found on the shelves of those curious in such
matters.

A number of public trials of Homoeopathy have been made in different
parts of the world.  Six of these are mentioned in the Manifesto of
the "Homoeopathic Examiner."  Now to suppose that any trial can
absolutely silence people, would be to forget the whole experience of
the past.  Dr. Haygarth and Dr. Alderson could not stop the sale of
the five-guinea Tractors, although they proved that they could work
the same miracles with pieces of wood and tobacco-pipe.  It takes
time for truth to operate as well as Homoeopathic globules.  Many
persons thought the results of these trials were decisive enough of
the nullity of the treatment; those who wish to see the kind of
special pleading and evasion by which it is attempted to cover
results which, stated by the "Homoeopathic Examiner" itself, look
exceedingly like a miserable failure, may consult the opening
flourish of that Journal.  I had not the intention to speak of these
public trials at all, having abundant other evidence on the point.
But I think it best, on the whole, to mention two of them in a few
words,--that instituted at Naples and that of Andral.

There have been few names in the medical profession, for the last
half century, so widely known throughout the world of science as that
of M. Esquirol, whose life was devoted to the treatment of insanity,
and who was without a rival in that department of practical medicine.
It is from an analysis communicated by him to the "Gazette Medicale
de Paris" that I derive my acquaintance with the account of the trial
at Naples by Dr. Panvini, physician to the Hospital della Pace.  This
account seems to be entirely deserving of credit.  Ten patients were
set apart, and not allowed to take any medicine at all,--much against
the wish of the Homoeopathic physician.  All of them got well, and of
course all of them would have been claimed as triumphs if they had
been submitted to the treatment.  Six other slight cases (each of
which is specified) got well under the Homoeopathic treatment, none
of its asserted specific effects being manifested.

All the rest were cases of grave disease; and so far as the trial,
which was interrupted about the fortieth day, extended, the patients
grew worse, or received no benefit.  A case is reported on the page
before me of a soldier affected with acute inflammation in the chest,
who took successively aconite, bryonia, nux vomica, and pulsatilla,
and after thirty-eight days of treatment remained without any
important change in his disease.  The Homoeopathic physician who
treated these patients was M. de Horatiis, who had the previous year
been announcing his wonderful cures.  And M. Esquirol asserted to the
Academy of Medicine in 1835, that this M. de Horatiis, who is one of
the prominent personages in the "Examiner's" Manifesto published in
1840, had subsequently renounced Homoeopathy.  I may remark, by the
way, that this same periodical, which is so very easy in explaining
away the results of these trials, makes a mistake of only six years
or a little more as to the time when this at Naples was instituted.

M. Andral, the "eminent and very enlightened allopathist" of the
"Homoeopathic Examiner," made the following statement in March, 1835,
to the Academy of Medicine: "I have submitted this doctrine to
experiment; I can reckon at this time from one hundred and thirty to
one hundred and forty cases, recorded with perfect fairness, in a
great hospital, under the eye of numerous witnesses; to avoid every
objection--I obtained my remedies of M. Guibourt, who keeps a
Homoeopathic pharmacy, and whose strict exactness is well known; the
regimen has been scrupulously observed, and I obtained from the
sisters attached to the hospital a special regimen, such as Hahnemann
orders.  I was told, however, some months since, that I had not been
faithful to all the rules of the doctrine.  I therefore took the
trouble to begin again; I have studied the practice of the Parisian
Homoeopathists, as I had studied their books, and I became convinced
that they treated their patients as I had treated mine, and I affirm
that I have been as rigorously exact in the treatment as any other
person."

And he expressly asserts the entire nullity of the influence of all
the Homoeopathic remedies tried by him in modifying, so far as he
could observe, the progress or termination of diseases.  It deserves
notice that he experimented with the most boasted substances,--
cinchona, aconite, mercury, bryonia, belladonna.  Aconite, for
instance, he says he administered in more than forty cases of that
collection of feverish symptoms in which it exerts so much power,
according to Hahnemann, and in not one of them did it have the
slightest influence, the pulse and heat remaining as before.

These statements look pretty honest, and would seem hard to be
explained away, but it is calmly said that he "did not know enough of
the method to select the remedies with any tolerable precision."
["Homoeopathic Examiner, vol. i.  p. 22.]

"Nothing is left to the caprice of the physician."  (In a word,
instead of being dependent upon blind chance, that there is an
infallible law, guided by which; the physician MUST select the proper
remedies.') ['Ibid.,' in a notice of Menzel's paper.]  Who are they
that practice Homoeopathy, and say this of a man with the Materia
Medica of Hahnemann lying before him?  Who are they that send these
same globules, on which he experimented, accompanied by a little
book, into families, whose members are thought competent to employ
them, when they deny any such capacity to a man whose life has been
passed at the bedside of patients, the most prominent teacher in the
first Medical Faculty in the world, the consulting physician of the
King of France, and one of the most renowned practical writers, not
merely of his nation, but of his age?  I leave the quibbles by which
such persons would try to creep out from under the crushing weight of
these conclusions to the unfortunates who suppose that a reply is
equivalent to an answer.

Dr. Baillie, one of the physicians in the great Hotel Dieu of Paris,
invited two Homoeopathic practitioners to experiment in his wards.
One of these was Curie, now of London, whose works are on the
counters of some of our bookstores, and probably in the hands of some
of my audience.  This gentleman, whom Dr. Baillie declares to be an
enlightened man, and perfectly sincere in his convictions, brought
his own medicines from the pharmacy which furnished Hahnemann
himself, and employed them for four or five months upon patients in
his ward, and with results equally unsatisfactory, as appears from
Dr. Baillie's statement at a meeting of the Academy of Medicine.  And
a similar experiment was permitted by the Clinical Professor of the
Hotel Dieu of Lyons, with the same complete failure.

But these are old and prejudiced practitioners.  Very well, then take
the statement of Dr. Fleury, a most intelligent young physician, who
treated homoeopathically more than fifty patients, suffering from
diseases which it was not dangerous to treat in this way, taking
every kind of precaution as to regimen, removal of disturbing
influences, and the state of the atmosphere, insisted upon by the
most vigorous partisans of the doctrine, and found not the slightest
effect produced by the medicines.  And more than this, read nine of
these cases, which he has published, as I have just done, and observe
the absolute nullity of aconite, belladonna, and bryonia, against the
symptoms over which they are pretended to exert such palpable, such
obvious, such astonishing influences.  In the view of these
statements, it is impossible not to realize the entire futility of
attempting to silence this asserted science by the flattest and most
peremptory results of experiment.  Were all the hospital physicians
of Europe and America to devote themselves, for the requisite period,
to this sole pursuit, and were their results to be unanimous as to
the total worthlessness of the whole system in practice, this
slippery delusion would slide through their fingers without the
slightest discomposure, when, as they supposed, they had crushed
every joint in its tortuous and trailing body.


3.  I have said, that to show the truth of the Homoeopathic doctrine,
as announced by Hahnemann, it would be necessary to show, in the
third place, that remedies never cure diseases when they are not
capable of producing similar symptoms!  The burden of this somewhat
comprehensive demonstration lying entirely upon the advocates of this
doctrine, it may be left to their mature reflections.


It entered into my original plan to treat of the doctrine relating to
Psora, or itch,--an almost insane conception, which I am glad to get
rid of, for this is a subject one does not care to handle without
gloves.  I am saved this trouble, however, by finding that many of
the disciples of Hahnemann, those disciples the very gospel of whose
faith stands upon his word, make very light of his authority on this
point, although he himself says, "It has cost me twelve years of
study and research to trace out the source of this incredible number
of chronic affections, to discover this great truth, which remained
concealed from all my predecessors and contemporaries, to establish
the basis of its demonstration, and find out, at the same time, the
curative medicines that were fit to combat this hydra in all its
different forms."

But, in the face of all this, the following remarks are made by
Wolff, of Dresden, whose essays, according to the editor of the
"Homoeopathic Examiner," "represent the opinions of a large majority
of Homoeopathists in Europe."

"It cannot be unknown to any one at all familiar with Homoeopathic
literature, that Hahnemann's idea of tracing the large majority of
chronic diseases to actual itch has met with the greatest opposition
from Homoeopathic physicians themselves."  And again, "If the Psoric
theory has led to no proper schism, the reason is to be found in the
fact that it is almost without any influence in practice."

We are told by Jahr, that Dr. Griesselich, "Surgeon to the Grand Duke
of Baden," and a "distinguished" Homoeopathist, actually asked
Hahnemann for the proof that chronic diseases, such as dropsy, for
instance, never arise from any other cause than itch; and that,
according to common report, the venerable sage was highly incensed
(fort courrouce) with Dr. Hartmann, of Leipsic, another
"distinguished" Homoeopathist, for maintaining that they certainly
did arise from other causes.

And Dr. Fielitz, in the "Homoeopathic Gazette" of Leipsic, after
saying, in a good-natured way, that Psora is the Devil in medicine,
and that physicians are divided on this point into diabolists and
exorcists, declares that, according to a remark of Hahnemann, the
whole civilized world is affected with Psora.  I must therefore
disappoint any advocate of Hahnemann who may honor me with his
presence, by not attacking a doctrine on which some of the disciples
of his creed would be very happy to have its adversaries waste their
time and strength.  I will not meddle with this excrescence, which,
though often used in time of peace, would be dropped, like the limb
of a shell-fish, the moment it was assailed; time is too precious,
and the harvest of living extravagances nods too heavily to my
sickle, that I should blunt it upon straw and stubble.

I will close the subject with a brief examination of some of the
statements made in Homoeopathic works, and more particularly in the
brilliant Manifesto of the "Examiner," before referred to.  And
first, it is there stated under the head of "Homoeopathic
Literature," that "SEVEN HUNDRED volumes have been issued from the
press developing the peculiarities of the system, and many of them
possessed of a scientific character that savans know well how to
respect."  If my assertion were proper evidence in the case, I should
declare, that, having seen a good many of these publications, from
the year 1834, when I bought the work of the Rev. Thomas Everest,"
[Dr. Curie speaks of this silly pamphlet as having been published in
1835.] to within a few weeks, when I received my last importation of
Homaeopathic literature, I have found that all, with a very few
exceptions, were stitched pamphlets varying from twenty or thirty
pages to somewhat less than a hundred, and generally resembling each
other as much as so many spelling-books.

But not being evidence in the case, I will give you the testimony of
Dr. Trinks, of Dresden, who flourishes on the fifteenth page of the
same Manifesto as one of the most distinguished among the
Homoeopathists of Europe.  I translate the sentence literally from
the "Archives de la Medecine Homoeopathique."

"The literature of Homoeopathy, if that honorable name must be
applied to all kinds of book-making, has been degraded to the
condition of the humblest servitude.  Productions without talent,
without spirit, without discrimination, flat and pitiful eulogies,
exaggerations surpassing the limits of the most robust faith,
invectives against such as dared to doubt the dogmas which had been
proclaimed, or catalogues of remedies; of such materials is it
composed!  From distance to distance only, have appeared some memoirs
useful to science or practice, which appear as so many green oases in
the midst of this literary desert."

It is a very natural as well as a curious question to ask, What has
been the success of Homoeopathy in the different countries of Europe,
and what is its present condition?

The greatest reliance of the advocates of Homoeopathy is of course on
Germany.  We know very little of its medical schools, its medical
doctrines, or its medical men, compared with those of England and
France.  And, therefore, when an intelligent traveller gives a direct
account from personal inspection of the miserable condition of the
Homoeopathic hospital at Leipsic, the first established in Europe,
and the first on the list of the ever-memorable Manifesto, it is easy
enough answer or elude the fact by citing various hard names of
"distinguished" practitioners, which sound just as well to the
uninformed public as if they were Meckel, or Tiedemann, or
Langenbeck.  Dr. Leo-Wolf, who, to be sure, is opposed to
Homoeopathy, but who is a scholar, and ought to know something
of his own countrymen, assures us that "Dr. Kopp is the only German
Homoeopathist, if we can call him so, who has been distinguished as
an author and practitioner before he examined this method."  And Dr.
Lee, the same gentleman in whose travels the paragraph relating to
the Leipsic Hospital is to be found, says the same thing.  And I will
cheerfully expose myself to any impertinent remark which it might
suggest, to assure my audience that I never heard or saw one
authentic Homoeopathic name of any country in Europe, which I had
ever heard mentioned before as connected with medical science by a
single word or deed sufficient to make it in any degree familiar to
my ears, unless Arnold of Heidelberg is the anatomist who discovered
a little nervous centre, called the otic ganglion.  But you need ask
no better proof of who and what the German adherents of this doctrine
must be, than the testimony of a German Homoeopathist as to the
wretched character of the works they manufacture to enforce its
claims.

As for the act of this or that government tolerating or encouraging
Homoeopathy, every person of common intelligence knows that it is a
mere form granted or denied according to the general principles of
policy adopted in different states, or the degree of influence which
some few persons who have adopted it may happen to have at court.
What may be the value of certain pompous titles with which many of
the advocates of Homoeopathy are honored, it might be disrespectful
to question.  But in the mean time the judicious inquirer may ponder
over an extract which I translate from a paper relating to a
personage well known to the community as Williams the Oculist, with
whom I had the honor of crossing the Atlantic some years since, and
who himself handed me two copies of the paper in question.

"To say that he was oculist of Louis XVIII.  and of Charles X., and
that he now enjoys the same title with respect to His Majesty, Louis
Philippe, and the King of the Belgians, is unquestionably to say a
great deal; and yet it is one of the least of his titles to public
confidence.  His reputation rests upon a basis more substantial even
than the numerous diplomas with which he is provided, than the
membership of the different medical societies which have chosen him
as their associate," etc., etc.

And as to one more point, it is time that the public should fully
understand that the common method of supporting barefaced imposture
at the present day, both in Europe and in this country, consists in
trumping up "Dispensaries," "Colleges of Health," and other
advertising charitable clap-traps, which use the poor as decoy-ducks
for the rich, and the proprietors of which have a strong predilection
for the title of "Professor."  These names, therefore, have come to
be of little or no value as evidence of the good character, still
less of the high pretensions of those who invoke their authority.
Nor does it follow, even when a chair is founded in connection with a
well-known institution, that it has either a salary or an occupant;
so that it may be, and probably is, a mere harmless piece of
toleration on the part of the government if a Professorship of
Homoeopathy is really in existence at Jena or Heidelberg.  And
finally, in order to correct the error of any who might suppose that
the whole Medical Profession of Germany has long since fallen into
the delusions of Hahnemann, I will quote two lines which a celebrated
anatomist and surgeon (whose name will occur again in this lecture in
connection with a very pleasing letter) addressed to the French
Academy of Medicine in 1835.  "I happened to be in Germany some
months since, at a meeting of nearly six hundred physicians; one of
them wished to bring up the question of Homoeopathy; they would not
even listen to him."  This may have been very impolite and bigoted,
but that is not precisely the point in reference to which I mention
the circumstance.

But if we cannot easily get at Germany, we can very easily obtain
exact information from France and England.  I took the trouble to
write some months ago to two friends in Paris, in whom I could place
confidence, for information upon the subject.  One of them answered
briefly to the effect that nothing was said about it.  When the late
Curator of the Lowell Institute, at his request, asked about the
works upon the subject, he was told that they had remained a long
time on the shelves quite unsalable, and never spoken of.

The other gentleman, [Dr. Henry T. Bigelow, now Professor of
Surgery in Harvard University] whose name is well known to my
audience, and who needs no commendation of mine, had the kindness to
procure for me many publications upon the subject, and some
information which sets the whole matter at rest, so far as Paris is
concerned.  He went directly to the Baillieres, the principal and
almost the only publishers of all the Homoeopathic books and journals
in that city.  The following facts were taken by him from the
account-books of this publishing firm.  Four Homoeopathic Journals
have been published in Paris; three of them by the Baillieres.

The reception they met with may be judged of by showing the number of
subscribers to each on the books of the publishing firm.

A Review published by some other house, which lasted one year, and
had about fifty subscribers, appeared in 1834, 1835.

There were only four Journals of Homoeopathy ever published in Paris.
The Baillieres informed my correspondent that the sale of
Homoeopathic books was much less than formerly, and that consequently
they should undertake to publish no new books upon the subject,
except those of Jahr or Hahnemann.  "This man," says my
correspondent,--referring to one of the brothers,--"the publisher and
headquarters of Homoeopathy in Paris, informs me that it is going
down in England and Germany as well as in Paris."  For all the facts
he had stated he pledged himself as responsible.

Homoeopathy was in its prime in Paris, he said, in 1836 and 1837, and
since then has been going down.

Louis told my correspondent that no person of distinction in Paris
had embraced Homoeopathy, and that it was declining.  If you ask who
Louis is, I refer you to the well-known Homoeopathist, Peschier of
Geneva, who says, addressing him, "I respect no one more than
yourself; the feeling which guides your researches, your labors, and
your pen, is so honorable and rare, that I could not but bow down
before it; and I own, if there were any allopathist who inspired me
with higher veneration, it would be him and not yourself whom I
should address."

Among the names of "Distinguished Homoeopathists," however, displayed
in imposing columns, in the index of the "Homoeopathic Examiner," are
those of MARJOLIN, AMUSSAT, and BRESCHET, names well known to the
world of science, and the last of them identified with some of the
most valuable contributions which anatomical knowledge has received
since the commencement of the present century.  One Dr. Chrysaora,
who stands sponsor for many facts in that Journal, makes the
following statement among the rest: "Professors, who are esteemed
among the most distinguished of the Faculty (Faculty de Medicine),
both as to knowledge and reputation, have openly confessed the power
of Homoeopathia in forms of disease where the ordinary method of
practice proved totally insufficient.  It affords me the highest
pleasure to select from among these gentlemen, Marjolin, Amussat, and
Breschet."

Here is a literal translation of an original letter, now in my
possession, from one of these Homoeopathists to my correspondent:--

"DEAR SIR, AND RESPECTED PROFESSIONAL BROTHER:

"You have had the kindness to inform me in your letter that a new
American Journal, the 'New World,'  has made use of my name in
support of the pretended Homoeopathic doctrines, and that I am
represented as one of the warmest partisans of Homoeopathy in France.

"I am vastly surprised at the reputation manufactured for me upon the
new continent; but I am obliged, in deference to truth, to reject it
with my whole energy.  I spurn far from me everything which relates
to that charlatanism called Homoeopathy, for these pretended
doctrines cannot endure the scrutiny of wise and enlightened persons,
who are guided by honorable sentiments in the practice of the noblest
of arts.

"PARIS, 3d November, 1841

"I am, etc., etc.,

"G. BRESCHET,

"Professor in the Faculty of Medicine, Member of the Institute,
Surgeon of Hotel Dieu, and Consulting Surgeon to the King, etc."
[I first saw M.  Breschet's name mentioned in that Journal]

Concerning Amussat, my correspondent writes, that he was informed by
Madame Hahnemann, who converses in French more readily than her
husband, and therefore often speaks for him, that "he was not a
physician, neither Homoeopathist nor Allopathist, but that he was the
surgeon of their own establishment; that is, performed as a surgeon
all the operations they had occasion for in their practice."

I regret not having made any inquiries as to Marjolin, who, I doubt
not, would strike his ponderous snuff-box until it resounded like the
Grecian horse, at hearing such a doctrine associated with his
respectable name.  I was not aware, when writing to Paris, that this
worthy Professor, whose lectures I long attended, was included in
these audacious claims; but after the specimens I have given of the
accuracy of the foreign correspondence of the "Homoeopathic
Examiner," any further information I might obtain would seem so
superfluous as hardly to be worth the postage.

Homoeopathy may be said, then, to be in a sufficiently miserable
condition in Paris.  Yet there lives, and there has lived for years,
the illustrious Samuel Hahnemann, who himself assured my
correspondent that no place offered the advantages of Paris in its
investigation, by reason of the attention there paid to it.

In England, it appears by the statement of Dr. Curie in October,
1839, about eight years after its introduction into the country, that
there were eighteen Homoeopathic physicians in the United Kingdom, of
whom only three were to be found out of London, and that many of
these practised Homoeopathy in secret.

It will be seen, therefore, that, according to the recent statement
of one of its leading English advocates, Homoeopathy had obtained not
quite half as many practical disciples in England as Perkinism could
show for itself in a somewhat less period from the time of its first
promulgation in that country.

Dr. Curie's letter, dated London, October 30, 1839, says there is
"one in Dublin, Dr. Luther; at Glasgow, Dr. Scott."  The
"distinguished" Chrysaora writes from Paris, dating October 20, 1839,
"On the other hand, Homoeopathy is commencing to make an inroad into
England by the way of Ireland.  At Dublin, distinguished physicians
have already embraced the new system, and a great part of the
nobility and gentry of that city have emancipated themselves from the
English fashion and professional authority."

But the Marquis of Anglesea and Sir Edward Lytton Bulwer patronize
Homoeopathy; the Queen Dowager Adelaide has been treated by a
Homoeopathic physician.  "Jarley is the delight of the nobility and
gentry."  "The Royal Family are the patrons of Jarley."

Let me ask if a Marquis and a Knight are better than two Lords, and
if the Dowager of Royalty is better than Royalty itself, all of which
illustrious dignities were claimed in behalf of Benjamin Douglass
Perkins?

But if the balance is thought too evenly suspended in this case,
another instance can be given in which the evidence of British
noblemen and their ladies is shown to be as valuable in establishing
the character of a medical man or doctrine, as would be the testimony
of the Marquis of Waterford concerning the present condition and
prospects of missionary enterprise.  I have before me an octavo
volume of more than four hundred pages, in which, among much similar
matter, I find highly commendatory letters from the Marchioness of
Ormond, Lady Harriet Kavanagh, the Countess of Buckinghamshire, the
Right Hon. Viscount Ingestre, M. P., and the Most Noble, the Marquis
of Sligo,--all addressed to "John St. John Long, Esq," a wretched
charlatan, twice tried for, and once convicted of, manslaughter at
the Old Bailey.

This poor creature, too, like all of his tribe, speaks of the medical
profession as a great confederation of bigoted monopolists.  He, too,
says that "If an innovator should appear, holding out hope to those
in despair, and curing disorders which the faculty have recorded as
irremediable, he is at once, and without inquiry, denounced as an
empiric and an impostor."  He, too, cites the inevitable names of
Galileo and Harvey, and refers to the feelings excited by the great
discovery of Jenner.  From the treatment of the great astronomer who
was visited with the punishment of other heretics by the
ecclesiastical authorities of a Catholic country some centuries
since, there is no very direct inference to be drawn to the medical
profession of the present time.  His name should be babbled no
longer, after having been placarded for the hundredth time in the
pages of St. John Long.  But if we are doomed to see constant
reference to the names of Harvey and Jenner in every worthless
pamphlet containing the prospectus of some new trick upon the public,
let us, once for all, stare the facts in the face, and see how the
discoveries of these great men were actually received by the medical
profession.

In 1628, Harvey published his first work upon the circulation.  His
doctrines were a complete revolution of the prevailing opinions of
all antiquity.  They immediately found both champions and opponents;
of which last, one only, Riolanus, seemed to Harvey worthy of an
answer, on account of his "rank, fame, and learning."  Controversy in
science, as in religion, was not, in those days, carried on with all
the courtesy which our present habits demand, and it is possible that
some hard words may have been applied to Harvey, as it is very
certain that he used the most contemptuous expressions towards
others.

Harvey declares in his second letter to Riolanus, "Since the first
discovery of the circulation, hardly a day, or a moment, has passed
without my hearing it both well and ill spoken of; some attack it
with great hostility, others defend it with high encomiums; one party
believe that I have abundantly proved the truth of the doctrine
against all the weight of opposing arguments, by experiments,
observations, and dissections; others think it not yet sufficiently
cleared up, and free from objections."  Two really eminent
Professors, Plempius of Louvain, and Walaeus of Leyden, were among
its early advocates.

The opinions sanctioned by the authority of long ages, and the names
of Hippocrates and Galen, dissolved away, gradually, but certainly,
before the demonstrations of Harvey.  Twenty-four years after the
publication of his first work, and six years before his death, his
bust in marble was placed in the Hall of the College of Physicians,
with a suitable inscription recording his discoveries.

Two years after this he was unanimously invited to accept the
Presidency of that body; and he lived to see his doctrine
established, and all reputable opposition withdrawn.

There were many circumstances connected with the discovery of Dr.
Jenner which were of a nature to excite repugnance and opposition.
The practice of inoculation for the small-pox had already disarmed
that disease of many of its terrors.  The introduction of a
contagious disease from a brute creature into the human system
naturally struck the public mind with a sensation of disgust and
apprehension, and a part of the medical public may have shared these
feelings.  I find that Jenner's discovery of vaccination was made
public in June, 1798.  In July of the same year the celebrated
surgeon, Mr. Cline, vaccinated a child with virus received from Dr.
Jenner, and in communicating the success of this experiment, he
mentions that Dr. Lister, formerly of the Small-Pox Hospital, and
himself, are convinced of the efficacy of the cow-pox.  In November
of the same year, Dr. Pearson published his "Inquiry," containing the
testimony of numerous practitioners in different parts of the
kingdom, to the efficacy of the practice.  Dr. HAYGARTH, who was so
conspicuous in exposing the follies of Perkinism, was among the very
earliest to express his opinion in favor of vaccination.  In 1801,
Dr. Lettsom mentions the circumstance "as being to the honor of the
medical professors, that they have very generally encouraged this
salutary practice, although it is certainly calculated to lessen
their pecuniary advantages by its tendency to extirpate a fertile
source of professional practice."

In the same year the Medical Committee of Paris spoke of vaccination
in a public letter, as "the most brilliant and most important
discovery of the eighteenth century."  The Directors of a Society for
the Extermination of the Small-Pox, in a Report dated October 1st,
1807, "congratulate the public on the very favorable opinion which
the Royal College of Physicians of London, after a most minute and
laborious investigation made by the command of his Majesty, have a
second time expressed on the subject of vaccination, in their Report
laid before the House of Commons, in the last session of Parliament;
in consequence of which the sum of twenty thousand pounds was voted
to Dr. Jenner, as a remuneration for his discovery, in addition to
ten thousand pounds before granted."  (In June, 1802.)

These and similar accusations, so often brought up against the
Medical Profession, are only one mode in which is manifested a spirit
of opposition not merely to medical science, but to all science, and
to all sound knowledge.  It is a spirit which neither understands
itself nor the object at which it is aiming.  It gropes among the
loose records of the past, and the floating fables of the moment, to
glean a few truths or falsehoods tending to prove, if they prove
anything, that the persons who have passed their lives in the study
of a branch of knowledge the very essence of which must always
consist in long and accurate observation, are less competent to judge
of new doctrines in their own department than the rest of the
community.  It belongs to the clown in society, the destructive in
politics, and the rogue in practice.

The name of Harvey, whose great discovery was the legitimate result
of his severe training and patient study, should be mentioned only to
check the pretensions of presumptuous ignorance.  The example of
Jenner, who gave his inestimable secret, the result of twenty-two
years of experiment and researches, unpurchased, to the public,--
when, as was said in Parliament, he might have made a hundred
thousand pounds by it as well as any smaller sum,--should be referred
to only to rebuke the selfish venders of secret remedies, among whom
his early history obliges us reluctantly to record Samuel Hahnemann.
Those who speak of the great body of physicians as if they were
united in a league to support the superannuated notions of the past
against the progress of improvement, have read the history of
medicine to little purpose.  The prevalent failing of this profession
has been, on the contrary, to lend a too credulous ear to ambitious
and plausible innovators.  If at the present time ten years of public
notoriety have passed over any doctrine professing to be of
importance in medical science, and if it has not succeeded in raising
up a powerful body of able, learned, and ingenious advocates for its
claims, the fault must be in the doctrine and not in the medical
profession.

Homoeopathy has had a still more extended period of trial than this,
and we have seen with what results.  It only remains to throw out a
few conjectures as to the particular manner in which it is to break
up and disappear.

1.  The confidence of the few believers in this delusion will never
survive the loss of friends who may die of any acute disease, under a
treatment such as that prescribed by Homoeopathy.  It is doubtful how
far cases of this kind will be trusted to its tender mercies, but
wherever it acquires any considerable foothold, such cases must come,
and with them the ruin of those who practise it, should any highly
valued life be thus sacrificed.

2.  After its novelty has worn out, the ardent and capricious
individuals who constitute the most prominent class of its patrons
will return to visible doses, were it only for the sake of a change.

3.  The Semi-Homoeopathic practitioner will gradually withdraw from
the rotten half of his business and try to make the public forget his
connection with it.

4.  The ultra Homoeopathist will either recant and try to rejoin the
medical profession; or he will embrace some newer and if possible
equally extravagant doctrine; or he will stick to his colors and go
down with his sinking doctrine.  Very few will pursue the course last
mentioned.

A single fact may serve to point out in what direction there will
probably be a movement of the dissolving atoms of Homoeopathy.  On
the 13th page of the too frequently cited Manifesto of the "Examiner"
I read the following stately paragraph:

"Bigelius, M. D., physician to the Emperor of Russia, whose elevated
reputation is well known in Europe, has been an acknowledged advocate
of Hahnemann's doctrines for several years.  He abandoned Allopathia
for Homoeopathia."  The date of this statement is January, 1840.  I
find on looking at the booksellers' catalogues that one Bigel, or
Bigelius, to speak more classically, has been at various times
publishing Homoeopathic books for some years.

Again, on looking into the "Encyclographie des Sciences Medicales"
for April, 1840, I find a work entitled "Manual of HYDROSUDOPATHY,
or the Treatment of Diseases by Cold Water, etc., etc., by Dr. Bigel,
Physician of the School of Strasburg, Member of the Medico-
Chirurgical Institute of Naples, of the Academy of St.  Petersburg,--
Assessor of the College of the Empire of Russia, Physician of his
late Imperial Highness the Grand Duke Constantine, Chevalier of the
Legion of Honor, etc."  Hydrosudopathy or Hydropathy, as it is
sometimes called, is a new medical doctrine or practice which has
sprung up in Germany since Homoeopathy, which it bids fair to drive
out of the market, if, as Dr. Bigel says, fourteen physicians
afflicted with diseases which defied themselves and their colleagues
came to Graefenberg, in the year 1836 alone, and were cured.  Now Dr.
Bigel, "whose elevated reputation is well known in Europe," writes as
follows: "The reader will not fail to see in this defence of the
curative method of Graefenberg a profession of medical faith, and he
will be correct in so doing."  And his work closes with the following
sentence, worthy of so distinguished an individual: "We believe, with
religion, that the water of baptism purifies the soul from its
original sin; let us believe also, with experience, that it is for
our corporeal sins the redeemer of the human body."  If Bigel,
Physician to the late Grand Duke Constantine, is identical with Bigel
whom the "Examiner" calls Physician to the Emperor of Russia, it
appears that he is now actively engaged in throwing cold water at
once upon his patients and the future prospects of Homoeopathy.

If, as must be admitted, no one of Hahnemann's doctrines is received
with tolerable unanimity among his disciples, except the central
axiom, Similia similibus curantur; if this axiom itself relies mainly
for its support upon the folly and trickery of Hahnemann, what can we
think of those who announce themselves ready to relinquish all the
accumulated treasures of our art, to trifle with life upon the
strength of these fantastic theories?  What shall we think of
professed practitioners of medicine, if, in the words of Jahr, "from
ignorance, for their personal convenience, or through charlatanism,
they treat their patients one day Homoeopathically and the next
Allopathically;" if they parade their pretended new science before
the unguarded portion of the community; if they suffer their names to
be coupled with it wherever it may gain a credulous patient; and deny
all responsibility for its character, refuse all argument for its
doctrines, allege no palliation for the ignorance and deception
interwoven with every thread of its flimsy tissue, when they are
questioned by those competent to judge and entitled to an answer?

Such is the pretended science of Homoeopathy, to which you are asked
to trust your lives and the lives of those dearest to you.  A mingled
mass of perverse ingenuity, of tinsel erudition, of imbecile
credulity, and of artful misrepresentation, too often mingled in
practice, if we may trust the authority of its founder, with
heartless and shameless imposition.  Because it is suffered so often
to appeal unanswered to the public, because it has its journals, its
patrons, its apostles, some are weak enough to suppose it can escape
the inevitable doom of utter disgrace and oblivion.  Not many years
can pass away before the same curiosity excited by one of Perkins's
Tractors will be awakened at the sight of one of the Infinitesimal
Globules.  If it should claim a longer existence, it can only be by
falling into the hands of the sordid wretches who wring their bread
from the cold grasp of disease and death in the hovels of ignorant
poverty.

As one humble member of a profession which for more than two thousand
years has devoted itself to the pursuit of the best earthly interests
of mankind, always assailed and insulted from without by such as are
ignorant of its infinite perplexities and labors, always striving in
unequal contest with the hundred-armed giant who walks in the
noonday, and sleeps not in the midnight, yet still toiling, not
merely for itself and the present moment, but for the race and the
future, I have lifted my voice against this lifeless delusion,
rolling its shapeless bulk into the path of a noble science it is too
weak to strike, or to injure.






THE CONTAGIOUSNESS OF PUERPERAL FEVER
Printed in 1843; reprinted with additions, 1855.


THE POINT AT ISSUE.


THE AFFIRMATIVE.

"The disease known as Puerperal Fever is so far contagious as to be
frequently carried from patient to patient by physicians and nurses."
O. W. Holmes, 1843.


THE NEGATIVE.

"The result of the whole discussion will, I trust, serve, not only to
exalt your views of the value and dignity of our profession, but to
divest your minds of the overpowering dread that you can ever become,
especially to woman, under the extremely interesting circumstances of
gestation and parturition, the minister of evil; that you can ever
convey, in any possible manner, a horrible virus, so destructive in
its effects, and so mysterious in its operations as that attributed
to puerperal fever."--Professor Hodge,
1852.

"I prefer to attribute them to accident, or Providence, of which I
can form a conception, rather than to a contagion of which I cannot
form any clear idea, at least as to this particular malady."--
Professor Meigs, 1852.

" .  .  .  in the propagation of which they have no more to do, than
with the propagation of cholera from Jessore to San Francisco, and
from Mauritius to St. Petersburg."--Professor Meigs, 1854.

                    ---------------------

"I arrived at that certainty in the matter, that I could venture to
foretell what women would be affected with the disease, upon hearing
by what midwife they were to be delivered, or by what nurse they were
to be attended, during their lying-in; and, almost in every instance,
my prediction was verified."--Gordon, 1795.

"A certain number of deaths is caused every year by the contagion of
puerperal fever, communicated by the nurses and medical attendants."
Farr, in Fifth Annual Report of Registrar-General of England, 1843.

".  .  .  boards of health, if such exist, or, without them, the
medical institutions of a country, should have the power of coercing,
or of inflicting some kind of punishment on those who recklessly go
from cases of puerperal fevers to parturient or puerperal females,
without using due precaution; and who, having been shown the risk,
criminally encounter it, and convey pestilence and death to the
persons they are employed to aid in the most interesting and
suffering period of female existence."--Copland's Medical
Dictionary, Art.  Puerperal States and Diseases, 1852.

"We conceive it unnecessary to go into detail to prove the contagious
nature of this disease, as there are few, if any, American
practitioners who do not believe in this doctrine."--Dr. Lee, in
Additions to Article last cited.

                   -----------------------

[INTRODUCTORY NOTE.] It happened, some years ago, that a discussion
arose in a Medical Society of which I was a member, involving the
subject of a certain supposed cause of disease, about which something
was known, a good deal suspected, and not a little feared.  The
discussion was suggested by a case, reported at the preceding
meeting, of a physician who made an examination of the body of a
patient who had died with puerperal fever, and who himself died in
less than a week, apparently in consequence of a wound received at
the examination, having attended several women in confinement in the
mean time, all of whom, as it was alleged, were attacked with
puerperal fever.

Whatever apprehensions and beliefs were entertained, it was plain
that a fuller knowledge of the facts relating to the subject would be
acceptable to all present.  I therefore felt that it would be doing a
good service to look into the best records I could find, and inquire
of the most trustworthy practitioners I knew, to learn what
experience had to teach in the matter, and arrived at the results
contained in the following pages.

The Essay was read before the Boston Society for Medical Improvement,
and, at the request of the Society, printed in the "New England
Quarterly Journal of Medicine and Surgery" for April, 1843.  As this
Journal never obtained a large circulation, and ceased to be
published after a year's existence, and as the few copies I had
struck off separately were soon lost sight of among the friends to
whom they were sent, the Essay can hardly be said to have been fully
brought before the Profession.

The subject of this Paper has the same profound interest for me at
the present moment as it had when I was first collecting the terrible
evidence out of which, as it seems to me, the commonest exercise of
reason could not help shaping the truth it involved.  It is not
merely on account of the bearing of the question,--if there is a
question,--on all that is most sacred in human life and happiness,
that the subject cannot lose its interest.  It is because it seems
evident that a fair statement of the facts must produce its proper
influence on a very large proportion of well-constituted and
unprejudiced minds.  Individuals may, here and there, resist the
practical bearing of the evidence on their own feelings or interests;
some may fail to see its meaning, as some persons may be found who
cannot tell red from green; but I cannot doubt that most readers will
be satisfied and convinced, to loathing, long before they have
finished the dark obituary calendar laid before them.

I do not know that I shall ever again have so good an opportunity of
being useful as was granted me by the raising of the question which
produced this Essay.  For I have abundant evidence that it has made
many practitioners more cautious in their relations with puerperal
females, and I have no doubt it will do so still, if it has a chance
of being read, though it should call out a hundred counterblasts,
proving to the satisfaction of their authors that it proved nothing.
And for my part, I had rather rescue one mother from being poisoned
by her attendant, than claim to have saved forty out of fifty
patients to whom I had carried the disease.  Thus, I am willing to
avail myself of any hint coming from without to offer this paper once
more to the press.  The occasion has presented itself, as will be
seen, in a convenient if not in a flattering form.


I send this Essay again to the MEDICAL PROFESSION, without the change
of a word or syllable.  I find, on reviewing it, that it anticipates
and eliminates those secondary questions which cannot be entertained
for a moment until the one great point of fact is peremptorily
settled.  In its very statement of the doctrine maintained it avoids
all discussion of the nature of the disease "known as puerperal
fever," and all the somewhat stale philology of the word contagion.
It mentions, fairly enough, the names of sceptics, or unbelievers as
to the reality of personal transmission; of Dewees, of Tonnelle, of
Duges, of Baudelocque, and others; of course, not including those
whose works were then unwritten or unpublished; nor enumerating all
the Continental writers who, in ignorance of the great mass of
evidence accumulated by British practitioners, could hardly be called
well informed on this subject.  It meets all the array of negative
cases,--those in which disease did not follow exposure,--by the
striking example of small-pox, which, although one of the most
contagious of diseases, is subject to the most remarkable
irregularities and seeming caprices in its transmission.  It makes
full allowance for other causes besides personal transmission,
especially for epidemic influences.  It allows for the possibility of
different modes of conveyance of the destructive principle.  It
recognizes and supports the belief that a series of cases may
originate from a single primitive source which affects each new
patient in turn; and especially from cases of Erysipelas.  It does
not undertake to discuss the theoretical aspect of the subject; that
is a secondary matter of consideration.  Where facts are numerous,
and unquestionable, and unequivocal in their significance, theory
must follow them as it best may, keeping time with their step, and
not go before them, marching to the sound of its own drum and
trumpet.  Having thus narrowed its area to a limited practical
platform of discussion, a matter of life and death, and not of
phrases or theories, it covers every inch of it with a mass of
evidence which I conceive a Committee of Husbands, who can count
coincidences and draw conclusions as well as a Synod of Accoucheurs,
would justly consider as affording ample reasons for an unceremonious
dismissal of a practitioner (if it is conceivable that such a step
could be waited for), after five or six funerals had marked the path
of his daily visits, while other practitioners were not thus
escorted.  To the Profession, therefore, I submit the paper in its
original form, and leave it to take care of itself.

To the MEDICAL STUDENTS, into whose hands this Essay may fall, some
words of introduction may be appropriate, and perhaps, to a small
number of them, necessary.  There are some among them who, from
youth, or want of training, are easily bewildered and confused in any
conflict of opinions into which their studies lead them.  They are
liable to lose sight of the main question in collateral issues, and
to be run away with by suggestive speculations.  They confound belief
with evidence, often trusting the first because it is expressed with
energy, and slighting the latter because it is calm and
unimpassioned.  They are not satisfied with proof; they cannot
believe a point is settled so long as everybody is not silenced.
They have not learned that error is got out of the minds that cherish
it, as the taenia is removed from the body, one joint, or a few
joints at a time, for the most part, rarely the whole evil at once.
They naturally have faith in their instructors, turning to them for
truth, and taking what they may choose to give them; babes in
knowledge, not yet able to tell the breast from the bottle, pumping
away for the milk of truth at all that offers, were it nothing better
than a Professor's shrivelled forefinger.

In the earliest and embryonic stage of professional development, any
violent impression on the instructor's mind is apt to be followed by
some lasting effect on that of the pupil.  No mother's mark is more
permanent than the mental naevi and moles, and excrescences, and
mutilations, that students carry with them out of the lecture-room,
if once the teeming intellect which nourishes theirs has been scared
from its propriety by any misshapen fantasy.  Even an impatient or
petulant expression, which to a philosopher would be a mere index of
the low state of amiability of the speaker at the moment of its
utterance, may pass into the young mind as an element of its future
constitution, to injure its temper or corrupt its judgment.  It is a
duty, therefore, which we owe to this younger class of students, to
clear any important truth which may have been rendered questionable
in their minds by such language, or any truth-teller against whom
they may have been prejudiced by hasty epithets, from the impressions
such words have left.  Until this is done, they are not ready for the
question, where there is a question, for them to decide.  Even if we
ourselves are the subjects of the prejudice, there seems to be no
impropriety in showing that this prejudice is local or personal, and
not an acknowledged conviction with the public at large.  It may be
necessary to break through our usual habits of reserve to do this,
but this is the fault of the position in which others have placed us.

Two widely-known and highly-esteemed practitioners, Professors in two
of the largest Medical Schools of the Union, teaching the branch of
art which includes the Diseases of Women, and therefore speaking with
authority; addressing in their lectures and printed publications
large numbers of young men, many of them in the tenderest immaturity
of knowledge, have recently taken ground in a formal way against the
doctrine maintained in this paper:

On the Non-Contagious Character of Puerperal Fever: An Introductory
Lecture.  By Hugh L.  Hodge, M. D., Professor of Obstetrics in the
University of Pennsylvania.  Delivered Monday, October 11, 1852.
Philadelphia, 1852.

On the Nature, Signs, and Treatment of Childbed Fevers : in a Series
of Letters addressed to the Students of his Class.  By Charles D.
Meigs, M.  D., Professor of Midwifery and the Diseases of Women and
Children in Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia, etc., etc.
Philadelphia, 1854.  Letter VI.


The first of the two publications, Dr. Hodge's Lecture, while its
theoretical considerations and negative experiences do not seem to me
to require any further notice than such as lay ready for them in my
Essay written long before, is, I am pleased to say, unobjectionable
in tone and language, and may be read without offence.

This can hardly be said of the chapter of Dr. Meigs's volume which
treats of Contagion in Childbed Fever.  There are expressions used in
it which might well put a stop to all scientific discussions, were
they to form the current coin in our exchange of opinions.  I leave
the "very young gentlemen," whose careful expositions of the results
of practice in more than six thousand cases are characterized as "the
jejune and fizenless dreamings of sophomore writers," to the
sympathies of those "dear young friends," and "dear young gentlemen,"
who will judge how much to value their instructor's counsel to think
for themselves, knowing what they are to expect if they happen not to
think as he does.

One unpalatable expression I suppose the laws of construction oblige
me to appropriate to myself, as my reward for a certain amount of
labor bestowed on the investigation of a very important question of
evidence, and a statement of my own practical conclusions.  I take no
offence, and attempt no retort.  No man makes a quarrel with me over
the counterpane that covers a mother, with her new-born infant at her
breast.  There is no epithet in the vocabulary of slight and sarcasm
that can reach my personal sensibilities in such a controversy.  Only
just so far as a disrespectful phrase may turn the student aside from
the examination of the evidence, by discrediting or dishonoring the
witness, does it call for any word of notice.

I appeal from the disparaging language by which the Professor in the
Jefferson School of Philadelphia world dispose of my claims to be
listened to.  I appeal, not to the vote of the Society for Medical
Improvement, although this was an unusual evidence of interest in the
paper in question, for it was a vote passed among my own townsmen;
nor to the opinion of any American, for none know better than the
Professors in the great Schools of Philadelphia how cheaply the
praise of native contemporary criticism is obtained.  I appeal to the
recorded opinions of those whom I do not know, and who do not know
me, nor care for me, except for the truth that I may have uttered; to
Copland, in his "Medical Dictionary," who has spoken of my Essay in
phrases to which the pamphlets of American "scribblers" are seldom
used from European authorities; to Ramsbotham, whose compendious
eulogy is all that self-love could ask; to the "Fifth Annual Report"
of the Registrar-General of England, in which the second-hand
abstract of my Essay figures largely, and not without favorable
comment, in an important appended paper.  These testimonies, half
forgotten until this circumstance recalled them, are dragged into the
light, not in a paroxysm of vanity, but to show that there may be
food for thought in the small pamphlet which the Philadelphia Teacher
treats so lightly.  They were at least unsought for, and would never
have been proclaimed but for the sake of securing the privilege of a
decent and unprejudiced hearing.

I will take it for granted that they have so far counterpoised the
depreciating language of my fellow-countryman and fellow-teacher as
to gain me a reader here and there among the youthful class of
students I am now addressing.  It is only for their sake that I think
it necessary to analyze, or explain, or illustrate, or corroborate
any portion of the following Essay.  But I know that nothing can be
made too plain for beginners; and as I do not expect the
practitioner, or even the more mature student, to take the trouble to
follow me through an Introduction which I consider wholly unnecessary
and superfluous for them, I shall not hesitate to stoop to the most
elementary simplicity for the benefit of the younger student.  I do
this more willingly because it affords a good opportunity, as it
seems to me, of exercising the untrained mind in that medical logic
which does not seem to have been either taught or practised in our
schools of late, to the extent that might be desired.

I will now exhibit, in a series of propositions reduced to their
simplest expression, the same essential statements and conclusions as
are contained in the Essay, with such commentaries and explanations
as may be profitable to the inexperienced class of readers addressed.


I.  It has been long believed, by many competent observers, that
Puerperal Fever (so called) is sometimes carried from patient to
patient by medical assistants.

II.  The express object of this Essay is to prove that it is so
carried.

III.  In order to prove this point, it is not necessary to consult
any medical theorist as to whether or not it is consistent with his
preconceived notions that such a mode of transfer should exist.

IV.  If the medical theorist insists on being consulted, and we see
fit to indulge him, he cannot be allowed to assume that the alleged
laws of contagion, deduced from observation in other diseases, shall
be cited to disprove the alleged laws deduced from observation in
this.  Science would never make progress under such conditions.
Neither the long incubation of hydrophobia, nor the protecting power
of vaccination, would ever have been admitted, if the results of
observation in these affections had been rejected as contradictory to
the previously ascertained laws of contagion.

V.  The disease in question is not a common one; producing, on the
average, about three deaths in a thousand births, according to the
English Registration returns which I have examined.

VI.  When an unusually large number of cases of this disease occur
about the same time, it is inferred, therefore, that there exists
some special cause for this increased frequency.  If the disease
prevails extensively over a wide region of country, it is attributed
without dispute to an epidemic influence.  If it prevails in a single
locality, as in a hospital, and not elsewhere, this is considered
proof that some local cause is there active in its production.

VII.  When a large number of cases of this disease occur in rapid
succession, in one individual's ordinary practice, and few or none
elsewhere, these cases appearing in scattered localities, in patients
of the same average condition as those who escape under the care of
others, there is the same reason for connecting the cause of the
disease with the person in this instance, as with the place in that
last mentioned.

VIII.  Many series of cases, answering to these conditions, are given
in this Essay, and many others will be referred to which have
occurred since it was written.

IX.  The alleged results of observation may be set aside; first,
because the so-called facts are in their own nature equivocal;
secondly, because they stand on insufficient authority; thirdly,
because they are not sufficiently numerous.  But, in this case, the
disease is one of striking and well-marked character; the witnesses
are experts, interested in denying and disbelieving the facts; the
number of consecutive cases in many instances frightful, and the
number of series of cases such that I have no room for many of them
except by mere reference.

X.  These results of observation, being admitted, may, we will
suppose, be interpreted in different methods.  Thus the coincidences
may be considered the effect of chance.  I have had the chances
calculated by a competent person, that a given practitioner, A.,
shall have sixteen fatal cases in a month, on the following data:
A. to average attendance upon two hundred and fifty births in a year;
three deaths in one thousand births to be assumed as the average from
puerperal fever; no epidemic to be at the time prevailing.  It
follows, from the answer given me, that if we suppose every one of
the five hundred thousand annual births of England to have been
recorded during the last half-century, there would not be one chance
in a million million million millions that one such series should be
noted.  No possible fractional error in this calculation can render
the chance a working probability.  Applied to dozens of series of
various lengths, it is obviously an absurdity.  Chance, therefore, is
out of the question as an explanation of the admitted coincidences.

XI.  There is, therefore, some relation of cause and effect between
the physician's presence and the patient's disease.

XII.  Until it is proved to what removable condition attaching to the
attendant the disease is owing, he is bound to stay away from his
patients so soon as he finds himself singled out to be tracked by the
disease.  How long, and with what other precautions, I have
suggested, without dictating, at the close of my Essay.  If the
physician does not at once act on any reasonable suspicion of his
being the medium of transfer, the families where he is engaged, if
they are allowed to know the facts, should decline his services for
the time.  His feelings on the occasion, however interesting to
himself, should not be even named in this connection.  A physician
who talks about ceremony and gratitude, and services rendered, and
the treatment he got, surely forgets himself; it is impossible that
he should seriously think of these small matters where there is even
a question whether he may not carry disease, and death, and
bereavement into any one of "his families," as they are sometimes
called.


I will now point out to the young student the mode in which he may
relieve his mind of any confusion, or possibly, if very young, any
doubt, which the perusal of Dr. Meigs's Sixth Letter may have raised
in his mind.

The most prominent ideas of the Letter are, first, that the
transmissible nature of puerperal fever appears improbable, and,
secondly, that it would be very inconvenient to the writer.
Dr. Woodville, Physician to the Small-Pox and Inoculation Hospital in
London, found it improbable, and exceedingly inconvenient to himself,
that cow pox should prevent small-pox; but Dr. Jenner took the
liberty to prove the fact, notwithstanding.

I will first call the young student's attention to the show of
negative facts (exposure without subsequent disease), of which much
seems to be thought.  And I may at the same time refer him to Dr.
Hodge's Lecture, where he will find the same kind of facts and
reasoning.  Let him now take up Watson's Lectures, the good sense and
spirit of which have made his book a universal favorite, and open to
the chapter on Continued Fever.  He will find a paragraph containing
the following sentence: "A man might say, 'I was in the battle of
Waterloo, and saw many men around me fall down and die, and it was
said that they were struck down by musket-balls; but I know better
than that, for I was there all the time, and so were many of my
friends, and we were never hit by any musket-balls.  Musket-balls,
therefore, could not have been the cause of the deaths we witnessed.'
And if, like contagion, they were not palpable to the senses, such a
person might go on to affirm that no proof existed of there being any
such thing as musket-balls."  Now let the student turn back to the
chapter on Hydrophobia in the same volume.  He will find that John
Hunter knew a case in which, of twenty-one persons bitten, only one
died of the disease.  He will find that one dog at Charenton was
bitten at different times by thirty different mad dogs, and outlived
it all.  Is there no such thing, then, as hydrophobia?  Would one
take no especial precautions if his wife, about to become a mother,
had been bitten by a rabid animal, because so many escape?  Or let
him look at "Underwood on Diseases of Children,"[Philadelphia, 1842,
p.  244, note.] and he will find the case of a young woman who was
inoculated eight times in thirty days, at the same time attending
several children with smallpox, and yet was not infected.  But seven
weeks afterwards she took the disease and died.

It would seem as if the force of this argument could hardly fail to
be seen, if it were granted that every one of these series of cases
were so reported as to prove that there could have been no transfer
of disease.  There is not one of them so reported, in the Lecture or
the Letter, as to prove that the disease may not have been carried by
the practitioner.  I strongly suspect that it was so carried in some
of these cases, but from the character of the very imperfect evidence
the question can never be settled without further disclosures.

Although the Letter is, as I have implied, principally taken up with
secondary and collateral questions, and might therefore be set aside
as in the main irrelevant, I am willing, for the student's sake, to
touch some of these questions briefly, as an illustration of its
logical character.

The first thing to be done, as I thought when I wrote my Essay, was
to throw out all discussions of the word contagion, and this I did
effectually by the careful wording of my statement of the subject to
be discussed.  My object was not to settle the etymology or
definition of a word, but to show that women had often died in
childbed, poisoned in some way by their medical attendants.  On the
other point, I, at least, have no controversy with anybody, and I
think the student will do well to avoid it in this connection.  If I
must define my position, however, as well as the term in question, I
am contented with Worcester's definition; provided always this avowal
do not open another side controversy on the merits of his Dictionary,
which Dr. Meigs has not cited, as compared with Webster's, which he
has.

I cannot see the propriety of insisting that all the laws of the
eruptive fevers must necessarily hold true of this peculiar disease
of puerperal women.  If there were any such propriety, the laws of
the eruptive fevers must at least be stated correctly.  It is not
true, for instance, as Dr. Meigs states, that contagion is "no
respecter of persons;" that "it attacks all individuals alike."  To
give one example: Dr. Gregory, of the Small-Pox Hospital, who ought
to know, says that persons pass through life apparently insensible to
or unsusceptible of the small-pox virus, and that the same persons do
not take the vaccine disease.

As to the short time of incubation, of which so much is made, we have
no right to decide beforehand whether it shall be long or short, in
the cases we are considering.  A dissection wound may produce
symptoms of poisoning in six hours; the bite of a rabid animal may
take as many months.

After the student has read the case in Dr. Meigs's 136th paragraph,
and the following one, in which he exclaims against the idea of
contagion, because the patient, delivered on the 26th of December,
was attacked in twenty-four hours, and died on the third day, let him
read what happened at the "Black Assizes" of 1577 and 1750.  In the
first case, six hundred persons sickened the same night of the
exposure, and three hundred more in three days. [Elliotson's
Practice, p.  298.]  Of those attacked in the latter year, the
exposure being on the 11th of May, Alderman Lambert died on the 13th,
Under-Sheriff Cox on the 14th, and many of note before the
20th.  But these are old stories.  Let the student listen then to Dr.
Gerhard, whose reputation as a cautious observer he may be supposed
to know.  "The nurse was shaving a man, who died in a few hours after
his entrance; he inhaled his breath, which had a nauseous taste, and
in an hour afterwards was taken with nausea, cephalalgia, and singing
of the ears.  From that moment the attack began, and assumed a severe
character.  The assistant was supporting another patient, who died
soon afterwards; he felt the pungent heat upon his skin, and was
taken immediately with the symptoms of typhus."[Am.  Jour.  Med.
Sciences, Feb.  1837, p.  299.]   It is by notes of cases, rather
than notes of admiration, that we must be guided, when we study the
Revised Statutes of Nature, as laid down from the curule chairs of
Medicine.

Let the student read Dr. Meigs's 140th paragraph soberly, and then
remember, that not only does he infer, suspect, and surmise, but he
actually asserts (page 154), "there was poison in the house," because
three out of five patients admitted into a ward had puerperal fever
and died.  Have I not as much right to draw a positive inference from
"Dr. A.'s" seventy exclusive cases as he from the three cases in the
ward of the Dublin Hospital?  All practical medicine, and all action
in common affairs, is founded on inferences.  How does Dr. Meigs know
that the patients he bled in puerperal fever would not have all got
well if he had not bled them?

"You see a man discharge a gun at another; you see the flash, you
hear the report, you see the person fall a lifeless corpse; and you
infer, from all these circumstances, that there was a ball discharged
from the gun, which entered his body and caused his death, because
such is the usual and natural cause of such an effect.  But you did
not see the ball leave the gun, pass through the air, and enter the
body of the slain; and your testimony to the fact of killing is,
therefore, only inferential,--in other words, circumstantial.  It is
possible that no ball was in the gun; and we infer that there was,
only because we cannot account for death on any other supposition."
[Chief Justice Gibson, in Am.  Law Journal, vol.  vi.  p.  123.]

"The question always comes to this: Is the circumstance of
intercourse with the sick followed by the appearance of the disease
in a proportion of cases so much greater than any other circumstance
common to any portion of the inhabitants of the place under
observation, as to make it inconceivable that the succession of cases
occurring in persons having that intercourse should have been the
result of chance?  If so, the inference is unavoidable, that that
intercourse must have acted as a cause of the disease.  All
observations which do not bear strictly on that point are irrelevant,
and, in the case of an epidemic first appearing in a town or
district, a succession of two cases is sometimes sufficient to
furnish evidence which, on the principle I have stated, is nearly
irresistible."

Possibly an inexperienced youth may be awe-struck by the quotation
from Cuvier.  These words, or their equivalent, are certainly to be
found in his Introduction.  So are the words "top not come down"!
to be found in the Bible, and they were as much meant for the ladies'
head-dresses as the words of Cuvier were meant to make clinical
observation wait for a permit from anybody to look with its eyes and
count on its fingers.  Let the inquiring youth read the whole
Introduction, and he will see what they mean.

I intend no breach of courtesy, but this is a proper place to warn
the student against skimming the prefaces and introductions of works
for mottoes and embellishments to his thesis.  He cannot learn
anatomy by thrusting an exploring needle into the body.  He will be
very liable to misquote his author's meaning while he is picking off
his outside sentences.  He may make as great a blunder as that simple
prince who praised the conductor of his orchestra for the piece just
before the overture; the musician was too good a courtier to tell him
that it was only the tuning of the instruments.

To the six propositions in the 142d paragraph, and the remarks about
"specific" diseases, the answer, if any is necessary, seems very
simple.  An inflammation of a serous membrane may give rise to
secretions which act as a poison, whether that be a "specific" poison
or not, as Dr. Homer has told his young readers, and as dissectors
know too well; and that poison may produce its symptoms in a few
hours after the system has received it, as any may see in Druitt's
"Surgery," if they care to look.  Puerperal peritonitis may produce
such a poison, and puerperal women may be very sensible to its
influences, conveyed by contact or exhalation.  Whether this is so or
not, facts alone can determine, and to facts we have had recourse to
settle it.

The following statement is made by Dr. Meigs in his 142d paragraph,
and developed more at length, with rhetorical amplifications, in the
134th.  "No human being, save a pregnant or parturient woman, is
susceptible to the poison."  This statement is wholly incorrect, as I
am sorry to have to point out to a Teacher in Dr. Meigs's position.
I do not object to the erudition which quotes Willis and Fernelius,
the last of whom was pleasantly said to have "preserved the dregs of
the Arabs in the honey of his Latinity."  But I could wish that more
modern authorities had not been overlooked.  On this point, for
instance, among the numerous facts disproving the statement, the
"American Journal of Medical Sciences," published not far from his
lecture-room, would have presented him with a respectable catalog of
such cases.  Thus he might refer to Mr. Storrs's paper "On the
Contagious Effects of Puerperal Fever on the Male Subject; or on
Persons not Childbearing"(Jan.  1846), or to Dr. Reid's case (April,
1846), or to Dr. Barron's statement of the children's dying of
peritonitis in an epidemic of puerperal fever at the Philadelphia
Hospital (Oct.  1842), or to various instances cited in Dr.
Kneeland's article (April, 186).  Or, if he would have referred to
the "New York Journal," he might have seen Prof. Austin Flint's
cases.  Or, if he had honored my Essay so far, he might have found
striking instances of the same kind in the first of the new series of
cases there reported and elsewhere.  I do not see the bearing of his
proposition, if it were true.  But it is one of those assertions that
fall in a moment before a slight examination of the facts; and I
confess my surprise, that a professor who lectures on the Diseases of
Women should have ventured to make it.

Nearly seven pages are devoted to showing that I was wrong in saying
I would not be "understood to imply that there exists a doubt in the
mind of any well-informed member of the medical profession as to the
fact that puerperal fever is sometimes communicated from one person
to another, both directly and indirectly."  I will devote seven lines
to these seven pages, which seven lines, if I may say it without
offence, are, as it seems to me, six more than are strictly
necessary.

The following authors are cited as sceptics by Dr. Meigs:
Dewees.--I cited the same passage.  Did not know half the facts.
Robert Lee.--Believes the disease is sometimes communicable by
contagion.  Tonnelle, Baudelocque.  Both cited by me.  Jacquemier.
--Published three years after my Essay.  Kiwisch.  Behindhand in
knowledge of Puerperal Fever." [B. & F.  Med.  Rev.  Jan.  1842.]
Paul Dubois.--Scanzoni.

These Continental writers not well informed on this point.[See Dr.
Simpson's Remarks at Meeting of Edin.  Med.  Chir.  Soc.  (Am.  Jour.
Oct.  1851.)]

The story of Von Busch is of interest and value, but there is nothing
in it which need perplex the student.  It is not pretended that the
disease is always, or even, it may be, in the majority of cases,
carried about by attendants; only that it is so carried in certain
cases.  That it may have local and epidemic causes, as well as that
depending on personal transmission, is not disputed.  Remember how
small-pox often disappears from a community in spite of its
contagious character, and the necessary exposure of many persons to
those suffering from it; in both diseases contagion is only one of
the coefficients of the disease.

I have already spoken of the possibility that Dr. Meigs may have been
the medium of transfer of puerperal fever in some of the cases he has
briefly catalogued.  Of Dr. Rutter's cases I do not know how to
speak.  I only ask the student to read the facts stated by Dr.
Condie, as given in my Essay, and say whether or not a man should
allow his wife to be attended by a practitioner in whose hands
"scarcely a female that has been delivered for weeks past has escaped
an attack,"  "while no instance of the disease has occurred in the
patients of any other accoucheur practising in the same district."
If I understand Dr. Meigs and Dr. Hodge, they would not warn the
physician or spare the patient under such circumstances.  They would
"go on," if I understand them, not to seven, or seventy, only, but to
seventy times seven, if they could find patients.  If this is not
what they mean, may we respectfully ask them to state what they do
mean, to their next classes, in the name of humanity, if not of
science!

I might repeat the question asked concerning Dr. Rutter's cases, with
reference to those reported by Dr. Roberton.  Perhaps, however, the
student would like to know the opinion of a person in the habit of
working at matters of this kind in a practical point of view.  To
satisfy him on this ground, I addressed the following question to the
President of one of our principal Insurance Companies, leaving Dr.
Meigs's book and my Essay in his hands at the same time.

Question.  "If such facts as Roberton's cases were before you, and
the attendant had had ten, or even five fatal cases, or three, or two
even, would you, or would you not, if insuring the life of the next
patient to be taken care of by that attendant, expect an extra
premium over that of an average case of childbirth?"

Answer.  "Of course I should require a very large extra premium, if
I would take take risk at all."

But I do not choose to add the expressions of indignation which the
examination of the facts before him called out.  I was satisfied from
the effect they produced on him, that if all the hideous catalogues
of cases now accumulated were fully brought to the knowledge of the
public, nothing, since the days of Burke and Hare, has raised such a
cry of horror as would be shrieked in the ears of the Profession.

Dr. Meigs has elsewhere invoked "Providence" as the alternative of
accident, to account for the "coincidences."  ("Obstetrics," Phil.
1852, p.  631.) If so, Providence either acts through the agency of
secondary causes, as in other diseases, or not.  If through such
causes, let us find out what they are, as we try to do in other
cases.  It may be true that offences, or diseases, will come, but
"woe unto him through whom they come," if we catch him in the
voluntary or careless act of bringing them!  But if Providence does
not act through secondary causes in this particular sphere of
etiology, then why does Dr. Meigs take such pains to reason so
extensively about the laws of contagion, which, on that supposition,
have no more to do with this case than with the plague which
destroyed the people after David had numbered them?  Above all, what
becomes of the theological aspect of the question, when he asserts
that a practitioner was "only unlucky in meeting with the epidemic
cases?" (Op. cit.  p. 633.) We do not deny that the God of battles
decides the fate of nations; but we like to have the biggest
squadrons on our side, and we are particular that our soldiers should
not only say their prayers, but also keep their powder dry.  We do
not deny the agency of Providence in the disaster at Norwalk, but we
turn off the engineer, and charge the Company five thousand dollars
apiece for every life that is sacrificed.

Why a grand jury should not bring in a bill against a physician who
switches off a score of women one after the other along his private
track, when he knows that there is a black gulf at the end of it,
down which they are to plunge, while the great highway is clear, is
more than I can answer.  It is not by laying the open draw to
Providence that he is to escape the charge of manslaughter.

To finish with all these lesser matters of question, I am unable to
see why a female must necessarily be unattended in her confinement,
because she declines the services of a particular practitioner.  In
all the series of cases mentioned, the death-carrying attendant was
surrounded by others not tracked by disease and its consequences.
Which, I would ask, is worse,--to call in another, even a rival
practitioner, or to submit an unsuspecting female to a risk which an
Insurance Company would have nothing to do with?

I do not expect ever to return to this subject.  There is a point of
mental saturation, beyond which argument cannot be forced without
breeding impatient, if not harsh, feelings towards those who refuse
to be convinced.  If I have so far manifested neither, it is well to
stop here, and leave the rest to those younger friends who may have
more stomach for the dregs of a stale argument.

The extent of my prefatory remarks may lead some to think that I
attach too much importance to my own Essay.  Others may wonder that I
should expend so many words upon the two productions referred to, the
Letter and the Lecture.  I do consider my Essay of much importance so
long as the doctrine it maintains is treated as a question, and so
long as any important part of the defence of that doctrine is thought
to rest on its evidence or arguments.  I cannot treat as
insignificant any opinions bearing on life, and interests dearer than
life, proclaimed yearly to hundreds of young men, who will carry them
to their legitimate results in practice.

The teachings of the two Professors in the great schools of
Philadelphia are sure to be listened to, not only by their immediate
pupils, but by the Profession at large.  I am too much in earnest for
either humility or vanity, but I do entreat those who hold the keys
of life and death to listen to me also for this once.  I ask no
personal favor; but I beg to be heard in behalf of the women whose
lives are at stake, until some stronger voice shall plead for them.

I trust that I have made the issue perfectly distinct and
intelligible.  And let it be remembered that this is no subject to be
smoothed over by nicely adjusted phrases of half-assent and half-
censure divided between the parties.  The balance must be struck
boldly and the result declared plainly.  If I have been hasty,
presumptuous, ill-informed, illogical; if my array of facts means
nothing; if there is no reason for any caution in the view of these
facts; let me be told so on such authority that I must believe it,
and I will be silent henceforth, recognizing that my mind is in a
state of disorganization.  If the doctrine I have maintained is a
mournful truth; if to disbelieve it, and to practise on this
disbelief, and to teach others so to disbelieve and practise, is to
carry desolation, and to charter others to carry it, into confiding
families, let it be proclaimed as plainly what is to be thought of
the teachings of those who sneer at the alleged dangers, and scout
the very idea of precaution.  Let it be remembered that persons are
nothing in this matter; better that twenty pamphleteers should be
silenced, or as many professors unseated, than that one mother's life
should be taken.  There is no quarrel here between men, but there is
deadly incompatibility and exterminating warfare between doctrines.
Coincidences, meaning nothing, though a man have a monopoly of the
disease for weeks or months; or cause and effect, the cause being in
some way connected with the person; this is the question.  If I am
wrong, let me be put down by such a rebuke as no rash declaimer has
received since there has been a public opinion in the medical
profession of America; if I am right, let doctrines which lead to
professional homicide be no longer taught from the chairs of those
two great Institutions.  Indifference will not do here; our
Journalists and Committees have no right to take up their pages with
minute anatomy and tediously detailed cases, while it is a question
whether or not the "blackdeath" of child-bed is to be scattered
broadcast by the agency of the mother's friend and adviser.  Let the
men who mould opinions look to it; if there is any voluntary
blindness, any interested oversight, any culpable negligence, even,
in such a matter, and the facts shall reach the public ear; the
pestilence-carrier of the lying-in chamber must look to God for
pardon, for man will never forgive him.


               THE CONTAGIOUSNESS OF PUERPERAL FEVER.

In collecting, enforcing, and adding to the evidence accumulated upon
this most serious subject, I would not be understood to imply that
there exists a doubt in the mind of any well-informed member of the
medical profession as to the fact that puerperal fever is sometimes
communicated from one person to another, both directly and
indirectly.  In the present state of our knowledge upon this point I
should consider such doubts merely as a proof that the sceptic had
either not examined the evidence, or, having examined it, refused to
accept its plain and unavoidable consequences.  I should be sorry to
think, with Dr. Rigby, that it was a case of "oblique vision;" I
should be unwilling to force home the argumentum ad hominem of Dr.
Blundell, but I would not consent to make a question of a momentous
fact which is no longer to be considered as a subject for trivial
discussions, but to be acted upon with silent promptitude.  It
signifies nothing that wise and experienced practitioners have
sometimes doubted the reality of the danger in question; no man has
the right to doubt it any longer.  No negative facts, no opposing
opinions, be they what they may, or whose they may, can form any
answer to the series of cases now within the reach of all who choose
to explore the records of medical science.

If there are some who conceive that any important end would be
answered by recording such opinions, or by collecting the history of
all the cases they could find in which no evidence of the influence
of contagion existed, I believe they are in error.  Suppose a few
writers of authority can be found to profess a disbelief in
contagion,--and they are very few compared with those who think
differently,--is it quite clear that they formed their opinions on a
view of all the facts, or is it not apparent that they relied mostly
on their own solitary experience?  Still further, of those whose
names are quoted, is it not true that scarcely a single one could by
any possibility have known the half or the tenth of the facts bearing
on the subject which have reached such a frightful amount within the
last few years?  Again, as to the utility of negative facts, as we
may briefly call them,--instances, namely, in which exposure has not
been followed by disease,--although, like other truths, they may be
worth knowing, I do not see that they are like to shed any important
light upon the subject before us.  Every such instance requires a
good deal of circumstantial explanation before it can be accepted.
It is not enough that a practitioner should have had a single case of
puerperal fever not followed by others.  It must be known whether he
attended others while this case was in progress, whether he went
directly from one chamber to others, whether he took any, and what
precautions.  It is important to know that several women were exposed
to infection derived from the patient, so that allowance may be made
for want of predisposition.  Now if of negative facts so sifted there
could be accumulated a hundred for every one plain instance of
communication here recorded, I trust it need not be said that we are
bound to guard and watch over the hundredth tenant of our fold,
though the ninety and nine may be sure of escaping the wolf at its
entrance.  If any one is disposed, then, to take a hundred instances
of lives endangered or sacrificed out of those I have mentioned, and
make it reasonably clear that within a similar time and compass ten
thousand escaped the same exposure, I shall thank him for his
industry, but I must be permitted to hold to my own practical
conclusions, and beg him to adopt or at least to examine them also.
Children that walk in calico before open fires are not always burned
to death; the instances to the contrary may be worth recording; but
by no means if they are to be used as arguments against woollen
frocks and high fenders.

I am not sure that this paper will escape another remark which it
might be wished were founded in justice.  It may be said that the
facts are too generally known and acknowledged to require any formal
argument or exposition, that there is nothing new in the positions
advanced, and no need of laying additional statements before the
Profession.  But on turning to two works, one almost universally, and
the other extensively appealed to as authority in this country, I see
ample reason to overlook this objection.  In the last edition of
Dewees's Treatise on the "Diseases of Females," it is expressly said,
"In this country, under no circumstance that puerperal fever has
appeared hitherto, does it afford the slightest ground for the belief
that it is contagious."  In the "Philadelphia Practice of Midwifery"
not one word can be found in the chapter devoted to this disease
which would lead the reader to suspect that the idea of contagion had
ever been entertained.  It seems proper, therefore, to remind those
who are in the habit of referring to these works for guidance, that
there may possibly be some sources of danger they have slighted or
omitted, quite as important as a trifling irregularity of diet, or a
confined state of the bowels, and that whatever confidence a
physician may have in his own mode of treatment, his services are of
questionable value whenever he carries the bane as well as the
antidote about his person.

The practical point to be illustrated is the following:

The disease known as Puerperal Fever is so far contagious as to be
frequently carried from patient to patient by physicians and nurses.


Let me begin by throwing out certain incidental questions, which,
without being absolutely essential, would render the subject more
complicated, and by making such concessions and assumptions as may be
fairly supposed to be without the pale of discussion.

1.  It is granted that all the forms of what is called puerperal
fever may not be, and probably are not, equally contagious or
infectious.  I do not enter into the distinctions which have been
drawn by authors, because the facts do not appear to me sufficient to
establish any absolute line of demarcation between such forms as may
be propagated by contagion and those which are never so propagated.
This general result I shall only support by the authority of Dr.
Ramsbotham, who gives, as the result of his experience, that the same
symptoms belong to what he calls the infectious and the sporadic
forms of the disease, and the opinion of Armstrong in his original
Essay.  If others can show any such distinction, I leave it to them
to do it.  But there are cases enough that show the prevalence of the
disease among the patients of a single practitioner when it was in no
degree epidemic, in the proper sense of the term. I may refer to
those of Mr. Roberton and of Dr. Peirson, hereafter to be cited, as
examples.

2.  I shall not enter into any dispute about the particular mode of
infection, whether it be by the atmosphere the physician carries
about him into the sick-chamber, or by the direct application of the
virus to the absorbing surfaces with which his hand comes in contact.
Many facts and opinions are in favor of each of these modes of
transmission.  But it is obvious that in the majority of cases it
must be impossible to decide by which of these channels the disease
is conveyed, from the nature of the intercourse between the physician
and the patient.

3.  It is not pretended that the contagion of puerperal fever must
always be followed by the disease.  It is true of all contagious
diseases, that they frequently spare those who appear to be fully
submitted to their influence.  Even the vaccine virus, fresh from the
subject, fails every day to produce its legitimate effect, though
every precaution is taken to insure its action.  This is still more
remarkably the case with scarlet fever and some other diseases.

4.  It is granted that the disease may be produced and variously
modified by many causes besides contagion, and more especially by
epidemic and endemic influences.  But this is not peculiar to the
disease in question.  There is no doubt that small-pox is propagated
to a great extent by contagion, yet it goes through the same periods
of periodical increase and diminution which have been remarked in
puerperal fever.  If the question is asked how we are to reconcile
the great variations in the mortality of puerperal fever in different
seasons and places with the supposition of contagion, I will answer
it by another question from Mr. Farr's letter to the Registrar-
General.  He makes the statement that "five die weekly of small-pox
in the metropolis when the disease is not epidemic,"--and adds, "The
problem for solution is,--Why do the five deaths become 10, 15, 20,
31, 58, 88, weekly, and then progressively fall through the same
measured steps?"

5.  I take it for granted, that if it can be shown that great numbers
of lives have been and are sacrificed to ignorance or blindness on
this point, no other error of which physicians or nurses may be
occasionally suspected will be alleged in palliation of this; but
that whenever and wherever they can be shown to carry disease and
death instead of health and safety, the common instincts of humanity
will silence every attempt to explain away their responsibility.


The treatise of Dr. Gordon of Aberdeen was published in the year
1795, being among the earlier special works upon the disease.  Apart
of his testimony has been occasionally copied into other works, but
his expressions are so clear, his experience is given with such manly
distinctness and disinterested honesty, that it may be quoted as a
model which might have been often followed with advantage.

"This disease seized such women only as were visited, or delivered by
a practitioner, or taken care of by a nurse, who had previously
attended patients affected with the disease."

"I had evident proofs of its infectious nature, and that the
infection was as readily communicated as that of the small-pox or
measles, and operated more speedily than any other infection with
which I am acquainted."

"I had evident proofs that every person who had been with a patient
in the puerperal fever became charged with an atmosphere of
infection, which was communicated to every pregnant woman who
happened to come within its sphere.  This is not an assertion, but a
fact, admitting of demonstration, as may be seen by a perusal of the
foregoing table,"--referring to a table of seventy-seven cases, in
many of which the channel of propagation was evident.

He adds, "It is a disagreeable declaration for me to mention, that I
myself was the means of carrying the infection to a great number of
women."  He then enumerates a number of instances in which the
disease was conveyed by midwives and others to the neighboring
villages, and declares that "these facts fully prove that the cause
of the puerperal fever, of which I treat, was a specific contagion,
or infection, altogether unconnected with a noxious constitution of
the atmosphere."

But his most terrible evidence is given in these words: "I ARRIVED AT
THAT CERTAINTY IN THE MATTER, THAT I COULD VENTURE TO FORETELL WHAT
WOMEN WOULD BE AFFECTED WITH THE DISEASE, UPON HEARING BY WHAT
MIDWIFE THEY WERE TO BE DELIVERED, OR BY WHAT NURSE THEY WERE TO BE
ATTENDED, DURING THEIR LYING-IN: AND ALMOST IN EVERY INSTANCE, MY
PREDICTION WAS VERIFIED."

Even previously to Gordon, Mr. White of Manchester had said, "I am
acquainted with two gentlemen in another town, where the whole
business of midwifery is divided betwixt them, and it is very
remarkable that one of them loses several patients every year of the
puerperal fever, and the other never so much as meets with the
disorder,"--a difference which he seems to attribute to their various
modes of treatment. [On the Management of Lying-in Women, p.  120.]

Dr. Armstrong has given a number of instances in his Essay on
Puerperal Fever, of the prevalence of the disease among the patients
of a single practitioner.  At Sunderland, "in all, forty-three cases
occurred from the 1st of January to the 1st of October, when the
disease ceased; and of this number forty were witnessed by Mr.
Gregson and his assistant, Mr. Gregory, the remainder having been
separately seen by three accoucheurs."  There is appended to the
London edition of this Essay, a letter from Mr. Gregson, in which
that gentleman says, in reference to the great number of cases
occurring in his practice, "The cause of this I cannot pretend fully
to explain, but I should be wanting in common liberality if I were to
make any hesitation in asserting, that the disease which appeared in
my practice was highly contagious, and communicable from one
puerperal woman to another."  "It is customary among the lower and
middle ranks of people to make frequent personal visits to puerperal
women resident in the same neighborhood, and I have ample evidence
for affirming that the infection of the disease was often carried
about in that manner; and, however painful to my feelings, I must in
candor declare, that it is very probable the contagion was conveyed,
in some instances, by myself, though I took every possible care to
prevent such a thing from happening, the moment that I ascertained
that the distemper was infectious."  Dr. Armstrong goes on to mention
six other instances within his knowledge, in which the disease had at
different times and places been limited, in the same singular manner,
to the practice of individuals, while it existed scarcely if at all
among the patients of others around them.  Two of the gentlemen
became so convinced of their conveying the contagion, that they
withdrew for a time from practice.

I find a brief notice, in an American Journal, of another series of
cases, first mentioned by Mr. Davies, in the "Medical Repository."
This gentleman stated his conviction that the disease is contagious.

"In the autumn of 1822 he met with twelve cases, while his medical
friends in the neighborhood did not meet with any, 'or at least very
few.'  He could attribute this circumstance to no other cause than
his having been present at the examination, after death, of two
cases, some time previous, and of his having imparted the disease to
his patients, notwithstanding every precaution."

Dr. Gooch says, "It is not uncommon for the greater number of cases
to occur in the practice of one man, whilst the other practitioners
of the neighborhood, who are not more skilful or more busy, meet with
few or none.  A practitioner opened the body of a woman who had died
of puerperal fever, and continued to wear the same clothes.  A lady
whom he delivered a few days afterwards was attacked with and died of
a similar disease; two more of his lying-in patients, in rapid
succession, met with the same fate; struck by the thought, that he
might have carried contagion in his clothes, he instantly changed
them, and 'met with no more cases of the kind.'  A woman in the
country, who was employed as washerwoman and nurse, washed the linen
of one who had died of puerperal fever; the next lying-in patient she
nursed died of the same disease; a third nursed by her met with the
same fate, till the neighborhood, getting afraid of her, ceased to
employ her."

In the winter of the year 1824, "Several instances occurred of its
prevalence among the patients of particular practitioners, whilst
others who were equally busy met with few or none.  One instance of
this kind was very remarkable.  A general practitioner, in large
midwifery practice, lost so many patients from puerperal fever, that
he determined to deliver no more for some time, but that his partner
should attend in his place.  This plan was pursued for one month,
during which not a case of the disease occurred in their practice.
The elder practitioner, being then sufficiently recovered, returned
to his practice, but the first patient he attended was attacked by
the disease and died.  A physician, who met him in consultation soon
afterwards, about a case of a different kind, and who knew nothing of
his misfortune, asked him whether puerperal fever was at all
prevalent in his neighborhood, on which he burst into tears, and
related the above circumstances.

"Among the cases which I saw this season in consultation, four
occurred in one month in the practice of one medical man, and all of
them terminated fatally." [Lond.  Med.  Gaz.  May 2, 1835.]

Dr. Ramsbotham asserted, in a Lecture at the London Hospital, that he
had known the disease spread through a particular district, or be
confined to the practice of a particular person, almost every patient
being attacked with it, while others had not a single case.  It
seemed capable, he thought, of conveyance, not only by common modes;
but through the dress of the attendants upon the patient.

In a letter to be found in the "London Medical Gazette" for January,
1840, Mr. Roberton of Manchester makes the statement which I here
give in a somewhat condensed form.

A midwife delivered a woman on the 4th of December, 1830, who died
soon after with the symptoms of puerperal fever.  In one month from
this date the same midwife delivered thirty women, residing in
different parts of an extensive suburb, of which number sixteen
caught the disease and all died.  These were the only cases which had
occurred for a considerable time in Manchester.  The other midwives
connected with the same charitable institution as the woman already
mentioned are twenty-five in number, and deliver, on an average,
ninety women a week, or about three hundred and eighty a month.  None
of these women had a case of puerperal fever.  "Yet all this time
this woman was crossing the other midwives in every direction, scores
of the patients of the charity being delivered by them in the very
same quarters where her cases of fever were happening."

Mr. Roberton remarks, that little more than half the women she
delivered during this month took the fever; that on some days all
escaped, on others only one or more out of three or four; a
circumstance similar to what is seen in other infectious maladies.

Dr. Blundell says, "Those who have never made the experiment can have
but a faint conception how difficult it is to obtain the exact truth
respecting any occurrence in which feelings and interests are
concerned.  Omitting particulars, then, I content myself with
remarking, generally, that from more than one district I have
received accounts of the prevalence of puerperal fever in the
practice of some individuals, while its occurrence in that of others,
in the same neighborhood, was not observed.  Some, as I have been
told, have lost ten, twelve, or a greater number of patients, in
scarcely broken succession; like their evil genius, the puerperal
fever has seemed to stalk behind them wherever they went.  Some have
deemed it prudent to retire for a time from practice.  In fine, that
this fever may occur spontaneously, I admit; that its infectious
nature may be plausibly disputed, I do not deny; but I add,
considerately, that in my own family I had rather that those I
esteemed the most should be delivered, unaided, in a stable, by the
manger-side, than that they should receive the best help, in the
fairest apartment, but exposed to the vapors of this pitiless
disease.  Gossiping friends, wet-nurses, monthly nurses, the
practitioner himself, these are the channels by which, as I suspect,
the infection is principally conveyed."

At a meeting of the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society, Dr. King
mentioned that some years since a practitioner at Woolwich lost
sixteen patients from puerperal fever in the same year.  He was
compelled to give up practice for one or two years, his business
being divided among the neighboring practitioners.  No case of
puerperal fever occurred afterwards, neither had any of the
neighboring surgeons any cases of this disease.

At the same meeting Mr. Hutchinson mentioned the occurrence of three
consecutive cases of puerperal fever, followed subsequently by two
others, all in the practice of one accoucheur.[Lancet, May 2, 1840.]

Dr. Lee makes the following statement: "In the last two weeks of
September, 1827, five fatal cases of uterine inflammation came under
our observation.  All the individuals so attacked had been attended
in labor by the same midwife, and no example of a febrile or
inflammatory disease of a serious nature occurred during that period
among the other patients of the Westminster General Dispensary, who
had been attended by the other midwives belonging to that
institution."

The recurrence of long series of cases like those I have cited,
reported by those most interested to disbelieve in contagion,
scattered along through an interval of half a century, might have
been thought sufficient to satisfy the minds of all inquirers that
here was something more than a singular coincidence.  But if, on a
more extended observation, it should be found that the same ominous
groups of cases clustering about individual practitioners were
observed in a remote country, at different times, and in widely
separated regions, it would seem incredible that any should be found
too prejudiced or indolent to accept the solemn truth knelled into
their ears by the funeral bells from both sides of the ocean,--the
plain conclusion that the physician and the disease entered, hand in
hand, into the chamber of the unsuspecting patient.

That such series of cases have been observed in this country, and in
this neighborhood, I proceed to show.

In Dr. Francis's "Notes to Denman's Midwifery," a passage is cited
from Dr. Hosack, in which he refers to certain puerperal cases which
proved fatal to several lying-in women, and in some of which the
disease was supposed to be conveyed by the accoucheurs themselves.

A writer in the "New York Medical and Physical Journal" for October,
1829, in speaking of the occurrence of puerperal fever, confined to
one man's practice, remarks, "We have known cases of this kind occur,
though rarely, in New York."

I mention these little hints about the occurrence of such cases,
partly because they are the first I have met with in American medical
literature, but more especially because they serve to remind us that
behind the fearful array of published facts there lies a dark list of
similar events, unwritten in the records of science, but long
remembered by many a desolated fireside.

Certainly nothing can be more open and explicit than the account
given by Dr. Peirson of Salem, of the cases seen by him.  In the
first nineteen days of January, 1829, he had five consecutive cases
of puerperal fever, every patient he attended being attacked, and the
three first cases proving fatal.  In March of the same year he had
two moderate cases, in June, another case, and in July, another,
which proved fatal.  "Up to this period," he remarks, "I am not
informed that a single case had occurred in the practice of any other
physician.  Since that period I have had no fatal case in my
practice, although I have had several dangerous cases.  I have
attended in all twenty cases of this disease, of which four have been
fatal.  I am not aware that there has been any other case in the town
of distinct puerperal peritonitis, although I am willing to admit my
information may be very defective on this point.  I have been told of
some I 'mixed cases,' and 'morbid affections after delivery.'"

In the "Quarterly Summary of the Transactions of the College of
Physicians of Philadelphia" may be found some most extraordinary
developments respecting a series of cases occurring in the practice
of a member of that body.

Dr. Condie called the attention of the Society to the prevalence, at
the present time, of puerperal fever of a peculiarly insidious and
malignant character.  "In the practice of one gentleman extensively
engaged as an obstetrician, nearly every female he has attended in
confinement, during several weeks past, within the above limits" (the
southern sections and neighboring districts), "had been attacked by
the fever."

"An important query presents itself, the Doctor observed, in
reference to the particular form of fever now prevalent.  Is it,
namely, capable of being propagated by contagion, and is a physician
who has been in attendance upon a case of the disease warranted in
continuing, without interruption, his practice as an obstetrician?
Dr. C., although not a believer in the contagious character of many
of those affections generally supposed to be propagated in this
manner, has nevertheless become convinced by the facts that have
fallen under his notice, that the puerperal fever now prevailing is
capable of being communicated by contagion.  How otherwise can be
explained the very curious circumstance of the disease in one
district being exclusively confined to the practice of a single
physician, a Fellow of this College, extensively engaged in
obstetrical practice,--while no instance of the disease has occurred
in the patients under the care of any other accoucheur practising
within the same district; scarcely a female that has been delivered
for weeks past has escaped an attack?"

Dr. Rutter, the practitioner referred to, "observed that, after the
occurrence of a number of cases of the disease in his practice, he
had left the city and remained absent for a week, but on returning,
no article of clothing he then wore having been used by him before,
one of the very first cases of parturition he attended was followed
by an attack of the fever, and terminated fatally; he cannot,
readily, therefore, believe in the transmission of the disease from
female to female, in the person or clothes of the physician."

The meeting at which these remarks were made was held on the 3d of
May, 1842.  In a letter dated December 20, 1842, addressed to Dr.
Meigs, and to be found in the "Medical Examiner,"  he speaks of
"those horrible cases of puerperal fever, some of which you did me
the favor to see with me during the past summer," and talks of his
experience in the disease, "now numbering nearly seventy cases, all
of which have occurred within less than a twelvemonth past."

And Dr. Meigs asserts, on the same page, "Indeed, I believe that his
practice in that department of the profession was greater than that
of any other gentleman, which was probably the cause of his seeing a
greater number of the cases."  This from a professor of midwifery,
who some time ago assured a gentleman whom he met in consultation,
that the night on which they met was the eighteenth in succession
that he himself had been summoned from his repose, seems hardly
satisfactory.

I must call the attention of the inquirer most particularly to the
Quarterly Report above referred to, and the letters of Dr. Meigs and
Dr. Rutter, to be found in the "Medical Examiner."  Whatever
impression they may produce upon his mind, I trust they will at least
convince him that there is some reason for looking into this
apparently uninviting subject.

At a meeting of the College of Physicians just mentioned, Dr.
Warrington stated, that a few days after assisting at an autopsy of
puerperal peritonitis, in which he laded out the contents of the
abdominal cavity with his hands, he was called upon to deliver three
women in rapid succession.  All of these women were attacked with
different forms of what is commonly called puerperal fever.  Soon
after these he saw two other patients, both on the same day, with the
same disease.  Of these five patients two died.

At the same meeting, Dr. West mentioned a fact related to him by Dr.
Samuel Jackson of Northumberland.  Seven females, delivered by Dr.
Jackson in rapid succession, while practising in Northumberland
County, were all attacked with puerperal fever, and five of them
died.  "Women," he said, "who had expected me to attend upon them,
now becoming alarmed, removed out of my reach, and others sent for a
physician residing several miles distant.  These women, as well as
those attended by midwives; all did well; nor did we hear of any
deaths in child-bed within a radius of fifty miles, excepting two,
and these I afterwards ascertained to have been caused by other
diseases."  He underwent, as he thought, a thorough purification, and
still his next patient was attacked with the disease and died.  He
was led to suspect that the contagion might have been carried in the
gloves which he had worn in attendance upon the previous cases.  Two
months or more after this he had two other cases.  He could find
nothing to account for these, unless it were the instruments for
giving enemata, which had been used in two of the former cases, and
were employed by these patients.  When the first case occurred, he
was attending and dressing a limb extensively mortified from
erysipelas, and went immediately to the accouchement with his clothes
and gloves most thoroughly imbued with its efluvia.  And here I may
mention, that this very Dr. Samuel Jackson of Northumberland is one
of Dr. Dewees's authorities against contagion.

The three following statements are now for the first time given to
the public.  All of the cases referred to occurred within this State,
and two of the three series in Boston and its immediate vicinity.

I.  The first is a series of cases which took place during the last
spring in a town at some distance from this neighborhood.  A
physician of that town, Dr. C., had the following consecutive cases.

No.  1, delivered March 20, died March 24.
  "  2,   "       April  9,   "  April 14.
  "  3,   "         "   10,   "   "    14.
  "  4,   "         "   11,   "   "    18.
  "  5,   "         "   27,   "   May   3.
  "  6,   "         "   28, had some symptoms,(recovered.)
  "  7,   "        May   8, had some symptoms,(also recovered.)

These were the only cases attended by this physician during the
period referred to.  "They were all attended by him until their
termination, with the exception of the patient No. 6, who fell into
the hands of another physician on the 2d of May.  (Dr. C. left town
for a few days at this time.)  Dr. C.  attended cases immediately
before and after the above-named periods, none of which, however,
presented any peculiar symptoms of the disease."

About the 1st of July he attended another patient in a neighboring
village, who died two or three days after delivery.

The first patient, it is stated, was delivered on the 20th of March.
"On the 19th, Dr. C. made the autopsy of a man who died suddenly,
sick only forty-eight hours; had oedema of the thigh, and gangrene
extending from a little above the ankle into the cavity of the
abdomen."  Dr. C. wounded himself, very slightly, in the right hand
during the autopsy.  The hand was quite painful the night following,
during his attendance on the patient No. 1.  He did not see this
patient after the 20th, being confined to the house, and very sick
from the wound just mentioned, from this time until the 3d of April.

Several cases of erysipelas occurred in the house where the autopsy
mentioned above took place, soon after the examination.  There were
also many cases of erysipelas in town at the time of the fatal
puerperal cases which have been mentioned.

The nurse who laid out the body of the patient No. 3 was taken on the
evening of the same day with sore throat and erysipelas, and died in
ten days from the first attack.

The nurse who laid out the body of the patient No. 4 was taken on the
day following with symptoms like those of this patient, and died in a
week, without any external marks of erysipelas.

"No other cases of similar character with those of Dr. C. occurred in
the practice of any of the physicians in the town or vicinity at the
time.  Deaths following confinement have occurred in the practice of
other physicians during the past year, but they were not cases of
puerperal fever.  No post-mortem examinations were held in any of
these puerperal cases."

Some additional statements in this letter are deserving of insertion.

"A physician attended a woman in the immediate neighborhood of the
cases numbered 2, 3, and 4.  This patient was confined the morning of
March 1st, and died on the night of March 7th.  It is doubtful
whether this should be considered a case of puerperal fever.  She had
suffered from canker, indigestion, and diarrhoea for a year previous
to her delivery.  Her complaints were much aggravated for two or
three months previous to delivery; she had become greatly emaciated,
and weakened to such an extent that it had not been expected that she
would long survive her confinement, if indeed she reached that
period.  Her labor was easy enough; she flowed a good deal, seemed
exceedingly prostrated, had ringing in the ears, and other symptoms
of exhaustion; the pulse was quick and small.  On the second and
third day there was some tenderness and tumefaction of the abdomen,
which increased somewhat on the fourth and fifth.  He had cases in
midwifery before and after this, which presented nothing peculiar."

It is also mentioned in the same letter, that another physician had a
case during the last summer and another last fall, both of which
recovered.

Another gentleman reports a case last December, a second case five
weeks, and another three weeks since.  All these recovered.  A case
also occurred very recently in the practice of a physician in the
village where the eighth patient of Dr. C. resides, which proved
fatal.  "This patient had some patches of erysipelas on the legs and
arms.  The same physician has delivered three cases since, which have
all done well.  There have been no other cases in this town or its
vicinity recently.  There have been some few cases of erysipelas."
It deserves notice that the partner of Dr. C., who attended the
autopsy of the man above mentioned and took an active part in it; who
also suffered very slightly from a prick under the thumb-nail
received during the examination, had twelve cases of midwifery
between March 26th and April 12th, all of which did well, and
presented no peculiar symptoms.  It should also be stated, that
during these seventeen days he was in attendance on all the cases of
erysipelas in the house where the autopsy had been performed.

I owe these facts to the prompt kindness of a gentleman whose
intelligence and character are sufficient guaranty for their
accuracy.

The two following letters were addressed to my friend Dr. Scorer, by
the gentleman in whose practice the cases of puerperal fever
occurred.  His name renders it unnecessary to refer more particularly
to these gentlemen, who on their part have manifested the most
perfect freedom and courtesy in affording these accounts of their
painful experience.


"January 28, 1843.

II.  .  .  .  "The time to which you allude was in 1830.  The first
case was in February, during a very cold time.  She was confined the
4th, and died the 12th.  Between the 10th and 28th of this month, I
attended six women in labor, all of whom did well except the last, as
also two who were confined March 1st and 5th.  Mrs. E., confined
February 28th, sickened, and died March 8th.  The next day, 9th, I
inspected the body, and the night after attended a lady, Mrs. B., who
sickened, and died 16th.  The 10th, I attended another, Mrs. G., who
sickened, but recovered.  March 16th, I went from Mrs. G.'s room to
attend a Mrs. H., who sickened, and died 21st.  The 17th, I inspected
Mrs. B.  On the 19th, I went directly from Mrs. H.'s room to attend
another lady, Mrs. G., who also sickened, and died 22d.  While Mrs.
B. was sick, on 15th, I went directly from her room a few rods, and
attended another woman, who was not sick.  Up to 20th of this month I
wore the same clothes.  I now refused to attend any labor, and did
not till April 21st, when, having thoroughly cleansed myself, I
resumed my practice, and had no more puerperal fever.

"The cases were not confined to a narrow space.  The two nearest were
half a mile from each other, and half that distance from my
residence.  The others were from two to three miles apart, and nearly
that distance from my residence.  There were no other cases in their
immediate vicinity which came to my knowledge.  The general health of
all the women was pretty good, and all the labors as good as common,
except the first.  This woman, in consequence of my not arriving in
season, and the child being half-born at some time before I arrived,
was very much exposed to the cold at the time of confinement, and
afterwards, being confined in a very open, cold room.  Of the six
cases you perceive only one recovered.

"In the winter of 1817 two of my patients had puerperal fever, one
very badly, the other not so badly.  Both recovered.  One other had
swelled leg, or phlegmasia dolens, and one or two others did not
recover as well as usual.

"In the summer of 1835 another disastrous period occurred in my
practice.  July 1st, I attended a lady in labor, who was afterwards
quite ill and feverish; but at the time I did not consider her case a
decided puerperal fever.  On the 8th, I attended one who did well.
On the 12th, one who was seriously sick.  This was also an equivocal
case, apparently arising from constipation and irritation of the
rectum.  These women were ten miles apart and five from my residence.
On 15th and 20th, two who did well.  On 25th, I attended another.
This was a severe labor, and followed by unequivocal puerperal fever,
or peritonitis.  She recovered.  August 2d and 3d, in about twenty-
four hours I attended four persons.  Two of them did very well; one
was attacked with some of the common symptoms, which however subsided
in a day or two, and the other had decided puerperal fever, but
recovered.  This woman resided five miles from me.  Up to this time I
wore the same coat.  All my other clothes had frequently been
changed.  On 6th, I attended two women, one of whom was not sick at
all; but the other, Mrs. L., was afterwards taken ill.  On 10th, I
attended a lady, who did very well.  I had previously changed all my
clothes, and had no garment on which had been in a puerperal room.
On 12th, I was called to Mrs. S., in labor.  While she was ill, I
left her to visit Mrs. L., one of the ladies who was confined on 6th.
Mrs. L.  had been more unwell than usual, but I had not considered
her case anything more than common till this visit.  I had on a
surtout at this visit, which, on my return to Mrs.  S., I left in
another room.  Mrs. S.  was delivered on 13th with forceps.  These
women both died of decided puerperal fever.

"While I attended these women in their fevers, I changed my clothes,
and washed my hands in a solution of chloride of lime after each
visit.  I attended seven women in labor during this period, all of
whom recovered without sickness.

"In my practice I have had several single cases of puerperal fever,
some of whom have died and some have recovered.  Until the year 1830
I had no suspicion that the disease could be communicated from one
patient to another by a nurse or midwife; but I now think the
foregoing facts strongly favor that idea.  I was so much convinced of
this fact, that I adopted the plan before related.

"I believe my own health was as good as usual at each of the above
periods.  I have no recollections to the contrary.

"I believe I have answered all your questions.  I have been more
particular on some points perhaps than necessary; but I thought you
could form your own opinion better than to take mine.  In 1830 I
wrote to Dr. Charming a more particular statement of my cases.  If I
have not answered your questions sufficiently, perhaps Dr. C.  may
have my letter to him, and you can find your answer there." [In a
letter to myself, this gentleman also stated, "I do not recollect
that there was any erysipelas or any other disease particularly
prevalent at the time."]



"BOSTON, February 3, 1843.

III.  "MY DEAR SIR,--I received a note from you last evening,
requesting me to answer certain questions therein proposed, touching
the cases of puerperal fever which came under my observation the past
summer.  It gives me pleasure to comply with your request, so far as
it is in my power so to do, but, owing to the hurry in preparing for
a journey, the notes of the cases I had then taken were lost or
mislaid.  The principal facts, however, are too vivid upon my
recollection to be soon forgotten.  I think, therefore, that I shall
be able to give you all the information you may require.

"All the cases that occurred in my practice took place between the
7th of May and the 17th of June 1842.

"They were not confined to any particular part of the city.  The
first two cases were patients residing at the South End, the next was
at the extreme North End, one living in Sea Street and the other in
Roxbury.  The following is the order in which they occurred:

"Case 1.  Mrs._____  was confined on the 7th of May, at 5 o'clock,
P. M., after a natural labor of six hours.  At 12 o'clock at night,
on the 9th (thirty-one hours after confinement), she was taken with
severe chill, previous to which she was as comfortable as women
usually are under the circumstances.  She died on the 10th.

"Case 2.  Mrs._____  was confined on the 10th of June (four weeks
after Mrs.  C.), at 11 A. M., after a natural, but somewhat severe
labor of five hours.  At 7 o'clock, on the morning of the 11th, she
had a chill.  Died on the 12th.

"Case 3.  Mrs._____ , confined on the 14th of June, was comfortable
until the 18th, when symptoms of puerperal fever were manifest.  She
died on the 20th.

"Case 4.  Mrs._____ , confined June 17th, at 5 o'clock, A.  M., was
doing well until the morning of the 19th.  She died on the evening of
the 21st.

"Case 5.  Mrs._____  was confined with her fifth child on the 17th of
June, at 6 o'clock in the evening.  This patient had been attacked
with puerperal fever, at three of her previous confinements, but the
disease yielded to depletion and other remedies without difficulty.
This time, I regret to say, I was not so fortunate.  She was not
attacked, as were the other patients, with a chill, but complained of
extreme pain in abdomen, and tenderness on pressure, almost from the
moment of her confinement.  In this as in the other cases, the
disease resisted all remedies, and she died in great distress on the
22d of the same month.  Owing to the extreme heat of the season, and
my own indisposition, none of the subjects were examined after death.
Dr. Channing, who was in attendance with me on the three last cases,
proposed to have a post-mortem examination of the subject of case No.
5, but from some cause which I do not now recollect it was not
obtained.

"You wish to know whether I wore the same clothes when attending the
different cases.  I cannot positively say, but I should think I did
not, as the weather became warmer after the first two cases; I
therefore think it probable that I made a change of at least a part
of my dress.  I have had no other case of puerperal fever in my own
practice for three years, save those above related, and I do not
remember to have lost a patient before with this disease.  While
absent, last July, I visited two patients sick with puerperal fever,
with a friend of mine in the country.  Both of them recovered.

"The cases that I have recorded were not confined to any particular
constitution or temperament, but it seized upon the strong and the
weak, the old and the young,--one being over forty years, and the
youngest under eighteen years of age .  .  .  .  If the disease is of
an erysipelatous nature, as many suppose, contagionists may perhaps
find some ground for their belief in the fact, that, for two weeks
previous to my first case of puerperal fever, I had been attending a
severe case of erysipelas, and the infection may have been conveyed
through me to the patient; but, on the other hand, why is not this
the case with other physicians, or with the same physician at all
times, for since my return from the country I have had a more
inveterate case of erysipelas than ever before, and no difficulty
whatever has attended any of my midwifery cases?"


I am assured, on unquestionable authority, that "About three years
since, a gentleman in extensive midwifery business, in a neighboring
State, lost in the course of a few weeks eight patients in child-bed,
seven of them being undoubted cases of puerperal fever.  No other
physician of the town lost a single patient of this disease during
the same period."  And from what I have heard in conversation with
some of our most experienced practitioners, I am inclined to think
many cases of the kind might be brought to light by extensive
inquiry.


This long catalogue of melancholy histories assumes a still darker
aspect when we remember how kindly nature deals with the parturient
female, when she is not immersed in the virulent atmosphere of an
impure lying-in hospital, or poisoned in her chamber by the
unsuspected breath of contagion.  From all causes together, not more
than four deaths in a thousand births and miscarriages happened in
England and Wales during the period embraced by the first "Report of
the Registrar-General."  In the second Report the mortality was shown
to be about five in one thousand. In the Dublin Lying-in Hospital,
during the seven years of Dr. Collins's mastership, there was one
case of puerperal fever to 178 deliveries, or less than six to the
thousand, and one death from this disease in 278 cases, or between
three and four to the thousand a yet during this period the disease
was endemic in the hospital, and might have gone on to rival the
horrors of the pestilence of the Maternite, had not the poison been
destroyed by a thorough purification.

In private practice, leaving out of view the cases that are to be
ascribed to the self-acting system of propagation, it would seem that
the disease must be far from common.  Mr. White of Manchester says,
"Out of the whole number of lying-in patients whom I have delivered
(and I may safely call it a great one), I have never lost one, nor to
the best of my recollection has one been greatly endangered, by the
puerperal, miliary, low nervous, putrid malignant, or milk fever."
Dr. Joseph Clarke informed Dr. Collins, that in the course of forty-
five years' most extensive practice he lost but four patients from
this disease.  One of the most eminent practitioners of Glasgow, who
has been engaged in very extensive practice for upwards of a quarter
of a century, testifies that he never saw more than twelve cases of
real puerperal fever.[Lancet, May 4, 1833]

I have myself been told by two gentlemen practising in this city, and
having for many years a large midwifery business, that they had
neither of them lost a patient from this disease, and by one of them
that he had only seen it in consultation with other physicians.  In
five hundred cases of midwifery, of which Dr. Storer has given an
abstract in the first number of this Journal, there was only one
instance of fatal puerperal peritonitis.

In the view of these facts, it does appear a singular coincidence,
that one man or woman should have ten, twenty, thirty, or seventy
cases of this rare disease following his or her footsteps with the
keenness of a beagle, through the streets and lanes of a crowded
city, while the scores that cross the same paths on the same errands
know it only by name.  It is a series of similar coincidences which
has led us to consider the dagger, the musket, and certain innocent-
looking white powders as having some little claim to be regarded as
dangerous.  It is the practical inattention to similar coincidences
which has given rise to the unpleasant but often necessary documents
called indictments, which has sharpened a form of the cephalotome
sometimes employed in the case of adults, and adjusted that
modification of the fillet which delivers the world of those who
happen to be too much in the way while such striking coincidences are
taking place.

I shall now mention a few instances in which the disease appears to
have been conveyed by the process of direct inoculation.

Dr. Campbell of Edinburgh states that in October, 1821, he assisted
at the post-mortem examination of a patient who died with puerperal
fever.  He carried the pelvic viscera in his pocket to the class-
room.  The same evening he attended a woman in labor without
previously changing his clothes; this patient died.  The next morning
he delivered a woman with the forceps; she died also, and of many
others who were seized with the disease within a few weeks, three
shared the same fate in succession.

In June, 1823, he assisted some of his pupils at the autopsy of a
case of puerperal fever.  He was unable to wash his hands with proper
care, for want of the necessary accommodations.  On getting home he
found that two patients required his assistance.  He went without
further ablution, or changing his clothes; both these patients died
with puerperal fever.  This same Dr. Campbell is one of Dr.
Churchill's authorities against contagion.

Mr. Roberton says that in one instance within his knowledge a
practitioner passed the catheter for a patient with puerperal fever
late in the evening; the same night he attended a lady who had the
symptoms of the disease on the second day.  In another instance a
surgeon was called while in the act of inspecting the body of a woman
who had died of this fever, to attend a labor; within forty-eight
hours this patient was seized with the fever.'

On the 16th of March, 1831, a medical practitioner examined the body
of a woman who had died a few days after delivery, from puerperal
peritonitis.  On the evening of the 17th he delivered a patient, who
was seized with puerperal fever on the 19th, and died on the 24th.
Between this period and the 6th of April, the same practitioner
attended two other patients, both of whom were attacked with the same
disease and died.

In the autumn of 1829 a physician was present at the examination of a
case of puerperal fever, dissected out the organs, and assisted in
sewing up the body.  He had scarcely reached home when he was
summoned to attend a young lady in labor.  In sixteen hours she was
attacked with the symptoms of puerperal fever, and narrowly escaped
with her life.

In December, 1830, a midwife, who had attended two fatal cases of
puerperal fever at the British Lying-in Hospital, examined a patient
who had just been admitted, to ascertain if labor had commenced.
This patient remained two days in the expectation that labor would
come on, when she returned home and was then suddenly taken in labor
and delivered before she could set out for the hospital.  She went on
favorably for two days, and was then taken with puerperal fever and
died in thirty-six hours.

"A young practitioner, contrary to advice, examined the body of a
patient who had died from puerperal fever; there was no epidemic at
the time; the case appeared to be purely sporadic.  He delivered
three other women shortly afterwards; they all died with puerperal
fever, the symptoms of which broke out very soon after labor.  The
patients of his colleague did well, except one, where he assisted to
remove some coagula from the uterus; she was attacked in the same
manner as those whom he had attended, and died also."  The writer in
the "British and Foreign Medical Review," from whom I quote this
statement,--and who is no other than Dr. Rigby, adds, "We trust that
this fact alone will forever silence such doubts, and stamp the well-
merited epithet of 'criminal,' as above quoted, upon such attempts."
[Brit.  and For.  Medical Review for Jan.  1842, p.  112.]

From the cases given by Mr. Ingleby, I select the following.  Two
gentlemen, after having been engaged in conducting the post-mortem
examination of a case of puerperal fever, went in the same dress,
each respectively, to a case of midwifery.  "The one patient was
seized  with the rigor about thirty hours afterwards.  The other
patient was seized with a rigor the third morning after delivery.
One recovered, one died." [Edin.  Med.  and Surg.  Journal, April,
1838.]

One of these same gentlemen attended another woman in the same
clothes two days after the autopsy referred to.  "The rigor did not
take place until the evening of the fifth day from the first visit.
Result fatal."  These cases belonged to a series of seven, the first
of which was thought to have originated in a case of erysipelas.
"Several cases of a mild character followed the foregoing seven, and
their nature being now most unequivocal, my friend declined visiting
all midwifery cases for a time, and there was no recurrence of the
disease."  These cases occurred in 1833.  Five of them proved fatal.
Mr. Ingleby gives another series of seven eases which occurred to a
practitioner in 1836, the first of which was also attributed to his
having opened several erysipelatous abscesses a short time
previously.

I need not refer to the case lately read before this Society, in
which a physician went, soon after performing an autopsy of a case of
puerperal fever, to a woman in labor, who was seized with the same
disease and perished.  The forfeit of that error has been already
paid.

At a meeting of the Medical and Chirurgical Society before referred
to, Dr. Merriman related an instance occurring in his own practice,
which excites a reasonable suspicion that two lives were sacrificed
to a still less dangerous experiment.  He was at the examination of a
case of puerperal fever at two o'clock in the afternoon.  He took
care not to touch the body.  At nine o'clock the same evening he
attended a woman in labor; she was so nearly delivered that he had
scarcely anything to do.  The next morning she had severe rigors, and
in forty-eight hours she was a corpse.  Her infant had erysipelas and
died in two days. [Lancet, May 2, 1840.]

In connection with the facts which have been stated, it seems proper
to allude to the dangerous and often fatal effects which have
followed from wounds received in the post-mortem examination of
patients who have died of puerperal fever.  The fact that such wounds
are attended with peculiar risk has been long noticed.  I find that
Chaussier was in the habit of cautioning his students against the
danger to which they were exposed in these dissections. [Stein, L'Art
d'Accoucher, 1794; Dict. des Sciences Medicales, art.  "Puerperal."]
The head pharmacien of the Hotel Dieu, in his analysis of the fluid
effused in puerperal peritonitis, says that practitioners are
convinced of its deleterious qualities, and that it is very dangerous
to apply it to the denuded skin. [Journal de Pharmacie, January,
1836.]  Sir Benjamin Brodie speaks of it as being well known that the
inoculation of lymph or pus from the peritoneum of a puerperal
patient is often attended with dangerous and even fatal symptoms.
Three cases in confirmation of this statement, two of them fatal,
have been reported to this Society within a few months.

Of about fifty cases of injuries of this kind, of various degrees of
severity, which I have collected from different sources, at least
twelve were instances of infection from puerperal peritonitis.  Some
of the others are so stated as to render it probable that they may
have been of the same nature.  Five other cases were of peritoneal
inflammation; three in males.  Three were what was called enteritis,
in one instance complicated with erysipelas; but it is well known
that this term has been often used to signify inflammation of the
peritoneum covering the intestines.  On the other hand, no case of
typhus or typhoid fever is mentioned as giving rise to dangerous
consequences, with the exception of the single instance of an
undertaker mentioned by Mr. Travers, who seems to have been poisoned
by a fluid which exuded from the body.  The other accidents were
produced by dissection, or some other mode of contact with bodies of
patients who had died of various affections.  They also differed much
in severity, the cases of puerperal origin being among the most
formidable and fatal.  Now a moment's reflection will show that the
number of cases of serious consequences ensuing from the dissection
of the bodies of those who had perished of puerperal fever is so
vastly disproportioned to the relatively small number of autopsies
made in this complaint as compared with typhus or pneumonia (from
which last disease not one case of poisoning happened), and still
more from all diseases put together, that the conclusion is
irresistible that a most fearful morbid poison is often generated in
the course of this disease.  Whether or not it is sui generis,
confined to this disease, or produced in some others, as, for
instance, erysipelas, I need, not stop to inquire.

In connection with this may be taken the following statement of Dr.
Rigby.  "That the discharges from a patient under puerperal fever are
in the highest degree contagious we have abundant evidence in the
history of lying-in hospitals.  The puerperal abscesses are also
contagious, and may be communicated to healthy lying-in women by
washing with the same sponge; this fact has been repeatedly proved in
the Vienna Hospital; but they are equally communicable to women not
pregnant; on more than one occasion the women engaged in washing the
soiled bed-linen of the General Lying-in Hospital have been attacked
with abscess in the fingers or hands, attended with rapidly spreading
inflammation of the cellular tissue."

Now add to all this the undisputed fact, that within the walls of
lying-in hospitals there is often generated a miasm, palpable as the
chlorine used to destroy it, tenacious so as in some cases almost to
defy extirpation, deadly in some institutions as the plague; which
has killed women in a private hospital of London so fast that they
were buried two in one coffin to conceal its horrors; which enabled
Tonnelle to record two hundred and twenty-two autopsies at the
Maternite of Paris; which has led Dr. Lee to express his deliberate
conviction that the loss of life occasioned by these institutions
completely defeats the objects of their founders; and out of this
train of cumulative evidence, the multiplied groups of cases
clustering about individuals, the deadly results of autopsies, the
inoculation by fluids from the living patient, the murderous poison
of hospitals,--does there not result a conclusion that laughs all
sophistry to scorn, and renders all argument an insult?

I have had occasion to mention some instances in which there was an
apparent relation between puerperal fever and erysipelas.  The length
to which this paper has extended does not allow me to enter into the
consideration of this most important subject.  I will only say, that
the evidence appears to me altogether satisfactory that some most
fatal series of puerperal fever have been produced by an infection
originating in the matter or effluvia of erysipelas.  In evidence of
some connection between the two diseases, I need not go back to the
older authors, as Pouteau or Gordon, but will content myself with
giving the following references, with their dates; from which it will
be seen that the testimony has been constantly coming before the
profession for the last few years.

"London Cyclopaedia of Practical Medicine," article Puerperal Fever,
1833.

Mr. Ceeley's Account of the Puerperal Fever at Aylesbury.  "Lancet,"
1835.

Dr. Ramsbotham's Lecture.  "London Medical Gazette," 1835.

Mr. Yates Ackerly's Letter in the same Journal, 1838.

Mr. Ingleby on Epidemic Puerperal Fever.  "Edinburgh Medical and
Surgical Journal," 1838.

Mr. Paley's Letter.  "London Medical Gazette," 1839.

Remarks at the Medical and Chirurgical Society. "Lancet," 1840.

Dr. Rigby's "System of Midwifery."  1841.

"Nunneley on Erysipelas,"--a work which contains a large number of
references on the subject.  1841.

"British and Foreign Quarterly Review," 1842.

Dr. S.  Jackson of Northumberland, as already quoted from the Summary
of the College of Physicians, 1842.

And lastly, a startling series of cases by Mr. Storrs of Doncaster,
to be, found in the "American Journal of the Medical Sciences" for
January, 1843.

The relation of puerperal fever with other continued fevers would
seem to be remote and rarely obvious.  Hey refers to two cases of
synochus occurring in the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, in women who
had attended upon puerperal patients.  Dr. Collins refers to several
instances in which puerperal fever has appeared to originate from a
continued proximity to patients suffering with typhus.

Such occurrences as those just mentioned, though most important to be
remembered and guarded against, hardly attract our notice in the
midst of the gloomy facts by which they are surrounded.  Of these
facts, at the risk of fatiguing repetitions, I have summoned a
sufficient number, as I believe, to convince the most incredulous
that every attempt to disguise the truth which underlies them all is
useless.

It is true that some of the historians of the disease, especially
Hulme, Hull, and Leake, in England; Tonnelle, Duges, and Baudelocque,
in France, profess not to have found puerperal fever contagious.  At
the most they give us mere negative facts, worthless against an
extent of evidence which now overlaps the widest range of doubt, and
doubles upon itself in the redundancy of superfluous demonstration.
Examined in detail, this and much of the show of testimony brought up
to stare the daylight of conviction out of countenance, proves to be
in a great measure unmeaning and inapplicable, as might be easily
shown were it necessary.  Nor do I feel the necessity of enforcing
the conclusion which arises spontaneously from the facts which have
been enumerated, by formally citing the opinions of those grave
authorities who have for the last half-century been sounding the
unwelcome truth it has cost so many lives to establish.

"It is to the British practitioner," says Dr. Rigby, "that we are
indebted for strongly insisting upon this important and dangerous
character of puerperal fever."

The names of Gordon, John Clarke, Denman, Burns, Young, Hamilton,
Haighton, Good, Waller; Blundell, Gooch, Ramsbotham, Douglas, Lee,
Ingleby, Locock, Abercrombie, Alison; Travers, Rigby, and Watson,
many of whose writings I have already referred to, may have some
influence with those who prefer the weight of authorities to the
simple deductions of their own reason from the facts laid before
them.  A few Continental writers have adopted similar conclusions. It
gives me pleasure to remember, that while the doctrine has been
unceremoniously discredited in one of the leading Journals, and made
very light of by teachers in two of the principal Medical Schools, of
this country, Dr. Channing has for many years inculcated, and
enforced by examples, the danger to be apprehended and the
precautions to be taken in the disease under consideration.

I have no wish to express any harsh feeling with regard to the
painful subject which has come before us.  If there are any so far
excited by the story of these dreadful events that they ask for some
word of indignant remonstrance to show that science does not turn the
hearts of its followers into ice or stone, let me remind them that
such words have been uttered by those who speak with an authority I
could not claim.  It is as a lesson rather than as a reproach that I
call up the memory of these irreparable errors and wrongs.  No tongue
can tell the heart-breaking calamity they have caused; they have
closed the eyes just opened upon a new world of love and happiness;
they have bowed the strength of manhood into the dust; they have cast
the helplessness of infancy into the stranger's arms, or bequeathed
it, with less cruelty, the death of its dying parent.  There is no
tone deep enough for regret, and no voice loud enough for warning.
The woman about to become a mother, or with her new-born infant upon
her bosom, should be the object of trembling care and sympathy
wherever she bears her tender burden, or stretches her aching limbs.
The very outcast of the streets has pity upon her sister in
degradation, when the seal of promised maternity is impressed upon
her.  The remorseless vengeance of the law, brought down upon its
victim by a machinery as sure as destiny, is arrested in its fall at
a word which reveals her transient claim for mercy.  The solemn
prayer of the liturgy singles out her sorrows from the multiplied
trials of life, to plead for her in the hour of peril.  God forbid
that any member of the profession to which she trusts her life,
doubly precious at that eventful period, should hazard it
negligently, unadvisedly, or selfishly!

There may be some among those whom I address who are disposed to ask
the question, What course are we to follow in relation to this
matter?  The facts are before them, and the answer must be left to
their own judgment and conscience.  If any should care to know my own
conclusions, they are the following; and in taking the liberty to
state them very freely and broadly, I would ask the inquirer to
examine them as freely in the light of the evidence which has been
laid before him.

1.  A physician holding himself in readiness to attend cases of
midwifery should never take any active part in the post-mortem
examination of cases of puerperal fever.

2.  If a physician is present at such autopsies, he should use
thorough ablution, change every article of dress, and allow twenty-
four hours or more to elapse before attending to any case of
midwifery.  It may be well to extend the same caution to cases of
simple peritonitis.

3.  Similar precautions should be taken after the autopsy or surgical
treatment of cases of erysipelas, if the physician is obliged to
unite such offices with his obstetrical duties, which is in the
highest degree inexpedient.

4.  On the occurrence of a single case of puerperal fever in his
practice, the physician is bound to consider the next female he
attends in labor, unless some weeks at least have elapsed, as in
danger of being infected by him, and it is his duty to take every
precaution to diminish her risk of disease and death.

5.  If within a short period two cases of puerperal fever happen
close to each other, in the practice of the same physician, the
disease not existing or prevailing in the neighborhood, he would do
wisely to relinquish his obstetrical practice for at least one month,
and endeavor to free himself by every available means from any
noxious influence he may carry about with him.

6.  The occurrence of three or more closely connected cases, in the
practice of one individual, no others existing in the neighborhood,
and no other sufficient cause being alleged for the coincidence, is
prima facie evidence that he is the vehicle of contagion.

7.  It is the duty of the physician to take every precaution that the
disease shall not be introduced by nurses or other assistants, by
making proper inquiries concerning them, and giving timely warning of
every suspected source of danger.

8.  Whatever indulgence may be granted to those who have heretofore
been the ignorant causes of so much misery, the time has come when
the existence of a private pestilence in the sphere of a single
physician should be looked upon, not as a misfortune, but a crime;
and in the knowledge of such occurrences the duties of the
practitioner to his profession should give way to his paramount
obligations to society.


ADDITIONAL REFERENCES AND CASES.

Fifth Annual Report of the Registrar-General of England,

1843.  Appendix.  Letter from William Farr, Esq.--Several new series
of cases are given in the Letter of Mr. Stows, contained in the
Appendix to this Report.  Mr. Stows suggests precautions similar to
those I have laid down, and these precautions are strongly enforced
by Mr. Farr, who is, therefore, obnoxious to the same criticisms as
myself.

Hall and Dexter, in Am.  Journal of Med.  Sc.  for January, 1844.-
Cases of puerperal fever seeming to originate in erysipelas.

Elkington, of Birmingham, in Provincial Med.  Journal, cited in Am.
Journ.  Med.  Se.  for April, 1844.--Six cases in less than a
fortnight, seeming to originate in a case of erysipelas.

West's Reports, in Brit.  and For.  Med.  Review for October, 1845,
and January, 1847.--Affection of the arm, resembling malignant
pustule, after removing the placenta of a patient who died from
puerperal fever.  Reference to cases at Wurzburg, as proving
contagion, and to Keiller's cases in the Monthly Journal for
February, 1846, as showing connection of puerperal fever and
erysipelas.

Kneeland.--Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever.  Am.  Jour.  Med.
Se., January, 1846.  Also, Connection between Puerperal Fever and
Epidemic Erysipelas.  Ibid., April, 1846.

Robert Storrs.--Contagious Effects of Puerperal Fever on the Male
Subject; or on Persons not Child-bearing.  (From Provincial Med.  and
Surg.  Journal.) Am.  Jour.  Med.  Sc., January, 184,6.  Numerous
cases.  See also Dr. Reid's case in same Journal for April, 1846.

Routh's paper in Proc.  of Royal Med.  Chir.  Soc., Am.  Jour.  Med.
Sc., April, 1849, also in B.  and F.  Med.  Chir.  Review, April,
1850.

Hill, of Leuchars.--A Series of Cases illustrating the Contagious
Nature of Erysipelas and of Puerperal Fever, and their Intimate
Pathological Connection.  (From Monthly Journal of Med.  Sc.) Am.
Jour.  Med.  Se., July, 1850.

Skoda on the Causes of Puerperal Fever.  (Peritonitis in rabbits,
from inoculation with different morbid secretions.) Am.  Jour.  Med.
Se., October, 1850.

Arneth.  Paper read before the National Academy of Medicine.  Annales
d'Hygiene, Tome LXV.  2e Partie.  (Means of Disinfection proposed by
M.  "Semmeliveis" (Semmelweiss.) Lotions of chloride of lime and use
of nail-brush before admission to lying-in wards.  Alleged sudden and
great decrease of mortality from puerperal fever.  Cause of disease
attributed to inoculation with cadaveric matters.) See also Routh's
paper, mentioned above.

Moir.  Remarks at a meeting of the Edinburgh Medico-Chirurgical
Society.  Refers to cases of Dr. Kellie, of Leith.  Sixteen in
succession, all fatal.  Also to several instances of individual
pupils having had a succession of cases in various quarters of the
town, while others, practising as extensively in the same localities,
had none.  Also to several special cases not mentioned elsewhere.
Am.  Jour.  Med.  Se.  for October, 1851.  (From New Monthly Journal
of Med.  Science.)

Simpson.--Observations at a Meeting of the Edinburgh Obstetrical
Society.  (An "eminent gentleman," according to Dr.  Meigs, whose
"name is as well known in America as in (his) native land."
Obstetrics.  Phil.  1852, pp.  368, 375.) The student is referred to
this paper for a valuable resume of many of the facts, and the
necessary inferences, relating to this subject.  Also for another
series of cases, Mr. Sidey's, five or six in rapid succession.
Dr. Simpson attended the dissection of two of Dr. Sidey's cases, and
freely handled the diseased parts.  His next four child-bed patients
were affected with puerperal fever, and it was the first time he had
seen it in practice.  As Dr. Simpson is a gentleman (Dr. Meigs, as
above), and as "a gentleman's hands are clean" (Dr. Meigs' Sixth
Letter), it follows that a gentleman with clean hands may carry the
disease.  Am.  Jour.  Med.  Sc., October, 1851.

Peddle.--The five or six cases of Dr. Sidey, followed by the four of
Dr. Simpson, did not end the series.  A practitioner in Leith having
examined in Dr. Simpson's house, a portion of the uterus obtained
from one of the patients, had immediately afterwards three fatal
cases of puerperal fever.  Dr.  Veddie referred to two distinct
series of consecutive cases in his own practice.  He had since taken
precautions, and not met with any such cases.  Am.  Jour.  Med.  Sc.,
October, 1851.

Copland.  Considers it proved that puerperal fever maybe propagated
by the hands and the clothes, or either, of a third person, the bed-
clothes or body-clothes of a patient.  Mentions a new series of
cases, one of which he saw, with the practitioner who had attended
them.  She was the sixth he had had within a few days.  All died.
Dr. Copland insisted that contagion had caused these cases; advised
precautionary measures, and the practitioner had no other cases for a
considerable time.  Considers it criminal, after the evidence
adduced,--which he could have quadrupled,--and the weight of
authority brought forward, for a practitioner to be the medium of
transmitting contagion and death to his patients.  Dr. Copland lays
down rules similar to those suggested by myself, and is therefore
entitled to the same epithet for so doing.  Medical Dictionary, New
York, 1852.  Article, Puerperal States and Diseases.

If there is any appetite for facts so craving as to be yet
unappeased,--Lesotho, necdum satiata,--more can be obtained.
Dr.  Hodge remarks that "the frequency and importance of this
singular circumstance (that the disease is occasionally more
prevalent with one practitioner than another) has been exceedingly
overrated."  More than thirty strings of cases, more than two hundred
and fifty sufferers from puerperal fever, more than one hundred and
thirty deaths appear as the results of a sparing estimate of such
among the facts I have gleaned as could be numerically valued.  These
facts constitute, we may take it for granted, but a small fraction of
those that have actually occurred.  The number of them might be
greater, but "'t is enough, 't will serve," in Mercutio's modest
phrase, so far as frequency is concerned.  For a just estimate of the
importance of the singular circumstance, it might be proper to
consult the languid survivors, the widowed husbands, and the
motherless children, as well as "the unfortunate accoucheur."






III

CURRENTS AND COUNTER-CURRENTS IN MEDICAL SCIENCE

An Address delivered before the Massachusetts Medical Society, at the
Annual Meeting, May 30, 1860.

               "Facultate magis quam violentia."
                                   HIPPOCRATES.

Our Annual Meeting never fails to teach us at least one lesson.  The
art whose province it is to heal and to save cannot protect its own
ranks from the inroads of disease and the waste of the Destroyer.

Seventeen of our associates have been taken from us since our last
Anniversary.  Most of them followed their calling in the villages or
towns that lie among the hills or along the inland streams.  Only
those who have lived the kindly, mutually dependent life of the
country, can tell how near the physician who is the main reliance in
sickness of all the families throughout a thinly settled region comes
to the hearts of the people among whom he labors, how they value him
while living, how they cherish his memory when dead.  For these
friends of ours who have gone before, there is now no more toil; they
start from their slumbers no more at the cry of pain; they sally
forth no more into the storms; they ride no longer over the lonely
roads that knew them so well; their wheels are rusting on their axles
or rolling with other burdens; their watchful eyes are closed to all
the sorrows they lived to soothe.  Not one of these was famous in the
great world; some were almost unknown beyond their own immediate
circle.  But they have left behind them that loving remembrance which
is better than fame, and if their epitaphs are chiselled briefly in
stone, they are written at full length on living tablets in a
thousand homes to which they carried their ever-welcome aid and
sympathy.

One whom we have lost, very widely known and honored, was a leading
practitioner of this city.  His image can hardly be dimmed in your
recollection, as he stood before you only three years ago, filling
the same place with which I am now honored.  To speak of him at all
worthily, would be to write the history of professional success, won
without special aid at starting, by toil, patience, good sense, pure
character, and pleasing manners; won in a straight uphill ascent,
without one breathing-space until he sat down, not to rest, but to
die.  If prayers could have shielded him from the stroke, if love
could have drawn forth the weapon, and skill could have healed the
wound, this passing tribute might have been left to other lips and to
another generation.

Let us hope that our dead have at last found that rest which neither
summer nor winter, nor day nor night, had granted to their unending
earthly labors!  And let us remember that our duties to our brethren
do not cease when they become unable to share our toils, or leave
behind them in want and woe those whom their labor had supported.  It
is honorable to the Profession that it has organized an Association a
for the relief of its suffering members and their families; it owes
this tribute to the ill-rewarded industry and sacrifices of its less
fortunate brothers who wear out health and life in the service of
humanity.  I have great pleasure in referring to this excellent
movement, which gives our liberal profession a chance to show its
liberality, and serves to unite us all, the successful and those whom
fortune has cast down, in the bonds of a true brotherhood.

A medical man, as he goes about his daily business after twenty years
of practice, is apt to suppose that he treats his patients according
to the teachings of his experience.  No doubt this is true to some
extent; to what extent depending much on the qualities of the
individual.  But it is easy to prove that the prescriptions of even
wise physicians are very commonly founded on something quite
different from experience.  Experience must be based on the permanent
facts of nature.  But a glance at the prevalent modes of treatment of
any two successive generations will show that there is a changeable
as well as a permanent element in the art of healing; not merely
changeable as diseases vary, or as new remedies are introduced, but
changeable by the going out of fashion of special remedies, by the
decadence of a popular theory from which their fitness was deduced,
or other cause not more significant.  There is no reason to suppose
that the present time is essentially different in this respect from
any other.  Much, therefore, which is now very commonly considered to
be the result of experience, will be recognized in the next, or in
some succeeding generation, as no such result at all, but as a
foregone conclusion, based on some prevalent belief or fashion of the
time.

There are, of course, in every calling, those who go about the work
of the day before them, doing it according to the rules of their
craft, and asking no questions of the past or of the future, or of
the aim and end to which their special labor is contributing.  These
often consider and call themselves practical men.  They pull the oars
of society, and have no leisure to watch the currents running this or
that way; let theorists and philosophers attend to them.  In the mean
time, however, these currents are carrying the practical men, too,
and all their work may be thrown away, and worse than thrown away, if
they do not take knowledge of them and get out of the wrong ones and
into the right ones as soon as they may.  Sir Edward Parry and his
party were going straight towards the pole in one of their arctic
expeditions, travelling at the rate of ten miles a day.  But the ice
over which they travelled was drifting straight towards the equator,
at the rate of twelve miles a day, and yet no man among them would
have known that he was travelling two miles a day backward unless he
had lifted his eyes from the track in which he was plodding.  It is
not only going backward that the plain practical workman is liable
to, if he will not look up and look around; he may go forward to ends
he little dreams of.  It is a simple business for a mason to build up
a niche in a wall; but what if, a hundred years afterwards when the
wall is torn down, the skeleton of a murdered man drop out of the
niche?  It was a plain practical piece of carpentry for a Jewish
artisan to fit two pieces of timber together according to the legal
pattern in the time of Pontius Pilate; he asked no questions,
perhaps, but we know what burden the cross bore on the morrow!  And
so, with subtler tools than trowels or axes, the statesman who works
in policy without principle, the theologian who works in forms
without a soul, the physician who, calling himself a practical man,
refuses to recognize the larger laws which govern his changing
practice, may all find that they have been building truth into the
wall, and hanging humanity upon the cross.

The truth is, that medicine, professedly founded on observation, is
as sensitive to outside influences, political, religious,
philosophical, imaginative, as is the barometer to the changes of
atmospheric density.  Theoretically it ought to go on its own
straightforward inductive path, without regard to changes of
government or to fluctuations of public opinion.  But look a moment
while I clash a few facts together, and see if some sparks do not
reveal by their light a closer relation between the Medical Sciences
and the conditions of Society and the general thought of the time,
than would at first be suspected.

Observe the coincidences between certain great political and
intellectual periods and the appearance of illustrious medical
reformers and teachers.  It was in the age of Pericles, of Socrates,
of Plato, of Phidias, that Hippocrates gave to medical knowledge the
form which it retained for twenty centuries.  With the world-
conquering Alexander, the world-embracing Aristotle, appropriating
anatomy and physiology, among his manifold spoils of study, marched
abreast of his royal pupil to wider conquests.  Under the same
Ptolemies who founded the Alexandrian Library and Museum, and ordered
the Septuagint version of the Hebrew Scriptures, the infallible
Herophilus ["Contradicere Herophilo in anatomicis, est contradicere
evangelium," was a saying of Fallopius.] made those six hundred
dissections of which Tertullian accused him, and the sagacious
Erasistratus introduced his mild antiphlogistic treatment in
opposition to the polypharmacy and antidotal practice of his time.
It is significant that the large-minded Galen should have been the
physician and friend of the imperial philosopher Marcus Aurelius.
The Arabs gave laws in various branches of knowledge to those whom
their arms had invaded, or the terror of their spreading dominion had
reached, and the point from which they started was, as Humboldt
acknowledges, "the study of medicine, by which they long ruled the
Christian Schools," and to which they added the department of
chemical pharmacy.

Look at Vesalius, the contemporary of Luther.  Who can fail to see
one common spirit in the radical ecclesiastic and the reforming
court-physician?  Both still to some extent under the dominion of the
letter: Luther holding to the real presence; Vesalius actually
causing to be drawn and engraved two muscles which he knew were not
found in the human subject, because they had been described by Galen,
from dissections of the lower animals.  Both breaking through old
traditions in the search of truth; one, knife in hand, at the risk of
life and reputation, the other at the risk of fire and fagot, with
that mightier weapon which all the devils could not silence, though
they had been thicker than the tiles on the house-tops.  How much the
physician of the Catholic Charles V. had in common with the great
religious destructive, may be guessed by the relish with which he
tells the story how certain Pavian students exhumed the body of an
"elegans scortum," or lovely dame of ill repute, the favorite of a
monk of the order of St. Anthony, who does not seem to have resisted
temptation so well as the founder of his order.  We have always
ranked the physician Rabelais among the early reformers, but I do not
know that Vesalius has ever been thanked for his hit at the morals of
the religious orders, or for turning to the good of science what was
intended for the "benefit of clergy."

Our unfortunate medical brother, Michael Servetus, the spiritual
patient to whom the theological moxa was applied over the entire
surface for the cure of his heresy, came very near anticipating
Harvey.  The same quickened thought of the time which led him to
dispute the dogma of the Church, opened his mind to the facts which
contradicted the dogmas of the Faculty.

Harvey himself was but the posthumous child of the great Elizabethan
period.  Bacon was at once his teacher and his patient.  The founder
of the new inductive philosophy had only been dead two years when the
treatise on the Circulation, the first-fruit of the Restoration of
Science, was given to the world.

And is it to be looked at as a mere accidental coincidence, that
while Napoleon was modernizing the political world, Bichat was
revolutionizing the science of life and the art that is based upon
it; that while the young general was scaling the Alps, the young
surgeon was climbing the steeper summits of unexplored nature; that
the same year read the announcement of those admirable "Researches on
Life and Death," and the bulletins of the battle of Marengo?

If we come to our own country, who can fail to recognize that
Benjamin Rush, the most conspicuous of American physicians, was the
intellectual offspring of the movement which produced the Revolution?
"The same hand," says one of his biographers," which subscribed the
declaration of the political independence of these States,
accomplished their emancipation from medical systems formed in
foreign countries, and wholly unsuitable to the state of diseases in
America."

Following this general course of remark, I propose to indicate in a
few words the direction of the main intellectual current of the time,
and to point out more particularly some of the eddies which tend to
keep the science and art of medicine from moving with it, or even to
carry them backwards.

The two dominant words of our time are law and average, both pointing
to the uniformity of the order of being in which we live.  Statistics
have tabulated everything,--population, growth, wealth, crime,
disease.  We have shaded maps showing the geographical distribution
of larceny and suicide.  Analysis and classification have been at
work upon all tangible and visible objects.  The Positive Philosophy
of Comte has only given expression to the observing and computing
mind of the nineteenth century.

In the mean time, the great stronghold of intellectual conservatism,
traditional belief, has been assailed by facts which would have been
indicted as blasphemy but a few generations ago.  Those new tables of
the law, placed in the hands of the geologist by the same living God
who spoke from Sinai to the Israelites of old, have remodelled the
beliefs of half the civilized world.  The solemn scepticism of
science has replaced the sneering doubts of witty philosophers.  The
more positive knowledge we gain, the more we incline to question all
that has been received without absolute proof.

As a matter of course, this movement has its partial reactions.  The
province of faith is claimed as a port free of entry to unsupported
individual convictions.  The tendency to question is met by the
unanalyzing instinct of reverence.  The old church calls back its
frightened truants.  Some who have lost their hereditary religious
belief find a resource in the revelations of Spiritualism.  By a
parallel movement, some of those who have become medical infidels
pass over to the mystic band of believers in the fancied miracles of
Homoeopathy.

Under these influences transmitted to, or at least shared by, the
medical profession, the old question between "Nature," so called, and
"Art," or professional tradition, has reappeared with new interest.
I say the old question, for Hippocrates stated the case on the side
of "Nature" more than two thousand years ago.  Miss Florence
Nightingale,--and if I name her next to the august Father of the
Healing Art, its noblest daughter well deserves that place of honor,
--Miss Florence Nightingale begins her late volume with a paraphrase
of his statement.  But from a very early time to this there has
always been a strong party against "Nature."  Themison called the
practice of Hippocrates "a meditation upon death."  Dr. Rush says:
"It is impossible to calculate the mischief which Hippocrates, has
done, by first marking Nature with his name and afterwards letting
her loose upon sick people.  Millions have perished by her hands in
all ages and countries."  Sir John Forbes, whose defence of "Nature"
in disease you all know, and to the testimonial in whose honor four
of your Presidents have contributed, has been recently greeted, on
retiring from the profession, with a wish that his retirement had
been twenty years sooner, and the opinion that no man had done so
much to destroy the confidence of the public in the medical
profession.

In this Society we have had the Hippocratic and the Themisonic side
fairly represented.  The treatise of one of your early Presidents on
the Mercurial Treatment is familiar to my older listeners.  Others
who have held the same office have been noted for the boldness of
their practice, and even for partiality to the use of complex
medication.

On the side of "Nature" we have had, first of all, that remarkable
discourse on Self-Limited Diseases, [On Self-Limited Diseases.  A
Discourse delivered before the Massachusetts Medical Society, at
their Annual Meeting, May 27, 1835.  By Jacob Bigelow, M. D.] which
has given the key-note to the prevailing medical tendency of this
neighborhood, at least, for the quarter of a century since it was
delivered.  Nor have we forgotten the address delivered at
Springfield twenty years later, [Search out the Secrets, of Nature.
By Augustus A.  Gould, M.  D.  Read at the Annual Meeting, June 27,
1855.] full of good sense and useful suggestions, to one of which
suggestions we owe the learned, impartial, judicious, well-written
Prize Essay of Dr. Worthington Hooker. [Rational Therapeutics.  A
Prize Essay.  By Worthington Hooker, M.  D., of New Haven.  Boston.
1857.] We should not omit from the list the important address of
another of our colleagues, [On the Treatment of Compound and
Complicated Fractures. By William J.  Walker, M.  D.  Read at the
Annual Meeting, May 29, 1845.] showing by numerous cases the power of
Nature in healing compound fractures to be much greater than is
frequently supposed,--affording, indeed, more striking illustrations
than can be obtained from the history of visceral disease, of the
supreme wisdom, forethought, and adaptive dexterity of that divine
Architect, as shown in repairing the shattered columns which support
the living temple of the body.

We who are on the side of "Nature" please ourselves with the idea
that we are in the great current in which the true intelligence of
the time is moving.  We believe that some who oppose, or fear, or
denounce our movement are themselves caught in various eddies that
set back against the truth.  And we do most earnestly desire and most
actively strive, that Medicine, which, it is painful to remember, has
been spoken of as "the withered branch of science" at a meeting of
the British Association, shall be at length brought fully to share,
if not to lead, the great wave of knowledge which rolls with the
tides that circle the globe.

If there is any State or city which might claim to be the American
headquarters of the nature-trusting heresy, provided it be one, that
State is Massachusetts, and that city is its capital.  The effect
which these doctrines have upon the confidence reposed in the
profession is a matter of opinion.  For myself, I do not believe this
confidence can be impaired by any investigations which tend to limit
the application of troublesome, painful, uncertain, or dangerous
remedies.  Nay, I will venture to say this, that if every specific
were to fail utterly, if the cinchona trees all died out, and the
arsenic mines were exhausted, and the sulphur regions were burned up,
if every drug from the vegetable, animal, and mineral kingdom were to
disappear from the market, a body of enlightened men, organized as a
distinct profession, would be required just as much as now, and
respected and trusted as now, whose province should be to guard
against the causes of disease, to eliminate them if possible when
still present, to order all the conditions of the patient so as to
favor the efforts of the system to right itself, and to give those
predictions of the course of disease which only experience can
warrant, and which in so many cases relieve the exaggerated fears of
sufferers and their friends, or warn them in season of impending
danger.  Great as the loss would be if certain active remedies could
no longer be obtained, it would leave the medical profession the most
essential part of it's duties, and all, and more than all, its
present share of honors; for it would be the death-blow to
charlatanism, which depends for its success almost entirely on drugs,
or at least on a nomenclature that suggests them.

There is no offence, then, or danger in expressing the opinion, that,
after all which has been said, the community is still overdosed: The
best proof of it is, that "no families take so little medicine as
those of doctors, except those of apothecaries, and that old
practitioners are more sparing of active medicines than younger
ones." [Dr. James Jackson has kindly permitted me to make the
following extract from a letter just received by him from Sir James
Clark, and dated May 26, 1860:  "As a physician advances in age, he
generally, I think, places less confidence in the ordinary medical
treatment than he did, not only during his early, but even his middle
period of life."]  The conclusion from these facts is one which the
least promising of Dr. Howe's pupils in the mental department could
hardly help drawing.

Part of the blame of over-medication must, I fear, rest with the
profession, for yielding to the tendency to self-delusion, which
seems inseparable from the practice of the art of healing.  I need
only touch on the common modes of misunderstanding or misapplying the
evidence of nature.

First, there is the natural incapacity for sound observation, which
is like a faulty ear in music.  We see this in many persons who know
a good deal about books, but who are not sharp-sighted enough to buy
a horse or deal with human diseases.

Secondly, there is in some persons a singular inability to weigh the
value of testimony; of which, I think, from a pretty careful
examination of his books, Hahnemann affords the best specimen outside
the walls of Bedlam.

The inveterate logical errors to which physicians have always been
subject are chiefly these:

The mode of inference per enumerationem simplicem, in scholastic
phrase; that is, counting only their favorable cases.  This is the
old trick illustrated in Lord Bacon's story of the gifts of the
shipwrecked people, hung up in the temple.--Behold! they vowed these
gifts to the altar, and the gods saved them.  Ay, said a doubting
bystander, but how many made vows of gifts and were shipwrecked
notwithstanding?  The numerical system is the best corrective of this
and similar errors.  The arguments commonly brought against its
application to all matters of medical observation, treatment
included, seem to apply rather to the tabulation of facts ill
observed, or improperly classified, than to the method itself.

The post hoc ergo propter hoc error: he got well after taking my
medicine; therefore in consequence of taking it.

The false induction from genuine facts of observation, leading to the
construction of theories which are then deductively applied in the
face of the results of direct observation.  The school of Broussais
has furnished us with a good example of this error.

And lastly, the error which Sir Thomas Browne calls giving "a reason
of the golden tooth;" that is, assuming a falsehood as a fact, and
giving reasons for it, commonly fanciful ones, as is constantly done
by that class of incompetent observers who find their "golden tooth"
in the fabulous effects of the homoeopathie materia medica,--which
consists of sugar of milk and a nomenclature.

Another portion of the blame rests with the public itself, which
insists on being poisoned.  Somebody buys all the quack medicines
that build palaces for the mushroom, say rather, the toadstool
millionaires.  Who is it?  These people have a constituency of
millions.  The popular belief is all but universal that sick persons
should feed on noxious substances.  One of our members was called not
long since to a man with a terribly sore mouth.  On inquiry he found
that the man had picked up a box of unknown pills, in Howard Street,
and had proceeded to take them, on general principles, pills being
good for people.  They happened to contain mercury, and hence the
trouble for which he consulted our associate.

The outside pressure, therefore, is immense upon the physician,
tending to force him to active treatment of some kind.  Certain old
superstitions, still lingering in the mind of the public, and not yet
utterly expelled from that of the profession, are at the bottom of
this, or contribute to it largely.  One of the most ancient is, that
disease is a malignant agency, or entity, to be driven out of the
body by offensive substances, as the smoke of the fish's heart and
liver drove the devil out of Tobit's bridal chamber, according to the
Apochrypha.  Epileptics used to suck the blood from the wounds of
dying gladiators. [Plinii Hist.  Mundi.  lib.  xxviii.  c.  4.] The
Hon. Robert Boyle's little book was published some twenty or thirty
years before our late President, Dr. Holyoke, was born. [A Collection
of Choice and Safe Remedies.  The Fifth Edition, corrected.  London,
1712.  Dr. Holyoke was born in 1728.] In it he recommends, as
internal medicines, most of the substances commonly used as
fertilizers of the soil.  His "Album Graecum" is best left
untranslated, and his "Zebethum Occidentale" is still more
transcendentally unmentionable except in a strange dialect.  It
sounds odiously to us to hear him recommend for dysentery a powder
made from "the sole of an old shoe worn by some man that walks much."
Perhaps nobody here ever heard of tying a stocking, which had been
worn during the day, round the neck at night for a sore throat.  The
same idea of virtue in unlovely secretions! [The idea is very
ancient.  "Sordes hominis" "Sudore et oleo medicinam facientibus."
--Plin.  xxviii.  4.]

Even now the Homoeopathists have been introducing the venom of
serpents, under the learned title of Lachesis, and outraging human
nature with infusions of the pediculus capitis; that is, of course,
as we understand their dilutions, the names of these things; for if a
fine-tooth-comb insect were drowned in Lake Superior, we cannot agree
with them in thinking that every drop of its waters would be
impregnated with all the pedicular virtues they so highly value.
They know what they are doing.  They are appealing to the detestable
old superstitious presumption in favor of whatever is nauseous and
noxious as being good for the sick.

Again, we all occasionally meet persons stained with nitrate of
silver, given for epilepsy.  Read what Dr. Martin says, about the way
in which it came to be used, in his excellent address before the
Norfolk County Medical Society, and the evidence I can show, but have
not time for now, and then say what you think of the practice which
on such presumptions turns a white man as blue as the double-tattooed
King of the Cannibal Islands!  [Note A.]

If medical superstitions have fought their way down through all the
rationalism and scepticism of the nineteenth century, of course the
theories of the schools, supported by great names, adopted into the
popular belief and incorporated with the general mass of
misapprehension with reference to disease, must be expected to meet
us at every turn in the shape of bad practice founded on false
doctrine.  A French patient complains that his blood heats him, and
expects his doctor to bleed him.  An English or American one says he
is bilious, and will not be easy without a dose of calomel.  A doctor
looks at a patient's tongue, sees it coated, and says the stomach is
foul; his head full of the old saburral notion which the extreme
inflammation-doctrine of Broussais did so much to root out, but which
still leads, probably, to much needless and injurious wrong of the
stomach and bowels by evacuants, when all they want is to be let
alone.  It is so hard to get anything out of the dead hand of medical
tradition!  The mortmain of theorists extinct in science clings as
close as that of ecclesiastics defunct in law.

One practical hint may not be out of place here.  It seems to be
sometimes forgotten, by those who must know the fact, that the tongue
is very different, anatomically and physiologically, from the
stomach.  Its condition does not in the least imply a similar one of
the stomach, which is a very different structure, covered with a
different kind of epithelium, and furnished with entirely different
secretions.  A silversmith will, for a dollar, make a small hoe, of
solid silver, which will last for centuries, and will give a patient
more comfort, used for the removal of the accumulated epithelium and
fungous growths which constitute the "fur," than many a prescription
with a split-footed Rx before it, addressed to the parts out of
reach.

I think more of this little implement on account of its agency in
saving the Colony at Plymouth in the year 1623.  Edward Winslow heard
that Massasoit was sick and like to die.  He found him with a
houseful of people about him, women rubbing his arms and legs, and
friends "making such a hellish noise" as they probably thought would
scare away the devil of sickness.  Winslow gave him some conserve,
washed his mouth, scraped his tongue, which was in a horrid state,
got down some drink, made him some broth, dosed him with an infusion
of strawberry leaves and sassafras root, and had the satisfaction of
seeing him rapidly recover.  Massasoit, full of gratitude, revealed
the plot which had been formed to destroy the colonists, whereupon
the Governor ordered Captain Miles Standish to see to them; who
thereupon, as everybody remembers, stabbed Pecksuot with his own
knife, broke up the plot, saved the colony, and thus rendered
Massachusetts and the Massachusetts Medical Society a possibility, as
they now are a fact before us.  So much for this parenthesis of the
tongue-scraper, which helped to save the young colony from a much
more serious scrape, and may save the Union yet, if a Presidential
candidate should happen to be taken sick as Massasoit was, and his
tongue wanted cleaning,--which process would not hurt a good many
politicians, with or without a typhoid fever.

Again, see how the "bilious" theory works in every-day life here and
now, illustrated by a case from actual life.  A youthful
practitioner, whose last molars have not been a great while cut,
meets an experienced and noted physician in consultation.  This is
the case.  A slender, lymphatic young woman is suckling two lusty
twins, the intervals of suction being occupied on her part with
palpitations, headaches, giddiness, throbbing in the head, and
various nervous symptoms, her cheeks meantime getting bloodless, and
her strength running away in company with her milk.  The old
experienced physician, seeing the yellowish waxy look which is common
in anaemic patients, considers it a "bilious" case, and is for giving
a rousing emetic.  Of course, he has to be wheedled out of this, a
recipe is written for beefsteaks and porter, the twins are
ignominiously expelled from the anaemic bosom, and forced to take
prematurely to the bottle, and this prolific mother is saved for
future usefulness in the line of maternity.

The practice of making a profit on the medicine ordered has been held
up to reprobation by one at least of the orators who have preceded
me.  That the effect of this has been ruinous in English practice I
cannot doubt, and that in this country the standard of practice was
in former generations lowered through the same agency is not
unlikely.  I have seen an old account-book in which the physician
charged an extra price for gilding his rich patients' pills.  If all
medicine were very costly, and the expense of it always came out of
the physician's fee, it would really be a less objectionable
arrangement than this other most pernicious one.  He would naturally
think twice before he gave an emetic or cathartic which evacuated his
own pocket, and be sparing of the cholagogues that emptied the
biliary ducts of his own wallet, unless he were sure they were
needed.  If there is any temptation, it should not be in favor of
giving noxious agents, as it clearly must be in the case of English
druggists and "General Practitioners."  The complaint against the
other course is a very old one.  Pliny, inspired with as truly Roman
horror of quackery as the elder Cato,--who declared that the Greek
doctors had sworn to exterminate all barbarians, including the
Romans, with their drugs, but is said to have physicked his own wife
to death, notwithstanding,--Pliny says, in so many words, that the
cerates and cataplasms, plasters, collyria, and antidotes, so
abundant in his time, as in more recent days, were mere tricks to
make money.


A pretty strong eddy, then, or rather many eddies, setting constantly
back from the current of sober observation of nature, in the
direction of old superstitions and fancies, of exploded theories, of
old ways of making money, which are very slow to pass out of fashion

But there are other special American influences which we are bound to
take cognizance of.  If I wished to show a student the difficulties
of getting at truth from medical experience, I would give him the
history of epilepsy to read.  If I wished him to understand the
tendencies of the American medical mind, its sanguine enterprise, its
self-confidence, its audacious handling of Nature, its impatience
with her old-fashioned ways of taking time to get a sick man well, I
would make him read the life and writings of Benjamin Rush.  Dr. Rush
thought and said that there were twenty times more intellect and a
hundred times more knowledge in the country in 1799 than before the
Revolution.  His own mind was in a perpetual state of exaltation
produced by the stirring scenes in which he had taken a part, and the
quickened life of the time in which he lived.  It was not the state
to favor sound, calm observation.  He was impatient, and Nature is
profoundly imperturbable.  We may adjust the beating of our hearts to
her pendulum if we will and can, but we may be very sure that she
will not change the pendulum's rate of going because our hearts are
palpitating.  He thought he had mastered yellow-fever.  "Thank God,"
he said, "out of one hundred patients whom I have visited or
prescribed for this day, I have lost none."  Where was all his legacy
of knowledge when Norfolk was decimated?  Where was it when the blue
flies were buzzing over the coffins of the unburied dead piled up in
the cemetery of New Orleans, at the edge of the huge trenches yawning
to receive them?

One such instance will do as well as twenty.  Dr. Rush must have been
a charming teacher, as he was an admirable man.  He was observing,
rather than a sound observer; eminently observing, curious, even,
about all manner of things.  But he could not help feeling as if
Nature had been a good deal shaken by the Declaration of
Independence, and that American art was getting to be rather too much
for her,--especially as illustrated in his own practice.  He taught
thousands of American students, he gave a direction to the medical
mind of the country more than any other one man; perhaps he typifies
it better than any other.  It has clearly tended to extravagance in
remedies and trust in remedies, as in everything else.  How could a
people which has a revolution once in four years, which has contrived
the Bowie-knife and the revolver, which has chewed the juice out of
all the superlatives in the language in Fourth of July orations, and
so used up its epithets in the rhetoric of abuse that it takes two
great quarto dictionaries to supply the demand; which insists in
sending out yachts and horses and boys to out-sail, out-run, out-
fight, and checkmate all the rest of creation; how could such a
people be content with any but "heroic" practice?  What wonder that
the stars and stripes wave over doses of ninety grains of sulphate of
quinine, [More strictly, ninety-six grains in two hours. Dunglison's
Practice, 1842, vol. ii.  p. 520.  Eighty grains in one dose.
Ibid.  p. 536.  Ninety-six grains of sulphate of quinine are equal
to eight ounces of good bark.--Wood & Bache.] and that the American
eagle screams with delight to see three drachms of calomel given at a
single mouthful?

Add to this the great number of Medical Journals, all useful, we
hope, most of them necessary, we trust, many of them excellently well
conducted, but which must find something to fill their columns, and
so print all the new plans of treatment and new remedies they can get
hold of, as the newspapers, from a similar necessity, print the
shocking catastrophes and terrible murders.

Besides all this, here are we, the great body of teachers in the
numberless medical schools of the Union, some of us lecturing to
crowds who clap and stamp in the cities, some of us wandering over
the country, like other professional fertilizers, to fecundate the
minds of less demonstrative audiences at various scientific stations;
all of us talking habitually to those supposed to know less than
ourselves, and loving to claim as much for our art as we can, not to
say for our own schools, and possibly indirectly for our own
practical skill.  Hence that annual crop of introductory lectures;
the useful blossoming into the ornamental, as the cabbage becomes
glorified in the cauliflower; that lecture-room literature of
adjectives, that declamatory exaggeration, that splendid show of
erudition borrowed from D'Israeli, and credited to Lord Bacon and the
rest, which have suggested to our friends of the Medical Journals an
occasional epigram at our expense.  Hence the tendency in these
productions, and in medical lectures generally, to overstate the
efficacy of favorite methods of cure, and hence the premium offered
for showy talkers rather than sagacious observers, for the men of
adjectives rather than of nouns substantive in the more ambitious of
these institutions.

Such are some of the eddies in which we are liable to become involved
and carried back out of the broad stream of philosophical, or, in
other words, truth-loving, investigations.  The causes of disease, in
the mean time, have been less earnestly studied in the eagerness of
the search for remedies.  Speak softly!  Women have been borne out
from an old-world hospital, two in one coffin, that the horrors of
their prison-house might not be known, while the very men who were
discussing the treatment of the disease were stupidly conveying the
infection from bed to bed, as rat-killers carry their poisons from
one household to another.  Do not some of you remember that I have
had to fight this private-pestilence question against a scepticism
which sneered in the face of a mass of evidence such as the calm
statisticians of the Insurance office could not listen to without
horror and indignation? ["The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever."--
N. E. Quar. Jour. of Medicine and Surgery, April, 1843.  Reprinted,
with Additions.  Boston: Ticknor & Fields.  1855.] Have we forgotten
what is told in one of the books published under our own sanction,
that a simple measure of ventilation, proposed by Dr. John Clark, had
saved more than sixteen thousand children's lives in a single
hospital?  How long would it have taken small doses of calomel and
rhubarb to save as many children?  These may be useful in prudent
hands, but how insignificant compared to the great hygienic
conditions!  Causes, causes, and again causes,--more and more we fall
back on these as the chief objects of our attention.  The shortest
system of medical practice that I know of is the oldest, but not the
worst.  It is older than Hippocrates, older than Chiron the Centaur.
Nature taught it to the first mother when she saw her first-born
child putting some ugly pebble or lurid berry into its mouth.  I know
not in what language it was spoken, but I know that in English it
would sound thus: Spit it out!

Art can do something more than say this.  It can sometimes reach the
pebble or berry after it has been swallowed.  But the great thing is
to keep these things out of children's mouths, and as soon as they
are beyond our reach, to be reasonable and patient with Nature, who
means well, but does not like to hurry, and who took nine calendar
months, more or less, to every mother's son among us, before she
thought he was fit to be shown to the public.

Suffer me now to lay down a few propositions, whether old or new it
matters little, not for your immediate acceptance, nor yet for your
hasty rejection, but for your calm consideration.

But first, there are a number of terms which we are in the habit of
using in a vague though not unintelligible way, and which it is as
well now to define.  These terms are the tools with which we are to
work, and the first thing is to sharpen them.  It is nothing to us
that they have been sharpened a thousand times before; they always
get dull in the using, and every new workman has a right to carry
them to the grindstone and sharpen them to suit himself.

Nature, in medical language, as opposed to Art, means trust in the
reactions of the living system against, ordinary normal impressions.

Art, in the same language, as opposed to Nature, means an intentional
resort to extraordinary abnormal impressions for the relief of
disease.

The reaction of the living system is the essence of both.  Food is
nothing, if there is no digestive act to respond to it.  We cannot
raise a blister on a dead man, or hope that a carminative forced
between his lips will produce its ordinary happy effect.

Disease, dis-ease,--disturbed quiet, uncomfortableness,--means
imperfect or abnormal reaction of the living system, and its more or
less permanent results.

Food, in its largest sense, is whatever helps to build up the normal
structures, or to maintain their natural actions.

Medicine, in distinction from food, is every unnatural or noxious
agent applied for the relief of disease.

Physic means properly the Natural art, and Physician is only the
Greek synonyme of Naturalist.

With these few explanations I proceed to unfold the propositions I
have mentioned.

Disease and death, if we may judge by the records of creation, are
inherently and essentially necessary in the present order of things.
A perfect intelligence, trained by a perfect education, could do no
more than keep the laws of the physical and spiritual universe.  An
imperfect intelligence, imperfectly taught,--and this is the
condition of our finite humanity,--will certainly fail to keep all
these laws perfectly.  Disease is one of the penalties of one of the
forms of such failure.  It is prefigured in the perturbations of the
planets, in the disintegration of the elemental masses; it has left
its traces in the fossil organisms of extinct creations. [Professor
Agassiz has kindly handed me the following note: "There are abnormal
structures in animals of all ages anterior to the creation of
mankind.  Malformed specimens of Crinoids are known from the Triassic
and Jurassic deposits.  Malformed and diseased bones of tertiary
mammalia have been collected in the caverns of Gailenreuth with
traces of healing."]

But it is especially the prerogative, I had almost said privilege, of
educated and domesticated beings, from man down to the potato,
serving to teach them, and such as train them, the laws of life, and
to get rid of those who will not mind or cannot be kept subject to
these laws.

Disease, being always an effect, is always in exact proportion to the
sum of its causes, as much in the case of Spigelius, who dies of a
scratch, as in that of the man who recovers after an iron bar has
been shot through his brain.  The one prevalent failing of the
medical art is to neglect the causes and quarrel with the effect.

There are certain general facts which include a good deal of what is
called and treated as disease.  Thus, there are two opposite
movements of life to be seen in cities and elsewhere, belonging to
races which, from various persistent causes, are breeding down and
tending to run out, and to races which are breeding up, or
accumulating vital capital,--a descending and an ascending series.
Let me give an example of each; and that I may incidentally remove a
common impression about this country as compared with the Old World,
an impression which got tipsy with conceit and staggered into the
attitude of a formal proposition in the work of Dr. Robert Knox, I
will illustrate the downward movement from English experience, and
the upward movement from a family history belonging to this immediate
neighborhood.

Miss Nightingale speaks of "the fact so often seen of a
great-grandmother, who was a tower of physical vigor, descending into
a grandmother perhaps a little less vigorous, but still sound as a
bell, and healthy to the core, into a mother languid and confined to
her carriage and house; and lastly into a daughter sickly and
confined to her bed." So much for the descending English series; now
for the ascending American series.

Something more than one hundred and thirty years ago there graduated
at Harvard College a delicate youth, who lived an invalid life and
died at the age of about fifty.  His two children were both of
moderate physical power, and one of them diminutive in stature.  The
next generation rose in physical development, and reached eighty
years of age and more in some of its members.  The fourth generation
was of fair average endowment.  The fifth generation, great-great-
grandchildren of the slender invalid, are several of, them of
extraordinary bodily and mental power; large in stature, formidable
alike with their brains and their arms, organized on a more extensive
scale than either of their parents.

This brief account illustrates incidentally the fallacy of the
universal-degeneration theory applied to American life; the same on
which one of our countrymen has lately brought some very forcible
facts to bear in a muscular discussion of which we have heard rather
more than is good for us. But the two series, American and English,
ascending and descending, were adduced with the main purpose of
showing the immense difference of vital endowments in different
strains of blood; a difference to which all ordinary medication is in
all probability a matter of comparatively trivial purport.  Many
affections which art has to strive against might be easily shown to
be vital to the well-being of society.  Hydrocephalus, tabes
mesenterica, and other similar maladies, are natural agencies which
cut off the children of races that are sinking below the decent
minimum which nature has established as the condition of viability,
before they reach the age of reproduction.  They are really not so
much diseases, as manifestations of congenital incapacity for life;
the race would be ruined if art could ever learn always to preserve
the individuals subject to them.  We must do the best we can for
them, but we ought also to know what these "diseases" mean.

Again, invalidism is the normal state of many organizations.  It can
be changed to disease, but never to absolute health by medicinal
appliances.  There are many ladies, ancient and recent, who are
perpetually taking remedies for irremediable pains and aches.  They
ought to have headaches and back-aches and stomach-aches; they are
not well if they do not have them.  To expect them to live without
frequent twinges is like expecting a doctor's old chaise to go
without creaking; if it did, we might be sure the springs were
broken.  There is no doubt that the constant demand for medicinal
remedies from patients of this class leads to their over-use; often
in the case of cathartics, sometimes in that of opiates.  I have been
told by an intelligent practitioner in a Western town, that the
constant prescription of opiates by certain physicians in his
vicinity has rendered the habitual use of that drug in all that
region very prevalent; more common, I should think, than alcoholic
drunkenness in the most intemperate localities of which I have known
anything.  A frightful endemic demoralization betrays itself in the
frequency with which the haggard features and drooping shoulders of
the opium-drunkards are met with in the streets.

The next proposition I would ask you to consider is this:
The presumption always is that every noxious agent, including
medicines proper, which hurts a well man, hurts a sick one.
[ Note B.]

Let me illustrate this proposition before you decide upon it.  If it
were known that a prize-fighter were to have a drastic purgative
administered two or three days before a contest, or a large blister
applied to his back, no one will question that it would affect the
betting on his side unfavorably; we will say to the amount of five
per cent.  Now the drain upon the resources of the system produced in
such a case must be at its minimum, for the subject is a powerful
man, in the prime of life, and in admirable condition.  If the drug
or the blister takes five per cent. from his force of resistance, it
will take at least as large a fraction from any invalid.  But this
invalid has to fight a champion who strikes hard but cannot be hit in
return, who will press him sharply for breath, but will never pant
himself while the wind can whistle through his fleshless ribs.  The
suffering combatant is liable to want all his stamina, and five per
cent. may lose him the battle.

All noxious agents, all appliances which are not natural food or
stimuli, all medicines proper, cost a patient, on the average, five
per cent. of his vital force, let us say.  Twenty times as much waste
of force produced by any of them, that is, would exactly kill him,
nothing less than kill him, and nothing more.  If this, or something
like this, is true, then all these medications are, prima facie,
injurious.

In the game of Life-or-Death, Rouge et Noir, as played between the
Doctor and the Sexton, this five per cent., this certain small injury
entering into the chances is clearly the sexton's perquisite for
keeping the green table, over which the game is played, and where he
hoards up his gains.  Suppose a blister to diminish a man's pain,
effusion or dyspnoea to the saving of twenty per cent. in vital
force; his profit from it is fifteen, in that case, for it always
hurts him five to begin with, according to our previous assumption.

Presumptions are of vast importance in medicine, as in law.  A man is
presumed innocent until he is proved guilty.  A medicine--that is, a
noxious agent, like a blister, a seton, an emetic, or a cathartic--
should always be presumed to be hurtful.  It always is directly
hurtful; it may sometimes be indirectly beneficial.  If this
presumption were established, and disease always assumed to be the
innocent victim of circumstances, and not punishable by medicines,
that is, noxious agents, or poisons, until the contrary was shown, we
should not so frequently hear the remark commonly, perhaps
erroneously, attributed to Sir Astley Cooper, but often repeated by
sensible persons, that, on the whole, more harm than good is done by
medication.  Throw out opium, which the Creator himself seems to
prescribe, for we often see the scarlet poppy growing in the
cornfields, as if it were foreseen that wherever there is hunger to
be fed there must also be pain to be soothed; throw out a few
specifics which our art did not discover, and is hardly needed to
apply [ Note C.]; throw out wine, which is a food, and the vapors
which produce the miracle of anaesthesia, and I firmly believe that
if the whole materia medica, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom
of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind,--and all the
worse for the fishes.

But to justify this proposition, I must add that the injuries
inflicted by over-medication are to a great extent masked by disease.
Dr. Hooker believes that the typhus syncopatia of a preceding
generation in New England "was often in fact a brandy and opium
disease."  How is a physician to distinguish the irritation produced
by his blister from that caused by the inflammation it was meant to
cure?  How can he tell the exhaustion produced by his evacuants from
the collapse belonging to the disease they were meant to remove?

Lastly, medication without insuring favorable hygienic conditions is
like amputation without ligatures.  I had a chance to learn this well
of old, when physician to the Broad Street district of the Boston
Dispensary.  There, there was no help for the utter want of wholesome
conditions, and if anybody got well under my care, it must have been
in virtue of the rough-and-tumble constitution which emerges from the
struggle for life in the street gutters, rather than by the aid of my
prescriptions.

But if the materia medica were lost overboard, how much more pains
would be taken in ordering all the circumstances surrounding the
patient (as can be done everywhere out of the crowded pauper
districts), than are taken now by too many who think they do their
duty and earn their money when they write a recipe for a patient left
in an atmosphere of domestic malaria, or to the most negligent kind
of nursing!  I confess that I should think my chance of recovery from
illness less with Hippocrates for my physician and Mrs. Gamp for my
nurse, than if I were in the hands of Hahnemann himself, with
Florence Nightingale or good Rebecca Taylor to care for me.

If I am right in maintaining that the presumption is always against
the use of noxious agents in disease, and if any whom I might
influence should adopt this as a principle of practice, they will
often find themselves embarrassed by the imperative demand of
patients and their friends for such agents where a case is not made
out against this standing presumption.  I must be permitted to say,
that I think the French, a not wholly uncivilized people, are in
advance of the English and ourselves in the art of prescribing for
the sick without hurting them.  And I do confess that I think their
varied ptisans and syrups are as much preferable to the mineral
regimen of bug-poison and ratsbane, so long in favor on the other
side of the Channel, as their art of preparing food for the table to
the rude cookery of those hard-feeding and much-dosing islanders.
We want a reorganized cuisine of invalidism perhaps as much as the
culinary, reform, for which our lyceum lecturers, and others who live
much at hotels and taverns, are so urgent.  Will you think I am
disrespectful if I ask whether, even in Massachusetts, a dose of
calomel is not sometimes given by a physician on the same principle
as that upon which a landlord occasionally prescribes bacon and
eggs,--because he cannot think of anything else quite so handy?  I
leave my suggestion of borrowing a hint from French practice to your
mature consideration.

I may, however, call your attention, briefly, to the singular fact,
that English and American practitioners are apt to accuse French
medical practice of inertness, and French surgical practice of
unnecessary activity.  Thus, Dr. Bostock considers French medical
treatment, with certain exceptions, as "decidedly less effective"
than that of his own country.   Mr. S. Cooper, again, defends the
simple British practice of procuring union by the first intention
against the attacks of M. Roux and Baron Larrey. [Cooper's Surg.
Diet.  art.  "Wounds."  Yet Mr. John Bell gives the French surgeons
credit for introducing this doctrine of adhesion, and accuses
O'Halloran of "rudeness and ignorance," and "bold, uncivil language,"
in disputing their teaching.  Princ.  of Surgery, vol. i.  p. 42.
Mr. Hunter succeeded at last in naturalizing the doctrine and
practice, but even he had to struggle against the perpetual jealousy
of rivals, and died at length assassinated by an insult.]  We have
often heard similar opinions maintained by our own countrymen.  While
Anglo-American criticism blows hot or cold on the two departments of
French practice, it is not, I hope, indecent to question whether all
the wisdom is necessarily with us in both cases.

Our art has had two or three lessons which have a deep meaning to
those who are willing to read them honestly.  The use of water-
dressings in surgery completed the series of reforms by which was
abolished the "coarse and cruel practice" of the older surgeons, who
with their dressings and acrid balsams, their tents and leaden tubes,
"absolutely delayed the cure."  The doctrine of Broussais, transient
as was its empire, reversed the practice of half of Christendom for a
season, and taught its hasty disciples to shun their old favorite
remedies as mortal poisons.  This was not enough permanently to shift
the presumption about drugs where it belonged, and so at last, just
as the sympathetic powder and the Unguentum Armarium came in a
superstitious age to kill out the abuses of external over-medication,
the solemn farce of Homoeopathy was enacted in the face of our own
too credulous civilization, that under shelter of its pretences the
"inward bruises" of over-drugged viscera might be allowed to heal by
the first intention.  Its lesson we must accept, whether we will or
not; its follies we are tired of talking about.  The security of the
medical profession against this and all similar fancies is in the
average constitution of the human.  mind with regard to the laws of
evidence.

My friends and brothers in Art!  There is nothing to be feared from
the utterance of any seeming heresy to which you may have listened.
I cannot compromise your collective wisdom.  If I have strained the
truth one hair's breadth for the sake of an epigram or an antithesis,
you are accustomed to count the normal pulse-beats of sound judgment,
and know full well how to recognize the fever-throbs of conceit and
the nervous palpitations of rhetoric.

The freedom with which each of us speaks his thought in this
presence, belongs in part to the assured position of the Profession
in our Commonwealth, to the attitude of Science, which is always
fearless, and to the genius of the soil on which we stand, from which
Nature withheld the fatal gift of malaria only to fill it with
exhalations that breed the fever of inquiry in our blood and in our
brain.  But mainly we owe the large license of speech we enjoy to
those influences and privileges common to us all as self-governing
Americans.

This Republic is the chosen home of minorities, of the less power in
the presence of the greater.  It is a common error to speak of our
distinction as consisting in the rule of the majority.  Majorities,
the greater material powers, have always ruled before.  The history
of most countries has been that of majorities, mounted majorities,
clad in iron, armed with death treading down the tenfold more
numerous minorities.  In the old civilizations they root themselves
like oaks in the soil; men must live in their shadow or cut them
down.  With us the majority is only the flower of the passing noon,
and the minority is the bud which may open in the next morning's sun.
We must be tolerant, for the thought which stammers on a single
tongue today may organize itself in the growing consciousness of the
time, and come back to us like the voice of the multitudinous waves
of the ocean on the morrow.

Twenty-five years have passed since one of your honored Presidents
spoke to this Society of certain limitations to the power of our Art,
now very generally conceded.  Some were troubled, some were almost
angry, thinking the Profession might suffer from such concessions.
It has certainly not suffered here; if, as some affirm, it has lost
respect anywhere, it was probably for other, and no doubt sufficient
reasons.

Since that time the civilization of this planet has changed hands.
Strike out of existence at this moment every person who was breathing
on that day, May 27, 1835, and every institution of society, every
art and every science would remain intact and complete in the living
that would be left.  Every idea the world then held has been since
dissolved and recrystallized.

We are repeating the same process.  Not to make silver shrines for
our old divinities, even though by this craft we should have our
wealth, was this Society organized and carried on by the good men and
true who went before us.  Not for this, but to melt the gold out of
the past, though its dross should fly in dust to all the winds of
heaven, to save all our old treasures of knowledge and mine deeply
for new, to cultivate that mutual respect of which outward courtesy
is the sign, to work together, to feel together, to take counsel
together, and to stand together for the truth, now, always, here,
everywhere; for this our fathers instituted, and we accept, the
offices and duties of this time-honored Society.







BORDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE IN SOME PROVINCES OF MEDICAL SCIENCE.

An Introductory Lecture delivered before the Medical Class
of Harvard University, November 6, 1861.


[This Lecture appears as it would have been delivered had the time
allowed been less strictly, limited.  Passages necessarily omitted
have been restored, and points briefly touched have been more fully
considered.  A few notes have been added for the benefit of that
limited class of students who care to track an author through the
highways and by-ways of his reading.  I owe my thanks to several of
my professional brethren who have communicated with me on subjects
with which they are familiar; especially to Dr. John Dean, for the
opportunity of profiting by his unpublished labors, and to Dr. Hasket
Derby, for information and references to recent authorities relating
to the anatomy and physiology of the eye.]


The entrance upon a new course of Lectures is always a period of
interest to instructors and pupils.  As the birth of a child to a
parent, so is the advent of a new class to a teacher.  As the light
of the untried world to the infant, so is the dawning of the light
resting over the unexplored realms of science to the student.  In the
name of the Faculty I welcome you, Gentlemen of the Medical Class,
new-born babes of science, or lustier nurslings, to this morning of
your medical life, and to the arms and the bosom of this ancient
University.  Fourteen years ago I stood in this place for the first
time to address those who occupied these benches.  As I recall these
past seasons of our joint labors, I feel that they have been on the
whole prosperous, and not undeserving of their prosperity.

For it has been my privilege to be associated with a body of true and
faithful workers; I cannot praise them freely to their faces, or I
should be proud to discourse of the harmonious diligence and the
noble spirit in which they have toiled together, not merely to teach
their several branches, but to elevate the whole standard of
teaching.

I may speak with less restraint of those gentlemen who have aided me
in the most laborious part of my daily duties, the Demonstrators, to
whom the successive classes have owed so much of their instruction.
They rise before me, the dead and the living, in the midst of the
most grateful recollections.  The fair, manly face and stately figure
of my friend, Dr. Samuel Parkman, himself fit for the highest offices
of teaching, yet willing to be my faithful assistant in the time of
need, come back to me with the long sigh of regret for his early loss
to our earthly companionship.  Every year I speak the eulogy of Dr.
Ainsworth's patient toil as I show his elaborate preparations: When I
take down my "American Cyclopaedia" and borrow instruction from the
learned articles of Dr. Kneeland, I cease to regret that his
indefatigable and intelligent industry was turned into a broader
channel.  And what can I say too cordial of my long associated
companion and friend, Dr. Hodges, whose admirable skill, working
through the swiftest and surest fingers that ever held a scalpel
among us, has delighted class after class, and filled our Museum with
monuments which will convey his name to unborn generations?

This day belongs, however, not to myself and my recollections, but to
all of us who teach and all of you who listen, whether experts in our
specialties or aliens to their mysteries, or timid neophytes just
entering the portals of the hall of science.  Look in with me, then,
while I attempt to throw some rays into its interior, which shall
illuminate a few of its pillars and cornices, and show at the same
time how many niches and alcoves remain in darkness.


SCIENCE is the topography of ignorance.  From a few elevated points
we triangulate vast spaces, inclosing infinite unknown details.  We
cast the lead, and draw up a little sand from abysses we may never
reach with our dredges.

The best part of our knowledge is that which teaches us where
knowledge leaves off and ignorance begins.  Nothing more clearly
separates a vulgar from a superior mind, than the confusion in the
first between the little that it truly knows, on the one hand, and
what it half knows and what it thinks it knows on the other.

That which is true of every subject is especially true of the branch
of knowledge which deals with living beings.  Their existence is a
perpetual death and reanimation.  Their identity is only an idea, for
we put off our bodies many times during our lives, and dress in new
suits of bones and muscles.

               "Thou art not thyself;
     For thou exist'st on many a thousand grains
     That issue out of dust."

If it is true that we understand ourselves but imperfectly in health,
this truth is more signally manifested in disease, where natural
actions imperfectly understood, disturbed in an obscure way by half-
seen causes, are creeping and winding along in the dark toward their
destined issue, sometimes using our remedies as safe stepping-stones,
occasionally, it may be, stumbling over them as obstacles.

I propose in this lecture to show you some points of contact between
our ignorance and our knowledge in several of the branches upon the
study of which you are entering.  I may teach you a very little
directly, but I hope much more from the trains of thought I shall
suggest.  Do not expect too much ground to be covered in this rapid
survey.  Our task is only that of sending out a few pickets under the
starry flag of science to the edge of that dark domain where the
ensigns of the obstinate rebel, Ignorance, are flying undisputed.  We
are not making a reconnoissance in force, still less advancing with
the main column.  But here are a few roads along which we have to
march together, and we wish to see clearly how far our lines extend,
and where the enemy's outposts begin.

Before touching the branches of knowledge that deal with organization
and vital functions, let us glance at that science which meets you at
the threshold of your study, and prepares you in some measure to deal
with the more complex problems of the living laboratory.


CHEMISTRY.  includes the art of separating and combining the elements
of matter, and the study of the changes produced by these operations.
We can hardly say too much of what it has contributed to our
knowledge of the universe and our power of dealing with its
materials.  It has given us a catalogue raisonne of the substances
found upon our planet, and shown how everything living and dead is
put together from them.  It is accomplishing wonders before us every
day, such as Arabian story-tellers used to string together in their
fables.  It spreads the, sensitive film on the artificial retina
which looks upon us through the optician's lens for a few seconds,
and fixes an image that will outlive its original.  It questions the
light of the sun, and detects the vaporized metals floating around
the great luminary,--iron, sodium, lithium, and the rest,--as if the
chemist of our remote planet could fill his bell-glasses from its
fiery atmosphere.  It lends the power which flashes our messages in
thrills that leave the lazy chariot of day behind them.  It seals up
a few dark grains in iron vases, and lo! at the touch of a single
spark, rises in smoke and flame a mighty Afrit with a voice like
thunder and an arm that shatters like an earthquake.  The dreams of
Oriental fancy have become the sober facts of our every-day life, and
the chemist is the magician to whom we owe them.

To return to the colder scientific aspect of chemistry.  It has shown
us how bodies stand affected to each other through an almost
boundless range of combinations.  It has given us a most ingenious
theory to account for certain fixed relations in these combinations.
It has successfully eliminated a great number of proximate compounds,
more or less stable, from organic structures.  It has invented others
which form the basis of long series of well-known composite
substances.  In fact, we are perhaps becoming overburdened with our
list of proximate principles, demonstrated and hypothetical.

How much nearer have we come to the secret of force than Lully and
Geber and the whole crew of juggling alchemists?  We have learned a
great deal about the how, what have we learned about the why?

Why does iron rust, while gold remains untarnished, and gold
amalgamate, while iron refuses the alliance of mercury?

The alchemists called gold Sol, the sun, and iron Mars, and pleased
themselves with fancied relations between these substances and the
heavenly bodies, by which they pretended to explain the facts they
observed.  Some of their superstitions have lingered in practical
medicine to the present day, but chemistry has grown wise enough to
confess the fact of absolute ignorance.

What is it that makes common salt crystallize in the form of cubes,
and saltpetre in the shape of six-sided prisms?  We see no reason why
it should not have been just the other way, salt in prisms and
saltpetre in cubes, or why either should take an exact geometrical
outline, any more than coagulating albumen.

But although we had given up attempting to explain the essential
nature of affinities and of crystalline types, we might have supposed
that we had at least fixed the identity of the substances with which
we deal, and determined the laws of their combination.  All at once
we find that a simple substance changes face, puts off its
characteristic qualities and resumes them at will;--not merely when
we liquefy or vaporize a solid, or reverse the process; but that a
solid is literally transformed into another solid under our own eyes.
We thought we knew phosphorus.  We warm a portion of it sealed in an
empty tube, for about a week.  It has become a brown infusible
substance, which does not shine in the dark nor oxidate in the air.
We heat it to 500 F., and it becomes common phosphorus again.  We
transmute sulphur in the same singular way.  Nature, you know, gives
us carbon in the shape of coal and in that of the diamond.  It is
easy to call these changes by the name allotropism, but not the less
do they confound our hasty generalizations.

These facts of allotropism have some corollaries connected with them
rather startling to us of the nineteenth century.  There may be other
transmutations possible besides those of phosphorus and sulphur.
When Dr. Prout, in 1840, talked about azote and carbon being "formed"
in the living system, it was looked upon as one of those freaks of
fancy to which philosophers, like other men, are subject.  But when
Professor Faraday, in 1851, says, at a meeting of the British
Association, that "his hopes are in the direction of proving that
bodies called simple were really compounds, and may be formed
artificially as soon as we are masters of the laws influencing their
combinations,"--when he comes forward and says that he has tried
experiments at transmutation, and means, if his life is spared, to
try them again,--how can we be surprised at the popular story of
1861, that Louis Napoleon has established a gold-factory and is
glutting the mints of Europe with bullion of his own making?

And so with reference to the law of combinations.  The old maxim was,
Corpora non agunt nisi soluta.  If two substances, a and b, are
inclosed in a glass vessel, c, we do not expect the glass to change
them, unless a or b or the compound a b has the power of dissolving
the glass.  But if for a I take oxygen, for b hydrogen, and for c a
piece of spongy platinum, I find the first two combine with the
common signs of combustion and form water, the third in the mean time
undergoing no perceptible change.  It has played the part of the
unwedded priest, who marries a pair without taking a fee or having
any further relation with the parties.  We call this catalysis,
catalytic action, the action of presence, or by what learned name we
choose.  Give what name to it we will, it is a manifestation of power
which crosses our established laws of combination at a very open
angle of intersection.  I think we may find an analogy for it in
electrical induction, the disturbance of the equilibrium of the
electricity of a body by the approach of a charged body to it,
without interchange of electrical conditions between the two bodies.
But an analogy is not an explanation, and why a few drops of yeast
should change a saccharine mixture to carbonic acid and alcohol,--a
little leaven leavening the whole lump,--not by combining with it,
but by setting a movement at work, we not only cannot explain, but
the fact is such an exception to the recognized laws of combination
that Liebig is unwilling to admit the new force at all to which
Berzelius had given the name so generally accepted.

The phenomena of isomerism, or identity of composition and
proportions of constituents with difference of qualities, and of
isomorphism, or identity of form in crystals which have one element
substituted for another, were equally surprises to science; and
although the mechanism by which they are brought about can be to a
certain extent explained by a reference to the hypothetical atoms of
which the elements are constituted, yet this is only turning the
difficulty into a fraction with an infinitesimal denominator and an
infinite numerator.

So far we have studied the working of force and its seeming anomalies
in purely chemical phenomena.  But we soon find that chemical force
is developed by various other physical agencies,--by heat, by light,
by electricity, by magnetism, by mechanical agencies; and, vice
versa, that chemical action develops heat, light, electricity,
magnetism, mechanical force, as we see in our matches, galvanic
batteries, and explosive compounds.  Proceeding with our experiments,
we find that every kind of force is capable of producing all other
kinds, or, in Mr. Faraday's language, that "the various forms under
which the forces of matter are made manifest have a common origin,
or, in other words, are so directly related and mutually dependent
that they are convertible one into another."

Out of this doctrine naturally springs that of the conservation of
force, so ably illustrated by Mr. Grove, Dr. Carpenter, and Mr.
Faraday.  This idea is no novelty, though it seems so at first sight.
It was maintained and disputed among the giants of philosophy.
Des Cartes and Leibnitz denied that any new motion originated in
nature, or that any ever ceased to exist; all motion being in a
circle, passing from one body to another, one losing what the other
gained.  Newton, on the other hand, believed that new motions were
generated and existing ones destroyed.  On the first supposition,
there is a fixed amount of force always circulating in the universe.
On the second, the total amount may be increasing or diminishing.
You will find in the "Annual of Scientific Discovery" for 1858 a very
interesting lecture by Professor Helmholtz of Bonn, in which it is
maintained that a certain portion of force is lost in every natural
process, being converted into unchangeable heat, so that the universe
will come to a stand-still at last, all force passing into heat, and
all heat into a state of equilibrium.

The doctrines of the convertibility or specific equivalence of the
various forms of force, and of its conservation, which is its logical
consequence, are very generally accepted, as I believe, at the
present time, among physicists.  We are naturally led to the
question, What is the nature of force?  The three illustrious
philosophers just referred to agree in attributing the general
movements of the universe to the immediate Divine action.  The
doctrine of "preestablished harmony" was an especial contrivance of
Leibnitz to remove the Creator from unworthy association with the
less divine acts of living beings.  Obsolete as this expression
sounds to our ears, the phrase laws of the universe, which we use so
constantly with a wider application, appears to me essentially
identical with it.

Force does not admit of explanation, nor of proper definition, any
more than the hypothetical substratum of matter.  If we assume the
Infinite as omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, we cannot suppose
Him excluded from any part of His creation, except from rebellious
souls which voluntarily exclude Him by the exercise of their fatal
prerogative of free-will.  Force, then, is the act of immanent
Divinity.  I find no meaning in mechanical explanations.  Newton's
hypothesis of an ether filling the heavenly spaces does not, I
confess, help my conceptions.  I will, and the muscles of my vocal
organs shape my speech.  God wills, and the universe articulates His
power, wisdom, and goodness.  That is all I know.  There is no bridge
my mind can throw from the "immaterial" cause to the "material"
effect.

The problem of force meets us everywhere, and I prefer to encounter
it in the world of physical phenomena before reaching that of living
actions.  It is only the name for the incomprehensible cause of
certain changes known to our consciousness, and assumed to be outside
of it.  For me it is the Deity Himself in action.

I can therefore see a large significance in the somewhat bold
language of Burdach: "There is for me but one miracle, that of
infinite existence, and but one mystery, the manner in which the
finite proceeds from the infinite.  So soon as we recognize this
incomprehensible act as the general and primordial miracle, of which
our reason perceives the necessity, but the manner of which our
intelligence cannot grasp, so soon as we contemplate the nature known
to us by experience in this light, there is for us no other
impenetrable miracle or mystery."

Let us turn to a branch of knowledge which deals with certainties up
to the limit of the senses, and is involved in no speculations beyond
them.  In certain points of view, HUMAN ANATOMY may be considered an
almost exhausted science.  From time to time some small organ which
had escaped earlier observers has been pointed out,--such parts as
the tensor tarsi, the otic ganglion, or the Pacinian bodies; but some
of our best anatomical works are those which have been classic for
many generations. The plates of the bones in Vesalius, three
centuries old, are still masterpieces of accuracy, as of art.  The
magnificent work of Albinus on the muscles, published in 1747, is
still supreme in its department, as the constant references of the
most thorough recent treatise on the subject, that of Theile,
sufficiently show.  More has been done in unravelling the mysteries
of the fasciae, but there has been a tendency to overdo this kind of
material analysis.  Alexander Thomson split them up into cobwebs, as
you may see in the plates to Velpeau's Surgical Anatomy.  I well
remember how he used to shake his head over the coarse work of Scarpa
and Astley Cooper,--as if Denner, who painted the separate hairs of
the beard and pores of the skin in his portraits, had spoken lightly
of the pictures of Rubens and Vandyk.

Not only has little been added to the catalogue of parts, but some
things long known had become half-forgotten. Louis and others
confounded the solitary glands of the lower part of the small
intestine with those which "the great Brunner," as Haller calls him,
described in 1687 as being found in the duodenum.  The display of the
fibrous structure of the brain seemed a novelty as shown by
Spurzheim.  One is startled to find the method anticipated by Raymond
Vieussens nearly two centuries ago.  I can hardly think Gordon had
ever looked at his figures, though he names their author, when he
wrote the captious and sneering article which attracted so much
attention in the pages of the "Edinburgh Review."

This is the place, if anywhere, to mention any observations I could
pretend to have made in the course of my teaching the structure of
the human body.  I can make no better show than most of my
predecessors in this well-reaped field.  The nucleated cells found
connected with the cancellated structure of the bones, which I first
pointed out and had figured in 1847, and have shown yearly from that
time to the present, and the fossa masseterica, a shallow concavity
on the ramus of the lower jaw, for the lodgment of the masseter
muscle, which acquires significance when examined by the side of the
deep cavity on the corresponding part in some carnivora to which it
answers, may perhaps be claimed as deserving attention.  I have also
pleased myself by making a special group of the six radiating muscles
which diverge from the spine of the axis, or second cervical
vertebra, and by giving to it the name stella musculosa nuchaee.  But
this scanty catalogue is only an evidence that one may teach long and
see little that has not been noted by those who have gone before him.
Of course I do not think it necessary to include rare, but already
described anomalies, such as the episternal bones, the rectus
sternalis, and other interesting exceptional formations I have
encountered, which have shown a curious tendency to present
themselves several times in the same season, perhaps because the
first specimen found calls our attention to any we may subsequently
meet with.

The anatomy of the scalpel and the amphitheatre was, then, becoming
an exhausted branch of investigation.  But during the present century
the study of the human body has changed its old aspect, and become
fertile in new observations.  This rejuvenescence was effected by
means of two principal agencies,--new methods and a new instrument.

Descriptive anatomy, as known from an early date, is to the body what
geography is to the planet.  Now geography was pretty well known so
long ago as when Arrowsmith, who was born in 1750, published his
admirable maps.  But in that same year was born Werner, who taught a
new way of studying the earth, since become familiar to us all under
the name of Geology.

What geology has done for our knowledge of the earth, has been done
for our knowledge of the body by that method of study to which is
given the name of General Anatomy.  It studies, not the organs as
such, but the elements out of which the organs are constructed.  It
is the geology of the body, as that is the general anatomy of the
earth.  The extraordinary genius of Bichat, to whom more than any
other we owe this new method of study, does not require Mr. Buckle's
testimony to impress the practitioner with the importance of its
achievements.  I have heard a very wise physician question whether
any important result had accrued to practical medicine from Harvey's
discovery of the circulation.  But Anatomy, Physiology, and Pathology
have received a new light from this novel method of contemplating the
living structures, which has had a vast influence in enabling the
practitioner at least to distinguish and predict the course of
disease.  We know as well what differences to expect in the habits of
a mucous and of a serous membrane, as what mineral substances to look
for in the chalk or the coal measures.  You have only to read
Cullen's description of inflammation of the lungs or of the bowels,
and compare it with such as you may find in Laennec or Watson, to see
the immense gain which diagnosis and prognosis have derived from
general anatomy.

The second new method of studying the human structure, beginning with
the labors of Scarpa, Burns, and Colles, grew up principally during
the first third of this century.  It does not deal with organs, as
did the earlier anatomists, nor with tissues, after the manner of
Bichat.  It maps the whole surface of the body into an arbitrary
number of regions, and studies each region successively from the
surface to the bone, or beneath it.  This hardly deserves the name of
a science, although Velpeau has dignified it with that title, but it
furnishes an admirable practical way for the surgeon who has to
operate on a particular region of the body to study that region.  If
we are buying a farm, we are not content with the State map or a
geological chart including the estate in question.  We demand an
exact survey of that particular property, so that we may know what we
are dealing with.  This is just what regional, or, as it is sometimes
called, surgical anatomy, does for the surgeon with reference to the
part on which his skill is to be exercised.  It enables him to see
with the mind's eye through the opaque tissues down to the bone on
which they lie, as if the skin were transparent as the cornea, and
the organs it covers translucent as the gelatinous pulp of a medusa.

It is curious that the Japanese should have anticipated Europe in a
kind of rude regional anatomy.  I have seen a manikin of Japanese
make traced all over with lines, and points marking their
intersection.  By this their doctors are guided in the performance of
acupuncture, marking the safe places to thrust in needles, as we buoy
out our ship-channels, and doubtless indicating to learned eyes the
spots where incautious meddling had led to those little accidents of
shipwreck to which patients are unfortunately liable.

A change of method, then, has given us General and Regional Anatomy.
These, too, have been worked so thoroughly, that, if not exhausted,
they have at least become to a great extent fixed and positive
branches of knowledge.  But the first of them, General Anatomy, would
never, have reached this positive condition but for the introduction
of that, instrument which I have mentioned as the second great aid to
modern progress.

This instrument is the achromatic microscope.  For the history of the
successive steps by which it became the effective scientific
implement we now possess, I must refer you to the work of Mr.
Quekett, to an excellent article in the "Penny Cyclopaedia," or to
that of Sir David Brewster in the "Encyclopaedia Britannica."  It is
a most interesting piece of scientific history, which shows how the
problem which Biot in 1821 pronounced insolvable was in the course of
a few years practically solved, with a success equal to that which
Dollond had long before obtained with the telescope.  It is enough
for our purpose that we are now in possession of an instrument freed
from all confusions and illusions, which magnifies a thousand
diameters,--a million times in surface,--without serious distortion
or discoloration of its object.

A quarter of a century ago, or a little more, an instructor would not
have hesitated to put John Bell's "Anatomy" and Bostock's
"Physiology" into a student's hands, as good authority on their
respective subjects.  Let us not be unjust to either of these
authors.  John Bell is the liveliest medical writer that I can
remember who has written since the days of delightful old Ambroise
Pare.  His picturesque descriptions and bold figures are as good now
as they ever were, and his book can never become obsolete.  But
listen to what John Bell says of the microscope:

"Philosophers of the last age had been at infinite pains to find the
ultimate fibre of muscles, thinking to discover its properties in its
form; but they saw just in proportion to the glasses which they used,
or to their practice and skill in that art, which is now almost
forsaken."

Dr. Bostock's work, neglected as it is, is one which I value very
highly as a really learned compilation, full of original references.
But Dr. Bostock says: "Much as the naturalist has been indebted to
the microscope, by bringing into view many beings of which he could
not otherwise have ascertained the existence, the physiologist has
not yet derived any great benefit from the instrument."

These are only specimens of the manner in which the microscope and
its results were generally regarded by the generation just preceding
our own.

I have referred you to the proper authorities for the account of
those improvements which about the year 1830 rendered the compound
microscope an efficient and trustworthy instrument.  It was now for
the first time that a true general anatomy became possible.  As early
as 1816 Treviranus had attempted to resolve the tissues, of which
Bichat had admitted no less than twenty-one, into their simple
microscopic elements.  How could such an attempt succeed, Henle well
asks, at a time when the most extensively diffused of all the
tissues, the areolar, was not at all understood?  All that method
could do had been accomplished by Bichat and his followers.  It was
for the optician to take the next step.  The future of anatomy and
physiology, as an enthusiastic micrologist of the time said, was in
the hands of Messrs.  Schieck and Pistor, famous opticians of Berlin.

In those earlier days of which I am speaking, all the points of
minute anatomy were involved in obscurity.  Some found globules
everywhere, some fibres.  Students disputed whether the conjunctiva
extended over the cornea or not, and worried themselves over Gaultier
de Claubry's stratified layers of the skin, or Breschet's
blennogenous and chromatogenous organs.  The dartos was a puzzle, the
central spinal canal a myth, the decidua clothed in fable as much as
the golden fleece.  The structure of bone, now so beautifully made
out,--even that of the teeth, in which old Leeuwenhoek, peeping with
his octogenarian eyes through the minute lenses wrought with his own
hands, had long ago seen the "pipes," as he called them,--was hardly
known at all.  The minute structure of the viscera lay in the mists
of an uncertain microscopic vision.  The intimate recesses of the
animal system were to the students of anatomy what the anterior of
Africa long was to geographers, and the stories of microscopic
explorers were as much sneered at as those of Bruce or Du Chailly,
and with better reason.

Now what have we come to in our own day?  In the first place, the
minute structure of all the organs has been made out in the most
satisfactory way.  The special arrangements of the vessels and the
ducts of all the glands, of the air-tubes and vesicles of the lungs,
of the parts which make up the skin and other membranes, all the
details of those complex parenchymatous organs which had confounded
investigation so long, have been lifted out of the invisible into the
sight of all observers.  It is fair to mention here, that we owe a
great deal to the art of minute injection, by which we are enabled to
trace the smallest vessels in the midst of the tissues where they are
distributed.  This is an old artifice of anatomists.  The famous
Ruysch, who died a hundred and thirty years ago, showed that each of
the viscera has its terminal vessels arranged in its own peculiar
way; the same fact which you may see illustrated in Gerber's figures
after the minute injections of Berres.  I hope to show you many
specimens of this kind in the microscope, the work of English and
American hands.  Professor Agassiz allows me also to make use of a
very rich collection of injected preparations sent him by Professor
Hyrtl, formerly of Prague, now of Vienna, for the proper exhibition
of which I had a number of microscopes made expressly, by Mr. Grunow,
during the past season.  All this illustrates what has been done for
the elucidation of the intimate details of formation of the organs.

But the great triumph of the microscope as applied to anatomy has
been in the resolution of the organs and the tissues into their
simple constituent anatomical elements.  It has taken up general
anatomy where Bichat left it.  He had succeeded in reducing the
structural language of nature to syllables, if you will permit me to
use so bold an image.  The microscopic observers who have come after
him have analyzed these into letters, as we may call them,--the
simple elements by the combination of which Nature spells out
successively tissues, which are her syllables, organs which are her
words, systems which are her chapters, and so goes on from the simple
to the complex, until she binds up in one living whole that wondrous
volume of power and wisdom which we call the human body.

The alphabet of the organization is so short and simple, that I will
risk fatiguing your attention by repeating it, according to the plan
I have long adopted.

A.  Cells, either floating, as in the blood, or fixed, like those in
the cancellated structure of bone, already referred to.  Very
commonly they have undergone a change of figure, most frequently a
flattening which reduces them to scales, as in the epidermis and the
epithelium.

B.  Simple, translucent, homogeneous solid, such as is found at the
back of the cornea, or forming the intercellular substance of
cartilage.

C.  The white fibrous element, consisting of very delicate, tenacious
threads.  This is the long staple textile substance of the body.  It
is to the organism what cotton is pretended to be to our Southern
States.  It pervades the whole animal fabric as areolar tissue, which
is the universal packing and wrapping material.  It forms the
ligaments which bind the whole frame-work together.  It furnishes the
sinews, which are the channels of power.  It enfolds every muscle.
It wraps the brain in its hard, insensible folds, and the heart
itself beats in a purse that is made of it.

D.  The yellow elastic, fibrous element, the caoutchouc of the animal
mechanism, which pulls things back into place, as the India-rubber
band shuts the door we have opened.

E.  The striped muscular fibre,--the red flesh, which shortens itself
in obedience to the will, and thus produces all voluntary active
motion.

F.  The unstriped muscular fibre, more properly the fusiform-cell
fibre, which carries on the involuntary internal movements.

G.  The nerve-cylinder, a glassy tube, with a pith of some firmness,
which conveys sensation to the brain and the principle which induces
motion from it.

H.  The nerve-corpuscle, the centre of nervous power.

I.  The mucous tissue, as Virchow calls it, common in embryonic
structures, seen in the vitreous humor of the adult.

To these add X, granules, of indeterminate shape and size, Y, for
inorganic matters, such as the salts of bone and teeth, and Z, to
stand as a symbol of the fluids, and you have the letters of what I
have ventured to call the alphabet of the body.

But just as in language certain diphthongs and syllables are
frequently recurring, so we have in the body certain secondary and
tertiary combinations, which we meet more frequently than the
solitary elements of which they are composed.

Thus A B, or a collection of cells united by simple structureless
solid, is seen to be extensively employed in the body under the name
of cartilage.  Out of this the surfaces of the articulations and the
springs of the breathing apparatus are formed.  But when Nature came
to the buffers of the spinal column (intervertebral disks) and the
washers of the joints (semilunar fibrocartilages of the knee, etc.),
she required more tenacity than common cartilage possessed.  What did
she do?  What does man do in a similar case of need?  I need hardly
tell you.  The mason lays his bricks in simple mortar.  But the
plasterer works some hair into the mortar which he is going to lay in
large sheets on the walls.  The children of Israel complained that
they had no straw to make their bricks with, though portions of it
may still be seen in the crumbling pyramid of Darshour, which they
are said to have built.  I visited the old house on Witch Hill in
Salem a year or two ago, and there I found the walls coated with clay
in which straw was abundantly mingled;--the old Judaizing witch-
hangers copied the Israelites in a good many things.  The Chinese and
the Corsicans blend the fibres of amianthus in their pottery to give
it tenacity.  Now to return to Nature.  To make her buffers and
washers hold together in the shocks to which they would be subjected,
she took common cartilage and mingled the white fibrous tissue with
it, to serve the same purpose as the hair in the mortar, the straw in
the bricks and in the plaster of the old wall, and the amianthus in
the earthen vessels.  Thus we have the combination A B C, or fibro-
cartilage.  Again, the bones were once only gristle or cartilage, A
B.  To give them solidity they were infiltrated with stone, in the
form of salts of lime, an inorganic element, so that bone would be
spelt out by the letters A, B, and Y.

If from these organic syllables we proceed to form organic words, we
shall find that Nature employs three principal forms; namely,
Vessels, Membranes, and Parenchyma, or visceral tissue.  The most
complex of them can be resolved into a combination of these few
simple anatomical constituents.


Passing for a moment into the domain of PATHOLOGICAL ANATOMY, we find
the same elements in morbid growths that we have met with in normal
structures.  The pus-corpuscle and the white blood-corpuscle can only
be distinguished by tracing them to their origin.  A frequent form of
so-called malignant disease proves to be only a collection of altered
epithelium-cells.  Even cancer itself has no specific anatomical
element, and the diagnosis of a cancerous tumor by the microscope,
though tolerably sure under the eye of an expert, is based upon
accidental, and not essential points,--the crowding together of the
elements, the size of the cell-nuclei, and similar variable
characters.

Let us turn to PHYSIOLOGY.  The microscope, which has made a new
science of the intimate structure of the organs, has at the same time
cleared up many uncertainties concerning the mechanism of the special
functions.  Up to the time of the living generation of observers,
Nature had kept over all her inner workshops the forbidding
inscription, No Admittance!  If any prying observer ventured to spy
through his magnifying tubes into the mysteries of her glands and
canals and fluids, she covered up her work in blinding mists and
bewildering halos, as the deities of old concealed their favored
heroes in the moment of danger.

Science has at length sifted the turbid light of her lenses, and
blanched their delusive rainbows.

Anatomy studies the organism in space.  Physiology studies it also in
time.  After the study of form and composition follows close that of
action, and this leads us along back to the first moment of the germ,
and forward to the resolution of the living frame into its lifeless
elements.  In this way Anatomy, or rather that branch of it which we
call Histology, has become inseparably blended with the study of
function.  The connection between the science of life and that of
intimate structure on the one hand, and composition on the other, is
illustrated in the titles of two recent works of remarkable
excellence,--"the Physiological Anatomy" of Todd and Bowman, and the
"Physiological Chemistry" of Lehmann.

Let me briefly recapitulate a few of our acquisitions in Physiology,
due in large measure to our new instruments and methods of research,
and at the same time indicate the limits which form the permanent or
the temporary boundaries of our knowledge.  I will begin with the
largest fact and with the most absolute and universally encountered
limitation.

The "largest truth in Physiology" Mr. Paget considers to be "the
development of ova through multiplication and division of their
cells."  I would state it more broadly as the agency of the cell in
all living processes.  It seems at present necessary to abandon the
original idea of Schwann, that we can observe the building up of a
cell from the simple granules of a blastema, or formative fluid.  The
evidence points rather towards the axiom, Omnis cellula a cellula;
that is, the germ of a new cell is always derived from a preexisting
cell.  The doctrine of Schwann, as I remarked long ago (1844), runs
parallel with the nebular theory in astronomy, and they may yet stand
or fall together.

As we have seen Nature anticipating the plasterer in fibro-cartilage,
so we see her beforehand with the glassblower in her dealings with
the cell.  The artisan blows his vitreous bubbles, large or small, to
be used afterwards as may be wanted.  So Nature shapes her hyaline
vesicles and modifies them to serve the needs of the part where they
are found.  The artisan whirls his rod, and his glass bubble becomes
a flattened disk, with its bull's-eye for a nucleus.  These lips of
ours are all glazed with microscopic tiles formed of flattened cells,
each one of them with its nucleus still as plain and relatively as
prominent, to the eye of the microscopist, as the bull's-eye in the
old-fashioned windowpane.  Everywhere we find cells, modified or
unchanged.  They roll in inconceivable multitudes (five millions and
more to the cubic millimetre, according to Vierordt) as blood-disks
through our vessels.  A close-fitting mail of flattened cells coats
our surface with a panoply of imbricated scales (more than twelve
thousand millions), as Harting has computed, as true a defence against
our enemies as the buckler of the armadillo or the carapace of the
tortoise against theirs.  The same little protecting organs pave all
the great highways of the interior system.  Cells, again, preside
over the chemical processes which elaborate the living fluids; they
change their form to become the agents of voluntary and involuntary
motion; the soul itself sits on a throne of nucleated cells, and
flashes its mandates through skeins of glassy filaments which once
were simple chains of vesicles.  And, as if to reduce the problem of
living force to its simplest expression, we see the yolk of a
transparent egg dividing itself in whole or in part, and again
dividing and subdividing, until it becomes a mass of cells, out of
which the harmonious diversity of the organs arranges itself, worm or
man, as God has willed from the beginning.

This differentiation having been effected, each several part assumes
its special office, having a life of its own adjusted to that of
other parts and the whole.  "Just as a tree constitutes a mass
arranged in a definite manner, in which, in every single part, in the
leaves as in the root, in the trunk as in the blossom, cells are
discovered to be the ultimate elements, so is it also with the forms
of animal life.  Every animal presents itself as a sum of vital
unities, every one of which manifests all the characteristics of
life."

The mechanism is as clear, as unquestionable, as absolutely settled
and universally accepted, as the order of movement of the heavenly
bodies, which we compute backward to the days of the observatories on
the plains of Shinar, and on the faith of which we regulate the
movements of war and trade by the predictions of our ephemeris.

The mechanism, and that is all.  We see the workman and the tools,
but the skill that guides the work and the power that performs it are
as invisible as ever.  I fear that not every listener took the
significance of those pregnant words in the passage I quoted from
John Bell,--"thinking to discover its properties in its form."  We
have discovered the working bee in this great hive of organization.
We have detected the cell in the very act of forming itself from a
nucleus, of transforming itself into various tissues, of selecting
the elements of various secretions.  But why one cell becomes nerve
and another muscle, why one selects bile and another fat, we can no
more pretend to tell, than why one grape sucks out of the soil the
generous juice which princes hoard in their cellars, and another the
wine which it takes three men to drink,--one to pour it down, another
to swallow it, and a third to hold him while it is going down.
Certain analogies between this selecting power and the phenomena of
endosmosis in the elective affinities of chemistry we can find, but
the problem of force remains here, as everywhere, unsolved and
insolvable.

Do we gain anything by attempting to get rid of the idea of a special
vital force because we find certain mutually convertible relations
between forces in the body and out of it?  I think not, any more than
we should gain by getting rid of the idea and expression Magnetism
because of its correlation with electricity.  We may concede the
unity of all forms of force, but we cannot overlook the fixed
differences of its manifestations according to the conditions under
which it acts.  It is a mistake, however, to think the mystery is
greater in an organized body than in any other.  We see a stone fall
or a crystal form, and there is nothing stranger left to wonder at,
for we have seen the Infinite in action.

Just so far as we can recognize the ordinary modes of operation of
the common forces of nature,--gravity, cohesion, elasticity,
transudation, chemical action, and the rest,--we see the so-called
vital acts in the light of a larger range of known facts and familiar
analogies.  Matteuecci's well-remembered lectures contain many and
striking examples of the working of physical forces in physiological
processes.  Wherever rigid experiment carries us, we are safe in
following this lead; but the moment we begin to theorize beyond our
strict observation, we are in danger of falling into those mechanical
follies which true science has long outgrown.

Recognizing the fact, then, that we have learned nothing but the
machinery of life, and are no nearer to its essence, what is it that
we have gained by this great discovery of the cell formation and
function?

It would have been reward enough to learn the method Nature pursues
for its own sake.  If the sovereign Artificer lets us into his own
laboratories and workshops, we need not ask more than the privilege
of looking on at his work.  We do not know where we now stand in the
hierarchy of created intelligences.  We were made a little lower than
the angels.  I speak it not irreverently; as the lower animals
surpass man in some of their attributes, so it may be that not every
angel's eye can see as broadly and as deeply into the material works
of God as man himself, looking at the firmament through an equatorial
of fifteen inches' aperture, and searching into the tissues with a
twelfth of an inch objective.

But there are other positive gains of a more practical character.
Thus we are no longer permitted to place the seat of the living
actions in the extreme vessels, which are only the carriers from
which each part takes what it wants by the divine right of the
omnipotent nucleated cell.  The organism has become, in the words
already borrowed from Virchow, "a sum of vital unities."  The
strictum and laxum, the increased and diminished action of the
vessels, out of which medical theories and methods of treatment have
grown up, have yielded to the doctrine of local cell-communities,
belonging to this or that vascular district, from which they help
themselves, as contractors are wont to do from the national treasury.

I cannot promise to do more than to select a few of the points of
contact between our ignorance and our knowledge which present
particular interest in the existing state of our physiological
acquisitions.  Some of them involve the microscopic discoveries of
which I have been speaking, some belong to the domain of chemistry,
and some have relations with other departments of physical science.

If we should begin with the digestive function, we should find that
the long-agitated question of the nature of the acid of the gastric
juice is becoming settled in favor of the lactic.  But the whole
solvent agency of the digestive fluid enters into the category of
that exceptional mode of action already familiar to us in chemistry
as catalysis.  It is therefore doubly difficult of explanation;
first, as being, like all reactions, a fact not to be accounted for
except by the imaginative appeal to "affinity," and secondly, as
being one of those peculiar reactions provoked by an element which
stands outside and looks on without compromising itself.

The doctrine of Mulder, so widely diffused in popular and scientific
belief, of the existence of a common base of all albuminous
substances, the so-called protein, has not stood the test of rigorous
analysis.  The division of food into azotized and non-azotized is no
doubt important, but the attempt to show that the first only is
plastic or nutritive, while the second is simply calorifacient, or
heat-producing, fails entirely in the face of the facts revealed by
the study of man in different climates, and of numerous experiments
in the feeding of animals.  I must return to this subject in
connection with the respiratory function.

The sugar-making faculty of the liver is another "catalytic" mystery,
as great as the rest of them, and no greater.  Liver-tissue brings
sugar out of the blood, or out of its own substance;--why?

          Quia est in eo
          Virtus saccharitiva.

Just what becomes of the sugar beyond the fact of its disappearance
before it can get into the general circulation and sweeten our
tempers, it is hard to say.

The pancreatic fluid makes an emulsion of the fat contained in our
food, but just how the fatty particles get into the villi we must
leave Brucke and Kolliker to settle if they can.

No one has shown satisfactorily the process by which the blood-
corpuscles are formed out of the lymph-corpuscles, nor what becomes
of them.  These two questions are like those famous household
puzzles,--Where do the flies come from?  and, Where do the pins go
to?

There is a series of organs in the body which has long puzzled
physiologists,--organs of glandular aspect, but having no ducts,--the
spleen, the thyroid and thymus bodies, and the suprarenal capsules.
We call them vascular glands, and we believe that they elaborate
colored and uncolored blood-cells; but just what changes they effect,
and just how they effect them, it has proved a very difficult matter
to determine.  So of the noted glandules which form Peyer's patches,
their precise office, though seemingly like those of the lymphatic
glands, cannot be positively assigned, so far as I know, at the
present time.  It is of obvious interest to learn it with reference
to the pathology of typhoid fever.  It will be remarked that the
coincidence of their changes in this disease with enlargement of the
spleen suggests the idea of a similarity of function in these two
organs.

The theories of the production of animal heat, from the times of
Black, Lavoisier, and Crawford to those of Liebig, are familiar to
all who have paid any attention to physiological studies.  The
simplicity of Liebig's views, and the popular form in which they have
been presented, have given them wide currency, and incorporated them
in the common belief and language of our text-books.  Direct
oxidation or combustion of the carbon and hydrogen contained in the
food, or in the tissues themselves; the division of alimentary
substances into respiratory, or non-azotized, and azotized,--these
doctrines are familiar even to the classes in our high-schools.  But
this simple statement is boldly questioned.  Nothing proves that
oxygen combines (in the system) with hydrogen and carbon in
particular, rather than with sulphur and azote.  Such is the well-
grounded statement of Robin and Verdeil.  "It is very probable that
animal heat is entirely produced by the chemical actions which take
place in the organism, but the phenomenon is too complex to admit of
our calculating it according to the quality of oxygen consumed."
These last are the words of Regnault, as cited by Mr. Lewes, whose
intelligent discussion of this and many of the most interesting
physiological problems I strongly recommend to your attention.

This single illustration covers a wider ground than the special
function to which it belongs.  We are learning that the chemistry of
the body must be studied, not simply by its ingesta and egesta, but
that there is a long intermediate series of changes which must be
investigated in their own light, under their own special conditions.
The expression "sum of vital unities" applies to the chemical
actions, as well as to other actions localized in special parts; and
when the distinguished chemists whom I have just cited entitle their
work a treatise on the immediate principles of the body, they only
indicate the nature of that profound and subtile analysis which must
take the place of all hasty generalizations founded on a comparison
of the food with residual products.

I will only call your attention to the fact, that the exceptional
phenomenon of the laboratory is the prevailing law of the organism.
Nutrition itself is but one great catalytic process.  As the blood
travels its rounds, each part selects its appropriate element and
transforms it to its own likeness.  Whether the appropriating agent
be cell or nucleus, or a structureless solid like the intercellular
substance of cartilage, the fact of its presence determines the
separation of its proper constituents from the circulating fluid, so
that even when we are wounded bone is replaced by bone, skin by skin,
and nerve by nerve.

It is hardly without a smile that we resuscitate the old question of
the 'vis insita' of the muscular fibre, so famous in the discussions of
Haller and his contemporaries.  Speaking generally, I think we may
say that Haller's doctrine is the one now commonly received; namely,
that the muscles contract in virtue of their own inherent endowments.
It is true that Kolliker says no perfectly decisive fact has been
brought forward to prove that the striated muscles contract with.
out having been acted on by nerves.  Yet Mr. Bowman's observations on
the contraction of isolated fibres appear decisive enough (unless we
consider them invalidated by Dr. Lionel Beale's recent researches),
tending to show that each elementary fibre is supplied with nerves;
and as to the smooth muscular fibres, we have Virchow's statement
respecting the contractility of those of the umbilical cord, where
there is not a trace of any nerves.

In the investigation of the nervous system, anatomy and physiology
have gone hand in hand.  It is very singular that so important, and
seemingly simple, a fact as the connection of the nerve-tubes, at
their origin or in their course, with the nerve-cells, should have so
long remained open to doubt, as you may see that it did by referring
to the very complete work of Sharpey and Quain (edition of 1849), the
histological portion of which is cordially approved by Kolliker
himself.

Several most interesting points of the minute anatomy of the nervous
centres have been laboriously and skilfully worked out by a recent
graduate of this Medical School, in a monograph worthy to stand in
line with those of Lockhart Clarke, Stilling, and Schroder van der
Kolk. I have had the privilege of examining and of showing some of
you a number of Dr. Dean's skilful preparations.  I have no space to
give even an abstract of his conclusions.  I can only refer to his
proof of the fact, that a single cell may send its processes into
several different bundles of nerve-roots, and to his demonstration of
the curved ascending and descending fibres from the posterior
nerveroots, to reach what he has called the longitudinal columns of
the cornea.  I must also mention Dr. Dean's exquisite microscopic
photographs from sections of the medulla oblongata, which appear to
me to promise a new development, if not a new epoch, in anatomical
art.

It having been settled that the nerve-tubes can very commonly be
traced directly to the nerve-cells, the object of all the observers
in this department of anatomy is to follow these tubes to their
origin.  We have an infinite snarl of telegraph wires, and we may be
reasonably sure, that, if we can follow them up, we shall find each
of them ends in a battery somewhere.  One of the most interesting
problems is to find the ganglionic origin of the great nerves of the
medulla oblongata, and this is the end to which, by the aid of the
most delicate sections, colored so as to bring out their details,
mounted so as to be imperishable, magnified by the best instruments,
and now self-recorded in the light of the truth-telling sunbeam, our
fellow-student is making a steady progress in a labor which I think
bids fair to rank with the most valuable contributions to histology
that we have had from this side of the Atlantic.

It is interesting to see how old questions are incidentally settled
in the course of these new investigations.  Thus, Mr. Clarke's
dissections, confirmed by preparations of Mr. Dean's which I have
myself examined, placed the fact of the decussation of the pyramids--
denied by Haller, by Morgagni, and even by Stilling--beyond doubt.
So the spinal canal, the existence of which, at least in the adult,
has been so often disputed, appears as a coarse and unequivocal
anatomical fact in many of the preparations referred to.

While these studies of the structure of the cord have been going on,
the ingenious and indefatigable Brown-Sequard has been investigating
the functions of its different parts with equal diligence.  The
microscopic anatomists had shown that the ganglionic corpuscles of
the gray matter of the cord are connected with each other by their
processes, as well as with the nerve-roots.  M.  Brown-Sequard has
proved by numerous experiments that the gray substance transmits
sensitive impressions and muscular stimulation.  The oblique
ascending and descending fibres from the posterior nerve-roots,
joining the "longitudinal columns of the cornua," account for the
results of Brown-Sequard's sections of the posterior columns.  The
physiological experimenter has also made it evident that the
decussation of the conductors of sensitive impressions has its seat
in the spinal core, and not in the encephalon, as had been supposed.
Not less remarkable than these results are the facts, which I with
others of my audience have had the opportunity of observing, as shown
by M. Brown-Sequard, of the artificial production of epilepsy in
animals by injuring the spinal cord, and the induction of the
paroxysm by pinching a certain portion of the skin.  I would also
call the student's attention to his account of the relations of the
nervous centres to nutrition and secretion, the last of which
relations has been made the subject of an extended essay by our
fellow countryman, Dr. H. F. Campbell of Georgia.

The physiology of the spinal cord seems a simple matter as you study
it in Longet.  The experiments of Brown-Sequard have shown the
problem to be a complex one, and raised almost as many doubts as they
have solved questions; at any rate, I believe all lecturers on
physiology agree that there is no part of their task they dread so
much as the analysis of the evidence relating to the special offices
of the different portions of the medulla spinalis.  In the brain we
are sure that we do not know how to localize functions; in the spinal
cord, we think we do know something; but there are so many anomalies,
and seeming contradictions, and sources of fallacy, that beyond the
facts of crossed paralysis of sensation, and the conducting agency of
the gray substance, I am afraid we retain no cardinal principles
discovered since the development of the reflex function took its
place by Sir Charles Bell's great discovery.

By the manner in which I spoke of the brain, you will see that I am
obliged to leave phrenology sub Jove,--out in the cold,--as not one
of the household of science.  I am not one of its haters; on the
contrary, I am grateful for the incidental good it has done.  I love
to amuse myself in its plaster Golgothas, and listen to the glib
professor, as he discovers by his manipulations

     "All that disgraced my betters met in me."

I loved of old to see square-headed, heavy-jawed Spurzheim make a
brain flower out into a corolla of marrowy filaments, as Vieussens
had done before him, and to hear the dry-fibred but human-hearted
George Combe teach good sense under the disguise of his equivocal
system.  But the pseudo-sciences, phrenology and the rest, seem to me
only appeals to weak minds and the weak points of strong ones.  There
is a pica or false appetite in many intelligences; they take to odd
fancies in place of wholesome truth, as girls gnaw at chalk and
charcoal.  Phrenology juggles with nature.  It is so adjusted as to
soak up all evidence that helps it, and shed all that harms it.  It
crawls forward in all weathers, like Richard Edgeworth's hygrometer.
It does not stand at the boundary of our ignorance, it seems to me,
but is one of the will-o'-the-wisps of its undisputed central domain
of bog and quicksand.  Yet I should not have devoted so many words to
it, did I not recognize the light it has thrown on human actions by
its study of congenital organic tendencies.  Its maps of the.
surface of the head are, I feel sure, founded on a delusion, but its
studies of individual character are always interesting and
instructive.

The "snapping-turtle" strikes after its natural fashion when it first
comes out of the egg.  Children betray their tendencies in their way
of dealing with the breasts that nourish them; nay, lean venture to
affirm, that long before they are born they teach their mothers
something of their turbulent or quiet tempers.

     "Castor gaudet equis, ovo proanatus eodem
          Pugnis."

Strike out the false pretensions of phrenology; call it anthropology;
let it study man the individual in distinction from man the
abstraction, the metaphysical or theological lay-figure; and it
becomes "the proper study of mankind," one of the noblest and most
interesting of pursuits.

The whole physiology of the nervous system, from the simplest
manifestation of its power in an insect up to the supreme act of the
human intelligence working through the brain, is full of the most
difficult yet profoundly interesting questions.  The singular
relations between electricity and nerve-force, relations which it has
been attempted to interpret as meaning identity, in the face of
palpable differences, require still more extended studies.  You may
be interested by Professor Faraday's statement of his opinion on the
matter.  "Though I am not satisfied that the nervous fluid is only
electricity, still I think that the agent in the nervous system maybe
an inorganic force; and if there be reason for supposing that
magnetism is a higher relation of force than electricity, so it may
well be imagined that the nervous power may be of a still more
exalted character, and yet within the reach of experiment."

In connection with this statement, it is interesting to refer to the
experiments of Helmholtz on the rapidity of transmission of the
nervous actions.  The rate is given differently in Valentin's report
of these experiments and in that found in the "Scientific Annual" for
1858.  One hundred and eighty to three hundred feet per second is the
rate of movement assigned for sensation, but all such results must be
very vaguely approximative.  Boxers, fencers, players at the Italian
game of morn, "prestidigitators," and all who depend for their
success on rapidity of motion, know what differences there are in the
personal equation of movement.

Reflex action, the mechanical sympathy, if I may so call it, of
distant parts; Instinct, which is crystallized intelligence,--an
absolute law with its invariable planes and angles introduced into
the sphere of consciousness, as raphides are inclosed in the living
cells of plants; Intellect,--the operation of the thinking principle
through material organs, with an appreciable waste of tissue in every
act of thought, so that our clergymen's blood has more phosphates to
get rid of on Monday than on any other day of the week; Will,--
theoretically the absolute determining power, practically limited in
different degrees by the varying organization of races and
individuals, annulled or perverted by different ill-understood
organic changes; on all these subjects our knowledge is in its
infancy, and from the study of some of them the interdict of the
Vatican is hardly yet removed.

I must allude to one or two points in the histology and physiology of
the organs of sense.  The anterior continuation of the retina beyond
the ora serrata has been a subject of much discussion.  If H. Muller
and Kolliker can be relied upon, this question is settled by
recognizing that a layer of cells, continued from the retina, passes
over the surface of the zonula Zinnii, but that no proper nervous
element is so prolonged forward.

I observe that Kolliker calls the true nervous elements of the retina
"the layer of gray cerebral substance."  In fact, the ganglionic
corpuscles of each eye may be considered as constituting a little
brain, connected with the masses behind by the commissure, commonly
called the optic nerve.  We are prepared, therefore, to find these
two little brains in the most intimate relations with each other, as
we find the cerebral hemispheres.  We know that they are directly
connected by fibres that arch round through the chiasma.

I mention these anatomical facts to introduce a physiological
observation of my own, first announced in one of the lectures before
the Medical Class, subsequently communicated to the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences, and printed in its "Transactions" for February
14, 1860.  I refer to the apparent transfer of impressions from one
retina to the other, to which I have given the name reflex vision.
The idea was suggested to me in consequence of certain effects
noticed in employing the stereoscope.  Professor William B. Rodgers
has since called the attention of the American Scientific Association
to some facts bearing on the subject, and to a very curious
experiment of Leonardo da Vinci's, which enables the observer to look
through the palm of his hand (or seem to), as if it had a hole bored
through it.  As he and others hesitated to accept my explanation, I
was not sorry to find recently the following words in the
"Observations on Man" of that acute observer and thinker, David
Hartley.  "An impression made on the right eye alone by a single
object may propagate itself into the left, and there raise up an
image almost equal in vividness to itself; and consequently when we
see with one eye only, we may, however, have pictures in both eyes."
Hartley, in 1784, had anticipated many of the doctrines which have
since been systematized into the theory of reflex actions, and with
which I have attempted to associate this act of reflex vision.  My
sixth experiment, however, in the communication referred to, appears
to me to be a crucial one, proving the correctness of my explanation,
and I am not aware that it has been before instituted.

Another point of great interest connected with the physiology of
vision, and involved for a long time in great obscurity, is that of
the adjustment of the eye to different distances.  Dr. Clay Wallace
of New York, who published a very ingenious little book on the eye
about twenty years ago, with vignettes reminding one of Bewick, was
among the first, if not the first, to describe the ciliary muscle, to
which the power of adjustment is generally ascribed.  It is
ascertained, by exact experiment with the phacueidoscope, that
accommodation depends on change of form of the crystalline lens.
Where the crystalline is wanting, as Mr. Ware long ago taught, no
power of accommodation remains.  The ciliary muscle is generally
thought to effect the change of form of the crystalline.  The power
of accommodation is lost after the application of atropine, in
consequence, as is supposed, of the paralysis of this muscle.  This,
I believe, is the nearest approach to a demonstration we have on this
point.

I have only time briefly to refer to Professor Draper's most
ingenious theory as to the photographic nature of vision, for an
account of which I must refer to his original and interesting
Treatise on Physiology.

It were to be wished that the elaborate and very interesting
researches of the Marquis Corti, which have revealed such singular
complexity of structure in the cochlea of the ear, had done more to
clear up its doubtful physiology; but I am afraid we have nothing but
hypotheses for the special part it plays in the act of hearing, and
that we must say the same respecting the office of the semicircular
canals.

The microscope has achieved some of its greatest triumphs in teaching
us the changes which occur in the development of the embryo.  No more
interesting discovery stands recorded in the voluminous literature of
this subject than the one originally announced by Martin Barry,
afterwards discredited, and still later confirmed by Mr. Newport and
others; namely the fact that the fertilizing filament reaches the
interior of the ovum in various animals;--a striking parallel to the
action of the pollen-tube in the vegetable.  But beyond the
mechanical facts all is mystery in the movements of organization, as
profound as in the fall of a stone or the formation of a crystal.

To the chemist and the microscopist the living body presents the same
difficulties, arising from the fact that everything is in perpetual
change in the organism.  The fibrine of the blood puzzles the one as
much as its globules puzzle the other.  The difference between the
branches of science which deal with space only, and those which deal
with space and time, is this: we have no glasses that can magnify
time.  The figure I here show you a was photographed from an object
(pleurosigma angulatum) magnified a thousand diameters, or presenting
a million times its natural surface.  This other figure of the same
object, enlarged from the one just shown, is magnified seven thousand
diameters, or forty-nine million times in surface.  When we can make
the forty-nine millionth of a second as long as its integer,
physiology and chemistry will approach nearer the completeness of
anatomy.

Our reverence becomes more worthy, or, if you will, less unworthy of
its Infinite Object in proportion as our intelligence is lifted and
expanded to a higher and broader understanding of the Divine methods
of action.  If Galen called his heathen readers to admire, the power,
the wisdom, the providence, the goodness of the "Framer of the animal
body,"--if Mr. Boyle, the student of nature, as Addison and that
friend of his who had known him for forty years tell us, never
uttered the name of the Supreme Being without making a distinct pause
in his speech, in token of his devout recognition of its awful
meaning,--surely we, who inherit the accumulated wisdom of nearly two
hundred years since the time of the British philosopher, and of
almost two thousand since the Greek physician, may well lift our
thoughts from the works we study to their great Artificer.  These
wonderful discoveries which we owe to that mighty little instrument,
the telescope of the inner firmament with all its included worlds;
these simple formulae by which we condense the observations of a
generation in a single axiom; these logical analyses by which we
fence out the ignorance we cannot reclaim, and fix the limits of our
knowledge,--all lead us up to the inspiration of the Almighty, which
gives understanding to the world's great teachers.  To fear science
or knowledge, lest it disturb our old beliefs, is to fear the influx
of the Divine wisdom into the souls of our fellow-men; for what is
science but the piecemeal revelation,--uncovering,--of the plan of
creation, by the agency of those chosen prophets of nature whom God
has illuminated from the central light of truth for that single
purpose?

The studies which we have glanced at are preliminary in your
education to the practical arts which make use of them,--the arts of
healing,--surgery and medicine.  The more you examine the structure
of the organs and the laws of life, the more you will find how
resolutely each of the cell-republics which make up the E pluribus
unum of the body maintains its independence.  Guard it, feed it, air
it, warm it, exercise or rest it properly, and the working elements
will do their best to keep well or to get well.  What do we do with
ailing vegetables?  Dr. Warren, my honored predecessor in this chair,
bought a country-place, including half of an old orchard.  A few
years afterwards I saw the trees on his side of the fence looking in
good health, while those on the other side were scraggy and
miserable.  How do you suppose this change was brought about?  By
watering them with Fowler's solution?  By digging in calomel freely
about their roots?  Not at all; but by loosening the soil round them,
and supplying them with the right kind of food in fitting quantities.

Now a man is not a plant, or, at least, he is a very curious one, for
he carries his soil in his stomach, which is a kind--of portable
flower-pot, and he grows round it, instead of out of it.  He has,
besides, a singularly complex nutritive apparatus and a nervous
system.  But recollect the doctrine already enunciated in the
language of Virchow, that an animal, like a tree, is a sum of vital
unities, of which the cell is the ultimate element.  Every healthy
cell, whether in a vegetable or an animal, necessarily performs its
function properly so long as it is supplied with its proper materials
and stimuli.  A cell may, it is true, be congenitally defective, in
which case disease is, so to speak, its normal state.  But if
originally sound and subsequently diseased, there has certainly been
some excess, deficiency, or wrong quality in the materials or stimuli
applied to it.  You remove this injurious influence and substitute a
normal one; remove the baked coal-ashes, for instance, from the roots
of a tree, and replace them with loam; take away the salt meat from
the patient's table, and replace it with fresh meat and vegetables,
and the cells of the tree or the man return to their duty.

I do not know that we ever apply to a plant any element which is not
a natural constituent of the vegetable structure, except perhaps
externally, for the accidental purpose of killing parasites.  The
whole art of cultivation consists in learning the proper food and
conditions of plants, and supplying them.  We give them water,
earths, salts of various kinds such as they are made of, with a
chance to help themselves to air and light.  The farmer would be
laughed at who undertook to manure his fields or his trees with a
salt of lead or of arsenic.  These elements are not constituents of
healthy plants.  The gardener uses the waste of the arsenic furnaces
to kill the weeds in his walks.

If the law of the animal cell, and of the animal organism, which is
built up of such cells, is like that of the vegetable, we might
expect that we should treat all morbid conditions of any of the vital
unities belonging to an animal in the same way, by increasing,
diminishing, or changing its natural food or stimuli.

That is an aliment which nourishes; whatever we find in the
organism, as a constant and integral element, either forming part of
its structure, or one of the conditions of vital processes, that and
that only deserves the name of aliment.  I see no reason,
therefore, why iron, phosphate of lime, sulphur, should not be
considered food for man, as much as guano or poudrette for
vegetables.  Whether one or another of them is best in any given
case,--whether they shall be taken alone or in combination, in large
or small quantities, are separate questions.  But they are elements
belonging to the body, and even in moderate excess will produce
little disturbance.  There is no presumption against any of this
class of substances, any more than against water or salt, provided
they are used in fitting combinations, proportions, and forms.

But when it comes to substances alien to the healthy system, which
never belong to it as normal constituents, the case is very
different.  There is a presumption against putting lead or arsenic
into the human body, as against putting them into plants, because
they do not belong there, any more than pounded glass, which, it is
said, used to be given as a poison.  The same thing is true of
mercury and silver.  What becomes of these alien substances after
they get into the system we cannot always tell.  But in the case of
silver, from the accident of its changing color under the influence
of light, we do know what happens.  It is thrown out, in part at
least, under the epidermis, and there it remains to the patient's
dying day.  This is a striking illustration of the difficulty which
the system finds in dealing with non-assimilable elements, and
justifies in some measure the vulgar prejudice against mineral
poisons.

I trust the youngest student on these benches will not commit the
childish error of confounding a presumption against a particular
class of agents with a condemnation of them.  Mercury, for instance,
is alien to the system, and eminently disturbing in its influence.
Yet its efficacy in certain forms of specific disease is acknowledged
by all but the most sceptical theorists.  Even the esprit moqueur of
Ricord, the Voltaire of pelvic literature, submits to the time-
honored constitutional authority of this great panacea in the class
of cases to which he has devoted his brilliant intelligence.  Still,
there is no telling what evils have arisen from the abuse of this
mineral.  Dr. Armstrong long ago pointed out some of them, and they
have become matters of common notoriety.  I am pleased, therefore,
when I find so able and experienced a practitioner as Dr. Williams of
this city proving that iritis is best treated without mercury, and
Dr. Vanderpoel showing the same thing to be true for pericarditis.

Whatever elements nature does not introduce into vegetables, the
natural food of all animal life,--directly of herbivorous, indirectly
of carnivorous animals,--are to be regarded with suspicion.  Arsenic-
eating may seem to improve the condition of horses for a time,--and
even of human beings, if Tschudi's stories can be trusted,--but it
soon appears that its alien qualities are at war with the animal
organization.  So of copper, antimony, and other non-alimentary
simple substances; everyone of them is an intruder in the living
system, as much as a constable would be, quartered in our household.
This does not mean that they may not, any of them, be called in for a
special need, as we send for the constable when we have good reason
to think we have a thief under our roof; but a man's body is his
castle, as well as his house, and the presumption is that we are to
keep our alimentary doors bolted against these perturbing agents.

Now the feeling is very apt to be just contrary to this.  The habit
has been very general with well-taught practitioners, to have
recourse to the introduction of these alien elements into the system
on the occasion of any slight disturbance.  The tongue was a little
coated, and mercury must be given; the skin was a little dry, and the
patient must take antimony.  It was like sending for the constable
and the posse comitatus when there is only a carpet to shake or a
refuse-barrel to empty. [Dr. James Johnson advises persons not ailing
to take five grains of blue pill with one or two of aloes twice a
week for three or four months in the year, with half a pint of
compound decoction of sarsaparilla every day for the same period, to
preserve health and prolong life.  Pract.  Treatise on Dis.  of
Liver, etc.  p. 272.]  The constitution bears slow poisoning a great
deal better than might be expected; yet the most intelligent men in
the profession have gradually got out of the habit of prescribing
these powerful alien substances in the old routine way.  Mr. Metcalf
will tell you how much more sparingly they are given by our
practitioners at the present time, than when he first inaugurated the
new era of pharmacy among us.  Still, the presumption in favor of
poisoning out every spontaneous reaction of outraged nature is not
extinct in those who are trusted with the lives of their fellow-
citizens.  "On examining the file of prescriptions at the hospital, I
discovered that they were rudely written, and indicated a treatment,
as they consisted chiefly of tartar emetic, ipecacuanha, and epsom
salts, hardly favorable to the cure of the prevailing diarrhoea and
dysenteries."   In a report of a poisoning case now on trial, where
we are told that arsenic enough was found in the stomach to produce
death in twenty-four hours, the patient is said to have been treated
by arsenic, phosphorus, bryonia, aconite, nux vomica, and muriatic
acid,--by a practitioner of what school it may be imagined.

The traditional idea of always poisoning out disease, as we smoke out
vermin, is now seeking its last refuge behind the wooden cannon and
painted port-holes of that unblushing system of false scientific
pretences which I do not care to name in a discourse addressed to an
audience devoted to the study of the laws of nature in the light of
the laws of evidence.  It is extraordinary to observe that the system
which, by its reducing medicine to a name and a farce, has accustomed
all who have sense enough to see through its thin artifices to the
idea that diseases get well without being "cured," should now be the
main support of the tottering poison-cure doctrine.  It has
unquestionably helped to teach wise people that nature heals most
diseases without help from pharmaceutic art, but it continues to
persuade fools that art can arrest them all with its specifics.

It is worse than useless to attempt in any way to check the freest
expression of opinion as to the efficacy of any or all of the
"heroic" means of treatment employed by practitioners of different
schools and periods.  Medical experience is a great thing, but we
must not forget that there is a higher experience, which tries its
results in a court of a still larger jurisdiction; that, namely, in
which the laws of human belief are summoned to the witness-box, and
obliged to testify to the sources of error which beset the medical
practitioner.  The verdict is as old as the father of medicine, who
announces it in the words, "judgment is difficult."  Physicians
differed so in his time, that some denied that there was any such
thing as an art of medicine.

One man's best remedies were held as mischievous by another.  The art
of healing was like soothsaying, so the common people said; "the same
bird was lucky or unlucky, according as he flew to the right or
left."

The practice of medicine has undergone great changes within the
period of my own observation.  Venesection, for instance, has so far
gone out of fashion, that, as I am told by residents of the New York
Bellevue and the Massachusetts General Hospitals, it is almost
obsolete in these institutions, at least in medical practice.  The
old Brunonian stimulating treatment has come into vogue again in the
practice of Dr. Todd and his followers.  The compounds of mercury
have yielded their place as drugs of all work, and specifics for that
very frequent subjective complaint, nescio quid faciam,--to compounds
of iodine. [Sir Astley Cooper has the boldness,--or honesty,--to
speak of medicines which "are given as much to assist the medical man
as his patient."  Lectures (London, 1832), p.  14.] Opium is believed
in, and quinine, and "rum," using that expressive monosyllable to
mean all alcoholic cordials.  If Moliere were writing now, instead of
saignare, purgare, and the other, he would be more like to say,
Stimulare, opium dare et potassio-iodizare.

I have been in relation successively with the English and American
evacuant and alterative practice, in which calomel and antimony
figured so largely that, as you may see in Dr. Jackson's last
"Letter," Dr. Holyoke, a good representative of sterling old-
fashioned medical art, counted them with opium and Peruvian bark as
his chief remedies; with the moderately expectant practice of Louis;
the blood-letting "coup sur coup" of Bouillaud; the contra-stimulant
method of Rasori and his followers; the anti-irritant system of
Broussais, with its leeching and gum-water; I have heard from our own
students of the simple opium practice of the renowned German teacher,
Oppolzer; and now I find the medical community brought round by the
revolving cycle of opinion to that same old plan of treatment which
John Brown taught in Edinburgh in the last quarter of the last
century, and Miner and Tully fiercely advocated among ourselves in
the early years of the present.  The worthy physicians last
mentioned, and their antagonist Dr. Gallup, used stronger language
than we of these degenerate days permit ourselves.  "The lancet is a
weapon which annually slays more than the sword," says Dr. Tully.
"It is probable that, for forty years past, opium and its
preparations have done seven times the injury they have rendered
benefit, on the great scale of the world," says Dr. Gallup.

What is the meaning of these perpetual changes and conflicts of
medical opinion and practice, from an early antiquity to our own
time?  Simply this: all "methods" of treatment end in disappointment
of those extravagant expectations which men are wont to entertain of
medical art.  The bills of mortality are more obviously affected by
drainage, than by this or that method of practice.  The insurance
companies do not commonly charge a different percentage on the lives
of the patients of this or that physician.  In the course of a
generation, more or less, physicians themselves are liable to get
tired of a practice which has so little effect upon the average
movement of vital decomposition.  Then they are ready for a change,
even if it were back again to a method which has already been tried,
and found wanting.

Our practitioners, or many of them, have got back to the ways of old
Dr. Samuel Danforth, who, as it is well known, had strong objections
to the use of the lancet.  By and by a new reputation will be made by
some discontented practitioner, who, tired of seeing patients die
with their skins full of whiskey and their brains muddy with opium,
returns to a bold antiphlogistic treatment, and has the luck to see a
few patients of note get well under it.  So of the remedies which
have gone out of fashion and been superseded by others.  It can
hardly be doubted that they will come into vogue again, more or less
extensively, under the influence of that irresistible demand for
change just referred to.

Then will come the usual talk about a change in the character of
disease, which has about as much meaning as that concerning
"old-fashioned snow-storms."  "Epidemic constitutions" of disease
mean something, no doubt; a great deal as applied to malarious
affections; but that the whole type of diseases undergoes such
changes that the practice must be reversed from depleting to
stimulating, and vice versa, is much less likely than that methods of
treatment go out of fashion and come in again.  If there is any
disease which claims its percentage with reasonable uniformity, it is
phthisis.  Yet I remember that the reverend and venerable Dr. Prince
of Salem told me one Commencement day, as I was jogging along towards
Cambridge with him, that he recollected the time when that disease
was hardly hardly known; and in confirmation of his statement
mentioned a case in which it was told as a great event, that somebody
down on "the Cape" had died of "a consumption."  This story does not
sound probable to myself, as I repeat it, yet I assure you it is
true, and it shows how cautiously we must receive all popular stories
of great changes in the habits of disease.

Is there no progress, then, but do we return to the same beliefs and
practices which our forefathers wore out and threw away?  I trust and
believe that there is a real progress.  We may, for instance, return
in a measure to the Brunonian stimulating system, but it must be in a
modified way, for we cannot go back to the simple Brunonian
pathology, since we have learned too much of diseased action to
accept its convenient dualism.  So of other doctrines, each new
Avatar strips them of some of their old pretensions, until they take
their fitting place at last, if they have any truth in them, or
disappear, if they were mere phantasms of the imagination.

In the mean time, while medical theories are coming in and going out,
there is a set of sensible men who are never run away with by them,
but practise their art sagaciously and faithfully in much the same
way from generation to generation.  From the time of Hippocrates to
that of our own medical patriarch, there has been an apostolic
succession of wise and good practitioners.  If you will look at the
first aphorism of the ancient Master you will see that before all
remedies he places the proper conduct of the patient and his
attendants, and the fit ordering of all the conditions surrounding
him.  The class of practitioners I have referred to have always been
the most faithful in attending to these points.  No doubt they have
sometimes prescribed unwisely, in compliance with the prejudices of
their time, but they have grown wiser as they have grown older, and
learned to trust more in nature and less in their plans of
interference.  I believe common opinion confirms Sir James Clark's
observation to this effect.

The experience of the profession must, I think, run parallel with
that of the wisest of its individual members.  Each time a plan of
treatment or a particular remedy comes up for trial, it is submitted
to a sharper scrutiny.  When Cullen wrote his Materia Medica, he had
seriously to assail the practice of giving burnt toad, which was
still countenanced by at least one medical authority of note.  I have
read recently in some medical journal, that an American practitioner,
whose name is known to the country, is prescribing the hoof of a
horse for epilepsy.  It was doubtless suggested by that old fancy of
wearing a portion of elk's hoof hung round the neck or in a ring, for
this disease.  But it is hard to persuade reasonable people to
swallow the abominations of a former period.  The evidence which
satisfied Fernelius will not serve one of our hospital physicians.

In this way those articles of the Materia Medica which had nothing
but loathsomeness to recommend them have been gradually dropped, and
are not like to obtain any general favor again with civilized
communities.  The next culprits to be tried are the poisons.  I have
never been in the least sceptical as to the utility of some of them,
when properly employed.  Though I believe that at present, taking the
world at large, and leaving out a few powerful agents of such immense
value that they rank next to food in importance, the poisons
prescribed for disease do more hurt than good, I have no doubt, and
never professed to have any, that they do much good in prudent and
instructed hands.  But I am very willing to confess a great jealousy
of many agents, and I could almost wish to see the Materia Medica so
classed as to call suspicion upon certain ones among them.

Thus the alien elements, those which do not properly enter into the
composition of any living tissue, are the most to be suspected,--
mercury, lead, antimony, silver, and the rest, for the reasons I have
before mentioned.  Even iodine, which, as it is found in certain
plants, seems less remote from the animal tissues, gives unequivocal
proofs from time to time that it is hostile to some portions of the
glandular system.

There is, of course, less prima facie objection to those agents which
consist of assimilable elements, such as are found making a part of
healthy tissues.  These are divisible into three classes,--foods,
poisons, and inert, mostly because insoluble, substances.  The food
of one animal or of one human being is sometimes poison to another,
and vice versa; inert substances may act mechanically, so as to
produce the effect of poisons; but this division holds exactly enough
for our purpose.

Strictly speaking, every poison consisting of assimilable elements
may be considered as unwholesome food.  It is rejected by the
stomach, or it produces diarrhoea, or it causes vertigo or
disturbance of the heart's action, or some other symptom for which
the subject of it would consult the physician, if it came on from any
other cause than taking it under the name of medicine.  Yet portions
of this unwholesome food which we call medicine, we have reason to
believe, are assimilated; thus, castor-oil appears to be partially
digested by infants, so that they require large doses to affect them
medicinally.  Even that deadliest of poisons, hydrocyanic acid, is
probably assimilated, and helps to make living tissue, if it do not
kill the patient, for the assimilable elements which it contains,
given in the separate forms of amygdalin and emulsin, produce no
disturbance, unless, as in Bernard's experiments, they are suffered
to meet in the digestive organs.  A medicine consisting of
assimilable substances being then simply unwholesome food, we
understand what is meant by those cumulative effects of such remedies
often observed, as in the case of digitalis and strychnia.  They are
precisely similar to the cumulative effects of a salt diet in
producing scurvy, or of spurred rye in producing dry gangrene.  As
the effects of such substances are a violence to the organs, we
should exercise the same caution with regard to their use that we
would exercise about any other kind of poisonous food,--partridges at
certain seasons, for instance.  Even where these poisonous kinds of
food seem to be useful, we should still regard them with great
jealousy.  Digitalis lowers the pulse in febrile conditions.
Veratrum viride does the same thing.  How do we know that a rapid
pulse is not a normal adjustment of nature to the condition it
accompanies?  Digitalis has gone out of favor; how sure are we that
Veratrum viride will not be found to do more harm than good in a case
of internal inflammation, taking the whole course of the disease into
consideration?  Think of the change of opinion with regard to the use
of opium in delirium tremens (which you remember is sometimes called
delirium vigilans), where it seemed so obviously indicated, since the
publication of Dr. Ware's admirable essay.  I respect the evidence of
my contemporaries, but I cannot forget the sayings of the Father of
medicine,--Ars longa, judicium diffcile.

I am not presuming to express an opinion concerning Veratrum viride,
which was little heard of when I was still practising medicine.  I am
only appealing to that higher court of experience which sits in
judgment on all decisions of the lower medical tribunals, and which
requires more than one generation for its final verdict.

Once change the habit of mind so long prevalent among practitioners
of medicine; once let it be everywhere understood that the
presumption is in favor of food, and not of alien substances, of
innocuous, and not of unwholesome food, for the sick; that this
presumption requires very strong evidence in each particular case to
overcome it; but that, when such evidence is afforded, the alien
substance or the unwholesome food should be given boldly, in
sufficient quantities, in the same spirit as that with which the
surgeon lifts his knife against a patient,--that is, with the same
reluctance and the same determination,--and I think we shall have and
hear much less of charlatanism in and out of the profession.  The
disgrace of medicine has been that colossal system of self-deception,
in obedience to which mines have been emptied of their cankering
minerals, the vegetable kingdom robbed of all its noxious growths,
the entrails of animals taxed for their impurities, the poison-bags
of reptiles drained of their venom, and all the inconceivable
abominations thus obtained thrust down the throats of human beings
suffering from some fault of organization, nourishment, or vital
stimulation.

Much as we have gained, we have not yet thoroughly shaken off the
notion that poison is the natural food of disease, as wholesome
aliment is the support of health.  Cowper's lines, in "The Task,"
show the matter-of-course practice of his time:

    "He does not scorn it, who has long endured
     A fever's agonies, and fed on drugs."

Dr. Kimball of Lowell, who has been in the habit of seeing a great
deal more of typhoid fever than most practitioners, and whose
surgical exploits show him not to be wanting in boldness or
enterprise, can tell you whether he finds it necessary to feed his
patients on drugs or not.  His experience is, I believe, that of the
most enlightened and advanced portion of the profession; yet I think
that even in typhoid fever, and certainly in many other complaints,
the effects of ancient habits and prejudices may still be seen in the
practice of some educated physicians.

To you, young men, it belongs to judge all that has gone before you.
You come nearer to the great fathers of modern medicine than some of
you imagine.  Three of my own instructors attended Dr. Rush's
Lectures.  The illustrious Haller mentions Rush's inaugural thesis in
his "Bibliotheca Anatomica;" and this same Haller, brought so close
to us, tells us he remembers Ruysch, then an old man, and used to
carry letters between him and Boerhaave.  Look through the history of
medicine from Boerhaave to this present day.  You will see at once
that medical doctrine and practice have undergone a long series of
changes.  You will see that the doctrine and practice of our own time
must probably change in their turn, and that, if we can trust at all
to the indications of their course, it will be in the direction of an
improved hygiene and a simplified treatment.  Especially will the old
habit of violating the instincts of the sick give place to a
judicious study of these same instincts.  It will be found that
bodily, like mental insanity, is best managed, for the most part, by
natural soothing agencies.  Two centuries ago there was a
prescription for scurvy containing "stercoris taurini et anserini
par, quantitas trium magnarum nucum," of the hell-broth containing
which "guoties-cumque sitit oeger, large bibit."   When I have
recalled the humane common-sense of Captain Cook in the matter of
preventing this disease; when I have heard my friend, Mr. Dana,
describing the avidity with which the scurvy-stricken sailors snuffed
up the earthy fragrance of fresh raw potatoes, the food which was to
supply the elements wanting to their spongy tissues, I have
recognized that the perfection of art is often a return to nature,
and seen in this single instance the germ of innumerable beneficent
future medical reforms.

I cannot help believing that medical curative treatment will by and
by resolve itself in great measure into modifications of the food,
swallowed and breathed, and of the natural stimuli, and that less
will be expected from specifics and noxious disturbing agents, either
alien or assimilable.  The noted mineral-waters containing iron,
sulphur, carbonic acid, supply nutritious or stimulating materials to
the body as much as phosphate of lime and ammoniacal compounds do to
the cereal plants.  The effects of a milk and vegetable diet, of
gluten bread in diabetes, of cod-liver oil in phthisis, even of such
audacious innovations as the water-cure and the grape-cure, are only
hints of what will be accomplished when we have learned to discover
what organic elements are deficient or in excess in a case of chronic
disease, and the best way of correcting the abnormal condition, just
as an agriculturist ascertains the wants of his crops and modifies
the composition of his soil.  In acute febrile diseases we have long
ago discovered that far above all drug-medication is the use of mild
liquid diet in the period of excitement, and of stimulant and
nutritious food in that of exhaustion.  Hippocrates himself was as
particular about his barley-ptisan as any Florence Nightingale of our
time could be.

The generation to which you, who are just entering the profession,
belong, will make a vast stride forward, as I believe, in the
direction of treatment by natural rather than violent agencies.  What
is it that makes the reputation of Sydenham, as the chief of English
physicians?  His prescriptions consisted principally of simples.  An
aperient or an opiate, a "cardiac" or a tonic, may be commonly found
in the midst of a somewhat fantastic miscellany of garden herbs.  It
was not by his pharmaceutic prescriptions that he gained his great
name.  It was by daring to order fresh air for small-pox patients,
and riding on horseback for consumptives, in place of the smothering
system, and the noxious and often loathsome rubbish of the
established schools.  Of course Sydenham was much abused by his
contemporaries, as he frequently takes occasion to remind his reader.
"I must needs conclude," he says, "either that I am void of merit, or
that the candid and ingenuous part of mankind, who are formed with so
excellent a temper of mind as to be no strangers to gratitude, make a
very small part of the whole."  If in the fearless pursuit of truth
you should find the world as ungracious in the nineteenth century as
he found it in the seventeenth, you may learn a lesson of self-
reliance from another utterance of the same illustrious physician:
"'T is none of my business to inquire what other persons think, but
to establish my own observations; in order to which, I ask no favor
of the reader but to peruse my writings with temper."

The physician has learned a great deal from the surgeon, who is
naturally in advance of him, because he has a better opportunity of
seeing the effects of his remedies.  Let me shorten one of Ambroise
Pare's stories for you.  There had been a great victory at the pass
of Susa, and they were riding into the city.  The wounded cried out
as the horses trampled them under their hoofs, which caused good
Ambroise great pity, and made him wish himself back in Paris.  Going
into a stable he saw four dead soldiers, and three desperately
wounded, placed with their backs against the wall.  An old campaigner
came up.--"Can these fellows get well?" he said.  "No!" answered the
surgeon.  Thereupon, the old soldier walked up to them and cut all
their throats, sweetly, and without wrath (doulcement et sans
cholere).  Ambroise told him he was a bad man to do such a thing.
"I hope to God;" he said, "somebody will do as much for me if I ever
get into such a scrape" (accoustre de telle facon).  "I was not much
salted in those days" (bien doux de sel), says Ambroise, "and little
acquainted with the treatment of wounds."  However, as he tells us,
he proceeded to apply boiling oil of Sambuc (elder) after the
approved fashion of the time,--with what torture to the patient may
be guessed.  At last his precious oil gave out, and he used instead
an insignificant mixture of his own contrivance.  He could not sleep
that night for fear his patients who had not been scalded with the
boiling oil would be poisoned by the gunpowder conveyed into their
wounds by the balls.  To his surprise, he found them much better than
the others the next morning, and resolved never again to burn his
patients with hot oil for gun-shot wounds.

This was the beginning, as nearly as we can fix it, of that reform
which has introduced plain water-dressings in the place of the
farrago of external applications which had been a source of profit to
apothecaries and disgrace to art from, and before, the time when
Pliny complained of them.  A young surgeon who was at Sudley Church,
laboring among the wounded of Bull Run, tells me they had nothing but
water for dressing, and he (being also doux de sel) was astonished to
see how well the wounds did under that simple treatment.

Let me here mention a fact or two which may be of use to some of you
who mean to enter the public service.  You will, as it seems, have
gun-shot wounds almost exclusively to deal with.  Three different
surgeons, the one just mentioned and two who saw the wounded of Big
Bethel, assured me that they found no sabre-cuts or bayonet wounds.
It is the rifle-bullet from a safe distance which pierces the breasts
of our soldiers, and not the gallant charge of broad platoons and
sweeping squadrons, such as we have been in the habit of considering
the chosen mode of warfare of ancient and modern chivalry. [Sir
Charles James Napier had the same experience in Virginia in 1813.
"Potomac.  We have nasty sort of fighting here, amongst creeks and
bushes, and lose men without show."  "Yankee never shows himself, he
keeps in the thickest wood, fires and runs off."--These five
thousand in the open field might be attacked, but behind works it
would be throwing away lives."  He calls it "an inglorious warfare,"
--says one of the leaders is "a little deficient in gumption,"--but
--still my opinion is, that if we tuck up our sleeves and lay our
ears back we might thrash them; that is, if we caught them out of
their trees, so as to slap at them with the bayonet."--Life, etc.
vol.  i.  p.  218 et seq.]

Another fact parallels the story of the old campaigner, and may teach
some of you caution in selecting your assistants.  A chaplain told it
to two of our officers personally known to myself.  He overheard the
examination of a man who wished to drive one of the "avalanche"
wagons, as they call them.  The man was asked if he knew how to deal
with wounded men.  "Oh yes," he answered; "if they're hit here,"
pointing to the abdomen, "knock 'em on the head,--they can't get
well."

In art and outside of it you will meet the same barbarisms that
Ambroise Pare met with,--for men differ less from century to century
than we are apt to suppose; you will encounter the same opposition,
if you attack any prevailing opinion, that Sydenham complained of.
So far as possible, let not such experiences breed in you a contempt
for those who are the subjects of folly or prejudice, or foster any
love of dispute for its own sake.  Should you become authors, express
your opinions freely; defend them rarely.  It is not often that an
opinion is worth expressing, which cannot take care of itself.
Opposition is the best mordant to fix the color of your thought in
the general belief.

It is time to bring these crowded remarks to a close.  The day has
been when at the beginning of a course of Lectures I should have
thought it fitting to exhort you to diligence and entire devotion to
your tasks as students.  It is not so now.  The young man who has not
heard the clarion-voices of honor and of duty now sounding throughout
the land, will heed no word of mine.  In the camp or the city, in the
field or the hospital, under sheltering roof, or half-protecting
canvas, or open sky, shedding our own blood or stanching that of our
wounded defenders, students or teachers, whatever our calling and our
ability, we belong, not to ourselves, but to our imperilled country,
whose danger is our calamity, whose ruin would be our enslavement,
whose rescue shall be our earthly salvation!






SCHOLASTIC AND BEDSIDE TEACHING.

An Introductory Lecture delivered before the Medical Class of Harvard
University, November 6, 1867.

The idea is entertained by some of our most sincere professional
brethren, that to lengthen and multiply our Winter Lectures will be
of necessity to advance the cause of medical education.  It is a fair
subject for consideration whether they do not overrate the relative
importance of that particular mode of instruction which forms the
larger part of these courses.

As this School could only lengthen its lecture term at the expense of
its "Summer Session," in which more direct, personal, and familiar
teaching takes the place of our academic discourses, and in which
more time can be given to hospitals, infirmaries, and practical
instruction in various important specialties, whatever might be
gained, a good deal would certainly be lost in our case by the
exchange.

The most essential part of a student's instruction is obtained, as I
believe, not in the lecture-room, but at the bedside.  Nothing seen
there is lost; the rhythms of disease are learned by frequent
repetition; its unforeseen occurrences stamp themselves indelibly in
the memory.  Before the student is aware of what he has acquired, he
has learned the aspects and course and probable issue of the diseases
he has seen with his teacher, and the proper mode of dealing with
them, so far as his master knows it.  On the other hand, our ex
cathedra prelections have a strong tendency to run into details
which, however interesting they may be to ourselves and a few of our
more curious listeners, have nothing in them which will ever be of
use to the student as a practitioner.  It is a perfectly fair
question whether I and some other American Professors do not teach
quite enough that is useless already.  Is it not well to remind the
student from time to time that a physician's business is to avert
disease, to heal the sick, to prolong life, and to diminish
suffering?  Is it not true that the young man of average ability will
find it as much as he can do to fit himself for these simple duties?
Is it not best to begin, at any rate, by making sure of such
knowledge as he will require in his daily walk, by no means
discouraging him from any study for which his genius fits him when he
once feels that he has become master of his chosen art.

I know that many branches of science are of the greatest value as
feeders of our medical reservoirs.  But the practising physician's
office is to draw the healing waters, and while he gives his time to
this labor he can hardly be expected to explore all the sources that
spread themselves over the wide domain of science.  The traveller who
would not drink of the Nile until he had tracked it to its parent
lakes, would be like to die of thirst; and the medical practitioner
who would not use the results of many laborers in other departments
without sharing their special toils, would find life far too short
and art immeasurably too long.

We owe much to Chemistry, one of the most captivating as well as
important of studies; but the medical man must as a general rule
content himself with a clear view of its principles and a limited
acquaintance with its facts; such especially as are pertinent to his
pursuits.  I am in little danger of underrating Anatomy or
Physiology; but as each of these branches splits up into specialties,
any one of which may take up a scientific life-time, I would have
them taught with a certain judgment and reserve, so that they shall
not crowd the more immediately practical branches.  So of all the
other ancillary and auxiliary kinds of knowledge, I would have them
strictly subordinated to that particular kind of knowledge for which
the community looks to its medical advisers.

A medical school is not a scientific school, except just so far as
medicine itself is a science.  On the natural history side, medicine
is a science; on the curative side, chiefly an art.  This is implied
in Hufeland's aphorism: "The physician must generalize the disease
and individualize the patient."

The coordinated and classified results of empirical observation, in
distinction from scientific experiment, have furnished almost all we
know about food, the medicine of health, and medicine, the food of
sickness.  We eat the root of the Solanum tuberosum and throw away
its fruit; we eat the fruit of the Solanum Lycopersicum and throw
away its root.  Nothing but vulgar experience has taught us to reject
the potato ball and cook the tomato.  So of most of our remedies.
The subchloride of mercury, calomel, is the great British specific;
the protochloride of mercury, corrosive sublimate, kills like
arsenic, but no chemist could have told us it would be so.

From observations like these we can obtain certain principles from
which we can argue deductively to facts of a like nature, but the
process is limited, and we are suspicious of all reasoning in that
direction applied to the processes of healthy and diseased life.  We
are continually appealing to special facts.  We are willing to give
Liebig's artificial milk when we cannot do better, but we watch the
child anxiously whose wet-nurse is a chemist's pipkin.  A pair of
substantial mammary glands has the advantage over the two hemispheres
of the most learned Professor's brain, in the art of compounding a
nutritious fluid for infants.

The bedside is always the true centre of medical teaching.  Certain
branches must be taught in the lecture-room, and will necessarily
involve a good deal that is not directly useful to the future
practitioner.  But the over ambitious and active student must not be
led away by the seduction of knowledge for its own sake from his
principal pursuit.  The humble beginner, who is alarmed at the vast
fields of knowledge opened to him, may be encouraged by the assurance
that with a very slender provision of science, in distinction from
practical skill, he may be a useful and acceptable member of the
profession to which the health of the community is intrusted.

To those who are not to engage in practice, the various pursuits of
science hardly require to be commended.  Only they must not be
disappointed if they find many subjects treated in our courses as a
medical class requires, rather than as a scientific class would
expect, that is, with special limitations and constant reference to
practical ends.  Fortunately they are within easy reach of the
highest scientific instruction.  The business of a school like this
is to make useful working physicians, and to succeed in this it is
almost as important not to overcrowd the mind of the pupil with
merely curious knowledge as it is to store it with useful
information.

In this direction I have written my lecture, not to undervalue any
form of scientific labor in its place, an unworthy thought from which
I hope I need not defend myself,--but to discourage any undue
inflation of the scholastic programme, which even now asks more of
the student than the teacher is able to obtain from the great
majority of those who present themselves for examination.  I wish to
take a hint in education from the Secretary of the Massachusetts
Board of Agriculture, who regards the cultivation of too much land as
a great defect in our New England farming.  I hope that our Medical
Institutions may never lay themselves open to the kind of accusation
Mr. Lowe brings against the English Universities, when he says that
their education is made up "of words that few understand and most
will shortly forget; of arts that can never be used, if indeed they
can even be learnt; of histories inapplicable to our times; of
languages dead and even mouldy; of grammatical rules that never had
living use and are only post mortem examinations; and of statements
fagoted with utter disregard of their comparative value."

This general thought will be kept in view throughout my somewhat
discursive address, which will begin with an imaginary clinical
lesson from the lips of an historical personage, and close with the
portrait from real life of one who, both as teacher and practitioner,
was long loved and honored among us.  If I somewhat overrun my hour,
you must pardon me, for I can say with Pascal that I have not had the
time to make my lecture shorter.


In the year 1647, that good man John Eliot, commonly called the
Apostle Eliot, writing to Mr. Thomas Shepherd, the pious minister of
Cambridge, referring to the great need of medical instruction for the
Indians, used these words:

"I have thought in my heart that it were a singular good work, if the
Lord would stirre up the hearts of some or other of his people in
England to give some maintenance toward some Schoole or Collegiate
exercise this way, wherein there should be Anatomies and other
instructions that way, and where there might be some recompence given
to any that should bring in any vegetable or other thing that is
vertuous in the way of Physick.

"There is another reason which moves my thought and desires this way,
namely that our young students in Physick may be trained up better
then they yet bee, who have onely theoreticall knowledge, and are
forced to fall to practise before ever they saw an Anatomy made, or
duely trained up in making experiments, for we never had but one
Anatomy in the countrey, which Mr. Giles Firman [Firmin] now in
England, did make and read upon very well, but no more of that now."

Since the time of the Apostle Eliot the Lord has stirred up the
hearts of our people to the building of many Schools and Colleges
where medicine is taught in all its branches.  Mr. Giles Firmin's
"Anatomy" may be considered the first ancestor of a long line of
skeletons which have been dangling and rattling in our lecture-rooms
for more than a century.

Teaching in New England in 1647 was a grave but simple matter.  A
single person, combining in many cases, as in that of Mr. Giles
Firmin, the offices of physician and preacher, taught what he knew to
a few disciples whom he gathered about him.  Of the making of that
"Anatomy" on which my first predecessor in the branch I teach" did
read very well" we can know nothing.  The body of some poor wretch
who had swung upon the gallows, was probably conveyed by night to
some lonely dwelling at the outskirts of the village, and there by
the light of flaring torches hastily dissected by hands that trembled
over the unwonted task.  And ever and anon the master turned to his
book, as he laid bare the mysteries of the hidden organs; to his
precious Vesalius, it might be, or his figures repeated in the
multifarious volume of Ambroise Pare; to the Aldine octavo in which
Fallopius recorded his fresh observations; or that giant folio of
Spigelius just issued from the press of Amsterdam, in which lovely
ladies display their viscera with a coquettish grace implying that it
is rather a pleasure than otherwise to show the lace-like omentum,
and hold up their appendices epiploicae as if they were saying "these
are our jewels."

His teaching of medicine was no doubt chiefly clinical, and received
with the same kind of faith as that which accepted his words from the
pulpit.  His notions of disease were based on what he had observed,
seen always in the light of the traditional doctrines in which he was
bred.  His discourse savored of the weighty doctrines of Hippocrates,
diluted by the subtle speculations of Galen, reinforced by the
curious comments of the Arabian schoolmen as they were conveyed in
the mellifluous language of Fernelius, blended, it may be, with
something of the lofty mysticism of Van Helmont, and perhaps stealing
a flavor of that earlier form of Homoeopathy which had lately come to
light in Sir Kenelm Digby's "Discourse concerning the Cure of Wounds
by the Sympathetic Powder."

His Pathology was mythology.  A malformed foetus, as the readers of
Winthrop's Journal may remember, was enough to scare the colonists
from their propriety, and suggest the gravest fears of portended
disaster.  The student of the seventeenth century opened his Licetus
and saw figures of a lion with the head of a woman, and a man with
the head of an elephant.  He had offered to his gaze, as born of a
human mother, the effigy of a winged cherub, a pterocephalous
specimen, which our Professor of Pathological Anatomy would hardly
know whether to treat with the reverence due to its celestial aspect,
or to imprison in one of his immortalizing jars of alcohol.

His pharmacopoeia consisted mainly of simples, such as the venerable
"Herball" of Gerard describes and figures in abounding affluence.
St. John's wort and Clown's All-heal, with Spurge and Fennel, Saffron
and Parsley, Elder and Snake-root, with opium in some form, and
roasted rhubarb and the Four Great Cold Seeds, and the two Resins, of
which it used to be said that whatever the Tacamahaca has not cured,
the Caranna will, with the more familiar Scammony and Jalap and Black
Hellebore, made up a good part of his probable list of remedies.  He
would have ordered Iron now and then, and possibly an occasional dose
of Antimony.  He would perhaps have had a rheumatic patient wrapped
in the skin of a wolf or a wild cat, and in case of a malignant fever
with "purples" or petechiae, or of an obstinate king's evil, he might
have prescribed a certain black powder, which had been made by
calcining toads in an earthen pot; a choice remedy, taken internally,
or applied to any outward grief.

Except for the toad-powder and the peremptory drastics, one might
have borne up against this herb doctoring as well as against some
more modern styles of medication.  Barbeyrac and his scholar Sydenham
had not yet cleansed the Pharmacopoeia of its perilous stuff, but
there is no doubt that the more sensible physicians of that day knew
well enough that a good honest herb-tea which amused the patient and
his nurses was all that was required to carry him through all common
disorders.

The student soon learned the physiognomy of disease by going about
with his master; fevers, pleurisies, asthmas, dropsies, fluxes,
small-pox, sore-throats, measles, consumptions.  He saw what was done
for them.  He put up the medicines, gathered the herbs, and so
learned something of materia medico and botany.  He learned these few
things easily and well, for he could give his whole attention to
them.  Chirurgery was a separate specialty.  Women in child-birth
were cared for by midwives.  There was no chemistry deserving the
name to require his study.  He did not learn a great deal, perhaps,
but what he did learn was his business, namely, how to take care of
sick people.

Let me give you a picture of the old=fashioned way of instruction, by
carrying you with me in imagination in the company of worthy Master
Giles Firmin as he makes his round of visits among the good folk of
Ipswich, followed by his one student, who shall answer to the
scriptural name of Luke.  It will not be for entertainment chiefly,
but to illustrate the one mode of teaching which can never be
superseded, and which, I venture to say, is more important than all
the rest put together.  The student is a green hand, as you will
perceive.

In the first dwelling they come to, a stout fellow is bellowing with
colic.

"He will die, Master, of a surety, methinks," says the timid youth in
a whisper.

"Nay, Luke," the Master answers, "'t is but a dry belly-ache.  Didst
thou not mark that he stayed his roaring when I did press hard over
the lesser bowels?  Note that he hath not the pulse of them with
fevers, and by what Dorcas telleth me there hath been no long
shutting up of the vice naturales.  We will steep certain comforting
herbs which I will shew thee, and put them in a bag and lay them on
his belly.  Likewise he shall have my cordial julep with a portion of
this confection which we do call Theriaca Andromachi, which hath
juice of poppy in it, and is a great stayer of anguish.  This fellow
is at his prayers to-day, but I warrant thee he shall be swearing
with the best of them to-morrow."

They jog along the bridle-path on their horses until they come to
another lowly dwelling.  They sit a while with a delicate looking
girl in whom the ingenuous youth naturally takes a special interest.
The good physician talks cheerfully with her, asks her a few
questions.  Then to her mother: "Good-wife, Margaret hath somewhat
profited, as she telleth, by the goat's milk she hath taken night and
morning.  Do thou pluck a maniple--that is an handful--of the plant
called Maidenhair, and make a syrup therewith as I have shewed thee.
Let her take a cup full of the same, fasting, before she sleepeth,
also before she riseth from her bed."  And so they leave the house.

"What thinkest thou, Luke, of the maid we have been visiting?"  "She
seemeth not much ailing, Master, according to my poor judgment.  For
she did say she was better.  And she had a red cheek and a bright
eye, and she spake of being soon able to walk unto the meeting, and
did seem greatly hopeful, but spare of flesh, methought, and her
voice something hoarse, as of one that hath a defluxion, with some
small coughing from a cold, as she did say.  Speak I not truly,
Master, that she will be well speedily?"

"Yea, Luke, I do think she shall be well, and mayhap speedily.  But
it is not here with us she shall be well.  For that redness of the
cheek is but the sign of the fever which, after the Grecians, we do
call the hectical; and that shining of the eyes is but a sickly
glazing, and they which do every day get better and likewise thinner
and weaker shall find that way leadeth to the church-yard gate.  This
is the malady which the ancients did call tubes, or the wasting
disease, and some do name the consumption.  A disease whereof most
that fall ailing do perish.  This Margaret is not long for earth--but
she knoweth it not, and still hopeth."

"Why, then, Master, didst thou give her of thy medicine, seeing that
her ail is unto death?"

"Thou shalt learn, boy, that they which are sick must have somewhat
wherewith to busy their thoughts.  There be some who do give these
tabid or consumptives a certain posset made with lime-water and anise
and liquorice and raisins of the sun, and there be other some who do
give the juice of craw-fishes boiled in barley-water with chicken-
broth, but these be toys, as I do think, and ye shall find as good
virtue, nay better, in this syrup of the simple called Maidenhair."

Something after this manner might Master Giles Firmin have delivered
his clinical instructions.  Somewhat in this way, a century and a
half later, another New England physician, Dr. Edward Augustus
Holyoke, taught a young man who came to study with him, a very
diligent and intelligent youth, James Jackson by name, the same whose
portrait in his advanced years hangs upon this wall, long the honored
Professor of Theory and Practice in this Institution, of whom I shall
say something in this Lecture.  Our venerated Teacher studied
assiduously afterwards in the great London Hospitals, but I think he
used to quote his "old Master" ten times where he quoted Mr. Cline or
Dr. Woodville once.

When I compare this direct transfer of the practical experience of a
wise man into the mind of a student,--every fact one that he can use
in the battle of life and death,--with the far off, unserviceable
"scientific" truths that I and some others are in the habit of
teaching, I cannot help asking myself whether, if we concede that our
forefathers taught too little, there is not--a possibility that we
may sometimes attempt to teach too much.  I almost blush when I think
of myself as describing the eight several facets on two slender
processes of the palate bone, or the seven little twigs that branch
off from the minute tympanic nerve, and I wonder whether my excellent
colleague feels in the same way when he pictures himself as giving
the constitution of neurin, which as he and I know very well is that
of the hydrate of trimethyle-oxethyle-ammonium, or the formula for
the production of alloxan, which, though none but the Professors and
older students can be expected to remember it, is C10 H4 N4 O6+ 2HO,
NO5}=C8 H4 N2 O10+2CO2+N2+NH4 O, NO5.

I can bear the voice of some rough iconoclast addressing the
Anatomist and the Chemist in tones of contemptuous indignation: "What
is this stuff with which you are cramming the brains of young men who
are to hold the lives of the community in their hands?  Here is a man
fallen in a fit; you can tell me all about the eight surfaces of the
two processes of the palate bone, but you have not had the sense to
loosen that man's neck-cloth, and the old women are all calling you a
fool?  Here is a fellow that has just swallowed poison.  I want
something to turn his stomach inside out at the shortest notice.  Oh,
you have forgotten the dose of the sulphate of zinc, but you remember
the formula for the production of alloxan!"

"Look you, Master Doctor,--if I go to a carpenter to come and stop a
leak in my roof that is flooding the house, do you suppose I care
whether he is a botanist or not?  Cannot a man work in wood without
knowing all about endogens and exogens, or must he attend Professor
Gray's Lectures before he can be trusted to make a box-trap?  If my
horse casts a shoe, do you think I will not trust a blacksmith to
shoe him until I have made sure that he is sound on the distinction
between the sesquioxide and the protosesquioxide of iron?"

--But my scientific labor is to lead to useful results by and by, in
the next generation, or in some possible remote future.--

"Diavolo!" as your Dr. Rabelais has it,--answers the iconoclast,--
"what is that to me and my colic, to me and my strangury?  I pay the
Captain of the Cunard steamship to carry me quickly and safely to
Liverpool, not to make a chart of the Atlantic for after voyagers!
If Professor Peirce undertakes to pilot me into Boston Harbor and
runs me on Cohasset rocks, what answer is it to tell me that he is
Superintendent of the Coast Survey?  No, Sir!  I want a plain man in
a pea-jacket and a sou'wester, who knows the channel of Boston
Harbor, and the rocks of Boston Harbor, and the distinguished
Professor is quite of my mind as to the matter, for I took the pains
to ask him before I ventured to use his name in the way of
illustration."


I do not know how the remarks of the image-breaker may strike others,
but I feel that they put me on my defence with regard to much of my
teaching.  Some years ago I ventured to show in an introductory
Lecture how very small a proportion of the anatomical facts taught in
a regular course, as delivered by myself and others, had any
practical bearing whatever on the treatment of disease.  How can I,
how can any medical teacher justify himself in teaching anything that
is not like to be of practical use to a class of young men who are to
hold in their hands the balance in which life and death, ease and
anguish, happiness and wretchedness are to be daily weighed?

I hope we are not all wrong.  Oftentimes in finding how sadly
ignorant of really essential and vital facts and rules were some of
those whom we had been larding with the choicest scraps of science, I
have doubted whether the old one-man system of teaching, when the one
man was of the right sort, did not turn out better working physicians
than our more elaborate method.  The best practitioner I ever knew
was mainly shaped to excellence in that way.  I can understand
perfectly the regrets of my friend Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh, for
the good that was lost with the old apprenticeship system.  I
understand as well Dr. Latham's fear "that many men of the best
abilities and good education will be deterred from prosecuting physic
as a profession, in consequence of the necessity indiscriminately
laid upon all for impossible attainments."

I feel therefore impelled to say a very few words in defence of that
system of teaching adopted in our Colleges, by which we wish to
supplement and complete the instruction given by private individuals
or by what are often called Summer Schools.

The reason why we teach so much that is not practical and in itself
useful, is because we find that the easiest way of teaching what is
practical and useful.  If we could in any way eliminate all that
would help a man to deal successfully with disease, and teach it by
itself so that it should be as tenaciously rooted in the memory, as
easily summoned when wanted, as fertile in suggestion of related
facts, as satisfactory to the peremptory demands of the intelligence
as if taught in its scientific connections, I think it would be our
duty so to teach the momentous truths of medicine, and to regard all
useless additions as an intrusion on the time which should be
otherwise occupied.

But we cannot successfully eliminate and teach by itself that which
is purely practical.  The easiest and surest why of acquiring facts
is to learn them in groups, in systems, and systematized knowledge is
science.  You can very often carry two facts fastened together more
easily than one by itself, as a housemaid can carry two pails of
water with a hoop more easily than one without it.  You can remember
a man's face, made up of many features, better than you can his nose
or his mouth or his eye-brow.  Scores of proverbs show you that you
can remember two lines that rhyme better than one without the jingle.
The ancients, who knew the laws of memory, grouped the seven cities
that contended for the honor of being Homer's birthplace in a line
thus given by Aulus Gellius:

Smurna, Rodos, Colophon, Salamin, Ios, Argos, Athenai.

I remember, in the earlier political days of Martin Van Buren, that
Colonel Stone, of the "New York Commercial," or one of his
correspondents, said that six towns of New York would claim in the
same way to have been the birth-place of the "Little Magician," as he
was then called; and thus he gave their names, any one of which I
should long ago have forgotten, but which as a group have stuck tight
in my memory from that day to this;

Catskill, Saugerties, Redhook, Kinderhook, Scaghticoke, Schodac.

If the memory gains so much by mere rhythmical association, how much
more will it gain when isolated facts are brought together under laws
and principles, when organs are examined in their natural
connections, when structure is coupled with function, and healthy and
diseased action are studied as they pass one into the other!
Systematic, or scientific study is invaluable as supplying a natural
kind of mnemonics, if for nothing else.  You cannot properly learn
the facts you want from Anatomy and Chemistry in any way so easily as
by taking them in their regular order, with other allied facts, only
there must be common sense exercised in leaving out a great deal
which belongs to each of the two branches as pure science.  The
dullest of teachers is the one who does not know what to omit.

The larger aim of scientific training is to furnish you with
principles to which you will be able to refer isolated facts, and so
bring these within the range of recorded experience.  See what the
"London Times" said about the three Germans who cracked open John
Bull Chatwood's strong-box at the Fair the other day, while the three
Englishmen hammered away in vain at Brother Jonathan Herring's.  The
Englishmen represented brute force.  The Germans had been trained to
appreciate principle.  The Englishman "knows his business by rote and
rule of thumb"--science, which would "teach him to do in an hour what
has hitherto occupied him two hours," "is in a manner forbidden to
him."  To this cause the "Times" attributes the falling off of
English workmen in comparison with those of the Continent.

Granting all this, we must not expect too much from "science" as
distinguished from common experience.  There are ten thousand
experimenters without special apparatus for every one in the
laboratory.  Accident is the great chemist and toxicologist.  Battle
is the great vivisector.  Hunger has instituted researches on food
such as no Liebig, no Academic Commission has ever recorded.

Medicine, sometimes impertinently, often ignorantly, often carelessly
called "allopathy," appropriates everything from every source that
can be of the slightest use to anybody who is ailing in any way, or
like to be ailing from any cause.  It learned from a monk how to use
antimony, from a Jesuit how to cure agues, from a friar how to cut
for stone, from a soldier how to treat gout, from a sailor how to
keep off scurvy, from a postmaster how to sound the Eustachian tube,
from a dairy-maid how to prevent small-pox, and from an old market-
woman how to catch the itch-insect.  It borrowed acupuncture and the
moxa from the Japanese heathen, and was taught the use of lobelia by
the American savage.  It stands ready to-day to accept anything from
any theorist, from any empiric who can make out a good case for his
discovery or his remedy.  "Science" is one of its benefactors, but
only one, out of many.  Ask the wisest practising physician you know,
what branches of science help him habitually, and what amount of
knowledge relating to each branch he requires for his professional
duties.  He will tell you that scientific training has a value
independent of all the special knowledge acquired.  He will tell you
that many facts are explained by studying them in the wider range of
related facts to which they belong.  He will gratefully recognize
that the anatomist has furnished him with indispensable data, that
the physiologist has sometimes put him on the track of new modes of
treatment, that the chemist has isolated the active principles of his
medicines, has taught him how to combine them, has from time to time
offered him new remedial agencies, and so of others of his allies.
But he will also tell you, if I am not mistaken, that his own branch
of knowledge is so extensive and so perplexing that he must accept
most of his facts ready made at their hands.  He will own to you that
in the struggle for life which goes on day and night in our thoughts
as in the outside world of nature, much that he learned under the
name of science has died out, and that simple homely experience has
largely taken the place of that scholastic knowledge to which he and
perhaps some of his instructors once attached a paremount importance.

This, then, is my view of scientific training as conducted in courses
such as you are entering on.  Up to a certain point I believe in set
Lectures as excellent adjuncts to what is far more important,
practical instruction at the bedside, in the operating room, and
under the eye of the Demonstrator.  But I am so far from wishing
these courses extended, that I think some of them--suppose I say my
own--would almost bear curtailing.  Do you want me to describe more
branches of the sciatic and crural nerves?  I can take Fischer's
plates, and lecturing on that scale fill up my whole course and not
finish the nerves alone.  We must stop somewhere, and for my own part
I think the scholastic exercises of our colleges have already claimed
their full share of the student's time without our seeking to extend
them.

I trust I have vindicated the apparent inconsequence of teaching
young students a good deal that seems at first sight profitless, but
which helps them to learn and retain what is profitable.  But this is
an inquisitive age, and if we insist on piling up beyond a certain
height knowledge which is in itself mere trash and lumber to a man
whose life is to be one long fight with death and disease, there will
be some sharp questions asked by and by, and our quick-witted people
will perhaps find they can get along as well without the professor's
cap as without the bishop's mitre and the monarch's crown.

I myself have nothing to do with clinical teaching.  Yet I do not
hesitate to say it is more essential than all the rest put together,
so far as the ordinary practice of medicine is concerned; and this is
by far the most important thing to be learned, because it deals with
so many more lives than any other branch of the profession.  So of
personal instruction, such as we give and others give in the interval
of lectures, much of it at the bedside, some of it in the laboratory,
some in the microscope-room, some in the recitation-room, I think it
has many advantages of its own over the winter course, and I do not
wish to see it shortened for the sake of prolonging what seems to me
long enough already.

If I am jealous of the tendency to expand the time given to the
acquisition of curious knowledge, at the expense of the plain old-
fashioned bedside teachings, I only share the feeling which Sydenham
expressed two hundred years ago, using an image I have already
borrowed.  "He would be no honest and successful pilot who was to
apply himself with less industry to avoid rocks and sands and bring
his vessel safely home, than to search into the causes of the ebbing
and flowing of the sea, which, though very well for a philosopher, is
foreign to him whose business it is to secure the ship.  So neither
will a physician, whose province it is to cure diseases, be able to
do so, though he be a person of great genius, who bestows less time
on the hidden and intricate method of nature, and adapting his means
thereto, than on curious and subtle speculation."

"Medicine is my wife and Science is my mistress," said Dr. Rush.  I
do not think that the breach of the seventh commandment can be shown
to have been of advantage to the legitimate owner of his affections.
Read what Dr. Elisha Bartlett says of him as a practitioner, or ask
one of our own honored ex-professors, who studied under him, whether
Dr. Rush had ever learned the meaning of that saying of Lord Bacon,
that man is the minister and interpreter of Nature, or whether he did
not speak habitually of Nature as an intruder in the sick room, from
which his art was to expel her as an incompetent and a meddler.

All a man's powers are not too much for such a profession as
Medicine.  "He is a learned man," said old Parson Emmons of Franklin,
"who understands one subject, and he is a very learned man who
understands two subjects."  Schonbein says he has been studying
oxygen for thirty years.  Mitscherlich said it took fourteen years to
establish a new fact in chemistry.  Aubrey says of Harvey, the
discoverer of the circulation, that "though all his profession would
allow him to be an excellent anatomist, I have never heard of any who
admired his therapeutic way."  My learned and excellent friend before
referred to, Dr. Brown of Edinburgh, from whose very lively and
sensible Essay, "Locke and Sydenham," I have borrowed several of my
citations, contrasts Sir Charles Bell, the discoverer, the man of
science, with Dr. Abercrombie, the master in the diagnosis and
treatment of disease.  It is through one of the rarest of
combinations that we have in our Faculty a teacher on whom the
scientific mantle of Bell has fallen, and who yet stands preeminent
in the practical treatment of the class of diseases which his
inventive and ardent experimental genius has illustrated.  M. Brown-
Sequard's example is as, eloquent as his teaching in proof of the
advantages of well directed scientific investigation.  But those who
emulate his success at once as a discoverer and a practitioner must
be content like him to limit their field of practice.  The highest
genius cannot afford in our time to forget the ancient precept,
Divide et impera.

"I suppose I must go and earn this guinea," said a medical man who
was sent for while he was dissecting an animal.  I should not have
cared to be his patient.  His dissection would do me no good, and his
thoughts would be too much upon it.  I want a whole man for my
doctor, not a half one.  I would have sent for a humbler
practitioner, who would have given himself entirely to me, and told
the other--who was no less a man than John Hunter--to go on and
finish the dissection of his tiger.

Sydenham's "Read Don Quixote" should be addressed not to the student,
but to the Professor of today.  Aimed at him it means, "Do not be too
learned."

Do not think you are going to lecture to picked young men who are
training themselves to be scientific discoverers.  They are of fair
average capacity, and they are going to be working doctors.

These young men are to have some very serious vital facts to deal
with.  I will mention a few of them.

Every other resident adult you meet in these streets is or will be
more or less tuberculous.  This is not an extravagant estimate, as
very nearly one third of the deaths of adults in Boston last year
were from phthisis.  If the relative number is less in our other
northern cities, it is probably in a great measure because they are
more unhealthy; that is, they have as much, or nearly as much,
consumption, but they have more fevers or other fatal diseases.

These heavy-eyed men with the alcoholized brains, these pallid youths
with the nicotized optic ganglia and thinking-marrows brown as their
own meerschaums, of whom you meet too many,--will ask all your wisdom
to deal with their poisoned nerves and their enfeebled wills.

Nearly seventeen hundred children under five years of age died last
year in this city.  A poor human article, no doubt, in many cases,
still, worth an attempt to save them, especially when we remember the
effect of Dr. Clarke's suggestion at the Dublin Hospital, by which
some twenty-five or thirty thousand children's lives have probably
been saved in a single city.

Again, the complaint is often heard that the native population is not
increasing so rapidly as in former generations.  The breeding and
nursing period of American women is one of peculiar delicacy and
frequent infirmity.  Many of them must require a considerable
interval between the reproductive efforts, to repair damages arid
regain strength.  This matter is not to be decided by an appeal to
unschooled nature.  It is the same question as that of the deformed
pelvis,--one of degree.  The facts of mal-vitalization are as much to
be attended to as those of mal-formation.  If the woman with a
twisted pelvis is to be considered an exempt, the woman with a
defective organization should be recognized as belonging to the
invalid corps.  We shudder to hear what is alleged as to the
prevalence of criminal practices; if back of these there can be shown
organic incapacity or overtaxing of too limited powers, the facts
belong to the province of the practical physician, as well as of the
moralist and the legislator, and require his gravest consideration.

Take the important question of bleeding.  Is venesection done with
forever?  Six years ago it was said here in an introductory Lecture
that it would doubtless come back again sooner or later.  A fortnight
ago I found myself in the cars with one of the most sensible and
esteemed practitioners in New England.  He took out his wallet and
showed me two lancets, which he carried with him; he had never given
up their use.  This is a point you will have to consider.

Or, to mention one out of many questionable remedies, shall you give
Veratrum Viride in fevers and inflammations?  It makes the pulse
slower in these affections.  Then the presumption would naturally be
that it does harm.  The caution with reference to it on this ground
was long ago recorded in the Lecture above referred to.  See what Dr.
John Hughes Bennett says of it in the recent edition of his work on
Medicine.  Nothing but the most careful clinical experience can
settle this and such points of treatment.

These are all practical questions--questions of life and death, and
every day will be full of just such questions.  Take the problem of
climate.  A patient comes to you with asthma and wants to know where
he can breathe; another comes to you with phthisis and wants to know
where he can live.  What boy's play is nine tenths of all that is
taught in many a pretentious course of lectures, compared with what
an accurate and extensive knowledge of the advantages and
disadvantages of different residences in these and other complaints
would be to a practising physician

I saw the other day a gentleman living in Canada, who had spent seven
successive winters in Egypt, with the entire relief of certain
obscure thoracic symptoms which troubled him while at home.  I saw,
two months ago, another gentleman from Minnesota, an observer and a
man of sense, who considered that State as the great sanatorium for
all pulmonary complaints.  If half our grown population are or will
be more or less tuberculous, the question of colonizing Florida
assumes a new aspect.  Even within the borders of our own State, the
very interesting researches of Dr. Bowditch show that there is a
great variation in the amount of tuberculous disease in different
towns, apparently connected with local conditions.  The hygienic map
of a State is quite as valuable as its geological map, and it is the
business of every practising physician to know it thoroughly.  They
understand this in England, and send a patient with a dry irritating
cough to Torquay or Penzance, while they send another with relaxed
bronchial membranes to Clifton or Brighton.  Here is another great
field for practical study.

So as to the all-important question of diet.  "Of all the means of
cure at our command," says Dr. Bennett, "a regulation of the quantity
and quality of the diet is by far the most powerful."  Dr. MacCormac
would perhaps except the air we breathe, for he thinks that impure
air, especially in sleeping rooms, is the great cause of tubercle.
It is sufficiently proved that the American,--the New Englander,--the
Bostonian, can breed strong and sound children, generation after
generation,--nay, I have shown by the record of a particular family
that vital losses may be retrieved, and a feeble race grow to lusty
vigor in this very climate and locality.  Is not the question why our
young men and women so often break down, and how they can be kept
from breaking down, far more important for physicians to settle than
whether there is one cranial vertebra, or whether there are four, or
none?

--But I have a taste for the homologies, I want to go deeply into the
subject of embryology, I want to analyze the protonihilates
precipitated from pigeon's milk by the action of the lunar spectrum,-
shall I not follow my star,--shall I not obey my instinct,--shall I
not give myself to the lofty pursuits of science for its own sake?

Certainly you may, if you like.  But take down your sign, or never
put it up.  That is the way Dr. Owen and Dr. Huxley, Dr. Agassiz and
Dr. Jeffries Wyman, Dr. Gray and Dr. Charles T. Jackson settled the
difficulty.  We all admire the achievements of this band of
distinguished doctors who do not practise.  But we say of their work
and of all pure science, as the French officer said of the charge of
the six hundred at Balaclava, "C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la
guerre,"--it is very splendid, but it is not a practising doctor's
business.  His patient has a right to the cream of his life and not
merely to the thin milk that is left after "science" has skimmed it
off.  The best a physician can give is never too good for the
patient.

It is often a disadvantage to a young practitioner to be known for
any accomplishment outside of his profession.  Haller lost his
election as Physician to the Hospital in his native city of Berne,
principally on the ground that he was a poet.  In his later years the
physician may venture more boldly.  Astruc was sixty-nine years old
when he published his "Conjectures," the first attempt, we are told,
to decide the authorship of the Pentateuch showing anything like a
discerning criticism.  Sir Benjamin Brodie was seventy years old
before he left his physiological and surgical studies to indulge in
psychological speculations.  The period of pupilage will be busy
enough in acquiring the knowledge needed, and the season of active
practice will leave little leisure for any but professional studies.

Dr. Graves of Dublin, one of the first clinical teachers of our time,
always insisted on his students' beginning at once to visit the
hospital.  At the bedside the student must learn to treat disease,
and just as certainly as we spin out and multiply our academic
prelections we shall work in more and more stuffing, more and more
rubbish, more and more irrelevant, useless detail which the student
will get rid of just as soon as he leaves us.  Then the next thing
will be a new organization, with an examining board of first-rate
practical men, who will ask the candidate questions that mean
business,--who will make him operate if he is to be a surgeon, and
try him at the bedside if he is to be a physician,--and not puzzle
him with scientific conundrums which not more than one of the
questioners could answer himself or ever heard of since he graduated.

Or these women who are hammering at the gates on which is written "No
admittance for the mothers of mankind," will by and by organize an
institution, which starting from that skilful kind of nursing which
Florence Nightingale taught so well, will work backwards through
anodynes, palliatives, curatives, preventives, until with little show
of science it imparts most of what is most valuable in those branches
of the healing art it professes to teach.  When that time comes, the
fitness of women for certain medical duties, which Hecquet advocated
in 1708, which Douglas maintained in 1736, which Dr. John Ware, long
the honored Professor of Theory and Practice in this Institution,
upheld within our own recollection in the face of his own recorded
opinion to the contrary, will very possibly be recognized.

My advice to every teacher less experienced than myself would be,
therefore: Do not fret over the details you have to omit; you
probably teach altogether too many as it is.  Individuals may learn a
thing with once hearing it, but the only way of teaching a whole
class is by enormous repetition, representation, and illustration in
all possible forms.  Now and then you will have a young man on your
benches like the late Waldo Burnett,--not very often, if you lecture
half a century.  You cannot pretend to lecture chiefly for men like
that,--a Mississippi raft might as well take an ocean-steamer in tow.
To meet his wants you would have to leave the rest of your class
behind and that you must not do.  President Allen of Jefferson
College says that his instruction has been successful in proportion
as it has been elementary.  It may be a humiliating statement, but it
is one which I have found true in my own experience.

To the student I would say, that however plain and simple may be our
teaching, he must expect to forget much which he follows
intelligently in the lecture-room.  But it is not the same as if he
had never learned it.  A man must get a thing before he can forget
it.  There is a great world of ideas we cannot voluntarily recall,--
they are outside the limits of the will.  But they sway our conscious
thought as the unseen planets influence the movements of those within
the sphere of vision.  No man knows how much he knows,--how many
ideas he has,--any more than he knows how many blood-globules roll in
his veins.  Sometimes accident brings back here and there one, but
the mind is full of irrevocable remembrances and unthinkable
thoughts, which take a part in all its judgments as indestructible
forces.  Some of you must feel your scientific deficiencies painfully
after your best efforts.  But every one can acquire what is most
essential.  A man of very moderate ability may be a good physician,
if he devotes himself faithfully to the work.  More than this, a
positively dull man, in the ordinary acceptation of the term,
sometimes makes a safer practitioner than one who has, we will say,
five per cent. more brains than his average neighbor, but who thinks
it is fifty per cent. more.  Skulls belonging to this last variety of
the human race are more common, I may remark, than specimens like the
Neanderthal cranium, a cast of which you will find on the table in
the Museum.

Whether the average talent be high or low, the Colleges of the land
must make the best commodity they can out of such material as the
country and the cities furnish them.  The community must have Doctors
as it must have bread.  It uses up its Doctors just as it wears out
its shoes, and requires new ones.  All the bread need not be French
rolls, all the shoes need not be patent leather ones; but the bread
must be something that can be eaten, and the shoes must be something
that can be worn.  Life must somehow find food for the two forces
that rub everything to pieces, or burn it to ashes,--friction and
oxygen.  Doctors are oxydable products, and the schools must keep
furnishing new ones as the old ones turn into oxyds; some of first-
rate quality that burn with a great light, some of a lower grade of
brilliancy, some honestly, unmistakably, by the grace of God, of
moderate gifts, or in simpler phrase, dull.

The public will give every honest and reasonably competent worker in
the healing art a hearty welcome.  It is on the whole very loyal to
the Medical Profession.  Three successive years have borne witness to
the feeling with which this Institution, representing it in its
educational aspect, is regarded by those who are themselves most
honored and esteemed.  The great Master of Natural Science bade the
last year's class farewell in our behalf, in those accents which
delight every audience.  The Head of our ancient University honored
us in the same way in the preceding season.  And how can we forget
that other occasion when the Chief Magistrate of the Commonwealth,
that noble citizen whom we have just lost, large-souled, sweet-
natured, always ready for every kind office, came among us at our
bidding, and talked to us of our duties in words as full of wisdom as
his heart was of goodness?

You have not much to fear, I think, from the fancy practitioners.
The vulgar quackeries drop off, atrophied, one after another.
Homoeopathy has long been encysted, and is carried on the body
medical as quietly as an old wen.  Every year gives you a more
reasoning and reasonable people to deal with.  See how it is in
Literature.  The dynasty of British dogmatists, after lasting a
hundred years and more, is on its last legs.  Thomas Carlyle, third
in the line of descent, finds an audience very different from those
which listened to the silver speech of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and
the sonorous phrases of Samuel Johnson.  We read him, we smile at his
clotted English, his "swarmery" and other picturesque expressions,
but we lay down his tirade as we do one of Dr. Cumming's
interpretations of prophecy, which tells us that the world is coming
to an end next week or next month, if the weather permits,--not
otherwise,--feeling very sure that the weather will be unfavorable.

It is the same common-sense public you will appeal to.  The less
pretension you make, the better they will like you in the long run.
I hope we shall make everything as plain and as simple to you as we
can.  I would never use a long word, even, where a short one would
answer the purpose.  I know there are professors in this country who
"ligate" arteries.  Other surgeons only tie them, and it stops the
bleeding just as well.  It is the familiarity and simplicity of
bedside instruction which makes it so pleasant as well as so
profitable.  A good clinical teacher is himself a Medical School.  We
need not wonder that our young men are beginning to announce
themselves not only as graduates of this or that College, but also as
pupils of some one distinguished master.

I wish to close this Lecture, if you will allow me a few moments
longer, with a brief sketch of an instructor and practitioner whose
character was as nearly a model one in both capacities as I can find
anywhere recorded.

Dr. JAMES JACKSON, Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine
in this University from 1812 to 1846, and whose name has been since
retained on our rolls as Professor Emeritus, died on the 27th of
August last, in the ninetieth year of his age.  He studied his
profession, as I have already mentioned, with Dr. Holyoke of Salem,
one of the few physicians who have borne witness to their knowledge
of the laws of life by living to complete their hundredth year.  I
think the student took his Old Master, as he always loved to call
him, as his model; each was worthy of the other, and both were bright
examples to all who come after them.

I remember that in the sermon preached by Dr. Grazer after Dr.
Holyoke's death, one of the points most insisted upon as
characteristic of that wise and good old man was the perfect balance
of all his faculties.  The same harmonious adjustment of powers, the
same symmetrical arrangement of life, the same complete fulfilment of
every day's duties, without haste and without needless delay, which
characterized the master, equally distinguished the scholar.  A
glance at the life of our own Old Master, if I can do any justice at
all to his excellences, will give you something to carry away from
this hour's meeting not unworthy to be remembered.

From December, 1797, to October, 1799, he remained with Dr. Holyoke
as a student, a period which he has spoken of as a most interesting
and most gratifying part of his life.  After this he passed eight
months in London, and on his return, in October, 1800, he began
business in Boston.

He had followed Mr. Cline, as I have mentioned, and was competent to
practise Surgery.  But he found Dr. John Collins Warren had already
occupied the ground which at that day hardly called for more than one
leading practitioner, and wisely chose the Medical branch of the
profession.  He had only himself to rely upon, but he had confidence
in his prospects, conscious, doubtless, of his own powers, knowing
his own industry and determination, and being of an eminently
cheerful and hopeful disposition.  No better proof of his spirit can
be given than that, just a year from the time when he began to
practise as a physician, he took that eventful step which in such a
man implies that he sees his way clear to a position; he married a
lady blessed with many gifts, but not bringing him a fortune to
paralyze his industry.

He had not miscalculated his chances in life.  He very soon rose into
a good practice, and began the founding of that reputation which grew
with his years, until he stood by general consent at the head of his
chosen branch of the profession, to say the least, in this city and
in all this region of country.  His skill and wisdom were the last
tribunal to which the sick and suffering could appeal.  The community
trusted and loved him, the profession recognized him as the noblest
type of the physician.  The young men whom he had taught wandered
through foreign hospitals; where they learned many things that were
valuable, and many that were curious; but as they grew older and
began to think more of their ability to help the sick than their
power of talking about phenomena, they began to look back to the
teaching of Dr. Jackson, as he, after his London experience, looked
back to that of Dr. Holyoke.  And so it came to be at last that the
bare mention of his name in any of our medical assemblies would call
forth such a tribute of affectionate regard as is only yielded to age
when it brings with it the record of a life spent in well doing.

No accident ever carries a man to eminence such as his in the medical
profession.  He who looks for it must want it earnestly and work for
it vigorously; Nature must have qualified him in many ways, and
education must have equipped him with various knowledge, or his
reputation will evaporate before it reaches the noon-day blaze of
fame.  How did Dr. Jackson gain the position which all conceded to
him?  In the answer to this question some among you may find a key
that shall unlock the gate opening on that fair field of the future
of which all dream but which not all will ever reach.

First of all, he truly loved his profession.  He had no intellectual
ambitions outside of it, literary, scientific or political.  To him
it was occupation enough to apply at the bedside the best of all that
he knew for the good of his patient; to protect the community against
the inroads of pestilence; to teach the young all that he himself had
been taught, with all that his own experience had added; to leave on
record some of the most important results of his long observation.

With his patients he was so perfect at all points that it is hard to
overpraise him.  I have seen many noted British and French and
American practitioners, but I never saw the man so altogether
admirable at the bedside of the sick as Dr. James Jackson.  His smile
was itself a remedy better than the potable gold and the dissolved
pearls that comforted the praecordia of mediaeval monarchs.  Did a
patient, alarmed without cause, need encouragement, it carried the
sunshine of hope into his heart and put all his whims to flight, as
David's harp cleared the haunted chamber of the sullen king.  Had the
hour come, not for encouragement, but for sympathy, his face, his
voice, his manner all showed it, because his heart felt it.  So
gentle was he, so thoughtful, so calm, so absorbed in the case before
him, not to turn round and look for a tribute to his sagacity, not to
bolster himself in a favorite theory, but to find out all he could,
and to weigh gravely and cautiously all that he found, that to follow
him in his morning visit was not only to take a lesson in the healing
art, it was learning how to learn, how to move, how to look, how to
feel, if that can be learned.  To visit with Dr. Jackson was a
medical education.

He was very firm, with all his kindness.  He would have the truth
about his patients.  The nurses found it out; and the shrewder ones
never ventured to tell him anything but a straight story.  A clinical
dialogue between Dr. Jackson and Miss Rebecca Taylor, sometime nurse
in the Massachusetts General Hospital, a mistress in her calling, was
as good questioning and answering as one would be like to hear
outside of the court-room.

Of his practice you can form an opinion from his book called "Letters
to a Young Physician."  Like all sensible men from the days of
Hippocrates to the present, he knew that diet and regimen were more
important than any drug or than all drugs put together.  Witness his
treatment of phthisis and of epilepsy.  He retained, however, more
confidence in some remedial agents than most of the younger
generation would concede to them.  Yet his materia medica was a
simple one.

"When I first went to live with Dr. Holyoke," he says, "in 1797,
showing me his shop, he said, 'There seems to you to be a great
variety of medicines here, and that it will take you long to get
acquainted with them, but most of them are unimportant.  There are
four which are equal to all the rest, namely, Mercury, Antimony, Bark
and Opium.'"  And Dr. Jackson adds, "I can only say of his practice,
the longer I have lived, I have thought better and better of it."
When he thought it necessary to give medicine, he gave it in earnest.
He hated half-practice--giving a little of this or that, so as to be
able to say that one had done something, in case a consultation was
held, or a still more ominous event occurred.  He would give opium,
for instance, as boldly as the late Dr. Fisher of Beverly, but he
followed the aphorism of the Father of Medicine, and kept extreme
remedies for extreme cases.

When it came to the "non-naturals," as he would sometimes call them,
after the old physicians,--namely, air, meat and drink, sleep and
watching, motion and rest, the retentions and excretions, and the
affections of the mind,--he was, as I have said, of the school of
sensible practitioners, in distinction from that vast community of
quacks, with or without the diploma, who think the chief end of man
is to support apothecaries, and are never easy until they can get
every patient upon a regular course of something nasty or noxious.
Nobody was so precise in his directions about diet, air, and
exercise, as Dr. Jackson.  He had the same dislike to the a peu pres,
the about so much, about so often, about so long, which I afterwards
found among the punctilious adherents of the numerical system at La
Pitie.

He used to insist on one small point with a certain philological
precision, namely, the true meaning of the word "cure."  He would
have it that to cure a patient was simply to care for him.  I refer
to it as showing what his idea was of the relation of the physician
to the patient.  It was indeed to care for him, as if his life were
bound up in him, to watch his incomings and outgoings, to stand guard
at every avenue that disease might enter, to leave nothing to chance;
not merely to throw a few pills and powders into one pan of the
scales of Fate, while Death the skeleton was seated in the other, but
to lean with his whole weight on the side of life, and shift the
balance in its favor if it lay in human power to do it.  Such
devotion as this is only to be looked for in the man who gives
himself wholly up to the business of healing, who considers Medicine
itself a Science, or if not a science, is willing to follow it as an
art,--the noblest of arts, which the gods and demigods of ancient
religions did not disdain to practise and to teach.

The same zeal made him always ready to listen to any new suggestion
which promised to be useful, at a period of life when many men find
it hard to learn new methods and accept new doctrines.  Few of his
generation became so accomplished as he in the arts of direct
exploration; coming straight from the Parisian experts, I have
examined many patients with him, and have had frequent opportunities
of observing his skill in percussion and auscultation.

One element in his success, a trivial one compared with others, but
not to be despised, was his punctuality.  He always carried two
watches,--I doubt if he told why, any more than Dr. Johnson told what
he did with the orange-peel,--but probably with reference to this
virtue.  He was as much to be depended upon at the appointed time as
the solstice or the equinox.  There was another point I have heard
him speak of as an important rule with him; to come at the hour when
he was expected; if he had made his visit for several days
successively at ten o'clock, for instance, not to put it off, if be
could possibly help it, until eleven, and so keep a nervous patient
and an anxious family waiting for him through a long, weary hour.

If I should attempt to characterize his teaching, I should say that
while it conveyed the best results of his sagacious and extended
observation, it was singularly modest, cautious, simple, sincere.
Nothing was for show, for self-love; there was no rhetoric, no
declamation, no triumphant "I told you so," but the plain statement
of a clear-headed honest man, who knows that he is handling one of
the gravest subjects that interest humanity.  His positive
instructions were full of value, but the spirit in which he taught
inspired that loyal love of truth which lies at the bottom of all
real excellence.

I will not say that, during his long career, Dr. Jackson never made
an enemy.  I have heard him tell how, in his very early days, old Dr.
Danforth got into a towering passion with him about some professional
consultation, and exploded a monosyllable or two of the more
energetic kind on the occasion.  I remember that that somewhat
peculiar personage, Dr. Waterhouse, took it hardly when Dr. Jackson
succeeded to his place as Professor of Theory and Practice.  A young
man of Dr. Jackson's talent and energy could hardly take the position
that belonged to him without crowding somebody in a profession where
three in a bed is the common rule of the household.  But he was a
peaceful man and a peace-maker all his days.  No man ever did more,
if so much, to produce and maintain the spirit of harmony for which
we consider our medical community as somewhat exceptionally
distinguished.

If this harmony should ever be threatened, I could wish that every
impatient and irritable member of the profession would read that
beautiful, that noble Preface to the "Letters," addressed to John
Collins Warren.  I know nothing finer in the medical literature of
all time than this Prefatory Introduction.  It is a golden prelude,
fit to go with the three great Prefaces which challenge the
admiration of scholars,--Calvin's to his Institutes, De Thou's to his
History, and Casaubon's to his Polybius,--not because of any learning
or rhetoric, though it is charmingly written, but for a spirit
flowing through it to which learning and rhetoric are but as the
breath that is wasted on the air to the Mood that warms the heart.

Of a similar character is this short extract which I am permitted to
make from a private letter of his to a dear young friend.  He was
eighty-three years old at the time of writing it.

"I have not loved everybody whom I have known, but I have striven to
see the good points in the characters of all men and women.  At first
I must have done this from something in my own nature, for I was not
aware of it, and yet was doing it without any plan, when one day,
sixty years ago, a friend whom I loved and respected said this to me,
'Ah, James, I see that you are destined to succeed in the world, and
to make friends, because you are so ready to see the good point in
the characters of those you meet.'"

I close this imperfect notice of some features in the character of
this most honored and beloved of physicians by applying to him the
words which were written of William Heberden, whose career was not
unlike his own, and who lived to the same patriarchal age.

"From his early youth he had always entertained a deep sense of
religion, a consummate love of virtue, an ardent thirst after
knowledge, and an earnest desire to promote the welfare and happiness
of all mankind.  By these qualities, accompanied with great sweetness
of manners, he acquired the love and esteem of all good men, in a
degree which perhaps very few have experienced; and after passing an
active life with the uniform testimony of a good conscience, he
became an eminent example of its influence, in the cheerfulness and
serenity of his latest age."

Such was the man whom I offer to you as a model, young gentlemen, at
the outset of your medical career.  I hope that many of you will
recognize some traits of your own special teachers scattered through
various parts of the land in the picture I have drawn.  Let me assure
you that whatever you may learn in this or any other course of public
lectures,--and I trust you will learn a great deal,--the daily
guidance, counsel, example, of your medical father, for such the Oath
of Hippocrates tells you to consider your preceptor, will, if he is
in any degree like him of whom I have spoken, be the foundation on
which all that we teach is reared, and perhaps outlive most of our
teachings, as in Dr. Jackson's memory the last lessons that remained
with him were those of his Old Master.






THE MEDICAL PROFESSION IN MASSACHUSETTS.

A Lecture of a Course by members of the Massachusetts Historical
Society, delivered before the Lowell Institute, January 29, 1869.

The medical history of eight generations, told in an hour, must be in
many parts a mere outline.  The details I shall give will relate
chiefly to the first century.  I shall only indicate the leading
occurrences, with the more prominent names of the two centuries which
follow, and add some considerations suggested by the facts which have
been passed in review.

A geographer who was asked to describe the tides of Massachusetts
Bay, would have to recognize the circumstance that they are a limited
manifestation of a great oceanic movement.  To consider them apart
from this, would be to localize a planetary phenomenon, and to
provincialize a law of the universe.  The art of healing in
Massachusetts has shared more or less fully and readily the movement
which, with its periods of ebb and flow, has been raising its level
from age to age throughout the better part of Christendom.  Its
practitioners brought with them much of the knowledge and many of the
errors of the Old World; they have always been in communication with
its wisdom and its folly; it is not without interest to see how far
the new conditions in which they found themselves have been favorable
or unfavorable to the growth of sound medical knowledge and practice.

The state of medicine is an index of the civilization of an age and
country,--one of the best, perhaps, by which it can be judged.
Surgery invokes the aid of all the mechanical arts.  From the rude
violences of the age of stone,--a relic of which we may find in the
practice of Zipporah, the wife of Moses,--to the delicate operations
of to-day upon patients lulled into temporary insensibility, is a
progress which presupposes a skill in metallurgy and in the labors of
the workshop and the laboratory it has taken uncounted generations to
accumulate.  Before the morphia which deadens the pain of neuralgia,
or the quinine which arrests the fit of an ague, can find their place
in our pharmacies, commerce must have perfected its machinery, and
science must have refined its processes, through periods only to be
counted by the life of nations.  Before the means which nature and
art have put in the hands of the medical practitioner can be fairly
brought into use, the prejudices of the vulgar must be overcome, the
intrusions of false philosophy must be fenced out, and the
partnership with the priesthood dissolved.  All this implies that
freedom and activity of thought which belong only to the most
advanced conditions of society; and the progress towards this is by
gradations as significant of wide-spread changes, as are the varying
states of the barometer of far-extended conditions of the atmosphere.

Apart, then, from its special and technical interest, my subject has
a meaning which gives a certain importance, and even dignity, to
details in themselves trivial and almost unworthy of record.  A
medical entry in Governor Winthrop's journal may seem at first sight
a mere curiosity; but, rightly interpreted, it is a key to his whole
system of belief as to the order of the universe and the relations
between man and his Maker.  Nothing sheds such light on the
superstitions of an age as the prevailing interpretation and
treatment of disease.  When the touch of a profligate monarch was a
cure for one of the most inveterate of maladies, when the common
symptoms of hysteria were prayed over as marks of demoniacal
possession, we might well expect the spiritual realms of thought to
be peopled with still stranger delusions.

Let us go before the Pilgrims of the Mayflower, and look at the
shores on which they were soon to land.  A wasting pestilence had so
thinned the savage tribes that it was sometimes piously interpreted
as having providentially prepared the way for the feeble band of
exiles.  Cotton Mather, who, next to the witches, hated the
"tawnies," "wild beasts," "blood-hounds," "rattlesnakes,"
"infidels," as in different places he calls the unhappy Aborigines,
describes the condition of things in his lively way, thus:
"The Indians in these Parts had newly, even about a Year or Two
before, been visited with such a prodigious Pestilence; as carried
away not a Tenth, but Nine Parts of Ten (yea't is said Nineteen of
Twenty) among them so that the Woods were almost cleared of those
pernicious Creatures to make Room for a better Growth."

What this pestilence was has been much discussed.  It is variously
mentioned by different early writers as "the plague," "a great and
grievous plague," "a sore consumption," as attended with spots which
left unhealed places on those who recovered, as making the "whole
surface yellow as with a garment."  Perhaps no disease answers all
these conditions so well as smallpox.  We know from different sources
what frightful havoc it made among the Indians in after years,--in
1631, for instance, when it swept away the aboriginal inhabitants of
"whole towns," and in 1633.  We have seen a whole tribe, the Mandans,
extirpated by it in our own day.  The word "plague" was used very
vaguely, as in the description of the "great sickness" found among
the Indians by the expedition of 1622.  This same great sickness
could hardly have been yellow fever, as it occurred in the month of
November.  I cannot think, therefore, that either the scourge of the
East or our Southern malarial pestilence was the disease that wasted
the Indians.  As for the yellowness like a garment, that is too
familiar to the eyes of all who have ever looked on the hideous mask
of confluent variola.

Without the presence or the fear of these exotic maladies, the
forlorn voyagers of the Mayflower had sickness enough to contend
with.  At their first landing at Cape Cod, gaunt and hungry and
longing for fresh food, they found upon the sandy shore "great
mussel's, and very fat and full of sea-pearl."  Sailors and
passengers indulged in the treacherous delicacy; which seems to have
been the sea-clam; and found that these mollusks, like the shell the
poet tells of, remembered their august abode, and treated the way-
worn adventurers to a gastric reminiscence of the heaving billows.
In the mean time it blew and snowed and froze.  The water turned to
ice on their clothes, and made them many times like coats of iron.
Edward Tilley had like to have "sounded" with cold.  The gunner, too,
was sick unto death, but "hope of trucking" kept him on his feet,--a
Yankee, it should seem, when he first touched the shore of New
England.  Most, if not all, got colds and coughs, which afterwards
turned to scurvy, whereof many died.

How can we wonder that the crowded and tempest-tossed voyagers, many
of them already suffering, should have fallen before the trials of
the first winter in Plymouth?  Their imperfect shelter, their
insufficient supply of bread, their salted food, now in unwholesome
condition, account too well for the diseases and the mortality that
marked this first dreadful season; weakness, swelling of the limbs,
and other signs of scurvy, betrayed the want of proper nourishment
and protection from the elements.  In December six of their number
died, in January eight, in February, seventeen, in March thirteen.
With the advance of spring the mortality diminished, the sick and
lame began to recover, and the colonists, saddened but not
disheartened, applied themselves to the labors of the opening year.

One of the most pressing needs of the early colonists must have been
that of physicians and surgeons.  In Mr. Savage's remarkable
Genealogical Dictionary of the first settlers who came over before
1692 and their descendants to the third generation, I find scattered
through the four crowded volumes the names of one hundred and thirty-
four medical practitioners.  Of these, twelve, and probably many
more, practised surgery; three were barber-surgeons.  A little
incident throws a glimmer from the dark lantern of memory upon
William Direly, one of these practitioners with the razor and the
lancet.  He was lost between Boston and Roxbury in a violent tempest
of wind and snow; ten days afterwards a son was born to his widow,
and with a touch of homely sentiment, I had almost said poetry, they
called the little creature "Fathergone" Direly.  Six or seven,
probably a larger number, were ministers as well as physicians, one
of whom, I am sorry to say, took to drink and tumbled into the
Connecticut River, and so ended.  One was not only doctor, but also
schoolmaster and poet.  One practised medicine and kept a tavern.
One was a butcher, but calls himself a surgeon in his will, a union
of callings which suggests an obvious pleasantry.  One female
practitioner, employed by her own sex,--Ann Moore,--was the precursor
of that intrepid sisterhood whose cause it has long been my pleasure
and privilege to advocate on all fitting occasions.

Outside of this list I must place the name of Thomas Wilkinson, who
was complained of, is 1676, for practising contrary to law.

Many names in the catalogue of these early physicians have been
associated, in later periods, with the practice of the profession,--
among them, Boylston, Clark, Danforth, Homan, Jeffrey, Kittredge,
Oliver, Peaslee, Randall, Shattuck, Thacher, Wellington, Williams,
Woodward.  Touton was a Huguenot, Burchsted a German from Silesia,
Lunerus a German or a Pole; "Pighogg Churrergeon," I hope, for the
honor of the profession, was only Peacock disguised under this alias,
which would not, I fear, prove very attractive to patients.

What doctrines and practice were these colonists likely to bring,
with them?

Two principal schools of medical practice prevailed in the Old World
during the greater part of the seventeenth century.  The first held
to the old methods of Galen: its theory was that the body, the
microcosm, like the macrocosm, was made up of the four elements--
fire, air, water, earth; having respectively the qualities hot, dry,
moist, cold.  The body was to be preserved in health by keeping each
of these qualities in its natural proportion; heat, by the proper
temperature; moisture, by the due amount of fluid; and so as to the
rest.  Diseases which arose from excess of heat were to be attacked
by cooling remedies; those from excess of cold, by heating ones; and
so of the other derangements of balance.  This was truly the
principle of contraries contrariis, which ill-informed persons have
attempted to make out to be the general doctrine of medicine, whereas
there is no general dogma other than this: disease is to be treated
by anything that is proved to cure it.  The means the Galenist
employed were chiefly diet and vegetable remedies, with the use of
the lancet and other depleting agents.  He attributed the four
fundamental qualities to different vegetables, in four different
degrees; thus chicory was cold in the fourth degree, pepper was hot
in the fourth, endive was cold and dry in the second, and bitter
almonds were hot in the first and dry in the second degree.  When we
say "cool as a cucumber," we are talking Galenism.  The seeds of that
vegetable ranked as one of "the four greater cold seeds" of this
system.

Galenism prevailed mostly in the south of Europe and France.  The
readers of Moliere will have no difficulty in recalling some of its
favorite modes of treatment, and the abundant mirth he extracted from
them.

These Galenists were what we should call "herb-doctors" to-day.
Their insignificant infusions lost credit after a time; their
absurdly complicated mixtures excited contempt, and their nauseous
prescriptions provoked loathing and disgust.  A simpler and bolder
practice found welcome in Germany, depending chiefly on mineral
remedies, mercury, antimony, sulphur, arsenic, and the use, sometimes
the secret use, of opium.  Whatever we think of Paracelsus, the chief
agent in the introduction of these remedies, and whatever limits we
may assign to the use of these long-trusted mineral drugs, there can
be no doubt that the chemical school, as it was called, did a great
deal towards the expurgation of the old, overloaded, and repulsive
pharmacopoeia.  We shall find evidence in the practice of our New-
England physicians of the first century, that they often employed
chemical remedies, and that, by the early part of the following
century, their chief trust was in the few simple, potent drugs of
Paracelsus.

We have seen that many of the practitioners of medicine, during the
first century of New England, were clergymen.  This relation between
medicine and theology has existed from a very early period; from the
Egyptian priest to the Indian medicine-man, the alliance has been
maintained in one form or another.  The partnership was very common
among our British ancestors.  Mr. Ward, the Vicar of Stratford-on-
Avon, himself a notable example of the union of the two characters,
writing about 1660, says,

"The Saxons had their blood-letters, but under the Normans physicke,
begunne in England; 300 years agoe itt was not a distinct profession
by itself, but practised by men in orders, witness Nicholas de
Ternham, the chief English physician and Bishop of Durham; Hugh of
Evesham, a physician and cardinal; Grysant, physician and pope; John
Chambers, Dr. of Physick, was the first Bishop of Peterborough; Paul
Bush, a bachelor of divinitie in Oxford, was a man well read in
physick as well as divinitie, he was the first bishop of Bristol."

"Again in King Richard the Second's time physicians and divines were
not distinct professions; for one Tydeman, Bishop of Landaph and
Worcester, was physician to King Richard the Second."

This alliance may have had its share in creating and keeping up the
many superstitions which have figured so largely in the history of
medicine.  It is curious to see that a medical work left in
manuscript by the Rev. Cotton Mather and hereafter to be referred to,
is running over with follies and superstitious fancies; while his
contemporary and fellow-townsman, William Douglass, relied on the
same few simple remedies which, through Dr. Edward Holyoke and Dr.
James Jackson, have come down to our own time, as the most important
articles of the materia medica.

Let us now take a general glance at some of the conditions of the
early settlers; and first, as to the healthfulness of the climate.
The mortality of the season that followed the landing of the Pilgrims
at Plymouth has been sufficiently accounted for.  After this, the
colonists seem to have found the new country agreeing very well with
their English constitutions.  Its clear air is the subject of eulogy.
Its dainty springs of sweet water are praised not only by Higginson
and Wood, but even the mischievous Morton says, that for its delicate
waters Canaan came not near this country."  There is a tendency to
dilate on these simple blessings, which reminds one a little of the
Marchioness in Dickens's story, with her orange-peel-and-water
beverage.  Still more does one feel the warmth of coloring,--such as
we expect from converts to a new faith, and settlers who want to
entice others over to their clearings, when Winslow speaks, in 1621,
of "abundance of roses, white, red, and damask; single, but very
sweet indeed;" a most of all, however, when, in the same connection,
he says, "Here are grapes white and red, and very sweet and strong
also."  This of our wild grape, a little vegetable Indian, which
scalps a civilized man's mouth, as his animal representative scalps
his cranium.  But there is something quite charming in Winslow's
picture of the luxury in which they are living.  Lobsters, oysters,
eels, mussels, fish and fowl, delicious fruit, including the grapes
aforesaid,--if they only had "kine, horses, and sheep," he makes no
question but men would live as contented here as in any part of the
world.  We cannot help admiring the way in which they took their
trials, and made the most of their blessings.

"And how Content they were," says Cotton Mather, "when an Honest Man,
as I have heard, inviting his Friends to a Dish of Clams, at the
Table gave Thanks to Heaven, who had given them to suck the abundance
of the Seas, and of the Treasures Aid in the Sands!"

Strangely enough, as it would seem, except for this buoyant
determination to make the best of everything, they hardly appear to
recognize the difference of the climate from that which they had
left.  After almost three years' experience, Winslow says, he can
scarce distinguish New England from Old England, in respect of heat
and cold, frost, snow, rain, winds, etc.  The winter, he thinks (if
there is a difference), is sharper and longer; but yet he may be
deceived by the want of the comforts he enjoyed at home.  He cannot
conceive any climate to agree better with the constitution of the
English, not being oppressed with extremity of heats, nor nipped by
biting cold:

"By which means, blessed be God, we enjoy our health, notwithstanding
those difficulties we have undergone, in such a measure as would have
been admired, if we had lived in England with the like means."

Edward Johnson, after mentioning the shifts to which they were put
for food, says,--

"And yet, methinks, our children are as cheerful, fat, and lusty,
with feeding upon those mussels, clams, and other fish, as they were
in England with their fill of bread."

Higginson, himself a dyspeptic, "continually in physic," as he says,
and accustomed to dress in thick clothing, and to comfort his stomach
with drink that was "both strong and stale,"--the "jolly good ale and
old," I suppose, of free and easy Bishop Still's song,--found that he
both could and did oftentimes drink New England water very well,
--which he seems to look upon as a remarkable feat.  He could go as
lightclad as any, too, with only a light stuff cassock upon his
shirt, and stuff breeches without linings.  Two of his children were
sickly: one,--little misshapen Mary,--died on the passage, and, in
her father's words, "was the first in our ship that was buried in the
bowels of the great Atlantic sea;" the other, who had been "most
lamentably handled" by disease, recovered almost entirely "by the
very wholesomeness of the air, altering, digesting, and drying up the
cold and crude humors of the body."  Wherefore, he thinks it a wise
course for all cold complexions to come to take physic in New
England, and ends with those often quoted words, that "a sup of New
England's air is better than a whole draught of Old England's ale."
Mr. Higginson died, however, "of a hectic fever," a little more than
a year after his arrival.

The medical records which I shall cite show that the colonists were
not exempt from the complaints of the Old World.  Besides the common
diseases to which their descendants are subject, there were two
others, to say nothing of the dreaded small-pox, which later medical
science has disarmed,--little known among us at the present day, but
frequent among the first settlers.  The first of these was the
scurvy, already mentioned, of which Winthrop speaks in 1630, saying,
that it proved fatal to those who fell into discontent, and lingered
after their former conditions in England; the poor homesick creatures
in fact, whom we so forget in our florid pictures of the early times
of the little band in the wilderness.  Many who were suffering from
scurvy got well when the Lyon arrived from England, bringing store of
juice of lemons.  The Governor speaks of another case in 1644; and it
seems probable that the disease was not of rare occurrence.

The other complaint from which they suffered, but which has nearly
disappeared from among us, was intermittent fever, or fever and ague.
I investigated the question as to the prevalence of this disease in
New England, in a dissertation, which was published in a volume with
other papers, in the year 1838.  I can add little to the facts there
recorded.  One which escaped me was, that Joshua Scottow, in "Old
Men's Tears," dated 1691, speaks of "shaking agues," as among the
trials to which they had been subjected.  The outline map of New
England, accompanying the dissertation above referred to, indicates
all the places where I had evidence that the disease had originated.
It was plain enough that it used to be known in many localities where
it has long ceased to be feared.  Still it was and is remarkable to
see what a clean bill of health in this particular respect our barren
soil inherited with its sterility.  There are some malarious spots on
the edge of Lake Champlain, arid there have been some temporary
centres of malaria, within the memory of man, on one or more of our
Massachusetts rivers, but these are harmless enough, for the most
part, unless the millers dam them, when they are apt to retaliate
with a whiff from their meadows, that sets the whole neighborhood
shaking with fever and ague.


The Pilgrims of the Mayflower had with them a good physician, a man
of standing, a deacon of their church, one whom they loved and
trusted, Dr. Samuel Fuller.  But no medical skill could keep cold and
hunger and bad food, and, probably enough, desperate homesickness in
some of the feebler sort, from doing their work.  No detailed record
remains of what they suffered or what was attempted for their relief
during the first sad winter.  The graves of those who died were
levelled and sowed with grain that the losses of the little band
might not be suspected by the savage tenants of the wilderness, and
their story remains untold.

Of Dr. Fuller's practice, at a later period, we have an account in a
letter of his to Governor Bradford, dated June, 1630.  "I have been
to Matapan" (now Dorchester), he says, "and let some twenty of those
people blood."  Such wholesale depletion as this, except with avowed
homicidal intent, is quite unknown in these days; though I once saw
the noted French surgeon, Lisfranc, in a fine phlebotomizing frenzy,
order some ten or fifteen patients, taken almost indiscriminately, to
be bled in a single morning.

Dr. Fuller's two visits to Salem, at the request of Governor
Endicott, seem to have been very satisfactory to that gentleman.
Morton, the wild fellow of Merry Mount, gives a rather questionable
reason for the Governor's being so well pleased with the physician's
doings.  The names under which he mentions the two personages, it
will be seen, are not intended to be complimentary.  "Dr. Noddy did a
great cure for Captain Littleworth.  He cured him of a disease called
a wife."   William Gager, who came out with Winthrop, is spoken of as
"a right godly man and skilful chyrurgeon, but died of a malignant
fever not very long after his arrival."

Two practitioners of the ancient town of Newbury are entitled to
special notice, for different reasons.  The first is Dr. John Clark,
who is said by tradition to have been the first regularly educated
physician who resided in New England.  His portrait, in close-fitting
skull-cap, with long locks and venerable flowing beard, is familiar
to our eyes on the wall of our Society's antechamber.  His left hand
rests upon a skull, his right hand holds an instrument which deserves
a passing comment.  It is a trephine, a surgical implement for
cutting round pieces out of broken skulls, so as to get at the
fragments which have been driven in, and lift them up.  It has a
handle like that of a gimlet, with a claw like a hammer, to lift
with, I suppose, which last contrivance I do not see figured in my
books.  But the point I refer to is this: the old instrument, the
trepan, had a handle like a wimble, what we call a brace or bit-
stock.  The trephine is not mentioned at all in Peter Lowe's book,
London, 1634; nor in Wiseman's great work on Surgery, London, 1676;
nor in the translation of Dionis, published by Jacob Tonson, in 1710.
In fact it was only brought into more general use by Cheselden and
Sharpe so late as the beginning of the last century.  As John Clark
died in 1661, it is remarkable to see the last fashion in the way of
skull-sawing contrivances in his hands,--to say nothing of the claw
on the handle, and a Hey's saw, so called in England, lying on the
table by him, and painted there more than a hundred years before Hey
was born.  This saw is an old invention, perhaps as old as
Hippocrates, and may be seen figured in the "Armamentarium
Chirurgicum" of Scultetus, or in the Works of Ambroise Pare.

Dr. Clark is said to have received a diploma before be came, for
skill in lithotomy.  He loved horses, as a good many doctors do, and
left a good property, as they all ought to do.  His grave and noble
presence, with the few facts concerning him, told with more or less
traditional authority, give us the feeling that the people of
Newbury, and afterwards of Boston, had a wise and skilful medical
adviser and surgeon in Dr. John Clark.

The venerable town of Newbury had another physician who was less
fortunate.  The following is a court record of 1652:

"This is to certify whom it may concern, that we the subscribers,
being called upon to testify against doctor William Snelling for
words by him uttered, affirm that being in way of merry discourse, a
health being drank to all friends, he answered,

    "I'll pledge my friends,
     And for my foes
     A plague for their heels
     And,'---

[a similar malediction on the other extremity of their feet.]

"Since when he hath affirmed that he only intended the proverb used
in the west country, nor do we believe he intended otherwise.

"[Signed]
"WILLIAM THOMAS.
"THOMAS MILWARD.

"March 12th 1651, All which I acknowledge, and am sorry I did not
expresse my intent, or that I was so weak as to use so foolish a
proverb.

"[Signed]
"GULIELMUS SNELLING."


Notwithstanding this confession and apology, the record tells us that
"William Snelling in his presentment for cursing is fined ten
shillings and the fees of court."

I will mention one other name among those of the Fathers of the
medical profession in New England.  The "apostle" Eliot says, writing
in 1647, "We never had but one anatomy in the country, which Mr.
Giles Firman, now in England, did make and read upon very well."

Giles Firmin, as the name is commonly spelled, practised physic in
this country for a time.  He seems to have found it a poor business;
for, in a letter to Governor Winthrop, he says, "I am strongly sett
upon to studye divinitie: my studyes else must be lost, for physick
is but a meene helpe."

Giles Firmin's Lectures on Anatomy were the first scientific
teachings of the New World.  While the Fathers were enlightened
enough to permit such instructions, they were severe in dealing with
quackery; for, in 1631, our court records show that one Nicholas
Knopp, or Knapp, was sentenced to be fined or whipped "for taking
upon him to cure the scurvey by a water of noe worth nor value, which
he solde att a very deare rate."  Empty purses or sore backs would be
common with us to-day if such a rule were enforced.

Besides the few worthies spoken of, and others whose names I have not
space to record, we must remember that there were many clergymen who
took charge of the bodies as well as the souls of their patients,
among them two Presidents of Harvard College, Charles Chauncy and
Leonard Hoar,--and Thomas Thacher, first minister of the "Old South,"
author of the earliest medical treatises printed in the country,[A
Brief Rule to Guide the Common People in Small pox and
Measles.  1674.] whose epitaph in Latin and Greek, said to have been
written by Eleazer, an "Indian Youth" and a member of the Senior
Class of Harvard College, may be found in the "Magnalia."  I miss
this noble savage's name in our triennial catalogue; and as there is
many a slip between the cup and lip, one is tempted to guess that he
may have lost his degree by some display of his native instinct,--
possibly a flourish of the tomahawk or scalping-knife.  However this
may have been, the good man he celebrated was a notable instance of
the Angelical Conjunction, as the author of the "Magnalia" calls it,
of the offices of clergyman and medical practitioner.

Michael Wigglesworth, author of the "Day of Doom," attended the sick,
"not only as a Pastor, but as a Physician too, and this, not only in
his own town, but also in all those of the vicinity."  Mather says of
the sons of Charles Chauncy, "All of these did, while they had
Opportunity, Preach the Gospel; and most, if not all of them, like
their excellent Father before them, had an eminent skill in physick
added unto their other accomplishments," etc.  Roger Williams is said
to have saved many in a kind of pestilence which swept away many
Indians.

To these names must be added, as sustaining a certain relation to the
healing art, that of the first Governor Winthrop, who is said by John
Cotton to have been "Help for our Bodies by Physick [and] for our
Estates by Law," and that of his son, the Governor of Connecticut,
who, as we shall see, was as much physician as magistrate.

I had submitted to me for examination, in 1862, a manuscript found
among the Winthrop Papers, marked with the superscription, "For my
worthy friend Mr. Wintrop," dated in 1643, London, signed Edward
Stafford, and containing medical directions and prescriptions.  It
may be remembered by some present that I wrote a report on this
paper, which was published in the "Proceedings" of this Society.
Whether the paper was written for Governor John Winthrop of
Massachusetts, or for his son, Governor John of Connecticut, there is
no positive evidence that I have been able to obtain.  It is very
interesting, however, as giving short and simple practical
directions, such as would be most like to be wanted and most useful,
in the opinion of a physician in repute of that day.

The diseases prescribed for are plague, small-pox, fevers, king's
evil, insanity, falling-sickness, and the like; with such injuries as
broken bones, dislocations, and burning with gunpowder.  The remedies
are of three kinds: simples, such as St. John's wort, Clown's all-
heal, elder, parsley, maidenhair, mineral drugs, such as lime,
saltpetre, Armenian bole, crocus metallorum, or sulphuret of
antimony; and thaumaturgic or mystical, of which the chief is, "My
black powder against the plague, small-pox; purples, all sorts of
feavers; Poyson; either, by Way of Prevention or after Infection."
This marvellous remedy was made by putting live toads into an earthen
pot so as to half fill it, and baking and burning them "in the open
ayre, not in an house,"--concerning which latter possibility I
suspect Madam Winthrop would have had something to say,--until they
could be reduced by pounding, first into a brown, and then into a
black, powder.  Blood-letting in some inflammations, fasting in the
early stage of fevers, and some of those peremptory drugs with which
most of us have been well acquainted in our time, the infragrant
memories of which I will not pursue beyond this slight allusion, are
among his remedies.

The Winthrops, to one of whom Dr. Stafford's directions were
addressed, were the medical as well as the political advisers of
their fellow-citizens for three or four successive generations.  One
of them, Governor John of Connecticut, practised so extensively,
that, but for his more distinguished title in the State, he would
have been remembered as the Doctor.  The fact that he practised in
another colony, for the most part, makes little difference in the
value of the records we have of his medical experience, which have
fortunately been preserved, and give a very fair idea, in all
probability, of the way in which patients were treated in
Massachusetts, when they fell into intelligent and somewhat educated
hands, a little after the middle of the seventeenth century:

I have before me, while writing, a manuscript collection of the
medical cases treated by him, and recorded at the time in his own
hand, which has been intrusted to me by our President, his
descendant.

They are generally marked Hartford, and extend from the year 1657 to
1669.  From these, manuscripts, and from the letters printed in the
Winthrop Papers published by our Society, I have endeavored to obtain
some idea of the practice of Governor John Winthrop, Junior.  The
learned eye of Mr. Pulsifer would have helped me, no doubt, as it has
done in other cases; but I have ventured this time to attempt finding
my own way among the hieroglyphics of these old pages.  By careful
comparison of many prescriptions, and by the aid of Schroder, Salmon,
Culpeper, and other old compilers, I have deciphered many of his
difficult paragraphs with their mysterious recipes.

The Governor employed a number of the simples dear to ancient women,
--elecampane and elder and wormwood and anise and the rest; but he
also employed certain mineral remedies, which he almost always
indicates by their ancient symbols, or by a name which should leave
them a mystery to the vulgar.  I am now prepared to reveal the mystic
secrets of the Governor's beneficent art, which rendered so many good
and great as well as so many poor and dependent people his debtors,-
at least, in their simple belief,--for their health and their lives.

His great remedy, which he gave oftener than any other, was nitre;
which he ordered in doses of twenty or thirty grains to adults, and
of three grains to infants.  Measles, colics, sciatica, headache,
giddiness, and many other ailments, all found themselves treated, and
I trust bettered, by nitre; a pretty safe medicine in moderate doses,
and one not likely to keep the good Governor awake at night, thinking
whether it might not kill, if it did not cure.  We may say as much
for spermaceti, which he seems to have considered "the sovereign'st
thing on earth" for inward bruises, and often prescribes after falls
and similar injuries.

One of the next remedies, in point of frequency, which he was in the
habit of giving, was (probably diaphoretic) antimony; a mild form of
that very active metal, and which, mild as it was, left his patients
very commonly with a pretty strong conviction that they had been
taking something that did not exactly agree with them.  Now and then
he gave a little iron or sulphur or calomel, but very rarely;
occasionally, a good, honest dose of rhubarb or jalap; a taste of
stinging horseradish, oftener of warming guiacum; sometimes an
anodyne, in the shape of mithridate,--the famous old farrago, which
owed its virtue to poppy juice; [This is the remedy which a Boston
divine tried to simplify.  See Electuarium Novum Alexipharmacum, by
Rev.  Thomas Harward, lecturer at the Royal Chappell.  Boston, 1732.
This tract is in our Society's library.] very often, a harmless
powder of coral; less frequently, an inert prescription of pleasing
amber; and (let me say it softly within possible hearing of his
honored descendant), twice or oftener,--let us hope as a last
resort,--an electuary of millipedes,--sowbugs, if we must give them
their homely English name.  One or two other prescriptions, of the
many unmentionable ones which disgraced the pharmacopoeia of the
seventeenth century, are to be found, but only in very rare
instances, in the faded characters of the manuscript.

The excellent Governor's accounts of diseases are so brief, that we
get only a very general notion of the complaints for which he
prescribed.  Measles and their consequences are at first more
prominent than any other one affection, but the common infirmities of
both sexes and of all ages seem to have come under his healing hand.
Fever and ague appears to have been of frequent occurrence.

His published correspondence shows that many noted people were in
communication with him as his patients.  Roger Williams wants a
little of his medicine for Mrs. Weekes's daughter; worshipful John
Haynes is in receipt of his powders; troublesome Captain Underhill
wants "a little white vitterall" for his wife, and something to cure
his wife's friend's neuralgia, (I think his wife's friend's husband
had a little rather have had it sent by the hands of Mrs. Underhill,
than by those of the gallant and discursive captain); and pious John
Davenport says, his wife "tooke but one halfe of one of the papers"
(which probably contained the medicine he called rubila), "but could
not beare the taste of it, and is discouraged from taking any more;"
and honored William Leete asks for more powders for his "poore little
daughter Graciana," though he found it "hard to make her take it,"
delicate, and of course sensitive, child as she was, languishing and
dying before her time, in spite of all the bitter things she
swallowed,--God help all little children in the hands of dosing
doctors and howling dervishes!  Restless Samuel Gorton, now tamed by
the burden of fourscore and two years, writes so touching an account
of his infirmities, and expresses such overflowing gratitude for the
relief he has obtained from the Governor's prescriptions, wondering
how "a thing so little in quantity, so little in sent, so little in
taste, and so little to sence in operation, should beget and bring
forth such efects," that we repent our hasty exclamation, and bless
the memory of the good Governor, who gave relief to the worn-out
frame of our long-departed brother, the sturdy old heretic of Rhode
Island.

What was that medicine which so frequently occurs in the printed
letters under the name of "rubila"?  It is evidently a secret remedy,
and, so far as I know, has not yet been made out.  I had almost given
it up in despair, when I found what appears to be a key to the
mystery.  In the vast multitude of prescriptions contained in the
manuscripts, most of them written in symbols, I find one which I thus
interpret:

"Four grains of (diaphoretic) antimony, with twenty grains of nitre,
with a little salt of tin, making rubila."  Perhaps something was
added to redden the powder, as he constantly speaks of "rubifying"
or "viridating" his prescriptions; a very common practice of
prescribers, when their powders look a little too much like plain
salt or sugar.


Waitstill Winthrop, the Governor's son, "was a skilful physician,"
says Mr. Sewall, in his funeral sermon; "and generously gave, not
only his advice, but also his Medicines, for the healing of the Sick,
which, by the Blessing of God, were made successful for the recovery
of many."  "His son John, a member of the Royal Society, speaks of
himself as 'Dr. Winthrop,' and mentions one of his own prescriptions
in a letter to Cotton Mather."  Our President tells me that there was
an heirloom of the ancient skill in his family, within his own
remembrance, in the form of a certain precious eye-water, to which
the late President John Quincy Adams ascribed rare virtue, and which
he used to obtain from the possessor of the ancient recipe.

These inherited prescriptions are often treasured in families, I do
not doubt, for many generations.  When I was yet of trivial age, and
suffering occasionally, as many children do, from what one of my
Cambridgeport schoolmates used to call the "ager,"--meaning thereby
toothache or face-ache,--I used to get relief from a certain plaster
which never went by any other name in the family than "Dr. Oliver."

Dr. James Oliver was my great-great-grandfather, graduated in 1680,
and died in 1703.  This was, no doubt, one of his nostrums; for
nostrum, as is well known, means nothing more than our own or my own
particular medicine, or other possession or secret, and physicians in
old times used to keep their choice recipes to themselves a good
deal, as we have had occasion to see.

Some years ago I found among my old books a small manuscript marked
"James Oliver.  This Book Begun Aug. 12, 1685."  It is a rough sort
of account-book, containing among other things prescriptions for
patients, and charges for the same, with counter-charges for the
purchase of medicines and other matters.  Dr. Oliver practised in
Cambridge, where may be seen his tomb with inscriptions, and with
sculptured figures that look more like Diana of the Ephesians, as
given in Calmet's Dictionary, than like any angels admitted into good
society here or elsewhere.

I do not find any particular record of what his patients suffered
from, but I have carefully copied out the remedies he mentions, and
find that they form a very respectable catalogue.  Besides the usual
simples, elder, parsley, fennel, saffron, snake-root, wormwood, I
find the Elixir Proprietatis, with other elixire and cordials, as if
he rather fancied warming medicines; but he called in the aid of some
of the more energetic remedies, including iron, and probably mercury,
as he bought two pounds of it at one time.

The most interesting item is his bill against the estate of Samuel
Pason of Roxbury, for services during his last illness.  He attended
this gentleman,--for such he must have been, by the amount of physic
which he took, and which his heirs paid for,--from June 4th, 1696, to
September 3d of the same year, three months.  I observe he charges
for visits as well as for medicines, which is not the case in most of
his bills.  He opens the attack with a carminative appeal to the
visceral conscience, and follows it up with good hard-hitting
remedies for dropsy,--as I suppose the disease would have been
called,--and finishes off with a rallying dose of hartshorn and iron.

It is a source of honest pride to his descendant that his bill, which
was honestly paid, as it seems to have been honorably earned,
amounted to the handsome total of seven pounds and two shillings.
Let me add that he repeatedly prescribes plaster, one of which was
very probably the "Dr. Oliver" that soothed my infant griefs, and for
which I blush to say that my venerated ancestor received from Goodman
Hancock the painfully exiguous sum of no pounds, no shillings, and
sixpence.

I have illustrated the practice of the first century, from the two
manuscripts I have examined, as giving an impartial idea of its
every-day methods.  The Governor, Johannes Secundus, it is fair to
remember, was an amateur practitioner, while my ancestor was a
professed physician.  Comparing their modes of treatment with the
many scientific follies still prevailing in the Old World, and still
more with the extraordinary theological superstitions of the
community in which they lived, we shall find reason, I think, to
consider the art of healing as in a comparatively creditable state
during the first century of New England.

In addition to the evidence as to methods of treatment furnished by
the manuscripts I have cited, I subjoin the following document, to
which my attention was called by Dr. Shurtleff, our present Mayor.
This is a letter of which the original is to be found in vol.  lxix.
page 10 of the "Archives" preserved at the State House in Boston.  It
will be seen that what the surgeon wanted consisted chiefly of
opiates, stimulants, cathartics, plasters, and materials for
bandages.  The complex and varied formulae have given place to
simpler and often more effective forms of the same remedies; but the
list and the manner in which it is made out are proofs of the good
sense and schooling of the surgeon, who, it may be noted, was in such
haste that he neglected all his stops.  He might well be in a hurry,
as on the very day upon which he wrote, a great body of Indians--
supposed to be six or seven hundred--appeared before Hatfield; and
twenty-five resolute young men of Hadley, from which town he wrote,
crossed the river and drove them away.


HADLY May 30: 76

Mr RAWSON Sr

What we have recd by Tho: Houey the past month is not the cheifest of
our wants as you have love for poor wounded I pray let us not want
for these following medicines if you have not a speedy conveyance of
them I pray send on purpose they are those things mentioned in my
former letter but to prevent future mistakes I have wrote them att
large wee have great want with the greatest halt and speed let
us be supplyed.
Sr
Yr Sert
WILL LOCHS


(Endorsed)

Mr. Lockes Letter Recd from the Governor 13 Jane & acquainted ye
Council with it but could not obtaine any thing to be sent in answer
thereto 13 June 1676


I have given some idea of the chief remedies used by our earlier
physicians, which were both Galenic and chemical; that is, vegetable
and mineral.  They, of course, employed the usual perturbing
medicines which Montaigne says are the chief reliance of their craft.
There were, doubtless, individual practitioners who employed special
remedies with exceptional boldness and perhaps success.  Mr. Eliot is
spoken of, in a letter of William Leete to Winthrop, Junior, as being
under Mr. Greenland's mercurial administrations.  The latter was
probably enough one of these specialists.

There is another class of remedies which appears to have been
employed occasionally, but, on the whole, is so little prominent as
to imply a good deal of common sense among the medical practitioners,
as compared with the superstitions prevailing around them.  I have
said that I have caught the good Governor, now and then, prescribing
the electuary of millipedes; but he is entirely excused by the almost
incredible fact that they were retained in the materia medica so late
as when Rees's Cyclopaedia was published, and we there find the
directions formerly given by the College of Edinburgh for their
preparation.  Once or twice we have found him admitting still more
objectionable articles into his materia medica; in doing which, I am
sorry to say that he could plead grave and learned authority.  But
these instances are very rare exceptions in a medical practice of
many years, which is, on the whole, very respectable, considering the
time and circumstances.

Some remedies of questionable though not odious character appear
occasionally to have been employed by the early practitioners, but
they were such as still had the support of the medical profession.
Governor John Winthrop, the first, sends for East Indian bezoar, with
other commodities he is writing for.  Governor Endicott sends him one
he had of Mr. Humfrey.  I hope it was genuine, for they cheated
infamously in the matter of this concretion, which ought to come out
of an animal's stomach, but the real history of which resembles what
is sometimes told of modern sausages.

There is a famous law-case of James the First's time, in which a
goldsmith sold a hundred pounds' worth of what he called bezoar,
which was proved to be false, and the purchaser got a verdict against
him.  Governor Endicott also sends Winthrop a unicorn's horn, which
was the property of a certain Mrs. Beggarly, who, in spite of her
name, seems to have been rich in medical knowledge and possessions.
The famous Thomas Bartholinus wrote a treatise on the virtues of this
fabulous-sounding remedy, which was published in 1641, and
republished in 1678.

The "antimonial cup," a drinking vessel made of that metal, which,
like our quassia-wood cups, might be filled and emptied in saecula
saeculorum without exhausting its virtues, is mentioned by Matthew
Cradock, in a letter to the elder Winthrop, but in a doubtful way, as
it was thought, he says, to have shortened the days of Sir Nathaniel
Riche; and Winthrop himself, as I think, refers to its use, calling
it simply "the cup."   An antimonial cup is included in the inventory
of Samuel Seabury, who died 1680, and is valued at five shillings.
There is a treatise entitled "The Universall Remedy, or the Vertues
of the Antimoniall Cup, By John Evans, Minister and Preacher of God's
Word, London, 1634," in our own Society's library.

One other special remedy deserves notice, because of native growth.
I do not know when Culver's root, Leptandra Virginica of our National
Pharmacopoeia, became noted, but Cotton Mather, writing in 1716 to
John Winthrop of New London, speaks of it as famous for the cure of
consumptions, and wishes to get some of it, through his mediation,
for Katharine, his eldest daughter.  He gets it, and gives it to the
"poor damsel," who is languishing, as he says, and who dies the next
month,--all the sooner, I have little doubt, for this uncertain and
violent drug, with which the meddlesome pedant tormented her in that
spirit of well-meant but restless quackery, which could touch nothing
without making mischief, not even a quotation, and yet proved at
length the means of bringing a great blessing to our community, as we
shall see by and by; so does Providence use our very vanities and
infirmities for its wise purposes.

Externally, I find the practitioners on whom I have chiefly relied
used the plasters of Paracelsus, of melilot, diachylon, and probably
diaphoenicon, all well known to the old pharmacopoeias, and some of
them to the modern ones,--to say nothing of "my yellow salve," of
Governor John, the second, for the composition of which we must apply
to his respected descendant.

The authors I find quoted are Barbette's Surgery, Camerarius on Gout,
and Wecherus, of all whom notices may be found in the pages of Haller
and Vanderlinden; also, Reed's Surgery, and Nicholas Culpeper's
Practice of Physic and Anatomy, the last as belonging to Samuel
Seabury, chirurgeon, before mentioned.  Nicholas Culpeper was a
shrewd charlatan, and as impudent a varlet as ever prescribed for a
colic; but knew very well what he was about, and badgers the College
with great vigor.  A copy of Spigelius's famous Anatomy, in the
Boston Athenaeum, has the names of Increase and Samuel Mather written
in it, and was doubtless early overhauled by the youthful Cotton, who
refers to the great anatomist's singular death, among his curious
stories in the "Magnalia," and quotes him among nearly a hundred
authors whom he cites in his manuscript "The Angel of Bethesda."  Dr.
John Clark's "books and instruments, with several chirurgery
materials in the closet," a were valued in his inventory at sixty
pounds; Dr. Matthew Fuller, who died in 1678, left a library valued
at ten pounds; and a surgeon's chest and drugs valued at sixteen
pounds.'


Here we leave the first century and all attempts at any further
detailed accounts of medicine and its practitioners.  It is necessary
to show in a brief glance what had been going on in Europe during the
latter part of that century, the first quarter of which had been made
illustrious in the history of medical science by the discovery of the
circulation.

Charles Barbeyrac, a Protestant in his religion, was a practitioner
and teacher of medicine at Montpellier.  His creed was in the way of
his obtaining office; but the young men followed his instructions
with enthusiasm.  Religious and scientific freedom breed in and in,
until it becomes hard to tell the family of one from that of the
other.  Barbeyrac threw overboard the old complex medical farragos of
the pharmacopoeias, as his church had disburdened itself of the
popish ceremonies.

Among the students who followed his instructions were two Englishmen:
one of them, John Locke, afterwards author of an "Essay on the Human
Understanding," three years younger than his teacher; the other,
Thomas Sydenham, five years older.  Both returned to England.  Locke,
whose medical knowledge is borne witness to by Sydenham, had the good
fortune to form a correct opinion on a disease from which the Earl of
Shaftesbury was suffering, which led to an operation that saved his
life.  Less felicitous was his experience with a certain ancilla
culinaria virgo,--which I am afraid would in those days have been
translated kitchen-wench, instead of lady of the culinary
department,--who turned him off after she had got tired of him, and
called in another practitioner. [Locke and Sydenham, p. 124.  By John
Brown, M.  D.  Edinburgh, 1866.]  This helped, perhaps, to spoil a
promising doctor, and make an immortal metaphysician.  At any rate,
Locke laid down the professional wig and cane, and took to other
studies.

The name of Thomas Sydenham is as distinguished in the history of
medicine as that of John Locke in philosophy.  As Barbeyrac was found
in opposition to the established religion, as Locke took the rational
side against orthodox Bishop Stillingfleet, so Sydenham went with
Parliament against Charles, and was never admitted a Fellow by the
College of Physicians, which, after he was dead, placed his bust in
their hall by the side of that of Harvey.

What Sydenham did for medicine was briefly this he studied the course
of diseases carefully, and especially as affected by the particular
season; to patients with fever he gave air and cooling drinks,
instead of smothering and heating them, with the idea of sweating out
their disease; he ordered horseback exercise to consumptives; he,
like his teacher, used few and comparatively simple remedies; he did
not give any drug at all, if he thought none was needed, but let well
enough alone.  He was a sensible man, in short, who applied his
common sense to diseases which he had studied with the best light of
science that he could obtain.

The influence of the reform he introduced must have been more or less
felt in this country, but not much before the beginning of the
eighteenth century, as his great work was not published until 1675,
and then in Latin.  I very strongly suspect that there was not so
much to reform in the simple practice of the physicians of the new
community, as there was in that of the learned big-wigs of the
"College," who valued their remedies too much in proportion to their
complexity, and the extravagant and fantastic ingredients which went
to their making.

During the memorable century which bred and bore the Revolution, the
medical profession gave great names to our history.  But John Brooks
belonged to the State, and Joseph Warren belongs to the country and
mankind, and to speak of them would lead me beyond my limited--
subject.  There would be little pleasure in dwelling on the name of
Benjamin Church; and as for the medical politicians, like Elisha
Cooke in the early part of the century, or Charles Jarvis, the bald
eagle of Boston, in its later years, whether their practice was
heroic or not, their patients were, for he is a bold man who trusts
one that is making speeches and coaxing voters, to meddle with the
internal politics of his corporeal republic.

One great event stands out in the medical history of this eighteenth
century; namely, the introduction of the practice of inoculation for
small-pox.  Six epidemics of this complaint had visited Boston in the
course of a hundred years.  Prayers had been asked in the churches
for more than a hundred sick in a single day, and this many times.
About a thousand persons had died in a twelvemonth, we are told, and,
as we may infer, chiefly from this cause.

In 1721, this disease, after a respite of nineteen years, again
appeared as an epidemic.  In that year it was that Cotton Mather,
browsing, as was his wont, on all the printed fodder that came within
reach of his ever-grinding mandibles, came upon an account of
inoculation as practised in Turkey, contained in the "Philosophical
Transactions."  He spoke of it to several physicians, who paid little
heed to his story; for they knew his medical whims, and had probably
been bored, as we say now-a-days, many of them, with listening to his
"Angel of Bethesda," and satiated with his speculations on the
Nishmath Chajim.

The Reverend Mather,--I use a mode of expression he often employed
when speaking of his honored brethren,--the Reverend Mather was right
this time, and the irreverent doctors who laughed at him were wrong.
One only of their number disputes his claim to giving the first
impulse to the practice, in Boston.  This is what that person says:
"The Small-Pox spread in Boston, New England, A.1721, and the
Reverend Dr. Cotton Mather, having had the use of these
Communications from Dr. William Douglass (that is, the writer of
these words); surreptitiously, without the knowledge of his Informer,
that he might have the honour of a New fangled notion, sets an
Undaunted Operator to work, and in this Country about 290 were
inoculated."

All this has not deprived Cotton Mather of the credit of suggesting,
and a bold and intelligent physician of the honor of carrying out,
the new practice.  On the twenty-seventh day of June, 1721, Zabdiel
Boylston of Boston inoculated his only son for smallpox,--the first
person ever submitted to the operation in the New World.  The story
of the fierce resistance to the introduction of the practice; of how
Boylston was mobbed, and Mather had a hand-grenade thrown in at his
window; of how William Douglass, the Scotchman, "always positive, and
sometimes accurate," as was neatly said of him, at once depreciated
the practice and tried to get the credit of suggesting it, and how
Lawrence Dalhonde, the Frenchman, testified to its destructive
consequences; of how Edmund Massey, lecturer at St.  Albans, preached
against sinfully endeavoring to alter the course of nature by
presumptuous interposition, which he would leave to the atheist and
the scoffer, the heathen and unbeliever, while in the face of his
sermon, afterwards reprinted in Boston, many of our New England
clergy stood up boldly in defence of the practice,--all this has been
told so well and so often that I spare you its details.  Set this
good hint of Cotton Mather against that letter of his to John
Richards, recommending the search after witch-marks, and the
application of the water-ordeal, which means throw your grandmother
into the water, if she has a mole on her arm;--if she swims, she is a
witch and must be hanged; if she sinks, the Lord have mercy on her
soul!

Thus did America receive this great discovery, destined to save
thousands of lives, via Boston, from the hands of one of our own
Massachusetts physicians.

The year 1735 was rendered sadly memorable by the epidemic of the
terrible disease known as "throat distemper," and regarded by many as
the same as our "diphtheria."  Dr. Holyoke thinks the more general
use of mercurials in inflammatory complaints dates from the time of
their employment in this disease, in which they were thought to have
proved specially useful.

At some time in the course of this century medical practice had
settled down on four remedies as its chief reliance.  I must repeat
an incident which I have related in another of these Essays.  When
Dr. Holyoke, nearly seventy years ago, received young Mr. James
Jackson as his student, he showed him the formidable array of
bottles, jars, and drawers around his office, and then named the four
remedies referred to as being of more importance than all the rest
put together.  These were "Mercury, Antimony, Opium, and Peruvian
Bark."  I doubt if either of them remembered that, nearly seventy
years before, in 1730, Dr. William Douglass, the disputatious
Scotchman, mentioned those same four remedies, in the dedication of
his quarrelsome essay on inoculation, as the most important ones in
the hands of the physicians of his time.

In the "Proceedings" of this Society for the year 1863 is a very
pleasant paper by the late Dr. Ephraim Eliot, giving an account of
the leading physicians of Boston during the last quarter of the last
century.  The names of Lloyd, Gardiner, Welsh, Rand, Bulfinch,
Danforth, John Warren, Jeffries, are all famous in local history, and
are commemorated in our medical biographies.  One of them, at least,
appears to have been more widely known, not only as one of the first
aerial voyagers, but as an explorer in the almost equally hazardous
realm of medical theory.  Dr. John Jeffries, the first of that name,
is considered by Broussais as a leader of medical opinion in America,
and so referred to in his famous "Examen des Doctrines Medicales."

Two great movements took place in this eighteenth century, the effect
of which has been chiefly felt in our own time; namely, the
establishment of the Massachusetts Medical Society, and the founding
of the Medical School of Harvard University.


The third century of our medical history began with the introduction
of the second great medical discovery of modern times,--of all time
up to that date, I may say,--once more via Boston, if we count the
University village as its suburb, and once more by one of our
Massachusetts physicians.  In the month of July, 1800, Dr. Benjamin
Waterhouse of Cambridge submitted four of his own children to the new
process of vaccination,--the first persons vaccinated, as Dr. Zabdiel
Boylston's son had been the first person inoculated in the New World.

A little before the first half of this century was completed, in the
autumn of 1846, the great discovery went forth from the Massachusetts
General Hospital, which repaid the debt of America to the science of
the Old World, and gave immortality to the place of its origin in the
memory and the heart of mankind.  The production of temporary
insensibility at will--tuto, cito, jucunde, safely, quickly,
pleasantly--is one of those triumphs over the infirmities of our
mortal condition which change the aspect of life ever afterwards.
Rhetoric can add nothing to its glory; gratitude, and the pride
permitted to human weakness, that our Bethlehem should have been
chosen as the birthplace of this new embodiment of the divine mercy,
are all we can yet find room for.

The present century has seen the establishment of all those great
charitable institutions for the cure of diseases of the body and of
the mind, which our State and our city have a right to consider as
among the chief ornaments of their civilization.

The last century had very little to show, in our State, in the way of
medical literature.  The worthies who took care of our grandfathers
and great-grandfathers, like the Revolutionary heroes, fought (with
disease) and bled (their patients) and died (in spite of their own
remedies); but their names, once familiar, are heard only at rare
intervals.  Honored in their day, not unremembered by a few solitary
students of the past, their memories are going sweetly to sleep in
the arms of the patient old dry-nurse, whose "blackdrop" is the
never-failing anodyne of the restless generations of men.  Except the
lively controversy on inoculation, and floating papers in journals,
we have not much of value for that long period, in the shape of
medical records.

But while the trouble with the last century is to find authors to
mention, the trouble of this would be to name all that we find.  Of
these, a very few claim unquestioned preeminence.

Nathan Smith, born in Rehoboth, Mass., a graduate of the Medical
School of our University, did a great work for the advancement of
medicine and surgery in New England, by his labors as teacher and
author, greater, it is claimed by some, than was ever done by any
other man.  The two Warrens, of our time, each left a large and
permanent record of a most extended surgical practice.  James Jackson
not only educated a whole generation by his lessons of wisdom, but
bequeathed some of the most valuable results of his experience to
those who came after him, in a series of letters singularly pleasant
and kindly as well as instructive.  John Ware, keen and cautious,
earnest and deliberate, wrote the two remarkable essays which have
identified his name, for all time, with two important diseases, on
which he has shed new light by his original observations.

I must do violence to the modesty of the living by referring to the
many important contributions to medical science by Dr. Jacob Bigelow,
and especially to his discourse on "Self-limited Diseases," an
address which can be read in a single hour, but the influence of
which will be felt for a century.

Nor would the profession forgive me if I forgot to mention the
admirable museum of pathological anatomy, created almost entirely by
the hands of Dr. John Barnard Swett Jackson, and illustrated by his
own printed descriptive catalogue, justly spoken of by a
distinguished professor in the University of Pennsylvania as the most
important contribution which had ever been made in this country to
the branch to which it relates.

When we look at the literature of mental disease, as seen in hospital
reports and special treatises, we can mention the names of Wyman,
Woodward, Brigham, Bell, and Ray, all either natives of Massachusetts
or placed at the head of her institutions for the treatment of the
insane.

We have a right to claim also one who is known all over the civilized
world as a philanthropist, to us as a townsman and a graduate of our
own Medical School, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the guide and benefactor
of a great multitude who were born to a world of inward or of outward
darkness.

I cannot pass over in silence the part taken by our own physicians in
those sanitary movements which are assuming every year greater
importance.  Two diseases especially have attracted attention, above
all others, with reference to their causes and prevention; cholera,
the "black death" of the nineteenth century, and consumption, the
white plague of the North, both of which have been faithfully studied
and reported on by physicians of our own State and city.  The
cultivation of medical and surgical specialties, which is fast
becoming prevalent, is beginning to show its effects in the
literature of the profession, which is every year growing richer in
original observations and investigations.

To these benefactors who have labored for us in their peaceful
vocation, we must add the noble army of surgeons, who went with the
soldiers who fought the battles of their country, sharing many of
their dangers, not rarely falling victims to fatigue, disease, or the
deadly volleys to which they often exposed themselves in the
discharge of their duties.

The pleasant biographies of the venerable Dr. Thacher, and the worthy
and kind-hearted gleaner, Dr. Stephen W.  Williams, who came after
him, are filled with the names of men who served their generation
well, and rest from their labors, followed by the blessing of those
for whom they endured the toils and fatigues inseparable from their
calling.  The hardworking, intelligent country physician more
especially deserves the gratitude of his own generation, for he
rarely leaves any permanent record in the literature of his
profession.  Books are hard to obtain; hospitals, which are always
centres of intelligence, are remote; thoroughly educated and superior
men are separated by wide intervals; and long rides, though favorable
to reflection, take up much of the time which might otherwise be
given to the labors of the study.  So it is that men of ability and
vast experience, like the late Dr. Twitchell, for instance, make a
great and deserved reputation, become the oracles of large districts,
and yet leave nothing, or next to nothing, by which their names shall
be preserved from blank oblivion.

One or two other facts deserve mention, as showing the readiness of
our medical community to receive and adopt any important idea or
discovery.  The new science of Histology, as it is now called, was
first brought fully before the profession of this country by the
translation of Bichat's great work, "Anatomie Generale," by the late
Dr. George Hayward.

The first work printed in this country on Auscultation,--that
wonderful art of discovering disease, which, as it were, puts a
window in the breast, through which the vital organs can be seen, to
all intents and purposes, was the manual published anonymously by
"A Member of the Massachusetts Medical Society."


We are now in some slight measure prepared to weigh the record of the
medical profession in Massachusetts, and pass our judgment upon it.
But in-order to do justice to the first generation of practitioners,
we must compare what we know of their treatment of disease with the
state of the art in England, and the superstitions which they saw all
around them in other departments of knowledge or belief.

English medical literature must have been at a pretty low ebb when
Sydenham recommended Don Quixote to Sir Richard Blackmore for
professional reading.  The College Pharmacopoeia was loaded with the
most absurd compound mixtures, one of the most complex of which (the
same which the Reverend Mr. Harward, "Lecturer at the Royal Chappel
in Boston," tried to simplify), was not dropped until the year 1801.
Sir Kenelm Digby was playing his fantastic tricks with the
Sympathetic powder, and teaching Governor Winthrop, the second, how
to cure fever and ague, which some may like to know.  "Pare the
patient's nails; put the parings in a little bag, and hang the bag
round the neck of a live eel, and put him in a tub of water.  The eel
will die, and the patient will recover."

Wiseman, the great surgeon, was discoursing eloquently on the
efficacy of the royal touch in scrofula.  The founder of the
Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, consorting with alchemists and
astrologers, was treasuring the manuscripts of the late pious Dr.
Richard Napier, in which certain letters (Rx Ris) were understood to
mean Responsum Raphaelis,--the answer of the angel Raphael to the
good man's medical questions.  The illustrious Robert Boyle was
making his collection of choice and safe remedies, including the sole
of an old shoe,  the thigh bone of a hanged man, and things far worse
than these, as articles of his materia medica.  Dr. Stafford, whose
paper of directions to his "friend, Mr. Wintrop," I cited, was
probably a man of standing in London; yet toad-powder was his
sovereign remedy.

See what was the state of belief in other matters among the most
intelligent persons of the colonies, magistrates and clergymen.
Jonathan Brewster, son of the church-elder, writes the wildest
letters to John Winthrop about alchemy,--"mad for making gold as the
Lynn rock-borers are for finding it."

Remember the theology and the diabology of the time.  Mr. Cotton's
Theocracy was a royal government, with the King of kings as its
nominal head, but with an upper chamber of saints, and a tremendous
opposition in the lower house; the leader of which may have been
equalled, but cannot have been surpassed by any of our earth-born
politicians.  The demons were prowling round the houses every night,
as the foxes were sneaking about the hen-roosts.  The men of
Gloucester fired whole flasks of gunpowder at devils disguised as
Indians and Frenchmen.

How deeply the notion of miraculous interference with the course of
nature was rooted, is shown by the tenacity of the superstition about
earthquakes.  We can hardly believe that our Professor Winthrop,
father of the old judge and the "squire," whom many of us Cambridge
people remember so well, had to defend himself against the learned
and excellent Dr. Prince, of the Old South Church, for discussing
their phenomena as if they belonged to the province of natural
science:

Not for the sake of degrading the aspect of the noble men who founded
our State, do I refer to their idle beliefs and painful delusions,
but to show against what influences the common sense of the medical
profession had to assert itself.

Think, then, of the blazing stars, that shook their horrid hair in
the sky; the phantom ship, that brought its message direct from the
other world; the story of the mouse and the snake at Watertown;  of
the mice and the prayer-book;  of the snake in church; of the calf
with two heads; and of the cabbage in the perfect form of a cutlash,
--all which innocent occurrences were accepted or feared as alarming
portents.

We can smile at these: but we cannot smile at the account of unhappy
Mary Dyer's malformed offspring;  or of Mrs.  Hutchinson's domestic
misfortune of similar character, in the story of which the physician,
Dr. John Clark of Rhode Island, alone appears to advantage; or as we
read the Rev. Samuel Willard's fifteen alarming pages about an
unfortunate young woman suffering with hysteria.  Or go a little
deeper into tragedy, and see poor Dorothy Talby, mad as Ophelia,
first admonished, then whipped; at last, taking her own little
daughter's life; put on trial, and standing mute, threatened to be
pressed to death, confessing, sentenced, praying to be beheaded; and
none the less pitilessly swung from the fatal ladder.

The cooper's crazy wife--crazy in the belief that she has committed
the unpardonable sin--tries to drown her child, to save it from
misery; and the poor lunatic, who would be tenderly cared for to-day
in a quiet asylum, is judged to be acting under the instigation of
Satan himself.  Yet, after all, what can we say, who put Bunyan's
"Pilgrim's Progress," full of nightmare dreams of horror, into all
our children's hands; a story in which the awful image of the man in
the cage might well turn the nursery where it is read into a
madhouse?

The miserable delusion of witchcraft illustrates, in a still more
impressive way, the false ideas which governed the supposed relation
of men with the spiritual world.  I have no doubt many physicians
shared in these superstitions.  Mr. Upham says they--that is, some of
them--were in the habit of attributing their want of success to the
fact, that an "evil hand" was on their patient.  The temptation was
strong, no doubt, when magistrates and ministers and all that
followed their lead were contented with such an explanation.  But how
was it in Salem, according to Mr. Upham's own statement?  Dr. John
Swinnerton was, he says, for many years the principal physician of
Salem.  And he says, also, "The Swinnerton family were all along
opposed to Mr. Parris, and kept remarkably clear from the witchcraft
delusion."   Dr. John Swinnerton--the same, by the way, whose memory
is illuminated by a ray from the genius of Hawthorne--died the very
year before the great witchcraft explosion took place.  But who can
doubt that it was from him that the family had learned to despise and
to resist the base superstition; or that Bridget Bishop, whose house
he rented, as Mr. Upham tells me, the first person hanged in the time
of the delusion, would have found an efficient protector in her
tenant, had he been living, to head the opposition of his family to
the misguided clergymen and magistrates?

I cannot doubt that our early physicians brought with them many Old-
World medical superstitions, and I have no question that they were
more or less involved in the prevailing errors of the community in
which they lived.  But, on the whole, their record is a clean one, so
far as we can get at it; and where it is questionable we must
remember that there must have been many little-educated persons among
them; and that all must have felt, to some extent, the influence of
those sincere and devoted but unsafe men, the physic-practising
clergymen, who often used spiritual means as a substitute for
temporal ones, who looked upon a hysteric patient as possessed by the
devil, and treated a fractured skull by prayers and plasters,
following the advice of a ruling elder in opposition to the "unanimous
opinion of seven surgeons."

To what results the union of the two professions was liable to lead,
may be seen by the example of a learned and famous person, who has
left on record the product of his labors in the double capacity of
clergyman and physician.

I have had the privilege of examining a manuscript of Cotton Mather's
relating to medicine, by the kindness of the librarian of the
American Antiquarian Society, to which society it belongs.  A brief
notice of this curious document may prove not uninteresting.

It is entitled "The Angel of Bethesda: an Essay upon the Common
Maladies of Mankind, offering, first, the sentiments of Piety," etc.,
etc., and "a collection of plain but potent and Approved REMEDIES for
the Maladies."  There are sixty-six "Capsula's," as he calls them, or
chapters, in his table of contents; of which, five--from the
fifteenth to the nineteenth, inclusive--are missing.  This is a most
unfortunate loss, as the eighteenth capsula treated of agues, and we
could have learned from it something of their degree of frequency in
this part of New England.  There is no date to the manuscript; which,
however, refers to a case observed Nov. 14, 1724.

The divine takes precedence of the physician in this extraordinary
production.  He begins by preaching a sermon at his unfortunate
patient.  Having thrown him into a cold sweat by his spiritual
sudorific, he attacks him with his material remedies, which are often
quite as unpalatable.  The simple and cleanly practice of Sydenham,
with whose works he was acquainted, seems to have been thrown away
upon him.  Everything he could find mentioned in the seventy or
eighty authors he cites, all that the old women of both sexes had
ever told him of, gets into his text, or squeezes itself into his
margin.

Evolving disease out of sin, he hates it, one would say, as he hates
its cause, and would drive it out of the body with all noisome
appliances.  "Sickness is in Fact Flagellum Dei pro peccatis mundi."
So saying, he encourages the young mother whose babe is wasting away
upon her breast with these reflections:

"Think; oh the grievous Effects of Sin!  This wretched Infant has not
arrived unto years of sense enough, to sin after the similitude of
the transgression committed by Adam.  Nevertheless the Transgression
of Adam, who had all mankind Foederally, yea, Naturally, in him, has
involved this Infant in the guilt of it.  And the poison of the old
serpent, which infected Adam when he fell into his Transgression, by
hearkening to the Tempter, has corrupted all mankind, and is a seed
unto such diseases as this Infant is now laboring under.  Lord, what
are we, and what are our children, but a Generation of Vipers?"

Many of his remedies are at least harmless, but his pedantry and
utter want of judgment betray themselves everywhere.  He piles his
prescriptions one upon another, without the least discrimination.  He
is run away with by all sorts of fancies and superstitions.  He
prescribes euphrasia, eye-bright, for disease of the eyes; appealing
confidently to the strange old doctrine of signatures, which inferred
its use from the resemblance of its flower to the organ of vision.
For the scattering of wens,  the efficacy of a Dead Hand has been out
of measure wonderful.  But when he once comes to the odious class of
remedies, he revels in them like a scarabeus.  This allusion will
bring us quite near enough to the inconceivable abominations with
which he proposed to outrage the sinful stomachs of the unhappy
confederates and accomplices of Adam.

It is well that the treatise was never printed, yet there are
passages in it worth preserving.  He speaks of some remedies which
have since become more universally known:

"Among the plants of our soyl, Sir William Temple singles out Five
[Six] as being of the greatest virtue and most friendly to health:
and his favorite plants, Sage, Rue, Saffron, Alehoof, Garlick, and
Elder."

"But these Five [Six] plants may admitt of some competitors.  The
QUINQUINA--How celebrated: Immoderately, Hyperbolically celebrated!"

Of Ipecacuanha, he says,--
"This is now in its reign; the most fashionable vomit."

"I am not sorry that antimonial emetics begin to be disused."

He quotes "Mr. Lock" as recommending red poppy-water and abstinence
from flesh as often useful in children's diseases.

One of his "Capsula's" is devoted to the animalcular origin of
diseases, at the end of which he says, speaking of remedies for this
supposed source of our distempers:

"Mercury we know thee: But we are afraid thou wilt kill us too, if we
employ thee to kill them that kill us.

"And yett, for the cleansing of the small Blood Vessels, and making
way for the free circulation of the Blood and Lymph--there is nothing
like Mercurial Deobstruents."

From this we learn that mercury was already in common use, and the
subject of the same popular prejudice as in our own time.

His poetical turn shows itself here and there:

"O Nightingale, with a Thorn at thy Breast; Under the trouble of a
Cough, what can be more proper than such thoughts as these?"...

If there is pathos in this, there is bathos in his apostrophe to the
millipede, beginning "Poor sowbug!" and eulogizing the healing
virtues of that odious little beast; of which he tells us to take
"half a pound, putt 'em alive into a quart or two of wine," with
saffron and other drugs, and take two ounces twice a day.

The "Capsula" entitled "Nishmath Chajim" was printed in 1722, at
New London, and is in the possession of our own Society.  He means,
by these words, something like the Archxus of Van Helmont, of which
he discourses in a style wonderfully resembling that of Mr. Jenkinson
in the "Vicar of Wakefield."  "Many of the Ancients thought there was
much of a Real History in the Parable, and their Opinion was that
there is, DIAPHORA KATA TAS MORPHAS, A Distinction (and so a
Resemblance) of men as to their Shapes after Death."  And so on, with
Ireaeus, Tertullian, Thespesius, and "the TA TONE PSEUCONE CROMATA,"
in the place of "Sanconiathon, Manetho, Berosus," and "Anarchon ara
kai ateleutaion to pan."

One other passage deserves notice, as it relates to the single
medical suggestion which does honor to Cotton Mather's memory.  It
does not appear that he availed himself of the information which he
says, he obtained from his slave, for such I suppose he was.

In his appendix to "Variolae Triumphatae," he says,--

"There has been a wonderful practice lately used in several parts of
the world, which indeed is not yet become common in our nation.

"I was first informed of it by a Garamantee servant of my own, long
before I knew that any Europeans or Asiaticks had the least
acquaintance with it, and some years before I was enriched with the
communications of the learned Foreigners, whose accounts I found
agreeing with what I received of my servant, when he shewed me the
Scar of the Wound made for the operation; and said, That no person
ever died of the smallpox, in their countrey, that had the courage to
use it.

"I have since met with a considerable Number of these Africans, who
all agree in one story; That in their countrey grandy-many dy of the
small-pox: But now they learn this way: people take juice of smallpox
and cutty-skin and put in a Drop; then by'nd by a little sicky,
sicky: then very few little things like small-pox; and nobody dy of
it; and nobody have small-pox any more.  Thus, in Africa, where the
poor creatures dy of the smallpox like Rotten Sheep, a merciful God
has taught them an Infallible preservative.  'T is a common practice,
and is attended with a constant success."

What has come down to us of the first century of medical practice, in
the hands of Winthrop and Oliver, is comparatively simple and
reasonable.  I suspect that the conditions of rude, stern life, in
which the colonists found themselves in the wilderness, took the
nonsense out of them, as the exigencies of a campaign did out of our
physicians and surgeons in the late war.  Good food and enough of it,
pure air and water, cleanliness, good attendance, an anaesthetic, an
opiate, a stimulant, quinine, and two or three common drugs, proved
to be the marrow of medical treatment; and the fopperies of the
pharmacopoeia went the way of embroidered shirts and white kid gloves
and malacca joints, in their time of need.  "Good wine is the best
cordiall for her," said Governor John Winthrop, Junior, to Samuel
Symonds, speaking of that gentleman's wife,--just as Sydenham,
instead of physic, once ordered a roast chicken and a pint of canary
for his patient in male hysterics.

But the profession of medicine never could reach its full development
until it became entirely separated from that of divinity.  The
spiritual guide, the consoler in afliction, the confessor who is
admitted into the secrets of our souls, has his own noble sphere of
duties; but the healer of men must confine himself solely to the
revelations of God in nature, as he sees their miracles with his own
eyes.  No doctrine of prayer or special providence is to be his
excuse for not looking straight at secondary causes, and acting,
exactly so far as experience justifies him, as if he were himself the
divine agent which antiquity fabled him to be.  While pious men were
praying--humbly, sincerely, rightly, according to their knowledge--
over the endless succession of little children dying of spasms in the
great Dublin Hospital, a sagacious physician knocked some holes in
the walls of the ward, let God's blessed air in on the little
creatures, and so had already saved in that single hospital, as it
was soberly calculated thirty years ago, more than sixteen thousand
lives of these infant heirs of immortality. [Collins's Midwifery, p.
312.  Published by order of the Massachusetts Medical Society.
Boston, 1841.]

Let it be, if you will, that the wise inspiration of the physician
was granted in virtue of the clergyman's supplications.  Still, the
habit of dealing with things seen generates another kind of
knowledge, and another way of thought, from that of dealing with
things unseen; which knowledge and way of thought are special means
granted by Providence, and to be thankfully accepted.

The mediaeval ecclesiastics expressed a great truth in that saying,
so often quoted, as carrying a reproach with it: "Ubi tres medici,
duo athei,"--"Where there are three physicians, there are two
atheists."

It was true then, it is true to-day, that the physician very
commonly, if not very generally, denies and repudiates the deity of
ecclesiastical commerce.  The Being whom Ambroise Pare meant when he
spoke those memorable words, which you may read over the professor's
chair in the French School of Medicine, "Te le pensay, et Dieu le
guarit," "I dressed his wound, and God healed it,"--is a different
being from the God that scholastic theologians have projected from
their consciousness, or shaped even from the sacred pages which have
proved so plastic in their hands.  He is a God who never leaves
himself without witness, who repenteth him of the evil, who never
allows a disease or an injury, compatible with the enjoyment of life,
to take its course without establishing an effort, limited by certain
fixed conditions, it is true, but an effort, always, to restore the
broken body or the shattered mind.  In the perpetual presence of this
great Healing Agent, who stays the bleeding of wounds, who knits the
fractured bone, who expels the splinter by a gentle natural process,
who walls in the inflammation that might involve the vital organs,
who draws a cordon to separate the dead part from the living, who
sends his three natural anaesthetics to the over-tasked frame in due
order, according to its need,--sleep, fainting, death; in this
perpetual presence, it is doubtless hard for the physician to realize
the theological fact of a vast and permanent sphere of the universe,
where no organ finds itself in its natural medium, where no wound
heals kindly, where the executive has abrogated the pardoning power,
and mercy forgets its errand; where the omnipotent is unfelt save in
malignant agencies, and the omnipresent is unseen and unrepresented;
hard to accept the God of Dante's "Inferno," and of Bunyan's caged
lunatic.  If this is atheism, call three, instead of two of the trio,
atheists, and it will probably come nearer the truth.

I am not disposed to deny the occasional injurious effect of the
materializing influences to which the physician is subjected.
A spiritual guild is absolutely necessary to keep him, to keep us
all, from becoming the "fingering slaves" that Wordsworth treats with
such shrivelling scorn.  But it is well that the two callings have
been separated, and it is fitting that they remain apart.  In
settling the affairs of the late concern, I am afraid our good
friends remain a little in our debt.  We lent them our physician
Michael Servetus in fair condition, and they returned him so damaged
by fire as to be quite useless for our purposes.  Their Reverend
Samuel Willard wrote us a not over-wise report of a case of hysteria;
and our Jean Astruc gave them (if we may trust Dr. Smith's Dictionary
of the Bible) the first discerning criticism on the authorship of the
Pentateuch.  Our John Locke enlightened them with his letters
concerning toleration; and their Cotton Mather obscured our twilight
with his "Nishmath Chajim."

Yet we must remember that the name of Basil Valentine, the monk, is
associated with whatever good and harm we can ascribe to antimony;
and that the most remarkable of our specifics long bore the name of
"Jesuit's Bark," from an old legend connected with its introduction.
"Frere Jacques," who taught the lithotomists of Paris, owes his
ecclesiastical title to courtesy, as he did not belong to a religious
order.

Medical science, and especially the study of mental disease, is
destined, I believe, to react to much greater advantage on the
theology of the future than theology has acted on medicine in the
past.  The liberal spirit very generally prevailing in both
professions, and the good understanding between their most
enlightened members, promise well for the future of both in a
community which holds every point of human belief, every institution
in human hands, and every word written in a human dialect, open to
free discussion today, to-morrow, and to the end of time.  Whether
the world at large will ever be cured of trusting to specifics as a
substitute for observing the laws of health, and to mechanical or
intellectual formula as a substitute for character, may admit of
question.  Quackery and idolatry are all but immortal.

We can find most of the old beliefs alive amongst us to-day, only
having changed their dresses and the social spheres in which they
thrive.  We think the quarrels of Galenists and chemists belong to
the past, forgetting that Thomsonism has its numerous apostles in our
community; that it is common to see remedies vaunted as purely
vegetable, and that the prejudice against "mineral poisons,"
especially mercury, is as strong in many quarters now as it was at
the beginning of the seventeenth century.  Names are only air, and
blow away with a change of wind; but beliefs are rooted in human
wants and weakness, and die hard.  The oaks of Dodona are prostrate,
and the shrine of Delphi is desolate; but the Pythoness and the Sibyl
may be consulted in Lowell Street for a very moderate compensation.
Nostradamus and Lilly seem impossible in our time; but we have seen
the advertisements of an astrologer in our Boston papers year after
year, which seems to imply that he found believers and patrons.  You
smiled when I related Sir Kenelm Digby's prescription with the live
eel in it; but if each of you were to empty his or her pockets, would
there not roll out, from more than one of them, a horse-chestnut,
carried about as a cure for rheumatism?  The brazen head of Roger
Bacon is mute; but is not "Planchette" uttering her responses in a
hundred houses of this city?  We think of palmistry or chiromancy as
belonging to the days of Albertus Magnus, or, if existing in our
time, as given over to the gypsies; but a very distinguished person
has recently shown me the line of life, and the line of fortune, on
the palm of his hand, with a seeming confidence in the sanguine
predictions of his career which had been drawn from them.  What shall
we say of the plausible and well-dressed charlatans of our own time,
who trade in false pretences, like Nicholas Knapp of old, but without
any fear of being fined or whipped; or of the many follies and
inanities, imposing on the credulous part of the community, each of
them gaping with eager, open mouth for a gratuitous advertisement by
the mention of its foolish name in any respectable connection?

I turn from this less pleasing aspect of the common intelligence
which renders such follies possible, to close the honorable record of
the medical profession in this, our ancient Commonwealth.

We have seen it in the first century divided among clergymen,
magistrates, and regular practitioners; yet, on the whole, for the
time, and under the circumstances, respectable, except where it
invoked supernatural agencies to account for natural phenomena.

In the second century it simplified its practice, educated many
intelligent practitioners, and began the work of organizing for
concerted action, and for medical teaching.

In this, our own century, it has built hospitals, perfected and
multiplied its associations and educational institutions, enlarged
and created museums, and challenged a place in the world of science
by its literature.

In reviewing the whole course of its history we read a long list of
honored names, and a precious record written in private memories, in
public charities, in permanent contributions to medical science, in
generous sacrifices for the country.  We can point to our capital as
the port of entry for the New World of the great medical discoveries
of two successive centuries, and we can claim for it the triumph over
the most dreaded foe that assails the human body,--a triumph which
the annals of the race can hardly match in three thousand years of
medical history.






THE YOUNG PRACTITIONER

[A Valedictory Address delivered to the Graduating Class of the
Bellevue Hospital College, March 2, 1871.]


The occasion which calls us together reminds us not a little of that
other ceremony which unites a man and woman for life.  The banns have
already been pronounced which have wedded our young friends to the
profession of their choice.  It remains only to address to them some
friendly words of cheering counsel, and to bestow upon them the
parting benediction.

This is not the time for rhetorical display or ambitious eloquence.
We must forget ourselves, and think only of them.  To us it is an
occasion; to them it is an epoch.  The spectators at the wedding look
curiously at the bride and bridegroom; at the bridal veil, the
orange-flower garland, the giving and receiving of the ring; they
listen for the tremulous "I will," and wonder what are the mysterious
syllables the clergyman whispers in the ear of the married maiden.
But to the newly-wedded pair what meaning in those words, "for
better, for worse," "in sickness and in health," "till death us do
part!"  To the father, to the mother, who know too well how often the
deadly nightshade is interwoven with the wreath of orange-blossoms,
how empty the pageant, how momentous the reality!

You will not wonder that I address myself chiefly to those who are
just leaving academic life for the sterner struggle and the larger
tasks of matured and instructed manhood.  The hour belongs to them;
if others find patience to listen, they will kindly remember that,
after all, they are but as the spectators at the wedding, and that
the priest is thinking less of them than of their friends who are
kneeling at the altar.

I speak more directly to you, then, gentlemen of the graduating
class.  The days of your education, as pupils of trained instructors,
are over.  Your first harvest is all garnered.  Henceforth you are to
be sowers as well as reapers, and your field is the world.  How does
your knowledge stand to-day?  What have you gained as a permanent
possession?  What must you expect to forget?  What remains for you
yet to learn?  These are questions which it may interest you to
consider.

There is another question which must force itself on the thoughts of
many among you: "How am I to obtain patients and to keep their
confidence?  "You have chosen a laborious calling, and made many
sacrifices to fit yourselves for its successful pursuit.  You wish to
be employed that you may be useful, and that you may receive the
reward of your industry.  I would take advantage of these most
receptive moments to give you some hints which may help you to
realize your hopes and expectations.  Such is the outline of the
familiar talk I shall offer you.

Your acquaintance with some of the accessory branches is probably
greater now than it will be in a year from now,--much greater than it
will by ten years from now.  The progress of knowledge, it may be
feared, or hoped, will have outrun the text-books in which you
studied these branches.  Chemistry, for instance, is very apt to
spoil on one's hands.  "Nous avons change tout cela" might serve as
the standing motto of many of our manuals.  Science is a great
traveller, and wears her shoes out pretty fast, as might be expected.

You are now fresh from the lecture-room and the laboratory.  You can
pass an examination in anatomy, physiology, chemistry, materia
medica, which the men in large practice all around you would find a
more potent sudorific than any in the Pharmacopceia.  These masters
of the art of healing were once as ready with their answers as you
are now, but they have got rid of a great deal of the less
immediately practical part of their acquisitions, and you must
undergo the same depleting process.  Hard work will train it off, as
sharp exercise trains off the fat of a prize-fighter.

Yet, pause a moment before you infer that your teachers must have
been in fault when they furnished you with mental stores not directly
convertible to practical purposes, and likely in a few years to lose
their place in your memory.  All systematic knowledge involves much
that is not practical, yet it is the only kind of knowledge which
satisfies the mind, and systematic study proves, in the long-run, the
easiest way of acquiring and retaining facts which are practical.
There are many things which we can afford to forget, which yet it was
well to  learn.  Your mental condition is not the same as if you had
never known what you now try in vain to recall.  There is a perpetual
metempsychosis of thought, and the knowledge of to-day finds a soil
in the forgotten facts of yesterday.  You cannot see anything in the
new season of the guano you placed last year about the roots of your
climbing plants, but it is blushing and breathing fragrance in your
trellised roses; it has scaled your porch in the bee-haunted honey-
suckle; it has found its way where the ivy is green; it is gone where
the woodbine expands its luxuriant foliage.

Your diploma seems very broad to-day with your list of
accomplishments, but it begins to shrink from this hour like the Peau
de Chagrin of Balzac's story.  Do not worry about it, for all the
while there will be making out for you an ampler and fairer
parchment, signed by old Father Time himself as President of that
great University in which experience is the one perpetual and all-
sufficient professor.

Your present plethora of acquirements will soon cure itself.
Knowledge that is not wanted dies out like the eyes of the fishes of
the Mammoth Cave.  When you come to handle life and death as your
daily business, your memory will of itself bid good-by to such
inmates as the well-known foramina of the sphenoid bone and the
familiar oxides of methyl-ethylamyl-phenyl-ammonium.  Be thankful
that you have once known them, and remember that even the learned
ignorance of a nomenclature is something to have mastered, and may
furnish pegs to hang facts upon which would otherwise have strewed
the floor of memory in loose disorder.

But your education has, after all, been very largely practical.  You
have studied medicine and surgery, not chiefly in books, but at the
bedside and in the operating amphitheatre.  It is the special
advantage of large cities that they afford the opportunity of seeing
a great deal of disease in a short space of time, and of seeing many
cases of the same kind of disease brought together.  Let us not be
unjust to the claims of the schools remote from the larger centres of
population.  Who among us has taught better than Nathan Smith, better
than Elisha Bartlett? who teaches better than some of our living
contemporaries who divide their time between city and country
schools?  I am afraid we do not always do justice to our country
brethren, whose merits are less conspicuously exhibited than those of
the great city physicians and surgeons, such especially as have
charge of large hospitals.  There are modest practitioners living in
remote rural districts who are gifted by nature with such sagacity
and wisdom, trained so well in what is most essential to the practice
of their art, taught so thoroughly by varied experience, forced to
such manly self-reliance by their comparative isolation, that, from
converse with them alone, from riding with them on their long rounds
as they pass from village to village, from talking over cases with
them, putting up their prescriptions, watching their expedients,
listening to their cautions, marking the event of their predictions,
hearing them tell of their mistakes, and now and then glory a little
in the detection of another's blunder, a young man would find himself
better fitted for his real work than many who have followed long
courses of lectures and passed a showy examination.  But the young
man is exceptionally fortunate who enjoys the intimacy of such a
teacher.  And it must be confessed that the great hospitals,
infirmaries, and dispensaries of large cities, where men of well-
sifted reputations are in constant attendance, are the true centres
of medical education.  No students, I believe, are more thoroughly
aware of this than those who have graduated at this institution.
Here, as in all our larger city schools, the greatest pains are taken
to teach things as well as names.  You have entered into the
inheritance of a vast amount of transmitted skill and wisdom, which
you have taken, warm, as it were, with the life of your well-schooled
instructors.  You have not learned all that art has to teach you, but
you are safer practitioners to-day than were many of those whose
names we hardly mention without a genuflection.  I had rather be
cared for in a fever by the best-taught among you than by the
renowned Fernelius or the illustrious Boerhaave, could they come back
to us from that better world where there are no physicians needed,
and, if the old adage can be trusted, not many within call.  I had
rather have one of you exercise his surgical skill upon me than find
myself in the hands of a resuscitated Fabricius Hildanus, or even of
a wise Ambroise Pare, revisiting earth in the light of the nineteenth
century.

You will not accuse me of underrating your accomplishments.  You know
what to do for a child in a fit, for an alderman in an apoplexy, for
a girl that has fainted, for a woman in hysterics, for a leg that is
broken, for an arm that is out of joint, for fevers of every color,
for the sailor's rheumatism, and the tailor's cachexy.  In fact you
do really know so much at this very hour, that nothing but the
searching test of time can fully teach you the limitations of your
knowledge.

Of some of these you will permit me to remind you.  You will never
have outgrown the possibility of new acquisitions, for Nature is
endless in her variety.  But even the knowledge which you may be said
to possess will be a different thing after long habit has made it a
part of your existence.  The tactus eruditus extends to the mind as
well as to the finger-ends.  Experience means the knowledge gained by
habitual trial, and an expert is one who has been in the habit of
trying.  This is the kind of knowledge that made Ulysses wise in the
ways of men.  Many cities had he seen, and known the minds of those
who dwelt in them.  This knowledge it was that Chaucer's Shipman
brought home with him from the sea a

     "In many a tempest had his berd be shake."

This is the knowledge we place most confidence in, in the practical
affairs of life.

Our training has two stages.  The first stage deals with our
intelligence, which takes the idea of what is to be done with the
most charming ease and readiness.  Let it be a game of billiards, for
instance, which the marker is going to teach us.  We have nothing to
do but to make this ball glance from that ball and hit that other
ball, and to knock that ball with this ball into a certain caecal
sacculus or diverticulum which our professional friend calls a
pocket.  Nothing can be clearer; it is as easy as "playing upon this
pipe," for which Hamlet gives Guildenstern such lucid directions.
But this intelligent Me, who steps forward as the senior partner in
our dual personality, turns out to be a terrible bungler.  He misses
those glancing hits which the hard-featured young professional person
calls "carroms," and insists on pocketing his own ball instead of the
other one.

It is the unintelligent Me, stupid as an idiot, that has to try a
thing a thousand times before he can do it, and then never knows how
he does it, that at last does it well.  We have to educate ourselves
through the pretentious claims of intellect, into the humble accuracy
of instinct, and we end at last by acquiring the dexterity, the
perfection, the certainty, which those masters of arts, the bee and
the spider, inherit from Nature.

Book-knowledge, lecture-knowledge, examination-knowledge, are all in
the brain.  But work-knowledge is not only in the brain, it is in the
senses, in the muscles, in the ganglia of the sympathetic nerves,--
all over the man, as one may say, as instinct seems diffused through
every part of those lower animals that have no such distinct organ as
a brain.  See a skilful surgeon handle a broken limb; see a wise old
physician smile away a case that looks to a novice as if the sexton
would soon be sent for; mark what a large experience has done for
those who were fitted to profit by it, and you will feel convinced
that, much as you know, something is still left for you to learn.

May I venture to contrast youth and experience in medical practice,
something in the way the man painted the lion, that is, the lion
under?

The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows-the exceptions.
The young man knows his patient, but the old man knows also his
patient's family, dead and alive, up and down for generations.  He
can tell beforehand what diseases their unborn children will be
subject to, what they will die of if they live long enough, and
whether they had better live at all, or remain unrealized
possibilities, as belonging to a stock not worth being perpetuated.
The young man feels uneasy if he is not continually doing something
to stir up his patient's internal arrangements.  The old man takes
things more quietly, and is much more willing to let well enough
alone: All these superiorities, if such they are,'you must wait for
time to bring you.  In the meanwhile (if we will let the lion be
uppermost for a moment), the young man's senses are quicker than
those of his older rival.  His education in all the accessory
branches is more recent, and therefore nearer the existing condition
of knowledge.  He finds it easier than his seniors to accept the
improvements which every year is bringing forward.  New ideas build
their nests in young men's brains.  "Revolutions are not made by men
in spectacles," as I once heard it remarked, and the first whispers
of a new truth are not caught by those who begin to feel the need of
an ear-trumpet.  Granting all these advantages to the young man, he
ought, nevertheless, to go on improving, on the whole, as a medical
practitioner, with every year, until he has ripened into a well-
mellowed maturity.  But, to improve, he must be good for something at
the start.  If you ship a poor cask of wine to India and back, if you
keep it a half a century, it only grows thinner and sharper.

You are soon to enter into relations with the public, to expend your
skill and knowledge for its benefit, and find your support in the
rewards of your labor.  What kind of a constituency is this which is
to look to you as its authorized champions in the struggle of life
against its numerous enemies?

In the first place, the persons who seek the aid of the physician are
very honest and sincere in their wish to get rid of their complaints,
and, generally speaking, to live as long as they can.  However
attractively the future is painted to them, they are attached to the
planet with which they are already acquainted.  They are addicted to
the daily use of this empirical and unchemical mixture which we call
air; and would hold on to it as a tippler does to his alcoholic
drinks.  There is nothing men will not do, there is nothing they have
not done, to recover their health and save their lives.  They have
submitted to be half-drowned in water, and half-choked with gases, to
be buried up to their chins in earth, to be seared with hot irons
like galley-slaves, to be crimped with knives, like cod-fish, to have
needles thrust into their flesh, and bonfires kindled on their skin,
to swallow all sorts of abominations, and to pay for all this, as if
to be singed and scalded were a costly privilege, as if blisters were
a blessing, and leeches were a luxury.  What more can be asked to
prove their honesty and sincerity?

This same community is very intelligent with respect to a great many
subjects-commerce, mechanics, manufactures, politics.  But with
regard to medicine it is hopelessly ignorant and never finds it out.
I do not know that it is any worse in this country than in Great
Britain, where Mr. Huxley speaks very freely of "the utter ignorance
of the simplest laws of their own animal life, which prevails among
even the most highly educated persons."  And Cullen said before him
"Neither the acutest genius nor the soundest judgment will avail in
judging of a particular science, in regard to which they have not
been exercised.  I have been obliged to please my patients sometimes
with reasons, and I have found that any will pass, even with able
divines and acute lawyers; the same will pass with the husbands as
with the wives."  If the community could only be made aware of its
own utter ignorance, and incompetence to form opinions on medical
subjects, difficult enough to those who give their lives to the study
of them, the practitioner would have an easier task.  But it will
form opinions of its own, it cannot help it, and we cannot blame it,
even though we know how slight and deceptive are their foundations.

This is the way it happens: Every grown-up person has either been ill
himself or had a friend suffer from illness, from which he has
recovered.  Every sick person has done something or other by
somebody's advice, or of his own accord, a little before getting
better.  There is an irresistible tendency to associate the thing
done, and the improvement which followed it, as cause and effect.
This is the great source of fallacy in medical practice.  But the
physician has some chance of correcting his hasty inference.  He
thinks his prescription cured a single case of a particular
complaint; he tries it in twenty similar cases without effect, and
sets down the first as probably nothing more than a coincidence.  The
unprofessional experimenter or observer has no large experience to
correct his hasty generalization.  He wants to believe that the means
he employed effected his cure.  He feels grateful to the person who
advised it, he loves to praise the pill or potion which helped him,
and he has a kind of monumental pride in himself as a living
testimony to its efficacy.  So it is that you will find the community
in which you live, be it in town or country, full of brands plucked
from the burning, as they believe, by some agency which, with your
better training, you feel reasonably confident had nothing to do with
it.  Their disease went out of itself, and the stream from the
medical fire-annihilator had never even touched it.

You cannot and need not expect to disturb the public in the
possession of its medical superstitions.  A man's ignorance is as
much his private property, and as precious in his own eyes, as his
family Bible.  You have only to open your own Bible at the ninth
chapter of St. John's Gospel, and you will find that the logic of a
restored patient was very simple then, as it is now, and very hard to
deal with.  My clerical friends will forgive me for poaching on their
sacred territory, in return for an occasional raid upon the medical
domain of which they have now and then been accused.

A blind man was said to have been restored to sight by a young person
whom the learned doctors of the Jewish law considered a sinner, and,
as such, very unlikely to have been endowed with a divine gift of
healing.  They visited the patient repeatedly, and evidently teased
him with their questions about the treatment, and their insinuations
about the young man, until he lost his temper.  At last he turned
sharply upon them:  "Whether he be a sinner or no, I know not: one
thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I see."

This is the answer that always has been and always will be given by
most persons when they find themselves getting well after doing
anything, no matter what,--recommended by anybody, no matter whom.
Lord Bacon, Robert Boyle, Bishop Berkeley, all put their faith in
panaceas which we should laugh to scorn.  They had seen people get
well after using them.  Are we any wiser than those great men?  Two
years ago, in a lecture before the Massachusetts Historical Society,
I mentioned this recipe of Sir Kenelm Digby for fever and ague: Pare
the patient's nails; put the parings in a little bag, and hang the
bag round the neck of a live eel, and place him in a tub of water.
The eel will die, and the patient will recover.

Referring to this prescription in the course of the same lecture, I
said: "You smiled when I related Sir Kenehn Digby's prescription,
with the live eel in it; but if each of you were to empty his or her
pockets, would there not roll out, from more than one of them, a
horse-chestnut, carried about as a cure for rheumatism?"  Nobody saw
fit to empty his or her pockets, and my question brought no response.
But two months ago I was in a company of educated persons, college
graduates every one of them, when a gentleman, well known in our
community, a man of superior ability and strong common-sense, on the
occasion of some talk arising about rheumatism, took a couple of very
shiny horse-chestnuts from his breeches-pocket, and laid them on the
table, telling us how, having suffered from the complaint in
question, he had, by the advice of a friend, procured these two
horse-chestnuts on a certain time a year or more ago, and carried
them about him ever since; from which very day he had been entirely
free from rheumatism.

This argument, from what looks like cause and effect, whether it be
so or not, is what you will have to meet wherever you go, and you
need not think you can answer it.  In the natural course of things
some thousands of persons must be getting well or better of slight
attacks of colds, of rheumatic pains, every week, in this city alone.
Hundreds of them do something or other in the way of remedy, by
medical or other advice, or of their own motion, and the last thing
they do gets the credit of the recovery.  Think what a crop of
remedies this must furnish, if it were all harvested!

Experience has taught, or will teach you, that most of the wonderful
stories patients and others tell of sudden and signal cures are like
Owen Glendower's story of the portents that announced his birth.  The
earth shook at your nativity, did it?  Very likely, and

               "So it would have done,
     At the same season, if your mother's cat
     Had kittened, though yourself had ne'er been born."

You must listen more meekly than Hotspur did to the babbling
Welshman, for ignorance is a solemn and sacred fact, and, like
infancy, which it resembles, should be respected.  Once in a while
you will have a patient of sense, born with the gift of observation,
from whom you may learn something.  When you find yourself in the
presence of one who is fertile of medical opinions, and affluent in
stories of marvellous cures,--of a member of Congress whose name
figures in certificates to the value of patent medicines, of a
voluble dame who discourses on the miracles she has wrought or seen
wrought with the little jokers of the sugar-of-milk globule-box, take
out your watch and count the pulse; also note the time of day, and
charge the price of a visit for every extra fifteen, or, if you are
not very busy, every twenty minutes.  In this way you will turn what
seems a serious dispensation into a double blessing, for this class
of patients loves dearly to talk, and it does them a deal of good,
and you feel as if you had earned your money by the dose you have
taken, quite as honestly as by any dose you may have ordered.

You must take the community just as it is, and make the best of it.
You wish to obtain its confidence; there is a short rule for doing
this which you will find useful,--deserve it.  But, to deserve it in
full measure, you must unite many excellences, natural and acquired.

As the basis of all the rest, you must have all those traits of
character which fit you to enter into the most intimate and
confidential relations with the families of which you are the
privileged friend and counsellor.  Medical Christianity, if I may use
such a term, is of very early date.  By the oath of Hippocrates, the
practitioner of ancient times bound himself to enter his patient's
house with the sole purpose of doing him good, and so to conduct
himself as to avoid the very appearance of evil.  Let the physician
of to-day begin by coming up to this standard, and add to it all the
more recently discovered virtues and graces.

A certain amount of natural ability is requisite to make you a good
physician, but by no means that disproportionate development of some
special faculty which goes by the name of genius.  A just balance of
the mental powers is a great deal more likely to be useful than any
single talent, even were it the power of observation; in excess.  For
a mere observer is liable to be too fond of facts for their own sake,
so that, if he told the real truth, he would confess that he takes
more pleasure in a post-mortem examination which shows him what was
the matter with a patient, than in a case which insists on getting
well and leaving him in the dark as to its nature.  Far more likely
to interfere with the sound practical balance of the mind is that
speculative, theoretical tendency which has made so many men noted in
their day, whose fame has passed away with their dissolving theories.
Read Dr. Bartlett's comparison of the famous Benjamin Rush with his
modest fellow-townsman Dr. William Currie, and see the dangers into
which a passion for grandiose generalizations betrayed a man of many
admirable qualities.

I warn you against all ambitious aspirations outside of your
profession.  Medicine is the most difficult of sciences and the most
laborious of arts.  It will task all your powers of body and mind if
you are faithful to it.  Do not dabble in the muddy sewer of
politics, nor linger by the enchanted streams of literature, nor dig
in far-off fields for the hidden waters of alien sciences.  The great
practitioners are generally those who concentrate all their powers on
their business.  If there are here and there brilliant exceptions, it
is only in virtue of extraordinary gifts, and industry to which very
few are equal.

To get business a man mast really want it; and do you suppose that
when you are in the middle of a heated caucus, or half-way through a
delicate analysis, or in the spasm of an unfinished ode, your eyes
rolling in the fine frenzy of poetical composition, you want to be
called to a teething infant, or an ancient person groaning under the
griefs of a lumbago?  I think I have known more than one young man
whose doctor's sign proclaimed his readiness to serve mankind in that
capacity, but who hated the sound of a patient's knock, and as he sat
with his book or his microscope, felt exactly as the old party
expressed himself in my friend Mr. Brownell's poem

          "All I axes is, let me alone."

The community soon finds out whether you are in earnest, and really
mean business, or whether you are one of those diplomaed dilettanti
who like the amusement of quasi medical studies, but have no idea of
wasting their precious time in putting their knowledge in practice
for the benefit of their suffering fellow-creatures.

The public is a very incompetent judge of your skill and knowledge,
but it gives its confidence most readily to those who stand well with
their professional brethren, whom they call upon when they themselves
or their families are sick, whom they choose to honorable offices,
whose writings and teachings they hold in esteem.  A man may be much
valued by the profession and yet have defects which prevent his
becoming a favorite practitioner, but no popularity can be depended
upon as permanent which is not sanctioned by the judgment of
professional experts, and with these you will always stand on your
substantial merits.

What shall I say of the personal habits you must form if you wish for
success?  Temperance is first upon the list.  Intemperance in a
physician partakes of the guilt of homicide, for the muddled brain
may easily make a fatal blunder in a prescription and the unsteady
hand transfix an artery in an operation.  Tippling doctors have been
too common in the history of medicine.  Paracelsus was a sot,
Radcliffe was much too fond of his glass, and Dr. James Hurlbut of
Wethersfield, Connecticut, a famous man in his time, used to drink a
square bottle of rum a day, with a corresponding allowance of opium
to help steady his nerves.  We commonly speak of a man as being the
worse for liquor, but I was asking an Irish laborer one day about his
doctor, who, as he said, was somewhat given to drink.  "I like him
best when he's a little that way," he said; "then I can spake to
him."  I pitied the poor patient who could not venture to allude to
his colic or his pleurisy until his physician was tipsy.

There are personal habits of less gravity than the one I have
mentioned which it is well to guard against, or, if they are formed,
to relinquish.  A man who may be called at a moment's warning into
the fragrant boudoir of suffering loveliness should not unsweeten its
atmosphere with reminiscences of extinguished meerschaums.  He should
remember that the sick are sensitive and fastidious, that they love
the sweet odors and the pure tints of flowers, and if his presence is
not like the breath of the rose, if his hands are not like the leaf
of the lily, his visit may be unwelcome, and if he looks behind him
he may see a window thrown open after he has left the sick-chamber.
I remember too well the old doctor who sometimes came to help me
through those inward griefs to which childhood is liable.  "Far off
his coming "--shall I say "shone," and finish the Miltonic phrase, or
leave the verb to the happy conjectures of my audience?  Before him
came a soul-subduing whiff of ipecacuanha, and after him lingered a
shuddering consciousness of rhubarb.  He had lived so much among his
medicaments that he had at last become himself a drug, and to have
him pass through a sick-chamber was a stronger dose than a
conscientious disciple of Hahnemann would think it safe to
administer.

Need I remind yon of the importance of punctuality in your
engagements, and of the worry and distress to patients and their
friends which the want of it occasions?  One of my old teachers
always carried two watches, to make quite sure of being exact, and
not only kept his appointments with the regularity of a chronometer,
but took great pains to be at his patient's house at the time when he
had reason to believe he was expected, even if no express appointment
was made.  It is a good rule; if you call too early, my lady's hair
may not be so smooth as could be wished, and, if you keep her waiting
too long, her hair may be smooth, but her temper otherwise.

You will remember, of course, always to get the weather-gage of your
patient.  I mean, to place him so that the light falls on his face
and not on yours.  It is a kind of, ocular duel that is about to take
place between you; you are going to look through his features into
his pulmonary and hepatic and other internal machinery, and he is
going to look into yours quite as sharply to see what you think about
his probabilities for time or eternity.

No matter how hard he stares at your countenance, he should never be
able to read his fate in it.  It should be cheerful as long as there
is hope, and serene in its gravity when nothing is left but
resignation.  The face of a physician, like that of a diplomatist,
should be impenetrable.  Nature is a benevolent old hypocrite; she
cheats the sick and the dying with illusions better than any
anodynes.  If there are cogent reasons why a patient should be
undeceived, do it deliberately and advisedly, but do not betray your
apprehensions through your tell-tale features.

We had a physician in our city whose smile was commonly reckoned as
being worth five thousand dollars a year to him, in the days, too, of
moderate incomes.  You cannot put on such a smile as that any more
than you can get sunshine without sun; there was a tranquil and
kindly nature under it that irradiated the pleasant face it made one
happier to meet on his daily rounds.  But you can cultivate the
disposition, and it will work its way through to the surface, nay,
more,--you can try to wear a quiet and encouraging look, and it will
react on your disposition and make you like what you seem to be, or
at least bring you nearer to its own likeness.

Your patient has no more right to all the truth you know than he has
to all the medicine in your saddlebags, if you carry that kind of
cartridge-box for the ammunition that slays disease.  He should get
only just so much as is good for him.  I have seen a physician
examining a patient's chest stop all at once, as he brought out a
particular sound with a tap on the collarbone, in the attitude of a
pointer who has just come on the scent or sight of a woodcock.  You
remember the Spartan boy, who, with unmoved countenance, hid the fox
that was tearing his vitals beneath his mantle.  What he could do in
his own suffering you must learn to do for others on whose vital
organs disease has fastened its devouring teeth.  It is a terrible
thing to take away hope, even earthly hope, from a fellow-creature.
Be very careful what names you let fall before your patient.  He
knows what it means when you tell him he has tubercles or Bright's
disease, and, if he hears the word carcinoma, he will certainly look
it out in a medical dictionary, if he does not interpret its dread
significance on the instant.  Tell him he has asthmatic symptoms, or
a tendency to the gouty diathesis, and he will at once think of all
the asthmatic and gouty old patriarchs he has ever heard of, and be
comforted.  You need not be so cautious in speaking of the health of
rich and remote relatives, if he is in the line of succession.

Some shrewd old doctors have a few phrases always on hand for
patients that will insist on knowing the pathology of their
complaints without the slightest capacity of understanding the
scientific explanation.  I have known the term "spinal irritation"
serve well on such occasions, but I think nothing on the whole has
covered so much ground, and meant so little, and given such profound
satisfaction to all parties, as the magnificent phrase "congestion of
the portal system."

Once more, let me recommend you, as far as possible, to keep your
doubts to yourself, and give the patient the benefit of your
decision.  Firmness, gentle firmness, is absolutely necessary in this
and certain other relations.  Mr. Rarey with Cruiser, Richard with
Lady Ann, Pinel with his crazy people, show what steady nerves can do
with the most intractable of animals, the most irresistible of
despots, and the most unmanageable of invalids.

If you cannot acquire and keep the confidence of your patient, it is
time for you to give place to some other practitioner who can.  If
you are wise and diligent, you can establish relations with the best
of them which they will find it very hard to break.  But, if they
wish to employ another person, who, as they think, knows more than
you do, do not take it as a personal wrong.  A patient believes
another man can save his life, can restore him to health, which, as
he thinks, you have not the skill to do.  No matter whether the
patient is right or wrong, it is a great impertinence to think you
have any property in him.  Your estimate of your own ability is not
the question, it is what the patient thinks of it.  All your wisdom
is to him like the lady's virtue in Raleigh's song:

    "If she seem not chaste to me,
     What care I how chaste she be?"

What I call a good patient is one who, having found a good physician,
sticks to him till he dies.  But there are many very good people who
are not what I call good patients.  I was once requested to call on a
lady suffering from nervous and other symptoms.  It came out in the
preliminary conversational skirmish, half medical, half social, that
I was the twenty-sixth member of the faculty into whose arms,
professionally speaking, she had successively thrown herself.  Not
being a believer in such a rapid rotation of scientific crops, I
gently deposited the burden, commending it to the care of number
twenty-seven, and, him, whoever he might be, to the care of Heaven.

If there happened to be among my audience any person who wished to
know on what principles the patient should choose his physician, I
should give him these few precepts to think over:

Choose a man who is personally agreeable, for a daily visit from an
intelligent, amiable, pleasant, sympathetic person will cost you no
more than one from a sloven or a boor, and his presence will do more
for you than any prescription the other will order.

Let him be a man of recognized good sense in other matters, and the
chance is that he will be sensible as a practitioner.

Let him be a man who stands well with his professional brethren, whom
they approve as honest, able, courteous.

Let him be one whose patients are willing to die in his hands, not
one whom they go to for trifles, and leave as soon as they are in
danger, and who can say, therefore, that he never loses a patient.

Do not leave the ranks of what is called the regular profession,
unless you wish to go farther and fare worse, for you may be assured
that its members recognize no principle which hinders their accepting
any remedial agent proved to be useful, no matter from what quarter
it comes.  The difficulty is that the stragglers, organized under
fantastic names in pretentious associations, or lurking in solitary
dens behind doors left ajar, make no real contributions to the art of
healing.  When they bring forward a remedial agent like chloral, like
the bromide of potassium, like ether, used as an anesthetic, they
will find no difficulty in procuring its recognition.

Some of you will probably be more or less troubled by the pretensions
of that parody of mediaeval theology which finds its dogma of
hereditary depravity in the doctrine of psora, its miracle of
transubstantiation in the mystery of its triturations and dilutions,
its church in the people who have mistaken their century, and its
priests in those who have mistaken their calling.  You can do little
with persons who are disposed to accept these curious medical
superstitions.  The saturation-point of individual minds with
reference to evidence, and especially medical evidence, differs, and
must always continue to differ, very widely.  There are those whose
minds are satisfied with the decillionth dilution of a scientific
proof.  No wonder they believe in the efficacy of a similar
attenuation of bryony or pulsatilla.  You have no fulcrum you can
rest upon to lift an error out of such minds as these, often highly
endowed with knowledge and talent, sometimes with genius, but
commonly richer in the imaginative than the observing and reasoning
faculties.

Let me return once more to the young graduate.  Your relations to
your professional brethren may be a source of lifelong happiness and
growth in knowledge and character, or they may make you wretched and
end by leaving you isolated from those who should be your friends and
counsellors.  The life of a physician becomes ignoble when he suffers
himself to feed on petty jealousies and sours his temper in perpetual
quarrels.  You will be liable to meet an uncomfortable man here and
there in the profession,--one who is so fond of being in hot water
that it is a wonder all the albumen in his body is not coagulated.
There are common barrators among doctors as there are among lawyers,
--stirrers up of strife under one pretext and another, but in reality
because they like it.  They are their own worst enemies, and do
themselves a mischief each time they assail their neighbors.  In my
student days I remember a good deal of this Donnybrook-Fair style of
quarrelling, more especially in Paris, where some of the noted
surgeons were always at loggerheads, and in one of our lively Western
cities.  Soon after I had set up an office, I had a trifling
experience which may serve to point a moral in this direction.  I had
placed a lamp behind the glass in the entry to indicate to the
passer-by where relief from all curable infirmities was to be sought
and found.  Its brilliancy attracted the attention of a devious
youth, who dashed his fist through the glass and upset my modest
luminary.  All he got by his vivacious assault was that he left
portions of integument from his knuckles upon the glass, had a lame
hand, was very easily identified, and had to pay the glazier's bill.
The moral is that, if the brilliancy of another's reputation excites
your belligerent instincts, it is not worth your while to strike at
it, without calculating which of you is likely to suffer most, if you
do.

You may be assured that when an ill-conditioned neighbor is always
complaining of a bad taste in his mouth and an evil atmosphere about
him, there is something wrong about his own secretions.  In such
cases there is an alterative regimen of remarkable efficacy: it is a
starvation-diet of letting alone.  The great majority of the
profession are peacefully inclined.  Their pursuits are eminently
humanizing, and they look with disgust on the personalities which
intrude themselves into the placid domain of an art whose province it
is to heal and not to wound.

The intercourse of teacher and student in a large school is
necessarily limited, but it should be, and, so far as my experience
goes, it is, eminently cordial and kindly.  You will leave with
regret, and hold in tender remembrance, those who have taken you by
the hand at your entrance on your chosen path, and led you patiently
and faithfully, until the great gates at its end have swung upon
their hinges, and the world lies open before you.  That venerable
oath to which I have before referred bound the student to regard his
instructor in the light of a parent, to treat his children like
brothers, to succor him in his day of need.  I trust the spirit of
the oath of Hippocrates is not dead in the hearts of the students of
to-day.  They will remember with gratitude every earnest effort,
every encouraging word, which has helped them in their difficult and
laborious career of study.  The names they read on their diplomas
will recall faces that are like family-portraits in their memory, and
the echo of voices they have listened to so long will linger in their
memories far into the still evening of their lives.

One voice will be heard no more which has been familiar to many among
you.  It is not for me, a stranger to these scenes, to speak his
eulogy.  I have no right to sadden this hour by dwelling on the deep
regrets of friendship, or to bid the bitter tears of sorrow flow
afresh.  Yet I cannot help remembering what a void the death of such
a practitioner as your late instructor must leave in the wide circle
of those who leaned upon his counsel and assistance in their hour of
need, in a community where he was so widely known and esteemed, in a
school where he bore so important a part.  There is no exemption from
the common doom for him who holds the shield to protect others.  The
student is called from his bench, the professor from his chair, the
practitioner in his busiest period hears a knock more peremptory than
any patient's midnight summons, and goes on that unreturning visit
which admits of no excuse, and suffers no delay.  The call of such a
man away from us is the bereavement of a great family.  Nor can we
help regretting the loss for him of a bright and cheerful earthly
future; for the old age of a physician is one of the happiest periods
of his life.  He is loved and cherished for what he has been, and
even in the decline of his faculties there are occasions when his
experience is still appealed to, and his trembling hands are looked
to with renewing hope and trust, as being yet able to stay the arm of
the destroyer.

But if there is so much left for age, how beautiful, how inspiring is
the hope of youth!  I see among those whom I count as listeners one
by whose side I have sat as a fellow-teacher, and by whose
instructions I have felt myself not too old to profit.  As we
borrowed him from your city, I must take this opportunity of telling
you that his zeal, intelligence, and admirable faculty as an
instructor were heartily and universally recognized among us.  We
return him, as we trust, uninjured, to the fellow-citizens who have
the privilege of claiming him as their own.

And now, gentlemen of the graduating class, nothing remains but for
me to bid you, in the name of those for whom I am commissioned and
privileged to speak, farewell as students, and welcome as
practitioners.  I pronounce the two benedictions in the same breath,
as the late king's demise and the new king's accession are proclaimed
by the same voice at the same moment.  You would hardly excuse me if
I stooped to any meaner dialect than the classical and familiar
language of your prescriptions, the same in which your title to the
name of physician is, if, like our own institution, you follow the
ancient usage, engraved upon your diplomas.

Valete, JUVENES, artis medicae studiosi; valete, discipuli, valete,
filii!

Salvete, VIRI, artis medicae magister; Salvete amici; salvete
fratres!






MEDICAL LIBRARIES.

[Dedicatory Address at the opening of the Medical Library in Boston,
December 3, 1878.]

It is my appointed task, my honorable privilege, this evening, to
speak of what has been done by others.  No one can bring his tribute
of words into the presence of great deeds, or try with them to
embellish the memory of any inspiring achievement, without feeling
and leaving with others a sense of their insufficiency.  So felt
Alexander when he compared even his adored Homer with the hero the
poet had sung.  So felt Webster when he contrasted the phrases of
rhetoric with the eloquence of patriotism and of self-devotion.  So
felt Lincoln when on the field of Gettysburg he spoke those immortal
words which Pericles could not nave bettered, which Aristotle could
not have criticised.  So felt he who wrote the epitaph of the builder
of the dome which looks down on the crosses and weathercocks that
glitter over London.

We are not met upon a battle-field, except so far as every laborious
achievement means a victory over opposition, indifference,
selfishness, faintheartedness, and that great property of mind as
well as matter,--inertia.  We are not met in a cathedral, except so
far as every building whose walls are lined with the products of
useful and ennobling thought is a temple of the Almighty, whose
inspiration has given us understanding.  But we have gathered within
walls which bear testimony to the self-sacrificing, persevering
efforts of a few young men, to whom we owe the origin and development
of all that excites our admiration in this completed enterprise; and
I might consider my task as finished if I contented myself with
borrowing the last word of the architect's epitaph and only saying,
Look around you!

The reports of the librarian have told or will tell you, in some
detail, what has been accomplished since the 21st of December, 1874,
when six gentlemen met at the house of Dr. Henry Ingersoll Bowditch
to discuss different projects for a medical library.  In less than
four years from that time, by the liberality of associations and of
individuals, this collection of nearly ten thousand volumes, of five
thousand pamphlets, and of one hundred and twenty-five journals,
regularly received,--all worthily sheltered beneath this lofty roof,
--has come into being under our eyes.  It has sprung up, as it were;
in the night like a mushroom; it stands before us in full daylight as
lusty as an oak, and promising to grow and flourish in the perennial
freshness of an evergreen.

To whom does our profession owe this already large collection of
books, exceeded in numbers only by four or five of the most extensive
medical libraries in the country, and lodged in a building so well
adapted to its present needs?  We will not point out individually all
those younger members of the profession who have accomplished what
their fathers and elder brethren had attempted and partially
achieved.  We need not write their names on these walls, after the
fashion of those civic dignitaries who immortalize themselves on
tablets of marble and gates of iron.  But their contemporaries know
them well, and their descendants will not forget them,--the men who
first met together, the men who have given their time and their
money, the faithful workers, worthy associates of the strenuous
agitator who gave no sleep to his eyes, no slumber to his eyelids,
until he had gained his ends; the untiring, imperturbable, tenacious,
irrepressible, all-subduing agitator who neither rested nor let
others rest until the success of the project was assured.  If,
against his injunctions, I name Dr. James Read Chadwick, it is only
my revenge for his having kept me awake so often and so long while he
was urging on the undertaking in which he has been preeminently
active and triumphantly successful.

We must not forget the various medical libraries which preceded this:
that of an earlier period, when Boston contained about seventy
regular practitioners, the collection afterwards transferred to the
Boston Athenaeum; the two collections belonging to the University;
the Treadwell Library at the Massachusetts General Hospital; the
collections of the two societies, that for Medical Improvement and
that for Medical Observation; and more especially the ten thousand
volumes relating to medicine belonging to our noble public city
library,--too many blossoms on the tree of knowledge, perhaps, for
the best fruit to ripen.  But the Massachusetts Medical Society now
numbers nearly four hundred members in the city of Boston.  The time
had arrived for a new and larger movement.  There was needed a place
to which every respectable member of the medical profession could
obtain easy access; where, under one roof, all might find the special
information they were seeking; where the latest medical intelligence
should be spread out daily as the shipping news is posted on the
bulletins of the exchange; where men engaged in a common pursuit
could meet, surrounded by the mute oracles of science and art; where
the whole atmosphere should be as full of professional knowledge as
the apothecary's shop is of the odor of his medicaments.  This was
what the old men longed for,--the prophets and kings of the
profession, who

               "Desired it long,
     But died without the sight."

This is what the young men and those who worked under their guidance
undertook to give us.  And now such a library, such a reading-room,
such an exchange, such an intellectual and social meeting place, we
be hold a fact, plain before us.  The medical profession of our city,
and, let us add, of all those neighboring places which it can reach
with its iron arms, is united as never before by the commune
vinculum, the common bond of a large, enduring, ennobling, unselfish
interest.  It breathes a new air of awakened intelligence.  It
marches abreast of the other learned professions, which have long had
their extensive and valuable centralized libraries; abreast of them,
but not promising to be content with that position.  What glorifies a
town like a cathedral?  What dignifies a province like a university?
What illuminates a country like its scholarship, and what is the nest
that hatches scholars but a library?

The physician, some may say, is a practical man and has little use
for all this book-learning.  Every student has heard Sydenham's reply
to Sir Richard Blackmore's question as to what books he should read,
--meaning medical books.  "Read Don Quixote," was his famous answer.
But Sydenham himself made medical books and may be presumed to have
thought those at least worth reading.  Descartes was asked where was
his library, and in reply held up the dissected body of an animal.
But Descartes made books, great books, and a great many of them.  A
physician of common sense without erudition is better than a learned
one without common sense, but the thorough master of his profession
must have learning added to his natural gifts.

It is not necessary to maintain the direct practical utility of all
kinds of learning.  Our shelves contain many books which only a
certain class of medical scholars will be likely to consult.  There
is a dead medical literature, and there is a live one.  The dead is
not all ancient, the live is not all modern.  There is none, modern
or ancient, which, if it has no living value for the student, will
not teach him something by its autopsy.  But it is with the live
literature of his profession that the medical practitioner is first
of all concerned.

Now there has come a great change in our time over the form in which
living thought presents itself.  The first printed books,--the
incunabula,--were inclosed in boards of solid oak, with brazen clasps
and corners; the boards by and by were replaced by pasteboard covered
with calf or sheepskin; then cloth came in and took the place of
leather; then the pasteboard was covered with paper instead of cloth;
and at this day the quarterly, the monthly, the weekly periodical in
its flimsy unsupported dress of paper, and the daily journal, naked
as it came from the womb of the press, hold the larger part of the
fresh reading we live upon.  We must have the latest thought in its
latest expression; the page must be newly turned like the morning
bannock; the pamphlet must be newly opened like the ante-prandial
oyster.

Thus a library, to meet the need of our time, must take, and must
spread out in a convenient form, a great array of periodicals.  Our
active practitioners read these by preference over almost everything
else.  Our specialists, more particularly, depend on the month's
product, on the yearly crop of new facts, new suggestions, new
contrivances, as much as the farmer on the annual yield of his acres.
One of the first wants, then, of the profession is supplied by our
library in its great array of periodicals from many lands, in many
languages.  Such a number of medical periodicals no private library
would have room for, no private person would pay for, or flood his
tables with if they were sent him for nothing.  These, I think, with
the reports of medical societies and the papers contributed to them,
will form the most attractive part of our accumulated medical
treasures.  They will be also one of our chief expenses, for these
journals must be bound in volumes and they require a great amount of
shelf-room; all this, in addition to the cost of subscription for
those which are not furnished us gratuitously.

It is true that the value of old scientific periodicals is, other
things being equal, in the inverse ratio of their age, for the
obvious reason that what is most valuable in the earlier volumes of a
series is drained off into the standard works with which the
intelligent practitioner is supposed to be familiar.  But no extended
record of facts grows too old to be useful, provided only that we
have a ready and sure way of getting at the particular fact or facts
we are in search of.

And this leads me to speak of what I conceive to be one of the
principal tasks to be performed by the present and the coming
generation of scholars, not only in the medical, but in every
department of knowledge.  I mean the formation of indexes, and more
especially of indexes to periodical literature.

This idea has long been working in the minds of scholars, and all who
have had occasion to follow out any special subject.  I have a right
to speak of it, for I long ago attempted to supply the want of
indexes in some small measure for my own need.  I had a very complete
set of the "American Journal of the Medical Sciences;" an entire set
of the "North American Review," and many volumes of the reprints of
the three leading British quarterlies.  Of what use were they to me
without general indexes?  I looked them all through carefully and
made classified lists of all the articles I thought I should most
care to read.  But they soon outgrew my lists.  The "North American
Review" kept filling up shelf after shelf, rich in articles which I
often wanted to consult, but what a labor to find them, until the
index of Mr. Gushing, published a few months since, made the contents
of these hundred and twenty volumes as easily accessible as the words
in a dictionary!  I had a, copy of good Dr. Abraham Rees's
Cyclopaedia, a treasure-house to my boyhood which has not lost its
value for me in later years.  But where to look for what I wanted?  I
wished to know, for instance, what Dr. Burney had to say about
singing.  Who would have looked for it under the Italian word
cantare?  I was curious to learn something of the etchings of
Rembrandt, and where should I find it but under the head "Low
Countries, Engravers of the,"--an elaborate and most valuable article
of a hundred double-columned close-printed quarto pages, to which no
reference, even, is made under the title Rembrandt.

There was nothing to be done, if I wanted to know where that which I
specially cared for was to be found in my Rees's Cyclopaedia, but to
look over every page of its forty-one quarto volumes and make out a
brief list of matters of interest which I could not find by their
titles, and this I did, at no small expense of time and trouble.

Nothing, therefore, could be more pleasing to me than to see the
attention which has been given of late years to the great work of
indexing.  It is a quarter of a century since Mr. Poole published his
"Index to Periodical Literature," which it is much to be hoped is
soon to appear in a new edition, grown as it must be to formidable
dimensions by the additions of so long a period.  The "British and
Foreign Medical Review," edited by the late Sir John Forties,
contributed to by Huxley, Carpenter, Laycock, and others of the most
distinguished scientific men of Great Britain, has an index to its
twenty-four volumes, and by its aid I find this valuable series as
manageable as a lexicon.  The last edition of the "Encyclopaedia
Britannica" had a complete index in a separate volume, and the
publishers of Appletons' "American Cyclopaedia" have recently issued
an index to their useful work, which must greatly add to its value.
I have already referred to the index to the "North American Review,"
which to an American, and especially to a New Englander, is the most
interesting and most valuable addition of its kind to our literary
apparatus since the publication of Mr. Allibone's "Dictionary of
Authors."  I might almost dare to parody Mr. Webster's words in
speaking of Hamilton, to describe what Mr. Gushing did for the solemn
rows of back volumes of our honored old Review which had been long
fossilizing on our shelves: "He touched the dead corpse of the 'North
American,' and it sprang to its feet."  A library of the best
thought of the best American scholars during the greater portion of
the century was brought to light by the work of the indexmaker as
truly as were the Assyrian tablets by the labors of Layard.

A great portion of the best writing and reading literary, scientific,
professional, miscellaneous--comes to us now, at stated intervals, in
paper covers.  The writer appears, as it were, in his shirt-sleeves.
As soon as he has delivered his message the book-binder puts a coat
on his back, and he joins the forlorn brotherhood of "back volumes,"
than which, so long as they are unindexed, nothing can be more
exasperating.  Who wants a lock without a key, a ship without a
rudder, a binnacle without a compass, a check without a signature, a
greenback without a goldback behind it?

I have referred chiefly to the medical journals, but I would include
with these the reports of medical associations, and those separate
publications which, coming in the form of pamphlets, heap themselves
into chaotic piles and bundles which are worse than useless, taking
up a great deal of room, and frightening everything away but mice and
mousing antiquarians, or possibly at long intervals some terebrating
specialist.

Arranged, bound, indexed, all these at once become accessible and
valuable.  I will take the first instance which happens to suggest
itself.  How many who know all about osteoblasts and the experiments
of Ollier, and all that has grown out of them, know where to go for a
paper by the late Dr. A. L. Peirson of Salem, published in the year
1840, under the modest title, Remarks on Fractures?  And if any
practitioner who has to deal with broken bones does not know that
most excellent and practical essay, it is a great pity, for it
answers very numerous questions which will be sure to suggest
themselves to the surgeon and the patient as no one of the recent
treatises, on my own shelves, at least, can do.

But if indexing is the special need of our time in medical
literature, as in every department of knowledge, it must be
remembered that it is not only an immense labor, but one that never
ends.  It requires, therefore, the cooperation of a large number of
individuals to do the work, and a large amount of money to pay for
making its results public through the press.  When it is remembered
that the catalogue of the library of the British Museum is contained
in nearly three thousand large folios of manuscript, and not all its
books are yet included, the task of indexing any considerable branch
of science or literature looks as if it were well nigh impossible.
But many hands make light work.  An "Index Society" has been formed
in England, already numbering about one hundred and seventy members.
It aims at "supplying thorough indexes to valuable works and
collections which have hitherto lacked them; at issuing indexes to
the literature of special subjects; and at gathering materials for a
general reference index."  This society has published a little
treatise setting forth the history and the art of indexing, which I
trust is in the hands of some of our members, if not upon our
shelves.

Something has been done in the same direction by individuals in our
own country, as we have already seen.  The need of it in the
department of medicine is beginning to be clearly felt.  Our library
has already an admirable catalogue with cross references, the work of
a number of its younger members cooperating in the task.  A very
intelligent medical student, Mr. William D. Chapin, whose excellent
project is indorsed by well-known New York physicians and professors,
proposes to publish a yearly index to original communications in the
medical journals of the United States, classified by authors and
subjects.  But it is from the National Medical Library at Washington
that we have the best promise and the largest expectations.  That
great and growing collection of fifty thousand volumes is under the
eye and hand of a librarian who knows books and how to manage them.
For libraries are the standing armies of civilization, and an army is
but a mob without a general who can organize and marshal it so as to
make it effective.  The "Specimen Fasciculus of a Catalogue of the
National Medical Library," prepared under the direction of Dr.
Billings, the librarian, would have excited the admiration of Haller,
the master scholar in medical science of the last century, or rather
of the profession in all centuries, and if carried out as it is begun
will be to the nineteenth all and more than all that the three
Bibliothecae--Anatomica, Chirurgica, and Medicinae-Practicae--were to
the eighteenth century.  I cannot forget the story that Agassiz was
so fond of telling of the king of Prussia and Fichte.  It was after
the humiliation and spoliation of the kingdom by Napoleon that the
monarch asked the philosopher what could be done to regain the lost
position of the nation.  "Found a great university, Sire," was the
answer, and so it was that in the year 1810 the world-renowned
University of Berlin came into being.  I believe that we in this
country can do better than found a national university, whose
professors shall be nominated in caucuses, go in and out, perhaps,
like postmasters, with every change of administration, and deal with
science in the face of their constituency as the courtier did with
time when his sovereign asked him what o'clock it was: "Whatever hour
your majesty pleases."  But when we have a noble library like that at
Washington, and a librarian of exceptional qualifications like the
gentleman who now holds that office, I believe that a liberal
appropriation by Congress to carry out a conscientious work for the
advancement of sound knowledge and the bettering of human conditions,
like this which Dr. Billings has so well begun, would redound greatly
to the honor of the nation.  It ought to be willing to be at some
charge to make its treasures useful to its citizens, and, for its own
sake, especially to that class which has charge of health, public and
private.  This country abounds in what are called "self-made men,"
and is justly proud of many whom it thus designates.  In one sense no
man is self-made who breathes the air of a civilized community.  In
another sense every man who is anything other than a phonograph on
legs is self-made.  But if we award his just praise to the man who
has attained any kind of excellence without having had the same
advantages as others whom, nevertheless, he has equalled or
surpassed, let us not be betrayed into undervaluing the mechanic's
careful training to his business, the thorough and laborious
education of the scholar and the professional man.

Our American atmosphere is vocal with the flippant loquacity of half
knowledge.  We must accept whatever good can be got out of it, and
keep it under as we do sorrel and mullein and witchgrass, by
enriching the soil, and sowing good seed in plenty; by good teaching
and good books, rather than by wasting our time in talking against
it.  Half knowledge dreads nothing but whole knowledge.

I have spoken of the importance and the predominance of periodical
literature, and have attempted to do justice to its value.  But the
almost exclusive reading of it is not without its dangers.  The
journals contain much that is crude and unsound; the presumption; it
might be maintained, is against their novelties, unless they come
from observers of established credit.  Yet I have known a
practitioner,--perhaps more than one,--who was as much under the
dominant influence of the last article he had read in his favorite
medical journal as a milliner under the sway of the last fashion-
plate.  The difference between green and seasoned knowledge is very
great, and such practitioners never hold long enough to any of their
knowledge to have it get seasoned.

It is needless to say, then, that all the substantial and permanent
literature of the profession should be represented upon our shelves.
Much of it is there already, and as one private library after another
falls into this by the natural law of gravitation, it will gradually
acquire all that is most valuable almost without effort.  A scholar
should not be in a hurry to part with his books.  They are probably
more valuable to him than they can be to any other individual.  What
Swedenborg called "correspondence" has established itself between his
intelligence and the volumes which wall him within their sacred
inclosure.  Napoleon said that his mind was as if furnished with
drawers,--he drew out each as he wanted its contents, and closed it
at will when done with them.  The scholar's mind, to use a similar
comparison, is furnished with shelves, like his library.  Each book
knows its place in the brain as well as against the wall or in the
alcove.  His consciousness is doubled by the books which encircle
him, as the trees that surround a lake repeat themselves in its
unruffled waters.  Men talk of the nerve that runs to the pocket, but
one who loves his books, and has lived long with them, has a nervous
filament which runs from his sensorium to every one of them.  Or, if
I may still let my fancy draw its pictures, a scholar's library is to
him what a temple is to the worshipper who frequents it.  There is
the altar sacred to his holiest experiences.  There is the font where
his new-born thought was baptized and first had a name in his
consciousness.  There is the monumental tablet of a dead belief,
sacred still in the memory of what it was while yet alive.  No
visitor can read all this on the lettered backs of the books that
have gathered around the scholar, but for him, from the Aldus on the
lowest shelf to the Elzevir on the highest, every volume has a
language which none but be can interpret.  Be patient with the book-
collector who loves his companions too well to let them go.  Books
are not buried with their owners, and the veriest book-miser that
ever lived was probably doing far more for his successors than his
more liberal neighbor who despised his learned or unlearned avarice.
Let the fruit fall with the leaves still clinging round it.  Who
would have stripped Southey's walls of the books that filled them,
when, his mind no longer capable of taking in their meaning, he would
still pat and fondle them with the vague loving sense of what they
had once been to him,--to him, the great scholar, now like a little
child among his playthings?

We need in this country not only the scholar, but the virtuoso, who
hoards the treasures which he loves, it may be chiefly for their
rarity and because others who know more than he does of their value
set a high price upon them.  As the wine of old vintages is gently
decanted out of its cobwebbed bottles with their rotten corks into
clean new receptacles, so the wealth of the New World is quietly
emptying many of the libraries and galleries of the Old World into
its newly formed collections and newly raised edifices.  And this
process must go on in an accelerating ratio.  No Englishman will be
offended if I say that before the New Zealander takes his stand on a
broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's in the
midst of a vast solitude, the treasures of the British Museum will
have found a new shelter in the halls of New York or Boston.  No
Catholic will think hardly of my saying that before the Coliseum
falls, and with it the imperial city, whose doom prophecy has linked
with that of the almost eternal amphitheatre, the marbles, the
bronzes, the paintings, the manuscripts of the Vatican will have left
the shores of the Tiber for those of the Potomac, the Hudson, the
Mississippi, or the Sacramento.  And what a delight in the pursuit of
the rarities which the eager book-hunter follows with the scent of a
beagle!

Shall I ever forget that rainy day in Lyons, that dingy bookshop,
where I found the Aetius, long missing from my Artis bledicae
Principes, and where I bought for a small pecuniary consideration,
though it was marked rare, and was really tres rare, the Aphorisms of
Hippocrates, edited by and with a preface from the hand of Francis
Rabelais?  And the vellum-bound Tulpius, which I came upon in Venice,
afterwards my only reading when imprisoned in quarantine at
Marseilles, so that the two hundred and twenty-eight cases he has
recorded are, many of them, to this day still fresh in my memory.
And the Schenckius,--the folio filled with casus rariores, which had
strayed in among the rubbish of the bookstall on the boulevard,--and
the noble old Vesalius with its grand frontispiece not unworthy of
Titian, and the fine old Ambroise Pare, long waited for even in Paris
and long ago, and the colossal Spigelius with his eviscerated
beauties, and Dutch Bidloo with its miracles of fine engraving and
bad dissection, and Italian Mascagni, the despair of all would-be
imitators, and pre-Adamite John de Ketam, and antediluvian
Berengarius Carpensis,--but why multiply names, every one of which
brings back the accession of a book which was an event almost like
the birth of an infant?

A library like ours must exercise the largest hospitality.  A great
many books may be found in every large collection which remind us of
those apostolic looking old men who figure on the platform at our
political and other assemblages.  Some of them have spoken words of
wisdom in their day, but they have ceased to be oracles; some of them
never had any particularly important message for humanity, but they
add dignity to the meeting by their presence; they look wise, whether
they are so or not, and no one grudges them their places of honor.
Venerable figure-heads, what would our platforms be without you?

Just so with our libraries.  Without their rows of folios in creamy
vellum, or showing their black backs with antique lettering of
tarnished gold, our shelves would look as insufficient and unbalanced
as a column without its base, as a statue without its pedestal.  And
do not think they are kept only to be spanked and dusted during that
dreadful period when their owner is but too thankful to become an
exile and a wanderer from the scene of single combats between dead
authors and living housemaids.  Men were not all cowards before
Agamemnon or all fools before the days of Virchow and Billroth.  And
apart from any practical use to be derived from the older medical
authors, is there not a true pleasure in reading the accounts of
great discoverers in their own words?  I do not pretend to hoist up
the Bibliotheca Anatomica of Mangetus and spread it on my table every
day.  I do not get out my great Albinus before every lecture on the
muscles, nor disturb the majestic repose of Vesalius every time I
speak of the bones he has so admirably described and figured.  But it
does please me to read the first descriptions of parts to which the
names of their discoverers or those who have first described them
have become so joined that not even modern science can part them; to
listen to the talk of my old volume as Willis describes his circle
and Fallopius his aqueduct and Varolius his bridge and Eustachius his
tube and Monro his foramen,--all so well known to us in the human
body; it does please me to know the very words in which Winslow
described the opening which bears his name, and Glisson his capsule
and De Graaf his vesicle; I am not content until I know in what
language Harvey announced his discovery of the circulation, and how
Spigelius made the liver his perpetual memorial, and Malpighi found a
monument more enduring than brass in the corpuscles of the spleen and
the kidney.

But after all, the readers who care most for the early records of
medical science and art are the specialists who are dividing up the
practice of medicine and surgery as they were parcelled out,
according to Herodotus, by the Egyptians.  For them nothing is too
old, nothing is too new, for to their books of ail others is
applicable the saying of D'Alembert that the author kills himself in
lengthening out what the reader kills himself in trying to shorten.

There are practical books among these ancient volumes which can never
grow old.  Would you know how to recognize "male hysteria" and to
treat it, take down your Sydenham; would you read the experience of a
physician who was himself the subject of asthma, and who,
notwithstanding that, in the words of Dr. Johnson, "panted on till
ninety," you will find it in the venerable treatise of Sir John
Floyer; would you listen to the story of the King's Evil cured by the
royal touch, as told by a famous chirurgeon who fully believed in it,
go to Wiseman; would you get at first hand the description of the
spinal disease which long bore his name, do not be startled if I tell
you to go to Pott,--to Percival Pott, the great surgeon of the last
century.

There comes a time for every book in a library when it is wanted by
somebody.  It is but a few weeks since one of the most celebrated
physicians in the country wrote to me from a great centre of medical
education to know if I had the works of Sanctorius, which he had
tried in vain to find.  I could have lent him the "Medicina Statica,"
with its frontispiece showing Sanctorius with his dinner on the table
before him, in his balanced chair which sunk with him below the level
of his banquet-board when he had swallowed a certain number of
ounces,--an early foreshadowing of Pettenkofer's chamber and
quantitative physiology,--but the "Opera Omnia" of Sanctorius I had
never met with, and I fear he had to do without it.

I would extend the hospitality of these shelves to a class of works
which we are in the habit of considering as being outside of the pale
of medical science, properly so called, and sometimes of coupling
with a disrespectful name.  Such has always been my own practice.  I
have welcomed Culpeper and Salmon to my bookcase as willingly as
Dioscorides or Quincy, or Paris or Wood and Bache.  I have found a
place for St. John Long, and read the story of his trial for
manslaughter with as much interest as the laurel-water case in which
John Hunter figured as a witness.  I would give Samuel Hahnemann a
place by the side of Samuel Thomson.  Am I not afraid that some
student of imaginative turn and not provided with the needful
cerebral strainers without which all the refuse of gimcrack
intelligences gets into the mental drains and chokes them up,--am I
not afraid that some such student will get hold of the "Organon" or
the "Maladies Chroniques" and be won over by their delusions, and so
be lost to those that love him as a man of common sense and a brother
in their high calling?  Not in the least.  If he showed any symptoms
of infection I would for once have recourse to the principle of
similia similibus.  To cure him of Hahnemann I would prescribe my
favorite homoeopathic antidote, Okie's Bonninghausen.  If that
failed, I would order Grauvogl as a heroic remedy, and if he survived
that uncured, I would give him my blessing, if I thought him honest,
and bid him depart in peace.  For me he is no longer an individual.
He belongs to a class of minds which we are bound to be patient with
if their Maker sees fit to indulge them with existence.  We must
accept the conjuring ultra-ritualist, the dreamy second adventist,
the erratic spiritualist, the fantastic homoeopathist, as not
unworthy of philosophic study; not more unworthy of it than the
squarers of the circle and the inventors of perpetual motion, and the
other whimsical visionaries to whom De Morgan has devoted his most
instructive and entertaining "Budget of Paradoxes."  I hope,
therefore, that our library will admit the works of the so-called
Eclectics, of the Thomsonians, if any are in existence, of the
Clairvoyants, if they have a literature, and especially of the
Homoeopathists.  This country seems to be the place for such a
collection, which will by and by be curious and of more value than at
present, for Homoeopathy seems to be following the pathological law
of erysipelas, fading out where it originated as it spreads to new
regions.  At least I judge so by the following translated extract
from a criticism of an American work in the "Homoeopatische
Rundschau" of Leipzig for October, 1878, which I find in the
"Homoeopathic Bulletin" for the month of November just passed:
"While we feel proud of the spread and rise of Homoeopathy across the
ocean, and while the Homoeopathic works reaching us from there, and
published in a style such as is unknown in Germany, bear eloquent
testimony to the eminent activity of our transatlantic colleagues, we
are overcome by sorrowful regrets at the position Homoeopathy
occupies in Germany.  Such a work [as the American one referred to]
with us would be impossible; it would lack the necessary support."

By all means let our library secure a good representation of the
literature of Homoeopathy before it leaves us its "sorrowful regrets"
and migrates with its sugar of milk pellets, which have taken the
place of the old pilulae micae panis, to Alaska, to "Nova Zembla, or
the Lord knows where."

What shall I say in this presence of the duties of a Librarian?
Where have they ever been better performed than in our own public
city library, where the late Mr. Jewett and the living Mr. Winsor
have shown us what a librarian ought to be,--the organizing head, the
vigilant guardian, the seeker's index, the scholar's counsellor?  His
work is not merely that of administration, manifold and laborious as
its duties are.  He must have a quick intelligence and a retentive
memory.  He is a public carrier of knowledge in its germs.  His
office is like that which naturalists attribute to the bumble-bee,--
he lays up little honey for himself, but he conveys the fertilizing
pollen from flower to flower.

Our undertaking, just completed,--and just begun--has come at the
right time, not a day too soon.  Our practitioners need a library
like this, for with all their skill and devotion there is too little
genuine erudition, such as a liberal profession ought to be able to
claim for many of its members.  In reading the recent obituary
notices of the late Dr. Geddings of South Carolina, I recalled what
our lamented friend Dr. Coale used to tell me of his learning and
accomplishments, and I could not help reflecting how few such medical
scholars we had to show in Boston or New England.  We must clear up
this unilluminated atmosphere, and here,--here is the true electric
light which will irradiate its darkness.

The public will catch the rays reflected from the same source of
light, and it needs instruction on the great subjects of health and
disease,--needs it sadly.  It is preyed upon by every kind of
imposition almost without hindrance.  Its ignorance and prejudices
react upon the profession to the great injury of both.  The jealous
feeling, for instance, with regard to such provisions for the study
of anatomy as are sanctioned by the laws in this State and carried
out with strict regard to those laws, threatens the welfare, if not
the existence of institutions for medical instruction wherever it is
not held in check by enlightened intelligence.  And on the other hand
the profession has just been startled by a verdict against a
physician, ruinous in its amount,--enough to drive many a hard-
working young practitioner out of house and home,--a verdict which
leads to the fear that suits for malpractice may take the place of
the panel game and child-stealing as a means of extorting money.  If
the profession in this State, which claims a high standard of
civilization, is to be crushed and ground beneath the upper millstone
of the dearth of educational advantages and the lower millstone of
ruinous penalties for what the ignorant ignorantly shall decide to be
ignorance, all I can say is

God save the Commonhealth of Massachusetts!

Once more, we cannot fail to see that just as astrology has given
place to astronomy, so theology, the science of Him whom by searching
no man can find out, is fast being replaced by what we may not
improperly call theonomy, or the science of the laws according to
which the Creator acts.  And since these laws find their fullest
manifestations for us, at least, in rational human natures, the study
of anthropology is largely replacing that of scholastic divinity.  We
must contemplate our Maker indirectly in human attributes as we talk
of Him in human parts of speech.  And this gives a sacredness to the
study of man in his physical, mental, moral, social, and religious
nature which elevates the faithful students of anthropology to the
dignity of a priesthood, and sheds a holy light on the recorded
results of their labors, brought together as they are in such a
collection as this which is now spread out before us.

Thus, then, our library is a temple as truly as the dome-crowned
cathedral hallowed by the breath of prayer and praise, where the dead
repose and the living worship.  May it, with all its treasures, be
consecrated like that to the glory of God, through the contributions
it shall make to the advancement of sound knowledge, to the relief of
human suffering, to the promotion of harmonious relations between the
members of the two noble professions which deal with the diseases of
the soul and with those of the body, and to the common cause in which
all good men are working, the furtherance of the well-being of their
fellow-creatures!

NOTE.--As an illustration of the statement in the last paragraph but
one, I take the following notice from the "Boston Daily Advertiser,"
of December 4th, the day after the delivery of the address:
"Prince Lucien Bonaparte is now living in London, and is devoting
himself to the work of collecting the creeds of all religions and
sects, with a view to their classification,--his object being simply
scientific or anthropological."

Since delivering the address, also, I find a leading article in the
"Cincinnati Lancet and Clinic" of November 30th, headed "The
Decadence of Homoeopathy," abundantly illustrated by extracts from
the "Homoeopathic Times," the leading American organ of that sect.

In the New York "Medical Record" of the same date, which I had not
seen before the delivery of my address, is an account of the action
of the Homoeopathic Medical Society of Northern New York, in which
Hahnemann's theory of "dynamization" is characterized in a formal
resolve as "unworthy the confidence of the Homoeopathic profession."

It will be a disappointment to the German Homoeopathists to read in
the "Homoeopathic Times" such a statement as the following:
"Whatever the influences have been which have checked the outward
development of Homoeopathy, it is plainly evident that the
Homoeopathic school, as regards the number of its openly avowed
representatives, has attained its majority, and has begun to decline
both in this country and in England."

All which is an additional reason for making a collection of the
incredibly curious literature of Homoeopathy before that
pseudological inanity has faded out like so many other delusions.






SOME OF MY EARLY TEACHERS

[A Farewell Address to the Medical School of Harvard University,
November 28, 1882.]

I had intended that the recitation of Friday last should be followed
by a few parting words to my class and any friends who might happen
to be in the lecture-room.  But I learned on the preceding evening
that there was an expectation, a desire, that my farewell should take
a somewhat different form; and not to disappoint the wishes of those
whom I was anxious to gratify, I made up my mind to appear before you
with such hasty preparation as the scanty time admitted.

There are three occasions upon which a human being has a right to
consider himself as a centre of interest to those about him: when he
is christened, when he is married, and when he is buried.  Every one
is the chief personage, the hero, of his own baptism, his own
wedding, and his own funeral.

There are other occasions, less momentous, in which one may make more
of himself than under ordinary circumstances he would think it proper
to do; when he may talk about himself, and tell his own experiences,
in fact, indulge in a more or less egotistic monologue without fear
or reproach.

I think I may claim that this is one of those occasions.  I have
delivered my last anatomical lecture and heard my class recite for
the last time.  They wish to hear from me again in a less scholastic
mood than that in which they have known me.  Will you not indulge me
in telling you something of my own story?

This is the thirty-sixth Course of Lectures in which I have taken my
place and performed my duties as Professor of Anatomy.  For more than
half of my term of office I gave instruction in Physiology, after the
fashion of my predecessors and in the manner then generally prevalent
in our schools, where the physiological laboratory was not a
necessary part of the apparatus of instruction.  It was with my
hearty approval that the teaching of Physiology was constituted a
separate department and made an independent Professorship.  Before my
time, Dr. Warren had taught Anatomy, Physiology, and Surgery in the
same course of Lectures, lasting only three or four months.  As the
boundaries of science are enlarged, new divisions and subdivisions of
its territories become necessary.  In the place of six Professors in
1847, when I first became a member of the Faculty, I count twelve
upon the Catalogue before me, and I find the whole number engaged in
the work of instruction in the Medical School amounts to no less than
fifty.

Since I began teaching in this school, the aspect of many branches of
science has undergone a very remarkable transformation.  Chemistry
and Physiology are no longer what they were, as taught by the
instructors of that time.  We are looking forward to the synthesis of
new organic compounds; our artificial madder is already in the
market, and the indigo-raisers are now fearing that their crop will
be supplanted by the manufactured article.  In the living body we
talk of fuel supplied and work done, in movement, in heat, just as if
we were dealing with a machine of our own contrivance.

A physiological laboratory of to-day is equipped with instruments of
research of such ingenious contrivance, such elaborate construction,
that one might suppose himself in a workshop where some exquisite
fabric was to be wrought, such as Queens love to wear, and Kings do
not always love to pay for.  They are, indeed, weaving a charmed web,
for these are the looms from which comes the knowledge that clothes
the nakedness of the intellect.  Here are the mills that grind food
for its hunger, and "is not the life more than meat, and the body
than raiment?"

But while many of the sciences have so changed that the teachers of
the past would hardly know them, it has not been so with the branch I
teach, or, rather, with that division of it which is chiefly taught
in this amphitheatre.  General anatomy, or histology, on the other
hand, is almost all new; it has grown up, mainly, since I began my
medical studies.  I never saw a compound microscope during my years
of study in Paris.  Individuals had begun to use the instrument, but
I never heard it alluded to by either Professors or students.  In
descriptive anatomy I have found little to unlearn, and not a great
deal that was both new and important to learn.  Trifling additions
are made from year to year, not to be despised and not to be
overvalued.  Some of the older anatomical works are still admirable,
some of the newer ones very much the contrary.  I have had recent
anatomical plates brought me for inspection, and I have actually
button-holed the book-agent, a being commonly as hard to get rid of
as the tar-baby in the negro legend, that I might put him to shame
with the imperial illustrations of the bones and muscles in the great
folio of Albinus, published in 1747, and the unapproached figures of
the lymphatic system of Mascagni, now within a very few years of a
century old, and still copied, or, rather, pretended to be copied, in
the most recent works on anatomy.

I am afraid that it is a good plan to get rid of old Professors, and
I am thankful to hear that there is a movement for making provision
for those who are left in need when they lose their offices and their
salaries.  I remember one of our ancient Cambridge Doctors once asked
me to get into his rickety chaise, and said to me, half humorously,
half sadly, that he was like an old horse,--they had taken off his
saddle and turned him out to pasture.  I fear the grass was pretty
short where that old servant of the public found himself grazing.  If
I myself needed an apology for holding my office so long, I should
find it in the fact that human anatomy is much the same study that it
was in the days of Vesalius and Fallopius, and that the greater part
of my teaching was of such a nature that it could never become
antiquated.

Let me begin with my first experience as a medical student.  I had
come from the lessons of Judge Story and Mr. Ashmun in the Law School
at Cambridge.  I had been busy, more or less, with the pages of
Blackstone and Chitty, and other text-books of the first year of
legal study.  More or less, I say, but I am afraid it was less rather
than more.  For during that year I first tasted the intoxicating
pleasure of authorship.  A college periodical, conducted by friends
of mine, still undergraduates, tempted me into print, and there is no
form of lead-poisoning which more rapidly and thoroughly pervades the
blood and bones and marrow than that which reaches the young author
through mental contact with type-metal.  Qui a bu, boira,--he who has
once been a drinker will drink again, says the French proverb.  So
the man or woman who has tasted type is sure to return to his old
indulgence sooner or later.  In that fatal year I had my first attack
of authors' lead-poisoning, and I have never got quite rid of it from
that day to this.  But for that I might have applied myself more
diligently to my legal studies, and carried a green bag in place of a
stethoscope and a thermometer up to the present day.

What determined me to give up Law and apply myself to Medicine I can
hardly say, but I had from the first looked upon that year's study as
an experiment.  At any rate, I made the change, and soon found myself
introduced to new scenes and new companionships.

I can scarcely credit my memory when I recall the first impressions
produced upon me by sights afterwards become so familiar that they
could no more disturb a pulse-beat than the commonest of every-day
experiences.  The skeleton, hung aloft like a gibbeted criminal,
looked grimly at me as I entered the room devoted to the students of
the school I had joined, just as the fleshless figure of Time, with
the hour-glass and scythe, used to glare upon me in my childhood from
the "New England Primer."  The white faces in the beds at the
Hospital found their reflection in my own cheeks, which lost their
color as I looked upon them.  All this had to pass away in a little
time; I had chosen my profession, and must meet its painful and
repulsive aspects until they lost their power over my sensibilities.

The private medical school which I had joined was one established by
Dr. James Jackson, Dr. Walter Channing, Dr. John Ware, Dr. Winslow
Lewis, and Dr. George W.  Otis.  Of the first three gentlemen I have
either spoken elsewhere or may find occasion to speak hereafter.  The
two younger members of this association of teachers were both
graduates of our University, one of the year 1819, the other of 1818.

Dr. Lewis was a great favorite with students.  He was a man of very
lively temperament, fond of old books and young people, open-hearted,
free-spoken, an enthusiast in teaching, and especially at home in
that apartment of the temple of science where nature is seen in
undress, the anthropotomic laboratory, known to common speech as the
dissecting-room.  He had that quality which is the special gift of
the man born for a teacher,--the power of exciting an interest in
that which he taught.  While he was present the apartment I speak of
was the sunniest of studios in spite of its mortuary spectacles.  Of
the students I met there I best remember James Jackson, Junior, full
of zeal and playful as a boy, a young man whose early death was a
calamity to the profession of which he promised to be a chief
ornament; the late Reverend J. S. C. Greene, who, as the prefix to
his name signifies, afterwards changed his profession, but one of
whose dissections I remember looking upon with admiration; and my
friend Mr. Charles Amory, as we call him, Dr. Charles Amory, as he is
entitled to be called, then, as now and always, a favorite with all
about him.  He had come to us from the schools of Germany, and
brought with him recollections of the teachings of Blumenbach and the
elder Langenbeck, father of him whose portrait hangs in our Museum.
Dr. Lewis was our companion as well as our teacher.  A good
demonstrator is,--I will not say as important as a good Professor in
the teaching of Anatomy, because I am not sure that he is not more
important.  He comes into direct personal relations with the
students,--he is one of them, in fact, as the Professor cannot be
from the nature of his duties.  The Professor's chair is an
insulating stool, so to speak; his age, his knowledge, real or
supposed, his official station, are like the glass legs which support
the electrician's piece of furniture, and cut it off from the common
currents of the floor upon which it stands.  Dr. Lewis enjoyed
teaching and made his students enjoy being taught.  He delighted in
those anatomical conundrums to answer which keeps the student's eyes
open and his wits awake.  He was happy as he dexterously performed
the tour de maitre of the old barber-surgeons, or applied the spica
bandage and taught his scholars to do it, so neatly and symmetrically
that the aesthetic missionary from the older centre of civilization
would bend over it in blissful contemplation, as if it were a
sunflower.  Dr. Lewis had many other tastes, and was a favorite, not
only with students, but in a wide circle, professional, antiquarian,
masonic, and social.

Dr. Otis was less widely known, but was a fluent and agreeable
lecturer, and esteemed as a good surgeon.

I must content myself with this glimpse at myself and a few of my
fellow-students in Boston.  After attending two courses of Lectures
in the school of the University, I went to Europe to continue my
studies.

You may like to hear something of the famous Professors of Paris in
the days when I was a student in the Ecole de Medicine, and following
the great Hospital teachers.

I can hardly believe my own memory when I recall the old
practitioners and Professors who were still going round the hospitals
when I mingled with the train of students that attended the morning
visits.  See that bent old man who is groping his way through the
wards of La Charity.  That is the famous Baron Boyer, author of the
great work on surgery in nine volumes, a writer whose clearness of
style commends his treatise to general admiration, and makes it a
kind of classic.  He slashes away at a terrible rate, they say, when
he gets hold of the subject of fistula in its most frequent habitat,
--but I never saw him do more than look as if he wanted to cut a good
dollop out of a patient he was examining.  The short, square,
substantial man with iron-gray hair, ruddy face, and white apron is
Baron Larrey, Napoleon's favorite surgeon, the most honest man he
ever saw,--it is reputed that he called him.  To go round the Hotel
des Invalides with Larrey was to live over the campaigns of Napoleon,
to look on the sun of Austerlitz, to hear the cannons of Marengo, to
struggle through the icy waters of the Beresina, to shiver in the
snows of the Russian retreat, and to gaze through the battle smoke
upon the last charge of the red lancers on the redder field of
Waterloo.  Larrey was still strong and sturdy as I saw him, and few
portraits remain printed in livelier colors on the tablet of my
memory.

Leave the little group of students which gathers about Larrey beneath
the gilded dome of the Invalides and follow me to the Hotel Dieu,
where rules and reigns the master-surgeon of his day, at least so far
as Paris and France are concerned,--the illustrious Baron Dupuytren.
No man disputed his reign, some envied his supremacy.  Lisfranc
shrugged his shoulders as he spoke of "ce grand homme de l'autre cots
de la riviere," that great man on the other side of the river, but
the great man he remained, until he bowed before the mandate which
none may disobey.  "Three times," said Bouillaud, "did the apoplectic
thunderbolt fall on that robust brain,"--it yielded at last as the
old bald cliff that is riven and crashes down into the valley.  I saw
him before the first thunderbolt had descended: a square, solid man,
with a high and full-domed head, oracular in his utterances,
indifferent to those around him, sometimes, it was said, very rough
with them.  He spoke in low, even tones, with quiet fluency, and was
listened to with that hush of rapt attention which I have hardly seen
in any circle of listeners unless when such men as ex-President John
Quincy Adams or Daniel Webster were the speakers.  I do not think
that Dupuytren has left a record which explains his influence, but in
point of fact he dominated those around him in a remarkable manner.
You must have all witnessed something of the same kind.  The personal
presence of some men carries command with it, and their accents
silence the crowd around them, when the same words from other lips
might fall comparatively unheeded.

As for Lisfranc, I can say little more of him than that he was a
great drawer of blood and hewer of members.  I remember his ordering
a wholesale bleeding of his patients, right and left, whatever might
be the matter with them, one morning when a phlebotomizing fit was on
him.  I recollect his regretting the splendid guardsmen of the old
Empire,--for what?  because they had such magnificent thighs to
amputate.  I got along about as far as that with him, when I ceased
to be a follower of M. Lisfranc.

The name of Velpeau must have reached many of you, for he died in
1867, and his many works made his name widely known.  Coming to Paris
in wooden shoes, starving, almost, at first, he raised himself to
great eminence as a surgeon and as an author, and at last obtained
the Professorship to which his talents and learning entitled him.
His example may be an encouragement to some of my younger hearers who
are born, not with the silver spoon in their mouths, but with the
two-tined iron fork in their hands.  It is a poor thing to take up
their milk porridge with in their young days, but in after years it
will often transfix the solid dumplings that roll out of the silver
spoon.  So Velpeau found it.  He had not what is called genius, he
was far from prepossessing in aspect, looking as if he might have
wielded the sledge-hammer (as I think he had done in early life)
rather than the lancet, but he had industry, determination,
intelligence, character, and he made his way to distinction and
prosperity, as some of you sitting on these benches and wondering
anxiously what is to become of you in the struggle for life will have
done before the twentieth century has got halfway through its first
quarter.  A good sound head over a pair of wooden shoes is a great
deal better than a wooden head belonging to an owner who cases his
feet in calf-skin, but a good brain is not enough without a stout
heart to fill the four great conduits which carry at once fuel and
fire to that mightiest of engines.

How many of you who are before me are familiarly acquainted with the
name of Broussais, or even with that of Andral?  Both were lecturing
at the Ecole de Medicine, and I often heard them.  Broussais was in
those days like an old volcano, which has pretty nearly used up its
fire and brimstone, but is still boiling and bubbling in its
interior, and now and then sends up a spirt of lava and a volley of
pebbles.  His theories of gastro-enteritis, of irritation and
inflammation as the cause of disease, and the practice which sprang
from them, ran over the fields of medicine for a time like flame over
the grass of the prairies.  The way in which that knotty-featured,
savage old man would bring out the word irritation--with rattling and
rolling reduplication of the resonant letter r--might have taught a
lesson in articulation to Salvini.  But Broussais's theory was
languishing and well-nigh become obsolete, and this, no doubt, added
vehemence to his defence of his cherished dogmas.

Old theories, and old men who cling to them, must take themselves out
of the way as the new generation with its fresh thoughts and altered
habits of mind comes forward to take the place of that which is dying
out. This was a truth which the fiery old theorist found it very hard
to learn, and harder to bear, as it was forced upon him.  For the
hour of his lecture was succeeded by that of a younger and far more
popular professor.  As his lecture drew towards its close, the
benches, thinly sprinkled with students, began to fill up; the doors
creaked open and banged back oftener and oftener, until at last the
sound grew almost continuous, and the voice of the lecturer became a
leonine growl as he strove in vain to be heard over the noise of
doors and footsteps.

Broussais was now sixty-two years old.  The new generation had
outgrown his doctrines, and the Professor for whose hour the benches
had filled themselves belonged to that new generation.  Gabriel
Andral was little more than half the age of Broussais, in the full
prime and vigor of manhood at thirty-seven years.  He was a rapid,
fluent, fervid, and imaginative speaker, pleasing in aspect and
manner,--a strong contrast to the harsh, vituperative old man who had
just preceded him.  His Clinique Medicale is still valuable as a
collection of cases, and his researches on the blood, conducted in
association with Gavarret, contributed new and valuable facts to
science.  But I remember him chiefly as one of those instructors
whose natural eloquence made it delightful to listen to him.  I doubt
if I or my fellow-students did full justice either to him or to the
famous physician of Hotel Dieu, Chomel.  We had addicted ourselves
almost too closely to the words of another master, by whom we were
ready to swear as against all teachers that ever were or ever would
be.

This object of our reverence, I might almost say idolatry, was one
whose name is well known to most of the young men before me, even to
those who may know comparatively little of his works and teachings.
Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis, at the age of forty-seven, as I
recall him, was a tall, rather spare, dignified personage, of serene
and grave aspect, but with a pleasant smile and kindly voice for the
student with whom he came into personal relations.  If I summed up
the lessons of Louis in two expressions, they would be these; I do
not hold him answerable for the words, but I will condense them after
my own fashion in French, and then give them to you, expanded
somewhat, in English:

          Formez toujours des idees nettes.
          Fuyez toujours les a peu pres.

Always make sure that you form a distinct and clear idea of the
matter you are considering.

Always avoid vague approximations where exact estimates are possible;
about so many,--about so much, instead of the precise number and
quantity.

Now, if there is anything on which the biological sciences have
prided themselves in these latter years it is the substitution of
quantitative for qualitative formulae.  The "numerical system," of
which Louis was the great advocate, if not the absolute originator,
was an attempt to substitute series of carefully recorded facts,
rigidly counted and closely compared, for those never-ending records
of vague, unverifiable conclusions with which the classics of the
healing art were overloaded.  The history of practical medicine had
been like the story of the Danaides.  "Experience" had been, from
time immemorial, pouring its flowing treasures into buckets full of
holes.  At the existing rate of supply and leakage they would never
be filled; nothing would ever be settled in medicine.  But cases
thoroughly recorded and mathematically analyzed would always be
available for future use, and when accumulated in sufficient number
would lead to results which would be trustworthy, and belong to
science.

You young men who are following the hospitals hardly know how much
you are indebted to Louis.  I say nothing of his Researches on
Phthisis or his great work on Typhoid Fever.  But I consider his
modest and brief Essay on Bleeding in some Inflammatory Diseases,
based on cases carefully observed and numerically analyzed, one of
the most important written contributions to practical medicine, to
the treatment of internal disease, of this century, if not since the
days of Sydenham.  The lancet was the magician's wand of the dark
ages of medicine.  The old physicians not only believed in its
general efficacy as a wonder-worker in disease, but they believed
that each malady could be successfully attacked from some special
part of the body,--the strategic point which commanded the seat of
the morbid affection.  On a figure given in the curious old work of
John de Ketam, no less than thirty-eight separate places are marked
as the proper ones to bleed from, in different diseases.  Even Louis,
who had not wholly given up venesection, used now and then to order
that a patient suffering from headache should be bled in the foot, in
preference to any other part.

But what Louis did was this: he showed by a strict analysis of
numerous cases that bleeding did not strangle,--jugulate was the word
then used,--acute diseases, more especially pneumonia.  This was not
a reform,--it was a revolution.  It was followed up in this country
by the remarkable Discourse of Dr. Jacob Bigelow upon Self-Limited
Diseases, which has, I believe, done more than any other work or
essay in our own language to rescue the practice of medicine from the
slavery to the drugging system which was a part of the inheritance of
the profession.

Yes, I say, as I look back on the long hours of the many days I spent
in the wards and in the autopsy room of La Pitie, where Louis was one
of the attending physicians,--yes, Louis did a great work for
practical medicine.  Modest in the presence of nature, fearless in
the face of authority, unwearying in the pursuit of truth, he was a
man whom any student might be happy and proud to claim as his teacher
and his friend, and yet, as I look back on the days when I followed
his teachings, I feel that I gave myself up too exclusively to his
methods of thought and study.

There is one part of their business which certain medical
practitioners are too apt to forget; namely, that what they should
most of all try to do is to ward off disease, to alleviate suffering,
to preserve life, or at least to prolong it if possible.  It is not
of the slightest interest to the patient to know whether three or
three and a quarter cubic inches of his lung are hepatized.  His mind
is not occupied with thinking of the curious problems which are to be
solved by his own autopsy,--whether this or that strand of the spinal
marrow is the seat of this or that form of degeneration.  He wants
something to relieve his pain, to mitigate the anguish of dyspnea, to
bring back motion and sensibility to the dead limb, to still the
tortures of neuralgia.  What is it to him that you can localize and
name by some uncouth term the disease which you could not prevent and
which you cannot cure?  An old woman who knows how to make a poultice
and how to put it on, and does it tuto, eito, jucunde, just when and
where it is wanted, is better,--a thousand times better in many
cases,--than a staring pathologist, who explores and thumps and
doubts and guesses, and tells his patient be will be better tomorrow,
and so goes home to tumble his books over and make out a diagnosis.

But in those days, I, like most of my fellow students, was thinking
much more of "science" than of practical medicine, and I believe if
we had not clung so closely to the skirts of Louis and had followed
some of the courses of men like Trousseau,--therapeutists, who gave
special attention to curative methods, and not chiefly to diagnosis,
--it would have been better for me and others.  One thing, at any
rate, we did learn in the wards of Louis.  We learned that a very
large proportion of diseases get well of themselves, without any
special medication,--the great fact formulated, enforced, and
popularized by Dr. Jacob Bigelow in the Discourse referred to.  We
unlearned the habit of drugging for its own sake.  This detestable
practice, which I was almost proscribed for condemning somewhat too
epigrammatically a little more than twenty years ago, came to us, I
suspect, in a considerable measure from the English "general
practitioners," a sort of prescribing apothecaries.  You remember
how, when the city was besieged, each artisan who was called upon in
council to suggest the best means of defence recommended the articles
he dealt in: the carpenter, wood; the blacksmith, iron; the mason,
brick; until it came to be a puzzle to know which to adopt. Then the
shoemaker said, "Hang your walls with new boots,"  and gave good
reasons why these should be the best of all possible defences.  Now
the "general practitioner"  charged, as I understand, for his
medicine, and in that way got paid for his visit.  Wherever this is
the practice, medicine is sure to become a trade, and the people
learn to expect drugging, and to consider it necessary, because drugs
are so universally given to the patients of the man who gets his
living by them.

It was something to have unlearned the pernicious habit of constantly
giving poisons to a patient, as if they were good in themselves, of
drawing off the blood which he would want in his struggle with
disease, of making him sore and wretched with needless blisters, of
turning his stomach with unnecessary nauseous draught and mixtures,
--only because he was sick and something must be done.  But there
were positive as well as negative facts to be learned, and some of
us, I fear, came home rich in the negatives of the expectant
practice, poor in the resources which many a plain country
practitioner had ready in abundance for the relief and the cure of
disease.  No one instructor can be expected to do all for a student
which he requires.  Louis taught us who followed him the love of
truth, the habit of passionless listening to the teachings of nature,
the most careful and searching methods of observation, and the sure
means of getting at the results to be obtained from them in the
constant employment of accurate tabulation.  He was not a showy, or
eloquent, or, I should say, a very generally popular man, though the
favorite, almost the idol, of many students, especially Genevese and
Bostonians.  But he was a man of lofty and admirable scientific
character, and his work will endure in its influences long after his
name is lost sight of save to the faded eyes of the student of
medical literature.

Many other names of men more or less famous in their day, and who
were teaching while I was in Paris, come up before me.  They are but
empty sounds for the most part in the ears of persons of not more
than middle age.  Who of you knows anything of Richerand, author of a
very popular work on Physiology, commonly put into the student's
hands when I first began to ask for medical text-books?  I heard him
lecture once, and have had his image with me ever since as that of an
old, worn-out man,--a venerable but dilapidated relic of an effete
antiquity.  To verify this impression I have just looked out the
dates of his birth and death, and find that he was eighteen years
younger than the speaker who is now addressing you.  There is a
terrible parallax between the period before thirty and that after
threescore and ten, as two men of those ages look, one with naked
eyes, one through his spectacles, at the man of fifty and thereabout.
Magendie, I doubt not you have all heard of.  I attended but one of
his lectures.  I question if one here, unless some contemporary of my
own has strayed into the amphitheatre,--knows anything about
Marjolin.  I remember two things about his lectures on surgery, the
deep tones of his voice as he referred to his oracle,--the earlier
writer, Jean Louis Petit,--and his formidable snuffbox.  What he
taught me lies far down, I doubt not, among the roots of my
knowledge, but it does not flower out in any noticeable blossoms, or
offer me any very obvious fruits.  Where now is the fame of
Bouillaud, Professor and Deputy, the Sangrado of his time?  Where is
the renown of Piorry, percussionist and poet, expert alike in the
resonances of the thoracic cavity and those of the rhyming
vocabulary?--I think life has not yet done with the vivacious
Ricord, whom I remember calling the Voltaire of pelvic literature,--a
sceptic as to the morality of the race in general, who would have
submitted Diana to treatment with his mineral specifics, and ordered
a course of blue pills for the vestal virgins.

Ricord was born at the beginning of the century, and Piorry some
years earlier.  Cruveilhier, who died in 1874, is still remembered by
his great work on pathological anatomy; his work on descriptive
anatomy has some things which I look in vain for elsewhere.  But
where is Civiale,--where are Orfila, Gendrin, Rostan, Biett, Alibert,
--jolly old Baron Alibert, whom I remember so well in his broad-
brimmed hat, worn a little jauntily on one side, calling out to the
students in the court-yard of the Hospital St.  Louis, "Enfans de la
methode naturelle, etes-vous tous ici?" "Children of the natural
method [his own method of classification of skin diseases,] are you
all here?  "All here, then, perhaps; all where, now?

My show of ghosts is over.  It is always the same story that old men
tell to younger ones, some few of whom will in their turn repeat the
tale, only with altered names, to their children's children.

     Like phantoms painted on the magic slide,
     Forth from the darkness of the past we glide,
     As living shadows for a moment seen
     In airy pageant on the eternal screen,
     Traced by a ray from one unchanging flame,
     Then seek the dust and stillness whence we came.

Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, whom I well remember, came back from Leyden,
where he had written his Latin graduating thesis, talking of the
learned Gaubius and the late illustrious Boerhaave and other dead
Dutchmen, of whom you know as much, most of you, as you do of Noah's
apothecary and the family physician of Methuselah, whose
prescriptions seem to have been lost to posterity.  Dr. Lloyd came
back to Boston full of the teachings of Cheselden and Sharpe, William
Hunter, Smellie, and Warner; Dr. James Jackson loved to tell of Mr.
Cline and to talk of Mr. John Hunter; Dr. Reynolds would give you his
recollections of Sir Astley Cooper and Mr. Abernethy; I have named
the famous Frenchmen of my student days; Leyden, Edinburgh, London,
Paris, were each in turn the Mecca of medical students, just as at
the present day Vienna and Berlin are the centres where our young men
crowd for instruction.  These also must sooner or later yield their
precedence and pass the torch they hold to other hands.  Where shall
it next flame at the head of the long procession?  Shall it find its
old place on the shores of the Gulf of Salerno, or shall it mingle
its rays with the northern aurora up among the fiords of Norway,--or
shall it be borne across the Atlantic and reach the banks of the
Charles, where Agassiz and Wyman have taught, where Hagen still
teaches, glowing like his own Lampyris splendidula, with enthusiasm,
where the first of American botanists and the ablest of American
surgeons are still counted in the roll of honor of our great
University?

Let me add a few words which shall not be other than cheerful, as I
bid farewell to this edifice which I have known so long.  I am
grateful to the roof which has sheltered me, to the floors which have
sustained me, though I have thought it safest always to abstain from
anything like eloquence, lest a burst of too emphatic applause might
land my class and myself in the cellar of the collapsing structure,
and bury us in the fate of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram.  I have helped
to wear these stairs into hollows,--stairs which I trod when they
were smooth and level, fresh from the plane.  There are just thirty-
two of them, as there were five and thirty years ago, but they are
steeper and harder to climb, it seems to me, than they were then.  I
remember that in the early youth of this building, the late Dr. John
K.  Mitchell, father of our famous Dr. Weir Mitchell, said to me as
we came out of the Demonstrator's room, that some day or other a
whole class would go heels over head down this graded precipice, like
the herd told of in Scripture story.  This has never happened as yet;
I trust it never will.  I have never been proud of the apartment
beneath the seats, in which my preparations for lecture were made.
But I chose it because I could have it to myself, and I resign it,
with a wish that it were more worthy of regret, into the hands of my
successor, with my parting benediction.  Within its twilight
precincts I have often prayed for light, like Ajax, for the daylight
found scanty entrance, and the gaslight never illuminated its dark
recesses.  May it prove to him who comes after me like the cave of
the Sibyl, out of the gloomy depths of which came the oracles which
shone with the rays of truth and wisdom!

This temple of learning is not surrounded by the mansions of the
great and the wealthy.  No stately avenues lead up to its facades and
porticoes.  I have sometimes felt, when convoying a distinguished
stranger through its precincts to its door, that he might question
whether star-eyed Science had not missed her way when she found
herself in this not too attractive locality.  I cannot regret that
we--you, I should say--are soon to migrate to a more favored region,
and carry on your work as teachers and as learners in ampler halls
and under far more favorable conditions.

I hope that I may have the privilege of meeting you there, possibly
may be allowed to add my words of welcome to those of my former
colleagues, and in that pleasing anticipation I bid good-by to this
scene of my long labors, and, for the present at least, to the
friends with whom I have been associated.






APPENDUM

NOTES TO THE ADDRESS ON CURRENTS AND COUNTER
CURRENTS IN MEDICAL SCIENCE.

Some passages contained in the original manuscript of the Address,
and omitted in the delivery on account of its length, are restored in
the text or incorporated with these Notes.

NOTE A.--

There is good reason to doubt whether the nitrate of silver has any
real efficacy in epilepsy.  It has seemed to cure many cases, but
epilepsy is a very uncertain disease, and there is hardly anything
which has not been supposed to cure it.  Dr. Copland cites many
authorities in its favor, most especially Lombard's cases.  But De la
Berge and Monneret (Comp.  de Med.  Paris), 1839, analyze these same
cases, eleven in number, and can only draw the inference of a very
questionable value in the supposed remedy.  Dr. James Jackson says
that relief of epilepsy is not to be attained by any medicine with
which he is acquainted, but by diet.  (Letters to a Young Physician,
p.  67.) Guy Patin, Dean of the Faculty of Paris, Professor at the
Royal College, Author of the Antimonial Martyrology, a wit and a man
of sense and learning, who died almost two hundred years ago, had
come to the same conclusion, though the chemists of his time boasted
of their remedies.  "Did, you ever see a case of epilepsy cured by
nitrate of silver?"  I said to one of the oldest and most experienced
surgeons in this country.  "Never," was his instant reply.  Dr.
Twitchell's experience was very similar.  How, then, did nitrate of
silver come to be given for epilepsy?  Because, as Dr. Martin has so
well reminded us, lunatics were considered formerly to be under the
special influence of Luna, the moon (which Esquirol, be it observed,
utterly denies), and lunar caustic, or nitrate of silver, is a salt
of that metal which was called luna from its whiteness, and of course
must be in the closest relations with the moon.  It follows beyond
all reasonable question that the moon's metal, silver, and its
preparations, must be the specific remedy for moonblasted maniacs and
epileptics!

Yet the practitioner who prescribes the nitrate of silver supposes he
is guided by the solemn experience of the past, instead of by its
idle fancies.  He laughs at those old physicians who placed such
confidence in the right hind hoof of an elk as a remedy for the same
disease, and leaves the record of his own belief in a treatment quite
as fanciful and far more objectionable, written in indelible ink upon
a living tablet where he who runs may read it for a whole generation,
if nature spares his walking advertisement so long.



NOTE B.--

The presumption that a man is innocent until he is proved guilty,
does not mean that there are no rogues, but lays the onus probandi on
the party to which it properly belongs.  So with this proposition.
A noxious agent should never be employed in sickness unless there is
ample evidence in the particular case to overcome the general
presumption against all such agents, and the evidence is very apt to
be defective.

The miserable delusion of Homoeopathy builds itself upon an axiom
directly the opposite of this; namely, that the sick are to be cured
by poisons.  Similia similibus curantur means exactly this.  It is
simply a theory of universal poisoning, nullified in practice by the
infinitesimal contrivance.  The only way to kill it and all similar
fancies, and to throw every quack nostrum into discredit, is to root
out completely the suckers of the old rotten superstition that
whatever is odious or noxious is likely to be good for disease.  The
current of sound practice with ourselves is, I believe, setting fast
in the direction I have indicated in the above proposition.  To
uphold the exhibition of noxious agents in disease, as the rule,
instead of admitting them cautiously and reluctantly as the
exception, is, as I think, an eddy of opinion in the direction of the
barbarism out of which we believe our art is escaping.  It is only
through the enlightened sentiment and action of the Medical
Profession that the community can be brought to acknowledge that
drugs should always be regarded as evils.

It is true that some suppose, and our scientific and thoughtful
associate, Dr.  Gould, has half countenanced the opinion, that there
may yet be discovered a specific for every disease.  Let us not
despair of the future, but let us be moderate in our expectations.
When an oil is discovered that will make a bad watch keep good time;
when a recipe is given which will turn an acephalous foetus into a
promising child; when a man can enter the second time into his
mother's womb and give her back the infirmities which twenty
generations have stirred into her blood, and infused into his own
through hers, we may be prepared to enlarge the National
Pharmacopoeia with a list of specifies for everything but old age,
--and possibly for that also.



NOTE C.--

The term specific is used here in its ordinary sense, without raising
the question of the propriety of its application to these or other
remedies.

The credit of introducing Cinchona rests between the Jesuits, the
Countess of Chinchon, the Cardinal de Lugo, and Sir Robert Talbor,
who employed it as a secret remedy.  (Pereira.) Mercury as an
internal specific remedy was brought into use by that impudent and
presumptuous quack, as he was considered, Paracelsus.  (Encyc.  Brit.
art.  "Paracelsus.") Arsenic was introduced into England as a remedy
for intermittents by Dr. Fowler, in consequence of the success of a
patent medicine, the Tasteless Ague Drops, which were supposed,
"probably with reason," to be a preparation of that mineral.  (Rees's
Cyc.  art.  "Arsenic.")  Colchicum came into notice in a similar way,
from the success of the Eau Medicinale of M. Husson, a French
military officer.  (Pereira.) Iodine was discovered by a saltpetre
manufacturer, but applied by a physician in place of the old remedy,
burnt sponge, which seems to owe its efficacy to it.  (Dunglison, New
Remedies.) As for Sulphur, "the common people have long used it as an
ointment" for scabies.  (Rees's Cyc.  art.  "Scabies.") The modern
cantiscorbutic regimen is credited to Captain Cook.  "To his sagacity
we are indebted for the first impulse to those regulations by which
scorbutus is so successfully prevented in our navy."  (Lond.  Cyc.
Prac.  Med.  art.  "Scorbutus.") Iron and various salts which enter
into the normal composition of the human body do not belong to the
materia medica by our definition, but to the materia alimentaria.

For the first introduction of iron as a remedy, see Pereira, who
gives a very curious old story.

The statement in the text concerning a portion of the materia medica
stands exactly as delivered, and is meant exactly as it stands.  No
denunciation of drugs, as sparingly employed by a wise physician, was
or is intended.  If, however, as Dr.  Gould stated in his "valuable
and practical discourse" to which the Massachusetts Medical Society
"listened with profit as well as interest,"  "Drugs, in themselves
considered, may always be regarded as evils,"--any one who chooses
may question whether the evils from their abuse are, on the whole,
greater or less than the undoubted benefits obtained from their
proper use.  The large exception of opium, wine, specifics, and
anaesthetics, made in the text, takes off enough from the useful
side, as I fully believe, to turn the balance; so that a vessel
containing none of these, but loaded with antimony, strychnine,
acetate of lead, aloes, aconite, lobelia, lapis infernalis, stercus
diaboli, tormentilla, and other approved, and, in skilful hands,
really useful remedies, brings, on the whole, more harm than good to
the port it enters.

It is a very narrow and unjust view of the practice of medicine, to
suppose it to consist altogether in the use of powerful drugs, or of
drugs of any kind.  Far from it.  "The physician may do very much for
the welfare of the sick, more than others can do, although he does
not, even in the major part of cases, undertake to control and
overcome the disease by art.  It was with these views that I never
reported any patient cured at our hospital.  Those who recovered
their health were reported as well; not implying that they were made
so by the active treatment they had received there.  But it was to be
understood that all patients received in that house were to be cured,
that is, taken care of."  (Letters to a Young Physician, by James
Jackson, M.  D., Boston, 1855.)

"Hygienic rules, properly enforced, fresh air, change of air, travel,
attention to diet, good and appropriate food judiciously regulated,
together with the administration of our tonics, porter, ale, wine,
iron, etc., supply the diseased or impoverished system with what Mr.
Gull, of St. Bartholomew's Hospital, aptly calls the 'raw material of
the blood;' and we believe that if any real improvement has taken
place in medical practice, independently of those truly valuable
contributions we have before described, it is in the substitution of
tonics, stimulants, and general management, for drastic cathartics,
for bleeding, depressing agents, including mercury, tartar emetics,
etc., so much in vogue during the early part even of this century."
(F. P. Porcher, in Charleston Med. Journal and Review for January,
1860.)





End of Project Gutenberg Etext Medical Essays, by Oliver Wendell Holmes






ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR THE PG COMPLETE OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

A nail will pick a lock that defies hatchet and hammer
A little queer and uncertain in general aspect.
A misprint kills a sensitive author
Absolute, peremptory facts are bullies
Advised every literary man to have a profession.
Afraid of books who have not handled them from infancy
Age and neglect united gradually
Agreed on certain ultimata of belief
Algebraic symbols of minds which have grown too weak
All his geese are swans
All men are bores, except when we want them
All men love all women
All the forms of moral excellence, except truth
All want to reach old age and grumble when they get it
And now we two are walking the long path in peace together
Another privilege of talking is to misquote
Arc in the movement of a large intellect
As I understand truth
As to clever people's hating each other
As a child, he should have tumbled about in a library
Asked Solon what made him dare to be so obstinate
Assume a standard of judgment in our own minds
At the mercy of every superior mind
Audacious self-esteem, with good ground for it
Automatic and involuntary actions of the mind
Babbage's calculating machine
Be very careful to whom you trust one of these keys
Beautiful effects from wit,--all the prismatic colors
Been in the same precise circumstances before
Behave like men and gentlemen about it, if you know how.
Beliefs are rooted in human wants and weakness, and die hard
Bells which small trades-people connect with their shop-doors
Better for mankind,--and all the worse for the fishes
Better too few words, from the woman we love
Bewitching cup of self-quackery
Bill which will render pockets a superfluity in your next suit
Blank checks of intellectual bankruptcy
Bowing and nodding over the music
Brain often runs away with the heart's best blood
Brilliant flashes--of silence!
Brute beasts of the intellectual domain
Bury in it beliefs, doubts, dreams, hopes, and terrors
But we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.
But it was in talking of Life that we came most nearly together
C'est le DERNIER pas qui co te
Called an old man for the first time
Character is distinctly shown at the age of four months.
Cigar
Clairvoyance which sees into things without opening them
Code of finalities is a necessary condition of profitable talk
Cold shower-bath the world furnishes gratis
Comfort is essential to enjoyment
Commerce is just putting his granite foot upon them
Common sense, as you understand it.
Common sense was good enough for him
Compare the racer with the trotter
Conceit is just a natural thing to human minds
Conceit has the virtue of making them cheerful
Conclusion that he or she is really dull
Conflicting advice of all manner of officious friends
Consciousness of carrying a "settler" in the form of a fact
Controversy
Conversation which is suggestive rather than argumentative
Conversational fungi spring up most luxuriantly
Conversational bully
Conversational blank checks or counters
Conversational soprano
Creative action is not voluntary at all
Crippled souls
Crow with a king-bird after him
Cut your climate to your constitution
Dangerous subjects
Demand for intellectual labor is so enormous
Did I believe in love at first sight?
Didn't know Truth was such an invalid
Differ on the fundamental principles
Dishwater from the washings of English dandyism
Disputing about remainders and fractions
Do wish she would get well--or something
Do you know how important good jockeying is to authors?
Do you ever wonder why poets talk so much about flowers?
Do not be bullied out of your common sense by the specialist
Don't make your moral staple consist of the negative virtues
Don't believe any man ever talked like that in this world
Don't begin to pry till you have got the long arm on your side
Don't ever think the poetry is dead in an old man
Don't be in a hurry to choose your friends
Doomed to the pangs of an undeceived self-estimate
Dullest of teachers is the one who does not know what to omit
Dulness is not commonly a game fish
Earned your money by the dose you have taken
Easier to dispute it than to disprove it
Easier to say this than to prove it
Educational factory
Elysian abandonment of a huge recumbent chair.
Every person's feelings have a front-door and a side-door
Extra talent does sometimes make people jealous
Facts always yield the place of honor, in conversation
Fall silent and think they are thinking
Few, if any, were ruined by drinking
Flash terms for words which truly characterize their objects.
Fortune is the measure of intelligence
Fortune had left her, sorrow had baptized her
Friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things
Gambling with dice or stocks
Gambling, on the great scale, is not republican
Generalize the disease and individualize the patient
Generally ruined before they became drunkards
Genius in an essentially common person is detestable
Gift of seeing themselves in the true light
Give it an intellectual shake and hold it up to the light
Give us the luxuries of life
Good for nothing until they have been long kept and used
Good feeling helps society to make liars of most of us
Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris
Got his hand up, as a pointer lifts his forefoot
Governed, not by, but according to laws
Grave without a stone where nothing but a man is buried
Great silent-moving misery puts a new stamp on us
Grow we must, if we outgrow all that we love
Grow old early, if you would be old long
Habit is a labor-saving invention
Habits are the crutches of old age
Half knowledge dreads nothing but whole knowledge
Half-censure divided between the parties
Hard it is for some people to get out of a room
He did not know so much about old age then as he does now
He that has once done you a kindness
He who is carried by horses must deal with rogues
Height of art to conceal art
Her breathing was somewhat hurried and high, or thoracic
Here lies buried the soul of the licentiate Pedro Garcias
Hire logic, in the shape of a lawyer
Hold their outspread hands over your head
Holes in all her pockets
Hoped he did deserve a little abuse occasionally
Hopelessly dull discourse acts inductively
How long will school-keeping take to kill you?
Hung with moss, looking like bearded Druids
Hydrostatic paradox of controversy
I always believed in life rather than in books
I always break down when folks cry in my face
I allow no "facts " at this table
I show my thought, another his
I tell my secrets too easily when I am downhearted.
I love horses
I think I have not been attacked enough for it
I never think I have hit hard unless it rebounds
I replied with my usual forbearance
I am my own son, as it seems to me
I had not thought love was ever meant for me.
I hate books
I have lived by the sea-shore and by the mountains
I have taken all knowledge to be my province
If so and so, we should have been this or that
If they have run as well as they knew how!
If I thought I should ever see the Alps!
Il faut ne pas BRUTALISER la machine
In what direction we are moving
Incipit Allegoria Senectutis.
Infinite ocean of similitudes and analogies
Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked
Insanity
Intellectual companions can be found easily
Is this the mighty occan?--is this all?
It is by little things that we know ourselves
It is pleasant to be foolish at the right time
Judge men's minds by comparing with mine
Keep his wit in the background
Key to this side-door
Knowledge and timber only useful when seasoned
La main de fer sous le gant de velours
Laid the egg of the Reformation which Luther hatched
Laughs at times at the grand airs "Science" puts on
Law of the road with regard to handsome faces
Leading a string of my mind's daughters to market
Leap at a single bound into celebrity
Learn anything twice as easily as in my earlier days
Leave your friend to learn unpleasant truths from his enemies
Lecturer is public property
Let us cry!
Liability of all men to be elected to public office
Life would be nothing without paper-credit
Life is maintained by the respiration of oxygen and of sentiment
Like taking the cat in your lap after holding a squirrel
Listen to what others say about subjects you have studied
Little great man
Little muscle which knows its importance
Little narrow streaks of specialized knowledge
Live on the reputation of the reputation they might have made
Living in a narrow world of dry habits
Logic
Logicians carry the surveyor's chain over the track
Long illness is the real vampyrism
Look through the silvered rings of the arcus senilis!
Love must be either rich or rosy
Love is sparingly soluble in the words of men
Love-capacity is a congenital endowment
Lying is unprofitable
Made up your mind to do when you ask them for advice
Man of family
Man who means to be honest for a literary pickpocket
Man is father to the boy that was
Man's and a woman's dusting a library
Man's first life-story shall clean him out, so to speak
Mathematical fact
May doubt everything to-day if I will only do it civilly
Meaningless blushing
Mechanical invention had exhausted itself
Memory is a net
Men that know everything except how to make a living
Men grow sweet a little while before they begin to decay
Men of facts wait their turn in grim silence
Men who have found new occupations when growing old
Men that it weakens one to talk with an hour
Men are fools, cowards, and liars all at once
Might have hired an EARTHQUAKE for less money!
Moralist and occasional sermonizer
Most of our common, working beliefs are probabilities
Moved as if all her articulations were elbow-joints
Much ashamed of some people for retaining their reason
Must not read such a string of verses too literally
Must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it
Must be weaned from his late suppers now
Napoleon's test
Nature dresses and undresses them
Nature, who always has her pockets full of seeds
Nearest approach to flying that man has ever made
Neither make too much of flaws or overstatements
Never forget where they have put their money
No families take so little medicine as those of doctors
No fresh truth ever gets into a book
No man knows his own voice
Nobody is so old he doesn't think he can live a year
None of my business to inquire what other persons think
Nutritious diet of active sympathetic benevolence
Oblivion as residuary legatee
Oblivion's Uncatalogued Library
Odious trick of speech or manners must be got rid of.
Oh, so patient she is, this imperturbable Nature!
Old Age
Old age appear as a series of personal insults and indignities
Old jokes are dynamometers of mental tension
One very sad thing in old friendships
One whose patients are willing to die in his hands
One doesn't like to be cruel,--and yet one hates to lie
One that goes in a nurse may come out an angel
One can generally tell these wholesale thieves easily enough
Open patches where the sun gets in and goes to sleep
Oracle
Original, though you have uttered it a hundred times
Ought to produce insanity in every well-regulated mind
Our brains are seventy-year clocks
Overrate their own flesh and blood
Painted there by reflection from our faces
Passion never laughs
People in the green stage of millionism
People that make puns are like wanton boys
Person is really full of information, and does not abuse it
Personal incidents that call up single sharp pictures
Physical necessity to talk out what is in the mind
Picket-guard at the extreme outpost
Plagiarism
Pluck survives stamina
Poem must be kept and used, like a meersehaum, or a violin
Poetry, instead of making one other heart happy
Poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences
Poor creature that does not often repeat himself
Poverty is evidence of limited capacity
Power of human beings is a very strictly limited agency
Power of music
Pretensions of presumptuous ignorance
Pride, in the sense of contemning others
Probabilities
Project a principle full in the face of obvious fact!
Provincial conceit, which some of us must plead guilty to.
Pseudo-science
Pseudological inanity
Public itself, which insists on being poisoned
Pun is primŸ facie an insult
Put coppers on the railroad-tracks
Qu'est ce qu'il a fait?  What has he done?
Quackery and idolatry are all but immortal
Question everything
Racing horses are essentially gambling implements
Rapidity with which ideas grow old in our memories
Rather meet three of the scowlers than one of the smilers.
Rather longer than usual dressing that morning
Regained my freedom with a sigh
Religious mental disturbances
Remarkably intelligent audience
Remarks like so many postage-stamps
Returning thanks after a dinner of many courses
Ribbon which has strangled so many false pretensions
Sad thing to be born a sneaking fellow
Saddle-leather is in some respects even preferable
Saint may be a sinner that never got down to "hard pan"
Saturation-point of each mind differs from that of every other
Saying one thing about it and believing another
Scientific certainty has no spring in it
Scientific knowledge
Second story projecting
See if the ripe fruit were better or worse
Self-assertion, such as free suffrage introduces
Self-love is a cup without any bottom
Self-made men?
Self-unconsciousness of genius
Sense of SMELL
Sentenced to capital punishment for the crime of living
"Sentimentality," which is sentiment overdone
"Settler" in the form of a fact or a revolver
Several false premises
Shake the same bough again
She who nips off the end of a brittle courtesy
She always laughs and cries in the right places
Shut out, not all light, but all the light they do not want
Shy of asking questions of those who know enough to destroy
SIN has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all
Single combats between dead authors and living housemaids
Singular inability to weigh the value of testimony
Six persons engaged in every dialogue between two
Slow to accept marvellous stories and many forms of superstition
Small potatoes always get to the bottom.
Smiling at present follies
So long as a woman can talk, there is nothing she cannot bear
So much woman in it,--muliebrity, as well as femineity
So much must be pardoned to humanity
Society is a strong solution of books
Society of Mutual Admiration
Sold his sensibilities
Some people that think everything pitiable is so funny
Some people think that truth and gold are always to be washed for
Somebody had been calling him an old man
Something she is ashamed of, or ought to be
Something better than flowers; it is a seed-capsule
Somewhere,-- somewhere,--love is in store for them
Stages of life
Struggle with the ever-rising mists of delusion
Stupidity often saves a man from going mad
Style is the man
Sudden conviction that I had seen it somewhere
Takes very little to spoil everything for writer, talker, lover
Talk about those subjects you have had long in your mind
Talk, to me, is only spading up the ground for crops of thought
Talk without words is half their conversation
Talkers who have what may be called jerky minds
Talking with a dull friend affords great relief
Talking is like playing on the harp
Talking is one of the fine arts
Talking shapes our thoughts for us
Tears that we weep inwardly with unchanging features
Temptation of money and fame is too great for young people
Tepid and unstimulating expression of enthusiasm
Terrible smile
Thanklessness of critical honesty
That great procession of the UNLOVED
The house is quite as much the body we live in
The schoolmistress had tried life, too
The Amen! of Nature is always a flower
The race that shortens its weapons lengthens its boundaries
The year eighteen hundred and ever-so-few
The way to argue down a vice is not to tell lies about it
Their business is not a matter of sympathy, but of intellect
There is no elasticity in a mathematical fact
There is a higher law in grammar, not to be put down
There is almost always at least one key to this side-door
Think only in single file front this day forward
Think of the griefs that die unspoken!
Third vowel as its center
This is the shortest way,--she said
This is one of those cases in which the style is the man
Those who ask your opinion really want your praise
Time is a fact
To trifle with the vocabulary
To pay up, to own up, and to shut up, if beaten
Too late!---- "It might have been."----Amen!
Travellers change their guineas, but not their characters
Triumph of the ciphering hand-organ
True state of creative genius is allied to reverie, or dreaming
Truth must roll, or nobody can do anything with it
Truth is only safe when diluted
Truth's  sharp corners get terribly rounded
Truths a man carries about with him are his tools
Turn over any old falsehood
Unadorned and in plain calico
Undertakers
Unpacks and unfolds incidental illustrations
Unpretending mediocrity is good
Virtually old when it first makes its appearance
Virtue passed through the hem of their parchment
Virtues of a sporting man
Vulgarism of language
Wait awhile!
Walls of that larger Inquisition which we call Civilization
Want of ideas, want of words, want of manners
We die out of houses, just as we die out of our bodies
We always compare ourselves with our contemporaries.
We are all theological students
We carry happiness into our condition
We don't read what we don't like
We never tell our secrets to people that pump for them.
Wedded, faded away, threw themselves away
Wedding-ring conveys a right to a key to this side-door
Weeded their circle pretty well of these unfortunates
What a satire, by the way, is that machine
What are the great faults of conversation?
Whether anything can be conscious of its own flavor??
Whether gifted with the accident of beauty or not
While she is silent, Nature is working for her
Who is in advance of it or even with it
Wholesale professional dealers in misfortune
Why authors and actors are ashamed of being funny?
Why did I not ask? you will say
Will you take the long path with me?
Winning-post a slab of white or gray stone
Wit knows that his place is at the tail of a procession.
Wonder how my great trees are coming on this summer.
World calls him hard names, probably
World has a million roosts for a man, but only one nest.
Yes, I am a man, like another
Young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions
Youth and age--something in the soul




End of Project Gutenberg The Complete PG Oliver Wendell Holmes
by Oliver Wendell Holmes

