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Title: Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873.

Author: Various

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Language: English

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LIPPINCOTT's MAGAZINE

OF

_POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE_.




Vol XII, No. 28.

JULY, 1873




TABLE OF CONTENTS
  THE NEW HYPERION [Illustrated] By EDWARD STRAHAN.
    I.--Preambulary.
  FROM PHILADELPHIA TO BALTIMORE [Illustrated] By ROBERT MORRIS COPELAND.
  CHARITY CROSS By MARGARET MASON.
  BERRYTOWN by REBECCA HARDING DAVIS.
    Chapter XI.
    Chapter XII.
    Chapter XIII.
    Chapter XIV.
    Chapter XV.
  STRANGE SEA INDUSTRIES AND ADVENTURES By WILL WALLACE HARNEY.
  POSEY'S NUGGET By LOUIS A. ROBERTS.
  FRANCESCA'S WORSHIP By MARGARET J. PRESTON.
  OUR HOME IN THE TYROL By MARGARET HOWITT.
    Chapter V.
    Chapter VI.
  WITH THE AMERICAN AMBULANCE CORPS AT PARIS By RALPH KEELER.
  THE HUMMING-BIRD By JAMES MAURICE THOMPSON.
  A PRINCESS OF THULE BY WILLIAM BLACK.
    Chapter X.--Fairy-land.
    Chapter XI.--The First Plunge.
  SOME PASSAGES IN SHELLEY'S EARLY HISTORY By JANUARY SEARLE.
  CHANGES By EMMA LAZARUS.
  OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.
    A Sleeping-car Serenade By W.G.B.
    Fables For The Youth By SARSFIELD YOUNG.
    A Picture With A History.
    Hints For Novel-Writers.
  NOTES.
  LITERATURE OF THE DAY.
    Books Received.



ILLUSTRATIONS
  VIEW OF THE SCHUYLKILL RIVER AND WEST PHILADELPHIA.
  SHARON HILL.
  GLENOLDEN.
  RIDLEY PARK.
  CRUM LYNNE FALLS.
  DISTANT VIEW OF LANDSCAPE, SHOWING MILITARY INSTITUTE AT CHESTER.
  CROZER SEMINARY.
  VIEW OF CHESTER.
  RESIDENCE OF MR. F.O.C. DARLEY.
  VIEW OF DELAWARE RIVER NEAR CLAYMONT.
  VIEW AT CLAYMONT: CREEK AND BRIDGE.
  PRINCIPIO.
  BRIDGE OVER THE SUSQUEHANNA AT HAVRE DE GRACE.
  MOUNT ARARAT'S PROFILE ROCK.
  PORT DEPOSIT.
  FORT MCHENRY.
  THE BRITISH SHELL.




THE NEW HYPERION.

FROM PARIS TO MARLY BY WAY OF THE RHINE.

[The author's vignettes neatly copied by Gusatave Doré.]

I.--PREAMBULARY.


[Illustration]

The behavior of a great Hope is like the setting of the
sun. It splashes out from under a horizontal cloud, so diabolically
incandescent that you see a dozen false suns blotting the heavens with
purple in every direction. You bury your eyes in a handkerchief, with
your back carefully turned upon the west, and meantime the spectacle
you were waiting for takes place and disappears. You promise yourself
to nick it better to-morrow. The soul withdraws into its depths. The
stars arise (offering two or three thousand more impracticable suns),
and the night is ironical.

[Illustration]

Having already conquered, without boasting, a certain success before
the reading public, and having persuaded an author of renown to sign
his name to my bantling, my Expectation and Hope have long been to
surpass that trifling production. You may think it a slight thing to
prepare a lucky volume, and, tapping Fame familiarly on the shoulder,
engage her to undertake its colportage throughout the different
countries of the globe. My first little work of travel and geography
had exceeded my dreams of a good reception. It had earned me several
proposals from publishers; it had been annotated with "How true!" and
"Most profound!" by the readers in public libraries; its title had
given an imaginative air to the ledgers of book-sellers; and it had
added a new shade of moodiness to the collection of Mudie. The man
who hits one success by accident is always trying to hit another by
preparation. Since that achievement I have thought of nothing but the
creation of another impromptu, and I have really prepared a quantity
of increments toward it in the various places to which my traveling
existence has led me. That I have settled down, since these many years
past, at the centre and capital of ideas would prove me, even without
the indiscretions of that first little book, an American by birth. I
need not add that my card is printed in German text, Paul Fleming,
and that time has brought to me a not ungraceful, though a
sometimes practically retardating, circumference. Beneath a mask of
cheerfulness, and even of obesity, however, I continue to guard
the sensitive feelings of my earlier days. Yes: under this abnormal
convexity are fostered, as behind a lens, the glowing tendencies of my
youth. Though no longer, like the Harold described in Icelandic verse
by Regner Hairy-Breeches, "a young chief proud of my flowing locks,"
yet I still "spend my mornings among the young maidens," or such of
them as frequent the American Colony, as we call it, in Paris. I still
"love to converse with the handsome widows." Miss Ashburton, who
in one little passage of our youth treated me with considerable
disrespect, and who afterward married a person of great lingual
accomplishments, her father's late courier, at Naples, has been
handsomely forgiven, but not forgotten. A few intelligent ladies,
of marked listening powers and conspicuous accomplishments, are
habitually met by me at their residences in the neighborhood of the
Arc de Triomphe or at the receptions of the United States minister.
These fair attractions, although occupying, in practice, a
preponderating share of my time, are as nothing to me, however, in
comparison with that enticing illusion, my Book.

[Illustration]

The scientific use of the imagination in treating the places and
distances of Geography is the dream of my days and the insomnia of my
nights.

Every morning I take down and dust the loose sheets of my coming book
or polish the gilding of my former one. It is in my fidelity to these
baffling hopes--hopes fed with so many withered (or at least torn and
blotted) leaves--rather than in any resemblance authenticable by a
looking-glass, that I show my identity with the old long-haired and
nasal Flemming.

[Illustration]

Yet, though so long a Parisian, and so comfortable in my theoretic
pursuit of Progressive Geography, my leisure hours are unconsciously
given to knitting myself again to past associations, and some of my
deepest pleasures come from tearing open the ancient wounds. Shall
memory ever lose that sacred, that provoking day in the Vale of
Lauterbrunnen when the young mechanic in green serenaded us with his
guitar? It had for me that quite peculiar and personal application
that it immediately preceded my rejection by Miss Mary. The Staubbach
poured before our eyes, as from a hopper in the clouds, its Stream
of Dust. The Ashburtons, clad in the sensible and becoming fashion
of English lady-tourists, with long ringlets and Leghorn hats, sat
on either side of me upon the grass. And then that implacable youth,
looking full in my eye, sang his verses of insulting sagacity:

  She gives thee a garland woven fair;
          Take care!
  It is a fool's-cap for thee to wear;
          Beware! beware!
          Trust her not,
      She is fooling thee!

Meeting him two or three times afterward as he pursued his
apprentice-tour, I felt as though I had encountered a green-worm.
And I confess that it was partly on his account that I made a vow,
fervently uttered and solemnly kept, never again to visit Switzerland
or the Rhine. Miss Ashburton I easily forgave. The disadvantage, I
distinctly felt, was hers, solely and restrictedly hers; and I should
have treated with profound respect, if I had come across him, the
professional traveler who was good enough to marry her afterward.

But these bitter-sweet recollections are only the relief to my
studies. It is true they are importunate, but they are strictly kept
below stairs.

Nor would any one, regarding the stout and comfortable Flemming,
suspect what regrets and what philosophies were disputing possession
of his interior. For my external arrangements, I flatter myself that I
have shaped _them_ in tolerable taste.

My choice of the French capital I need not defend to any of my
American readers. To all of you this consummation is simply a matter
of ability. I heartily despise, as I always did, all mere pamperings
of physical convenience. Still, for some who retain some sympathy with
the Paul Flemming of aforetime, it may be worth while to mention the
particular physical conveniencies my soul contemns. I inhabit, and
have done so for eight years at least, a neat little residence of
the kind styled "between court and garden," and lying on the utmost
permissible circumference of the American quarter in Paris--say on the
hither side of Passy. For nearly the same period I have had in lease a
comical box at Marly, whither I repair every summer. My town-quarters,
having been furnished by an artist, gave me small pains. The whole
interior is like a suite of rooms in the Hôtel Cluny. The only
trouble was in bringing up the cellar to the quality I desired and
in selecting domestics--points on which, though careless of worldly
comfort in general, I own I am somewhat particular.

[Illustration]

No gentleman valets for me--rude creatures presuming to outdress their
masters. What I wanted was the Corporal Trim style of thing--bald,
faithful, ancient retainer. After a world of vexation I succeeded in
finding an artless couple, who agreed for a stipulation to sigh when I
spoke of my grandfather before my guests, and to have been brought up
in the family.

But I am wandering, and neglecting the true vein of sentiment which
so abounds in my heart. All my pleasure is still in mournful
contemplation, but I have learned that the feelings are most refined
when freed from low cares and personal discomforts. I was going to
cite a letter I wrote to my oldest friend, the baron of Hohenfels. It
was sketched out first in verse, but in that form was a failure:

       *       *       *       *       *

                                                    "15th MARCH.

"The snow-white clouds beyond my window are piled up like Alps. The
shades of B. Franklin and W. Tell seem to walk together on those
Elysian Fields; for it was here (or sufficiently nigh for the purpose)
that in days gone by our pure patriot dwelt and flirted with Madame
Helvetius; and yonder clouds so much resemble the snowy Alps that they
remind me irresistibly of the Swiss. Noble examples of a high purpose
and a fixed will! Do B. and W. not move, Hyperion-like, on high? Were
_they_ not, likewise, sons of Heaven and Earth?

[Illustration]

"I wish I knew the man who called flowers 'the fugitive poetry of
Nature.' That was a sweet carol, which I think I have quoted to you,
sung by the Rhodian children of old in spring, bearing in their hands
a swallow, and chanting 'The swallow is come,' with some other
lines, which I have forgotten. A pretty carol is that, too, which the
Hungarian boys, on the islands of the Danube, sing to the returning
stork in spring, what time it builds its nests in the chimneys and
gracefully diverts the draft of smoke into the interior. What a
thrill of delight in spring-time! What a joy in being and moving!
Some housekeepers might object to that, and say that there was but
imperfect joy in moving; but I am about to propose to you, as soon as
I have taken a little more string, a plan of removal that will suit
both us and the season. My friend, the time of storms is flying
before the pretty child called April, who pursues it with his blooming
thyrsus. Breathing scent upon the air, he has already awakened some
of the trees on the boulevards, and the white locust-blossoms in the
garden of Rossini are beginning to hang out their bunches to attract
the nightingales. He calls to the swallows, and they arrive in clouds.

"He knocks at the hard envelope of the chrysalis, which accordingly
prepares to take its chance for a precarious metamorphosis--into the
wings of the butterfly or into the bosom of the bird. How very sweet!

"Strange is the lesson, my friend, which humanity teaches itself from
the larva. Even so do I, methinks, feed in life's autumn upon the
fading foliage of Hope, and, still feeding and weaving, turn it at
last into a little grave. A neat image that, which, by the by, I stole
from Drummond of Hawthornden. Do you recollect his verse?--but
of course I should be provoked if I thought you did--

  For, with strange thoughts possessed,
        I feed on fading leaves
        Of hope--which me deceives,
  And thousand webs doth warp within my breast.
  And thus, in end, unto myself I weave
  A fast-shut prison. No! but even a Grave!

"To pursue my subject: April, having thus balanced the affairs of the
bird and the worm, proceeds to lay over the meadows a tablecloth for
the bees. He opens all the windows of Paris, and on the streets shows
us the sap mounting in carnation in the faces of the girls.

"My dear Hohenfels, I invite you to the festival which Spring is
spreading just now in the village of Marly. My cabin will be gratified
to open in your honor. May it keep you until autumn! Come, and come at
once."

       *       *       *       *       *

[Illustration]

Having signed my missive, I tucked it into an envelope, which I
blazoned with my favorite seal, the lyre of Hyperion broken, and rang
for Charles. In his stead, in lieu of my faithful Charles, it was
Hohenfels himself who entered, fresh from the Hôtel Mirabeau.

"Look alive, man! Can you lend me an umbrella?" said he briskly.

I looked out at the window: it was snowing.

The moment seemed inopportune for the delivery of my epistle:
I endeavored to conceal it--without hypocrisy and by a natural
movement--under the usual pile of manuscript on my table devoted
to Progressive Geography. But the baron had spied his name on the
address: "How is that? You were writing to me? There, I will spare you
the trouble of posting."

He read my sentences, turning at the end of each period to look out
at the snow, which was heavily settling in large damp flakes. He
said nothing at first about the discrepancy, but only looked forth
alternately with his reading, which was pointed enough. I said long
ago that the beauty of Hohenfels' character, like that of the precious
opal, was owing to a defect in his organization. The baron retains his
girlish expression, his blue eye, and his light hair of the kind that
never turns gray: he is still slender, but much bent. He went over to
the fireplace and crouched before the coals that were flickering there
still. Then he said, with that gentle, half-laughing voice, "Take
care, Paul, old boy! Children who show sense too early never grow,
they say: by parity of argument, men who are poetical too late in life
never get their senses."

"I have given up poetry," said I, "and you cannot scan that
communication in your hand."

"But it is something worse than poetry! It is prose inflated and
puffed and bubbled. You are falling into your old moony ways again,
and sonneteering in plain English. Are you not ashamed, at your age?"

"What age do you mean? I feel no infirmities of age. If my hair is
gray, 'tis not with years, as By--"

"If your hair is gray, it is because you are forty-eight, my old
beauty."

"Forty-five!" I said, with some little natural heat.

"Forty-five let it be, though you have said so these three years. And
what age is that to go running after the foot of the rainbow? Here you
are, my dear Flemming, breathing forth hymns to Spring, and inviting
your friends to picnics! Don't you know that April is the traitor
among the twelve months of the year? You are ready to strike for Marly
in a linen coat and slippers! Have you forgotten, my poor fellow, that
Marly is windy and raw, and that Louis XIV. caught that chill at Marly
of which he died? Ah, Paul, you are right enough. You are young, still
young. You are not forty-eight: you are sixteen--sixteen for the third
time."

Hohenfels, whose once fine temper is going a little, stirred the fire
and suddenly rose.

"Lend me an umbrella!" he repeated imperatively.

[Illustration]

"Are you in such a hurry to go? That is not very complimentary to me,"
I observed. "Have you done scolding me?"

What is called by some my growing worldliness teaches me to value
dryness in an old friend as I value dryness in a fine, cobwebbed,
crusty wine. It is from the merest Sybaritism that I surround myself
with comrades who, like Hohenfels, can fit their knobs into my
pattern, and receive my knobs in their own vacancy. My hint brought
him over at once into the leathern chair opposite the one I occupy.

"Paul, Paul," he said, "I only criticise you for your good. What have
you done with your three adolescences? You are getting stout, yet you
still write poetically. You have some wit, imagination, learning and
aptitude. You might make a name in science or art, but everything
you do lacks substance, because you live only in your old eternal
catchwords of the Past and the Future. You can sketch and paint,
yet have never exhibited your pictures except in ladies' albums.
You profess to love botany, yet your sole herbarium has been the
mignonette in sewing-girls' windows. You are inoffensive, you are
possessed of a competency, but in everything, in every vocation, you
rest in the state of amateur--amateur housekeeper, amateur artist,
amateur traveler, amateur geographer. And such a geographer as
you might be, with your taste for travel and the Hakluyt Society's
publications you have pored over for years!"

This chance allusion to my grand secret took me from my guard.
Hohenfels, blundering up and down in search of something to
anathematize, had stumbled upon the very fortress of my strength.
I deemed it time to let him into a part of my reserved intellectual
treasure--to whirl away a part at least of the sand in which my
patient sphinx had been buried.

"I have indeed been a reader," I said modestly. "When a youth at
Heidelberg, I perused, with more profit than would be immediately
guessed from the titles, such works as the Helden-Buchs and
the Nibelungen-Lieds, the Saxon Rhyme-Chronicles, the poems of
Minnesingers and Mastersingers, and Ships of Fools, and Reynard Foxes,
and Death-Dances, and Lamentations of Damned Souls. My study since
then has been in German chemistry from its renaissance in Paracelsus,
and physical science, including both medicine and the evolution of
life. Shall I give you a few dozen of my favorite writers?"

"Quite unnecessary," said the baron with some haste. "But I fancied
you were going to speak of geographical authors."

[Illustration]

"Are you fond of such writings yourself?" I asked.

"Immensely--that is, not too scientific, you know," said the baron,
who was out of his element here. "Bayard Taylor, now, or some such
fellows as the Alpine Club."

"My dear baron, the republications by the Hakluyt Society are but
a small part of the references I have taken down for my Progressive
Geography. You admire Switzerland?"

"Vastly. Steep jump, the Staubbach."

"But the Alps are only hillocks compared with the Andes of Peru, with
the Cordilleras, with Chimborazo! Ah, baron, Chimborazo! Well, my dear
boy, the system I elaborate makes it a matter of simple progression
and calculation to arrive at mountains much more considerable still."

"Such as--?"

"The Mountains of the Moon!"

I then, in a few dexterously involved sentences, allowed the plan of
my newly-invented theory to appear--so much of it, that is, as would
leave Hohenfels completely in the dark, and detract in no wise from
the splendor of my Opus when it should be published. As science,
however, truly considered, is the art of dilapidating and merging into
confused ruin the theories of your predecessors, I was somewhat
more precise with the destructive than the constructive part of my plan.

"Geographical Science, I am prepared to show, is that which modern
learning alone has neglected, to the point of leaving its discoveries
stationary. It is not so with the more assiduously cultivated
branches. What change, what advance, in every other department of
culture! In geology, the ammonite of to-day was for Chalmers a parody
facetiously made by Nature in imitation of her living conchology, and
for Voltaire a pilgrim's cockle dropped in the passes of the Alps. In
medicine, what progress has been made since ague was compared to the
flutter of insects among the nerves, and good Mistress Dorothy Burton,
who died but in 1629, cured it by hanging a spider round the patient's
neck "in a nutshell lapped in silk"! In chemistry, what strides! In
astronomy, what perturbations and changes! In history, what do we not
owe to the amiable authors who, dipping their pens in whitewash, have
reversed the judgments of ages on Nero and Henry VIII.! In genealogy,
what thanks must we pay to Darwin! Geographical Science alone, stolid
in its insolent fixity, has not moved: the location of Thebes and
Memphis is what it was in the days of Cheops and Rameses. And so poor
in intellect are our professors of geodesic lore that London continues
to be, just as it always was, in latitude 51° 30' 48" N., longitude 0°
5' 38" W., while the observatory of Paris contentedly sits in latitude
48° 50' 12" N. and longitude 2° 20' 22-1/2" E. from the observatory
of Greenwich! This disgracefully stationary condition of the science
cannot much longer be permitted."

"And how," said the baron, "will it be changed?" and he poked the
fire to conceal a yawn. Excellent man! his time latterly had been more
given to the investigation of opera than of the exact sciences.

"Through my theory of Progression and Proportion in geographical
statistics, by which the sources of the Nile can be easily determined
from the volume and speed of that current, while the height of the
mountains on the far side of the moon will be but a pleasing sum in
Ratio for a scholar's vacations. Nor will anything content me, my
dear Hohenfels, till this somewhat theoretical method of traveling
is displaced by bodily progression; till these easy excursions of the
mind are supplemented by material extensions; till the foot is pressed
where the brain has leaped; and till I, then for the first time a
traveler, stand behind the lunar rim, among the 'silent silver lights
and darks undreamed of!'"

"I am unable to appreciate your divagations," humbly observed
Hohenfels, "though I always thought your language beautiful. Meantime,
my hat is spoiled in coming hither, and you have the effrontery to
write bucolics to me during the most frightful weather of the year.
Once for all, do you refuse me an um--"

He did not finish his sentence. A world of sunshine burst like a
bomb into the chamber, and our eyes were dazzled with the splendor:
a sturdy beam shot directly into the fireplace, and the embers turned
haggard and gray, and quickly retired from the unequal contest. I
opened the window. A warm air, faint with the scent of earth and turf,
invaded the apartment, and the map-like patches of dampness on the
asphaltum pavement were rapidly and visibly drying away.

"I'm off!" said Hohenfels, with a rapid movement of retreat.

"But you are forgetting your--"

"What, my gloves?"

[Illustration]

"No, the umbrella." And I presented him the heaviest and longest and
oldest of my collection. He laughed: it was a hoary canopy which we
had used beside the Neckar and in Heidelberg--"a pleasant town," as
the old song says, "when it has done raining." We sealed a compact
over the indestructible German umbrella. I agreed to defer for a
fortnight my departure for Marly: on his side he made a solemn vow to
come there on the first of May, and there receive in full and without
wincing the particulars of my Progressive Geography. As he passed by
the window I took care that he should catch a glimpse of me seated
by accident in a strong light, my smoking-cap crowded down to my
spectacles, and my nose buried in my old geographers.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Illustration]

For the next few days the weather supported the side of Hohenfels. It
scattered rain, sunshine and spits of snow. At last the sun got the
upper hand and remained master. The wisterias tumbled their cataracts
of blue blossoms down the spouts; rare flowers, of minute proportions,
burst from the button-holes of the young horsemen going to the Bois;
the gloves of the American colony became lilac; hyacinths, daffodils
and pansies moved by wagon-loads over the streets and soared to
the windows of the sewing-girls. Overhead, in the steaming and
cloud-marbled blue, stood the April sun. "Apelles of the flowers," as
an old English writer has styled him, he was coloring the garden-beds
with his rarest enamels, and spreading a sheet of varied tints over
the steps of the Madeleine, where they hold the horticultural market.

[Illustration]

This sort of country ecstasy, this season at once stimulating and
enervating, tortured me. It disturbed my bibliophilist labors,
and gave a twang of musty nausea even to the sweet scent of old
binding-leather. I was as a man caught in the pangs of removing,
unattached to either home; and I bent from my windows over the throngs
of festal promenaders, taciturn and uneasy. I fancied that wings were
sprouting from my brown dressing-robe, and that they were the volatile
wings of the moth or dragon-fly. But to establish myself at Marly
before the baron, would not that be a breach of compact? Would he
not make it a _casus belli_? Luckily, we were getting through April:
to-morrow it would be the twenty-eighth.

On that memorable morning the sun rose strong and bright, and
photographed a brilliant idea upon my cerebellum.

I would undertake a pedestrian attack upon Marly by winding my way
around the suburbs of the capital. What more appropriate, for a
profound geographer and tourist, than to measure with my walking-stick
that enormous bed of gypsum, at the centre of which, like a bee in a
sugar-basin, Paris sits and hums?

[Illustration]

The notion gained upon me. Perhaps it was the natural reaction from
the Mountains of the Moon; but in my then state of mind no prospect
could appear more delicious than a long tramp among the quiet scenes
through which the city fringes itself off into rurality. Those suburbs
of blank convent walls! those curves of the Seine and the Marne,
blocked with low villages, whose walls of white, stained with tender
mould and tiled with brown, dipped their placid reflections into the
stream! those droll square boats, pushing out from the sedges to urge
you across the ferry! those long rafts of lumber, following, like
cunning crocodiles, the ins and outs of the shallow Seine! those banks
of pollard willows, where girls in white caps tended flocks of geese
and turkeys, and where, every silver-spangled morning, the shore was
a landscape by Corot, and every twilight a landscape by Daubigny! How
exquisite these pictures became to my mind as I thought them forth one
by one, leaning over a grimy pavement in the peculiar sultriness of
the year's first warmth!

"Quick, Charles! my tin botany-box."

I could be at Marly on the first of May at the dinner hour as
punctually as Hohenfels--before him, maybe. And after what a range of
delicious experience! How he would envy me!

"Is monsieur going to travel all alone?" said keen old Charles, taking
the alarm in a minute. "Why am I not to go along with monsieur?"

The accent of primitive fidelity was perfect. I observed casually, "I
am going on a little journey of thirty-six hours, and alone. You
can pack everything up, and go on to Marly as usual. You may go
to-morrow."

"Shall I not go along with monsieur, then?" repeated Charles, with a
turn for tautology not now for the first time manifested.

"What for? Am I a child?"

"Surely not--on the contrary. But, though Monsieur Paul has a sure
foot and a good eye, and is not to say getting old, yet when a person
is fifty it is not best for a person to run about the streets as if a
person was a young person."

It was Josephine who did me the honor to address me the last remark.

I confess to but forty-five years of age; Hohenfels, quite
erroneously, gives me forty-eight; Josephine, with that raw alacrity
in leaping at computations peculiar to the illiterate, oppressed me
with fifty. Which of us three knew best? I should like to ask. But it
is of little consequence. The Easterns generally vaunt themselves on
not knowing the day of their birth. And wisdom comes to us from the
East.

[Illustration]

I decided, for reasons sufficient to myself, to get out of Paris by
the opposite side. I determined to make my sortie by way of the Temple
Market and the Belleville abattoirs. On the thirtieth of April, at an
ambitiously early hour, wearing my gardening cap, with my sketch-book
sticking out of my pocket, my tin box in one hand and my stout stick
in the other, I emerged among the staring porters of the neighboring
houses, and it was in this equipment that I received the renewed
lamentations of Charles and Josephine.

[Illustration]

"Will you dare to go along the Boulevard looking like that, sir?" said
Josephine.

"A gentleman in a cap! They'll take you for a bricklayer--indeed they
will, sir," said Charles; "or rather for a milkman, with his tin can.
I can't stand that: I will carry it rather myself, though I feel my
rheumatics on these damp pavements."

"Monsieur Paul must take a cab--at least to the barrier: it will not
be pleasant to make a scandal in the street."

"Who will tend Monsieur Paul these two days, now?" This was uttered
with manly grief by Charles.

"And whoever will cook for him along the road?" It was Josephine who
asked the question with a heavy sigh.

To make an end of this charming scene of Old Virginia faithfulness,
I put my best leg out and departed with gymnastic sprightliness. An
instant after I turned my head.

Charles and Josephine were fixed on the doorstep, following me with
their regards, and I believed I saw a tear in the left eye of each.
What fidelity! I smiled in a sort of indulgent and baronial manner,
but I felt touched by their sensibility.

Come on! It is but a twenty-four hours' separation.

Go forth, then, as I remember saying long ago, without fear and with a
manly heart, to meet the dim and shadowy Future.

EDWARD STRAHAN.

       *       *       *       *       *

FROM PHILADELPHIA TO BALTIMORE.

In 1832 a few adventurous men obtained a charter for a railroad from
Baltimore to Port Deposit: other charters were granted by Delaware
and Pennsylvania in succeeding years, and at last in 1838 all were
consolidated as the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad
Company, and became a through all-rail line, interrupted only by
the Susquehanna and some minor water-courses, under one management,
beginning at Philadelphia and ending at Baltimore. But the country was
too young and weak to make this a strong road, either in capital
or business. It struggled along with a heavy debt, poor road-bed,
imperfect rail (in some parts the old strap rail), few locomotives and
cars, and inconvenient dépôts, making but little progress up to
1851, when Mr. Samuel M. Felton was brought from Boston to assume the
presidency.

Seeing the actual and future importance of the line, some Eastern men
bought up the stock, put in the necessary money and encouraged Mr.
Felton to begin an entire revolution in the road. The road-bed was
perfected and widened for a double track, new dépôts erected in
Baltimore and Philadelphia, new rails laid, new branches opened;
and whereas Mr. Felton found the road with only a single track, 25
locomotives and 308 cars, he left it with many miles of double track,
its dépôts rebuilt, 49 locomotives and 1145 cars. When he took the
road its locomotives traveled 312,840 miles per year, and earned
$718,010, at a cost of $252,184.54: when he left it, borne down by
disease, the locomotives traveled 780,537 miles per year, at a cost of
$1,960,649. The capital stock in 1851 was $3,850,000, and paid three
and a half per cent.: it is now $13,486,250, and pays eight per cent.

[Illustration: VIEW OF THE SCHUYLKILL RIVER AND WEST PHILADELPHIA.]

When the war broke out in 1862 this road was the key of the continent,
and the fact that it was officered and controlled by Northern and
energetic men saved it from destruction or becoming an engine in the
hands of our enemies. Over it hundreds of thousands of soldiers
and citizens were carried to the front, and millions of tons of
merchandise and supplies were poured into the quarter-master's,
commissary's and medical departments all along the line.

In 1864, worn out by disease, the able manager laid down his
authority, to be taken up by another vigorous New England man, who
in his turn has given almost life-blood to carry the road on to
greatness.

[Illustration]

Since 1864 the advance in earnings has not been so great as in the
four preceding years, because of the necessary reduction in travel
and transportation since the war. But enormous improvements have been
made, thousands of steel rails have been laid, locomotives, freight
cars and passenger cars of the most beautiful description have
been added to the stock, new dépôts made (some of the finest in the
country), a new line planned and executed, carrying the road from the
meadows and marshes of the Delaware through the valleys and beautiful
rolling uplands of Delaware county to Chester, avoiding all danger
from floods, and going over or under twenty-seven streets to enter the
city without possible peril to life or limb. A whole railroad system
subsidiary to this road has been developed in Delaware, and to-day,
with the best road-bed, double tracks, steel rails, the best
locomotives, the best passenger cars in the country, supplied with all
the modern improvements of brake, platform and signal, and a perfectly
drilled corps of subordinates, this road may challenge the attention
of the country, and be pointed out as one of the best evidences of the
growth and prosperity of Philadelphia.

[Illustration: SHARON HILL.]

[Illustration: GLENOLDEN.]

The dépôt in Philadelphia, at the corner of Broad street and
Washington avenue, is a large and spacious building, which does not
pretend to be a model of domestic architecture, but is roomy and
reasonably well ventilated. The bell rings, we take our seats and move
out through the usual coal-yards and shanties and suburbs, passing the
United States Arsenal, until we reach Gray's Ferry, where we see the
Schuylkill, beautiful at high tide, the high banks opposite once a famous
estate, now the seat of the Almshouse, where four thousand paupers
live in the winter and about fifteen hundred in the summer. So mild and
pleasant is this climate that the majority of the paupers creep out, like
the blue bottleflies, with the coming of spring, preferring to sleep in
barns or under the green trees all the summer, rather than endure the
hard beds, discipline and regular habits of the Almshouse. The rains of
summer may fill their old bones with rheumatism for winter, but there are
charms in the life of the stroller, who feeds to-day at a farm-house,
or works a few hours to-morrow for a trifle to get whisky and tobacco,
but has no notes to pay, no house to maintain, no servants to support.

[Illustration: RIDLEY PARK.]

[Illustration: CRUM LYNNE FALLS]

Gray's Ferry is an old historic name, for here Washington and the
men of the Revolution crossed again and again. The old rope ferry was
succeeded by the old horse ferry, and now there are three railroads
here--the Darby Improvement, the Junction (which goes to West
Philadelphia and makes the connection for the great Southern
Air-line), and the old line, which leads us out, through the old
Bartram Gardens, where an enthusiastic botanist made the first and
best collection of trees and plants in this country, on to the marshes
of the Delaware. The mighty river, widening into a bay, flows on to
the ocean, its bosom furrowed by thousands of keels and whitened by
myriad sails. We look over wide acres of marshes, now green with the
tender colors of spring, the corn-fields of the higher portion giving
by their brown earth beautiful contrasts of color, the rows of corn
just coming into sight. All over these meadows stand huge oak trees
and elms, amongst whose branches the vessels seem to glide. But
beautiful as the scene is, it is a bad place for a railroad, for when
the great river rushes down swollen by some freshet, and is met by the
incoming tide, the water sets back over the marshes and threatens to
sweep away the track or put out the fires of the locomotives; and to
cross streams and tideways many draw-bridges, with their attendant
dangers, must be maintained. To avoid all these difficulties, Mr.
Hinckley planned the change which is known as the Darby Improvement,
carrying the road from Gray's Ferry to Chester over and through the
high lands of Darby and Ridley. We shall no longer hear the brakeman
shout out "Gibson's," "Lazaretto,", "Tinicum" (called by the Indians
_Tenecunck_), "Crum Creek." We shall no longer wonder that the train
should be stopped for so few passengers to get on or off, for in
future our car will take us over a road-bed so perfectly laid with
steel rails that a full glass of water will not spill as the train
hurries on through a thickly settled country. Look quickly from the
window at the country you are traversing: see the beautiful station
at Bonnaffon, and the magnificent oak tree, worth a hundred stations,
that stands in a field just beyond. We cannot enumerate all the
beauties and objects of interest that line the road: every valley
opens a pleasant view, every hill is covered with handsome houses,
comfortable farmeries or superb trees. Before the road was made, these
lands, lying on a ridge high above the river, perfectly healthy and
offering the most desirable homes for city people, were inaccessible,
but now they can be reached, and have been already appreciated. Most
of the land has grown too valuable for farming, and has been bought up
and laid out with different degrees of care for suburban residences.

[Illustration: DISTANT VIEW OF LANDSCAPE, SHOWING MILITARY INSTITUTE
AT CHESTER.]

Darby is one of the oldest towns in the State, and contributes largely
to the business of the road. Mills were built here in 1696, and it was
divided into Upper and Lower Darby in 1786. The first of the new towns
is Sharon Hill, where a large amount of land has been laid out in the
rectangular method, and already many of the lots are sold to actual
settlers: a machine-shop has been established, and the railroad has
built a very nice station for passengers.

Next to Sharon Hill comes Glenolden, where hill and dale, wood and
meadow and a beautiful stream, offer all the picturesqueness that
can charm an enthusiastic or artistic eye, together with good
building-sites and every advantage that fertile and forest-clad land
can give to one who would exchange the heat and pavements of a city
for rural life. From Glenolden it is but a short distance to Norwood
and to Moore's Crossing, where the company are erecting turnouts,
engine-houses, etc., and from here, eight miles from the city,
numerous trains will run to Philadelphia to accommodate the workingmen
who, it is believed, will come out to live on these cool and breezy
uplands.

[Illustration: CROZER SEMINARY.]

From Moore's we soon get to Ridley Park, which was described at length
in a former Number. The two stations at Ridley are models of beauty in
their way: the principal station spans the road-bed, wide enough here
for four tracks, and is probably the most picturesque in the country,
as well as very convenient. Crum Lynne Station is remarkable for
the beautiful sculpture of the capitals of the pilasters to the
architraves of the windows, the architect having designed each one for
this building, using the flowers and fruits and birds and animals of
the region for his ornamental work, instead of the usual cornice and
frieze and capital of Grecian architecture.

But the train sweeps us away from Ridley limits, past Leiperville with
its primeval railway, and on to Chester. As we round the curve and
rush through the woods we see on the left the broad river with its
three-masted schooners, ships and steamers, and on the right the
spires and houses of the town; and first and predominant the Military
School of Colonel Hyatt. This school was incorporated by act of
Legislature in 1862, and is devoted to both civil and military
education. The studies and drill are so combined as to secure good
mental and physical culture; and to ensure good military instruction
the State and the United States have contributed arms of all kinds.
Scholars come from all parts of the country, and even the West Indies;
and as the standard of scholarship is high, the graduates compare
favorably with those from other institutions.

Chester is one of the oldest towns on the line of the road by actual
years, but one of the youngest in growth. First called by the Indians
_Mackaponacka_, and then by the settlers _Upland_, it had a justice of
the peace court in 1676. Its court-house was built in 1724. Its first
newspaper was published in 1819. For many years Chester dozed away in
dignified quiet as the county-town: its court-house and jail gave it
all the honor it required. But the streams made good mill-sites, the
deep waterfront along the river offered splendid wharfage and chances
for shipbuilding, and, as good luck would have it, a rivalry awoke
which ended in loading Media with the county buildings and relieving
Chester. Since then it has doubled and trebled: mills and factories
are on all sides, and its shipyards are not easily surpassed. Roach's
shipyard covers twenty-three acres. The firm make their own engines
and everything required in iron shipbuilding from keel to topmast.
They have six vessels now on the stocks, and employ eleven hundred
men, and have room for sixteen hundred. They have built for every
trade from the coaster to the East Indiaman, varying in size from six
hundred to four thousand tons, and their vessels pass unchallenged
amongst the best in the world.

[Illustration: VIEW OF CHESTER.]

Nor is trade the only feature of the town. About half a mile from the
dépôt, on a gentle eminence, is the Crozer Theological Seminary. The
approach from Chester for the pedestrian, along the shrub-, vine- and
tree-clad banks of Chester Creek into and across the wide lawn, is a
delightful walk. The principal building was erected by John P. Crozer
for a normal school. During the war he gave it to the government for a
hospital, and when he died in 1866 left it to his sons, desiring
them to devote it to some benevolent use. They have responded in a
munificent manner by establishing a school for training young men for
the ministry, with accommodations for a hundred students, houses for
the professors, a church, a library building, lecture-halls and all
the required conveniences for a great and successful school. They
have added an endowment fund of two hundred and twenty-eight thousand
dollars, the whole gift being about three hundred and ninety thousand
dollars, and one of the family has since given twenty-five thousand
dollars as a library fund. The seminary was opened in 1868 with
fifteen students: there are now fifty from all parts of the Union.

[Illustration: RESIDENCE OF MR. F.O.C. DARLEY.]

But the most complaisant conductor of the most accommodating special
train could not wait any longer for us, and we must hurry on through
Lamokin, where the Baltimore Central, a tributary road, turns off
and traverses a most picturesque country, round by Port Deposit to
Perryville, where it again reaches the main road. At Lamokin are
works where steel of a peculiar kind is manufactured under a European
patent. From here the road again clings to the shore of the Delaware,
and until we reach Wilmington the river, with its sails and its blue
water, is on the left--on the right a high ridge, which ends in the
valley of the Shell Pot and Brandywine at Wilmington.

[Illustration: VIEW OF DELAWARE RIVER NEAR CLAYMONT.]

We flash past Linwood to stop a moment at Claymont, where the ridge
comes nearer the river and offers superb sites for buildings. Why
Claymont has not grown more no one seems to know. There are schools
and churches, fine rolling land, noble river-views, and all that can
make a country home delightful. That the place has attractions for
lovers of the picturesque may be inferred from the fact that it counts
among its residents an artist of such wide and well-founded celebrity
as Mr. F.O.C. Darley, whose delineations of American life and scenery,
especially in the form of book-illustrations, have been familiar to
the public for the past thirty years. With so many years of fame, Mr.
Darley counts but fifty-two of life, and in the enjoyment of vigorous
health still continues the practice of his art, executing many
commissions from Europe, where his genius is as highly appreciated as
at home.

[Illustration: VIEW AT CLAYMONT: CREEK AND BRIDGE.]

[Illustration: PRINCIPIO.]

But we must stick to our train, which carries us through the Red
Bank Cut to Ellerslie Station, where occurred the first accident of a
serious character which has happened on this road for eighteen years,
and which was due only to a willful violation of orders by an old and
very trusted conductor. At Ellerslie are the Edgemoor Iron-works of
Messrs. William Sellers & Co., where every known improvement in the
manufacture of iron is being tested and applied. The next curve in the
road shows us the meadows of the Shell Pot and the Brandywine, with
Wilmington in the distance. The Brandywine, famous in our history,
runs through as picturesque a valley as there is in America, combining
all that the climate of Delaware permits in trees, shrubs, vines
and flowers with the wildness and variety of the valley of the
Pemigewasset or the wild Ammonoosuck. In this rare valley are mills as
old as the settlement of the country, and quaint hamlets that seem to
belong to Europe rather than America.

At Wilmington the system of the Delaware railroads begins: it spreads
out over the peninsula of Delaware and the Eastern Shore of Maryland
like a huge left hand. The thumb touches Chestertown and Centreville,
the fore finger Oxford, the middle finger Cambridge, the ring finger
Crisfield, the little finger Lewes; and this hand gathers into the
main road every year millions of baskets of peaches, and millions more
of oysters in baskets and sacks, and crates of berries, and car-loads
of hardwood and lumber. Under the influence of these roads the sleepy
peninsula is beginning a new career.

We cannot go down the peninsula, so let us keep on to Baltimore,
pausing, however, for a moment as we cross Mason and Dixon's line near
Elkton. Little did Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon dream, as they set
that tangent point for the determination of the boundary-lines of
the three States, how famous they would become. But there the simple
monument stands in the open fields, and there it must remain so long
as the three States need a boundary.

[Illustration: BRIDGE OVER THE SUSQUEHANNA AT HAVRE DE GRACE.]

Soon after leaving Mason and Dixon we strike the first of the great
estuaries of the Delaware and Susquehanna, which are the delight
of the sportsman, the naturalist and the tourist. No matter at what
season of the year you approach North-east, Principio, the Susquehanna
River or Stemmer's Run--no matter at what time of the day--the views
are always fine. The water spreads out in huge widening bays, and
loses itself in the forest or hides behind some projecting headland;
and when, as is often the case, the surface of the water is actually
darkened with large flocks of wild fowl, the variety as well as
beauty of the scene could not be heightened. Such shooting-ground
for sportsmen exists nowhere else on this coast easily accessible.
At Perryville, Havre de Grace, Bush River and many other places
the chance sportsman can find every accommodation, while clubs of
gentlemen have leased many of the best points, and established little
houses where they may be comfortable when the day's sport is over, and
where they can leave from season to season boats, decoys and all the
paraphernalia of the sport. To recount the names of canvas-backs, red
heads, bald pates and innumerable other ducks, to tell of the tens,
fifties, hundreds shot in a single day, would add nothing to the
excitement of any sportsman who has seen from the cars the huge flocks
of birds rise and sweep out to sea when scared by some passing train
or boat.

[Illustration: MOUNT ARARAT--PROFILE ROCK.]

If every passenger could stop once, and study the Susquehanna bridge
crossing the river between Perryville and Havre de Grace, he would
have a most profound respect for its projectors and builders. For many
years all transport by cars was interrupted here, and travelers and
merchandise were transported by ferry-boat, causing wearisome delays
and extra expense. But now a bridge 3273 feet long and with 1000 feet
of trestling, resting on thirteen huge piers built on foundations in
water from twenty-seven to sixty feet deep, and costing a million and
a half of dollars, carries all safely over, and defies floods and ice.
This bridge, one of the triumphs of engineering and a just source
of pride to the road, has already saved in time and trouble a large
percentage of its cost. It was threatened the past winter by the
ice-pack which filled the river back to Port Deposit, and which seemed
to promise for some time the destruction of that well-named little
town. It is hard to believe that in a country so extensive as ours,
with all kinds of lands and town-sites, any one could begin to build a
town in such a situation. It clings to the broken and rocky shores
and hillsides as lichens adhere to rocks and to the bark of trees or
swallows' nests to the eaves of a barn. There it is, however, and,
judging from its costly houses, churches and business appearance, its
inhabitants have found it a profitable place to stay in. Port Deposit
last winter, when the river was filled with ice from shore to shore
and for miles in both directions, fissured and cracked and covered
with mud, logs and débris, seemed on the verge of destruction; and
it was easy to believe that if the river did rise suddenly the moving
mass of ice, like some huge glacier, would sweep away all evidences
of humanity, leaving behind only the glacial scratches and the _roches
moutonnées_. Overhanging the railroad is a very remarkable profile
rock which has attained some celebrity, and is shown in one of our
sketches.

[Illustration: PORT DEPOSIT.]

[Illustration: FORT McHENRY.]

From Port Deposit to Baltimore the country is more rolling than from
Perryville to Wilmington, and there are many picturesque points. One
could find at Gunpowder River and Stemmer's Run several beautiful
points of view, but by the time he reaches these places the traveler
begins to get impatient for the great city, the terminus of his
wanderings, which soon begins to announce itself by more thickly
congregated houses, and roads cut straight through hill and valley,
regardless of cost or the destruction of local charms of hill and
dale.

[Illustration: THE BRITISH SHELL.]

If one were to judge by the streets, he would think Baltimorians
lived only on oysters, for the new streets seem wholly built of
their shells, making them very white, glaring and offensive to the
unaccustomed eye. But the attention is soon diverted from houses and
roads, to the bay and to Fort McHenry, which lies before the town like
a sleeping lion. Few forts in the country are more interesting or
have played a more important part in our military history; but all
its military reputation is less interesting than the fact that
whilst confined to a British vessel, one of the fleet unsuccessfully
bombarding the fort, Francis Key wrote the "Star-Spangled Banner,"
now a national hymn. A bomb thrown into the fort at that time by the
British has been preserved on a pillar ever since--almost the only
local reminder of the facts of the bombardment.

At Baltimore we leave the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore
Railroad, sorry to part from so good a road and one so important to
the welfare of the country. It is a link in the great system, and one
kept very bright and well polished by its managers. Their course has
been to pay only a moderate dividend, and use the rest of the earnings
to improve the road and its belongings, and to foster the interests
of the people who use it. Such wise policy must build it strongly into
the affections and interests of those who live along it, and ensure
its being each year a better and better-paying road.

ROBERT MORRIS COPELAND.

       *       *       *       *       *





CHARITY CROSS.


  Tinted are her cheeks with rose
  She is waiting in the snows
  Of the falling apple-blows.

  Tinklings of a drowsy rill
  Come from the upland orchard hill,
  Niches in her dreams to fill.

  Dotted is her rustic shawl
  With the apple-leaves that fall:
  Twilight splendors cover all.

  Deeper lined than earthly grace,
  Rest of heaven doth in her face
  Rejoice in its abiding-place.

  Charity Cross, it groweth late:
  Household duties for you wait,
  Just beyond the garden-gate.

  Leave the apple-blooms to fall,
  Far-off brook to vainly call:
  Lightly climb the orchard wall.

  All your dreamings softly fold:
  Let them drift away untold
  In the dying sunset's gold.

  Down the path that leads between
  Ferns and mosses, shaded green,
  The gabled house is dimly seen.

  Winds, with poplar trees at play,
  Chafe with tossing boughs all day
  Weather-beaten walls of gray.

  Open wide the trellised door:
  Sunset glories go before,
  Fall upon the kitchen floor,

  Turn to gold the swinging loom
  Standing in the corner's gloom
  Of the low brown-raftered room.

  Brazen dogs that ever sleep
  Silently the entrance keep
  Of the fireplace huge and deep.

  Charity, stop no more to dream:
  Covers lift with puffing steam;
  Waiting stands the risen cream.

  Change to white your apron gray,
  Sprinkled clothes to fold away,
  Ready for another day.

  Quickly now the table spread
  With its homespun cloth of red,
  Savory meats and snowy bread.

  On the shelf a pink-lipped shell,
  That for ever tries to tell
  Ocean music, learned so well.

  Tiptoe on the cricket stand:
  Take it in your sun-browned hand--
  Shell from eastern tropic land.

  Let your clear voice through it ring,
  Homeward the hired help to bring
  From the distant meadow-spring.

  Far away they hear the call:
  Look! they come by orchard wall,
  Where the apple-blossoms fall.

  One that foremost leads the plough
  Sees you in the doorway now--
  Breaks a bending apple-bough;

  Waves it by the meadow creek:
  Answering blushes on your cheek
  Tell the words you do not speak.

  Out upon the rippling river
  Purple lights of sunset quiver,
  Rustling leaves reflected shiver.

  Shell in hand, she goes to greet
  Her lover, where the turf-grown street
  And the meadow pathway meet.

  Insect voices far away,
  Hushed in silence through the day,
  Whisper in the night of May,

  While in vain the pink-lipped shell,
  Murmuring in its hollow cell,
  Would its own love-story tell.

  Through the drifting apple-snow,
  Where the four-leafed clovers grow,
  Hand in hand they homeward go;

  And they vow, whate'er the weather,
  Mid the brier, through the heather,
  They will walk life's way together.

  Parting when the day grows late,
  If a moment at the gate
  One alone is left to wait,

  Yet each other they will greet
  Where life's shadeless, dusty street
  And the heavenly pathway meet.

MARGARET MASON.




BERRYTOWN.

CHAPTER XI.


Catharine sprang from her bed at daybreak that morning. She could
scarcely stop singing in the bath. She had so much to do, so much to
do! The air blew briskly, the factory bells were clanging, the bees
buzzed, the pretty white curtains were flapping. It was a busy world,
and she was busiest of all. Had she not Hugh Guinness's fate in hand?
She felt like a lad when he comes of age or makes his first venture
in business. Jane heard her singing noisily for a while, but when
breakfast was ready she did not come down.

She was standing in front of her glass, staring at it as though the
chubby, insignificant face there were the Sphinx and could answer the
riddles of life. McCall's remark had suddenly recurred to her: "What
is Hugh Guinness to you? You belong to another man." With a flash, Mr.
Muller, natty and plump, had stood before her, curiously unfamiliar,
mildly regarding her through his spectacles. _Her husband!_ Why had
she never understood that until this morning? Her crossed hands lay on
her wide blue-veined shoulders. She almost tore the flesh from them.
"I belong to no man!" she cried.

She could not shake off the thought of him, as she usually did.
He stood beside her, do what she would--the fat body and legs, the
finical dress, the wearisome platitudes, a regiment of blue-coated,
thick-lipped children behind him.

"If the best were done for them that could be hoped, they would but
grow up miniature Mullers; and to think of _that!_" said Kitty. She
had given her life to him. If she lived to be gray-headed, he alone
owned her, mind and body. "If I were dead in my coffin, he would put
his mild, fat little hand on me, and look forward to owning me in
heaven! Oh-h!" This last was the one unendurable pang to Catharine.

Jane at the moment thrust her black face in: "He's come. Hurry up,
honey! Mr. Muller, ob course. Shell I do up your hair, chile?"

Kitty shook her head and smiled. She would have had a kind smile for
Jane and her like if she had been held by thumbscrews. Stooping to
button her gaiters, she caught sight of her face in the glass. There
were dark hollows under the eyes: they had the look of an older,
graver woman than she had ever been before. Kitty hung up the green
dress she had meant to wear, and took down a rose-colored one. Mr.
Muller was talking down stairs. There was reality. There was her work
and her husband. Why, she had the account-books of the school in her
upper bureau-drawer at that moment, and in the lower ones her wedding
things. Dresses and cloaks all made; and such lovely linen! As for
Hugh Guinness, he was, after all, but a perplexing shadow, a riddle
that turned from her the more she tried to make him real. She went
down.

"Why, Catharine!" He held her hand, patting it between his own, which
were warm and moist. "I really could not deny myself a glimpse of you,
though I was sent on an errand by Maria to the station. But all roads
end for me in the Book-shop. That is natural--he! he!"

"Yes, it is natural."

"It must be only a glimpse, though. I begged of Jane a cup of hot tea,
to take off the chill of this morning air. Ah, here it is: thank you,
my good girl. Only a glimpse, for Maria's business was urgent: Maria's
business always is urgent. But I was to intercept Doctor McCall on his
way to the cars."

"Is he going this morning?"

"Yes. Not to return, it appears."

"Not to return?" Her voice seemed hardly to have the energy of a
question in it.

"But I," with a shrug and significant laugh, "am not to allow him to
go. Behold in me an emissary of Love! You; would not have suspected
a Mercury in your William, Catharine?" Within the last month he had
begun to talk down in this fashion to her, accommodating himself to
her childish tastes.

"What is Mercury's errand?"

"Aha! you curious little puss! How a woman does prick her ears at the
mention of a love-story! Though, I suppose, this one is wellnigh its
end. Maria made no secret of it. Doctor McCall, I inferred from what
she said, had been pouring out his troubles in her ear, and she sent
me to bring him back to her with the message that she had found a
way of escape from them. Eh? Did you speak? You did not know _what_,
dear?"

"I did not know that Maria had the right to bring him back. They
are--"

"Engaged? Oh, certainly. At least--It is an old attachment, and Maria
is such a woman to manage, you know! Is that the tea-pot, Jane? Just
fill my cup again. Oh yes, I suppose it is all settled."

Catharine was standing by the window. The wind blew in chilly and
strong, while Mr. Muller behind her sipped his tea and ambled in his
talk. Crossing the meadow, going down the road, she saw the large
figure of a man in a loose light overcoat, who swung in his gait and
carried his hat in his hand as a boy would do. Even if he had loved
her, she could not, like Maria, have gone a step to meet him, nor
intoned the Song of Solomon. But he did not love her.

She turned to her companion: "There is something I wished to say."

"In one moment, my dear." He was sweetening his tea. Hanging the
silver tongs on the lid, he looked up: "Good God, Catharine! what is
it?"

"I wished to tell you--no, don't touch me, please--this is a mistake
which we have made, and it is better to let it go no farther. It ought
to end now."

"End? Now?" But he was not surprised. The pale face staring at her
over the half-emptied cup looked as if it had been waiting to hear
this; so that they began the subject, as it were, in the middle. So
much had already been said between them without words. He set the
cup down, even in that moment folding his napkin neatly with shaking
fingers. Kitty did not laugh. She never laughed at him afterward.
Something in that large, loose figure yonder, going away from her to
the woman he loved, had whetted her eyesight and her judgment. She saw
the man at last under Muller's weak finical ways, and the manly look
he gave her.

"You mean that there must be no--no marriage?"

"No. I'm very sorry. It has been my fault. But I thought--"

"You thought you loved me, and you do not. Don't cry, Kitty."

A long silence followed, which seemed to Catharine like that of death.
It was noticeable that he did not make a single effort to change her
resolution or to keep her. It seemed as if he must have been waiting
for her to waken some day and see the gulf between them.

"Don't cry, Kitty," he said again, under his breath. He stood by the
empty fireplace, resting his dainty foot on the fender and looking
down on it: he took out his handkerchief, shook out its folds and
wiped his face, which was hot and parched. Kitty was sorry, as she
said--sorry and scared, as though she had been called on to touch the
corpse of one dear to her friends, but whose death cost her nothing.
That she was breaking an obligation she had incurred voluntarily
troubled her very little.

"Yes, I thought you would say this one day," he said at last. "I think
you are right to take care of yourself. I was too old a man for you
to marry. But I would have done all I could. I have been very fond of
you," looking at her.

"Yes. You never seemed old to me sir."

"And your work for the poor children? I thought, dear, you felt that
the Lord called you to that?"

"So I did. But I don't think I feel it so much to-day." Catharine's
eyes were wide with this new terror. Was she, then, turning her back
on her God?

She was, after all, he thought, nothing but a frightened, beautiful
child.

"I should have been too rough for you," he said. How was he to
suspect the heights from which she had looked down on his softness and
flippancy?

She observed that he said not a word of the preparations he had made,
the house furnished, the expectant congregation, or the storm of
gossip and scandal which would follow him as a jilted lover. Was the
real wound, then, so deep? Or did he overlook such trifles, as men do?

"I did not forget the new dresses and underclothes," thought Kitty,
mean and mortified.

He roused himself as Jane came in: "No, Jane, no more tea. Yes, that
is my cup on the mantel-shelf."

"Dah's a gen'leman, Miss Kitty. I took him in the Book-shop. 'T mought
be Spellissy 'bout de oats. Tink it is Spellissy."

"You had better go, Catharine," taking up his hat.

"It is not important." The door closed after Jane. She came close to
him, irresolute. What could she say? She thought, with the heat of
childishness, that she would give the blood out of her body, drop by
drop, to comfort him. She wished that she had gone on and married him.
"But I cannot say that I love him." This was a matter for life and
death--even Kitty's polite soul recognized that--and not for a civil
lie.

Again the man asserted himself before the woman: "No, there is nothing
for you to say, Catharine," smiling. "There are some things it is
better not to varnish over with words." He took up his hat after a
pause, and turned a feeble, uncertain face to the window: "I--I might
as well go now: I have a prayer-meeting this afternoon."

"And when you go you mean never to come back again?" cried Kitty, pale
and red in a moment. "That's to be the end of it all?"

"What more can there be? It's all said." Yet after he had walked to
the door he stood on the steps, looking about the room which had grown
so familiar and dear to him. At Kitty he did not look.

"Will you have a rose?" breaking one hastily from the trailing
branches at the window. "To remember the old Book-shop." She had never
given him anything before.

He threw it down: "I do not need a rose to make me remember,"
bitterly. "It _is_ all said, child? You have nothing to tell me?"
looking furtively at her.

For a long time she did not speak: "No, nothing."

"Good-bye, Kitty."

Kitty did not answer him. The tears ran hot and salt over her round
cheeks as she watched the little man disappear through the walnuts.
She went up stairs, and, still crying, chose one or two maudlin
sonnets and a lock of black hair as mementoes to keep of him. She did
keep them as long as she lived, and used frequently to sigh over them
with a sentimental tenderness which the real Muller never had won from
her.




CHAPTER XII.


Miss Muller's message was never delivered, but Doctor McCall did not
leave Berrytown that morning. Going down the road, he had caught sight
of the old Book-house, and Kitty in her pink wrapper at the window. He
overheard Symmes, the clerk at the station, say to some lounger that
Peter Guinness would be at home that day or the next. He took his
valise to the baggage-room.

"My business is not pressing," he said to Symmes. "No need to be off
until this evening."

Perhaps he could see the old man, himself unseen, he thought with a
boyish choking in his throat. He could surely give one more day to the
remembrance of that old sweet, hearty boy's life without wronging the
wretched ghost of a wife whose hand clutched so much away from him.

Miss Muller, seeing him on the bridge from the windows of her room,
supposed her message had been given: "He has stayed to know how he
may win me." For the first time she faced the riddle squarely. In the
morning she had only wished weakly to keep him beside her.

He was married. Popular novels offered recipes by the score for the
cure of such difficulties in love. But Maria was no reader of novels.
Out of a strict Calvinistic family she and her brother had leaped
into heterodoxy--William to pause neatly poised on the line where
Conventionalism ended; Maria to flounder in an unsounded quagmire,
which she believed the well of Truth. Five years ago she would have
felt her chance of salvation in danger if she had spoken to a woman
who persisted in loving a married man. But five years work strange
changes in the creeds of young women now-a-days; and Maria's heart was
choosing her creed for her to-day, according to the custom of her sex.

She saw Doctor McCall idly leaning over the foot-bridge of the creek
while he smoked. Passion and brilliancy unknown to them before came
into her dark eyes: she stretched out her hands as though she would
have dragged him to her: "Must I give him up because of this wife whom
he long ago cast off?"

If she tempted him to marry her? She knew what name her old church,
her old friends, even her father, who was still living, would apply to
her. Some of these people with whom she had lately cast in her lot had
different views on the subject of marriage. Hitherto, Maria had kept
clear of them. "The white wings of her Thought," she had said, "should
not be soiled by venturing near impurity." Now she remembered their
arguments against marriage as profound and convincing.

"I could not suggest to him myself this way of escape," she thought,
the red dying her face and neck. "I could not." But there was to be
a meeting that very evening of the "Inner Light Club," in which Maria
was a M.H.G. (Most Honorable Guide), and the subject for discussion
would be, "Shall marriage in the Advanced Consolidated Republic be for
life or for a term of years?" The profoundest thinkers in the society
would bring to this vital question all their strength and knowledge,
and, as they had all made up their minds beforehand against bondage
and babies, the verdict was likely to be unanimous.

She would contrive that McCall should be one of the audience: the
wisdom and truth of the arguments would shine in like a great light
on his life, and he would start up a new man, throwing aside this
heaviest yoke of social slavery. She would be there ("with a
black lace mantilla and veil--so much better than a bonnet," she
breathlessly resolved), and at the sight of her he would feel the
divine force of true love bringing them together, and claim her as his
own.

The modern Cleopatra fights upon the rostrum, in lieu of "sixty sail,"
and uses as weapons newspaper and club, instead of purple robe and
"cloyless sauce of epicurean cook," but the guerdon of the battle is
none the less Mark Antony.

At sundown that evening Doctor McCall was piloted by little Herr Bluhm
to his office; the Herr, according to his wont, sternly solemn, McCall
disposed to be hilarious, as suited the pleasant temperature of the
evening.

"Club, eh? Inner Light? Oh yes, I've no objections. One picks up good
ideas here, there, anywhere. Meets in your office?"

"Yes--a shabby, vulgar place to the outer eye, but so many noble souls
have there struggled out of darkness into light, such mighty Truths
have been born there which will guide the age, that to me it is the
very Holy Ground of Ideas."

"So?" McCall looked at the little man out of the corner of his eye,
and nodded gravely.

"It is a Woman's Club, though men take part in it. But we have such
faith in the superior integrity and purity of woman's mind when
brought to bear on great but hackneyed questions that we willingly
stand back until she has given her verdict. The magnet, sir, pointing
out with inexplicable intelligence the true path to humanity."

"Well, I don't know about that. Though it's very likely, very likely,"
hurriedly. McCall had no relish for argument about it. He was more
secure of his intellect in the matter of peaches than inner lights.
Cowed and awed as he could have been by no body of men, he followed
Bluhm up a dirty flight of stairs into the assemblage of Superior
Women. The office was by nature a chamber with gaudy wall-paper of
bouquets and wreaths. Viewed as an office, it was well enough, but in
the aesthetic, light of a Holy Ground of Ideas it needed sweeping.
The paper, too, hung in flaps from the damp walls: dusty files of
newspapers, an empty bird-cage, old boots, a case of medical books, a
pair of dilapidated trousers filled up one side of the room. A pot of
clove-pinks in the window struggled to drown with spicy fragrance the
odor of stale tobacco smoke. There was a hempen carpet, inch deep with
mud and dust, on the floor. Seated round an empty fireplace, on cane
chairs and in solemn circle, were about forty followers of the Inner
Light. McCall perceived Maria near the window, the dusky twilight
bringing out with fine effect her delicate, beautiful face. He turned
quickly to the others, looking for the popular type of the Advanced
Female, in loose sacque and men's trousers, with bonnet a-top, hair
cut short, sharp nose and sharper voice. She was not there. A third
of the women were Quakers, with their calm, benign faces for the
most part framed by white hair--women who, having fought successfully
against slavery, when that victory was won had taken up arms against
the oppressors of women with devout and faithful purpose. The rest
McCall declared to himself to be "rather a good-looking lot--women who
had," he guessed shrewdly, "been in lack of either enough to eat or
somebody to love in the world, and who fancied the ballot-box would
bring them an equivalent for a husband or market-money."

A little dish-faced woman in rusty black, and with whitish curls
surmounted by a faded blue velvet bonnet laid flat on top of her head,
had the floor: "Mr. Chairman--I mean Miss Chairman--the object of
our meeting this evening is, Shall marriage in the Consolidated
Republic--"

"I object!" Herr Bluhm sprang to his feet, wrapping a short mantle
like a Roman toga across his chest, and wearing a portentous frown
upon his brow, "There is business of the last meeting which is not
finished. Shall the thanks of this club be presented to the owners of
the Berrytown street-cars for free passes therein? That is the topic
for consideration. I move that a vote of thanks be passed;" and he sat
down gloomily.

"I do _not_ second that motion." A tall woman, with the magisterial
sweep of shawl and wave of the arm of a cheap boarding-house keeper,
rose. "I detect a subtle purpose in that offer. There is a rat behind
that arras. There is a prejudice against us in the legislature,
and the car company wish no mention of Woman Suffrage to be made
in Berrytown until their new charter is granted. Are we so cheaply
bought?--bribed by a dead-head ticket!"

"The order of the day," resumed the little widow placidly, "is, Shall
marriage in the Consol--"

"Legislature!" piped a weak voice in the crowd. "They only laugh at us
in the legislature."

"Let them laugh: they laughed at the slave." The speaker hurled this
in a deep bass voice full at McCall. She was a black-browed, handsome
young woman, wrapped in a good deal of scarlet, who sat sideways on
one chair with her feet on the rung of another. "How long will the
world dare to laugh?" fixing him fiercely with her eye.

"Upon my word, madam, I don't know," McCall gasped, and checked
himself, hot and uncomfortable.

A fat, handsomely-dressed woman jolted the chair in front of her to
command attention: "On the question of marriage--"

"Address the chair," growled Bluhm.

"Miss Chairman, I want to say that I ought to be qualified to speak on
marriage, being the mother of ten, to say nothing of twice twins."

"The question before the house is the street-car passes," thundered
Bluhm. "I move that we at least thank them for their offer. When a cup
of tea is passed me, I thank the giver: when the biscuits are handed,
I do likewise. It is a simple matter of courtesy."

"I deny it," said the black-browed female with a tone of tragedy.
"What substantial tea has been offered? what biscuits have been baked?
It is not tea: it is bribery! It is not biscuits: it is corruption!"

"I second Herr Bluhm's motion."

"Miss Chairman, put the question on its passage."

A mild old Quakeress rose, thus called on: "Thee has made a motion,
Friend Bluhm, and Sister Carr says she seconds it; so it seems to
me--Indeed I don't understand this parliamentary work."

"You're doing very nicely."

"All right!" called out several voices.

"Why should we have these trivial parliamentary forms?" demanded the
Tragic Muse, as McCall called her. "Away with all worn-out garments of
a degraded Past! Shall the rebellious serf of man still wear his old
clothes?"

"But," whispered McCall to Bluhm, "when will the great thinkers you
talked of begin to speak on those mighty truths--"

"Patience! These are our great thinkers. The logical heads some
of them have! Woman," standing up and beginning aloud, apropos to
nothing--"Woman is destined to purify the ballot-box, reform the
jury, whiten the ermine of the judge. [Applause.] When her divine
intuitions, her calm reason, are brought into play--" Prolonged
applause, in the midst of which Bluhm, again apropos to nothing,
abruptly sat down.

"The order of the day," said the little woman in black, "is, Shall
marriage--"

"What about the car company?"

"Let's shelve that."

"The question of marriage," began Bluhm, up again with a statelier
wrap of his toga, "is the most momentous affecting mankind. It demands
free speech, the freest speech. Are we resolved to approach it in
proud humility, giving to the God within ourselves and within our
neighbor freedom to declare the truth?"

"Ay!" "Ay!" from forty voices. Maria, pale and trembling, watched
McCall.

"Free speech is our boast," piped the widow. "If not ours, whose?"

"Before you go any farther," said the Muse with studied politeness,
"I have a question to put to Herr Bluhm. Did you did you not, sir,
in Toombs's drug-store last week, denominate this club a caravan of
idiots?" A breathless silence fell upon the assembly. Bluhm gasped
inarticulately. "His face condemns him," pursued his accuser. "Shall
such a man be allowed to speak among us? Ay, to take the lead among
us?"

Cries of "No!" "No!"

"What becomes of your free speech?" cried Bluhm, red and stammering
with fury. "I was angry. I am rough, perhaps, but I seek the truth,
as those do not who"--advancing and shaking his shut hand at the
Muse--"who 'smile and smile, and are a villain still.'"

"The order of the day"--the widow's voice rose above the din
tranquilly--"_is_ Shall marriage in the Consolidated Republic be
contracted for life or for a term of years?"

The next moment Maria felt her arm grasped. "Come out of this,"
whispered McCall, angry and excited. "This is no place for you, Maria.
Did you hear what they are going to discuss?"

"Yes," as he whisked her out of the door.

"Then I'm sorry for it. Such things oughtn't to be mentioned in a
lady's presence. If I had a sister, she should not know there was
such a thing as bigamy. Good God!" wiping his forehead with his
handkerchief, "if women are not pure and spotless, what have we to
look up to? And these shallow girls, who propose to reform the world,
begin by dabbling with the filth of the gutter, if they do no worse?"

"Shallow girls?" He was so big and angry that she felt like a wren or
sparrow in his hold. But the stupidity of him! the blind idiocy!
She eyed him from head to foot with a bitterness and contempt
unutterable--a handsome six-foot animal, with his small brain filled
with smaller, worn-out prejudices! The way of escape had been set
before him, and he had spurned it--and her!

"I don't see what it can matter to you," she said politely,
disengaging herself, "whether I make friends with these people and am
stained with the filth of the gutter or not?" She had a half-insane
consciousness that she was playing her last card.

"Why, to be sure it matters. You and I have been good friends always,
Maria, and I don't like to see you fellowship
with that lot. What was it Bluhm called them?" laughing. "That was
rough in Bluhm--rough. They're women."

"You are going?"

"In the next train, yes, I waited to see a--a friend, but he did not
come. It's just as well, perhaps," his face saddened. "Well, good-bye,
Maria. Don't be offended at me for not approving of your friends. Why,
bless my soul! such talk is--it's not decent;" and with a careless
shake of the hand he was gone.

Maria told herself that she despised a man who could so dismiss the
great social problem and its prophets with a fillip of his thumb. She
turned to go in to the assemblage of prophets. They were all that was
left her in life. But she did not go in. She went to her bare chamber,
and took Hero up on her lap and cried over him. "_You_ love me,
doggy?" she said.

She had an attack of syncope that night, for which no pack or sitz
proved a remedy; and it was about that time that the long and
painful affection of the ulnar nerve began which almost destroyed her
usefulness as a surgeon.




CHAPTER XIII.


That evening, as Miss Muller sat alone with Hero in her room (just as
the neuralgia was beginning), the door opened and Miss Vogdes entered.
The girl turned a harassed, worn countenance toward Maria, and
stumbled awkwardly over her words. It was not, certainly, because
she was conscious that she had used William Muller cruelly. She had
forgotten that William Muller lived.

She had been thinking of Maria all day. She was the woman whom Doctor
McCall loved. By the time night came Kitty had a maddening desire to
see again this woman that he loved--to touch her, hear her speak. She
had been used to regard her as a disagreeable bore, but now she looked
on her as a woman set apart from all the world. She had made a poor
excuse to come up to the Water-cure: now that she was there she half
forgot it. Maria's delicate face, her quick grace of motion, her
clear, well-bred voice, were so many stabs to Kitty, each of which
touched the quick. Maria's hair hung loosely over her shoulders:
it was very soft and thick. She wondered if Doctor McCall had ever
touched it. "Though what right have _I_ to know?" For some reason this
last was the pang that tugged hardest at Kitty's heart.

"I brought a message for Doctor McCall," she said, fumbling in her
pocket--"that is, for you to deliver to him, Maria."

Miss Muller turned her shoulder to her: "Doctor McCall is gone--I
don't know where."

She started forward: "Gone? To come again, you mean?"

"No--never to come back!" vehemently.

Kitty stood by her silent a moment: "William told me that you sent for
him, that he loved you, Maria--that you would be married some of these
days."

Miss Muller hesitated: there was no use in revealing her humiliation
to this girl: "There was an obstacle in the way. Doctor McCall is
peculiarly hedged in by circumstances."

"And you could not find the way of escape?"

"No." She did not see the flash of triumph on the girl's face, or
notice when she went out.

Kitty was human. "At least," she muttered going down the hill, "I
shall not have to see _her_ his wife." When she had reached the
Book-shop she took from her pocket a coarse yellow envelope containing
a telegram directed to Hugh Guinness in his father's care. She turned
it over. This was a bond between them which even Maria did not share:
she alone knew that he was Hugh Guinness.

"What am I to do with this?"

Doctor McCall was gone, never to come back. It was like touching his
hand far off to read this message to him. Besides, Kitty was curious.
She opened the envelope.

"Come to me at once. You will soon be free," without any signature
but an initial. The melodramatic mystery of it would have cautioned
knowing women, but Kitty was not knowing.

"If he had received this an hour ago, the 'way of escape' would have
been found. He would have been free to marry Maria." So much she
understood. She sat down and was quiet for half an hour. It was the
first wretched half hour of her life--so wretched that she forgot to
cry.

"It would make him very happy to marry Maria," she said, getting
up and speaking aloud. Then she opened the door and went up to her
chamber, her thoughts keeping time with her swift motions. It seemed
to her that she still spoke aloud. "If I were a man I could go to this
house in Philadelphia and receive this message, which will set him
free" (beginning to fold the dresses in her closet). "It will never
reach him otherwise. I could find and bring him to Maria. But I
never was five miles from Berrytown in my life, _I_ never could go"
(dragging out a great trunk and packing the dresses into it). "It
would be a friendly thing for some man to do for him. Maria could not
do so much" (cramming in undergarments enough for a year's wear). "If
I were a man! He'd not snub me then as he does now, when I am only
Kitty. If this could be done it would bring happiness for life to
him." (The trunk was packed as she had seen her mother's. She was
on her knees, trying to force down the lid, but her wrists were too
weak.) "He would come back at once. How lovely Maria looked in that
black lace mantilla! He would kiss her mouth and smooth her hair."
(Kitty, still kneeling, was staring at the wall with pale cheeks
and distended eyes. The lock snapped as it shut. She rose and began
putting on her gray hat and veil.) "No woman could go to the city
through that dark; and there is a storm coming. If I did it, what
would he care for me? I am only Kitty. I would sit in the window here
alone year after year, growing into a neglected old maid, and watch
him go by with his happy wife and children. I need not interfere. I
can throw the telegram into the fire and let them both go their ways.
What are they to me?" She had buttoned her sacque and gloves, and now
went up to the glass. It was a childish face that she looked at, but
one now exceptionally grave and reserved.

She walked quickly down and tapped at the kitchen door: "When the
porter comes for my trunk, Jane, give it to him. Tell my mother when
she comes it was necessary for me to leave home to help a friend. I
shall be back in a few days--if I am alive."

"De Lord be good to us, honey!" Jane stood aghast. Kitty came suddenly
up to the old woman and kissed her. She felt quite alone in the world
in beginning this desperate undertaking. The next moment she passed
the window and was gone.

Miss Muller, with a satchel and shawl-strap, would have started coolly
at an hour's notice alone for the Yosemite or Japan. But Kitty, with
the enormous trunk, which was her sole idea of travel, set out through
the night and storm, feeling death clutching at her on every side.

An hour after nightfall that evening the Eastern express-train reached
the station beyond Berrytown, bringing home Peter and his wife,
triumphant. Her money had covered a larger extent of muslins and laces
than she hoped for--enough to convert the raw school-girl Kitty, when
she was married, into a leader of church-going fashion.

Mrs. Guinness leaned back in the plush car-seat, planning the
wedding-breakfast. That was now her only care. Out in the world of
shops and milliners her superstitious dread of a man long since dead
had seemed to her absurd.

"I have had some unreasonable fears about Kitty," she said to Peter,
who was beginning to nod opposite to her. "But all will be well when
she is Muller's wife."

Another train passed at the moment they reached the station. Her eye
ran curiously over the long line of faces in the car-windows to find
some neighbor or friend.

She touched Peter's arm: "How like that is to Kitty!" nodding toward
a woman's head brought just opposite to them. The train began to move,
and the woman turned her face toward them: "Merciful Heaven, it _is_
Kitty!"

The engine sent out its shrill foreboding whistle and rushed on,
carrying the girl into the darkness. Behind her in the car as it
passed her mother saw the face of Hugh Guinness.




CHAPTER XIV.


Doctor McCall had been five minutes too late for the first train,
and so had been delayed for the express in which Kitty started on her
adventure. Commonplace accidents determine commonplace lives, was a
favorite maxim of the Berrytown Illuminati. The Supreme Intelligence
whom they complimented with respect could not be expected to hold such
petty trifles or petty lives in His controlling hand.

Doctor McCall had seen Catharine when she first entered the station.
Her very manner had the air of flight and secresy. Puzzled and
annoyed, he sat down in the rear of the car, himself unseen. When they
reached Philadelphia it was not yet dawn. The passengers rushed out
of the cars: Kitty sat quiet. She had never slept outside of the
Book-house before. She looked out at the dim-lighted dépôt, at the
slouching dark figures that stole through it from time to time, the
engines, with their hot red eyes, sweeping back and forward in the
distance, breaking the night with portentous shrieks. Where should she
go? She had never been in a hotel in her life: she had no money. If
she ventured into the night she would be arrested, no doubt, as a
vagrant. She had a gallant heart to take care of Hugh Guinness's
life, but her poor little woman's body was quaking in deadly fear for
herself. In a moment a decent mulatto woman, whom McCall had sent,
came from the waiting-room into the deserted car.

"There is a room for ladies, where you can be comfortable until
daybreak, madam," she said respectfully.

"I am much obliged to you," said Catharine.

When she saw how young she was, the mulatto, a motherly body, took her
into a little inner snuggery used to store packages: "You can turn the
key, and sleep if you will until morning."

"I'll not close my eyes until my errand is done," thought Kitty, and
sat down in a rocking-chair, placing her satchel beside her. In five
minutes she was fast asleep. McCall, pacing up and down the platform,
could see her through the open window. He forgot to wonder why she had
come. There was a certain neatness and freshness about her which he
thought he had never observed in other women. After her night's travel
her dress fell soft and gray as though just taken from the fold, her
petticoat, crisp and white, peeped in one place to sight. How dainty
and well-fitting were the little boots and gloves! Where the hair was
drawn back, too, from her forehead he could see the blue veins and
pink below the skin, like a baby's. He did not know before what keen
eyes he had. But this was as though a breath of the old home when
he had been a child, one of the dewy Bourbon roses in his father's
garden, had followed him to the stifling town. It made the station
different--even the morning. Fresh damp winds blew pleasantly from the
reddening sky. The white marble steps and lintels of the street shone
clean and bright; the porters going by to the freight dépôt gave him
good-day cheerfully. In the window the old mulatto had some thriving
pots of ivy and fragrant geraniums. Even a dog that came frisking up
the sidewalk rubbed itself in a friendly fashion against his legs.

McCall suddenly remembered a journey he had made long ago, and a
companion whose breath was foul with opium as her head at night rested
on his shoulder.

But there was no need that one woman's breath should sicken him even
now with the whole world; and again he stopped in his walk to look at
Kitty.

The fresh wind blowing on her wakened her presently. The mulatto was
anxious to serve her: it was always the case with people of her class
after Kitty had once spoken to them.

"I should like fresh water and towels," she said coolly, as though
toilet appurtenances were to be found at every street corner. The
woman paused, and then with a queer smile brought them. In a a few
moments McCall saw her come out fresher than before.

"Where is this house?" showing a name and number to the mulatto, who
read it once or twice, and then looked steadily at Kitty.

"Are you going alone to that place?"

"Certainly."

The woman gave her the directions without further parley, adding that
it was about six miles distant, and turned away. Catharine followed
her to thank her, and put a dollar note in her hand. It was all the
money she had.

She walked on down the rapidly filling streets--for miles, as she
thought. The hurry and rush of the day had begun. The sense of
nothingness in the midst of this great multitude came upon Kitty. The
fear, the excitement began to tell on her: yesterday she had eaten
but little in her pity for Muller. "Which was very foolish of me,"
she said to herself. "Now I've no money to buy anything to eat. I have
acted in this matter without common sense." The sun lighted up the
yellow leaves of the maples along the sidewalk. The wind blew strongly
up from the rivers. She passed a stand with some withered apples and
stale cakes, and put her hand in her pocket, then with a wistful look
went on.

It was late in the morning before she reached her journey's end.
Showing her paper now and then, she had noticed the curious inquiring
look which both men and women gave her on reading it. She found
herself at last under a long gray stone wall pierced by an
iron-knobbed gate. By the side of it a man was setting out on an
eating-stand a half-eaten ham, chaffy rolls and pies yellow with
age. The man was an old, cleanly shaven fellow, whose aquiline nose
reminded her with a twinge of conscience of Mr. Muller.

"Am I near to this house?" showing her paper.

"Here," nodding back at the stone wall, cutting his pies.

"This! What is this place, sir?"

"Moyamensing Prison." He finished cutting the pies carefully, and
then, wiping the knife, looked up at her, and suddenly came from
behind the stand:

"You're not well?" pushing a seat toward her. "Here's some water. Or
coffee?"

She sat down: "Oh, it's nothing. Only I've traveled a long way, and I
did not know it was a prison I was coming to."

"Won't you have some coffee? You don't look rugged."

"No, thank you."

"Well, it's not what you've been used to, of course. But hot." He
put the water within her reach and drew aside, looking at her now and
then. He was used to the pale faces and tears of women at that gate.
"Though she's different from them as has friends here," he thought,
silencing one or two noisy customers by a look. Presently he came up
to her: "You're afeard to go in there alone, young lady?"

"Yes, I am. What shall I do?"

"I thought as much. Yonder comes the chaplain. I'll speak to him,"
going to meet two gentlemen who crossed the street.

"You wished to see a prisoner?" one of them said, coming up to her.

Kitty was herself again. She stood up and bowed with her
old-fashioned, grave politeness: "I do not know. It was this that
brought me here," handing him the telegram.

"Ah? I remember," glancing at it. "Number 243 sent it, you recollect?"
to his companion. "But this is addressed to Hugh Guinness?" turning
inquiringly to Kitty.

"I am a--a member of his family. He was not at home, and I came to
receive the message for him."

"Will you go in with us, doctor?" The chaplain turned to his
companion.

"Presently. There is a man coming up the street I want to see."

The chaplain motioned her to follow him, casting a curious glance back
at her. They passed up into the long stone corridors, tier over tier,
with the lines of square iron doors, each with its slate dangling
outside, with a name scrawled on it. He stopped at one, opened it and
drew back, motioning her to enter.

Kitty caught sight of the damp wall of a cell, and stopped.

"Shall I go in with you?" seeing her shiver.

"No: Mr. Guinness might wish the message kept as private as possible."

"It is very probable. The prisoner is very ill, or you could not have
a private interview."

She went in, and the door closed behind her. It was a moment before
she could distinguish any object in the dimly lighted cell. Then she
saw the square window, the cobwebbed walls, and close at hand a narrow
pallet, on which lay a woman in a coarse and soiled night-dress.
She was tall and gaunt: one arm was thrown over her head, framing a
heavy-jawed, livid face, with dull black eyes fixed on Catharine.

"Who are you?" she said.

Kitty went straight up to her. The foul smell made her head reel. But
this was only a woman, after all; and one in great bodily need--dying,
she thought. Kitty was a born nurse. She involuntarily straightened
the wretched pillows and touched the hot forehead before she spoke: "I
came instead of Hugh Guinness. You had a message for him."

"I don't know. It doesn't matter for that," her eyes wandering. The
soft touch and the kind face bending over her were more to her just
now than all that had gone before in her life. "It is here the pain is,"
moving Kitty's hand to her side. The pain filled the dull eyes with tears.
"This is a poor place to die in," trying to smile.

"Oh, you are not going to die," cheerfully. "Let me lift you up higher
on the pillows. Put your arm about me--so. You're not too heavy for me
to lift."

The woman, when she was arranged, took Kitty's fingers and feebly
held them to her side. "It is so long since anybody took care of me. I
sha'n't live till to-morrow. Don't leave me--don't go away."

"I'll not go away," said Kitty.

       *       *       *       *       *

The man whom the prison physician had waited to meet was Doctor
McCall. He had followed Kitty so far, unwilling to interfere by
speaking to her. But when he saw her enter Moyamensing he thought that
she needed a protector. "Ha, Pollard, is this you?" stopping to shake
hands. They were old acquaintances, and managed, in spite of their
profession, to see something of each other every year. McCall ran
up to town once or twice through the winter, and stayed at Pollard's
house, and Pollard managed to spend a week or two with him in peach
season.

"I thought I knew your swing, McCall, two squares off. Looking for
me?"

"No: I followed a lady, a friend of mine, who has just gone in at the
gate."

"You know her, eh?" eagerly. "A most attractive little girl, I
thought: She went in with the chaplain to see one of the prisoners."

McCall paused, his hand on the gate. A horrible doubt stopped his
heart-beating for an instant. But how utterly absurd it was! Only
because this black shadow pursued him always could such a fancy have
come to him. "The prisoner is a woman?" with forced carelessness.

"Yes. A poor wretch brought here last spring for shoplifting. Her
term's out next week. She has had a sharp attack of pneumonia, and
has not much strength to bear it: she is a miserable wreck from
opium-eating."

"Opium-eating? Can I go in?" said McCall.

"Certainly."

When the woman heard their steps on the corridor she said to
Catharine, "I hear my husband coming now."

"That will be pleasant for you," kindly, wondering to herself what
sort of a ruffian had chosen this creature for a mate and had the
burden of her to carry.

"Yes, I know his step," turning dully to the door. It opened, and Hugh
Guinness stood on the threshold.

He halted one brief moment. It seemed to Catharine that he was an
older man than she had known him.

"It is you, then, Louise?" he said calmly, going up to the bed and
looking down on her, his hands clasped, as usual, behind him.

"Yes, it is I. I thought you would like to see me and talk things over
before I died, Hugh." She held out her hand, but he did not touch it.
Looking at her a moment from head to foot as she lay in her unclean
garments, he turned to where the other woman stood, a ray of light
from the window shining on her fair hair and innocent face: "Do you
know that I am Hugh Guinness, Kitty?"

"I knew that long ago."

"_This_," nodding down at the pallet, "is my wife. Now do you know why
I could not go home to my father or to you?"

"God help us!" ejaculated Pollard. The next moment, remembering
himself, he put his hand on McCall's shoulder: "I understand. When you
were a boy, eh? Never mind: every man has his own trouble to carry."

"I've been a very real trouble to you, Hugh," whined Louise. "But I
always loved you: I always meant to come back to you."

"When her later husbands had abandoned her." McCall laughed savagely,
turning away.

She started up on the pallet, clenching her bony, dirty hands: "There
were faults on both sides. I never would have been the woman I am if
you had loved me. What will you do with me now?"

There was a dead silence in the cell, broken only by the heavy
breathing of the woman. McCall stood dumb, looking first at Catharine
and then at his wife.

"This is what he will do," said Kitty's clear, quiet tones. "You shall
be washed and dressed, and taken home as his wife, to live or die as
suits God's will."

"Never," muttered McCall.

"How soon can she leave this--this place?" she said, turning as if he
had not spoken to Pollard.

"As soon as she is able to be moved. But," hesitating, with a doubtful
look at McCall, "is that plan best?"

"Why, she's his wife!" with her innocent eyes wide. "He has no right
to desert her. She will die if she is not properly cared for," turning
to McCall.

"Do you stay with me: don't leave me," holding Kitty's sleeve. "If you
would nurse me, I should get well."

"It is impossible that the lady should nurse you," said Pollard.

Kitty sat down: she began to tremble and turn white. "She has nobody
but me. I'll stay," she said quietly.

McCall beckoned his fellow-physician out into the corridor.

"My dear fellow--" Pollard began.

"No: I know you sympathize with me. But we will not talk of this
matter. Is that woman dying?"

"I'm afraid--that is, I think not. She is decidedly better to-day than
she was last night. With care she may recover."

Kitty came out and stood with them in the corridor. McCall looked at
her with amazement. The shy, silly school-girl, afraid to find her
way about Berrytown, bore herself in this desperate juncture like the
sagest of matrons.

"Is there no hospital to which she can be taken?" she said to Pollard.

"Yes, of course, of course."

"I'll go with her there, then. You know," laying her hand on McCall's
arm, "you _did_ marry her. You ought to try to help her poor body and
soul as long as she lives."

"Would you have me take her as my wife again?"

"Not for an hour!" cried Kitty vehemently. She went into the cell, but
came back in a moment: "Will you bring me some breakfast? I shall not
be of much use here until it comes."

"She has more of the angel in her than any woman I ever knew,"
muttered McCall.

"She has a good deal of common sense, apparently," rejoined Pollard.

       *       *       *       *       *

Kitty went with McCall's wife to the hospital, and helped to nurse her
for a week. Pains and chills and nausea she could help, but for the
deeper disease of soul, for the cure of which Kitty prayed on her
knees, often with tears, there was little hope in her simple remedies,
unless the cure and its evidence lay deep enough for only God's eye to
see.

The woman's nature, of a low type at birth, had grown more brutal
with every year of drunkenness and vice. She died at last, alone with
Kitty.

"She said, the last thing, 'God be merciful to me a sinner!'"
Kitty told the chaplain. "But I am afraid she hardly understood the
meaning."

"He understood, my dear child. We can leave her with Him, You must
go home now: you have done all you could. Doctor McCall will go with
you?"

"No, I shall go alone: I came alone."

"He will follow you home to Berrytown, then?" for the chaplain was but
a man, and his curiosity was roused to know the exact relation between
McCall and this old-fashioned, lovable girl.

Kitty hesitated: "I think he will come to Berrytown again. There is
some business there which his wife's death will leave him free now to
attend to."

She went to a sofa and sat down: "I shall be glad to be at home,"
beginning to cry. "I want to see father."

"Broke down utterly," the chaplain told his wife, "as soon as her
terrible work was done."

As for Kitty, it seemed to her that her work in life and death was
over for ever.

"You must come back," she said when McCall put her in the cars,
looking like a ghost of herself. "Your father will be wanting to see
you. And--and Maria."

"Maria? What the deuce is Maria to me?"

It was no ghost of Kitty that came home that evening. The shy, lively
color came and went unceasingly, and her eyes sparkled.

"Poor Maria!" she whispered to her pillow as she went to bed--"poor
Maria!"




CHAPTER XV.


It was a long time before he came. Months afterward, one evening when
the express-train rushed into the dépôt, Catharine went down through
the walnut trees into the garden. She stopped in the shadow as a man's
figure crossed the fields. The air was cool--it was early spring. The
clouds in the west threw the Book--house into shadow. Hugh Guinness,
coming home, could see the narrow-paned windows twinkling behind the
walnut boughs. It was just as he had left it when he was a boy. There
was the cow thrusting her head through a break in the fence he had
made himself; the yellow-billed ducks quacked about the pond he had
dug in the barnyard; the row of lilacs by the orchard fence were just
in blossom: they were always the latest on the farm, he remembered. He
saw Kitty, like the heart of his old home, waiting for him. Her white
dress and the hair pushed back from her face gave her an appearance of
curious gentleness and delicacy.

When he came to her he took both her hands in his.

"You will come to your father now?" she said, frightened and pale.

They walked side by side down the thick rows of young saplings. There
was a cool bank overgrown with trumpet-creeper. Inside, he caught
sight of a little recess or cave, and a gray old bench on which was
just room for two.

"Will you stop here and sit down one moment?" she said.

It was nothing to him but a deserted spring-house. It was the one
enchanted spot of Kitty's life.

Half an hour afterward they found old Peter playing on his violin at
the doorstep. Kitty had often planned an effective bringing back of
Hugh to him, but she forgot it all, and creeping up put her hands
about his neck. "Father! look there, father!" she whispered.

The Book-house still stands among its walnuts in Berrytown. But a
shrewd young fellow from New York has charge of it now, who deals
principally in school-books and publications relative to Reforms
and raspberries. Old Peter Guinness still holds an interest in it,
although his chief business is that of special agent for libraries in
buying rare books and pamphlets. He comes down for two or three weeks
in winter to look into matters. But since his wife died he makes his
home in Delaware with his son, who married, as all Berrytown knows,
Kitty Vogdes after she behaved so shamefully to Mr. Muller.

Mrs. Guinness died in high good-humor with her son-in-law. "Doctor
McCall," she assured her neighbors, "was exactly the man she should
have chosen for Catharine. She had known him from a boy, and knew
that his high social position and wealth were only his deserts. A
member--vestryman indeed--of St. Luke's Church, the largest in Sussex
county."

The farm-people in the sleepy, sunny Delaware neighborhood have
elected Kitty a chief favorite. "A gentle, good-natured little woman,
with no opinions of her own. A bit too fond of dress perhaps, and a
silly, doting mother, but the most neighborly, lovable creature alive,
after all."

Miss Muller was down in St. George's lecturing last fall, and made
her mark, as she always does. But the Guinness men were now hopelessly
conservative. She made her home with Kitty.

"A fine woman," old Peter said the morning after she was gone.

"Never knew a woman with a finer mind," said Hugh. "Nor many men."

"She nurses that dog as if it were a baby," said Kitty sharply. "It's
silly! It's disgusting!"

Peter twanged his bow on the porch, looking down over the great
farm-slopes stretching away in the morning light.

"We have everything to make life good to us, Hugh," he said after
Kitty had gone. "And the best thing, to my notion, is an old-fashioned
woman in the house, with no notion of ruling, like that Muller girl
and her set."

Hugh was romping with his boy: "Do you know your first business in
this world, sir? To take care of your mother," glancing at the garden,
where Kitty, in her pretty white dress, was clipping chrysanthemums.

She rules him and the house and their lives absolutely, with but
little regard for justice. But he has never suspected it. She hardly
knows herself that she does it.

REBECCA HARDING DAVIS.




STRANGE SEA INDUSTRIES AND ADVENTURES.


The wrecker on the Florida reefs, who steps from the Peninsula into
the marine world, will tell you there is nothing so like the land as
the water. The crystal atmosphere of this land of meridional spring,
the masses of tawny green in forests of the pine, and the deeper
foliage of the live-oak and wild-orange, even that fire of flower in
phaenogamous plants peculiar to the Peninsula, have their fellowship
and counterparts in the lustrous scenery of the submarine world. Even
the beauty of moon-like lakes and river springs is realized in the
salt envelope of the under-world. Washing the keel of the submerged
vessel, or bursting with a sudden chill through the tepid waters of
the Gulf, with a sensible difference to feeling and to sight, the
diver recognizes a river in the strata, a wayside spring in the
mid-sea fountain.

As the huge volume of many Florida springs, and their peculiar
characteristic of sudden sinking, give them a distinguishable quality,
so the like may be recognized in the fresh-water outbursts of the
neighboring seas. Silver Spring in Marion county tosses out three
hundred million gallons per day; Manatee Spring discharges a less
volume, but is noted for the presence of the sea-cow (_Trichecus
muriatus_); Santa Fé, Econfinna, Chipola and Oscilla are rivers which,
like classic Acheron, descend and disappear with a full head--lost
rivers, as they are aptly named. Pass to the marine world, and
south-west of Bataban, in the Gulf of Xagua (Cuba), a river-fountain
throws up a broad white disk like a flower of water on a liquid
stem, visible on the violet phosphorescence of the Caribbean Sea. Its
impetuous force makes it dangerous to unwary crafts; and, to add to
its recognizable characteristics, in its pure waters is to be found
the sea-cow--found there and in Manatee Bay and Spring alone. To
the geologist such rivers are not mysteries. The lower strata of the
limestone formation are hollowed out into vast cavernous channels
and chambers, through which rolls for ever the hoarse murmur of
multitudinous waters. It would require the conception of a Milton or
the stern Florentine who pictured Malebolge to depict those hollow
passages and lofty galleries, wrought into fantastic shapes by carbon
chisels, and all pure snow-white, yet unrecognizable in the sublime
horror of great darkness.

It is to the animal and vegetable coral the sea owes its arborescent
and floriform scenery, the counterpart of the forest and phaenogamous
beauty that adorns the land. The home of these wonderful creatures
must be visited to realize the beauty of their dwellings and the
wonderful structures they produce. A diver who explored the serene sea
about the Hayti banks gives a beautiful description of the splendors
of the under-world. The white, chalky bottom is visible from the
surface at a depth of one hundred feet. Over that brilliant floor the
filtered sunshine spreads a cloth of gold continually flecked with
sailing shadows and fluctuating tints. The singular clearness of
the medium removes that lovely violet drapery which surrounds like a
pavilion the submarine palace, and allows a wider scope of vision. But
the scene here is not the play of sunbeams or the magic glory of the
prismal waters. Form adds its grace to the loveliness of color and
the play of light and shadow. The structures, the work of astraea,
madrepores, andreas and meandrinas, bear a singular resemblance to
fabrications of the architect. One massive dome or archway, a hundred
feet in diameter, rises to the surface. Its front is carved in
elaborate tracery and crusted with serpulae, looking like the fret-and
flower-work that covers Saracenic architecture. Looking through
this into the violet ambuscade, the eye falls upon colonnades,
light slender shafts a foot in diameter, that seem to support the
paly-golden, lustrous roof. It is curiously like a vast temple,
spreading every way in vault and colonnade, on which religious
enthusiasm or barbaric royalty has worked with a reckless waste of
art and labor. Nor is it the cold and shapely beauty of the stone: it
seems to be a temple built of many-colored glass. To understand the
magnificence of the wonderful structure, the reader must have in
mind the laws affecting light in transmission through water--the
frangibility of the rays, the frequent alternations in dispersion,
reflection, interference and accidental and complementary color. He
must recollect that every indentation, every twist of stony serpulae
or fluting of the zoophyte catches the light and divides and splinters
it into radiance, burning with a fringe of silver fire or flashing
steel. When the mind has conceived of that, there is to add the vivid
beauty of the living coral, its hue of molten colored glass spreading
a radiant mucus over the stony skeleton.

But he has not yet entered into an entire conception of its
loveliness. The arborescent and phaenogamous forms of the coral are to
be noticed. Here is a plant: it has a pale, gray-blue stalk, and all
over it are delicate green leaves, fronds or tentacles, as you please
to call them. There is a fan-shaped shrub whose starry fronds recall
the _Chaemerops serrulata_ of the adjacent shore. The ament, so to
speak, of the _Parasmilia centralis_, the catkin of the sea, recalls
its terrene counterpart. There are other flowers in fascicles and
corymbs. The rose is not lacking, but glows with the radiant beauty of
its petaliferous sister; the columnar trunks of stony trees, covered
with green, flossy mosses, are scattered about; and fresh fountains
gush from the rocks, the white water as clearly distinguishable from
the ultramarine as in the upper atmosphere.[1]

But some varieties of beauty in the coral belong to calmer seas: among
others, the Red Sea is noticed for the exquisite loveliness of its
coralline formations. An American explorer, well known in submarine
diving, once visited that gulf sacred in history, and for a purpose
certainly as singular as anything he found there. It was, to use his
own words, "to fish for Pharaoh's golden chariot-wheels," lost in that
famous pursuit. Is it possible, in the nature of things, for such an
expedition to be made by any but an American? It takes a strong Bible
faith, allied to a simple but strong self-confidence, to start a man
on such an adventure. The curious transforming magic of the sea had
its effect on the Arab dragoman he had engaged to assist him. Having
settled on the exact spot, the swart Arabian descended, but signaled
to return almost immediately, and was brought to the surface in
open-eyed wonder. With all the hyperbole of Oriental imagination he
swore positively to the finding of the chariot-wheels, and added the
jewelry of Pharaoh's household. He was so earnest and so exact in the
matter of the golden wheel, set with precious stones, that, though the
captain dryly asked if he did not meet King Pharaoh himself, taking a
moist throne and keeping court with the fishes, he none the less
had the line attached and drew up--the rude wheel of a Tartar wagon,
transformed under water, but plain and ugly enough above.

"The djin did it," explained the Arab. "It is a palace of the djins,
howadji."

Though the adventurous explorer failed in his design on the defunct
Egyptian, he was rewarded by some compensating views and discoveries.
He saw there the _Xenia elongata_, a shrub-like coral distinguished
for the beauty of its colors, having stellar tentacles, rose-colored,
blue and lilac, an inch in diameter, and looking like flowers of
living jewelry; another with a long cue, like a tress of hair, and
others of allied beauty.

The coral-stone is seen and admired on centre-tables and in jewelry,
but this is really the least pleasing beauty in the organism. The
animal, subjected to exposure, is a brown mucus that dissipates in
the sun and air, but clothed in its native element this glutinous
substance is instinct with radiant life, the bodies being rose-color
and the arms a pure white. Sometimes they grow in clusters and
corymbs, gleaming with a pure, translucent color that fluctuates and
changes in the light

            Like colors of a shell,
  That keep the hue and polish of the wave.

Our searcher found one unexpected verification of the story in Exodus.
The passage in the Bible does not leave altogether in mystery the
natural means by which the transit was effected. We are told of the
strong east wind and the wall of waters. At the point near Suez a
shoal extends quite across the sea. For several days this wind had
borne back the shallow waters, descending as it did from the rugged
mountain-slopes, and opening or sweeping back the deep as it were.
Then the tide came, thrust forward in accumulated volume, until it
made a real wall of waters that stood up in a huge crested, angry
foam. It was sufficiently like to cause the explorer to apprehend
the possibility of finding Pharaoh by traveling the same watery road.
Another question that has puzzled scholars found a solution in the
American's observation. Smith's _Bible Dictionary_ discusses learnedly
the name of this curious gulf, written [Greek: ae eruthra thalassa]
in the Septuagint. The _Dictionary_ surmises that the name was derived
from the red western mountains, red coral zoophytes, etc., and appears
to give little weight to the real and natural reason which came under
our American's notice. On one occasion the diver observed, while
under sea, that the curious wavering shadows, which cross the lustrous
golden floor like Frauenhofer's lines on the spectrum, began to change
and lose themselves. A purple glory of intermingled colors darkened
the violet curtains of the sea-chambers, reddening all glints and
tinges with an angry fire. Instead of that lustrous, golden firmament,
the thallassphere darkened to crimson and opal. The walls grew purple,
the floor as red as blood: the deep itself was purpled with the venous
hue of deoxidized life-currents.

The view on the surface was even more magnificent. The sea at first
assumed the light tawny or yellowish red of sherry wine. Anon this
wine-color grew instinct with richer radiance: as far as eye could
see, and flashing in the crystalline splendor of the Arabian sun, was
a glorious sea of rose. The dusky red sandstone hills, with a border
of white sand and green and flowered foliage, like an elaborately
wrought cup of Bohemian glass enameled with brilliant flowers,
held the sparkling liquid petals of that rosy sea. The surface, on
examination, proved to be covered with a thin brickdust layer of
infusoriae slightly tinged with orange. Placed in a white glass
bottle, this changed to a deep violet, but the wide surface of the
external sea was of that magnificent and brilliant rose-color. It was
a new and pleasing example of the lustrous, ever-varying beauty of the
ocean world. It was caused by diatomaceae, minute algae, which under
the microscope revealed delicate threads gathered in tiny bundles, and
containing rings, like blood-disks, of that curious coloring-matter in
tiny tubes.

This miracle of beauty is not without its analogies in other seas.
The medusae of the Arctic seas, an allied existence, people the
ultramarine blue of the cold, pure sea with vivid patches of living
green thirty miles in diameter. These minute organisms are doubly
curious from their power of astonishing reproduction and the strange
electric fire they display. Minute as these microscopic creatures
are, every motion and flash is the result of volition, and not a mere
chemic or mechanic phosphorescence. The _Photocaris_ lights a flashing
cirrus, on being irritated, in brilliant kindling sparks, increasing
in intensity until the whole organism is illuminated. The living
fire washes over its back, and pencils in greenish-yellow light its
microscopic outline. Nor do these little creatures lack a beauty
of their own. Their minute shields of pure translucent silex are
elaborately wrought in microscopic symbols of mimic heraldry. They are
the chivalry of the deep, the tiny knights with lance and cuirass, and
oval bossy shield carved in quaint conceits and ornamental fashion.
Nor must we despise them when we reflect upon their power of
accretion. The _Gallionellae_, invisible to the naked eye, can, of
their heraldic shields and flinty armor, make two cubic feet of
Bilin polishing slate in four days. By straining sea-water, a web of
greenish cloth of gold, illuminated by their play of self-generated
electric light, has been collected. Humboldt and Ehrenberg speak of
their voracity, their power of discharging electricity at will, and
their sporting about, exhibiting an intelligent enjoyment of the life
God has given to them. Man and his works perish, but the monuments of
the infusoriae are the flinty ribs of the sea, the giant bones of huge
continents, heaped into mountain-ranges over which the granite and
porphyry have set their stony seal for ever. Man thrives in his little
zone: the populous infusoriae crowd every nook of earth from the
remote poles to the burning equatorial belt.

As the coral, in its soft, milky chalk, gives a name to tropical seas,
so also it is a question to my simplicity if the Yellow Sea, Black Sea
and White Sea do not owe their color and name, in part at least, to
microscopic infusoriae. One of these, the Yellow Sea, is very similar
in many characteristics to our beautiful southern gulf, and there
is connected with it an incident or two illustrative of submarine
adventure which is the partial purpose of this desultory sketch.

About the time our American was investing in Pharaoh's golden
chariot-wheels an East Indiaman was trading its way from the English
docks, eighteen weary weeks' sail by seamen's law, and more tedious by
delays. They exchanged for bullion on the Gold Coast; for bullion
and bad Cape brandy at Good Hope to sell to the Mohammedans, who are
forbidden to drink it. At Bombay and Calcutta they exchanged bullion
and brandy for opium to sell to the Chinese, who are forbidden to buy
or use it. Whether the coolie trade was included in its iniquities
or not, I cannot say. Very possibly that was the return cargo. From
Ceylon they proceed to Siam, and thence to Hong-Kong, where they drop
anchor in the offing, and by a special custom the cargo is sold and
paid for in sycee silver before disfreighting, and the bullion is in
the safe of the huge smuggler, although the opium has not yet been
removed. The Chinese restrictive laws are very severe; but when we
note that ninety thousand gallons of confiscated whisky were seized in
godly Massachusetts in one year, we can infer the difficulties in the
Maine law of the Celestials. The custom is for a hong, a smuggler in a
Chinese junk, to draw up beside the English contrabandist and transfer
the cargo in the outer harbor.

It is afternoon, and the great slumbering ocean breathes, but not with
the quick, palpitating tide of the Atlantic. The smuggler sits on the
oleaginous sea, tinged to ochreous yellow, waiting for evening and the
confederate junk. The tropic twilight comes on swift red-golden wings
that fan the vivid stars to brightness, and the rising tide breaks the
surface into wrinkles of phosphorescent fire. High over head is the
wide, unbroken canopy of the Pacific sky, and the gush of a larger
moon than ours fills all the sphere with splendor as the huge ship
stirs lazily in its Narcissus poise over its own reflection. There
is a reddish glow in the western horizon over Hong-Kong, a fainter
glimmer west by south over Macao, and farther west and north the
reflected glories of the sacred city of Canton. The three make a
semicircular crescent, like a great floating moon, on the horizon. A
coral islet juts out between the cities under which the huge smuggler
affects to play "I spy"--only affects, for she does not care for the
authorities she bribes nor the laws she despises.

But the wind draws up the curtain of cloud by strands of rainy
cordage, and men aloft are loosing the reefed topsail, bracing the
after-yards and setting them for a run in on the larboard tack. They
handle gaskets, bunt-lines, leech-lines, fix her best bib and spencer,
like a country girl for a run up to town. Men are swarming about the
yards and rigging. That is not all: Lascars, stevedores, supercargoes,
the hong merchants, agents, are all busy breaking bulk. The India
opium is covered with petals of the plant and stowed in chests lined
with hides and covered with gunny; and these cases are locked in by
stays, spars and bulkheads to prevent jamming. Helter-skelter and
confusion alow and aloft, on the yards, rigging, deck, between decks
and under hatches. The captain and purser are gloating over the sycee
silver, for the Chinese government is as jealous of its exportation
as of the importation of opium; and the sky and the sea are dark and
angry. In a slovenly way the sails are trimmed, and she edges clumsily
around the point with the bullion and opium, the full freight and
gains of a year's voyaging and trading. Half an hour or an hour hence
she will be free, and the junk dropping down to sea with the drugs in
her. All at once a shriek or yell of "Hard aport!" and a great
iron outward-bound steamer from Hong-Kong bursts into the unwieldy
Chinaman, goes crunching through her like ripping pasteboard; tears
her open; snarls through steamy nostrils and cindery fiery mouth, and
growls over her wreck. And the sodden, stupefied merchantman, as if
drunk with opium, goes yelling and staggering with her sleepy drugs to
the bottom, and stays there, sycee silver and all.

From pricking his way across the Tartar plains, and probing in the
Dead Sea and eating its fruits, just to know that living crustaceae
could be found in one and pulpy flesh in the other, our Launfal,
looking for the Sangreal in chariot-wheels, wound his devious way to
the Flowery Kingdom, having tried a stroke or two at pearl-diving, and
given some valuable hints, that were wasted, in Red Sea fishing and
the Suez Canal. The sleepy Celestial seasons had gone flowering their
way to paradise, and the opium-smuggler and her sycee silver lay safe
and swallowed in ribs and jowl of quicksand. Our American proposed to
have it up by the locks. Two things said Nay--the coral insect, which
was using it in its architectural designs, and the hungry quicksand.
Worst of all, the American could not find it. They hid the bulky
vessel in hills of sand, and after two months' labor in submarine
armor the speculator was beaten. "Get a coolie," said a resident China
merchant, and he did.

Every seaport city of China is a twin. It is two cities--one inland,
narrow-streeted, paved with rubble stones; the other at sea, floating
on bamboo reeds. The amphibious inmates of the marine town never
go ashore, but are a species of otter or seal. Besides, they are
first-class thieves, as well as cowardly, cruel pirates and wreckers.
They will steal the sheathing from a copper-bottomed vessel in broad
daylight, and at night a guard-boat is necessary for protection. They
will defy a sentry on shipboard--steal his ship from under him while
he is wondering what he is set to guard. They are all expert divers,
as familiar with the sea-bottom as with their own ugly little hovels.
Such a native was found, and for a dollar spotted the submerged vessel
in her matrix of sand and coral.

"Now set a guard-boat," said the Englishman, "or he will steal the
line, to get another dollar for finding the smuggler again."

But the want of experts defeated the plan, after all. It was necessary
to use a petard to lay bare the treasure, and no one had the necessary
skill. When the American consented to lost time and defeat the cyclone
threw another spoil in his way. The East like the West Indies is the
brooding-place of storms, which in gyratory coils, like a lasso thrown
wide and large, go twisting north by west. It caught a French frigate
in the loop, and flung her poor bones on the coral reefs, and the
hungry sand absorbed her. It is a peculiarity of those seas. But she
was found, and the petard, like a huge axe wielded by a giant's arms,
cut into her treasure-house and resc