The Project Gutenberg eBook of McClure's Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 6, November 1893, by Various.

Transcriber’s Note: The Table of Contents and the list of illustrations were added by the transcriber.

MCCLURE’s MAGAZINE.

Illustrations

REAL CONVERSATIONS.—III.
A DIALOGUE BETWEEN FRANK R. STOCKTON AND EDITH M. THOMAS.

Nature provides no lovelier mise-en-scène for a story, a poem or, a “conversation” than is to be found in the sylvan and pastoral world that looks out upon the gradual crescendo of the Blue Ridge mountains in northern New Jersey.

Tall beeches, hickories, chestnuts, and maples, too, rise on all sides to clothe fertile slope or wilder acclivity. Those who have never experimentally proved what riches the landscape-loving eye counts for its own in this portion of the State may still hold to the calumnious tradition that all Jersey is flat and unprofitable to the searcher for the beautiful in pictorial nature. There is no hilltop of this gracious country that does not rise to salute some yet more sightly hill; no sunny hollow or winding dell that does not seem the key to some Happy Valley beyond, where a Rasselas might be content to abide forever; no woodland glade that would not satisfy Leigh Hunt’s description,

Yet it would hardly be judicious for a poet to live here, lest he should be diverted altogether from thoughts of work, and, like the bees in Florida, lend himself to present enjoyment, without forecast of the morrow.

“Give me health and a day,” says Emerson, “and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.” While we venture no such reduction of royal heads, we are rich in the sense of privilege and of immunity from all the troubled voices of the world, given such a scene, such a fair September morning.

The Holt, the wooded hill on which stands Mr. Stockton’s home, rises on three sides—gently, leisurely; nothing abrupt, but as befits the site for an ideal homestead. Even were no houses made with hands erected in this place, the noble grove, comprising468 the whole congress of good trees and true, that yield fuel and timber for man’s use, would enclose and tapestry around a sort of spacious woodland chamber for the abode of contemplation and comfort. In truth, close beside the ample piazza, a group of stately pines, joined in brotherly love, securely roof over a little parlor where the gentle shower would scarce admonish a loiterer in a rustic seat.

Down this easy slope the trees descend to make a green, dream-lighted dell, through which we see the winding course of a wood-path, where the pilgrim of a day may saunter. So sauntering, or tarrying, the pilgrim proceeds leisurely along; at last, a little climb and a deft turn of the path deliver us into a sweetly secluded nook christened “Studio Bluff.”

And now to return to the sheltering eaves of the “Holt” and repair to the study. Yonder is the great desk, as full, it may be, of hives and honey as were the pockets of the Bee Man of Orn!

There is the bookcase, containing, among its volumes of reference and service, sundry eccentricities of literature: “Mr. Salmon,” for instance, with his exhaustive “Geographical and Historical Grammar,” sandwiching between its useful rules and tables tidbits of valuable information, including such subjects as “Cleopatra’s Asp;” adding also “a few paradoxes,” otherwise childish riddles, wherewith the simple olden time was wont to amuse itself. Here, on the walls hangs the sampler of one of the ladies Stockton, long since skilled with the “fine needle and nice thread.” Close beside this notable needlework hangs a parchment, the will of one of the forefathers of the house, who held it no “baseness to write fair,” if this scarcely faded engrossing bespeaks the writer’s creed in penmanship. Here, a grim, gaunt candlestick does picket duty all by itself: it is a bayonet taken from the last battlefield of the South—a bayonet inverted, the point thrust into a standard, the stock serving as socket for the candle. In this rapid survey of the room, the lines of old Turberville attract the eye, where they appear inscribed over the mantel:

On the mantel reposes a wickedly crooked dirk, sheathed and quiescent now. It is the weapon that slew the redoubted Po Money, a Dacoit chief, of whom the missionary who consigned it to the present owner naïvely observes, on his card of presentation, “Since he would never repent, it seemed best that he should be out of the world.”

By this window are flowers, a few; by choice a vase for each; for here the individuality of a flower is prized, and the crowded and discomfited loveliness of flowers in the mass is not tolerated. So a day-lily, or an early dahlia, may have its place, by itself, in undisputed queendom. A branch of vari-colored “foliage plant” completes the decorative floral company. But who is this—coming as in dyed garments from Bozrah—that reposes among these pied leaves, beneath their “protective coloring”? A cramped prisoner but a few hours before, in the world, but not of it. The bright creature rests in the sunny window until its wings gain strength to lift and bear it away.

Guest. And so you will give me the fancy of packing the butterfly back into his case?

Host. Yes, I give up all claim upon it. It is yours to have and to hold—only see that the poor fellow isn’t hurt in packing him up.

Guest. That deserves caution. This is the second lucky suggestion that has come in my way to-day. Both are too good to be lost. The muse learns thrift and treasures up all suggestions.

Guest. Oh, in all sorts of ways; from reading, from some one’s mere chance expression; sometimes from the particular insistence of some object in nature to be seen or heard; as though it had been waiting for its historian to come along. Usually, with the object is associated some slight touch of pathos. Dreams, too, offer suggestions. These suggestions, of course, are fantastic. They often have a touch of absurdity which the muse wisely omits, generally taking them for their allegorical face value. I dreamed once of seeing a rich cluster of purple blossoms, heavy with dew. The name, I learned was “honey-trope,” and so I transplanted the flower, root and branch, into a small garden plot of verses. I would think some of your whimsical situations and characters might come in this way.

Host. No, I don’t remember deriving suggestions from actual dreams; but I owe a great many to day-dreams. I used to entertain myself in this way constantly when a schoolboy. In walking home from school I would take up the thread of a plot and carry it on from day to day until the thing became a serial story. The habit was continued for years, simply because I enjoyed it—especially when walking. If anybody had known or asked me about it I should have confessed that I thought it a dreadful waste of time.

Guest. But it proved, I dare say, a sort of peripatetic training-school of fiction.

Host. Perhaps it might be called so. At any rate, years after, I used to go back to these stories for motives, especially in tales written for children. But there was another way in which, in later years, I have made use of day-dreams. I often woke very early in the morning—too early to think of rising, even if I had been thriftily inclined—and after some experimenting I found that the best way to put myself to sleep again was to construct some regular story.

Guest. (Stockton stories do not have that effect in the experience of readers!)

Host. Some regular story carried through to the end. I would begin a story one morning, continue it the next, and the next, until it ran into the serial. Some of these stories lasted for a long time; one ran through a470 whole year, I know. I got it all the way from America to Africa.

Guest. Perhaps you anticipated reality. For a friend of mine who reads every book of travels in Africa which she can lay hands on, firmly believes that the Dark Continent will be opened up as a pleasure and health resort for the whole world! But what became of the story?

Host. Well, a long time after, a portion of it came to light again in “The Great War Syndicate.” The idea of “Negative Gravity” was taken from another day-dream, the hero of which invented all sorts of applications of negative gravity, and from these I made a selection for the printed story.

Guest. Delightful—for we may hear from this hero again. I hope he is inexhaustible. How fortunate to have a treasure-house of characters and exploits. You have only to open the door and whatever you want comes out! You don’t have to go to any “Anatomy of Melancholy” or Lemprière, or Old Play, where somebody else is going, too, and will anticipate you—the hard luck of some of the rhyming fraternity!

Host. Of course, some suggestions are wholly involuntary. You do not know how or whence they come. I think of a good illustration of this involuntary action of the mind in conjuring up suggestion for a story. Some time ago, as I was lying in a hammock under the trees, I happened to look up through the branches and saw a great patch of blue sky absolutely clear. I said to myself: “Suppose I saw a little black spot appear in that blue sky.” I kept on thinking. Gradually the idea came of a man who did see such a little spot in the clear sky. And now I am working up this notion in a story I call “As One Woman to Another.”

Guest. You literally had given you less than the conditions given for describing a circle, for you had but a simple point to start with. One might conclude, all that is necessary is to fix upon some central idea, no matter how slight, and then the rest will come, drawn by a kind of mysterious attraction toward the centre.

Host. Ah, but it will not do for the professional writer to depend upon any such luck or chance, for if you wait for suggestions to come from the ether or anywhere else, you may wait in vain. You must begin something. If the mind has been well stored with incident and anecdote, these will furnish useful material, but not the plot. It is often necessary to get one’s self into a proper condition for the reception of impressions, and then to expose the mind, thus prepared, to the influence of the ideal atmosphere. If the proper fancy floats along it is instantly absorbed by the sensitive surface of the mind, where it speedily grows into an available thought, and from that anything can come.

Guest. But with the maker of verse such a resolution sometimes so offends the muse that she turns upon her471 votary with the most inhuman cruelty. Once I resolved, yes, deliberately resolved, to write some verses about the American Indian—to the effect that he must soon bid good-by and take his place with all broken and departed dynasties of the world—the goal to be some far western region of mournful and dying splendors. The first result of this resolution was rather encouraging. It was:

There inspiration stopped short, limping for lack of half a foot! Each morning, on first waking up, I tried to fill out the line. At last, one morning it was done, presto!—quite taken out of my hands. The result was totally involuntary, I may say.

Host. Yes, that was cruel! I suppose you could never finish the poem after that. But poets must have to do a great deal more waiting than any other class of literary workers, for they have to wait not only for ideas but for words, which, in poetry, have so much to do with the mechanism of the verse as well as the expression of the idea.

Guest. What the Dii Majores may do, or may have done, I could not presume to say; but with us verse-makers, sometimes it is only the words that do come, at first. The sense, import, and whole motive sometimes arrive much later. This ought to be kept a secret, for it is not to our credit. But I remember once, some one used the phrase, “For the time being.” It was immediately invested with a subtle extra value which seemed left to me to discover and define. Any maker of verse, I should guess, would in the same way be followed up continually by refrains and catch-words—the mere gossip of Parnassus, one might say. You have the fragments of a puzzle; they are scattered; some are missing.472 They must be hunted up and fitted together. Sometimes the last will be first and the first will be last, when the metrical whole is completed. For example of how detached and meaningless these first suggestions may be, take this line and a half:

It was months after this suggestion came to me that I found the context and motive of the verse. I had to wait for the rest, and take whatever came.

Host. This subject of suggestions, and how they come, is an interesting one. It reminds me of what the astronomers tell us of certain methods they employ. For instance, they expose, by means of telescopic action, a sensitive photographic plate to the action of light from portions of the heavens where nothing is seen. After a long exposure they look at the plate, and something may be seen that was never seen before—star, nebulæ, or perhaps a comet—something which the telescope will not reveal to the eye. As an instance of my use of this exposure plan I will mention this: some years ago I read a great deal about shipwrecks—a subject which always interests me—some accounts in the daily papers and some sea stories, such as those of Clark Russell, who is my favorite marine author, and the question came into my mind: “Is it possible that there should be any kind of shipwreck which has not been already discovered?” For days and days I exposed my mind to the influence of ideas about shipwrecks. At last a novel notion floated in upon me, and I wrote “The Remarkable Wreck of the Thomas Hyke.” I have since had another idea of an out-of-the-way shipwreck, which I think is another example of a wreck that has never occurred; but this is a variation and amplification of a wreck about which I read.

Guest. Has it ever happened that any of your fancies turned out to be actual fact? Truth is said to be stranger than fiction.

Host. In some instances just that thing has happened. In one story I had a character whose occupation was that of an analyzer of lava, specimens being sent to him from all parts of the world. In this connection a foreigner inquired of him if there were any volcanoes near Boston, to which city he was on his way. This preposterous idea was, of course, quickly dismissed in the story. But I received a letter from a scientific man in New England who thought I would like to know that, not far from Boston, but in a spot now covered by the ocean, there existed in prehistoric times an active volcano.473 As to the practical application of some of my fanciful inventions, I may say that two young ladies on Cape Cod imitated the example of Mrs. Leeks and Mrs. Aleshine, and having put on life preservers, and each taking an oar, found no difficulty in sweeping themselves through the water, after the fashion of the two good women in the story. I will also say that the Negative Gravity machine is nothing but a condensed balloon. As soon as a man can make a balloon which can bear his weight and can also be put in a money belt, he can do all the things that the man in the story did. I may also say that naval men have written to me stating that it is not impossible that some of the contrivances mentioned in “The Great War Syndicate” may some day be used in marine warfare. I myself have no doubt of this, for there is no reason why a turtle-backed little ironclad, almost submerged, should not steam under the stern of a great man-of-war like the “Camperdown,” and having disabled her propeller blades, tow her nolens volens into an American port, where she could be detained until peace should be declared.

Guest. I would not like to live in the port in whose harbor the captive vessel was detained.

Host. It might be disagreeable; perhaps it would be better to keep the captured vessel continually on the tow-path through unfrequented waters.

Guest. But we were speaking of the necessity of having a definite purpose at the outset of a piece of work.

Host. It amounts to a necessity, almost. For instance, if I am about to write a fairy tale, I must get my mind in an entirely different condition from what it would be were I planning a story of country life of the present day. With me the proper condition often requires hard work. The fairy tale will come when the other kind is wanted. But the ideas of one class must be kept back and those of the other encouraged until at last the proper condition exists and the story begins. But I suppose you poets do not set out in this way.

Guest. It would be a revelation to the public to be let into the secret of some of our “motives,” and the various ways we have of mingling “poetic-honey” and “trade-wax,” as Tom Hood calls it. The spur of necessity, real or fancied, is often a capital provocation to eloquence. I know a woman who writes verses, who is not only unnecessarily neglectful of worldly interests, but is careless in detail, and self-indulgent and absent-minded. On one occasion, losing quite a sum of money from her pocket-book, and wishing to give herself a lesson to be remembered, she set herself the task of writing certain verses to defray the expenses of her carelessness, as it were. Involuntarily, and yet with a kind of grim fitness in things, the subject that came to hand was, “Losses.” The poem was written and disposed of, and the writer was square with her conscience once more; and the poem was not manifestly worse for having a prosaic prompting behind it. It is well, I think, that the474 public doesn’t always fathom these little hidden sequences in our logic.

Host. Speaking of “hidden sequences in logic,” as you call them, reminds me of a story a little girl told me. There was a nest in a tree, and the nest was full of young birds. One very forward one always would sit on the edge of the nest, and had several falls in this way. The old birds picked it up repeatedly, and told it that it would most certainly be caught by cats. After they found that it would not reform, the mother-bird took it by one wing and the father-bird took it by the other, and together they carried it to London, where they left it. I could not imagine why they carried it to London; but a day or two later I discovered that the little girl had been reading the story of Dick Whittington, which was founded on the fact that there were no cats in London.

Guest. I am constantly surprised at the adroitness children manifest in their little stories. Where does it vanish when they grow older? If almost any child kept up the promise of its story-telling infancy, every grown person would be a clever novelist. But there was a question I had in mind to ask you while we were on the subject of suggestion and plot. Do you ever receive any available ideas from other people?

Host. Yes, a great many excellent suggestions have come to me from others. But the better they are the less I like to use them, for a good idea deserves hard work, and when the work were done I would not feel that the story were really mine. In a few cases I have used suggestions from other people. For instance, there have been publishers who desired a story written upon a certain incident or idea.

Guest. The sense of ideal property is strong. One feels an honest indignation at taking what belongs to another, even though but a thought, and that of no account to the thinker, in his own opinion of it. Nevertheless, you feel how easily this ideal property of his might be “realized” with just a touch of art. Somehow, that touch of art, contributed by you, you feel would not quite make the material yours.

Host. I have been thinking why it is that very often the work of an author of fiction is not as true as the work of an artist, and I have concluded that the artist has one great advantage over the author of fiction, and over the poet,475 even. The artist has his models for his characters—models which he selects to come as near as possible to what his creations are going to be. The unfortunate author has no such models. He must rely entirely upon the characters he has casually seen, upon reading, upon imagination. How I envy my friend Frost! Last summer, when he wished to sketch a winter scene in Canada, he had a model sitting with two overcoats on, and the day was hot. Now, I couldn’t have any such models. I should have to describe my cold man just by thinking of him.

Guest. Or learn to shiver, yourself, like the boy in “Grimm’s Tales”—and describe that!

Host. But it is a serious matter. The best artists have live models to work from. But your writer of fiction—how, for instance, can he see a love scene enacted? He must describe it as best he can, and, although he may remember some of his own, he will never describe those.

Guest. Goethe was able to overcome such objections, I believe; and Heine tells us that,

Host. I think the beautiful young heroine of fiction generally gives the author of love stories a great deal of trouble. Such ladies exist, and their appearances may be described; but it is very difficult to find out what they would do under certain conditions necessary to the story, and therefore the author is obliged to rely upon his imagination, or upon the few examples he has met with in his reading, where men or women have delivered love-clinics at their own bedsides, or have had the rare opportunities of describing them at the bedsides of others. For this reason people who are not in love, and whose actions are open to the observations of others, are often better treated by the novelist than are his lovers. I have sometimes thought that a new profession might be created—that of Literary Model. Of course we would have none but the very highest order of dramatic performers, but such assistance as they might be able to give would be invaluable. Suppose the writer wanted to portray the behavior of a woman who has just received the tidings of the sudden death of her rejected lover. How does a writer, who has never heard such intelligence delivered, know what expressions of face, or what gestures, to give to his heroine in this situation? How would the intense, high-strung, nervous woman conduct herself? How would the fair-haired, phlegmatic type of women receive the news? The professional literary model might be enormously useful in delineating the various phases assumed by one’s hero or heroine.

Guest. The idea is certainly novel. But I’m afraid the professional literary model, if a woman, would never be content with “well enough.” She would want to excel herself; and, if you didn’t employ her constantly, would be devising new rôles for herself476 to fill. She would be super-serviceable.

Host. Perhaps. But such zeal could easily be restrained. It might be a good idea for a novel-writer to have a study near the greenroom of a theatre, and then between the acts he might send for this or that performer to give him a living picture of a certain character in a certain situation. It might not take a minute to do this. By the way, the writer’s model would have a better time than one who sat for an artist, for the sittings would generally be very short.

Guest. All the world’s a stage, and a thoroughly good actor might make a good literary model. But all sorts of people must help as models, by simply going on with their own little dramas of life, before the eyes of the sagacious author.

Host. That is true enough, so far as the comedy scenes of the play are concerned. But, as I said before, who is going to set the author the copy for tragedy or love scenes? Occasionally you get oblique views—mere intimations of such scenes. I wish I had had the good fortune to see what a lady of my acquaintance saw a while ago. She is one of the very few who have ever seen a proposal of love and its acceptance, carried on before spectators, exactly as if the contracting parties were alone. The scene took place in a street car between two young persons of foreign tongue, one of whom was about to take a steamer; and the man knew that what he had to say must be said then or never said at all. With the total oblivion of the presence of others these two opened their hearts to each other, the affair proceeded through all its stages, and the compact was sealed. This would have been a rare opportunity for a literary artist.

Guest. How perverse fate is in this respect! It seems as if there were a conspiracy to show up the most dramatic scenes either just before we come into the audience or just after we have left. But, take it all in all, I suppose the material we are best fitted to make use of is the kind that sooner or later comes in our way. We only take what we can easiest assimilate; the novelist his own proper food, the essayist another sort, the writer of verse the “cud of sweet and bitter fancies,” most likely. Have I asked a great many questions? I want to ask just one more—have you ever written any poetry? It is a pet theory of mine that everybody has, at some time or other, made verses because he couldn’t help it—it’s instinctive! Now for a clean confession.

Host. Let me see. Yes, now I remember one such effort. I devised a poem, and two lines at the beginning of it and two lines at the end of it came readily into my mind. But I had only written two or three lines when a breeze came up and blew my paper away.

Host. Only the first two and the last two, which had been in my mind for some time. Those I put on paper are entirely gone.

The story then proceeded to the effect that Sir Cupid and I walked through the narrow alleys side by side, while Miss Jane always flitted some distance in front, and would never stop that I might overtake her. I entreated her to wait for me, but she always laughed, and declined, hurrying on, sometimes picking a white rose, sometimes a red, and always answering, when she spoke at all, that the paths were not wide enough for three. After a good deal of this fruitless chase I became disheartened, and, with my companion, Sir Cupid, left the garden. The poem concluded thus:

Now, will you not take these lines and these ideas and finish the poem?[1] I shall never be able to do it.

Guest. Ah! Those Sibylline leaves should have blown into the hands of a Dobson. But we’ll try at restoring the lost passages.

Host. The experiment may lead to great things. I almost think I see a new volume, with the title, “Collaborative Verses,” etc. And now choose whether you will go for a drive to Green Village or to the Black Meadows.

A Gentle Voice of Deprecation. Oh! don’t take her to Green Village! There isn’t anything remarkable there. She will like the Black Meadows much more.

Guest. Yes, there might be adventures in such a region. And I want to put in a plea to be taken to that sylvan road where you saw the original sign of the Squirrel Inn.

[1] MISS JANE, SIR CUPID, AND I.

A Collaborative Poem by E. M. T. and F. R. S.

We walked in a garden of roses,

Miss Jane, Sir Cupid, and I—

Nay, rather, she walked by herself,

And never would answer me why.

The more I besought her, still farther

And farther she flitted ahead,

Laughing and scattering roses—

Roses, the white and the red.

At last she gave me her “reason;”

Surely I “ought to have known”—

“Sir Cupid”—and—“Three are too many,”

She’d walk with me, if alone!

So, lost in the maze of the roses,

Forever she flitted before;

And I said, with a sigh, to Sir Cupid:

“I’ll follow the truant no more!”

The next time I drew near to the roses,

I listened; I heard a faint stir,

And when I looked into the garden

The rascal was walking with her!

Then softly I crept in, and caught her;

She blushed, but would not be free.

By keeping Sir Cupid between us

There was room in those alleys for three.

“INCURABLE”
A GHETTO TRAGEDY

There was a restless air about the Refuge. In a few minutes the friends of the patients would be admitted. The incurables would hear the latest gossip of the Ghetto, for the world was still very much with these abortive lives, avid of sensations, Jewish to the end. It was an unpretentious institution—two corner houses knocked together—near the east lung of London; supported mainly by the poor at a penny a week, and scarcely recognized by the rich, so that paraplegia and vertigo and rachitis and a dozen other hopeless diseases knocked hopelessly at its narrow portals. But it was a model institution all the same, and the patients lacked for nothing except freedom from pain. There was even a miniature synagogue for their spiritual needs, with the women’s compartment religiously railed off from the men’s, as if these grotesque ruins of sex might still distract each other’s devotions.

Yet the rabbis knew human nature. The sprightly hydrocephalous paralytic, Leah, had had the chair she inhabited carried down into the men’s sitting-room to beguile the moments, and was smiling fascinatingly upon the deaf blind man who had the Braille Bible at his fingers’ ends, and read on as stolidly as St. Anthony. Mad Mo had strolled vacuously into the ladies’ ward, and, indifferent to the pretty, white-aproned Christian nurses, was loitering by the side of a weird, hatchet-faced cripple, with a stiletto-shaped nose supporting big spectacles. Like most of the patients, she was up and dressed. Only a few of the white pallets ranged along the walls were occupied.

“Leah says she’d be quite happy if she could walk like you,” said Mad Mo, in complimentary tones. “She always says Milly walks so beautiful. She says you can walk the whole length of the garden.” Milly, huddled in her chair, smiled miserably.

“You’re crying again, Rachel,” protested a dark-eyed, bright-faced dwarf, in excellent English, as she touched her friend’s withered hand. “You are in the blues again. Why, that page is all blistered.”

“No, I feel so nice,” said the sad-eyed Russian in her quaint, musical accent, “You sall not tink I cry because479 I am not happy. When I read sad tings—like my life—den only I am happy.”

The dwarf gave a short laugh that made her pendant earrings oscillate. “I thought you were brooding over your love affairs,” she said.

“Me!” cried Rachel. “I lost too young my leg to be in love. No, it is Psalm lxxxviii that I brood over. ‘I am afflicted and ready to die from my youth up.’ Yes, I was only a girl when I had to go to Königsberg to find a doctor to cut off my leg. ‘Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness.’”

“Hush!” whispered the dwarf, with a warning nudge and a slight nod in the direction of a neighboring waterbed, on which a pale, rigid, middle-aged woman lay with shut, sleepless eyes.

Rachel shook her head incredulously. “Sarah is a Polis’ woman,” she said. “For years dey are in England and dey learn noding.”

“Ich bin krank! Krank! Krank!” suddenly moaned a shrivelled Polish grandmother, as if to corroborate the girl’s contention. She was squatting monkey-like on her bed, every now and again murmuring her querulous burden of sickness, and jabbering at the nurses to shut all the windows. Fresh air she objected to as vehemently as if it were butter or some other heterodox dainty.

Hard upon her crooning came blood-curdling screams from the room above, sounds that reminded the visitor he was not in a Barnum show, that the monstrosities were genuine. Pretty Sister Margaret—not yet indurated—thrilled with pity, as before her inner vision rose the ashen, perspiring face of the palsied sufferer, who sat quivering all the long day in an easy-chair, her swollen, jelly-like hands resting on cotton-wool pads, an air pillow between her knees, her whole frame racked at frequent intervals by fierce spasms of pain, her only diversion faint, blurred reflections of episodes of the street in the glass of a framed picture: yet morbidly suspicious of slow poison in her drink, and cursed with an incurable vitality.

Meantime Sarah lay silent, bitter thoughts moving beneath her white,480 impassive face like salt tides below a frozen surface. It was a strong, stern face, telling of a present of pain and faintly hinting of a past of prettiness. She seemed alone in the populated ward, and, indeed, the world was bare for her. Most of her life had been spent in the Warsaw Ghetto, where she was married at sixteen, nineteen years before. Her only surviving son—a youth whom the English atmosphere had not improved—had sailed away to trade with the Kafirs. And her husband had not been to see her for a fortnight.

When the visitors began to arrive her torpor vanished. She eagerly raised the half of her that was not paralyzed, partially sitting up. But gradually expectation died out of her large gray eyes. There was a buzz of talk in the room—the hydrocephalous girl was the gay centre of a group; the Polish grandmother who cursed her grandchildren when they didn’t come, and when they did, was denouncing their neglect of her to their faces; everybody had somebody to kiss or quarrel with. One or two acquaintances approached the bed-ridden wife, too, but she would speak no word, too proud to ask after her husband, and wincing under the significant glances occasionally cast in her direction. By and by she had the red screen placed round her bed, which gave her artificial walls and a quasi-privacy. Her husband would know where to look for her.

“Woe is me!” wailed her octogenarian countrywoman, rocking to and fro. “What sin have I committed to get such grandchildren? You only come to see if the old grandmother isn’t dead yet. So sick! So sick! So sick!”

Twilight filled the wards. The white beds looked ghostly in the darkness. The last visitor departed. Sarah’s husband had not yet come.

“He is not well, Mrs. Kretznow,” Sister Margaret ventured to say in her best Yiddish. “Or he is busy working. Work is not so slack any more.” Alone in the institution she shared Sarah’s ignorance of the Kretznow scandal. Talk of it died before her youth and sweetness.

“He would have written,” said Sarah, sternly. “He is wearied of me. I have lain here a year. Job’s curse is on me.”

“Shall I to him,” Sister Margaret paused to excogitate the word, “write?”

They had flashes of strange savage poetry, these crude yet complex souls. Sister Margaret, who was still liable to be startled, murmured feebly, “But——”

The matron gently touched the novice’s arm, and drew her away. “I will write to him,” she whispered.

Night fell, but sleep fell only for some. Sarah Kretznow tossed in a hell of loneliness. Ah, surely her husband had not forgotten her; surely she would not lie thus till death—that far-off death her strong religious instinct would forbid her hastening! She had gone into the Refuge to save him the constant sight of her helplessness and the cost of her keep. Was she now to be cut off forever from the sight of his strength?

The next day he came by special invitation. His face was sallow, rimmed with swarthy hair; his under lip was sensuous. He hung his head, half veiling the shifty eyes.

“Put up the screen!” she murmured, and in its shelter drew her husband’s head to her bosom and pressed her lips to his hair.

“Thy heart told thee right, Herzel, my life, I was dying for a sight of thee.”

He felt her breast heave convulsively under his face; with her hands she thrust him away.

“God’s fool that I am—I should have known; to-day is not visiting day. They have compassion on me—they481 see my sorrows—it is public talk.”

“I did not ask their pity. But they saw how I suffered—one cannot hide one’s heart.”

“They have every right,” she rejoined, sharply. “If thou hadst come to see me even once—why hast thou not?”

“I—I—have been travelling in the country with cheap jewelry. The tailoring is so slack.”

“Look me in the eyes! The law of Moses? No; it is a lie. God shall forgive thee. Why hast thou not come?”

“Tell that to the Sabbath fire-woman! Why hast thou not come? Is it so very much to spare me an hour or two a week? If I could go out like some of the patients, I would come to thee. But I have tired thee out utterly——”

He was covered with shame and confusion. His face was turned away. “I did not like to come,” he said desperately.

“Why not?” Crimson patches came and went on the white cheeks; her heart beat madly.

“No answer is also an answer,” he snarled, driven to bay. “Thou understandest well enough. Thyself saidst it was public talk.”

“Ah-h-h!” in a stifled shriek of despair. Her intuition divined everything. The shadowy, sinister suggestions she had so long beat back by force of will took form and substance. Her head fell back on the pillow, the eyes closed.

“Thou sayest they have compassion on thee in their talk,” he murmured at last, half deprecatingly, half resentfully. “Have they none on me?”

Her silence chilled him. “But thou hast compassion, Sarah,” he urged. “Thou understandest.”

“Wilt thou wash my skin and not make me wet?” she interrupted bitterly. “Go home. Go home to her!”

He shuffled out. That night her lonely hell was made lonelier by the opening of a peephole into paradise—a paradise of Adam and Eve and forbidden fruit. For days she preserved a stony silence toward the sympathy of the inmates. Of what avail words against the flames of jealousy in which she writhed?

He lingered about the passage on the next visiting day, vaguely remorseful; but she would not see him. So he went away sulkily indignant, and his new housemate comforted him, and he came no more.

When you lie on your back all day and all night, you have time to think, especially if you do not sleep. A situation presents itself in many lights from dawn to dusk, and from dusk to dawn. One such light flashed on the paradise and showed it to her as but the portico of purgatory. Her husband would be damned in the next world, even as she was in this. His soul would be cut off from among its people.

On this thought she brooded till it loomed horribly in her darkness. And at last she dictated a letter to the matron, asking Herzel to come and see her.

He obeyed, and stood shame-faced at her side, fidgeting with his peaked cap. Her hard face softened momentarily at the sight of him, her bosom heaved, suppressed sobs swelled her throat.

“Yes; perhaps thou didst again imagine I was on my deathbed?” she replied, with bitter irony.

“It is not so, Sarah. I would have come of myself, only thou wouldst not see my face.”

He started. A pang shot through his breast. He darted an agitated glance at her face.

“Is it not so? In this bed I shall die. But God knows how many years I shall lie in it.”

“And till the Holy One, blessed be He, takes me, thou wilt live a daily sinner.”

“Thou art to blame!” Her eyes flashed fire. “Blasphemer! Life is sweet to thee, yet perhaps thou wilt die first.”

“Thou dost forget what Rabbi Eliezer said: ‘Repent one day before thy death’—that is to-day, for who knows?”

“Yes. Why didst thou not send me a bill of divorcement when I left thy home for this?”

“Afraid!” She laughed in grim mirthlessness. “Afraid of a bed-ridden woman!”

“I was afraid it would make thee unhappy.” The sardonic gleam melted into softness, then became more terrible than before.

“Stab me not more than I merit. I did not think people would be cruel enough to tell thee.”

“I feared so,” he said, turning them away. “When she—came into my house, I—I dared not go to see thee—that was why I did not come, though I always meant to, Sarah, my life. I feared to look thee in the eyes. I foresaw they would read the secret in mine—so I was afraid.”

“Afraid!” she repeated, bitterly. “Afraid I would scratch them out! Nay, they are good eyes. Have they not seen my heart? For twenty years they have been my light. Those eyes and mine have seen our children die.”

Spasmodic sobs came thickly now. Swallowing them down, she said: “And she—did she not ask thee to give me Gett?”

“Nay; she was willing to go without. She said thou wast as one dead—look not thus at me. It is the will of God. It was for thy sake, too, Sarah, that she did not become my wife by law. She, too, would have spared thee the knowledge of her.”

“Yes, ye have both tender hearts! She is a mother in Israel, and thou art a spark of our father Abraham.”

“I can disbelieve it and still remain a Jewess.” Then, satire boiling over into passion, she cried, vehemently: “We are threshing empty ears. Thinkst thou I am not aware of the judgments—I, the granddaughter of Reb Shloumi? Thinkst thou I am ignorant thou couldst not obtain a Gett against me—me, who have borne thee children, who have wrought no evil? I speak not of the Beth-Din, for in this impious country they are loath to follow the judgments, and from the English Beth-Din thou wouldst find it impossible to obtain the Gett in any case, even though thou didst not marry me in this country, nor according to its laws. I speak of our own Rabbonim—thou knowest even the Maggid would not give thee Gett merely because thy wife is bed-ridden. That—that is what thou wast afraid of.”

“But if thou art willing,” he replied, eagerly, ignoring her scornful scepticism.

“The Almighty is more merciful than thou,” he answered. “It is He that hath ordained it is not good for man to live alone; and yet men shun me—people talk—and she—she may leave me to my loneliness again.” His voice faltered with self-pity. “Here thou hast friends, nurses, visitors. I—I have nothing. True, thou didst bear me children, but they withered as by the evil eye. My only son is across the ocean; he hath no love for me or you.”

“Go,” she whispered. “Go and send me the Gett. Go to the Maggid; he knew my grandfather. He is the man to arrange it for thee with his friends. Tell him it is my wish.”

“What else have I to give thee, my Herzel, I, who eat the bread of strangers? Truly says the proverb: ‘When one begs of a beggar, the Herr God laughs!’”

“Is it not a wife’s duty to submit? Nay, have no fear. Thou shalt have no difficulty in serving the Gett upon me. I will not throw it in the messenger’s face. And thou wilt marry her?”

“Assuredly. People will no longer talk. And she must bide with me. It is my one desire.”

“And thy dowry?” he said at last. “Thou wilt not make claim for compensation?”

“Be easy—I scarce know where my cesubah [marriage certificate] is. What need have I of money? As thou sayest, I have all I want. I do not even desire to purchase a grave—lying already so long in a charity grave. The bitterness is over.”

“Herzel!” She had uncovered her face with a despairing cry. He slouched back toward her, perturbed, dreading she would retract.

The long days of pain grew longer; the summer was coming, harbingered by sunny days, that flooded the wards with golden mockery. The evening Herzel brought the Gett, Sarah could have read every word on the parchment485 plainly if her eyes had not been blinded by tears.

She put out her hand toward her husband, groping for the document he bore. He placed it in her burning palm. The fingers closed automatically upon it, then relaxed, and the paper fluttered to the floor. But Sarah was no longer a wife.

Herzel was glad to hide his burning face by stooping for the fallen bill of divorcement. He was long picking it up. When his eyes met hers again, she had propped herself up in her bed. Two big round tears trickled down her cheeks, but she received the parchment calmly, and thrust it into her bosom.

“Let it lie there,” she said stonily, “there, where thy head hath lain. Blessed be the true Judge!”

“Why should I be angry? She was right—I am but a dead woman. Only no one may say Kaddish for me—no one may pray for the repose of my soul. I am not angry, Herzel. A wife should light the Sabbath candles, and throw in the fire the morsel of dough. But thy house was desolate; there was none to do these things. Here I have all I need. Now thou wilt be happy, too.”

“Recall not the past, we are strangers now,” she said, with recurrent harshness.

“But I may come and see thee—sometimes?” He had stirrings of remorse as the moment of final parting came.

“Yes, yes, Herzel! Do not leave me! Come and see me here—as a friend, an acquaintance, a man I used to know. The others are thoughtless—they forget me—I shall lie here—perhaps the Angel of Death will forget me, too.” Her grasp tightened till it hurt him acutely.

“Yes, I will come—I will come often,” he said, with a sob of physical pain.

“Of course, thou must have a ‘still wedding.’ The English Synagogue will not marry thee.”

They chatted of indifferent things, of the doings of the neighbors. When he was going she said: “Thou wilt come again?”

“Thou art so good to spend thy time on me thus. But thy wife. Will she not be jealous?”

She took it in its contemptuous sense, and her white lips twitched. But she only said: “Is she aware thou hast come here?”

“Wilt thou not bring her to see me? Then she will know that thou hast no love left for me.”

He flinched as at a stab. After a painful moment he said, “Art thou in earnest?”

“I am no marriage jester. Bring her to me. Will she not come to see an invalid? It is a Mitzvah [good deed] to visit the sick. It will wipe out her trespass.”

She came. Sarah stared at her for an instant with poignant curiosity; then her eyelids drooped to shut out the dazzle of her youth and freshness. Herzel’s wife moved awkwardly and sheepishly. But she was beautiful; a486 buxom, comely country girl from a Russian village, with a swelling bust and a cheek rosy with health and confusion.

Sarah’s breast was racked by a thousand needles; but she found breath at last.

“God bless—thee, Mrs.—Kretznow,” she said gaspingly. She took the girl’s hand. “How good thou art to come and see a sick creature!”

“My husband willed it,” the new wife said, in clumsy deprecation. She had a simple, stupid air that did not seem wholly due to the constraint of the strange situation.

“Thou wast right to obey. Be good to him, my child. For three years he waited on me, when I lay helpless. He has suffered much. Be good to him!”

With an impulsive movement she drew the girl’s head down to her and kissed her on the lips. Then, with an anguished cry of “Leave me for to-day!” she jerked the blanket over her face and burst into tears. She heard the couple move hesitatingly away. The girl’s beauty shone on her through the opaque coverings.

“O God!” she wailed, “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, let me die now! For the merits of the patriarchs take me soon, take me soon!”

Her vain, passionate prayer, muffled by the bedclothes, was wholly drowned by ear-piercing shrieks from the ward above—screams of agony mingled with half-articulate accusations of attempted poisoning—the familiar paroxysm of the palsied woman who clung to life.

The thrill passed again through Sister Margaret. She uplifted her sweet, humid eyes.

“HUMAN DOCUMENTS.”
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES.

A. Conan Doyle, whose father was an artist, was born in Edinburgh, in 1859. He began to write at the early age of seventeen, while studying medicine. He wrote some sixty short stories in the ten years before he became known through his widely-read “Sherlock Holmes” tales, and he has since given to the reading world such sustained efforts as “The White Company,” “Micah Clarke,” “The Refugees,” and “The Great Shadow.” Conan Doyle has given up the practice of medicine, in order to devote himself to literature exclusively. He is a close student of old romances, a great admirer of Scott and Fenimore Cooper, and has lectured on George Meredith, whom he places at the head of contemporary novel writers.

The Arctic explorer, R. E. Peary, C. E., U. S. N., was born in Pennsylvania, forty years ago. His family having removed to Maine in his childhood, he lived there till after reaching manhood. He was graduated at Bowdoin College, and, eight years ago, was selected by competitive examination to be one of the civil engineers of the United States Navy, with the same rank and pay as that of lieutenant. But he is improperly called “Lieutenant” in the press. He has written for magazines, geographical journals, and newspapers. His report on his experiences in Nicaragua as a civil engineer appeared in the “National Geographical Magazine.” His report on his reconnoissance of the Greenland inland ice in 1886, and especially his reports and articles on the North Greenland Expedition, have made him widely known. His book on this last expedition was nearly completed when he again started on another Greenland expedition a few months ago.

Camille Flammarion, the French astronomer, was born in 1842. He received his education in ecclesiastical seminaries; first at Langres and afterwards in Paris. He was a student in the Imperial Observatory from 1858 till 1862, when he became editor of the “Cosmos.” In 1865 he was made scientific editor of “Siècle.” He began about this time to lecture on astronomy, and a few years later his giving in his adhesion to spiritualism brought him great notoriety. In 1868 he made a number of balloon ascents, in order to study the condition of atmosphere at high altitudes, but he is above all an astronomer. He is called in France a “vulgarisateur” of astronomy, which means that he has presented to the people, in a picturesque and easily comprehended manner, the science of astronomy. His notable works are: “The Imaginary World and the Real;” “Celestial Marvels;” “God in Nature;” “History of Heaven;” “Scientific Contemplations;” “Aerial Voyages;” “The Atmosphere;” “History of this Planet;” and “The Worlds of Heaven.”

F. Hopkinson Smith was born in Baltimore, Md., October 23, 1838. By profession Mr. Smith is a civil engineer, and he has built a number of public edifices, many under contract with the United States. It was Mr. Smith who built the Race Rock Lighthouse, off New London Harbor, in Long Island Sound, between 1871 and 1877. In 1879 he built the Block Island breakwater. Mr. Smith has achieved success as a writer and lecturer. His best known water colors are “In the Darkling Wood” (1876); “Pegotty on the Harlem” (1881); “Under the Towers, Brooklyn Bridge” (1883); “In the North Woods” (1884); and “A January Thaw” (1887). Mr. Smith has also illustrated his own books, the books of others, and many magazine articles. Mr. Smith’s well-read books are: “Col. Carter of Cartersville;” “A White Umbrella in Mexico;” “Well-worn Roads of Spain, Holland, and Italy”; “Old Lines in New Black and White;” “A Day at Laguerre’s, and Other Days;” and “The Tile Club.”

A. CONAN DOYLE.

R. E. PEARY, C. E., U. S. N.

CAMILLE FLAMMARION.

F. HOPKINSON SMITH.

THE PERSONAL FORCE OF CLEVELAND.

In his eulogium upon President Garfield, Mr. Blaine touched with impressive emphasis upon the rapidity with which honors came to him. Within six years after Williams College had sent Garfield forth equipped, “he was successively president of a college, State Senator of Ohio, Major-General of the Army of the United States, and a Representative-elect to the national Congress. A combination of honors so varied, so elevated, within a period so brief and to a man so young, is without precedent or parallel in the history of the country.”

Those whose privilege it was to hear that matchless eulogy will not forget the meaning glance with which Mr. Blaine, lifting his eyes from his manuscript, swept that splendid company before him, the President and his Cabinet, the Justices of the Supreme Court, in their silken robes, the deliberate Senate and impetuous House, and the remaining distinguished heroes of the war, in brilliant uniform, as though saying to them, “You at least can understand how wonderful a thing it is to so speedily gain such honors as these.”

Yet before the echoes of this eulogy had ceased, a political career had been begun which was to be more marvellous in its successes and the celerity of its successive achievements than that of Garfield. Within ten years after Mr. Blaine pronounced this eulogy, a man then unknown beyond the city in which he lived had been chosen Governor of New York by a plurality unparalleled in the history of any State; had stepped from that office before its term was ended to the chair of the Chief Executive of the nation, and had again been elected to the presidency; and elected the second time while a private citizen—an unmatched political honor.

The swiftly succeeding successes of Garfield are no longer unparalleled and unprecedented; that distinction is now Grover Cleveland’s. Carrying a torch as a private in evening campaign processions in 1880, he was to be four years later the successful presidential candidate of his party. He had gained no distinction for subtle or extraordinary strategy; he had not sat as a member in a legislative hall; his name had been associated with no important measure conceived and executed for public good; not of social inclination, not greatly learned, possessing no wide acquaintance, and having somewhat limited experience, he, nevertheless, revealed himself to the American people within the short space of two years as a man of extraordinary personal force, the quality of which is a puzzling mystery, which men of intellectual power seem to find a fascination in trying to analyze.

What is this mysterious and impressive quality? We may tell its manifestations; its influence has made history.

“What is it that is so impressive and overwhelming about your friend Governor Cleveland?” said a distinguished politician to the late Daniel Manning, at a time when Mr. Manning was with great skill directing the politics that had Cleveland’s first presidential nomination in view.

“I do not know what it is, but I know that it is there,” was Mr. Manning’s reply.

“My political intuitions are infallible,” said Governor Tilden, after a single interview with Mr. Cleveland; “and I am of opinion that this man is of somewhat coarse mental fibre and disposition, but of great force and stubbornly honest in his convictions.”

“His name should be Petros,” Mr. Blaine once said of Mr. Cleveland, “for when he has once formed opinions494 he stands upon them with the firmness of a granite foundation.”

It would be possible to quote many similar opinions uttered by able men who have had opportunity to see and study Mr. Cleveland. Some of these opinions do not wholly compliment Cleveland’s mental powers. But all of the opinions, whether uttered by political friends or enemies, have this in common: they express amazement, not so much at the swift successes of his career, as for that mystic personal quality which has made him able to hold the politicians of his party in the hollow of his hand, to defy political conventionalities, to break down machines, and, above all, to gain the confidence of the American people. This personal quality, which has given him these victories, he seems to have furnished no hint of in his childhood or youth. Before he came to his majority he must have led an unimpressive life, for those who knew him in those early days have no anecdote to tell of him which suggests that anything he did or said was of uncommon quality.

The Buffalo bar at that time was a brilliant one. The leaders of it were men of great ambition. It would have been impossible for a young man, and especially for a young Democrat, to have gained influence with those men had there not been even then some personal quality which won their respect; and Mr. Cleveland gained a great measure of respect while he was still a very young man, and he seems to have been able to form close and permanent intimacies with young men whose advantage in beginning life had been much greater than his. He passed swiftly from the ranks of the poor law-student to the companionship of such men.

When young Bissell, fresh from his successful career at Yale College, blessed with some wealth, and possessing all the advantages which gentle social relations give, returned to Buffalo from his college life, one of his closest intimacies was developed with Grover Cleveland. Mr. Folsom, one of the brightest men at the Buffalo bar, must have been early impressed495 by this quality of Cleveland’s, for he took the young man into partnership, and before Cleveland was thirty years of age he had established, with men of intellectual power, a standing not due to unusual mental gifts, but to this same personal quality which has made him conspicuous above other Americans for the past twelve years.

In 1884, after Mr. Cleveland’s nomination for the presidency, President Arthur was asked if he knew the man whom the Democratic party had nominated.

“I know him slightly, and have heard much of him,” was the President’s reply. “I know that he is a good companion among the rather worldly men at the Buffalo bar, or was when he was there; but I also know this of him: he is a man of splendid moral fibre, and I have been told that his fidelity to his convictions and professional duties is regarded by his associates at the Buffalo bar as something wonderful. I do not think that he is a man of strong, original mind, but he is the faithfullest man to what he believes to be right and his duty that his party has—at least in New York State.”

Roscoe Conkling, not long after Mr. Cleveland’s nomination, was asked if he knew the Democratic candidate, and Mr. Conkling replied, with more of emphasis than he was accustomed to employ in speaking of any public man at that time:

“I do not know much about Mr. Cleveland as a politician, but my impression is that he is no politician, as the word is commonly understood. But I do know this about him. As a lawyer he prepares his cases well, as thoroughly, perhaps, as any man whom I have known in my practice.”

“Whatever may be said of the President as to his relations with the politicians, this much must be said, that he has never done anything since he has been in the White House for any selfish, personal motive, and that he is the most conscientious man in his adherence to what he believes to be his duty, and in his attempts to make out his duty when he is not entirely clear about it, that I have ever seen; and I do not believe any President has ever exceeded him in these respects.”

One of the greater powers in one of the greatest railway systems of the United States, not long ago meeting a company of friends at a private dinner in the Union League Club, sat for some time listening to the very interesting and acute analyses of Cleveland which were made by many brilliant men who were in that party.

“I do not think any of you has touched upon what is, after all, the quality which has made Mr. Cleveland what he is in American politics. I had some reason to know wherein his power lies, at a time when he probably had no other thought of his future than the expectation of earning a competence at the bar. It so happened that I was associated with certain litigations in which Mr. Cleveland was employed as counsel. He was not employed either for or against the interests which I represented, for they were merely incidental to these suits. I was amazed, after a little experience with him, to see the way in which he worked. I thought I had seen hard work and patient fidelity, but I never saw a lawyer so patient and so faithful to his clients as Cleveland was. I remember speaking about it to an eminent lawyer who has since become a judge, and he told me that Grover Cleveland was the most conscientious man in his relations with his clients that he had ever met. I spoke of it to somebody else, and that man told me that Cleveland had once actually lost a case by over-conscientiousness and too thorough preparation. He had examined his witnesses so persistently and exhaustively in private, and had pursued the case in all its details with such supreme drudgery, that when his witnesses went upon the stand their testimony seemed to the jury to be almost parrot-like; to be so glib, so perfectly consistent, that it seemed as though there must be a weakness in the case, and that such perfection must have come from rehearsals. For that reason the jury decided against him,496 although he won the case afterwards on appeal.

“Now, I am satisfied that it is just this quality in that man which made it possible for him, in Buffalo, where the Republican party was predominant, to gain minor political victories, and it certainly was that which brought to him such Republican support as enabled him to carry the city in a mayoralty election. We have been seeing just this thing manifested throughout the country since Cleveland became prominent. There probably never was a President since Washington who so completely gained the confidence of a great element in the opposing party as Mr. Cleveland has done; and you can’t explain it in any other way than that just as in Buffalo, in his professional struggles, or in political contests, he was believed to be a faithful man, rigid and true in his convictions; so the opinion has spread throughout the United States, and is entertained by a great many members of the opposing political party, that here is a man who is absolutely true to his own convictions and who is faithful to his responsibilities as he understands them. Now, I have seen enough of American politics to know that while our people admire talent, and sometimes go into spasms of enthusiasm over men who have emotional qualities which appeal to the masses, and which make them personally popular, yet, after all, there is an abiding faith in sincerity, fidelity, and character which compels the American masses to choose the man who has these qualities rather than that one who has brilliant talents; and I think there is no doubt that it was a latent suspicion that Mr. Blaine did not always possess that higher character, while endowed with far more brilliant genius than Mr. Cleveland possesses, which caused the people to choose Cleveland rather than Blaine in 1884.”

We had some indication that this railway prince was correct in his estimate, at a time during the past summer when Mr. Cleveland was in some peril of physical ailment. The greatest of American advocates, himself an ardent Republican, a man whom his party would be delighted to honor if he would permit it, having heard of Mr. Cleveland’s illness, said to a friend:

“I am more deeply interested in these reports about Mr. Cleveland’s health than I can tell you. I have every confidence in Mr. Cleveland’s integrity of purpose, and in the sincerity of his desire to lift these financial questions above the range of partisanship, and it would be a terrible misfortune for this country if he were to be disabled by illness at this time.”

This from a man who did not vote for Cleveland, who had never met him more than once or twice, but who had intuitively recognized that quality which is Cleveland’s power. Again, another man, one of preëminent genius in the world of finance, a very strong Republican, having also heard that Mr. Cleveland was seriously ill, went to a friend who had intimacy with the President, and said:

“I wish you would find out for me whether it is true that the President is in danger. I have heard that it is so, and if it is, it is the blackest cloud upon our horizon to-day. I did not vote for Mr. Cleveland, for I do not believe in some of the principles of his party, and I do not agree with him in some of his views. Yet if he had been the candidate of my party I would gladly have voted for him, for I think he is the most conscientious man I ever knew. I have perfect faith in his fidelity to his sense of duty, and I have never seen an action of his as President which I thought was inspired simply by a desire for partisan advantage. I think he is the faithfullest public man that we have had since Lincoln in his adherence to his convictions.”

There is only one word that will give a name to this quality that distinguishes Mr. Cleveland, and that is, Character—that quality which Emerson describes as a reserve force which acts directly and without means, whose essence, with Mr. Cleveland, is the courage of truth.

Not long ago a group of notable men were discussing Cleveland as a politician, and they seemed to be agreed that in the sense in which the word “politician” is customarily used497 he is not a man of remarkable ability, and there were anecdotes told to justify such opinion as that. His nomination for governor was the result of as purely political manipulation as New York State has ever seen, but he had no part in it. Those who were sincerely urging his nomination permitted him to take no part in these politics, for they had learned that he was possessed of two weaknesses as a politician, which, unless he were restrained, would be likely to defeat their plans: one of them the political fault of honesty. It was displayed in Buffalo once, when, it being proposed to nominate him for mayor, and the ticket agreed upon having been shown to him, he declared, with expressions more emphatic than pious, that he would not permit his name to go on the ticket upon which was the name of a certain man whom he believed to be unworthy, although this man had great political influence.

Another weakness, from the politicians’ point of view, is a seeming incapacity to understand the need of organization in political work. It is not only incapacity to understand the need, but also ignorance of the way in which organization can be effected. It has been revealed in all of Mr. Cleveland’s campaigns. After his election as Governor of New York by a plurality of nearly two hundred thousand, his availability as a presidential candidate was recognized, and, later, was strengthened by the assurance that his messages while Mayor of Buffalo had brought him the respect and confidence of the independent element; yet Mr. Cleveland’s friends very soon discovered that if they were to bring about his nomination for President, it must be done through organization of which he was either ignorant or to which he would be indifferent. So Mr. Cleveland had almost no part in that splendid game of 1884. He knew almost nothing of those things which were being done for him. Mr. Manning and the others had taken him up at first because of his availability; but Mr. Manning soon discovered that a man might be available and still be as ignorant of the science of politics, as understood by those who make it a professional pursuit, as a child.

After Mr. Cleveland became President, he sometimes drove his friends almost to distraction by his seeming incapacity to understand movements in the game of politics, which his friends suggested to him. A number of them went to him some time near the middle of his term as President, to set forth the political condition in New York State. They were men of long training and considerable achievement in politics. They had made successes both in New York City and New York State. They spoke to him with freedom—some of them with bluntness. They said to Mr. Cleveland that the then Governor of New York, Mr. Hill, was constructing with unusual cunning and consummate ability a political machine which might not be friendly, and was perhaps likely to be actively hostile, to him; and then, with much of detail, they showed Mr. Cleveland how he could break down such organization, utterly scatter it, and create and maintain in New York State one upon which he could rely with serenity. The merest tyro in politics can easily understand with what chagrin and astonishment these friends departed from his presence, because he did not seem to have been impressed in the slightest by their assertion that he was in political danger in New York State, and did not appear to comprehend the methods which they suggested by which the danger could be overcome.

Then again, in the spring and summer of 1892, when it seemed for a time as though the tide was setting against his nomination, when it was certain that the most powerful influence ever arrayed against a leading candidate for a presidential nomination had been secured, and one which, according to all precedent, would be successful, Mr. Cleveland astonished and almost vexed those friends of his who were working in and out of season to bring about his nomination, by professing indifference to the opposition of the New York State delegation, and of some of the most powerful politicians in the Democratic party. He had been at the Victoria Hotel one evening, listening498 in an almost perfunctory way to the plaints and warnings of his friends. He had no suggestions to offer, no advice to give. A stranger seeing him there would have thought that he was not one of that company holding this consultation, but perhaps a friend, there by chance, whose presence was not offensive, and was therefore tolerated.

At last, complaining of the warmth of the evening, he proposed a stroll; then, taking two friends by their arms, he walked slowly up Fifth Avenue, and astonished them by saying:

“These things which you have told me do not alarm me at all. They can do their worst, and yet I shall be nominated in spite of them.”

And, later on, after his prediction was justified, and his name in the Chicago Convention had triumphed over all political precedent, and conquered the most powerful and perfect opposition ever arrayed against a candidate, while there was still grumbling and bitter feeling and revengeful threats of New York State, he again amazed these friends by saying to them, when they proposed a certain form of counter-organization to prevent treachery, “No, no, do not do it. Let them do their worst; I can be elected without New York.”

At a time when the financial clouds were gathering last spring, a little company of politicians, who were personal friends as well, called upon Mr. Cleveland by appointment, and were received in that upper chamber through which for many days a persistent procession filed before the President asking for office. Mr. Cleveland planted himself firmly for an instant before each supplicant, so firmly that it almost seemed to these friends of his standing a little way off that his determination to be persuaded by no appeal to emotion, gratitude, friendship, or by any other thing than fitness revealed itself even in the rigidness of the muscles of his body. Patiently listening to each request and making perfunctory response, the President then received the next and then the next, and no man of all that number who thus met him knew whether his plea had met with favor or refusal. At last the throng was gone, the doors were closed, and there came to the face of the President a strange, hard look, tinged with something of surprise, and turning to his friends who remained he threw himself wearily into his chair and was silent for a moment. When he spoke there was something of sadness, something of reproach, in his tone and manner, and he said:

“You have seen a picture which I see every day, and you may now know why it is that my ears must be deaf to such appeals; why I scarcely hear the words they speak; why I almost fear that with most men who seek with great persistence political office the sense of truth is apt to be blunted, and why, therefore, it is imperative for me to be always suspicious.” Then the President added, with something of indignation:

“But how any man who is a good citizen can come to me now and plead for office, when there is impending financial calamity, I cannot understand. Politics! Is it possible that the politicians do not see that the best as well as the imperative politics now is that which will bring the country back to financial prosperity?”

Some hours later, one of that company had another glimpse of the President. Washington was still for the night. The White House was dark, excepting for a light that burned in the room where the President works. At his desk sat the man who had said in the morning that his ears were deaf to the office-seekers’ appeals, and yet with patient drudgery he was now examining the indorsements and recommendations of the different applicants, as he had been doing for hours. Then, taking up his pen, he began to write. The pen seemed scarcely ever to stop, and, watching through the partly opened door that led into an outer office, the President’s friend was reminded by it of something which he had read or heard. “Where have I heard or seen something which that sight brings to my memory?” he asked himself. The impression remained with him after he left Washington, until at last, taking down from499 his library shelf a biography, he read this passage:

“Since we sat down I have been watching a hand which I see behind the window of that room across the street. It fascinates my eye; it never stops. Page after page is finished and put upon a heap of manuscript, and still the hand goes on unwearied, and so it will be till candles are brought, and God knows how long after that. It is the same every night. I well know what hand it is—’tis Walter Scott’s.”

Cleveland is not, however, indifferent to political organization. He believes in it; he supports it. That was revealed at the conference which he held in October, 1892, in the Victoria Hotel, with some of the leaders of what is called the Democratic machine in New York. Some time there will be a revelation of what was said and done there in all detail, and it will furnish important light upon Mr. Cleveland’s character as well as his more purely political capacity. This much is known: that he did there and with emphasis maintain the right and duty of party men to form associations, to submit to discipline, and to act by common agreement—in other words, to use a colloquialism, he “recognized the machine.” But he also made one magnificent manifestation of that higher quality of his which is his character, for when there was something like threatening intimation made by one of those present, Mr. Cleveland declared that rather than do the thing that was asked of him he would withdraw from the ticket, and the country would know why he had withdrawn; and, after he said that, he held those men who had dared to make such intimation of threat subdued and supple in the hollow of his fist, from which condition they have not strayed from that day to this.

He would have been a failure in the House of Representatives as a parliamentary leader, probably a failure as a debater. The parliamentary leader is for his party always, right or wrong, and Mr. Cleveland could never have assumed command incurring such responsibilities as that. His intellectual processes are not quick enough for the give and take of debate. Blaine or Garfield, Randall or Thurman, would have overmatched him. Probably no member of either House has more greatly interested him than Mr. Reed, who in all respects, excepting personal force, differs from him. Each has expressed something of regard for the personal qualities of the other, and there has come to light a keen interest in Mr. Cleveland’s eyes as friends have described Reed, the parliamentary leader and debater, to him. He has never seen Reed standing in the aisle just beyond his desk, a throng of associates with hot, eager faces surrounding him, he towering above them, his head thrust slightly forward and a little to one side, a half-whimsical, half-defiant curl upon his lips, and the sneer of the coming sarcasm already betrayed by suggestive swelling of his nostrils; or else with the placid, serene, and tantalizing composure with which he prepares to hurl an epigram, already in his mind, at his antagonists. Nor has Mr. Cleveland seen that readiness to deliver almost tiger-like ferocity of attack if it be needed. The black flag—no quarter asked or given—hoisted when necessary, that furious, all-controlling, unconquerable determination to win, to beat down opposition at all hazards and any cost except outright dishonor, straining even a little toward unfair advantage when that and nothing else will win, and expecting to meet unfairness in return; bent on winning—somehow, anyhow, but winning—Mr. Cleveland has never seen such impressive spectacle as Reed makes when at his finest as the champion of his party in parliamentary battle and debate. But they have told him of these things, and he has seemed not to tire, but to delight to hear them.

He could not do that. He would stand by a principle or fall with it. Reed might beat him down in a turbulent body like the House, but he would go down like Galileo, crying, “But the world DOES move!”

Mr. Cleveland has himself recognized this intellectual defect, if it be one, for last spring, when a company of New York friends were speaking to him about the financial condition, he500 said, with great earnestness, “I do not quite see where I am; I must have time;” and then added a favorite expression of his, “My head is in a bag now; I cannot see clearly.” But these men, when they heard him say this, realized that when he did see clearly, as he believed, then his convictions would become established, and it would almost be as easy to move the earth from its axis as to shift him from them.

When he met his first cabinet, there were gathered around the table two men of extraordinary brilliancy of intellect, another of splendid repute and vast experience, and all of them were men of perhaps finer intellectual quality, and certainly had many advantages, both natural and acquired, which he did not possess. Yet Secretary Whitney, speaking of this meeting to an old college friend of his, some time after, said, “When we met the President in the cabinet room, we had not been there ten minutes before we realized that ‘Where MacGregor sat, there was the head of the table.’” Whitney himself was the only member of the cabinet who was younger than Cleveland, and three members of it had been active in public life before Cleveland was admitted to the bar.

After Mr. Cleveland had been elected to the presidency the second time, but before his inauguration, he spent an evening with a gentleman whose political experience began with the formation of the Republican party. They were together in Mr. Cleveland’s library in New York, until long past midnight. The conversation touched upon public men and political history, and it was then revealed to his visitor that Mr. Cleveland had that order of intellect which absorbs not from books but from personal contact with men of experience. It was evident that he had learned far more of public men than he was believed to know, and he had gleaned this information by persistent inquiry. It was made plain that he got such grasp of public questions as he possessed, by searching investigation, not of books, but of men’s minds and experience. Late that night Mr. Cleveland asked his visitor about Lincoln, being anxious to know everything that this man could tell him about the Republican party’s first President; and when Mr. Cleveland put a certain question to his friend, then it was made plain that Lincoln’s career had been deeply studied by Mr. Cleveland, and that he anxiously sought to learn the secret of his mastery of men and direction of events. That question was, “How was Mr. Lincoln able to overcome the politicians, to defeat conspiracies, to control a half-rebellious and not personally loyal cabinet, and to maintain himself in spite of attack, open and insidious?” And the visitor, who knew Lincoln well, said in reply, “Mr. Cleveland, Lincoln did this because he weighed every act by his judgment of what the estimation of the plain people of the country would be about it. He reached over the heads of the politicians, and out to that great body of American citizens whom he called ‘the plain people.’ He believed that the plain people were year in and out accurate in their judgments, and he believed that the man who had their confidence could face the politicians with contempt even, because he was sure to be right.”

For some moments Mr. Cleveland said nothing, and then, with great impressiveness and something of serenity, he said, “I have long seen that. The public man cannot go astray who follows the plain people, nor can the politician err who respects their impulses.” In this single remark we have probably the secret revealed of the influence which controls Mr. Cleveland.

It has been said of Mr. Cleveland that Republicans have supported him because he is a better man than his party, but the assertion seems a flippant and thoughtless one. Mr. Cleveland is no better than the best ideals of the Democratic party, although he is immeasurably better than the false and abhorrent influences and elements which have been pleased to associate themselves with that party. At its best the Democratic party is a splendid force. Mr. Cleveland is esteemed better than his party by some Republicans, because his party has not always been true to its principles. But he is a true Democrat.

PATTI AT CRAIG-Y-NOS.

Two queens travel from the Paddington station of the Great Western Railway in London to their palatial homes—the Queen of England, and the Queen of Song. If you ask at Paddington for directions to Craig-y-Nos Castle, the porters will inform you with not less alacrity than they would have shown had you inquired the way to Windsor. And you observe they delight in the duty. They make you as comfortable as possible for your two-hundred-mile journey. You depart with the circumstance of an ambassador. Had you been accredited to the foot of the throne by some reigning monarch of the continent you could not be more thoughtfully attended by the railway serving-men. You are a guest of Madame Patti, and that, in the eyes of these honest fellows, is as good as being a guest of Queen Victoria.

I pulled up at the end of a broiling hot day in August, at a wee bit station on the top of a Welsh mountain. The station is called “Penwyllt;” it overlooks the Swansea Valley, and stands about half-way between Brecon and the sea. When a traveller alights at Penwyllt there is no need to question his purpose. He can have but one destination, and that is Craig-y-Nos Castle. A carriage from the castle was awaiting me, and we set off down the steep road to the valley, a sudden turn showing the Patti palace there on the banks of the Tawe. The place was two miles distant, and a thousand feet below our wheels, but I could see an American flag flying from the square tower, and there it waved during the successive days of my visit; for it is Madame Patti’s way to welcome a guest with the emblem of his nationality. A prettier compliment is not conceivable.

Mr. Gladstone, in a vein of pleasantry, once told Madame Patti that he would like to make her Queen of Wales. But she is that already, and more. She is Queen of Hearts the world over, and every soul with an ear is her liege. But, literally, in Wales Madame Patti is very like a queen. She lives in a palace; people come to her from the ends of the earth; she is attended with “love, honor, troops of friends;” and whenever she stirs beyond her own immediate domain the country folk gather by the roadside, dropping courtesies, and throwing kisses to her bonny majesty.

Her greeting of me was characteristic of this most famous and fortunate of women, this unspoiled favorite of our whirling planet. A group of her friends stood merrily chatting in the hall, and, as I approached, a dainty little woman with big brown eyes came running out from the centre of the company, stretched forth a hand, spoke a hearty welcome, and accompanied it with the inimitable smile which has made slaves of emperors. The vivacious and charming creature was Madame Patti, or, as we know her in private life, Madame Patti-Nicolini. Her husband is a handsome man of fifty-eight, though he looks twenty years younger. He is as devoted as if he were the newly accepted lover of an entrancing lass in her teens, and though his English is rather hazardous, he contrives to get about bravely in Wales.

My visit could not have been more happily timed. I found a sort of family party at Craig-y-Nos, and there was no stiff ceremonial to be encountered.

Note.—Our illustrations of Craig-y-Nos, interior and exterior, are reproductions from photographs specially taken for McClure’s Magazine by W. Arthur Smith, Swansea, South Wales.—Ed.502 as the case usually is in British country-houses. La Diva’s guests were intimate friends, and chiefly a company of fair English girls who pass every summer with her. When the guests, in full dinner-dress, assembled in the drawing-room, I found that we covered five nationalities—Italian, German, French, English, and American—and while we awaited the appearance of our hostess, the gathering seemed like a polyglot congress.

As the chimes in the clock-tower pealed the hour of eight, a pretty vision appeared at the drawing-room door. It was Patti, royally bedecked. The defects of the masculine mind leave me incapable of describing the attire of that sparkling little woman. But the spectacle brought us to our feet, bowing as if we had been a company of court-gallants in the “spacious days of great Elizabeth,” and we added the modern tribute of applause, which our queen acknowledged with a silvery laugh. I remember only that the gown was white, and of some silky stuff, and that about La Diva’s neck were loops of pearls, and that above her fluffy chestnut hair were glittering jewels. With women it may be different, but no man can give a list of Patti’s adornments on any occasion; he knows only that they become her, and that he sees only her radiant face. Before our murmurs of delight had ceased, Patti, who had not entered the room, but merely stood in the portal of it, turned, taking the arm of the guest who was to sit at her right hand, and away we marched in her train, as if she were truly the queen, through the corridors to the conservatory, where dinner was served.

It was my privilege at the castle table to sit at Madame Patti’s left. At her right was one whose friendship with her dates from the instant of her first European triumph, thirty-two years ago. I was taken into the family, as it were. But the best of my privilege was that it brought me so near our hostess, and made easy conversation possible. The delight of those déjeuners and dinners at Craig-y-Nos is not to be forgotten. There is a notion503 abroad that these meals are held in state; but they are not. There is merely the ordinary dinner custom of an English mansion. The menu, though, is stately enough, for the art culinary is practised in its most exquisite fashion there. The dining-room is very seldom used, for, handsome as that apartment is, Patti, and her guests too, for that matter, prefer to eat in the great glass room which was formerly the conservatory and is still called so. There we sit, as far as outlook goes, out of doors, for, in whatever direction we gaze, we look up or down the Swansea Valley, across to the mountains, and along the tumbling course of the river Tawe. To the imminent neglect of my repast, I sat gazing at the wood-covered cliffs of Craig-y-Nos (Rock-of-the-Night) opposite, and listening to the ceaseless music of the mountain stream. Patti, noticing my admiration for the view, said, “You see what a dreadful place it is in which I bury myself.”

“‘Bury’ yourself! On the contrary, you have here all the charms of life, and you seem to have discovered the fountain of perpetual youth. A ‘dreadful’ place? Indeed, it is a paradise in miniature!”

“But one of your countrymen says that I hide far from the world among the ugly Welsh hills. He writes it in an American journal of fabulous circulation, and I suppose people believe the tale, do they not?” La Diva laughed heartily at the thought of a too credulous public, and then she added: “Really, they do write the oddest things about my home, as if it were either the scene of Jack the Giant-killer’s exploits on the top of the Beanstalk, or a prison in a desolate land.”

After visiting Patti at Craig-y-Nos one need no longer wonder why this enchanting woman sings “Home, Sweet Home” with such feeling. For she inhabits a paradise. There is not anywhere a lovelier spot, nor is there elsewhere a place so remote and at the same time so complete in attractiveness, and in every resource of civilization.

The dinner passed on merrily. Merrily is exactly the word to describe it. Up and down the table good stories flew, sometimes faster than we could catch them. Nobody likes a good joke better than Patti, and when she heard one that particularly pleased her she would interpret it to some guest who had not sufficiently mastered the language in which the original anecdote was told. It was delightful comedy, and after watching it with high pleasure, while La Diva spoke in a brace of languages, I said: “I wonder if you have what people call a native tongue, or whether in all of them you are ‘native and to the manner born’?”

“Oh, I don’t know so many,” she replied, “only—let’s see—English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Russian.”

“I really don’t know. To me there is no difference, as far as readiness goes,504 and I suppose that in all of them readiness helps.”

“Oh, yes, Italian. Listen!” And then she recited an Italian poem. Next to hearing Patti sing, the sweetest sound is her Italian speech. I expressed my delight, and she said:

“Speaking of languages, Mr. Gladstone paid me a pretty compliment a little while ago. I will show you his letter to-morrow, if you care to see it.”

Patti forgets nothing. The next day she brought me Mr. Gladstone’s letter. The Grand Old Man had been among her auditors at Edinburgh, and after her performance he went upon the stage to thank her for the pleasure he had felt in listening to her songs. He complained a little of a cold which had been troubling him, and Patti begged him to try some lozenges which she had found useful. That night she sent a little box of them to Mr. Gladstone, and the statesman acknowledged the gift with this letter:

“6 Rothesay Terrace, Edinburgh,
October 22, 1890.

“Dear Madame Patti:

“I do not know how to thank you enough for your charming gift. I am afraid, however, that the use of your lozenges will not make me your rival. Voce quastata di ottante’ anni non si ricupera.

“It was a rare treat to hear from your Italian lips last night the songs of my own tongue, rendered with a delicacy of modulation and a fineness of utterance such as no native ever in my hearing has reached or even approached. Believe me,

“Faithfully yours,

“W. E. Gladstone.”

This letter very naturally gave our conversation a reminiscent turn, and, after some talk of great folk she has known, I asked Madame Patti what had been the proudest experience in her career. “For a great and unexpected honor most gracefully tendered, nothing that has touched me deeper than a compliment paid by the Prince of Wales and a distinguished company, at a dinner given in honor of the Duke of York and the Princess May, a little while before their wedding. The dinner was given by Mr. Alfred Rothschild, one of my oldest and best friends. There were many royalties present, and more dukes and duchesses than I can easily remember. During the ceremonies the Prince of Wales arose, and to my great astonishment, proposed the health of his ‘old and valued friend Madame Patti.’ He made such a pretty speech, and in the course of it said that he had first seen and heard me in Philadelphia in 1860, when I sang in ‘Martha,’ and505 that since then his own attendance at what he was good enough to call my ‘victories in the realm of song’ had been among his most pleasant recollections. He recalled the fact that on one of the occasions when the princess and himself had invited me to Marlborough House, his wife had held up little Prince George, in whose honor we were this night assembled, and bade him kiss me, so that in after life he might say that he had ‘kissed the famous Madame Patti.’ And then, do you know, that whole company of royalty, nobility, and men of genius rose and cheered me and drank my health. Don’t you think that any little woman would be proud, and ought to be proud, of a spontaneous tribute like that?”

It is difficult, when repeating thus in print such snatches of autobiography, to suggest the modest tone and manner of the person whose words may be recorded. It is particularly difficult in the case of Madame Patti, who is as absolutely unspoiled as the freshest ingénue. Autobiography such as hers must read a little fanciful to most folk; it is so far removed from the common experiences of us all, and even from the extraordinary experiences of the renowned persons we usually hear about. But there is not a patch of vanity in Patti’s sunny nature. Her life has been a long, unbroken record of success—success of a degree attained by no other woman; no one else has won and held such homage; no one else has been so wondrously endowed with beauty and genius and sweet simplicity of nature—a nature unspoiled by flattery, by applause, by wealth, by the possession and exercise of power. Patti at fifty is like a girl in her ways, in her thoughts, in her spirit, in her disinterestedness, in her enjoyments. Time has dimmed none of her charms, it has lessened none of her superb gifts. She said to me one day: “They tell me I am getting to be an old woman, but I don’t believe it. I don’t feel old. I feel young. I am the youngest person of my acquaintance.” That is true enough, as they know who see Patti from day to day. She has all the enthusiasms and none of the affectations of a young girl. When she speaks of herself it is with the most delicious frankness and lack of self-consciousness. She is perfectly natural.

She promised to show me the programme of that Philadelphia performance before the Prince of Wales so long ago, and the next day she put it before me. It is a satin programme with gilt fringe, and its announcement is surmounted by the Prince of Wales’s feathers. At that Philadelphia performance Adelina Patti made her first appearance before royalty. In the next year she made her London début. It was at Covent Garden, as Amina in “La Sonnambula.” The next morning Europe rang with the fame of the506 new prima donna from America. “I tried to show them that the young lady from America was entitled to a hearing,” said she, as we looked over the old programmes.

“And has the ‘young lady from America’ retained that spirit of national pride, or has she become so much a citizen of the world that no corner of it has any greater claim than another upon her affections?”

“I love the Italian language, the American people, the English country, and my Welsh home.”

“A choice yet catholic selection. The national preferences, if you can be said to own any, have reason on their side. Your parents were Italian, you were born in Spain, you grew from girlhood to womanhood in America, you first won international fame in England, and among these Welsh hills you have planted a paradise.”

“How nice of you! That evening at Mr. Alfred Rothschild’s, the Prince of Wales asked me why I do not stay in London during ‘the season,’ and take some part in its endless social pleasures. ‘Because, your Royal Highness,’ I replied, ‘I have a lovely home in Wales, and whenever I come away from it I leave my heart there.’ ‘After all,’ said the prince, ‘why should you stay in London when the whole world is only too glad to make pilgrimages to Craig-y-Nos?’ Wasn’t that pretty?”

I wish I could somehow convey the naïveté with which the last three words were uttered. The tone expressed the most innocent pleasure in the world. Indeed, when Patti speaks in this way she seems to be wondering why people should say and do so many pleasant things in her behalf. There is an air of childish wonder in her look and voice.

I said: “All good republicans have a passion for royalty. I find that an article about a king or a queen or a prince is in greater demand in the United States than anywhere else in the world. Do tell me something more about the Prince and Princess of Wales. I promise you, as a zealous democrat, that no one on the far side of the Atlantic will skip a word. Have the prince and princess visited Craig-y-Nos?”

“No. But they were coming here a couple of years ago. See—here is507 the prince’s letter fixing the date. But it was followed by their sudden bereavement, and then for many, many months they lived in quiet and mourning, only coming forth in their usual way just before the recent royal wedding. They sent me an invitation to the wedding festivities. But alas! I could not attend them. I had just finished my season, and was lying painfully ill with rheumatism. You heard of that? For weeks I suffered acutely. It’s an old complaint. I have had it at intervals since I was a child. But about the royal wedding. When the Prince and Princess of Wales learned that I was too ill to accept their gracious invitation, they—well, what do you suppose they did next?”

“They sent me two large portraits of themselves, bearing their autographs, and fitted into great gilt frames. You shall see the portraits after dinner. They occupy the place of honor in Craig-y-Nos Castle.”

We had reached the coffee stage of the dinner, and the cigars were being passed. The ladies did not withdraw, according to the mediæval and popular English habit, but the company remained unbroken, and while the gentlemen smoked, the ladies kept them in conversation. Presently, some one proposed Patti’s health, and we all stood, singing “For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow.”

That put the ball of merriment in motion. One of the young ladies, a goddaughter of our hostess, carolled a stanza from a popular ditty. At first I thought it audacious that any one should sing in the presence of La Diva. It seemed an act of sacrilege. But in another instant we were all at it, piping the chorus, and Patti leading off. The fun of the thing was infectious. The song finished, we ventured another, and Patti joined us in the refrains of a medley of music-hall airs, beginning with London’s latest mania, “Daisy Bell, or a Bicycle Made for Two,” and winding up with Chevalier’s “Old Kent Road” and the “Coster’s Serenade,” Coburn’s “Man that Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo,” and the transatlantic “Daddy Wouldn’t Buy me a Bow-Wow.”

“On the contrary, I find it very jolly, not to say a rare experience; for it is not everybody who has heard you sing comic songs.”

Patti’s answer was a peal of laughter, and then she sat there singing very softly a stanza of “My Old Kentucky Home,” and as we finished the chorus she lifted a clear, sweet note, which thrilled us through and through, and stirred us to rapturous applause. “What have I done?” Patti put the question with a puzzled look. The reply came from the adjoining library: “High E.” One of our number had run to sound the piano pitch. Then I recalled what Sir Morell Mackenzie had told me a little while before he died. I was chatting with the great physician in that famous room of his in Harley Street. We happened to mention Madame Patti. “That great singer,” said Sir Morell, “has the most wonderful throat I have ever seen; it is the only one I have ever seen with the vocal chords in absolutely perfect condition after many years of use. They are not strained, or warped or roughened, but, as I tell you, they are absolutely perfect. There is no reason why they should not remain so ten years longer, and with care and health twenty years longer.”

Remembering this, I asked Madame Patti if she had taken extraordinary care of her voice. “I have never tired it,” said she; “I never sing when I am tired, and that means that I am never tired when I sing. And I have never strained for high notes. I have heard that the first question asked of new vocalists nowadays is ‘How high can you sing?’ But I have always thought that the least important matter in singing. One should sing only what one can sing with perfect ease.”

“But in eating and drinking? According to all accounts you are most abstemious in these things.”

“No, indeed. I avoid very hot and very cold dishes, otherwise I eat and drink whatever I like. My care is chiefly to avoid taking cold, and to avoid indigestion. But these are the ordinary precautions of one who knows that health is the key to happiness.”

“And in practising? Have you rigid rules for that? One hears of astounding exercise and self-denial.”

“Brilliant achievements in fiction. For practising I run a few scales twenty minutes a day. After a long professional tour I let my voice rest for a month and do not practise at all during that time.”

During my visit to Craig-y-Nos we usually spent our evenings in the billiard-rooms. There are two at the castle, an English room and a French one. In the French room there is the great orchestrion which Madame Patti had built in Geneva at a cost of twenty thousand dollars. It is operated by electricity, and is said to be the finest instrument of the kind in the world. Monsieur Nicolini would start it of an evening, and the wonderful contrivance would “discourse most eloquent music” from a repertoire of one hundred and sixteen pieces, including arias from grand operas, military marches, and simple ballads. Music is the one charm that Madame Patti cannot resist. The simplest melody stirs her to song. In the far corner from the orchestrion she will sit, in an enticing easy-chair, and hum the air that is rolling from the organ-pipes, keeping time with her dainty feet, or moving her head as the air grows livelier. Now and again she sends forth some lark-like troll, and then she will urge the young people to a dance, or a chorus, and when every one is tuned to the full pitch of melody and merriment she will join in the fun as heartily as the rest. I used to sit and watch her play the castanets, or hear her snatch an air or two from “Martha,” “Lucia,” or “Traviata.”

One night the younger fry of us were chanting negro melodies, and Patti came into the room, warbling as if possessed by an ecstasy. “I love those darky songs,” said she, and straightway she sang to us, with that inimitable purity and tenderness which are hers alone, “Way Down Upon the Swanee River,” and “Massa’s in the Cold, Cold Ground,” and after that “Home, Sweet Home,” while all of us listeners felt the tears rising, or the lumps swelling in our throats.

Guests at Craig-y-Nos are the most510 fortunate of mortals. If the guest be a gentleman, a valet is told off to attend upon him; if the guest be a lady, a handmaid is placed at her service. Breakfast is served in one’s room at any hour one may choose. Patti never comes down before high noon. She rises at half-past eight, but remains until twelve in her apartments, going through her correspondence with her secretary, and practising a little music. At half-past twelve an elaborate déjeuner is served in the glass pavilion. Until that hour a guest is free to follow his own devices. He may go shooting, fishing, riding, walking, or he may stroll about the lovely demesne, and see what manner of heavenly nook nature and Patti have made for themselves among the hills of Wales. Patti’s castle is in every sense a palatial dwelling. She saw it fifteen years ago, fell in love with it, purchased it, and has subsequently expended at least half a million dollars in enlarging and equipping it. The castellated mansion, with the theatre at one end and the pavilion and winter garden at the other, shows a frontage of fully a thousand feet along the terraced banks of the Tawe. But the place has been so often described that it is unnecessary for me to repeat the oft-told story, or to give details of the gasworks, the electric-lighting station, the ice-plant and cold-storage rooms, the steam-laundry, the French and English kitchens, the stables, the carriage-houses, the fifty servants, the watchfulness of Caroline Baumeister, the superintending zeal of William Heck. These matters are a part of the folk-lore of England and America. But I would like to say something of Patti’s little theatre. It is her special and particular delight. She gets more pleasure from it than from any other of the many possessions of Craig-y-Nos. It is a gem of a place, well-proportioned and exquisitely decorated. Not only can the sloping floor be quickly raised, so that the auditorium may be transformed into a ballroom, but the appurtenances of the stage are the most elaborate and perfect extant. For this statement I have the authority of511 an assistant stage-manager of the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden. This expert was supervising some alterations at the Patti theatre while I was at Craig-y-Nos, and he told me that the pretty house contained every accessory for the production of forty operas.

Occasionally Patti sings at concerts in her theatre. All her life she has treasured her voice for the public; she has never exhausted it by devising an excess of entertainment for her personal friends. So most of the performances in the little theatre are pantomimic. Although Patti seemed to me always to be humming and singing while I was at the castle, yet there was nothing of the “performing” order in what she did. She merely went singing softly about the house, or joining in our choruses, like a happy girl.

I remember that one morning, while a dozen of us were sitting in the shade of the terrace, the ladies with their fancy work, the gentlemen with their books and cigars, we heard from the open windows above us a burst of song, full-throated like a bird’s. It was for all the world like the notes of an English lark, which always sings in a kind of glorious ecstasy, as it mounts and mounts in the air, the merrier as it climbs the higher, until it pours from its invisible height a shower of joyous song. No one among us stirred. La Diva thought us far away up the valley, where we had planned an excursion, but we had postponed the project to a cooler day. We were afraid of disturbing Madame, so we kept silent and listened. Our unseen entertainer seemed to be bustling about her boudoir, singing as she flitted, snatching a bar or two from this opera and that, revelling in the fragment of a ballad, and trilling a few scales like my friend the lark. Presently she ceased, and we were about to stir, when she began to sing “Comin’ Thro’ the Rye.” She was alone in her room, but she was singing as gloriously as if to an audience of ten thousand persons in the Albert Hall. The unsuspected group of listeners on the terrace slipped from their own control and took to vigorous hand-smiting and cries of delight.

“Oh,” said she, “I couldn’t help it, really I could not. I am so happy!”

At luncheon Madame proposed an entertainment in the theatre for the evening. We were to have “Camille” in pantomime.

She persuaded Monsieur Nicolini to be the Armand Duval. Nicolini had never cared to act in the little theatre, but now he consented to make his début as a pantomimist, and he proved to be a master of the art. He had learned it, in fact, at the Conservatoire, when, as a young man, he had studied for the stage. “In those days,” says he, “the study of pantomime was part of an actor’s training. Pity it is not so now.”

The preparations for the pantomime went on apace. Among the guests were several capable amateurs. The performance began a little after ten on the evening of the following day. Some musicians were brought from Swansea. A dozen gentlefolk hastily512 summoned from the valley, those of us among the guests who were not enrolled for the pantomime, and a gallery full of peasantry and servants, made up the audience. We had “Camille” in five acts of pantomime, and altogether it was a capital performance, and a memorable one. Of course, Madame Patti and her husband carried off the honors. There was a supper after the play, and the sunlight crept into the Swansea Valley within two hours after we had retired.

I said to Patti after the pantomime, “You do not seem to believe that change of occupation is the best possible rest. You appear to me to work as hard at rehearsing and acting in your little theatre as if you were ‘on tour.’”

“Not quite. Besides, it isn’t work, it is play,” replied the miraculous little woman. “I love the theatre. And, then, there is always something to learn about acting. I find these pantomime performances very useful as well as very pleasant.”

Every afternoon about three o’clock Patti and her guests go for a drive, a small procession of landaus and brakes rattling along the smooth country roads. You can see at once that this is Patti-land. The cottagers come to their doors and salute her Melodious Majesty, and all the children of the country-side run out and throw kisses. “Oh! the dears,” exclaimed the kind-hearted cantatrice as we were driving toward the village of Ystradgynlais (they call it “Ist-rag-dun-las”), one afternoon,513 “I should like to build another castle and put all those mites into it, and let them live there amid music and flowers!” And I believe that she would have given orders for such a castle straightway, had there been a builder within sight.

On the way home Patti promised me “a surprise” for the evening. I wondered what it might be, and when the non-appearance of the ladies kept the gentlemen waiting in the drawing-room at dinner-time I was the more puzzled. Nicolini, to pass the time, showed us some of Madame’s trophies. It would be impossible to enumerate them, because Craig-y-Nos Castle is like another South Kensington Museum in the treasures it holds. Every shelf, table, and cabinet is packed with gifts which Madame Patti has received from all parts of the earth, from monarchs and millionaires, princes and peasants, old friends and strangers. There is Marie Antoinette’s watch, to begin with, and there are the new portraits of the Prince and Princess of Wales, to end with. There is a remarkable collection of portraits of royal personages, presented to Madame Patti by the distinguished originals on the occasion of her marriage to M. Nicolini. Photographs of the Grand Old Man of Politics and the Grand Old Man of Music rest side by side, on a little table presented by some potentate. Gladstone’s likeness bears his autograph, and the inscription: “Con tanti e tanti complimenti;” Verdi’s, his autograph, and a fervid tribute written in Milan a year ago. There are crowns and wreaths and rare china; there are paintings and plate and I know not what, wherever one looks. If one were to make Patti a gift, and he had a king’s ransom to purchase it withal, he would find it difficult to give her anything that would be a novelty, or that would be unique, in her eyes. She has everything now. For my part, I would pluck a rose from her garden, or gather a nosegay from a hedgerow, and it would please her as truly as if it were a priceless diadem. She values the thought that prompts the giving, rather than the gift itself. She never forgets even the smallest act of kindness that is done for her sake. And she is always doing kindnesses for others. I have heard from the Welsh folk many tales of her generous charities. And to her friends she is the most open-handed of women. There was one dank, drizzly day while I was at Craig-y-Nos. To the men this did not matter. The wet did not interfere with their projected amusements. But every lady wore some precious jewel which Patti had given her that morning—a ring, a brooch, a bracelet, as the case might be. For the generous creature thought her fair friends would be disappointed because they could not get out of doors that day. How could she know that every one in the castle welcomed the rain because514 it meant a few hours more with Patti?

The “surprise” she had spoken of was soon apparent. The ladies came trooping into the drawing-room attired in the gowns and jewels of Patti’s operatic rôles. Patti herself came last, in “Leonora’s” white and jewels. What a dinner party we had that night—we men, in the prim black and white of “evening dress,” sitting there with “Leonora,” and “Desdemona,” and “Marguerite,” and “Rachel,” and “Lucia,” and “Carmen,” and “Dinorah,” and I know not how many more! Nobody but Patti would have thought of such merry masquerading, or, having thought of it, would have gone to the trouble of providing it.

Of course, we talked of her favorite characters in opera, and then of singers she has known. She said it would give her real pleasure to hear Mario and Grisi again, or, coming to later days, Scalchi and Annie Louise Cary. The latter being an American and a friend, I was glad to hear this appreciation of her from the Queen of Song. “Cary and Scalchi were the two greatest contraltos I have ever known; and I have sung with both of them. I remember Annie Louise Cary as a superb artist, and a sweet and noble woman.” I said “Hear, hear,” in the parliamentary manner, and then Patti added: “Now we will go into the theatre again. There is to be another entertainment.” It was, of all unexpected things, a magic-lantern show. Patti’s magic-lantern is like everything else at Craig-y-Nos, from her piano to her pet parrot, the only one of its kind. It is capable of giving, with all sorts of “mechanical effects,” a two-hours’ entertainment every night for two months without repeating a scene. Patti invited me to sit beside her and watch the dissolving views. It seemed to me that it would be like this to sit by the queen during a “state performance” at Windsor. Here was Patti Imperatrice, dressed like a queen, wearing a crown of diamonds, and attended by her retinue of brilliantly attired women and attentive gentlemen of the court. And it was so like her to cause the entertainment to begin with a series of American views, and to hum softly a verse of “Home, Sweet Home,” as we looked out upon New York harbor from an imaginary steamship inward bound.

The next morning I started from Craig-y-Nos for America. As the dog-cart was tugged slowly up the mountain-side the Stars and Stripes saluted me from the castle tower, waving farewell as I withdrew from my peep at paradise.

ONCE ABOARD THE LUGGER.

Early last fall there died in Troy an old man and his wife. The woman went first, and the husband took a chill at her grave’s edge, when he stood bareheaded in a lashing shower. The loose earth crumbled under his feet, trickling over, and dropped on her coffin-lid. Through two long nights he lay on his bed without sleeping, and listened to this sound. At first it ran in his ears perpetually, but afterwards he heard it at intervals only, in the pauses of acute suffering. On the seventh day he died, of pleuro-pneumonia; and on the tenth (a Sunday) they buried him. For just fifty years the dead man had been minister of the Independent chapel on the hill, and had laid down his pastorate two years before, on his golden wedding day. Consequently there was a funeral sermon, and the young man, his successor, chose II. Samuel, i. 23, for his text: “Lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided.” Himself a newly married man, he waxed dithyrambic on the sustained affection and accord of the departed couple. “Truly,” he wound up, “such marriages as theirs were made in heaven.” And could they have heard, the two bodies in the cemetery had not denied it; but the woman, after the fashion of women, would have qualified the young minister’s assertion in her secret heart.

When, at the close of the year 1839, Reverend Samuel Bax visited Troy for the first time, to preach his trial sermon at Salem chapel, he arrived by Bontigo’s van, late on a Saturday night, and departed again for Plymouth at seven o’clock on Monday morning. He had just turned twenty-one, and looked younger, and the zeal of his calling was strong upon him. Moreover, he was shaken with nervous anxiety for the success of his sermon; so that it is no marvel if he carried away but blurred and misty impressions of the little port, and the congregation that sat beneath him that morning, ostensibly reverent, but actually on the lookout for heresy or any sign of weakness. Their impressions, at any rate, were sharp enough. They counted his thumps upon the desk, noted his one reference to “the original Greek,” saw and remembered the flush of his young face and the glow in his eye as he hammered the doctrine of the redemption out of original sin. The deacons fixed the subject of these trial sermons, and had chosen original sin, on the ground that a good beginning was half the battle. The maids in the congregation knew beforehand that he was unmarried, and came out of the chapel knowing also that his eyes were brown, that his hair had a reddish tinge in certain lights, that one of his cuffs was frayed slightly, but his black coat had516 scarcely been worn a dozen times, with other trifles. They loitered by the chapel door until he came out, in company with Deacon Snowden, who was conveying him off to dinner. The deacon, on week days, was harbor-master of the port, and on Sundays afforded himself roasted duck for dinner. Lizzie Snowden walked at her father’s right hand. She was a slightly bloodless blonde, tall, with a pretty complexion, and hair upon which it was rumored she could sit if she were so minded. The girls watched the young preacher and his entertainers as they moved down the hill, the deacon talking, and his daughter turning her head aside as if it were merely in the section of the world situated on her right hand that she took the least interest.

“That’s to show ’en the big plait,” commented one of the group behind. “He can’t turn his head hes way, but it stares ’en in the face.”

“I reckon, if he’s chosen minister, that Lizzie’ll have ’en,” said a tall, lanky girl. She was apprenticed to a dressmaker and engaged to a young tinsmith. Having laid aside ambition on her own account, she flung in this remark as an apple of discord.

“Tenifer Hosken has a chance. He’s fair-skinned hissel’, and Lizzie’s too near his own color. Black’s mate is white, as they say.”

“There’s Sue Tregraine. She’ll have more money than either, when her father dies.”

The only answer was a shrug. Ruan is a small town that faces Troy across the diminutive harbor, or, perhaps, I should say that Troy looks down upon it at this slight distance. When a Trojan speaks of it he says, “Across the water,” with as much implied contempt as though he meant Botany Bay. There is no cogent reason for this, except that the poorer class at Ruan earns its livelihood by fishing. In the eyes of its neighbors the shadow of this lonely calling is cast upwards upon its wealthier inhabitants. Troy depends on commerce, and employs these wealthier men of Ruan to build ships for it. Further it will hardly condescend. In the days of which I write intermarriage between the towns was almost unheard-of, and even now it is rare. Yet they are connected by a penny ferry.

Now there was a Ruan girl standing just outside this group, and she heard what was said. Her name was Nance Trewartha, and her father was a fisherman, who did, in fact, keep crab-pots. Moreover, she was his only child, and helped him at his trade. She could handle a boat as well as a man, she knew every sea-mark up and down the coast for forty miles, she could cut up bait, and her hands were horny with handling ropes from her childhood. But on Sundays she wore gloves, and came across the ferry to chapel, and was as wise as any of her sex. She had known before coming out of her pew that the young minister had a well-shaped back517 to his head, and a gold ring on his little finger with somebody’s hair in the collet, under a crystal. She was dark, straight, and lissome of figure, with ripe lips and eyes as black as sloes, and she hoped that the hair in the minister’s ring was his mother’s. She was well aware of her social inferiority; but—the truth may be told—she chose to forget it that morning, and to wonder what this young man would be like as a husband. She had looked up into his face during sermon time, devouring his boyish features, noticing his refined accent, marking every gesture. Certainly, he was comely and desirable. As he walked down the hill by Deacon Snowden’s side, she was perfectly conscious of the longing in her heart, but prepared to put a stop to it, and go home to dinner as soon as he had turned the corner and passed out of sight. Then came that unhappy remark about the crab-pots. She bit her lip for a moment, turned, and walked slowly off towards the ferry, full of thought.

He arrived, to assume his duties, in the waning light of a soft January day. Bontigo’s van set him down, with a carpet-bag, bandbox, and chest of books, at the door of the lodgings which Deacon Snowden had taken for him. The house stood in the North Street, as it is called. It was a small, yellow-washed building, containing just half a dozen rooms, and of these the two set apart for the minister looked straight upon the harbor. Under his sitting-room window was a little garden, and at the end of the garden a low wall, with a stretch of water beyond it and a bark that lay at anchor but a stone’s throw away, as it seemed, its masts overtopping the misty hillside that closed the view. A green painted door was let into the garden wall—a door with two flaps, the upper of which stood open; and through this opening he caught another glimpse of gray water.

The landlady, who showed him into this room and at once began to explain that the furniture was better than it looked, was hardly prepared for the rapture with which he stared out of the window. His boyhood had been spent in a sooty Lancashire town, and to him the green garden, the quay door, the bark, and the stilly water seemed to fall little short of Paradise.

“I reckoned you’d like it,” she said. “An’, to be sure, ’tis a blessing you do.”

He turned his stare upon her for a moment. She was a benign-looking woman of about fifty, in a short-skirted gray gown and widow’s cap.

“Because, leavin’ out the kitchen, there’s but four rooms, two for you an’ two for me; two facin’ the harbor, an’518 two facin’ the street. Now, if you’d took a dislike to this look-out I must ha’ put you over the street an’ moved in here mysel’. I do like the street, too, there’s so much more doin’.”

“I think this arrangement will be better in every way,” said the young minister.

“I’m main glad. Iss, there’s no denyin’ that I’m main glad. From upstairs you can see right down the harbor, which is prettier again. Would’ee like to see it now? O’ course you would—an’ it’ll be so much handier for answerin’ the door, too. There’s a back door at the end o’ the passage. You’ve only to slip a bolt an’ you’m out in the garden—out to your boat, if you choose to keep one. But the garden’s a tidy little spot to walk up an’ down in an’ make up your sermons, wi’ nobody to overlook you but the folk next door, an’ they’m churchgoers.”

After supper that evening the young minister unpacked his books and was about to arrange them, but drifted to the window instead. He paused for a minute or two, with his face close to the pane, and then flung up the sash. A faint north wind breathed down the harbor, scarcely ruffling the water. Around and above him the frosty sky flashed with innumerable stars, and behind the bark’s masts, behind the long chine of the eastern hill, a soft radiance heralded the rising moon. It was the new moon, and while he waited, her thin horn pushed up, as it were, through the furze brake on the hill’s summit, and she mounted into the free heaven. With upturned eyes the young minister followed her course for twenty minutes, not consciously observant, for he was thinking over his ambitions, and at his time of life these are apt to soar with the moon.519 Though possessed with zeal for good work in this small seaside town, he intended that Troy should be but a stepping-stone in his journey. He meant to go far. And while he meditated his future, forgetting the chill in the night air, it was being decided for him by a stronger will than his own. More than this, that will had already passed into action. His destiny was actually launched on the full spring tide that sucked the crevices of the gray wall at the garden’s end.

A slight sound drew the minister’s gaze down from the moon to the quay-door. Its upper flap still stood open, allowing a square of moonlight to pierce the straight black shadow of the garden wall.

In this square of moonlight were now framed the head and shoulders of a human being.

The young man felt a slight chill run down his spine. He leaned forward out of the window and challenged the apparition, bating his tone, as all people bate it at that hour.

There was no reply for a moment, though he felt sure his voice must have carried to the quay-door. The figure paused for a second or two, then unbarred the lower flap of the door and advanced across the wall’s shadow to the centre of the bright grassplot under the window. It was the figure of a young woman. Her head was bare and her sleeves turned up to the elbows. She wore no cloak or wrap, to cover her from the night air, and her short-skirted, coarse frock was open at the neck. As she turned up her face to the window, the minister could see by the moon’s rays that it was well-favored.

“Be you the new preacher?” she asked, resting a hand on her hip and speaking softly up to him.

“Iss; my name’s Nance Trewartha, an’ you ’en wanted across the water, quick as possible. Old Mrs. Slade’s a-dyin’ to-night, over yonder.”

“She’s one o’ your congregation, an’ can’t die easy till you’ve seen her. I reckon she’s got something ’pon her mind; an’ I was to fetch you over, quick as I could.”

As she spoke the church clock down in the town chimed out the hour, and immediately after, ten strokes sounded on the clear air.

“Very well,” said he, after a pause. “I’ll come. I suppose I must cross by the ferry.”

“Ferry’s closed this two hours, an’ you needn’t wake up any in the house. I’ve brought father’s boat to the ladder below, an’ I’ll bring you back again. You’ve only to step out here by the back door. An’ wrap yourself up, for ’tis a brave distance.”

The young man nodded down in a friendly manner, and going back into the room, slipped on his overcoat, picked up his hat, and turned the lamp down carefully. Then he struck a match, found his way to the back door, and unbarred it. The girl was waiting for him, still in the centre of the grassplot.

“I’m glad you’ve come,” she repeated, but this time there was something like constraint in her voice. As he pulled to the door softly, she moved and led the way down to the water side.

From the quay-door a long ladder ran down to the water. At low water one had to descend twenty feet and more; but now the high tide left but three of its rungs uncovered. At the young minister’s feet a small fishing-boat lay ready, moored by a short painter to the ladder. The girl stepped lightly down and held up her hand.

“Thank you,” said the young man, with dignity, “but I do not want help.”

She made no answer to this; but, as he stepped down, went forward and unmoored the painter. Then she pushed gently away from the ladder, hoisted the small foresail, and, returning to520 her companion, stood beside him for a moment with her hand on the tiller.

The young man looked helplessly at her. He had not the slightest idea of her meaning, did not, in fact, know the difference between a foresheet and a mainsail. And it was just to find out the depth of his ignorance that she had spoken.

She made the rope fast and took hold of the tiller again. The sails shook, and filled softly as they glided out from under the wall. The soft breeze blew straight behind them, the tide was just beginning to ebb. She slackened the mainsheet a little, and the water hissed as they spun down under the gray town towards the harbor’s mouth.

A dozen vessels lay at anchor below the town quay, their lamps showing a strange orange-yellow in the moonlight; between them the minister saw the cottages of Ruan glimmering on the eastern shore, and above them the coastguard station, with its flagstaff, a clear white upon the black hillside. It seemed to him that they were not shaping their course for the little town.

“I thought you told me,” he said at length, “that Mrs.—the dying woman—lived across there.”

The girl shook her head. “Not in Ruan itsel’—Ruan parish. We’ll have to go round the point.”

She was leaning back and gazing straight before her, towards the harbor’s mouth. The boat was one of the class that serves along that coast for hook and line as well as drift-net fishing, clinker built, about twenty-seven feet in the keel and nine in the beam. It had no deck beyond a small cuddy forward, on top of which a light hoarfrost was gathering as they moved. The minister stood beside the girl, and withdrew his eyes from this cuddy roof to contemplate her.

“Do you mean to say,” he asked, “that you don’t take cold wearing no wrap or bonnet on frosty nights like this?”

She let the tiller go for a moment, took his hand by the wrist and laid it on her own bare arm. He felt the flesh, but it was firm and warm. Then he withdrew his hand hastily, without finding anything to say. His eyes avoided hers. When, after half a minute, he looked at her again, her gaze was fixed straight ahead upon the misty stretch of sea beyond the harbor’s mouth.

In a minute or two they were sweeping between the tall cliff and the reef of rocks that guard this entrance on either side. On the reef stood a wooden cross, painted white, warning vessels to give it a wide berth; on the cliff a gray castle, with a battery before it, under the guns of which they spun seaward, still with the wind astern.

Outside the sea lay as smooth as within the harbor. The wind blew steadily off the shore, so that, close-hauled, one might fetch up or down channel with equal ease. The girl began to flatten the sails, and asked her companion to bear a hand. Their hands met over a rope, and the man noted with surprise that the girl’s was feverishly hot. Then she brought the boat’s nose round to the eastward, and, heeling gently over the dark water,521 they began to skirt the misty coast, with the breeze on their left cheeks.

She nodded towards the first point in the direction of Plymouth. He turned his coat-collar up about his ears, and wondered if his duty would often take him on such journeys as this. Also he felt thankful that the sea was smooth. He might, or might not, be given to seasickness; but somehow he was sincerely glad that he had not to be put to the test for the first time in this girl’s presence.

“I had no idea you were going to take me this distance. Didn’t you tell me the house lay beyond the point we’ve just passed?”

To his amazement the girl drew herself up, looked him straight in the face, and said:

“Because, young minister—because, sir, I’m sick o’ love for you, an’ I want ’ee to marry me.”

“Great heaven!” the young minister muttered, recoiling, “is the girl mad?”

“Ah, but look at me, sir.” She seemed to grow still taller as she stood there, resting one hand on the tiller and looking at him with perfectly serious eyes. “Look at me well before your fancy lights ’pon some other o’ the girls. To-morrow they’ll be all after ’ee, an’ this’ll be my only chance; for my father’s no better’n a plain fisherman, an’ they’re all above me in money an’ rank. I be but a common Ruan girl, an’ my family is counted for naught. But look at me well; there’s none stronger nor comelier, nor that’ll love thee so dear!”

The young man positively gasped. “Set me ashore at once!” he commanded, stamping his foot.

“Nay, that I will not till thou promise, an’ that’s flat. Dear lad, listen—an’ consent, consent—an’ I swear to thee thou’ll never be sorry for’t.”

“I never heard such awful impropriety in my life. Turn back; I order you to steer back to the harbor at once!”

She shook her head. “No, lad, I won’t. An’ what’s more, you don’t know how to handle a boat, an’ couldn’t get back by yoursel’, not in a month.”

“This is stark madness. You—you abandoned woman, how long do you mean to keep me here?”

“Till thou give in to me. We’m goin’ straight t’wards Plymouth now, an’ if th’ wind holds—as ’twill—we’ll be off the Rame in two hours. If you haven’t said me yes by that, maybe we’ll go on; or perhaps we’ll run across to the coast o’ France——”

“And oh, man, man! can’t ’ee see that I’m ruined, too, if I turn back without your word? How shall I show my face in Troy streets again, tell me?”

“You should have thought of that before,” he said, employing the one obvious answer.

“O’ course I thought of it. But for love o’ you I made up my mind to risk it. An’ now there’s no goin’ back.” She paused a moment and then added, as a thought struck her, “Why, lad, doesn’t that prove I love ’ee uncommon?”

He bit his lips and moved forward to the cuddy, on the roof of which he seated himself sulkily. The girl tossed him an end of rope.

“Dear, better coil that up an’ sit upon it. The frost’ll strike a chill into thee.”

With this she resumed her old attitude by the tiller. Her eyes were fixed ahead, her gaze passing just over the minister’s hat. When he glanced up he saw the rime twinkling on her shoulders and the starshine in her dark eyes. Around them the firmament blazed with constellations, up to its coping. Never had the minister seen them so multitudinous or so resplendent. Never before had heaven seemed so alive to him. He could almost hear it breathe. And beneath it the little boat raced eastward, with the reef-points pattering on its tan sails.

Neither spoke. For the most part the minister avoided the girl’s eyes, and sat nursing his wrath. The whole affair was ludicrous; but it meant the sudden ruin of his good name, at the very start of his career. This was the word he kept grinding between his teeth: “ruin,” “ruin.” Whenever it pleased this madwoman to set him ashore he must write to Deacon Snowden for his boxes and resign all connection with Troy. But would he ever get rid of the scandal? Could he ever be sure that, to whatever distance he might flee, it would not follow him? Had he not better abandon his calling once and for all? It was hard!

A star shot down from the Milky Way and disappeared in darkness behind the girl’s shoulder. His eyes, following it, encountered hers. She left the tiller and came slowly forward.

“In three minutes we’ll open Plymouth Sound,” she said, quietly; and then, with a sharp gesture, flung both arms out towards him. “Oh, lad, think better o’t, an’ turn back wi’ me. Say you’ll marry me, for I’m perishin’ o’ love.”

The moonshine fell on her throat and extended arms. Her lips were parted, her head was thrown back a little, and for the first time the young minister saw that she was a beautiful woman.

“Ay, look, look at me,” she pleaded. “That’s what I’ve wanted ’ee to do all along. Take my hands; they’m shapely to look at and strong to work for ’ee.”

Hardly knowing what he did, the young man took them; then in a moment he let them go—but too late; they were about his neck.

With that he sealed his fate for good or ill. He bent forward a little, and their lips met.

So steady was the wind that the boat still held on her course; but no sooner had the girl received the kiss that she knew to be a binding promise than she dropped her arms, walked off, and shifted the helm.

“Unfasten the sheet here,” she commanded, “and duck your head clear o’ the boom.”

As soon as their faces were set for home, the minister walked back to the cuddy roof and sat down to reflect. Not a word was spoken till they reached the harbor’s mouth again, and then he pulled out his watch. It was half-past four in the morning.

Outside the battery point the girl hauled down the sails and got out the sweeps; and together they pulled up under the still sleeping town to the minister’s quay-door. He was clumsy at this work, but she instructed him in whispers, and they managed to reach the ladder as the clocks were striking523 five. The tide was far down by this time, and she held the boat close to the ladder while he prepared to climb. With his foot on the first round he turned. She was white as a ghost, and trembling from top to toe.

“I’m not sure that I do,” he said, and stealing softly up the ladder stood at the top and watched her boat as she steered it back to Ruan.

Three months after they were married, to the indignant amazement of the minister’s congregation. It almost cost him his pulpit, but he held on and triumphed. There is no reason to believe that he ever repented of his choice, or, rather, of Nance’s. To be sure, she had kidnapped him by a lie; but perhaps she had wiped it out by fifty years of honest affection. On that point, however, I, who tell the tale, will not dogmatize.

SONG.

FOUR HUNDRED DEGREES BELOW ZERO.
AN INTERVIEW WITH PROFESSOR JAMES DEWAR.

The science of chemistry, like that of geography, has its undiscovered North Pole. Four hundred and sixty-one degrees below the freezing point of the Fahrenheit thermometer (−274° C.) lies a mysterious, specially indicated degree of cold which science has long been gazing toward and striving to attain, wondering meanwhile what may be the conditions of matter at this unexplored point. Its existence has long been indicated and its position established in two different ways, viz., the regularly diminishing volumes of gases, and the steady falling off in the resistance made by pure metals to the passage through them of electricity under increasing degrees of cold. This point, to which both these processes tend as an ultimate, is called the zero of absolute temperature. By more than one eminent observer it is supposed to be the temperature of inter-stellar space, the normal temperature of the universe. Whether or not this supposition be correct, the efforts which have been made and are still in progress to reach this degree of cold have been many, diverse, and ingenious; the equipment of the explorer being not boats, condensed foods, and the general machinery of ice exploration, but all the varied resources of mechanics and of chemistry which can be combined to compass the extremest degrees of cold.

All the world has heard of Professor James Dewar, and of his late great triumphs in the liquefaction of oxygen gas and the solidification of nitrogen and air. The sensation caused by his extraordinary results won him at once the congratulations of many scientific men, the profuse encomiums of the press, and the flattering recognition of appreciative royal personages. This was largely due to the fact that in the search for this unknown and mysterious point he had plunged much deeper than any chemist before him into the regions of low temperature, and had arrived within sixty degrees Centigrade of the point itself. This exciting and not uneventful journey downward did not take him beyond the confines of his own laboratory, but his description of it, as well as of the properties of matter under extreme cold, has something of the fascination, to the mind possessed of ordinary chemical curiosity, of the story of a Stanley, a Nansen, or a Peary, describing the peculiarities of countries in which they, of all men, have been the first to set their feet.

Professor Dewar, who was born in Kincardine-on-Forth in 1842, was educated at the University of Edinburgh, where his natural and special gifts as a chemist were developed by Sir Lyon Playfair, at that time Professor of Chemistry in the university. The perspicacity and tenacity of purpose which are characteristic of so many Scotchmen were eminently the inheritance of Sir Lyon’s young assistant, and between that period and the present a long series of original investigations in all departments of chemistry have won for Professor Dewar at his prime the Jacksonian Professorship of Natural Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge University, the Fullerian Professorship of Chemistry at the Royal Institution, the Fellowship of the Royal Society, the degree of Doctor of Laws, and other dignities, which make great alphabetical richness after his name upon scientific occasions of state. Personally, he is of middle height and strong build, with a clearly cut face, full of character. His speech, faintly525 flavored with the accent of Scotia, is exact and emphatic; and his manner, whether he is concentrated upon a scientific demonstration in his laboratory or traversing the speculative questions of the hour in ordinary conversation in his drawing-room, has the earnestness of the profound scientist, very agreeably tempered by the polish of the traveller and cosmopolitan man of the world. His absorption in scientific pursuits has not denied him a very marked esthetic development, and his residential suite of apartments at the Royal Institution is filled with treasures, rare tapestries, bronzes, and carvings, picked up at continental dépôts or purchased at the sales of great collections, which would make a highly interesting article in themselves. To her husband’s scientific sense of the value of age in wines, Mrs. Dewar adds her original researches in the matter of choice teas, and it is averred by the eminent membership of the Royal Institution that the degree of domestic civilization which prevails on the third floor of the building is quite as high and more potentially attractive than the stage of scientific civilization which rules in the theatre, the libraries, and the laboratories of the floors below. Like most Scotchmen, however, Professor Dewar is simple in his tastes, and is more deeply stirred by a frozen gas or an antique bronze than anything in the way of bisques or suprêmes. His heart, which shows no signs of low temperature, is mainly in his laboratory, and he leads the way there, down a flight of stone steps to the basement, with a readiness that very clearly exhibits his latent enthusiasm.

Moreover, it is a laboratory eminently calculated to excite the enthusiasm of anybody, being, in fact, the most famous laboratory known to chemical science. The workshop of Sir Humphry Davy, Michael Faraday, and Doctor Thomas Young, to say nothing of lesser and still famous men, it is a nest in which526 more great discoveries have been hatched than any other of its kind on earth. Here it was that Young conducted the experiments which gave us the undulatory theory of light. Here Davy, covering, nearly a hundred years ago, almost the whole field of chemistry and electricity, made clear those principles which science and applied science since his time have developed to the marvellous degrees of to-day. A little room leading to the right of the main laboratory was the scene of all Faraday’s experiments in magnetism, and a cellar on its south side is known to this day as “Davy’s Froggery,” from the fact that Davy kept in it hundreds of live frogs for use in his experiments. Professor Dewar, whose sense of the inspiration of his surroundings is clearly deep, dwells upon them with interest, and tells how on one occasion a barrel of live frogs, imported by Davy from France, burst at the docks, causing astonishment there and consternation in the laboratory when Davy learned of his loss. It was in this laboratory that Faraday first liquefied chlorine gas, sending thereupon that famously curt note to Dr. Paris, the biographer of Davy, in 1823:

All of Faraday’s work in the liquefaction of gases, the discovery of new hydrocarbons, the study of the changes of steel through the slight admixture of other metals, the improvement of optical glass, and the long list of results which are to-day represented in millions of tons of products from thousands of factories, were obtained within these four walls. And nothing could better illustrate the earnestness and modesty of the great chemist than a little anecdote which Professor Dewar, standing in the centre of the room, calls to mind. “I never met Faraday,” says he, “but Tyndall told me this story of him. The first time Tyndall entered this laboratory, Faraday led him to this point and said: ‘Tyndall, this is a sacred spot. This is the spot on which Davy separated sodium and potassium.’”

The laboratory of to-day, however, looks very little like a scene of chemical industry. It has more the air of a machine shop, equipped with power and mechanical appliances of a very heavy kind. Instead of bottles and multi-colored liquids, all is metal and steam. The room is about thirty feet wide and fifty deep, the north front consisting entirely of glass windows opening on a well-lighted interior court. In the left-hand corner, at the back, is a large steam-engine, while a smaller one occupies the corner diagonally across. Shafts, wheels, and belting run to two large air-pumps and three steel compressors, each about the size and shape of a small travelling trunk, and used respectively for compressing oxygen, nitrous oxide, and ethylene. A fourth compressor, or double compressing chamber, is cylindrical in form, and is wrapped in thick white flannel. This is the source of the liquefied oxygen. The system which Professor Dewar has followed is not novel in its general principles, as he explains. Specifically, however, it contains many new inventions which he does not wish made public. They are mainly in the nature of stop-cocks and valves, which it took long study to invent, and which became perfect only after many failures and costly experiments. To liquefy oxygen, he simply used pressure at low temperatures; but as, up to 1878, both oxygen and nitrogen after repeated trials were looked upon as permanent gases, it may be imagined that the attainment of temperatures low enough was a problem which required an extraordinary command of mechanics as well as of chemistry to practically solve.

“The process of liquefying oxygen, briefly speaking,” says the professor, “is this. Into the outer chamber of that double compressor I introduce, through a pipe, liquid nitrous oxide gas, under a pressure of about 1,400 pounds to the square inch. I then allow it to evaporate rapidly, and thus obtain a temperature around the inner chamber of −90° C. (−130° F.). Into this cooled inner chamber I introduce527 liquid ethylene, which is a gas at ordinary temperatures, under a pressure of 1,800 pounds to the square inch. When the inner chamber is full of ethylene, its rapid evaporation under exhaustion reduces the temperature to −145° C. (−229° F.). Running through this inner chamber is a tube containing oxygen gas under a pressure of 750 pounds to the square inch. The ‘critical point’ of oxygen gas, that is, the point above which no amount of pressure will reduce it to a liquid, is −115° C., but this pressure, at the temperature528 of −145° C., is amply sufficient to cause it to liquefy rapidly. In drawing off the liquid under this pressure, I lose nine-tenths of it by evaporation, and I have not yet seen how to diminish that loss. Every pint of it which I collect therefore represents ten pints manufactured. In all, I have thus far collected and used about fifty gallons, and the cost of machinery and experiments, very generously met by subscription among members of the Royal Institution and others, has been about five thousand pounds sterling.” It should be here stated that one of the most generous contributors to the fund has been Professor Dewar himself, a large fraction of the sum having come out of his own pocket.

Going more into detail, he makes clear some of the mechanical and chemical difficulties which beset him in the work. “The secret of my success,” he continues, “has been the mechanical arrangements combined with the use of ethylene. This is a volatile hydrocarbon, and is the chief illuminating constituent of coal gas. The only means of keeping it liquid for any length of time is to surround it with solid carbonic acid. Faraday was the first to call attention to the properties of ethylene, and we manufacture it by heating sulphuric acid in a glass retort protected by an iron cover to 160° C. Alcohol heated to 160° C. is allowed to drip into it and ethylene results, passing off as a gas, which is stored, after being purified. It is then compressed by two pumps, the first with a six-inch plunger and six-inch stroke, and the second a two-inch plunger and six-inch stroke. This liquefies it under the pressure stated. It is nasty stuff to handle, as, whenever it becomes mixed, by leakage or otherwise, with nitrous oxide or air, an explosion is imminent, and we have had not a few explosions in the course of the work. It liquefies at −103° C. (−152.4° F.), and when boiled in a partial vacuum absorbs a large amount of latent heat. The failure of preceding attempts to liquefy oxygen is due to lack of knowledge of its ‘critical point,’ and the law which that phrase describes. As long ago as 1851, Natterer subjected oxygen to a pressure of 2,800 atmospheres, or over thirty tons to the square inch. He obtained no result, because, as I have said, no amount of pressure will affect it above −115° C. I liquefy it at −145° C. for two reasons.529 The lower the temperature at which it is liquefied, the less is the pressure required upon the oxygen and the greater is the amount of latent heat which it absorbs in evaporating. By evaporating, under exhaustion, oxygen liquefied at −145° C., I get as low as −200° C., which I could not do were it liquefied at a higher temperature.

“Having obtained the liquid oxygen,” he continues, turning to the long table below the windows, “the question was how to store it for working purposes, with the least possible loss by evaporation. After various trials and experiments, we devised a set of vacuum vessels, each consisting of a tube or bottle for the liquid oxygen, sealed at the neck in a second tube or bottle, from which the air had been exhausted. I found the cheapest and best method of getting a vacuum to be the old Torricellian one of driving out the air with mercury vapor and then condensing the vapor. This had a further advantage. The tube containing the liquid oxygen was so cold that it froze the mercury vapor, and coated itself with a perfect metallic mirror, which by its reflection still further diminished the loss by radiated heat from the outside.” Without more ado, he lifted from a small frame one of the vacuum vessels referred to. It was a white glass jar, inside of which was what seemed to be a round metallic ball. Open at the neck, this ball was a bottle nearly filled with liquid oxygen, and by the light which reached it through the neck of the bottle it was a very clear pale blue liquid, which was evaporating quietly in a single thread of tiny bubbles, like a glass of champagne which has become nearly still.

It was one of those moments which Faraday would doubtless have regarded as solemn. To behold, for the first time, a liquid which your professors of chemistry have assured you was a gas and always would be a gas, is an experience which does not occur many times in a lifetime. After that, a sight of perpetual motion or the square of the circle would leave you calm. To know, furthermore, that this strange gas, which is the prime agent of all life, which is eight-ninths of all water and three-fourths of the entire earth, has been laid captive by science, reduced to a form which cannot fail to shed a flood of light on any number of abstruse problems in chemistry and mechanics, excites a deeper feeling. The pale blue liquid, which is strangely lustrous, seems truly magical. Moreover, it is a great surprise to see the liquid, which you expect to find under great pressure and ready to blow its containing vessel to pieces, evaporating quietly in the air, protected from heat by a vacuum on one side and its own cold vapor on the other. And so you can do nothing but stare at it in amazement, and gently shake the bottle, and turn from it to its discoverer with a feeling which is not entirely dissociated530 from awe. It has lost all its impressiveness to the professor, however, for he is busy preparing to illustrate some of its properties—an interesting introduction in themselves to the conditions which prevail twice as far below the freezing point of water as its boiling point lies above.

He begins by pouring some of the oxygen into a test tube, white fumes appearing as he does so from the freezing of the moisture in the surrounding air. Then he drops into the liquid oxygen in the test tube a bit of phosphorus. Despite the flaming energy with which these two combine at ordinary temperatures, there is no action. The phosphorus is as unaffected as a chip of wood in water. He takes it out and pours in some pure alcohol, whose freezing point is much below that of mercury. It freezes with a slight sputter into what you can only call alcohol ice. He takes out the ice and holds a match to it. There is no sign of combustion. Placed on a glass dish the alcohol ice melts into a thick, oily liquid, which also declines to burn. In a few seconds, however, it warms to its ordinary thinness and burns as hungrily as ever. Then comes an exhibition of the “spheroidal state.” A drop of water thrown towards a red-hot stove does not touch the stove, because the evaporation is so rapid that the forming gas lifts the water and keeps it moving about. Precisely the same thing occurs when the oxygen is dropped over a flat glass dish at the temperature of the air, which is red-hot to the oxygen, comparatively speaking. It dances about, shaking and boiling furiously. As he pours it, a tiny drop splashes on the professor’s hand, and he flings it off with a quick jerk. “It makes a sore worse than a burn,” he explains, “if it ever touches the skin.” Then he drops some of it into water. It floats quietly, and as it boils off into gas, freezes a cup of water around it, floating about comfortably in its own boat. Then came curious evidence of its magnetic properties. Pouring a little into a flat cup of rock salt, he placed the cup between the poles of an electro-magnet, the one which Faraday used. The boiling liquid, the moment that the circuit was completed, flew to the two terminals en masse and clung there, still boiling away rapidly on the two points. A piece of cotton wool soaked in the liquid was held closely to one of the points, until all the oxygen had been sucked out of it, when it hung suspended between them. Liquid oxygen has a magnetic property, he said, which is about 1,000 as compared with 1,000,000, the magnetic property of iron. It is a non-conductor of electricity, and a spark one-tenth of a millimetre long from a coil machine, which would give a long spark in the air, would not pass through the liquid. It gave a flash531 now and then as a bubble of oxygen vapor came between the terminals. Liquid oxygen is, in fact, a high insulator.

Liquid oxygen at atmospheric pressure boils at −184° C. (−229.2° F.). By evaporating it under a diminished pressure, he gets much higher degrees of cold, and these have enabled him to both liquefy and solidify nitrogen and air. The experiment illustrating this was not only interesting; it was difficult to believe. In a double vacuum vessel the centre of which was an open test tube, and the second compartment a reservoir of liquid oxygen connected with an exhaust pump, he so lowered the pressure that the oxygen boiled tumultuously. As it did so, drops of clear liquid began to form on the sides of the test tube and gather at the bottom. It was liquid air, the oxygen and nitrogen of the atmosphere liquefying together at a temperature of −197.2° (−322.9° F.). He poured some of the liquid air into a second tube, and then showed how the nitrogen, which liquefies at a temperature fourteen degrees below oxygen, boiled off first. A smouldering splinter of wood held at the mouth of the tube was extinguished. A few moments later when it was again held there, it burst into brilliant flame. The nitrogen had all evaporated, and the oxygen was coming off. He explained that air became solid under pressure at −207° C. (−340.6° F.). It was a structureless glass, and he had not determined whether or not the oxygen in it was solid or was held suspended as a jelly. Nitrogen solidified under pressure at −210° C. (−346° F.). It was a white crystalline substance. He had no knowledge as yet whether oxygen crystallized in solidifying, but his belief was that it would not.

Concerning hydrogen, most elusive of all the gases, he had no present expectation of attaining liquefaction. Its critical point was below −210° C., and its boiling point −250° C. He had no means as yet of attacking the problem. In fact, the only thermometer he was able to use at these low temperatures was one which used hydrogen expansion as a measure of temperature. His main reliance in measuring low temperatures was a thermo-electric junction. Deeply interesting also was his description of liquid ozone, that strange form of oxygen which though identical with it in constitution is different in molecular arrangement. He obtains twenty per cent. of ozone from liquid oxygen by electrical stimulation, the ozone being of a very dark blue color, as dark as concentrated indigo. It is highly unstable, a beam of light having caused it to explode on one occasion, and its study even in small quantities requires all the delicacy of manipulation which is one of the special directions in which Professor Dewar as a chemist occupies the foremost rank.

Through all these explanations, and others too elaborate and too technical for these pages, he had spoken in the clear, emphatic way which is characteristic of men who deal with abstruse subjects, and desire, from long habit, to present them with the maximum of clearness and the minimum of words. His speech is incisive, the utterances of an energetic and concentrated mind. Over a cup of tea upstairs, however, he spoke more slowly and dwelt with interest upon some of the many strange results which have already met his eyes in the region of −200° Centigrade.

“As we approach the zero point of absolute temperature,” said he, “we532 seem to be nearing what I can only call the death of matter. Pure metals undergo molecular changes which cannot yet be defined, but which entirely alter their characteristics as we know them. Tensile strength, electrical resistance, in fact, the whole character of the metal as we are acquainted with it, appears to change. At −200°, for instance, iron becomes as good an electrical conductor as copper, while it is more than probable that at the zero of absolute temperature, if not before, the electrical resistance of all metals reaches its zero point. The alloys do not follow the same rule, being much less affected. Carbon is a strange exception, its electrical resistance increasing with cold and decreasing with heat. The effect upon colors is also remarkable, and opens up a wide field for experiment and investigation. In fact, the most marked and immediate effect of my experiments will appear, I think, in the field of magneto-optics. You have seen a red oxide of mercury turn yellow when cooled to the temperature of liquid oxygen, and regain its original color upon returning to the temperature of the air. In the same way, sulphur becomes white. Bichromate of potash becomes also white. A solution of iodine in alcohol becomes colorless, as does ferric chloride, a deep red at the temperature of the air. They all regain their colors upon returning to the ordinary temperature. At these low temperatures chemical action ceases, as you have seen. I supposed the rule was invariable, but found that a photographic plate placed in liquid oxygen was still acted upon by energy from the outside, and at even −200° C. was sensitive to light.

“The effect upon bacterial life is also not what one would expect. Though it is destroyed by boiling in water, a temperature of 100° C., it can still endure unaffected a degree of cold much greater in proportion. I have submitted putrefying blood, milk, seeds, etc., for the space of an hour, to a temperature of −182° C., but found that they afterwards went on putrefying or germinating as the case happened to be. This is interesting in one way, as it gives color to Lord Kelvin’s suggestion that the first life might have been brought to this planet by a seed-bearing meteorite, though it does not explain,” he added with a smile, “how the meteorite was originally equipped with seeds. It shows, however, that spores may live upon a planet through long periods of low temperature. In the phenomena of diminishing electrical resistance and its final disappearance, I look for much new light upon the mystery of electricity itself. The changes in the characteristics of metals already observed enlock lessons whose scope we have not yet begun to measure. In fact,” said he, “for a long time to come I shall confine myself to the many fields of research which the temperatures already attained have opened up.”

Concerning the zero of absolute temperature, Professor Dewar was disinclined to theorize. As to its being the temperature of inter-stellar space, he has not yet come to any final conclusion, though he expressed the view that the strange white and shining night clouds which have puzzled the astronomers were composed of carbonic acid gas frozen solid. Nor does he yet, despite the temperatures reached, see how the zero is to be attained. He, like the Arctic explorers of the past, has reached a point beyond which no appliances of modern science can carry him. The mysteries which cluster about this point are so many, however, that the efforts to reach it will be untiring from this time forth. That its discovery will be a key to many unsolved problems in electricity, in matter, in light, and the great inscrutable mystery of life itself, is not to be doubted. This is an age of constant change in scientific conceptions and traditions, every marked advance in any one science tending to cause more or less of a readjustment of existing views in every other. Science has long been editing the Book of Genesis with an unsparing pen, and with the attainment of the zero of absolute temperature the command “Let there be light” may take on a meaning which the profoundest philosopher or scientist of the present time cannot remotely conceive.

THE HOUSE WITH THE TALL PORCH.

No one ever visited at it except the little chemist, the avocat and Medallion; and Medallion, though merely an auctioneer, was the only one on terms of intimacy with its owner, an old seigneur who for many years had never stirred beyond the limits of his little garden. At rare intervals he might be seen sitting in the large stone porch which gave overweighted dignity to the house, itself not very large. An air of mystery surrounded the place: in summer the grass was rank, the trees seemed huddled together in gloom about the house, the vines appeared to ooze on the walls, and at one end, where the window-shutters were always closed and barred, a great willow drooped and shivered; in winter the stone walls showed naked and grim among the gaunt trees and furtive shrubs.

None who ever saw the seigneur could forget him—a tall figure with stooping shoulders; a pale, deeply-lined, clean-shaven face; and a forehead painfully white, with blue veins showing; the eyes handsome, penetrative, brooding, and made indescribably sorrowful by the dark skin around them. There were those in Pontiac, such as the curé, who remembered when the seigneur was constantly to be seen in the village; and then another person was with him always, a young, tall youth, his son. They were fond and proud of each other, and were religious and good citizens in a high-bred, punctilious way. Then the seigneur was all health and stalwart strength. But one day a rumor went abroad that the seigneur had quarrelled with his son because of the wife of Farette the miller. No one outside knew if the thing was true, but Julie, the miller’s wife, seemed rather to plume herself that she had made a stir in her little world. Yet the curious habitants came to know that the young man had gone, and after a good many years his having once lived there was almost a tradition. But the little chemist remembered whenever he set foot inside the tall porch; the avocat was kept in mind by papers which he was called upon to read and alter from time to time; the curé never forgot, because when the young man went he lost not one of his flock, but two; and Medallion, knowing something of the story, had it before him with gradually increasing frequency; besides, he had wormed a deal of truth out of the miller’s wife. He knew that the closed, barred rooms were the young man’s; and he knew, also, that the old man was waiting, waiting, in a hope which he never even named to himself.

One day the silent old housekeeper came rapping at Medallion’s door, and simply said to him, “Come—the seigneur!” Medallion went, and for hours sat beside the seigneur’s chair, while the little chemist watched and sighed softly in a corner, now and again rising to feel the sick man’s pulse and to prepare a draught. The housekeeper hovered behind the high-backed chair, and when the seigneur dropped his handkerchief—now, as always, of the exquisite fashion of a past century—put it gently in his hand, and he would incline his head ever so gently, and wipe his pale, dry lips with it.

Once when the little chemist touched his wrist, his dark eyes rested on him with inquiry, and he said: “How long?”

It was useless trying to shirk the persistency of that look. “Ten hours, perhaps, sir,” he said with painful shyness.

The seigneur seemed to draw himself up a little, and his hand grasped his handkerchief tightly for an instant; then he said: “So long? Thank you.”534 Then, after a little, his eyes turned to Medallion, and he seemed about to speak, but still kept silent. His chin dropped on his breast, and for a time he was motionless and shrunken; but still there was a strange little curl of pride—or disdain—to his lips. At last he drew up his head, his shoulders heavily came erect to the carved back of the chair, where, strange to say, the stations of the cross were figured, and he said with a cold, ironical voice: “The angel of patience has lied.”

The evening wore on, and there was no sound save the ticking of the clock, the beat of rain upon the windows, and the deep breathing of the seigneur. Presently he started, his eyes opened wide, and his whole body seemed to listen. “I heard a voice,” he said.

His face was almost painfully eager and sensitively alert. “Hush,” he said, “I hear a voice in the tall porch.”

“Sir,” said Medallion, laying a hand respectfully on his arm, “it is nothing.”

With a light on his face and a proud, trembling energy, he got to his feet. “It is the voice of my son,” he said. “Go, go, and bring him in.”

No one moved. But he was not to be disobeyed. His ears had been growing keener as he neared the subtle atmosphere of that brink where a man strips himself to the soul for a lonely voyaging, and he waved the woman to the door. “Wait,” he said, as her hand fluttered at the handle, “take him to another room. Prepare a supper such as we used to have. When it is ready I will come. But listen, and obey me. Do not tell him that I have but half a dozen hours of life. Go, and bring him in.”

It was as he said. She found the son, weak and fainting, fallen within the porch, a worn, bearded man, returned from failure and suffering and the husks of evil. They clothed him and cared for him, and strengthened him with wine, while the woman wept over him, and at last set him at the loaded, well-lighted table. Then the seigneur came in, leaning his arm very lightly on that of Medallion, with a kingly air, and, greeting his son before them all as if they had parted yesterday, sat down. For two hours they sat there, and the seigneur talked gayly, with a color, and his fine eyes glowing; at last he rose, lifted his glass, and said: “The angel of patience is wise: I drink to my son.” He was about to say something more, but a sudden whiteness passed over his face. He drank off the wine and, as he put the glass down, shivered, and fell back in his chair. “Three hours short, chemist,” he said, and smiled, and was still—forever.

STRANGER THAN FICTION.

THE BRONTËS AL FRESCO. THE BRONTËS AND THE GHOSTS.
THE DEVIL AND THE POTATO BLIGHT. THE GREAT
BRONTË FIGHT.

I.
THE BRONTËS AL FRESCO.

I proceed with this chapter in the first person, though the story came to me at second-hand. My tutor, the Reverend W. McAllister, narrated it to me, in the words in which he had heard it from a youthful cousin, and I am able to give it almost in the same words and in the form in which I wrote it out as an exercise in composition.

The scene described does not, however, rest on the authority of Mr. McAllister or his friend, but on the testimony of all who knew the Brontës in their home life. The same scene has been described to me by old men whose memory extended back to matters in the last century, and quite recently, when visiting the place, an aged neighbor pointed out the exact spot where he himself had witnessed the Brontës engaged in their amusements. The story is so characteristic that I give it in extenso, and with all details, as I got it:

“In 1824 I made my first great journey out into the big world, accompanied by my elder brother. I was then very young. The nature of our business obliged us to go on foot, and the distance traversed was two or three miles.

“Our errand brought us into the midst of the Brontës, and as we had to remain there six or seven hours, I had an opportunity of seeing, under various aspects, that extraordinary and unique family, whose genius came to be revealed a few years later by three little girls, on English soil.

“I first saw a group of the Brontë brothers together. I think there were six of them, and they were marching, in step, across a field towards a level road. Their style of marching, and whole appearance, arrested my attention. They were dressed alike, in home-spun and home-knitted garments, that fitted them closely, and showed off to perfection their large, lithe, and muscular forms. They were all over six feet high, but, with their close-fitting apparel and erect bearing, they appeared to me to be men of gigantic stature. They bounded lightly over all the fences that stood in their way, all springing from the ground and alighting together, and they continued to march in step without an apparent effort, until they reached the public road, and then they began, in a business-like way, to settle conditions, in preparation for a serious contest.

“A few men and boys watched the little group of Brontës timorously, from a distance, but curiosity drew my brother and myself close up to where they were assembled. They did not seem to notice us, or know that we were present, but proceeded with a match of rolling a large metal ball along the road. The ball seemed to be about six pounds weight, and the one who could make it roll furthest along the road would be declared the winner.

“The contest was to them an earnest business. Every ounce of elastic force in the great, muscular frames was called into action, and there was a profusion of strange, strong language that literally made my flesh to creep, and my hair to stand on end. The536 forms of expression which they used were as far from commonplace as anything ever written by the gifted nieces; and as the uncles’ lives were on a lower plane of civilization, and their scant education had not reduced their tongues to the conventional forms of speech, they gave utterance to their thoughts with a pent-up and concentrated energy never equalled in rugged force by the novelists.

“I had never seen men like the Brontës, and I had never heard language like theirs. The quaint conceptions and glowing thoughts and ferocious epithets that struggled for utterance, at the unlettered lips of the Irish Brontës, revealed the original quarry from which the vicar’s daughters chiselled the stones for their artistic castle-building, and disclosed the original fountain from which they drew their pathos and passion. Similar fierce originality and power are felt to be present in everything produced by the English Brontës, but in their case the intensity of energy is held in check by the Branwell temperament, and kept under restraint by education and culture.

“The match over, and the sweep-stakes secured, the brothers returned to their harvest labor as they went, clearing, like greyhounds, every fence that stood in their way. At that time no fame attached to the Brontë name, but the men that I had come upon were so different from the local gentry, farmers, flax-dressers, and such like people, who lived around them, that I became, all at once, deeply interested in them.

“From a distance I watched their shining sickles flashing among the golden grain, and caught snatches of song, which I afterwards found to be from Robert Burns. My interest, however, in the Brontës was shared by no one. They were then neither prophets nor heroes in their own country, and they were regarded with a kind of superstitious dread by their neighbors, rather than with interest or curiosity.

“Young as I then was, I persevered with my inquiries, and my curiosity was rewarded. I learned that the Brontës had a brother a clergyman in England, ‘a fine gentleman,’ then on a visit with them, and that the Brontë family were in the habit of holding an open-air concert every favorable afternoon in a secluded glen below their house. I remember wondering if the clergyman ever broke out in the vigorous vernacular of his kith and kin, but I was especially interested in the open-air concert.

“My brother and I, by the nature of our errand, could not return home till late in the evening, and as we were at leisure we made up our minds to assist at the concert. On pretence of gathering blackberries we explored the glen and discovered the place. No one would accompany us, and we were told, with looks of terror, that it would be at our peril if we went to the concert, as the brothers had ‘the black art,’ and were, above all men, to be avoided. We resolved notwithstanding to go as spectators, and waited with impatience till the day’s work should be over.

“About six o’clock a horn was blown, and the reapers suddenly dropped their sickles and strolled down leisurely to the concert glen. We had already preceded them, and taken our places on a high ridge bordering the glen, in a thicket of low brushwood.

“Three sisters were the first to arrive on the scene. They brought a spinning-wheel, a supply of oat-bread and buttermilk, and a green satchel which contained a violin. The men sat astride the trunk of a prostrate tree, and disposed of their afternoon collation in an incredibly short space of time, one wooden bowl, or noggin, supplying milk to each.

“Scarcely had the frugal meal been ended when one of the brothers began to thrum the fiddle, and quick as lightning two of the sisters and the other brothers were whirling and spinning airily over the grass. The other sister was busily plying her spinning-wheel and watching the moving scene. In turns each of the sisters took her place at the wheel, and the one relieved instantly plunged into the mazes of the dance.

“The girls were tall, like their brothers, and picturesque in their red537 tippets. Like their brothers, they were handsome and graceful. They were mature maidens, but they had not lost their elegant figures, or their fresh white and red complexions. Their homemade dresses, though of plain woollen material and simply made, fitted them well, and were in perfect harmony with their rustic surroundings. Their hair hung in ringlets round their shoulders, and they moved with unconscious gracefulness, whirling over the greensward as if they scarcely touched it, or mazing through a ‘country dance’ or an ‘eight-part reel,’ or waltzing round and round in a manner to make the onlooker giddy.

“There was nothing in the whole performance suggestive of the rough peasant, or the country clown. All was exquisite grace and courtesy. The musician was also relieved from time to time, each of the brothers taking his turn at the violin.

“The scene was of the most weird and romantic character. The place selected for the family dance was in a secluded widening of the glen, down which flows a little stream that makes a murmuring noise as it tumbles over stones, and among the roots of alder and willow. It was wide enough to give full scope for extended galops, and sufficient for all the exigencies of Sir Roger de Coverley. The ground was thickly carpeted with grass, and surrounded by large trees with overhanging branches. The trees were festooned with ivy and honeysuckle. Sweetbrier and wild roses overflowed the hedges in great profusion, and ‘Flowering Sally,’ in pink bunches, fringed the brook.

“The sun was sinking in the west, throwing dark shadows down the sides of the Newry mountains, and shedding a pale glory on Slieve Donard and the other lofty peaks of the Mourne range. Close by stood the Knock Hill, generally sombre and unpicturesque, but on that occasion it glowed in the parting rays. The little valley, as it dipped downward, opened out to the west, and through the opening the setting sun poured a rich flood of light on the animated groups, mating each dancer with a long, dark shadow, and doubling the number of figures that tripped lightly over the grass.

“As the sun dropped behind the ridge of Armagh the concert came to an end, after a long bout of Scotch jigs, in which two and two in a row danced opposite to each other, chased by their tall, unearthly shadows. The closing scene was a great effort of endurance, but none seemed to weary, and with a few skips into the air, the arms raised in curves above the head, and the fingers being made to crack, all was still.

“There were four spectators of this wonderful family gathering—my brother and myself, a goat that was quietly barking a tree beside us, and pausing occasionally to look at the frantic display, and, on the other side of the valley from where we were, the clergyman brother, who walked to and fro, in solemn black, apparently in meditation, and taking no notice of the gleeful recreation of his brothers and sisters.

“There was no dawdling when the dance was over. Each of the brothers bowed with an air of gallantry to each of the sisters, and then one of the brothers caught up the spinning-wheel, and, poising it on his shoulder, strode up the homeward side of the glen. All followed smartly and disappeared, in company with the sober figure in black.

“We slipped out of the bower where we had sat entranced, and hurried homeward, with feelings of uncertainty as to the reality of things, in the gathering darkness.”

This is the most complete account I have ever heard of the summer-evening concerts held by the Brontës. Others had often seen these large-limbed, sinewy children of Anak dancing on the green with their flying shadows; but they had failed to appreciate the sylphlike motions of the maidens, or the stately curvetting of the gigantic brothers, and looked on the whole exhibition as something uncanny, and as tending to confirm the popular belief that the Brontës had dealings with the powers of the nether world.

The unique forms and forceful language of the Brontës were lost on their commonplace neighbors, who looked on them as strange and dangerous people.538 In fact, they were not regarded with much favor by the people of the district, from whom they carefully held aloof; and the belief that they were in league with the devil received a certain amount of confirmation, as we shall see by and by.

When I first began to take an interest in the Brontës I was admonished, in a mysterious manner, to have nothing to do with such people. I was advised to keep out of their way, lest I should hear their odious language, and it was even hinted that they might in some Satanic way do me bodily harm.

I am bound to say that matters in this respect have not altered much since for the better. My attempts, recently, to get accurate information on special points, regarding the Brontës and their ways, have been looked upon as a kind of craze, out of which, I have been assured, I was never likely to reap much credit. And even educated people, when replying to my inquiries on matters of fact, have sometimes felt called on to remind me that I was taking much pains with regard to a dangerous and outlandish family.

In fact, the Brontës paid the penalty for being a little cleverer than the people with whom they came in contact, and with whom they never associated. The Brontës looked down on the people of their own rank in life, and permitted no familiarities of any kind; and the only person who ever joined in their dances, as far as is known, was Farmer Burns. As they held aloof from everybody, they were only known by their strange language and odd ways. Imagination filled up the unknown, and gossips, as usual, made the most of every little circumstance. The fact that Mrs. Brontë had once been a Catholic prejudiced in no small degree the minds of Protestants against the children.

The clergyman’s presence in no way restrained the mirthful exuberance of the dancers. Before he left home he was always one of the party, and on his visits from college and from his living he often joined in their mirth, as formerly. But on the occasion referred to by Mr. McAllister he seemed uninterested in the familiar scene.

He was probably thinking of his precocious little women, Maria and Elizabeth, whom he had left at Cowan Bridge school a month before; or his heart may have been in the Haworth vicarage with the motherless little girls, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, who were under the care of their prim maiden aunt. Even then the children were wise beyond their years, though, in their narrow world, they had scarcely begun to accumulate the experience which enabled them to give local form and color to their father’s stories.

II.
THE DEVIL AND THE POTATO BLIGHT.

The concert glen and romantic brook witnessed very different ceremonies from that just described. At one period an awful drama took the place of lissome glee, when Hugh Brontë, “the giant,” in wild passion, sought to come into actual bodily conflict with the devil.

The potato blight fell as a crushing blow on the hopes of the Brontës, and proved the turning-point of their fortunes. They were growing in prosperity, and had enlarged their farm by the savings of many years. Through industry and frugality they had added field to field until their material success seemed to be assured; but while they were rejoicing in the position to which they had attained, the potato crop blackened, and melted away before their eyes.

Ireland at that period had two kinds of tenant farmers. One resembled the drowsy oriental, who basks in the sun, and seems content, not to live, but to exist.

In Ireland a large number of people on the land simply existed in those days. They knew that if they drained or improved their farms the landlords would raise their rents, so as to sweep away the entire profits arising from their improvements. They were well aware that any enlargement or brightening of their homesteads would cause the agent to scent superfluous money, and put on the screw; for a tenant539 would be more likely to make an effort to hold on to a comfortable house than to an uncomfortable one. Every staple of thatch put upon the leaky roof, or bucket of whitewash brushed on to the sooty walls of the cabin, gave the landlord a new hold on the tenant, and supplied the agent with a new pretext for increasing the rent for his master, or securing a present for himself. And there were agents so kindly disposed towards the miserable tenants that they preferred one pound as a present to themselves to two pounds added to the landlord’s rent-roll.

Under these circumstances tenants of the indolent type did not drain their lands or improve the appearance of their houses; and if they had thriving cattle they kept them concealed in remote fields when the agent was about; and when they were obliged to meet either agent or landlord, they decked themselves out like Jebusites, in ragged and squalid garments. It thus happened that landlords and land agents never saw their tenantry except in rags, and thus the tenants contrived to order themselves lowly and reverently to their betters.

The land of the thriftless brought forth potatoes in plenty. A little lime and dike scourings, mixed together, sufficed for manure. The potato seed was planted on the lea-sod, and covered up in ridges four or five feet wide. The elaborate preparation for planting potatoes in drills was then unheard of. Cabbage plants were dibbled into the edges of the ridges, and the potatoes and cabbages grew together. Abundant supplies of West-reds and Yellow-legs and Copper-duns, with large Savoy and Drumhead cabbages, only needed to be dug and gathered, to maintain existence.

Oats, following the potato crop, provided rough, wholesome bread, and little yellow rats of Kerry cows supplied milk. Great stalwart men and women lived on potatoes three times a day, with bread and buttermilk and an occasional egg. Sometimes, in the autumn, a lean and venerable cow would be fed for a few weeks on the after grass (flesh put on in a hurry being considered more tender) and then killed, salted, and hung up to the black back in the kitchen for family use. This pièce de résistance was the only flesh-meat ever known in the homes of such people.

Two pigs, fattened yearly on potatoes, and a few lambs, taken from the early clover, met the demands of the landlord. The wool of the sheep, spun, knitted, or woven at home, supplied scant, but sufficient, wardrobes. For fuel they had whins, or furze, cut from the fences, and turf from the bogs. The fire was preserved by raking a half-burned turf every night in the ashes, but a coal to light the fire was occasionally borrowed from more provident neighbors, and carried by a pair of tongs from house to house. Matches were unknown in those days.

The men broke stones by the roadsides, on warm days, for pocket-money or tobacco, and the women obtained their little extras by the produce of their surplus eggs, which they carried to market in little osier hand-baskets.

Existence in such homes flowed smoothly, one year being exactly like another. The people had no prospects, no hopes, no ambitions. They lived from hand to mouth, and, while all went well, the fulness of each day was sufficient for their simple wants. In their diurnal rounds they gathered their creels of potatoes, and drove their Kerry cows to the fields, golden with tufted ragweeds and purple with prickly thistles.

Such people seldom had their rents raised or their improvements confiscated, for the simple reason that they never made improvements, and never sought, through sustained effort, to better their conditions. They had no margin beyond the bare necessaries of life, no resources to fall back upon, in case of calamity. With barely enough to supply their daily wants, they lived on the verge of starvation, and when the famine came they starved.

The Brontës were people of a different fibre. They would not succumb without a struggle. They had advanced from the Emdale cabin to the Lisnacreedy cottage, and thence to the house and farm in Ballynaskeagh. The primitive corn-kiln, with its insignificant540 and precarious profits, had been abandoned for the lucrative occupation of macadamizing roads, and cultivating the land.

The Brontës worked hard, and were frugal as well as industrious. They had hoarded the savings of many years, and invested all in a new farm, and they felt that they had a right to look forward to a condition of prosperity and independence.

The class to which the Brontës belonged differed widely from the inert and feckless farmers that encumbered many a bankrupt estate. They did not live from hand to mouth, spending each day’s efforts on each day’s wants, and passing the summer in an easy doze. No people on earth slaved and saved as they did. They worked late and early. Their wives and daughters and little children rose with the sun, and labored the live-long day. Every good thing raised on the farm went to market, to meet the landlord’s exactions, and to add to the little store. Butter, bacon, fowl, eggs, and such like, raised by the laborious housewife, were sacred to the landlord, and to the hoard accumulated against the rainy day.

For such slaves there was little recreation except a half holiday on Christmas Day, with a party display on the Twelfth of July or the Seventeenth of March. No toil, however, could crush out of them the desire to better their lot, but their moiling and saving seldom resulted in anything more brilliant than a five-pound note to pay a son’s passage to America, or a twenty-pound portion for the daughter.

The industry of the Brontës was not in vain. They lived under the best landlords that Ireland has ever produced. “The Sharman estate,” now known as “the Sharman-Crawford property,” has been blessed by a succession of Christian landlords, who recognized that landed property had duties as well as privileges, and who have made it their life work to propagate their doctrines by peaceful persuasion.

On the Sharman estate the Brontës had a fair field for their industries. They worked in absolute harmony, as far as appeared to the outside world. They were a loving family in their way, but without the shows of love. Their home was all the world to them, and they clung to it, in early life, with something of the affectionate attachment that Emily Brontë and her sisters afterwards manifested towards the sombre parsonage at Haworth. They were healthful, hopeful and happy in their farm, with the growing signs of plenty around them.

At this juncture the potato blight, which cracked the framework of Ireland’s economic arrangements, blasted the Brontë paradise. The affection of the farmer towards his growing crops is in proportion to the solicitude with which he has watched over them; but the Brontës only learned fully what a treasure the potato crop had been to them when it was taken away. Never had their farm seemed so beautiful, or the potatoes appeared so bountiful, but, in a night, the fields were smitten black, and the stench of rotting leaves filled the air. The tubers became rotten and repulsive, instead of being white and floury.

Many theories were advanced to account for the calamity. Pamphlets were published and sermons preached, to show that national disaster had followed on the heels of national wrongdoing. Seasons for humiliation and fasting and prayer were set apart, to supplicate Almighty God to take away the awful judgment.

The Brontë mind never ran smoothly with the common current. To them the evil appeared to be simply the work of the devil. The Brontës held the simple old Zoroastrian creed that everything beneficent was the work of God, and everything maleficent the work of the Evil One.

Such opinions were not confined to the Brontës. As children we were given to understand that frosted blackberries were clubbed by the devil, who had blown his breath upon them as he passed by; and of course we all knew that the old Enemy, with the club foot, lurked in the blackberry bushes.

Servants and common laborers held541 to the belief, no doubt prompted and fortified by the action of the Brontës, that the devil went bodily from potato field to potato field, in his work of destruction; and many reports got into circulation, that he had been actually seen among the potatoes, in the form of a black dog or black bull, but that he always vanished in a flash of lurid light when challenged.

Hugh Brontë no more doubted that the devil, in bodily form, had destroyed the potato crop than he doubted his own existence. He saw the prop struck from under the family by a malignant enemy, and he would not tamely submit to the personal injury. It was both cruel and unjust that the devil, who never did any work, should pollute the fruits of their toil. He would shame the fiend out of his foul work; and for this purpose he would go deliberately to the field, and gather a basketful of rotten potatoes. These he would carry solemnly to the brink of the glen, and, standing on the edge of a precipice, call on the fiend to behold his foul and filthy work; and then, with great violence, dash them down as a feast for the fetid destroyer. This ceremony of feasting the fiend on the proceeds of his own foul work was often repeated, with fierce and desperate energy; and the Devil’s Dining-room is still pointed out by the neighbors.

I knew a man who witnessed one of these scenes. He spoke of Hugh Brontë’s address to the devil as being sublime in its ferocity. With bare, outstretched arms, the veins in his neck and forehead standing out like hempen cords, and his voice choking with concentrated passion, he would apostrophize Beelzebub, as the bloated fly, and call upon him to partake of the filthy repast he had provided. The address ended with wild, scornful laughter as Brontë hurled the rotten potatoes down the bank.

The dramatic power of the ceremony was so real, and the spell of Brontë’s earnestness was so contagious, that my informant, who was not a superstitious man, declared that for a few seconds after the challenge was given he watched in terror, expecting the fiend to appear.

III.
THE GREAT BRONTË FIGHT.

The fight between Welsh Brontë and Sam Clarke of Ballynaskeagh was an era-making event. The contest took place long before my time, but I had a precise and full account of the battle from two eye-witnesses. No encounter of the kind in County Down ever made such a noise, or left such a lasting impression. Like the flight of Mahomet or the founding of Rome, it became a fixed point around which other events ranged themselves.

Women would speak of their children as born, or their daughters married, so many years before or after the fight; and old men, in referring to their ages, would tell how they had been present when Welsh Brontë licked Sam Clarke, and that they must have been of such an age at the time. It was one of those famous encounters which only required the pen of Pindar to give it immortality in epic form.

The history of the affair which I here submit embodies the conclusions at which I have arrived, after comparing twenty or thirty versions; but I am specially indebted to the late Mr. John Todd of Croan, who was present at the battle with his brother James, and who narrated the incidents of the contest, with many picturesque details. I should add, however, that the Todds were friends of the Brontës, and told the story with the warmth of partisans.

Welsh Brontë had a sweetheart called Peggy Campbell, and she had a little, delicate, deformed brother who used to go to Ballynafern school on crutches. Some of the big healthy boys thoughtlessly amused themselves by tormenting the little cripple. He often arrived home with his clothes torn and daubed with mud, and sometimes showing in his person the signs of ill-treatment. After the manner of school-boys, he would never tell on his tormentors. Welsh’s sweetheart, however, had discovered the cowardly and cruel treatment to which her little brother had been subjected, and appealed to Welsh to protect him.

Welsh had, no doubt, often heard the542 story of his father’s wrongs, when a child, and, at a hint from Peggy, constituted himself the champion of the injured boy. He went to Sam Clarke, who was a near relative of the chief offenders, and begged him to interfere.

Clarke, who was said to be something of a bully, advised Brontë to mind his own business, and Brontë replied that that was the exact thing he was doing; and then he added, as a threat, that unless Clarke restrained his brutal relatives he would chastise them himself. Hot words ensued, and Brontë and Clarke parted with expressions of mutual defiance.

Welsh Brontë’s blood was up. His sense of justice was roused on behalf of an ill-used child, and his feelings of chivalry impelled him to become the champion of his sweetheart’s brother.

Meanwhile the boys were meditating vengeance on their victim, who, in addition to the crime of meek endurance, had, they believed, proved a sneak, by telling of their misdeeds.

Welsh Brontë resolved to watch the children on their way home from school on the following day. He took up his position in a clump of trees somewhere near the glen. He waited long, but the school-children did not appear, and, thinking that perhaps they had returned home by another path, he left his ambush to resume his work. Suddenly he heard hilarious cheering and piteous cries, and hurrying towards the spot from which the noise came, he found the school engaged in the ceremony of “ducking the clash beg,” or tale-bearer.

They had taken the poor little cripple’s crutches from him, and had placed him in the middle of a pond of water, up to his neck, and then, having taken hands, they danced round the pond, chanting, “Clash beg!” “Clash beg!” “Clash beg!”

Welsh Brontë took in the situation at a glance, and captured the two biggest Clarkes before they knew he was near. He then compelled them to wade into the pond, and support gently to the edge their victim. When they had placed him on the dry ground, he was so exhausted that he could neither stand nor support himself on his crutches, and Brontë obliged the Clarkes to carry him home on their backs, time about, the water dripping down their clothes. They did as Brontë directed them, but only after considerable chastisement.

The other children had fled home in alarm, and had given a highly colored description of the inhuman manner in which Brontë was treating the Clarkes. Some of them reported that he had actually drowned them in the pond. On that night a challenge from Sam Clarke reached Welsh Brontë, and was instantly accepted.

The time for angry words had gone, and all preliminary formalities were carried out according to rule, and with perfect courtesy. “Seconds” were appointed, the day was fixed, and a professional pugilist, who resided at Newry, was engaged to act as referee. Both men went into close training, and the event was awaited with the most intense excitement for ten miles round.

The day, a charming summer day, at last arrived. A crowd numbering ten thousand—some estimated the number at from thirty to fifty thousand—assembled. They came together from Newry, Banbridge, Rathfriland, Dromore, Hilltown, Warrenpoint, Loughbrickland, and other towns and districts. Such an assemblage of the scoundrelism of that region had never been drawn together before. But they were not all scoundrels, for public opinion had not, at that time, affixed the stamp of infamy indelibly to the brutal exhibitions of the ring; and it was said that a number of sporting clergymen and country gentlemen were present, undisguised and unashamed.

Many circumstances rendered the field famous. The mothers of the combatants had fed their sons for the fray like gamecocks; oat-bread and new milk were the staple food which was supposed to give muscle, strength, and endurance.

Shortly before the fight Clarke’s mother, when giving him his last meal before the encounter, said to him, “Sam, my son, may you never get bit or sup from me more, if you do not lick the mongrel.”

This Spartan speech spread through the field like wildfire, and such was the code of honor, on that occasion, that the exhortation was much blamed, and led to a strong current of popularity in favor of Brontë. The word “mongrel,” referring to the fact that her son’s antagonist had had a Catholic mother, was considered unfitting to be used in connection with the noble encounter that was about to take place.

The ring was roped off in the hollow of a green field; the multitude stood on the rising ground around, and all could see the entire ring. Three or four hundred men were enrolled as “special order preservers,” and stood in a circle round the ring, two or three deep. The seconds and referee and umpire were in their places at the opposite sides of the ring.

The hour fixed to begin was twelve o’clock, and prompt to the minute the two combatants strode down leisurely through the crowd, each with his sweetheart leaning on his arm; their mothers already occupied seats of honor outside the ring.

Clarke was an older and maturer man than Brontë, and much bigger. Beside him, Brontë, in his tight-fitting homespun, looked slender and youthful and overmatched.

In consequence of the ungenerous and unguarded words spoken by Clarke’s mother, sympathy, as we have seen, was already on Brontë’s side, and this was greatly increased by the natural feeling that prompts the generous to take the weak side.

As far as I have been able to ascertain, the original cause of the quarrel was wholly lost sight of before the fight began. No one seemed to give a thought to the circumstance that Brontë had got into the affair by espousing the cause of a helpless boy. After listening to an account of the fight, from some old man who had witnessed it, I have often asked what it was about, and I have generally got for answer, “Oh, it was just a fight,” my question being evidently deemed irrelevant, and somewhat silly.

The champions stepped into the ring, and their sweethearts with them. As each stripped he handed his clothes to his future wife, and these two women stood, each with her lover’s garments on her arm, till the matter was decided.

Time was not accurately kept, but the battle was said to have lasted three or four hours. At first Clarke had the advantage in strength and weight, but Brontë, who had long arms, was lithe and active and wiry, and did not seem to weary as the day wore on. On the contrary, Clarke began to show signs of fatigue, but the spectators thought he was simply husbanding his strength. Throughout the whole contest not a word was heard. Suddenly, Miss Campbell’s voice rang out clear in the silence: “Welsh, my boy, go in and avenge my brother, and the mongrel.”

Peggy Campbell, by her woman’s instinct, discerned that the hour for the final effort and victory had come. Welsh responded like a lightning flash. A few awful moments followed. The spectators held their breaths and some fainted, others covered their eyes with their hands, or averted their faces. Terrific crushing and crashing blows were heard all over the field, and when the blows ceased to resound, Sam Clarke was lying a motionless heap in the ring.

The crowd, after the long suspense and hushed silence, lost all control of themselves, and wanted to rush in and chair the victor, but the “special order preservers” held the ring, and the sea of human beings surged against them in vain.

Welsh Brontë declined to receive congratulations until he had deposited his antagonist safely at home in bed. The fight was followed by no evil consequences, and Sam Clarke and Welsh Brontë became fast friends from that day forth.

All were agreed as to the closing scene. During the last few seconds the fight became so fierce and furious that the blood of the spectators ran cold. Nothing like it for wild fury and Titanic ferocity had ever been witnessed, and no such battle has ever, since or before, been fought in County Down.

IV.
THE BRONTËS AND THE GHOSTS.

The glen, on the edge of which the Brontës lived, lay secluded among the hills, remote from the more frequented thoroughfares of the country. It was a beautiful and romantic spot by day, but lonesome and desolate at night. For miles round it had the reputation of being haunted, and few passed that way after dark. Those who were obliged to do so heard unnatural splashes in the stream, and rustlings among the bracken, and strange moanings and sobbings among the trees, when there was not a breath of air stirring.

Strange and fitful cries were said to be heard in the glen, and doleful wailings, as of some one in agony.

Long ago, according to tradition, a woman had been murdered in the glen by her false lover and betrayer. Hugh Brontë had told the story, with minute details and local color, till everybody who frequented the gatherings at the kiln knew it by heart.

The villain had enticed his victim to Rathfriland fair, on pretence of getting the wedding ring. He had there attempted to strangle her, but she had escaped from his grasp, and was making her way home to her mother, through fields and byways, when, according to one of Patrick Brontë’s unpublished songs:

He waylaid her in the lonely glen, and murdered her under circumstances of great atrocity. On that night the ghost of the murdered woman rushed upon the assassin, and, with a wild scream, dragged him from his bed and through the window of his cabin, and down, down, down, with unearthly yells, to the bottomless pit. The whole story was told in verse, I believe, by Patrick Brontë, and sung to a sad air at local gatherings. It ran partly thus:

The punishment was, according to local sentiment, well deserved; but both were doomed to walk the earth for a thousand years. They had made their abode in the glen, hence the doleful and dismal voices.

Another circumstance added to the horror with which the glen was regarded at night. It was said that, at a remote period, a man who had been robbed committed suicide, at a crossing of the brook. He was still living when found with his throat cut, and up to his last breath he continued to moan, with a gurgling sound, “There were ten tenpennies in my pocket at the river.”

I believe the story was founded on fact. A man had committed suicide under the circumstances narrated, but in quite a different part of the country. The deed, however, had come to be located in the Brontë glen, and increased the superstitious awe with which the place was then regarded. A snipe frequented the spot at night, and as people attempted to cross, it would start with a sudden screech from almost beneath their feet. The bird with the unearthly yell was supposed to be the spirit of the unfortunate man.

On one occasion Hugh Brontë was riding home with a neighbor. When they had reached the glen a headless man appeared on the road in front of them. The neighbor’s horse stood shivering, as if rooted to the ground, but Brontë’s horse, without any appearance of fear, walked up to the dreadful object, and Brontë, unmoved, and without pause or word, simply cracked his whip at it, and it disappeared in a flash of light.

Ghost baiting became a passion with the Brontës, and though they were too proud to associate much with their neighbors, they were not averse to being stared at and talked of by them.

The mill at the lower end of the glen, where now stand Mr. Ratcliffe’s dwelling-house and offices, was haunted. Lights flitted through it at night, and no one would go near it after sunset.545 When the terror was at its height Hugh Brontë armed himself with a sword and a Bible, and went alone to encounter the ghost or devil, or whatever it might be.

The neighbors, who saw Brontë marching to his doom, stood afar off in the darkness, and awaited the result. Unearthly noises were heard, and it was clear that a serious contest was proceeding. After a long delay Brontë returned, bruised and battered and greatly exhausted, but he would give no account of what had transpired.

His secrecy regarding his adventure increased the terror of the superstitious, for it was given out and believed that Brontë, having been worsted in the encounter, saved his life by making some compact with the fiend or ghost. And some even believed that he was ever after in league with the powers of darkness.

This fearsome theory seemed to be confirmed by Hugh Brontë’s subsequent action. One dark and dismal night, the ghost in the glen began to wail like a child in distress. The people barred their doors, covered their heads in bed with their blankets, and stopped their ears, to keep out the unearthly sounds; but Hugh Brontë went down quietly to the glen, and soothed the ghost until by little and little its moaning died away.

On several occasions it was believed that Hugh was actually seen in the glen, standing with his hand on the mane of a magnificent black horse, but when any neighbor drew near, the black horse dwindled into a great black cat, which kept purring around Brontë, and rubbing itself against his legs. As soon as the neighbor withdrew, the cat would again develop into the large black horse, and Brontë was often seen riding up and down upon it, near precipices and ravines where there was no path!

There was also supposed to be a white-sheeted figure that used to frequent the glen, carrying a little child in her arms. It was said that she was in the habit of asking for a night’s lodging, but never seemed disposed to accept it. She generally kept her face covered, or averted, but when it was exposed it proved to be a toothless, grinning skull, with a light shining from each eyeless socket.

One of the Brontë sisters and her daughter lived in a house near by, in which a man called Fraser had hanged himself. The house was declared to be haunted. Apparitions appeared in it, both by day and night, but especially at night. Noises were heard in the rooms during the hours of darkness. When the inmates slept at night, something like a huge frog with claws used to rush up the clothes from the foot of the bed, settle on their chests, and almost suffocate them.

Hugh went to his sister’s house one night, taking his gun with him. He upbraided Fraser for his ungallant and mean conduct in frightening lone women, and then called on him to come out like a man and face him. But nothing appeared, the ghost evidently declining to face a loaded musket.

Brontë was importunate in his challenge, taunting Fraser’s ghost with all kinds of sarcastic gibes and accusations, that he might irritate it into appearing, but the ghost would not be drawn. Then he fired off his gun, and challenged the ghost to meet him face to face, using every scornful and reproachful epithet to drive it into a passion, but all in vain.

On the following night Hugh returned to the haunted house with a fiddle, and tried to coax the ghost to appear in response to the music. The ghost, however, remained obdurate, regardless alike of threats, reproaches, and blandishments. Brontë returned home that night in a state of wild excitement. All the way he incessantly called on Fraser to come and shake hands with him, and make up their quarrel.

He retired to bed in a delirium of frenzy, and during the night the ghost appeared to him, and gave him a terrific squeeze, from which he never recovered. He died shortly after in great suffering, upbraiding Fraser for his heartless cruelty and cowardice, and he declared, dying, that when he reached the land of shadows he would take measures to prevent Fraser from haunting his sister and niece. After Hugh’s death the546 rumblings and apparitions ceased to trouble his sister’s house.

The great horror, however, of the haunted glen was the Headless Horseman. The phantom generally made its appearance among thickets of tangled bushes, which no horse could penetrate, and glided silently over uneven and broken ground, where no horse could have gone.

It always appeared to be ridden and guided by a man in flowing robes, whose feet were firmly in the stirrups and whose hands held the bridle, but whose head had been chopped off, leaving only a red and jagged stump.

The ghastly spectacle was so minutely described by the Brontës that others carried the picture of it in their imaginations, and it is not to be wondered at if many thought they saw the spectre among the shimmering shadows of the trees.

A neighbor of the Brontës, Kaly Nesbit, a very old and, I believe, a very good man, once gave to a number of us a vivid account of the apparition. He told the story with great earnestness, and with apparent conviction as to its truth. I give his account as nearly as I can in his own quaint language:

“I heerd the horse nichering in the glen. It was not the voice of a horse but of a fiend, for it came out of the bowels of the earth, and shook the hills, and made the trees quake. Besides, there was no room for a horse on the steep bank, and among the bushes and brablack.

”I had just had a drap of whiskey, about a noggin, and I wasn’t a bit afeard of witch or warlock, ghost or devil, and so I stepped into the glen to see for myself whatever was to be seen.

“At first I could not see any inkling of a horse, but I heerd the branches swishing along his sides, at the lower end of the glen. Then I saw a large dark object as big as a haystack coming nixt me, and walking straight through trees and bushes as if they were mere shadows.

“I juked down behind a hedge of broom, and as I hunkered in the shadow he came on in the slightly dusk light. The horse was as big as four horses, and at a distance I thought the rider was a huge blackavised man; but when he came fornenst me the moon fell full upon him through a break in the trees, and then I saw that he was crulged up on the saddle, and that only a red and ghastly stump stuck up between his shoulders, where his head should have been.

”I escaped unseen, but just as the terrible thing passed me it nichered again horribly, and I saw sparks of fire darting out of its mouth.

“It then turned and cut triangle across the valley, passing over the cockpit, and walking upon the air, as it emerged into the moonlight. It walked up straight against the steep edge of the quarry-pit, and vanished into the bank. I saw it vanishing by degrees, like a shadow, at first black, but growing lighter and lighter, till it entirely disappeared, and there was nothing on the high bank where it stopped but the bright moonlight.”

Kaly Nesbit had the reputation of being a very good man. I knew him pretty well, especially as a near relative of his had been my kind old nurse, who imparted to me much Brontë lore. I am sure he believed the fascinating story he told; but a noggin of whiskey is a rather indefinite quantity, and Kaly Nesbit, on that night, may have had his faculties for hearing and seeing in a rather sensitive condition.

However that may have been, his sober and earnest account of the monstrous spectre, confirming, as it did, the wildest stories of the Brontës, created a profound impression.

THE HYPNOTIC EXPERIMENTS OF DOCTOR LUYS.

(Illustrated with photographs of Doctor Luys’s patients, taken at the Charity Hospital in Paris.)

The scientific world is greatly interested in the dispute between the believers in the value of hypnotic experiments for purposes of therapeutics and psychology, and those who stigmatize the wonderful results which the former claim to have obtained, as the mere outcome of delusion or fraud.

Ever since the possibility of producing phenomena by the effect of animal magnetism was established, and their medical value asserted, by Frederick Anthony Mesmer, in his theory of mesmeric cures, the most violent hostility has been provoked. Volumes of controversy have been written, the most ardent of the writers being Nees Von Esenbeck, Kieser, Enemoser, Carus and Kluge amongst the Germans, and Deleaze and Foissac among the French.

The report made by the commission appointed by the French Academy of Sciences, the principal members of which were Benjamin Franklin, Lavoisier, Bailly, and Guillotin, pronounced the whole theory of Mesmer charlatanry, asserting that “there is no proof of the existence of the animal magnetic fluid; that this fluid, having no existence, is consequently without utility; and that the violent effects to be observed are due to the manipulations, to the excitement of the imagination, and to that sort of mechanical imitation which leads us to repeat anything548 which produces an impression on the senses.”

The consensus of opinion among scientists was opposed to the soundness of the theory of hypnotism. Yet such men as Laplace, Agassiz, Hufeland, Sir William Hamilton, and Doctor William Carpenter were always among its stanch supporters, so far as the fundamental facts were concerned.

THE NEW MESMERISM.

The novel development of the subject on sharply defined lines of scientific method owes itself to J. Braid, a surgeon of Manchester, England, who first published the results of his studies in 1840. But it was many years before his studies became widely known and had their due weight. He now shines primus inter pares among those who have shed most light on a perplexing problem. But just as the modern French art school built itself upon the work of the Englishman Constable, so it took the genius and enthusiasm of such investigators as Doctors Charcot and Luys, and of Colonel Rochas d’Aiglun to carry on Braid’s beginnings. These three scientists of recognized worth never proclaimed that the secrets of hypnotism have been solved, or that its possibilities have been more than foreshadowed; they simply asserted that the results already obtained, many being practical in an eminent degree, give encouragement to pursue their investigations.

It is my purpose to simply set forth that which has come under my personal observation at the Charité Hospital, whose doctor-in-chief, Doctor Luys, is to-day the most enthusiastic believer in experiments on the hypnotic phenomena.

METHODS OF LA CHARITÉ HOSPITAL.

The hypnotic experiments practised by the doctor-in-chief of the Charité Hospital, may be roughly divided into two classes. The first are experiments of a speculative kind, that is to say, such as do not produce practical effects. The second class includes such as often produce such results. These last experiments are mainly the diagnosis of patients by subjects in the hypnotic state, the cure of nervous disorders by the transfer of the same from patients to subjects in the hypnotic state, and the cure of moral and physical549 maladies by the power of suggestion.

The hypnotic state is divided by Doctor Luys into five phases of intensity: somnambulism, fascination, catalepsy, lethargy, and hypo-lethargy, with various intermediary phases which have not yet been tabulated. The hypnotic state in one or other of its phases is produced in the subject or patient in two ways; by word of command or by the use of the rotative mirror. The rotative mirror is often used where hypnotic influence is first applied to an individual. This mirror much resembles that used by bird catchers for snaring larks. It is composed of four arms, overlaid with bright, polished metal. The arms revolve by clockwork on a pivot, at a tremendous rate of speed. The patient is seated in a high-backed chair with his back to the light, which shines full on the mirror, and is bidden to keep his eyes fixed upon it, and simultaneously to desire to be sent to sleep. The clockwork sets the mirror in rotary motion with a dazzling effect. Sleep is not invariably produced. Many persons are refractory; but, as a rule, in about twenty per cent. of the cases the operation is successful, and after a period varying from five to twenty minutes the patient is seen to drop to sleep.

“The eyes,” says a writer on the subject, “are first attracted by the rays of light which flash from the wings of the mirror, then little by little, and at the end of a period which varies according to the temperament of the patient, a kind of fascination is produced, the lids get tired and imperceptibly close, the head falls back, and the patient sleeps a sleep which seems natural, but which is really one of the first phases of the hypnotic sleep.” In other cases, that is to say, in the case of patients who are more predisposed, a slight shock is manifested during the state of fascination, due, no doubt, to the sudden contraction of some muscle or system of muscles, and the patient falls into a deep sleep, breathing hard. He is then completely insensible, and apt for the reception of suggestion, having passed quickly through the several stages of the hypnotic sleep, sometimes to the last. In most cases, however, where the doctor has to do with subjects who have often been hypnotized, the simple word of command, without passes or gestures of550 any kind, suffices. With these he has but to say, “Go to sleep,” and they fall at once into a hypnotic state of greater or lesser profundity. Doctor Luys is, however, the sole possessor of hypnotism I have seen who has this power; and both Charcot and his assistant, Doctor Encausse, as well as Colonel Rachas, are obliged to enforce their commands with certain gestures of the hands and influence of the eyes.

THE DANGER OF HYPNOTISM.

Doctor Luys says: “From the social point of view, these new states of instantaneous loss of consciousness into which hypnotic or merely fascinated subjects may be made to pass deserve to be considered with lively interest. As I shall have to explain to you later, the individual in these novel conditions no longer belongs to himself; he is surrendered, an inert being, to the enterprise of those who surround him. He may be induced to become a homicide, an incendiary or suicide, and all these impulses deposited in his brain during sleep become forces stored up silently, which will then burst forth at a given moment, causing acts like those performed by the really insane. All these are real facts which you may meet with this very day in ordinary life.”

This is, indeed, one of the most dangerous features of hypnotism, that a being, apparently in perfect possession of himself, may be forced to do things by the potency of a command given to him in a trance, a fatal edict which he does not in the least remember, but is constrained mechanically to obey. Doctor Luys and his confrères insist that, unjust as it may appear, the plea of having acted irresponsibly under the effect of a hypnotic suggestion cannot, when the safety of society is involved, be admitted as an excuse any more than drunkenness. This justifies the French law that none but licensed physicians should practise hypnotic experiments.

Fortunately for the science of hypnotism the same energy towards useful acts can be stimulated, and it is just this entire obedience of which the professors take advantage for the practice of their healing art. Thus the confirmed drunkard, the man of vicious habits, the lazy child, the kleptomaniac, the suicidal or homicidal maniac can be cured. More wonderful things have been achieved. The patient’s willpower can be so intensified as to enable him to resume mastery of parts of the body which, as the result of such nervous disorders as paralysis, he may have entirely lost. Cases of ague, tic nerveux, neuralgia, and analogous disorders have been cured by repeatedly enjoining the patient, while in the hypnotic state, to conquer his trouble.

HOW CURATIVE PROCESSES ARE PURSUED.

These cures may be divided into two classes, the first effected by auto-suggestion, that is to say, by inspiring the patient with the determination to get the better of his disorder; and, second, those effected by the transfer of the disorder from the patient in his ordinary state to a subject in the hypnotic state.

In the same class may be named551 numerous cases of persons to whom hypnotism has been administered, just as chloroform is in other cases, as an anæsthetic: as, for instance, the case of a girl who came to the hospital maddened with toothache, and who, once in the hypnotic state, into which she was thrown by the influence of the revolving mirrors, allowed two molar teeth, which till then had caused her the most excruciating agony, to be removed without a sign of discomfort.

The second class of cures are, however, by far the most interesting and the most wonderful. These are the “direct cures,” which are called cures by transfer. This is the method used. One of the subjects attached to Doctor Luys’ clinic—such subjects being persons who have proved themselves very susceptible—is sent to sleep by a word of command from the doctor, and in this state grasps the hands of the patient who desires to be cured. In some cases the hands of the subject are laid upon the patient’s head. The subject is now described as “tapping” the patient of the nervous disorder that affects him. During the process of the transfer an assistant passes a magnetized iron bar over the arms and bodies of both patient and subject. The transfer usually lasts about three minutes. During this period the subject, or the person in the hypnotic state, assumes the individuality of the patient for the nonce, and can answer the doctor’s questions as to the patient’s state and progress. Thus it is the former and not the latter whom the doctor will question how the case is progressing and what ameliorations may be felt, and the subject will answer. In the cases which I saw, the patient in every case described what the subject had said about his state, symptoms, and progress as absolutely true and exact. It is further stated that no injury whatever is wrought on the substitute. While relieving the patient from whom the transfer is made, this vicarious agent is considerably benefited.

The detection of imposture on the part of the subject has invariably resulted in immediate dismissal.

EXTRAORDINARY PHENOMENA.

All the experiments described above are, if genuine (but scientific camps are divided on the question of their552 genuineness), of practical value. The same thing may be said of another series of test studies, which are also being pursued, though the value is less in degree. Doctor Luys says that the subject in the hypnotic state has an intensely increased visual faculty. Indeed, one of the symptoms of this state is a very noticeable alteration of the appearance of the eye. It is stated by the doctor, and the experiments publicly made may be considered as convincing, that, thanks to this increased visual faculty, the hypnotic subject is able to see in the human face what is entirely hidden to ordinary sight.

For some time past the doctor had established that when a magnet is presented to a hypnotic subject in one of the phases of trance, the effect produced varies, according as the north or south pole, that is to say, the negative or the positive end of the magnet, is offered. The north pole in all cases produces a state of intense delight, expressed by gestures and outcries of pleasure. The subjects in this case declare that they see at the end of the magnet emanations of a beautiful blue light. When the bar is reversed the greatest horror and disgust at once affect the subject. If asked what it is that causes this dismay the subject will answer that it is the sight of a fearful red light playing around the end of the magnet.

Investigating further in this direction the doctor has discovered that the same subjects can detect in the human face emanations corresponding to those seen at the ends of the magnetic bar. Thus from the left eye and left ear and left corner of the mouth in persons in a good state of health, blue emanations can be seen by the hypnotized person, according to the declarations of such subjects.

In cases of persons, however, suffering from nervous disorders, or from the results of diseases or accidents, the colors vary. Thus, according to one of the subjects, the red light proceeding from the right eye of a person affected with shortsightedness and fatigue of the organ was largely spotted with violet. Violet is the characteristic color in all cases of great nervous fatigue. Black, green, and multi-colored flames have been described by the subjects as553 showing from persons suffering with various forms of nervous disorder. A man who had been wounded in the eye with a rapier was characterized, at an interval of three months, by two different subjects, who, according to Doctor Luys, had had no means of inter-communication, as emitting a green light from the injured organ.

If it can be established that certain diseases produce in those suffering from them a variation in the color of the emanations, which are perceptible to the hypnotic subject, the existence and nature of the disease will be certified by the tint.

Amongst the experiments which have been classified as of a speculative kind, and distinct from those of practical worth, none are more interesting than those that involve the presentation to subjects in the hypnotic state, of various substances and medicines contained in hermetically sealed tubes. The manifestations, according as the tube is presented on the right or the left side of the subject, indicate emotions of a diametrically opposite nature. Thus, when a tube containing ordinary red pepper was offered to the left, or, as the doctor calls it, the blue side, of a girl subject in the hypnotic state, symptoms of keen pleasure were discernible, which changed suddenly to an expression of violent disgust when the tube was carried to the red or right side. According to the doctor, the human being is double, and does not feel the same on his red as on his blue side. Thyme presented to one patient produced terrifying hallucinations; in another it called forth an expression of calm delight. Singularly, in the application of thyme there was a physiological effect, also, on the thyroid gland of the throat, the size of the neck being increased from thirty to thirty-three centimetres, or somewhat more than an inch. Morphine in one patient bred fancies of an evidently terrifying nature; in another, an intense drowsiness. The effect of frankincense presented to the left of the neck was an emotion of terror. Some water in a tube, held near the left side of a hypnotic subject’s head, caused a series of spasms resembling those usual to patients suffering from hydrophobia.

The doctor maintains that in each case the patient was in total ignorance554 of the contents of the tube. Indeed, in looking over the illustrations of this article, which are direct reproductions from unretouched photographs, one can hardly help believing, with Doctor Luys, that the effect is actual, not simulated. In conclusion, who can tell but that these strange experiments will be looked upon some day as the first lisps of a new science?

THE SURGEON’S MIRACLE.

That’s what they called him, though he wasn’t any poorer than other folks—not so poor as some. How could he be poor, work as he did and steady as he was? Worth a whole grist of such bait as his brother, Ephe Dodge, and yet they never called Ephe poor—whatever worse name they might call him. When Ephe was off at a show in the village, Abe was following the plough, driving a straight furrow, though you wouldn’t have thought it to see the way his nose pointed. In winter, when Ephe was taking the girls to singing school or spelling bee or some other foolishness—out till after nine o’clock at night, like as not—Abe was hanging over the fire, holding a book so the light would shine, first on one page and then on the other, and he turning his head as he turned the book, and reading first with one eye and then with the other.

There, the murder’s out! Abe couldn’t read with both eyes at once. If Abe looked straight ahead he couldn’t see the furrow—nor anythin’ else, for that matter. His best friend couldn’t say but what Abe Dodge was the cross-eyedest cuss that ever was. Why, if you wanted to see Abe, you’d stand in front of him; but if you wanted Abe to see you, you’d got to stand behind him, or pretty near it. Homely? Well, if you mean downright “humbly,” that’s what he was. When one eye was in use the other was out of sight, all except the white of it. Humbly ain’t no name for it. The girls used to say he had to wake up in the night to rest his face, it was so humbly. In school you’d ought to have seen him look down at his copybook. He had to cant his head clear over and cock up his chin till it pointed out of the winder and down the road. You’d really ought to have seen him, you’d have died. Head of the class, too, right along; just as near to the head as Ephe was to the foot; and that’s sayin’ a good deal. But to see him at his desk! he looked for all the world like a week-old chicken, peekin’ at a tumblebug! And him a grown man, too, for he stayed to school winters so long as there was anything more the teacher could teach him. You see, there wasn’t anything to draw him away; no girl wouldn’t look at him—lucky, too, seein’ the way he looked.

Well, one term there was a new teacher come—regular high-up girl, down from Chicago. As bad luck would have it, Abe wasn’t at school the first week—hadn’t got through his fall work. So she got to know all the scholars, and they was awful tickled with556 her—everybody always was that knowed her. The first day she come in and saw Abe at his desk, she thought he was squintin’ for fun, and she upped and laughed right out. Some of the scholars laughed too, at first; but most of ’em, to do ’em justice, was a leetle took back; young as they was, and cruel by nature. (Young folks is most usually always cruel—don’t seem to know no better.)

Well, right in the middle of the hush, Abe gathered up his books and upped and walked outdoors, lookin’ right ahead of him, and consequently seeing the handsome young teacher unbeknown to her.

She was the worst cut up you ever did see; but what could she do or say? Go and tell him she thought he was makin’ up a face for fun? The girls do say that come noon-spell, when she found out about it, she cried—just fairly cried. Then she tried to be awful nice to Abe’s ornery brother Ephe, and Ephe he was tickled most to death; but that didn’t do Abe any good—Ephe was jest ornery enough to take care that Abe shouldn’t get any comfort out of it. They do say she sent messages to Abe, and Ephe never delivered them, or else twisted ’em so as to make things worse and worse. Mebbe so, mebbe not—Ephe was ornery enough for it.

’Course the school-ma’am she was boardin’ round, and pretty soon it come time to go to ol’ man Dodge’s, and she went; but no Abe could she ever see. He kept away, and as to meals, he never set by, but took a bite off by himself when he could get a chance. (’Course his mother favored him, being he was so cussed unlucky.) Then when the folks was all to bed, he’d come in and poke up the fire and peek into his book, but first one side and then the other, same as ever.

Now what does school-ma’am do but come down one night when she thought he was abed and asleep, and catch him unawares. Abe knowed it was her, quick as he heard the rustle of her dress, but there wasn’t no help for it, so he just turned his head away and covered his cross-eyes with his hands, and she pitched in. What she said I don’t know, but Abe he never said a word; only told her he didn’t blame her, not a mite; he knew she couldn’t help it—no more than he could. Then557 she asked him to come back to school, and he answered to please excuse him. After a bit she asked him if he wouldn’t come to oblige her, and he said he calculated he was obligin’ her more by stayin’ away.

Well, come to that she didn’t know what to say or do, so, woman-like, she upped and cried; and then she said he hurt her feelings. And the upshot of it was he said he’d come, and they shook hands on it.

Well, Abe kept his word and took up schoolin’ as if nothing had happened; and such schoolin’ as there was that winter! I don’t believe any regular academy had more learnin’ and teachin’ that winter than what that district school did. Seemed as if all the scholars had turned over a new leaf. Even wild, ornery, no-account Ephe Dodge couldn’t help but get ahead some—but then he was crazy to get the school-ma’am; and she never paid no attention to him, just went with Abe. Abe was teachin’ her mathematics, seeing that was the one thing where he knowed more than she did—outside of farmin’. Folks used to say that if Ephe had Abe’s head, or Abe had Ephe’s face, the school-ma’am would have half of the Dodge farm whenever ol’ man Dodge got through with it; but neither of them did have what the other had, and so there it was, you see.

Well, you’ve heard of Squire Caton, of course; Judge Caton, they call him, since he got to be Judge of the Supreme Court—and Chief Justice at that. Well, he had a farm down there not far from Fox River, and when he was there he was just a plain farmer like the rest of us, though up in Chicago he was a high-up lawyer, leader of the bar. Now it so happened that a young doctor named Brainard—Daniel Brainard—had just come to Chicago and was startin’ in, and Squire Caton was helpin’ him, gave him desk-room in his office and made him known to the folks—Kinzies, and Butterfields, and Ogdens, and Hamiltons, and Arnolds, and all of those folks—about all there was in Chicago in those days. Brainard had been to Paris—Paris, France, not Paris, Illinois, you understand—and knew all the doctorin’ there was to know then. Well, come spring Squire Caton had Doc Brainard down to visit him, and they shot ducks and geese and prairie chickens and some wild turkeys and deer, too—game was just swarmin’ at that time. All the while Caton was doin’ what law business there was to do; and Brainard thought he ought to be doin’ some doctorin’ to keep his hand in, so he asked Caton if there wasn’t any cases he could take up—surgery cases especially he hankered after, seein’ he had more carving tools than you could shake a stick at. He asked him particularly if there wasn’t anybody he could treat for “strabismus.” The squire hadn’t heard of anybody dying of that complaint; but when the doctor explained that strabismus was French for cross-eyes, he naturally thought of poor558 Abe Dodge, and the young doctor was right up on his ear. He smelled the battle afar off; and ’most before you could say Jack Robinson the squire and the doctor were on horseback and down to the Dodge farm, tool-chest and all.

Well, it so happened that nobody was at home but Abe and Ephe, and it didn’t take but few words before Abe was ready to set right down, then and there, and let anybody do anything he was a mind to with his misfortunate eyes. No, he wouldn’t wait till the old folks come home; he didn’t want to ask no advice; he wasn’t afraid of pain, nor of what anybody could do to his eyes—couldn’t be made any worse than they were, whatever you did to ’em. Take ’em out and boil ’em and put ’em back if you had a mind to, only go to work. He knew he was of age and he guessed he was master of his own eyes—such as they were.

Well, there wasn’t nothing else to do but go ahead. The doctor opened up his killing tools and tried to keep Abe from seeing them; but Abe he just come right over and peeked at ’em, handled ’em, and called ’em “splendid”—and so they were, barrin’ havin’ them used on your own flesh and blood and bones.

Then they got some cloths and a basin, and one thing and another, and set Abe right down in a chair. (No such thing as chloroform in those days, you’ll remember.) And Squire Caton was to hold an instrument that spread the eyelid wide open, while Ephe was to hold Abe’s head steady. First touch of the lancet, and first spirt of blood, and what do you think? That ornery Ephe wilted, and fell flat on the floor behind the chair!

“I can hold my own head,” says Abe, as steady as you please. But Squire Caton, he straddled over Ephe and held his head between his arms, and the two handles of the eye-spreader with his hands.

It was all over in half a minute, and then Abe he leaned forward, and shook the blood off his eyelashes, and looked straight out of that eye for the first time since he was born. And the first words he said were:

About that time Ephe he crawled outdoors, sick as a dog; and Abe spoke up, says he:

“All right,” says Abe; “if your hands are tired of cuttin’, you can make another job of it. My face ain’t tired of bein’ cut, I can tell you.”

So, if you’ll believe me, they just set to work and operated on the other eye, Abe holding his own head, as he said he would, and the squire holding the spreader. And when it was all done, the doctor was for putting a bandage on to keep things quiet till the wounds all healed up, but Abe just begged for one sight of himself, and he stood up559 and walked over to the clock and looked in the glass, and says he:

“So that’s the way I look, is it? Shouldn’t have known my own face—never saw it before. How long must I keep the bandage on, doctor?”

“Oh, if the eyes ain’t very sore when you wake up in the morning, you can take it off, if you’ll be careful.”

“Wake up! Do you s’pose I can sleep when such a blessing has fallen on me? I’ll lay still, but if I forget it, or you, for one minute this night, I’ll be so ashamed of myself that it’ll wake me right up!”

Then the doctor bound up his eyes and the poor boy said “Thank God!” two or three times, and they could see the tears running down his cheeks from under the cloth. Lord! It was just as pitiful as a broken-winged bird!

How about the girl? Well; it was all right for Abe—and all wrong for Ephe—all wrong for Ephe! But that’s all past and gone—past and gone. Folks come for miles and miles to see cross-eyed Abe with his eyes as straight as a loon’s leg. Doctor Brainard was a great man forever after in those parts. Everywhere else, too, by what I heard.

When the doctor and the squire come to go, Abe spoke up, blindfolded as he was, and says he:

“Doc, how much do you charge a feller for savin’ his life—making a man out of a poor wreck—doin’ what he never thought could be done but by dyin’ and goin’ to kingdom come?”

“Oh,” says Doc Brainard, says he, “that ain’t what we look at as pay practice. You didn’t call me in; I come of myself, as though it was what we call a clinic. If all goes well, and if you happen to have a barrel of apples to spare, you just send them up to Squire Caton’s house in Chicago, and I’ll call over and help eat ’em.”

What did Abe say to that? Why, sir, he never said a word; but they do say the tears started out again, out from under the bandage and down his cheeks. But then Abe he had a five-year-old pet mare he’d raised from a colt—pretty as a picture, kind as a kitten, and fast as split lightning; and next time Doc come down Abe he just slipped out to the barn and brought the mare round and hitched her to the gate-post, and when Doc come to be going, says Abe:

Well, sir, even then Abe had the hardest kind of a time to get Doc Brainard to take that mare; and when he did ride off, leadin’ her, it wasn’t half an hour before back she came, lickety-split. Doc said she broke away from him and put for home, but I always suspected he didn’t have no use for a hoss he couldn’t sell nor hire out, and couldn’t afford to keep in the village—that was what Chicago was then. But come along toward fall Abe he took her right up to town, and then the doctor’s practice had growed so much that he was pretty glad to have her; and Abe was glad to have him have her, seeing all that had come to him through havin’ eyes like other folks—that’s the school-ma’am, I mean.

How did the school-ma’am take it? Well, it was this way. After the cuttin’ Abe didn’t show up for a few days, till the inflammation got down and he’d had some practice handlin’ his eyes, so to speak. He just kept himself to himself,560 enjoying himself. He’d go around doin’ the chores, singing so you could hear him a mile. He was always great on singin’, Abe was, though ashamed to go to singin’-school with the rest. Then, when the poor boy began to feel like other folks, he went right over to where school-ma’am happened to be boardin’ round, and walked right up to her and took her by both hands, and looked her straight in the face, and said:

Well, she kind of smiled and blushed, and then the corners of her mouth pulled down, and she pulled one hand away, and—if you believe me—that was the third time that girl cried that season, to my certain knowledge—and all for nothin’ either time!

What did she say? Why, she just said she’d have to begin all over again to get acquainted with Abe. But Ephe’s nose was out of joint, and Ephe knowed it as well as anybody, Ephe did. It was Abe’s eyes to Ephe’s nose.

Married? Oh, yes, of course; and lived on the farm as long as the old folks lived, and afterwards, too; Ephe staying right along, like the fool he always had been. That feller never did have as much sense as a last year’s bird’s nest.

Alive yet? Abe? Well, no. Might have been if it hadn’t been for Shiloh. When the war broke out Abe thought he’d ought to go, old as he was, so he went into the Sixth. Maybe you’ve seen a book written about the captain of Company K of the Sixth. It was Company K he went into—him and Ephe. And he was killed at Shiloh—just as it always seems to happen. He got killed, and his worthless brother come home. Folks thought Ephe would have liked to marry the widow, but, Lord! she never had no such an idea! Such bait as he was compared to his brother. She never chirked up, to speak of, and now she’s dead too, and Ephe he just toddles round, taking care of the children—kind of a he dry-nurse; that’s about all he ever was good for, anyhow.

My name? Oh, my name’s Ephraim—Ephe they call me, for short; Ephe Dodge. Abe was my brother.

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MCCLURE'S MAGAZINE, VOL. 1, NO. 6, NOVEMBER 1893 ***

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	PAGE
A Dialogue between Frank R. Stockton and Edith M. Thomas.	467
“Incurable.” A Ghetto Tragedy.	478
“Human Documents.”	487
The Personal Force of Cleveland. By E. Jay Edwards.	493
Patti at Craig-y-Nos. By Arthur Warren.	501
Once Aboard the Lugger. By “Q.”	515
Song. By Thomas Lovell Beddoes.	523
An Interview with Professor James Dewar. By Henry J. W. Dam.	524
The House with the Tall Porch. By Gilbert Parker.	533
Stranger Than Fiction. By Doctor William Wright.	535
The Hypnotic Experiments of Doctor Luys. By R. H. Sherard.	547
The Surgeon’s Miracle. By Joseph Kirkland.	555

	PAGE
Frontispiece	466
Miss Edith M. Thomas.	467
A corner of the drawing-room.	472
The dining-room.	476
View from a window in the tower.	477
A. Conan Doyle.	488
R. E. Peary, C. E., U. S. N.	489
Camille Flammarion.	491
F. Hopkinson Smith.	492
Grover Cleveland.	494
Craig-y-Nos.	502
Craig-y-Nos and terraces from the river.	503
Madame Patti’s father.	504
Madame Patti at eighteen.	504
Madame Patti in 1869 and in 1877.	505
The dining-room.	506
The conservatory.	507
Madame’s boudoir.	508
The sitting-room.	509
The French billiard-room.	510
The English billiard-room.	511
Signor Nicolini.	512
A bit in the park. The suspension bridge.	513
The proscenium of Craig-y-Nos theater.	514
The laboratory of Davy and Faraday at the Royal Institution.	525
Professor Dewar in the laboratory of the Royal Institution.	527
The lecture-room of the Royal Institution.	528
Professor Dewar’s lecture-table.	529
Early and latest forms of vessels for holding liquefied oxygen.	530
The “compressors.”	531
Doctor Luys.	547
Pleasing effect of the north pole of a magnet.	548
Repulsive effect of the south pole of a magnet.	549
Esther, Doctor Luys’ subject.	550
Esther in the lethargic state.	551
Attraction of the hand in the lethargic state.	551
The action of water.	552
Pleasure caused by pepper presented to the left side.	552
Anxiety caused by pepper presented to the right side.	553
Pleasure caused by fennel presented to the right eye.	553
Anxiety caused by heliotrope.	554
The effect of thyme.	554
Fright produced by sulphate of sparteine.	554
Terror caused by frankincense.	554
Abe was following the plough.	555
And Ephe he was tickled.	556
And she pitched in.	556
First spirt of blood.	557
“Do you know me?”	558