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Transcriber’s Notes:

Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_), text enclosed
by equal signs is in bold (=bold=), and ^{} encloses superscripted
material.

Additional Transcriber’s Notes are at the end.

       *       *       *       *       *

VAN HOUTEN’S COCOA.

[Illustration: _Mr. Pickwick._]

“_Chops and tomato sauce are excellent, my dear M^{rs.} Bardell, but
let the liquid be Van Houten’s Cocoa._

“_It is a glorious restorative after a fatiguing journey._”

“Best & Goes Farthest.”

The Standard Cocoa of the World.

A Substitute for Tea & Coffee.

Better for the Nerves and Stomach.

Cheaper and more Satisfying.

At all Grocers. Ask for VAN HOUTEN’S.

Perfectly Pure--“Once tried, used always.”

☞A comparison will quickly prove the great superiority of VAN HOUTEN’S
COCOA. _Take no substitute._ Sold in =1/8=, =1/4=, =1/2= and =1 lb.=
Cans. ☞If not obtainable, enclose 25c. in stamps or postal note to
either VAN HOUTEN & ZOON, 106 Reade Street, New York, or 45 Wabash
Ave., Chicago, and a can containing enough for 35 to 40 cups will
be mailed _if you mention this publication_. Prepared only by _the
inventors_, VAN HOUTEN & ZOON, Weesp, Holland.

       *       *       *       *       *




THE MAN.


  A STORY OF TO-DAY,

  With Facts, Fancies and Faults Peculiarly its Own; Containing Certain
  Truths Heretofore Unpublished Concerning Right Relation of the Sexes,
  etc., etc.

  BY ASPASIA HOBBS.

  COPYRIGHT, 1891, BY J. S. OGILVIE.

  THE SUNNYSIDE SERIES, No. 47. Issued Monthly. December, 1891. Extra.
  $3.00 per year. Entered at New York Post-Office as second-class
  matter.




THREE OPEN LETTERS.


LETTER NO. 1.

BUFFALO, N. Y., July 1, 1891.

TO MARTHA HEATH,

_Friend_:--You said that someone would surely print it, and I write
you this to say that after four publishers had most politely rejected
the manuscript, the fifth has written me saying the story does not
amount to much; in fact, that I have no literary style, but as the
book is so out of the general run they concluded to accept it. They
sent me a check for $300.00 which they say is a bonus, and after the
first 5,000 copies are sold they propose to pay me a royalty. So you
see even if I have lost my place at Hustler’s, I am not destitute, so I
will not accept your offer of a loan. You and Grimes (dear old Grimes)
are the only persons in all this great city who have stood by me in my
trouble. If you had presented me with a box of candy I would thank you,
but for all the kindness I have received, prompted by your outspoken
and generous nature, I offer not a single word. Words, in times like
these, to such as you, are of small avail, my heart speaks. You say
you dislike awfully to see those last five chapters in print, and so
will I, my dear. Little did we think when I began this book that the
story would have such an ending; but, Martha, I am not writing a pretty
novel, but simple truth just as the facts occurred. I offer no excuse
nor apology, but will simply give you this from Charles Kingsley’s
“Alton Locke:”

Scene: A street corner in London, on one hand a gin palace, opposite a
pawn shop--those two monsters who feed on the vitals of the poor--all
about is abject wretchedness.

Locke stops, sighs and says, “Oh, this is so very unpoetic.” Sandy
Mackaye replies, “What, man, no poetry here! Why, what is poetry but
chapters lifted from the drama of life, and what is the drama if not
the battle between man and circumstance, and shall not man eventually
conquer? I will show you too in many a garret where no eye but that of
the good God enters, the patience, the fortitude, the self-sacrifice
and the love stronger than death, all flourishing while oppression and
stupid ignorance are clawing at the door!”

But right will conquer, dearest, and the goodness that has never been
weighed in the balances, nor tried in the fire, how do you know it _is_
goodness at all? It may only be namby-pamby--wishy-washy--goody-goody,
_who knows_? _We_ are all in God’s hand, sister, and the bad is the
stuff sent, on which to try our steel.

Yours ever,

ASPASIA.

       *       *       *       *       *

LETTER NO. 2.

July 3, 1891.

TO PYGMALION WOODBUR, ESQ., Attorney-at-Law.

_Sir_:--I have received your letter warning me that if I use your name
in a certain book of local history (said book entitled THE MAN) that
you will cause my arrest for malicious libel, and also sue me for
damages. To this I can only say that the book is now in the hands of
the electrotypers, and I am not inclined to change a line in it, on
your suggestion, even if I could. Please believe me, when I say, that I
bear you no ill-will and have no desire to injure you or place you in
a wrong light before the public, what I have written being but truth
penned without exaggeration or coloring. I make no apology or excuse.
What I have written I have written.

Yours, etc.,

ASPASIA HOBBS.

       *       *       *       *       *

LETTER NO. 3.

BUFFALO, N. Y., July 3, 1891.

TO JOHN BILKSON, of Hustler & Co.,

_Sir_:--Your registered letter of June 30th, received, wherein you
state that you have no further use for my services, and that whereas
you generally give an employee a letter of recommendation when you
discharge them, yet in my case you cannot do so.

Although I have made no request for such recommendation, I regret your
conscience will not allow you to supply it.

You remember the scene of five years ago in your office? No one knows a
word of this, and never will, unless you tell it (which I hardly think
you care to do). You swore then you would get even with me--is your
vengeance now satisfied?

I have no malice toward you--I cannot afford to have against
anyone--although I must say that your action in deducting from my
wages the price of one set of false teeth purchased from Dr. Poole is
not exactly right. You know, Mr. Bilkson, you lost those teeth purely
through accident and no one regretted the occurrence more than I. With
best wishes for the continued prosperity of Hustler & Co., I remain,

Yours, as ever,

ASPASIA HOBBS.

       *       *       *       *       *

THE MAN.




CHAPTER I. MYSELF.


What I have to write is of such great value, the circumstances so
peculiar, the record so strange, and the truths so startling, that it
is but proper I should explain who and what I am, in order that any
person, so disposed, may fully verify for himself the things I am about
to relate.

Just at that most quiet hour of all the twenty-four, in the city, on
a summer’s morning, when the darkness is stubbornly giving way to
daylight, there came a violent ring at Mr. Hobbs’ door-bell, followed
up with what seemed to be quite an unnecessary knocking.

Mr. Hobbs was interested in an elevator, and when he heard that ring he
was sure the elevator had burned--in fact, he had a presentiment that
such would be the case; besides this, Mr. Hobbs always carried a goodly
assortment of fears ready to use at any moment.

“There, didn’t I tell you!” he excitedly exclaimed to his wife, as he
rushed down the stairs--he hadn’t told his wife anything, just bottled
up his fears in his own bosom and let them ferment, but that made no
difference--“Didn’t I tell you!” and he hastily unlocked and opened the
door. No one there!

He looked up the street and down the street. Nothing but a
clothes-basket, covered over with a threadbare shawl, which evidently
a long time ago had been a costly one. Mr. Hobbs expected a messenger
with bad news and Mr. Hobbs was disappointed, in fact was mad; and he
snatched that shawl from the basket, staggered against the door, and a
voice, like unto that of a young and lusty bull, went up the stairway
where Mrs. Hobbs stood peering over the banisters:

“Maria, for God’s sake come quick! There’s something awful happened!
Quick, will you!”

Mrs. Hobbs was not very brave, but curiosity often reinforces courage;
so the good lady came down the stairs two steps at a time, and stood by
the side of her liege, who had got his breath by this time and stood
peering over the basket.

And there they stood together, all in white, with bare feet, on the
front porch, and nearly broad daylight.

In the basket, all wrapped up in dainty flannel, smiling, cooing and
kicking up its heels, lay a baby--well, perhaps two months old, and on
a card written with pencil were these words:

“_God knows._”

Mr. and Mrs. Hobbs had no children, and they each looked upon this as a
gift from providence--basket and all. They cared for the waif as their
own child, and if their reward does not come in this life, I am sure it
will in another.

“Her name shall be Aspasia Hobbs, for I always said my first girl (Mr.
and Mrs. Hobbs had been married five years, and had no children, but
the babies were already named; which, I am told, is the usual custom)
should be named Aspasia, after your mother, dear,” said Mrs. Hobbs.

And Aspasia Hobbs it was, and is yet: and I am Aspasia Hobbs: and Mr.
and Mrs. Hobbs are the only parents I have ever known.

I am now an old maid, aged thirty-seven (I must tell the truth). I am
homely and angular, and can pass along the street without a man turning
to look at me. From five years’ constant pounding on a caligraph my
hands have grown large and my knuckles and the ends of my fingers are
like knobs. I can walk twenty miles a day, or ride a wheel fifty.

The bishop of Western New York, in a sermon preached recently, said
riding bicycles is “unladylike” (and so is good health for that
matter)--but if the good bishop would lay aside prejudice and robe
and mount a safety, he could still show men the right way as well as
now--possibly better, who knows?

But, in the language of Spartacus, “I was not always thus.” Thank
Heaven, I am strong and well! They used to say, “She is such a
delicate, sensitive child, we can not keep her without we take very,
v-e-r-y good care of her.” Some fool has said that hundreds of people
die every year because they have such “very good care.”

My father was a member of the firm of Hobbs, Nobbs & Porcine, was
a Board of Trade man, and, therefore, had no time to give to his
children; but he was a good provider, as the old ladies say, and used
to remind us of it quite often. “Don’t I get you everything you need?”
he once roared at my mother, when she hinted that an evening home once
in a while would not be out of place. “Here you have an up-stairs girl,
a cook, a laundress, a coachman, a gardener, a tutor for Aspasia, and
don’t I pay Doctor Bolus just five hundred dollars a year to call here
every week and examine you all so as to keep you healthy? Great Scott,
the ingratitude of woman! they are getting worse and worse every day!”

My father was a good man--that is he was not bad, so he must have been
good. He never used tobacco, and I never heard him swear but once, and
that was when Professor Connors brought in a bill reading:

“Debtor, to calisthenics for wife and daughter, $50.”

“I’ll pay it,” said my father grimly, “but I will deduct it from Bolus’
check, for you say it’s for the health and therefore it belongs to
Bolus’ department and he should have furnished the goods.”

We lived on Delaware avenue, in one of the finest houses, which my
father bought and had furnished throughout before my mother or any
one of us were allowed to enter. He was a good man, and wanted to
astonish--that is to say, surprise us. So one Saturday night, at
dinner, he said,

“On Monday, my dears, we will leave this old Michigan street for a
house on the ‘Avenue.’ I have given up our pew in Grace Church, and
to-morrow, and hereafter, Rev. Fred. C. Inglehart and Delaware avenue
are plenty good enough for us.”

Our family have the finest monument in Forest Lawn, and father assured
us that if Methusalah was now a boy this monument would be new when his
great grandchildren died of old age. He waxed enthusiastic, and added,
as he lapsed into reverie,

“It’s a regular James Dandy, and knocks out Rodgers and Jowette in one
round.”

I am a graduate of Dr. Chesterfield’s academy, and also of the
high-school. I have studied music with Mr. McNerney and Senor Nuno,
elocution with Steele Mackaye; and father once offered to wager Mr.
Porcine that “Aspasia could do up any girl on the avenue or Franklin
street at the piano.”

I was a rich (alleged) man’s daughter, and as I had a managing mamma
and went in society I had the usual love (how that word is abused!)
experiences. I am not writing an autobiography, but merely telling
what is absolutely necessary for you to know of me; otherwise, I would
relate some insipid mush about flirtations with several gilded youths,
who waltzed delightfully and made love abominably--just as if a man
could _make_ love! But suffice it to say, I never, in those old days,
met a man I could not part with and feel relieved when he had taken his
“darby” and slender cane and hied him down the steps. Mamma said I was
heartless and didn’t know a good chance when I saw it.

One little affair of the pocket-book--that is, I mean of the
heart--might be mentioned. A certain attorney, Pygmalion Woodbur by
name--old Buffalonians know him well--paid his respects to me in an
uneasy and stilted fashion. He was ten years my senior, had a monster
yellow moustache generally colored black, which he combed down over the
cavern in his face. He dressed in the latest, and was looked upon as a
great catch. How these old bachelor men-about-town are lionized by a
certain set of women!

He called several times, invited himself to dinner, took mamma riding
and threw out side glances--grimaces--in my direction. One fine evening
I sat reading in the parlor, alone, and in walked Mr. Woodbur and began
about thusly:

“Aspasia--I may call you by your first name, now can’t I?--and you must
call me Pyggie, for short. I have just spoken to your father and he
says it’s all right,” etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

He slid off from the sofa on his knees, and seized my left hand and
kissed it violently.

Fair lady, have you ever been kissed with a rush, by a man with a large
yellow moustache colored black? Well it’s just like being jabbed with a
paint brush!

Now, after his poorly memorized speech had been delivered, and I had
jerked my hand away, there was a pause. I tried to laugh and I tried
to cry; then I tried to faint, and was too mad to do either; so I just
inwardly raged and then came the explosion--

“No! no! no! a thousand times _no_! Stick to you, Woodbur! _Never!_ I
hate you--get out of my sight, quick!”

Just then in came papa and mamma, who it seems were taking a turn about
at the keyhole.

“Why! why what’s the matter with my little girl,” and I fell sobbing in
my mother’s arms.

“You must excuse her, Mr. Woodbur,” said the good lady. “Since her
sunstroke, she has these spells quite often. You will excuse her, I
know.”

“Why, when was the gal struck! You never told me nothing about it,”
broke in my father.

“Now Hobbs, don’t be a fool,” said my mother under her breath.

Father started to answer. Woodbur saw his opportunity, and escaped
under cover of the smoke, and forgot to come back for his umbrella,
which I now have tied up with a white ribbon and put away with mint and
lavender in memory of days gone by--and the best that I can say of the
days that have gone by is that they have gone by.

As time wore, life seemed to grow dull and heavy, my cheeks grew
pale, and in summer I sat on the piazza, often from breakfast until
dinner-time, with a white crepe shawl thrown about my shoulders,
listlessly watching the passers-by. Mother said, “Poor girl, I wish she
would get mad just once as she used to. She is so good and submissive.”
Doctor Bolus said I needed cod liver oil with strong doses of quinine,
and once a week Glauber salts taken in molasses and sulphur; but still
in spite of all medicine could do for me, I grew weaker and weaker. I
fed on Mrs. Hemans and Tupper, and finally they carried me daily out to
the big carriage, and the coachman was instructed to drive very slowly,
and we went out through the Park, out to Forest Lawn and looked at our
family monument, which gleamed in the beautiful sunshine.

Mother generally rode with me, and one morning she left me waiting in
the carriage while she went over near our “lot,” so she could more
closely inspect the monument. While waiting the coachman turned to me
and said:

“Missis, yer father have bust, yer mother don’t know it; but you are no
fool, missis, and I thought you should know it, to kinder prepare like.
They have been around inventizering the horses and carriages and are
going to sell them next week--see? And my wife said you are the only
one who has sense, and I should break the news to you easy like--see?”

I heard him rattling on, but did not seem to understand what he said;
but I felt my heart beating fast and the blood coming to my cheeks. The
old dead submissiveness was gone, and I said:

“John, shut up, and repeat to me what you said first.”

“Nothin’,” said John, “only that your father have bust and run off to
Canada, and C. J. Hummer and the rest is goin’ to bounce you out next
week.”

I saw his grieved tone, or felt it rather, and said:

“John, I did not mean to speak cross to you.”

“Never mind, missis, I have no favors to ax, and you couldn’t grant eny
even if I did--for your father have bust, dwye see?”

Mother was coming from the monument, and greatly vexed, I saw.

“Why, Smythe has not put any foundation under it at all scarcely,” she
said, as she stepped into the carriage. “The weight on top is gradually
crushing the bottom, and I believe it is full six inches toppled over
to the west.”

“It is probably going west to grow up with the country,” I said.

Think of such a remark from a dying invalid!

My mother turned in astonishment to see if it was really her daughter.

“John,” said I, “drive home--go fast--let them out, will you--go home
quick. Mrs. Hobbs is not well.”

I felt an awful propensity to joke, and a wild exultation and pleasure
came over me that I had not known since we used to climb the hills at
our summer-house at Strykersville. John cracked the whip and saluted
all the other coachmen as we passed. He whistled, and so did I. For the
first time in five years I felt free; and John had lost the fear that
he would not be impressive, and he too was free. My mother sat bolt
upright in a rage.

“You are both drunk,” she said. “John, sit straight on that box. Don’t
carry the whip over your shoulder, and don’t cross your legs or I will
discharge you Saturday night!”

John turned round--smiled--looked at me and winked.




CHAPTER II. OURSELVES.


As the carriage stopped in the _portière_ the big gardener came down,
and placing one arm under and the other about me, was just going to
lift the invalid out as usual.

“Go away,” I fairly screamed. “Let me walk, will you! Carry mother in
quick,” for sure enough, she was the one who had to be carried. Her
rigid dignity had disappeared, and she had dropped back listless and
disheveled, moaning:

“Oh, John is drunk and Aspasia crazy! Look at her! she is so sick she
can’t walk, and yet see her run up those steps! What shall I do, what
shall I do! And the monument that they warranted in writing to last
for ever or no pay is tumbling down. I must have it fixed, even if it
costs ten thousand dollars; for the name of Hobbs must not grow dim.”
“Dear he” (she always spoke of her husband as simply “he” or “him”)
“has so often said, ‘You married Hobbs for better or worse’--says he
to me--‘and your name will be carved on the finest monument in Forest
Lawn.’“

Reader bold--lacking in knowledge and therefore in faith, limiting
possibility to your own tiny experience, quick to deny--you doubt that
I went away an invalid and returned in an hour cured. Let me whisper
in your ear that it was all in accordance with natural law, and not at
all strange or miraculous, excepting in the sense that all nature is
miraculous (let us not quarrel over definitions). That which cured me
was a good dose of Animating Purpose.

Men retire from business and die in a year from lack of animating
purpose. Women are protected, hedged about and propped up, cared for,
and die for the lack of this essential.

“Faith Cure,” “Christian Science” and any other strong desire filled
with hope and a determination to _be_ and to _do_, supply animating
purpose of a good kind, although sometimes, possibly, alloyed with
error: but any good idea which makes us forget self and sends the blood
coursing through our veins, is healing in its nature.

When the stays that held me were cut, and I knew I must live and work
and be useful, the old sickly self was thrust far behind by Animating
Purpose; not the finest quality of animating purpose, I will admit,
but a fairly good serviceable article, and certainly a thousand times
better than none.

You must not think that my mother was naturally weak--not so. Of a
fine delicate organization, she married when nineteen and had given
herself unreservedly to her husband in mind and body (for have not
husbands “rights?”) never doubting but what it was her wifely duty to
do so. She even gave up her own church and joined his--adopted his
opinions--quoted his sayings and repeated his jokes. “Well, _he_ says
so and that is an end to it.” In the house of Hobbs, Hobbs was the
court of last appeal.

In some marriages women say “I will” audibly, with mental reservation
of “when circumstances permit.” Such women have been instructed in
diplomacy. They have been told to meet their husbands at the door with
a smile and clean collar, to make home pleasant, to smooth down the
rough places--in short, to manage the man and never let him discover
it, which is the finest of the finest arts. They can examine his
pockets at such convenient times when he will not know it, count his
money, take what they need--which is better than harassing a man and
whining for a dollar--read his note-book, and thus in a thousand little
ways keep such close track of him that with proper skill there would be
positively no excuse for rubbing him the wrong way of the fur.

But not so with my mother. She said to Mr. Hobbs on their wedding night,

“I am yours--wholly yours. In your presence I will think aloud, there
shall be no concealment. To you I give my soul and body!”

Mr. Hobbs took the latter, and in a hoarse whisper said:

“I have an income of six thousand dollars a year, and you shall never
regret you married Hobbs, of Hobbs, Nobbs & Porcine. I will shield you
from every unpleasant thing; you shall never know care or trouble;
never a day’s work shall you do; nothing but just be happy and look
pretty the livelong day; and anything you want at Barnes & Bancroft’s,
Peter Paul’s, Dickinson’s or Fulton Market, why get it and have it
charged to Hobbs, for I am rated in ‘Dun’ ‘E. 2,’ and next year it will
be ‘2 plus.’”

Such total unselfishness touched the virgin heart of this
nineteen-year’s-old woman--that is to say, child. She lived in a
Hobbs’ atmosphere. The two lives did not grow into one, she became
Mrs. Hobbs not only in name but in fact. Now any thinking person will
admit that this was better than for her to have endeavored to retain
her individuality, for if she had done this and still was honest and
frank, there would have been strife. She would always have thought of
her girlhood as the _ante bellum_ times, for Mr. Hobbs had ideas, or
believed he had, and nothing gave him such delicious joy as to rub
these ideas into one, especially if they squirmed and protested.

I have seen precocious children that astonished or made jealous as
the case might be. How they did sing, play the banjo, or speak!
One such boy I remember--we were all sure he would grow to be an
orator who would shake the nation. I watched him, and saw him to-day
presiding at the second chair in Chadduck’s tonsorial palace, and
noted the Ciceronian wave of his hand as he shouted the legend, “Next
gentleman--shave.”

Walking across a prairie in Iowa with a friend, we suddenly found
ourselves going through a miniature grove, where the highest trees did
not reach my shoulders. I examined the leaves and found the trees to be
black-oak of the most perfect type.

“What beautiful young trees! How they will grow and grow and put out
their roots in every direction, and search the very bowels of the
earth for the food and sustenance they need! How they will toss their
branches in defiance to the storm, and be a refuge and defence for the
wearied traveler! How----”

“Stop that gush, will you please!” said my companion. “These are only
scrub-oaks and will not be any larger if they live a hundred years.”

Possibly this grove explains why the average man of sixty is no wiser
and no better than the average man of forty--it is Arrested Development.

My good mother is only a fine type of Arrested Development.




CHAPTER III. A LITTLE LOCAL HISTORY.


With my woman’s intuition I knew all just from the hint John gave. My
father a week before had gone to Montreal, saying he would be back
Wednesday. It was now Friday and he had not returned. I remember the
two men who had come to “take an inventory for the ‘Tax Office,’” one
said, and he winked at the other. How they walked through the house
with their hats on and joked each other as they tried the piano! I saw
it all! My father had lost money and had given a chattel mortgage on
the furniture, having first raised all the money he could on the real
estate.

I asked my mother if she remembered giving the mortgage, and she looked
at me, grieved and surprised, saying:

“Why, of course not, dear. I always signed the papers he brought me. Do
you think it a woman’s place to ask questions about business?”

Well, if I were writing my own history, I would tell you how the two
men from the “Tax Office” came back with Robert McCann the auctioneer;
how they hung a big red flag over the sidewalk and took up the carpets
so that when they walked across the bare floor of the big parlors the
echo of the footsteps rang through the whole house; how greasy men with
hook noses came and examined the furniture; of how one such insisted
on seeing my mother on very private business, when he asked, “If dot
bainting was a real Millais or only a schnide; and if it was a schnide,
to gif a zerdificate dat it vas a Millais and I will bid it off at a
hundred, so hellup me gracious!”; of how kind neighbors came and bought
in all the dishes and silverware and gave them back to us; of how a
certain widowed gentleman offered to bid in the piano if I would accept
a position as governess for his daughter and live at his house.

Well, the furniture went and so did we. The Fitch ambulance came and
took mother down to our new quarters, which I had rented on South
Division street, near Cedar, and right pretty did the little house look
too. Mrs. Grimes, the laundress, came with us--in fact, came in spite
of us.

“I have no money to pay you, and you cannot come. That is all there is
about it,” I protested.

“Well, I don’t want no money,” said this gray-haired old woman. “I have
’leven hundred dollars in the Erie County, and it is all yours if you
want it. Haven’t I worked for the Hobbses three weeks lacking two days
before you was left on the steps? I was the only girl they had then,
and I am the only girl you got now. I have sent my hair trunk down to
South Division street, and I’m going myself on the next load with Bill
Smith, who drives the van for Charlie Miller. I knowed Bill before I
did you, and Bill says he will stand by Aspasia Hobbs too, he does.”

What could I do but kiss the grizzled kindly face of this old “girl” on
both cheeks and let her come?

It was a full month before we got track of my father. I went to
Montreal and brought back an old man, with tottering mind, crushed
in spirit. He had fixed his heart on things of earth--he became a
part of them, they of him--and when they went down there was only one
result. He lingered along for three months, constantly reproaching
himself; seeing also reproach in the face of every passer-by, imagining
upbraidings in each look of those who sought to comfort and care for
him, and the light of his life went out in darkness.

“Judge not that ye be not judged.”




CHAPTER IV. SOME THINGS.


My mother received a little money from the life insurance companies.
Father patronized only assessment companies, as they are cheap. He
prided himself on his financial ability, always saying he could invest
money as well as any rascally insurance president and that there was
“nothing like having your money where you can put your claw on it in
case you get a straight tip.”

Idle I could not be, and I resolved to get a situation.

“Verily, I will teach school, for the young must be educated,” I said,
“or the world cannot be tamed. I must, I will mould growing character.”
In fact, I felt a call; so I called on Mr. Straight, the superintendent
of education, never doubting but that he would at once give me an
opportunity to show my ability. I displayed my Dr. Chesterfield and the
high-school diplomas, and various certificates from long-haired and
eccentric foreigners, (not forgetting Prof. Franklin of Col. Webber’s
and Judge Lewis’s testimonials, who imparts dramatic instruction for
one dollar an impart) as to my ability in music, dancing, French,
German, and deportment.

The superintendent counted the certificates and diplomas as he piled
them up on his desk, and asked me if I had any “pull.” Then he asked me
why I did not get married, and said he had been looking for me, “for
whenever a man busts his daughters always come here for a job.” He took
my name in a big book, and as he waved me out remarked that “there are
only seven hundred applicants ahead of you. I’m afraid you are not in
it. You had better catch on to some young fellow, my dear, before the
crow’s feet get too pronounced----ta, ta.”[1]

I stood outside the door confused, defeated, angry. I thought of
a thousand things I should have said to that grinning insinuating
superintendent, and here I had not said a word. I was out in the hall,
the door was shut. Slowly my wrath took form in action, and I walked
off with a much more emphatic tread than was becoming in a young
woman. I slammed my parasol against the banisters at every stride as
I went down the city hall steps. I had a plan. Straight to the _News_
office I went, intending to insert an advertisement and thus secure
exactly the position I desired. I bought a paper to see how other
people advertised, and my eyes fell on the following:

  WANTED: As correspondent, book-keeper and stenographer, a young woman
  who can translate German, French, and Italian, who is not afraid to
  work, and can look after the business in proprietor’s absence. Wages,
  $4.75 per week.

  Apply to HUSTLER & CO.,

  Manufacturers of Glue,

  Genesee Street.

I took the paper and entered a herdic, telling the driver to hurry as I
wanted to go to Hustler & Co.’s.

Arriving there, I walked in, banged the door, and demanded to see
Hustler, omitting all title and prefix. Straight had brow-beaten and
insulted me an hour before--let Hustler try if he dare. I wanted a
position, not advice, and would brook no parley or nonsense.

“Are you Hustler?” I asked of a little meek bald-headed man, with a
ginger-colored fringe of hair like a lambrequin around his occiput. He
plead guilty. “And did you,” I continued hurriedly, but in a determined
manner, “and did you insert this advertisement?” and I spread out the
paper before him.

He hesitated.

“Did you, or did you not?”

Here I moved back three paces and gazed at him as though I had him on
cross-examination. He admitted that he had inserted the advertisement,
had not yet found a young woman who could fill all of the conditions,
and that I could have the place.

“To-morrow, when the whistle blows for seven o’clock,” said he.

“To-morrow, when the whistle blows for seven o’clock,” said I.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] For fear that some may imagine that the character of Mr. Straight,
superintendent of schools, is untrue to life, and that such a man
could not hold the position, it must be explained that in the city
of Buffalo this office is an elective one, and is held by the person
able to control the caucus and secure the votes; so very naturally the
gentleman has an eye on next year’s election, and when he appoints new
teachers he accepts those (provided of course they are competent) who
are best backed up by influential friends. It must be said, however,
that the present incumbent of the office alluded to is a most worthy
and competent man, and also that the school-teachers of Buffalo outrank
in fitness those of most other cities; but these two facts do not in
the least condone the dangerous principle of having the office of
Superintendent of Schools a political one.




CHAPTER V. LOST.


At last I was no longer a dependent! From this time on I would not
only earn my own living, but I would do for others. I was no longer a
pensioner.

“He who receives a pension gives for it his manhood,” said Plato. A
pension makes a man a mendicant. When the world is peopled by God’s
people, every man will work according to his ability, and will be paid
for his services, so there will neither be pensioners nor bumptious
bestowers.

My work at Hustler & Co.’s was not difficult, when I got over the scare
and the belief that it was awfully complex. In short, the lion was
chained, as it always is when we get up close and inspect the animal;
or perhaps, it is only a stuffed lion that has been terrifying us.
Possibly some evilly disposed person, seeing our fear, has taken pains
to wipe the dust off the fiery glass eyes, to rough up the tawny mane,
and set the tail at that terrific angle--but who is afraid of a lion
on wheels? When I became composed and took a common sense view of the
work, the difficulties took wing, and at the end of the first week, Mr.
Hustler gave me the assurance “that I was no slouch,” which is the
highest compliment that Rustler Hustler, of the firm of Hustler & Co.,
glue makers, was ever known to pay to any living soul.

One of the girls in the office told me that the former stenographer
lost her place by taking dictation for Mr. Bilkson, the junior partner,
at close range; which being interpreted, meant that when Mr. Bilkson
dictated his letters to the young lady, he had her sit on his knee.
Mrs. Bilkson is a large, determined woman with a jealous nature and red
parasol. As she appeared in the private office one day without first
sending in her card, the close range plan was discovered. Soon after
that little Miss Bustle was found to be incompetent, and the cashier
gave her her time. Bilkson still remains.

When the junior dictates letters to me, it is through the little
sliding window that connects my room with the general office. This was
at my suggestion after a few days’ acquaintanceship with the gentleman.
I fear I also incurred his enmity when I told him I was hired to do the
work, not to entertain the firm.

Saturdays we have half a day off--that is, we work until 1:30 and are
docked half a day.

Every one who knows me, knows I am a great bicycler--in fact, working
closely, if it were not for the outdoor exercise I get, I could never
stand the strain, but would be a candidate for nervous prostration
(technical name Americanitis). Some years ago I had an awful bad
spell. Dr. Bolus was sent for and prescribed quinine and iron with a
trip to Bermuda and rest for a year. My old friend, Martha Heath, came
in soon after, and I asked her to go to Stoddard’s drugstore for the
quinine.

“I won’t,” said Martha Heath. “Bounce Bolus and buy a bicycle!”

I followed her advice, and have blessed Martha Heath ever since.

It was my custom on Saturdays after I had eaten my lunch at the
factory, to take my wheel and go on a long ride, sometimes in the
summer as far as Niagara Falls, getting back late in the evening. These
long quiet rides I anticipated with much pleasure, for to get away
from the strife of men out into the quiet country, seemed to give me
new life. The winter gave me little opportunity for these trips, so I
looked forward longingly to the coming of spring.

The month of April, 1891, it will be remembered was remarkable, in
that there was not a single fall of rain from the 10th to the 30th.
The roads were dry and dusty as in summer. Saturday afternoon, April
30th, when I rode out Clinton street in the delightful sunshine which
seemed to bear healing on its wings, women were working in the gardens,
cleaning up the rubbish; children playing on the road; a faint smell
of bonfire from burning rubbish, people starting in in the spring to
keep the yards clean; men plowing in the fields; and how the frogs
did croak! Joy and gladness on every hand. Out through Gardenville,
past Ebenezer, five o’clock found me at Hurdville. I was so very
busy drinking in the glorious scene that I had ridden slower than I
intended, for I had made calculations to be at Aurora before this time,
and well on the way homeward.

“Well,” said I, “Aspasia Hobbs, you had better hurry up or night will
catch you. Besides, the wind has come up strong from the southwest, and
away off over the Colden hills is a little black cloud--what a joke if
you should get wet?”

There is a lane running across from Hurdville to the Buffalo plank
road, so I decided to cut my trip short and strike across at once. I
looked at my watch and it was just 5:15 when I entered the lane, which
was grass-grown and not at all adapted for bicycling. As I pushed on,
the road grew worse, so I got off and pushed the wheel ahead of me.
Rather hard work it proved, as I wore a long woolen dress, which I had
to hold up in walking.

Then I tried riding again. A great yellow ominous brightness was in
the west, and soon I noticed it was growing dark, and that the little
cloud had grown until it seemed to cover the whole western sky. A few
big rain drops fell as I looked again at my watch, which said six
o’clock. I kept thinking I must come to the plank road every minute,
and strained my eyes for the telegraph poles which I knew marked the
highway. But no, I could not see them. “Surely this lane must cross
the main road or I am turned around and am following a road running
parallel with the other,” I concluded.

Still I trudged on, now riding, then walking. It began to rain now in
right good earnest. I felt the mud sticking to my shoes and my clothes
growing heavy. My arms grew tired pushing the wheel before me as I
walked. The spokes had become a solid mass of mud. I tried to mount the
wheel. It swerved and I lay in the ditch. I then realized that to try
to push the bicycle further or to ride would be folly; so I pulled the
machine into the bushes, and looked around me on every side. Not even
a lightning glare to relieve the gloom and brighten the landscape. The
rain still fell in torrents. I covered my face with my hands. I thought
of my mother waiting in the bright light of our little dining-room, the
supper on the table. I tried to imagine this howling wind and blackness
of the night was a dream; but no, I was alone--_alone_, _lost_.




CHAPTER VI. THE LOG CABIN.


It was the worst night I ever saw, and I hope I may never see another
one like it. How the winds did roar through the branches and the wild
crash now and then of a falling tree was most appalling. The darkness
was intense. The cold rain came in beating gusts, and I felt it was
gradually turning to sleet and snow.

Think of it, I, a city-bred woman, alone on an out-of-the-way country
road, dense woods on either side, mud and slush ankle deep, wandering I
knew not where!

My clothes weighed a hundred pounds. They clung to my tired form and
I seemed ready to fall with fatigue, when I saw, not far ahead of me,
the glimmer of a light which seemed to come from a small log house a
quarter of a mile back from the road.

Straight toward the welcoming glimmering light, through bramble, bush
and stumps, I stumbled my way, now and then sinking near knee deep in
some hole where a tree had been uprooted. I think I rather pounded on
the door than rapped, and so fearful was I that I would not meet with
a welcome reception, that I began scarcely before the door was opened
explaining in a loud and excited voice (for I am but a woman after
all), begging that I might be warmed and sheltered only until daylight,
when I could make my way back, promising pay in a sight draft on
Hustler & Co., for in my coming away I had left my purse in my office
dress. I only remember that what I took for an old man opened the door,
led me in, showing not the slightest look of curiosity or surprise, but
seeming rather to be expecting me. He stopped my excited talking by
saying, in the mildest, sweetest baritone I ever heard,

“Yes, I know. It is turning to snow. You lost your way and are wet and
cold. Look at this cheerful fireplace and this pile of pine wood. My
wife is here; but no, I have no woman’s clothes either. You had better
take off your dress and let it dry over the chair. Then if you stand
before the fire your other raiment will soon dry on you, which is as
good as changing; and in the meantime, I will get you something to eat.”

That night seems now as if it belonged to a former existence, so soft
and hazy when viewed across memory’s landscape. I only know that as
soon as the man stopped my hurried explanations, the sense of fear
vanished, and I felt as secure as when a child I prattled about my
mother’s rocking-chair as she watched me with loving eyes. I said not
a word, so great was the peace that had come over me. After a plain
supper, of which I partook heartily, I remember climbing a ladder up
into the garret of this log house, and stooping so as not to strike my
head against the rafters; also The Man’s tucking me in bed as though I
were a child, putting an extra blanket over me while saying softly to
himself as if he were speaking to a third person,

“She must be kept warm. Nature’s balm will heal, sleep is the great
restorer, to-morrow she will feel all the better for this little
experience. So is the seeming bad turned into good.”

He passed his hand gently over my eyes, took up the candle and I heard
him move down the ladder and--sweet childlike sleep held me fast.




CHAPTER VII. THE MAN.


The morning sun came creeping through the cracks of the garret as I
slowly awoke to consciousness and began rubbing my eyes, trying to make
out where I was and how I came there. Slowly it dawned upon me, the
awful work of trying to push that wheel through the mud; the descending
darkness; the increasing storm; of how I left the bicycle by the
road-side and the sickening sense that came over me as I felt that I
had lost my way and must find shelter or perish; of how my heavy woolen
dress, soaked with water, tangled my tired legs as I struggled forward;
of the glimmering light, and how I feared that though I had at last
found a house they might mistake me for an outcast and have no pity on
me; of the sweet peace I experienced when the old man spoke to me; of
following his suggestion that I should remove my dress; of how I stood
clad only in my under-clothing before the fire, and of how he put me to
bed, and I was all unabashed and unashamed. I thought of all this and
more, and was just getting ready to be thoroughly frightened when my
reverie was broken into by hearing a step come lightly up the ladder,
and the beautiful face of The Man framed in its becoming snowy white
hair appeared.

“Yes, she is awake,” he said, again seemingly talking to a third
person. “She will be a little sore of course after the exertion, but
refreshed and all the stronger for the hard work. Paradoxical--effort
put forth causes power to accumulate in the body, which is only a
storage battery after all. By giving out power we gain it, by losing
life we save it. How simple yet how wonderful are the works of God!”
Then speaking to me: “I will bring you warm water for a bath. It will
take the stiffness out of your limbs. Breakfast will be ready when you
are.”

I bathed, dressed without the aid of a glass, and was surprised to feel
how strong and well I felt. Down I went cautiously on the ladder, and
we ate breakfast, neither speaking a word. It seemed as if (glib as I
generally am--“A regular gusher,” Martha Heath says) to break in on the
silence would be sacrilege. Silence is music at rest.

Out of every fifty men who pass along the street, only one thinks;
the forty-nine have feelings but no thoughts. We have no time here to
treat of the forty-nine; let us leave them out of the question and
deal only with the one, the men of character, so-called, men who have
opinions and hold them. In this class we cannot admit the girl-men or
boy-men or those who are called men simply because they are not women,
or the vicious or even those of doubtful morality. Let us take only
the best and not even consider the “unco-gude.” Now having banished
the unthinking, the immoral and the doubtful, tell me, reader, have
you ever seen a man? Have you? Not a caricature or imitation of one,
full of a wish to be manly, and therefore anxious about the result?
not a being full of whim and prejudice, receiving the opinions from
the past and referring to numbers as proof; who prides himself on his
self-reliance and his absence of pride, and yet who can be won by
agreeing with him and through diplomacy? not one who endeavors to prove
to you the correctness of his views by argument in the endeavor to win
you over to his side, in order that that side may be strengthened? not
one in whose mouth there is continually a large capital I, or who has a
bad case of egomania and studiously avoids all mention of himself?

But what I mean is a man every whit whole, _mens sana in corpora sano_,
who is afraid of no man and of whom no man is afraid, to whom the
word ‘fear’ is unknown. Prize fighters sometimes boast that they are
without fear, but there is one thing they are afraid of, and that is
_fear_. Fear is the great disturber. It causes all physical ills (Yes,
I know what I say.) and it robs us of our heavenly birthright. What is
the cause of fear? Sin, and if your education had been begun at the
right time and in the right way, you might now be without sin--that
is, without fear. Begin the right education now, and in time you will
come into possession of your heritage; for you are an immortal spirit,
dwelling in this body which to-morrow you may slip off; and all the
right education you have acquired will still be yours, for as in matter
there is nothing lost, so in spirit nothing is destroyed.

When you stand in the presence of a man you will know it by the holy
calm that comes stealing over you. His presence will put you at
your ease--with no effort to please and yet without indifference.
Both can remain silent without there being an awkward pause or any
embarrassment. The atmosphere he will bring will clothe you as with a
garment, and though your sins be as scarlet you will make no effort
to dissemble, to excuse, to explain, or to apologize. You will find
this man is no longer young, for youth is restless and ambitious, and
although he fears not death, nor scarcely thinks of it, yet lives as
though this body was immortal.

I lived under the same roof with The Man one day in each week for two
months, and words utterly fail me when I endeavor to describe him, for
how can I describe to you the Ideal?

At first I thought him an old man, for his luxuriant hair and full wavy
beard were snowy white; but the face, tanned by exposure to the winds,
was free from wrinkles and had the bright anticipatory joyous look of
youth; eyes, large, brown and lustrous, looking through and through
one, but yet the glance was not piercing, for it spoke of love and
sympathy and not of curiosity or aggression; form, strong and athletic;
hands, calloused by work; yet this man, strong, brown, with throat
bared to the breast, seemed to have the strength of an athlete yet the
gentleness of a woman, the high look of wisdom, and with his whole
demeanor the composure of Plato. God had breathed into his nostrils and
he had become a living soul.




CHAPTER VIII. FIRST SUNDAY--A LOOK AROUND.


“The roads are very muddy, friend,” the man began, “you had better stay
here until to-morrow and return on the morning train. This is the day
of rest. What a beautiful word that is, ‘rest’! There is no feverish
tossing and longing for the morning to him who has worked rightly, only
sweet rest. The heart rests between beats. See how restful and calm
the landscape is,” and we looked out over the dripping woodland where
the drops sparkled like gems in the bright sunshine. “Nature rests,
yet ever works; accomplishing, but is never in haste. Man only is
busy. Nature is active, for rest is not idleness. As I sit here in the
quietness, my body is taking in new force, my pulse beats regularly,
calmly, surely. The circulation of the blood is doing its perfect work
by throwing off the worthless particles and building up the tissue
where needed. So rest is not rust. While we rest we are taking on board
a new cargo of riches. My best thoughts have been whispered to me while
sitting at rest, or idle, as men would say. I sit and wait, and all
good things are mine, ‘for lo! mine own shall come to me.’”

Thus did The Man speak in a low but most beautiful voice, and the music
of that voice lingers with me still and will as long as life shall
last. I seemed to have lost my will in that of The Man. I neither
decided I would stay or go, but I simply remained. I am not what is
called religious--far from it--for I have been a stumbling-block for
every pastor and revivalist at both Grace Church and Delaware avenue.
Neither have I any special liking for metaphysics, but I hung like a
drowning person to every word The Man said; and after all it was not
what he said, although I felt the sublime truth of his words, but it
was what there was back. I knew, down deep in my soul, that this man
possessed a power and was in direct communication with a Something of
which other men knew not.

I have traveled much, and studied mankind in every clime, for before
my father’s failure we went abroad every year. I know well the sleek
satisfied look of success which marks the prosperous merchant; I know
the easy confidence of the man satisfied with his clothes; I have seen
the serenity of the orator secure in his position through the plaudits
of his hearers; I know the actor who has never heard a hiss; the look
of beauty on the face of the philanthropist, who can minister to his
own happiness by relieving from his bountiful store the sore needs of
others; the lawyer, sure of his fee, or the husband who knows he is
king of one loving heart and therefore is able to defy the world;--but
here was a man alone seemingly, without friends, in the wilderness, in
a house devoid of ornament and almost destitute of furniture, whose
raiment was of the coarsest; yet here in the face of this man I saw
the look that told not of earthly success dependent on men or things,
but of riches laid up “where moth and rust cannot corrupt, and where
thieves do not break through and steal.”

We sat in silence for perhaps an hour and then The Man spoke.

“Friend, I have called you here. You know that spirit attracts spirit,
and once we know how, we attract at will. This secret you shall know.
I have somewhat to give to the world. You must come here each Saturday
and stay here during the day of rest. I could have gone to you, but
the city is full of distractions and the lower thought-currents there
render you less sensitive to truth; so here in this grove, God’s
temple, I will teach, that you may go forth as a laborer in the
vineyard where the harvest shall be not yet, but will be reaped by
those who come after. You are a stenographer. Bring pencils and paper,
and each Sunday I will give you a little of the truth that you are
to publish in a book and give out to dying men, for the world must
be saved. Men never needed truth and teachers as much as now. I do
not preach nor write, but I act through others, and during the past
hundred years I have told to men many things which they have given to
the world.”

“A hundred years?” I asked, astonished; and it was the first feeling of
surprise I had felt.

The Man smiled faintly and said:

“Yes; three hundred years have I lived in this body. I was born in
1591. Why do you wonder? Have you no faith in God? You see miracles
on every hand, and yet you now are ready to doubt. The oyster mends
its shell with pearls: some unthinking person twists off the claw of a
cray-fish, and you watch another spring forth and grow to full size,
and yet you doubt that a man can retain his strength indefinitely!

“We die through violation of law. This violation is through ignorance,
or is wilful. If we do away with ignorance and are willing to obey,
we can live as long as we wish. Men only die when they are not fit
to live. As long as a person’s body is useful, God preserves it. The
body is renewed completely every seven years. This you were taught in
school. Why should not this renewal continue? An infant has cartilage,
but very little bone. Gradually the cartilage ossifies, until in old
age the bones are brittle. This is caused by the deposits of lime which
are being continually taken into the system. There is constant waste
and constant repair in the human body. You know this full well, and you
know that at night and in moments of repose the repair exceeds the
waste. So where you were tired and ready to faint an hour ago, you are
now strong.

“When I was thirty years of age, and my body at its strongest and best,
I adopted a simple plan of keeping the excess lime and deteriorating
substances out of my system; so you see my flesh is strong yet, soft,
for the muscles should not be hard and tense, but pliable. My bones are
not brittle, but cartilage is everywhere where needed to form cushions
for the articulations. I have not known pain for a century, for nature
does her perfect work and the dead tissue is constantly carried off
and replaced with new. Pain generally comes from deposits left in the
body when they should be carried off. Rheumatism, you know, is only a
deposit in the linings of the muscles; but I never think of my body
until the subject is brought to my attention, and do not like to talk
of it, as the theme is not profitable; but later I will tell you when
you are able to understand, how to have the body throw off those excess
substances and renew itself without limit.”

Now lest some of my readers who are very young should imagine I was
“in love” with this man let me say--not so! In the presence of The Man
sex was lost. He was to me neither man nor woman, yet both; although
he had that glorious faculty of joyous anticipation, which we see in
children--so he was not only man and woman, but child. Yet in wisdom I
felt him to be a prophet, and I myself was but a child. For after all
we are but grown up children, and the difference between some grown
people is no greater than that found among children and some men.

With this man I was a child, and he seemed to regard me so, yet never
talked down to me, and I have since discovered that sensible people do
not talk baby talk to children, nor do they talk down to people who
they imagine ignorant. Men who do this reverse the situation and become
veritable ignorami themselves.

Old John Foster, the horse-trainer, used to break horses for my father,
and one day old John said to me, “Young lady, when you breaks a colt,
don’t get scared yerself and then the colt won’t. Hitch him up just
like he was an old hoss, and he will think he is one and go right along
and never know when he was broke.”

Some men always change the conversation when a woman enters, thinking
the subject too weighty for her comprehension; and in ‘sassiety’ they
still talk soft nonsense to women because they think women like it; and
lots of women have adopted the same idea, and have accepted the same
creed--that they do know nothing and always will, and that scientific
subjects, like Plymouth Rock pants, are for men folks.

Not long ago, you remember, we had a preacher who gave a series of
sermons to _men_ only, and a friend of mine who attended tells me the
reverend divine gave those men more ‘pointers’ in depravity than they
could have guessed alone in a dozen years.

But pardon this diversion and let me simply say, that to educate the
heart and conscience, you must not separate men from women, nor make
foolish distinctions between the ignorant and the cultured. We are all
God’s children, and it is all God’s truth, and this is God’s world.

The Man told me this, and much more in that delightful day of rest, and
he seemed to make no distinction between my childish ignorance and his
own unfathomed wisdom. So the sense of weakness was never thrust upon
me, and all during that day I seemed to grow in spirit. There came a
greater self-respect, a reverence for my own individuality (you will
not misunderstand me), an increased universality, a broader outlook,
a wider experience. It was only one day as men count time, but I had
lived--lived a century.

Monday morning came. After breakfast The Man arose and said:

“I will go with you, and get the bicycle.” (How did he know? I had not
told him anything of my ride). “You can take the train from Jamison,
which is about two miles from here. We can soon walk there.”

We found the wheel in the bushes, where I had left it by the roadside,
and the man pushed it ahead of him with one hand through the mud,
walking at a rapid easy stride, arriving at the station just as the
train pulled up. My benefactor lifted the bicycle lightly into the
baggage-car, bought me a ticket, handed it to me, smiled and was gone.
He did not say good-bye. I did not thank him for his kindness, and in
fact, not a word was spoken after we left the little log house.

Albert Love, the conductor, I knew, as I often rode on his train.
Helping me on the car, he laughingly said:

“Ah, you got caught in the storm and couldn’t get back, could you?”

“I didn’t want to,” I said.

“Oh! ah! Relative?” nodding his head in the direction of the retreating
form of The Man.

“Yes; uncle.”

“Hem--they call him a crank here.--’Ll’board.”




CHAPTER IX. MARTHA HEATH.


I hurried from the depot to the office, and was only an hour behind
time.

“You are late,” said Mr. Hustler, with a cynical, sickly smile which
looked much like a scowl. “Only an hour. Make a note of it and give it
to the time-keeper.”

I began my work and seemed to possess the strength of two women. My
fingers struck the keys of the typewriter like lightning, and my head
was clearer than ever before. When I took up a letter to answer, I saw
clear through it, and struck the vital point at once; and yet all the
time there was before me the mild and receptive face of The Man. The
strange experience I had gone through was ever in my mind, and yet the
work never disappeared from my desk as well and rapidly before. Where
is that old philosopher who said, “The mind cannot think of two things
at one time”?

At home I found my mother had waited tea for me until nine o’clock,
when Martha Heath entered, and seeing the untouched supper and the look
of despair on my mother’s face, knew the situation at a glance; for if
a smart woman cannot divine a thing, she will never, _never_, NEVER,
understand it when told.

Martha Heath came to see Aspasia Hobbs, but Martha Heath did not ask
for Aspasia Hobbs. She glanced at the face of the trembling old lady,
who was trying to keep back the flood, saw the untasted supper, and
Martha Heath then and there told a lie:

“Oh, I just dropped in to tell you Aspasia had gone home with one of
the girls who was a little nervous, and perhaps would stay over Sunday
with her. Who made your new dress, Mrs. Hobbs? Now don’t you feel big!
You are so fond of appearing in print that you always wear calico!”

And the laugh that followed was catching, and even the good old
grizzled Grimes felt the tension gone and she too chuckled. All three
women sat down to tea, and Martha Heath ate supper again, although she
had eaten at home before, and they chatted and the visitor talked a
little more than was necessary. She told how she had that afternoon
ran her bicycle into a nearsighted dude, who was chasing his hat, and
how she not only upset the dude but ran over his hat; and how the
dude called on a policeman to arrest her, but the policeman said he
“darsen’t tackle the gal alone.” The mother forgot her troubles and
the Grimes laughed so that she upset her tea, and when Martha Heath
said “Good-bye girls,” they all laughed again, and Grimes wiped her
brass-rimmed spectacles with the corner of a big check apron and said,
“Now ain’t she a queer un? and so kind too for her to come clear down
here to tell us ’Pasia wasn’t killed entirely!”

Gentle and pious reader, you would not tell a lie, would you? Oh, no!
But, Martha Heath had faith in me. I am self-reliant, strong, and able
to take care of myself, and homely enough, thank Heaven! so I am no
longer ogled on the street by blear eyed idlers. Martha Heath knows all
this. She believes in me. Martha Heath has faith in Providence--have
you?

Well, the work did fly! “Everything goes,” said Hustler as he looked
on approvingly. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and some way I
grew a little more thoughtful; not nervous, but serious. Friday night
I scarcely slept an hour. It seemed as if I was about to depart to
another and better world. At breakfast Saturday morning my mother said:

“It was a week ago to-day, Aspasia!”

“Oh, yes,” I said, inwardly.

“A week ago to-day! And now, never try to kill your old mother who
loves you just the same whether you love her or not, by going off
without telling us. Why, if Martha Heath hadn’t come and told us where
you was, I would have died before morning. It was awful thoughtless of
her too, not to have come here at once. She ought not to have put it
off until ten o’clock.”

It was only nine, but we like to make our troubles as great as
possible, for greater credit then is ours for bearing them.

I arose, kissed my good mother, and said: “Yes, I will always tell
you myself hereafter when I am to be away--and so I tell you now. I
am going away every Saturday to be gone over Sunday from now until
October.”

“‘How sharper than a rattlesnake’s tooth it is to have a thankless
child,’ the Bible says, and after all I have done for you too! Oh, it
is too much to think my only child should thus desert me in my old
age, and go off nobody knows where, and disgrace us all! Disgrace us,
disgrace us, dis----”

It was too much, and she covered her face with her hands and burst into
tears, rocking to and fro. Here Mrs. Grimes broke in with:

“Mrs. Hobbs, will you never--! Why, ’Pasia has more sense than all
of us. She ain’t no fool. She ain’t--Why, didn’t I come three weeks
lackin’ two days afore she was born, and didn’t I wash and dress her
myself?” The gentle Grimes always availed herself of the opportunity to
tell of my birth, to cut off any quibbler who might state I was not the
child of Mr. and Mrs. Hobbs. “Mrs. Hobbs, you are a fool, and if ’Pasia
ever does a bad thing it’ll be ’cause you drives her to it. I don’t
know where she’s goin’, and dam if I care! I’ll trust her anywhere! Go
on, ’Pasia, and stay a year. You’ll find us here when you comes back.”

The Grimes cyclone had cleared the atmosphere, the rain had ceased,
although the landscape was a trifle disheveled. I kissed the dear
mother, grabbed my lunch-bag, and was gone.




CHAPTER X. SECOND SUNDAY--TO THE WOODS AWAY.


I hurried through my work, dusted off the desk, locked the typewriter,
and at two o’clock mounted my bicycle, went straight out Seneca street,
over the iron bridge, on out the plank road, past Wendlings, through
Springbrook, and stopped then for the first time, and standing on
a rising slope of ground, I looked around in every direction. The
dandelions seemed to cover the earth as with a carpet, and great masses
of white hawthorn-trees in bridal array decked the landscape. The trees
were bursting into leaf, and through the silence there came the drowsy
hum of insects, and away off in the distance I could just detect the
tinkle of a cowbell. To the left, two miles away, I saw a dense wood
which seemed to transform the hill on which it stood into a great green
mound.

“Yes, that surely is the place,” I said. I followed the plank road a
mile further, then turned into a road which seemed like two paths side
by side, as a line of green sward filled the centre of the roadway. I
came to the wood, let down the bars, and back in the clearing was the
log house, and out under the spreading branches of a great oak sat The
Man. He smiled the same sweet smile and motioned me to a seat beside
him, and together we sat in silence. The calm and rest seemed complete.

“Let us sit here under the trees,” said The Man, “and I will explain
several things which you must understand before I make known the higher
truths which you are to give to mankind.

“Perhaps you have wondered why I do not go out into the world and teach
face to face; and my reason, friend, for not doing this, is because I
must needs disguise myself, if I go among the people. They would not
comprehend me, but would shout, ‘Crucify him! Crucify him!’ as they
did in the days of old. If I should go into the city and teach as the
Master did, can you imagine the headlines in the Sunday papers? I
would have followers of course, but even they would misunderstand me
and quarrel among themselves about who should be the greatest in the
Kingdom of Heaven. Many of them would fall down and worship me, and
when I passed out of their sight there would be an ever-increasing
number who would deify me, confounding my personality with that of a
God, while the power I possess is possible for all men. They would
say I was not a man but a ‘supreme being.’ On my metaphor they would
construct a system of theology, and would use my words as a fence to
hedge in and limit truth, instead of accepting my principles as a
broad base on which they might build a tower to touch the skies.

“A modern prophet has said, ‘I am astonished at the incredible amount
of Judaism and formalism which still exists nineteen centuries after
the Redeemer’s proclamation.’ ‘It is the letter that killeth,’ after
his protest against the use of a dead symbolism.

“The new religion, which is the old, is so profound that it is not
understood even now, and is a blasphemy to the greater number of
professing Christians. The person of Christ is the centre of it.
Redemption, eternal life, divinity, humanity, propitiation, judgment,
Satan, heaven and hell--all these beliefs have been so materialized and
coarsened that with a strange irony they present to us the spectacle
of things having a profound meaning and yet carnally interpreted.
Christian boldness and Christian liberty must be reconquered. It is
the Church that is heretical; the Church it is whose soul is troubled
and whose heart is timid. Whether we will or no there is an esoteric
doctrine--there is a direct revelation, ‘Each man enters into God so
much as God enters into him.’

“They would call me a heretic, and you must remember the heretic is
one with faith plus. I do not limit faith to this and that, but extend
it to all things. Not only is Sunday holy, but all time is holy. The
chancel is no more sacred than the pew. The world is God’s and all,
everything is sacred to His use--our needs are His use.

“They would literalize my tropes to suit their own prejudices, and
still insisting I was a god, distort my meaning in order to give a show
of reason to their own wrong acts. This has been done over and over, as
history tells you.

“Osiris, Thor, Memnon, Jupiter, Apollo, Gautama, and many others I
could name of whom you know, were strong and brave men who lived
on earth and bestowed great benefits on mankind; but ignorant and
headstrong people, not content that these great men should live out
their simple lives--for the great are simple, and pass for what they
are--destroyed to a certain extent their good influence by affirming
them to be not men at all; and to prove their statements, as untruthful
people ever do strain heaven and earth to prove their allegations,
they invented many stories and plans, such as that the great man was
born in a ‘_miraculous_’ way--as if the natural birth was not miracle
enough!--there being at the time a most erroneous idea that the act
of vitalization was vicious and wrong, and this barbaric idea still
remains with us to a certain extent.

“You remember in olden time priests (men who were believed to be in
direct communication with Deity) were supposed to have power to grant
absolution--that is, to forgive sin--and these granted indulgences;
that is, leave for the person to perform certain sinful acts, and
by paying a certain sum to the priests no punishment was inflicted
upon the sinner. The physical relations of the sexes were supposed
by these heathen to be sinful (and indeed they certainly are under
wrong conditions!) where the symbolic meaning is lost sight of, but
like other sacraments, most holy when performed in right spirit,
as symbolizing a perfect union of spirit, a complete giving up and
surrender of _soul to soul_; and many men now, having stood with a
woman before a priest and made certain promises, and having paid this
priest a sum of money, believe that they have certain rights over
this woman; and some women, I am sorry to say, believe too that it
is their duty to submit to a loveless embrace thus desecrating the
body, which is the temple of the Most High. And as it is a law of God
that sin cannot go unpunished, you see the almost endless misery this
transgression entails.

“Sin can only be wiped out with suffering. No community, scarcely a
house is free from this taint; and yet up to to-day, no public teacher
(we need teachers not preachers), has lifted his voice or used pen to
right this wrong which men and women in their blindness have pulled
down on themselves; but in fact men have been continually fixed in
the wrong by the encouragement given to marriages of expediency and
a multitude of unavowable motives, all of which are supposed to be
consecrated by the religious ceremony.”




CHAPTER XI. IS IT SO?


This was all so new to me that on Sunday morning I began the
conversation by asking:

“What, you do not wish to do away with the sacredness of marriage and
establish free love in its place?”

The Man was silent for a moment, then turned on me his gentle gaze and
I was answered. I was going to apologize for the interruption, but The
Man continued:

“Friend, I know what I have left unsaid. No living soul on earth
to-day appreciates the vital importance and the sacredness of the
true marriage as completely as I, and although I may touch briefly on
certain subjects, you must not think I have spoken all there is to be
said on the subject, for I know all spiritual laws--all natural law is
spiritual, for behind each material fact stands the spiritual Truth.

“The universe is a whole, made up of parts. I know the relation of
these parts to each other, and also the relation of parts to the
whole. All knowledge is mine back to the First Great Cause, behind
which no man can go, but still I am not without hope even of that.
Now you of course can not comprehend all I will tell you, but do not
combat it. To attempt to refute, mentally or verbally, is to close the
valves of the intellect so that you cannot receive. Those who endeavor
to controvert use any weapon that is at hand, truth or error, to
accomplish their purpose.

“I know lawyers who pride themselves on their ability to controvert any
statement any man can make, and I also see that the Chautauqua _Herald_
in endeavoring to complimentarily describe the Rev. Doctor Buckley,
speaks of him as a controversialist. The controversionalist is a
controversialist, and rushes in to test his steel as quickly with truth
as with error. However, he is diplomatic, and endeavors not to kill the
pet knight of his queen--Popular Opinion.

“Avoid controversy as you would a venomous snake. If you cultivate
it you will find yourself constantly forming a rebuttal whenever you
converse. Thus you lose all grasp on truth, and keep yourself ever
outside of Heaven’s gate.

“Sit quietly, put prejudice, jealousy and malice out of your way, ever
cultivate the receptive mood and you will only receive the good. Life
should be reception, just as the oyster with shell partially open
receives the waves bearing its food. What it needs is absorbed; what is
not is washed away by the same force that brought it. Do not be afraid
of receiving that which is harmful. Have faith--we are in God’s hand
and He doeth all things well. Does the oyster fear being poisoned? If
you cannot accept what I say let it pass. Much that I tell you, you can
absorb; if you do not need the rest the tide will bear it back all in
good time.

“All violence of direction in will or belief is harmful and wrong,
for man is only the medium of truth. He should be a prism, which
receiving the great ray of light coming from the one Source of all
life and light, reflects all the beauties of the rainbow, the symbol
of promise, never omitting the actinic ray. It is within the reach of
every man to so mirror the beauty and goodness of the Infinite, and
there is no success short of this. Over the temple at Delphi was the
inscription--‘Know Thyself.’ Over the temple of our hearts let us write
the words in white and gold--‘Trust Thyself.’

“Again, you must believe when I say I know what is left unsaid. Truth
is paradoxical, for it holds its perfect poise by the opposition of
two forces, just as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere,
poised between centrifugal and centripetal attraction.

“Now I have touched lightly on a few things, just to show you how
men in their blindness and hot haste have perverted the good. Eyes
accustomed to live in darkness are dazzled when they come to the
light, and this partially explains why the great are misunderstood.
Men measure them by their little foot rule, which is either six inches
or two feet long, and while opinions are divided as to whether the
man is a genius or a fool, the majority decide in favor of the latter;
but still there are many who, not content in seeing the wonders he
performs needs must attribute to him powers which he does not possess.
Man now speaks to his friend by word of mouth over a thousand miles of
space. The voice with all its peculiar inflections and intonations, is
heard and recognized. We know that this is in accordance with natural
law, but if the secret was known only to one man, and the rest of us
were in ignorance as to the process, we would attribute to that man
supernatural powers; and when he died many would relate not only how
they heard the voice coming from a thousand miles away, but how they
also saw the man jump the entire distance, and many other fables would
be invented as to the wonderful acts of this man.

“Now I am in possession of powers which work all smoothly in accordance
with natural law, but which you would deem miraculous; but some day you
and others will avail yourselves of these same laws, just as your voice
can be recorded, bottled up and carried across the ocean in a box, and
your body may die and the record of your voice still be preserved and
the sounds brought forth at will from this little roll of gelatine.
A year hence I will be many miles away, and you will be at home or
walking in the fields, and I will speak to you and you will answer.

“Now, have you guessed why I do not reveal myself to the rabble and
scatter my pearls before swine? I teach through others, giving them a
little truth at a time, and they send it forth. I choose women to carry
my messages, for they are more sensitive to truth--more alive--more
impressionable! Men are aggressive and bent on conquest--their desire
is for place and power, and to be seen and heard of men. But even this
has its place, although low down in the scale--is one of the rounds
in the spiral of evolution; and all in His own good time men shall be
taught, but the work must be done by women. As we are taught in the
old fable--which, by the way, is founded on truth--that through woman
man fell, so shall woman lead him back to Eden; and even now I see the
glorious dawn which betokens the sunrise.

“You now know why I have called you, and you understand too why I
cannot afford to run the risk of partial present failure--for in God’s
plans there is no failure--by standing before men. I am speaking to
many other writers and speakers. Even as I sit here in this beautiful
grove, telling them what to say, they are going forth over the whole
world preaching the gospel to every creature. You have been surprised
possibly to hear of men speaking the same truth at the same time in
different parts of the world--now you know how it has come about. Your
soul has not yet been quickened into life, so I cannot speak with you
excepting through this slow and crude man-contrivance which we call
language; but there will soon come a time when we can lay this aside,
and you will no longer be a captive to these tethering conditions; for
you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

So spake The Man, and the stars came out one by one as the daylight
died out of the sky, and I sat and seemed filled to overflowing with
wondering awe.




CHAPTER XII. THIRD SUNDAY--PRELIMINARY.


“Now take your note-book and pencil and let us take a little look out
over the world and see things as they are,” The Man said. “You will
then better understand what I will say later.

“The struggling march of Progress is marked on the map of human history
by a deep continuous stain of red, but to-day we hear King William
apologizing for his vast army by saying it is maintained not for war,
but to preserve the peace of Europe.

“In twenty years the population of the United States has increased from
forty to sixty-five millions, and our standing army has decreased in
like proportion.

“We are no longer able to sleep soundly after a man is hanged, and the
dreams have been so hateful that several states have done away entirely
with capital punishment, and the balance are searching restlessly for a
more humane (?) method of killing. We have tried electrocution, because
some one said that the man who killed and the man who got killed would
never know anything about it; and here in New York they passed a law
declaring that the people should not know anything about the killing
either, and that any newspaper publisher who described this killing
should be adjudged guilty of felony. Now, we are not satisfied with the
death-dealing work of the subtle fluid; but if put to a popular vote
with the aid of a secret ballot, we should say emphatically to judge
and jury, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’

“This increased sensitiveness which we see manifest on the question
thus referred to, finds vent in a thousand varied forms. Prisons are
no longer places of punishment but of discipline; the birch is no
longer the chief factor in imparting ideas to the young--we make the
application not to the anatomy, but to the understanding, and if we
still believe the child is totally depraved, we are a little ashamed
of the belief and say nothing about it. The woman who lolls in her
carriage is not quite comfortable, for her mind is alive to the fact
that others are trudging, footsore and weary, carrying heavy burdens.
Benevolence has become the fashion, and ‘Fresh Air Funds’ are actually
talked of on ’Change. On every hand we hear of Societies of Christian
Endeavor, the Chautauqua Idea, Ethical Culture, Kindergartens, not for
uppertendom, but for the infected district where violence, disease,
strife and discord have before reigned. Every preacher of every
denomination indulges the larger hope (possibly there are obscure
exceptions), and quotes as corroborating his argument the seers,
prophets and poets who were before denounced from the very pulpit in
which he now preaches.

“We are hearing much of heresy just now, but the ‘guilty’ man is not
disgraced; on the contrary, his crime places him before a larger
audience at double salary; and, if one may be allowed to say it, there
is a general belief abroad that some heretics have courted their
persecution. Certainly we do not try them for what they said, but the
way they said it. A man who was a heretic twenty years ago, now finds
himself orthodox, for there is faith plus in both pulpit and pew, and
the heretic is generally a man of limitless faith. We believe not only
that Jesus Christ was the son of God, but all men are or can be if they
claim their heritage; not one day in seven is holy, but all are; not
that certain places are consecrated, but all is consecrated ground, and
that evil is only perverted good, or absence of good, just as darkness
is absence of light. These things we hear from every pulpit without
surprise.

“Prize fighters use six-ounce gloves, and women endowed with police
powers act in behalf of societies for the prevention of cruelty to
animals and children. Matrons are to be found in jails and station
houses, and the maxim that ‘Might makes right’ has been reversed. Never
was the tear of pity so near the surface, and the change of which I
speak has been brought about largely since 1870. In these twenty-one
years the flinty heart of man has been softened more than in the three
hundred years preceding.

“Now we are approaching the vital question, for I propose to tell you
why this change has come; why our faces are now turned toward Zion. The
answer I give is not given out off-hand, but after most careful thought
and study for many, many years. _The spirit of the time has changed by
and through the influence of woman._

“The real essence of sex is spiritual; and as behind every physical
fact there is a spiritual truth, so above and beyond this sexual
instinct is the most sacred and divinest gift given to man. In the
encyclopedias we read that this inclination ‘has its purpose in
reproduction of the species.’ And is Nature after all but a trickster?
a practical joker? Is this fair dream of holy peace and joy of being at
last understood by a some one, loving, gentle, tender, true, in whose
presence one may think aloud and be at rest? Is this after all but a
scheme for the reproduction of our kind? When we consider what the kind
is, is reproduction of the kind the highest good? Even good men have
thought so; and for the misuse of God’s more sacred gift man was put
out of Eden and has wandered far. The return will be slow, and it must
be by the way he came. There is no other way. The monastery is as bad
a failure as the house of Camille. Only by a knowledge of the right
relation of men and women can we gain Heaven.

“You see me, the possessor of all knowledge, and Heaven is mine--for
Heaven is not a place, but a condition of mind. Seemingly I am alone,
for your physical eye sees no one near; but she is ever by me--I feel
her hand now as it rests lightly on my head. Friend, I am what I am
through the love of woman. Love is life.

“There is a class of women who especially have my sincere and profound
respect, these are the ‘old maids.’ They form to-day in this country
a genuine sisterhood of mercy. They do the work no one else will do
nor can do. In every village there are aged parents, orphan children,
widowed brothers, helpless invalids, people homeless and friendless who
owe a debt of gratitude which time can never repay to the unselfish
devotion of some old maid. They are women who will not fling their
womanhood away for the sake of a ‘provider,’ or to escape the supposed
ignominy of maidenhood. If a woman once decides she must have a man,
by just spreading her net, and not being over-choice about quality,
she can always secure some sort of game, for no matter how foolish,
frivolous and vain a woman is, there is a man near at hand who will
out-match her. I am glad to know that the number of old maids is
increasing, for a woman had a thousand times over better travel through
life alone than to accept any alliance short of her genuine mental and
spiritual mate. This may give you a clue to the reason for the well
known fact that the average old maid excels in intelligence and culture
her married sister. When a man marries the wrong woman it is a mistake,
for the woman it is a blunder.”




CHAPTER XIII. FOURTH SUNDAY--ATMOSPHERE.


I sat with note-book on my knee, pencil in hand and The Man began:

“The air here on this hillside is full of health and healing. Physical
life you know is only possible in a right atmosphere. Add five
parts more of carbonic acid gas and the body is poisoned--ceases to
act--dies! Do you see the change in the constituent parts of the air?
No--your senses are not aware of any change at all if the poison is
introduced gradually; and so the use of the electric light in hotels
has worked a great saving of life among the rural population, for
the most frantic effort to blow it out proves futile; but in days
gone by scarcely a month passed in any city when some innocent and
ignorant individual did not lock the door, close the window, vitiate
his physical atmosphere, and glide off slowly, surely, into that sleep
which we call death.

“In the carboniferous period there was no atmosphere capable of
sustaining animal life. Vegetation was flowerless, and the trees
grew rank in swamps filled with poisonous miasma, death and gloom.
No flowers decked the earth or the tree tops, no fruit hung on the
branches, the song of birds was not heard and the only animal life was
made up of mollusks and the lower forms of animate existence. Gradually
the carbon in the air was absorbed by the vegetation, and sank beneath
the bending swale, and new trees grew, and others followed still, and
these sank and sank again, carrying down into the depths the material
that has formed the shining coal which warms and cheers our homes.

“Gradually this purifying process continued; more and many kinds of
plants sprang into being; these too absorbed the poison from the air,
fit preparation that earth might receive her king. Animal life appeared
in monster shape; fierce, awful forms, that crawled upon the land,
through tangled swamps, or swam the sea, thriving in the atmosphere of
slime--of gloom--of death. Gradually these nightmare forms have passed
away, leaving only grim remains and foot-prints here and there, from
which ingenious men have guessed the right proportion of the whole.
Finer and finer, better and better grows the teeming life of animal and
flower, until in words of prophet told,

              “‘Sweet is the breath of morn,
  Her rising sweet with song of earliest birds;
  Pleasant the sun, when first on this delightful morn
  He spreads his orient ray o’er herb, tree, fruit and flower,
                       Glistening with dew.
  Fragrant the fertile earth after soft showers,
  And sweet the coming on of grateful evening mild.’”

The Man seemed musing to himself instead of talking to me, and I
thought he had been talking without special point, for he was now
silent, seated with back toward me, looking from the window; but it
came to me like a flash without his explaining in words that the
glimpse he had given of the history of the earth was only a summing
up of the history of the soul of man. I saw the hordes of barbarians
intent on conquest come streaming out from back of Assyria over into
Macedonia, into Greece. I saw the teeming millions of Persia sink
struggling beneath the sinking swale, and Greece come forth with men
noble, gentle, refined, compared with what men were before them. Rome
appeared, and I thought surely the carboniferous period was coming
back with its poisonous fumes when Cæsar passed over into Gaul, then
Britanny.

For centuries the earth gave forth no sign; but suddenly I saw a
woman--not an ideal one to be sure, but men lifted their hats to
the Virgin Queen, and with the Elizabethan age came a Spencer and a
Shakespeare.

Surely the flowers had begun to bloom, the woods were full of song of
birds, and I knew The Man was thinking of the What-Is-To-Be when he
slowly and softly repeated the verse I have written. He turned and
looked at me--our eyes met in firm, gentle embrace. Perhaps we both
smiled, and he knew I understood. I had made a great stride to the
front. He had spoken to me without words on a subject I had never
thought of. I had received the message and I felt that this was just
the beginning--only six o’clock in the morning.

I knew all he would say of atmosphere--that if body can not live
excepting in a right atmosphere, neither can spirit; for over and over
had I heard The Man say, “The material world is only symbol--behind
each physical fact is a spiritual truth. Each planet has its own
physical atmosphere varying according to its development.”

“Each person carries with him an atmosphere varying according to his
development,” The Man continued, “and this is why in the presence of
some person your spirit--that is, your better self--acts and lives. You
think great and exalted thoughts with this friend. Neither may say a
word, but your heart is full of love, benevolence and good-will. Now
the person may be a perfect stranger to you, and yet supply you with an
atmosphere in which your spirit may rejoice and sing. And again, who
has not felt in coming into the presence of others, that the air was
filled with the fumes of sulphur and carbonic acid. You become morose,
downcast, spiteful, discouraged. This is only because your spirit is
now in an unfavorable atmosphere. Get enough of these people who carry
with them a tainted atmosphere and keep you in their presence, you will
shrink away and die. Thousands upon thousands of men and women (women
suffer more than men from bad spiritual atmosphere, as they are more
sensitive and more spiritual) die yearly, and others drag their bodies
about--living corpses. See them on the street--these careworn haggard
faces. They die for lack of God’s sunshine--their souls are breathing
an atmosphere of hate, distrust, jealousy and cruel ambition.

“This accounts for the great number of cases of insanity among farmers’
wives. Living as many do, breathing only the atmosphere of those who
are sore labored and distressed--or who think they are, which is the
same thing, ‘For as a man thinketh so is he;’ meeting her husband only
in body and not in spirit, it is impossible for her to generate a
strong spiritual atmosphere of her own. So is it any wonder the soul
becomes weary, the body struggles, cries aloud, totters, reels and
falls?

“Good people meeting together, talking of good things, thinking
great thoughts, putting away all strife, envy and discord, create an
atmosphere favorable to spiritual growth, and make it possible for the
souls of all to expand and reach out, touching Infinity.

“Every wicked thought that flits across the mind is poisoning the
atmosphere which often souls must breathe, and every good thought
you think is adding to the total sum of good, and whether spoken or
unexpressed, enriches the Universe, for thought is an entity producing
a vibration too delicate for our dull physical senses to discern, but
our spirits are thus influenced.

“But this is enough. You must rest and then write out what I have told
you. What I will tell you next Sunday is of much greater import than
you have yet heard me speak.”




CHAPTER XIV. FIFTH SUNDAY--A REVELATION.


Sunday morning came. The day was perfect. Great white billowy clouds
floated lazily across the face of the blue ether, a gentle breeze
scarcely noticeable stirred the leaves of the trees, and all nature
seemed sublime. The birds twittered in the pine-trees as we walked
beneath, and the air was saturated with health and healing.

The Man had told me the week before that what he would tell me to-day
was of much importance--that I need not write it down at once for I
could not forget. Naturally I was somewhat expectant.

“You have read Shakespeare some of course,” he began. “Yes, I know,
at school, and then you have seen his plays. This has given you a
glimpse of his mind; but one could study years, certainly much longer
than it took him to write them, and then not get the full import of
Shakespeare’s words. Still, the difference between your mind and that
of Shakespeare is not so great as one might at first imagine. You
yourself think great thoughts--they come to you at times in great
waves, almost threatening to engulf you; high and holy aspirations;
sublime impulses, that you dare not attempt to put in words for mortal
ear, for you doubt your own strength, and also fear you will be
misunderstood. So your best thought is never expressed, for there is
no receptacle where you can pour it out--you feel that you go through
life alone, so the thought goes through your brain in the twinkling of
a second and is gone forever.

“All persons think great thoughts--few have the power to seize the
electric spark and clothe it in words. Now just to that extent that
you understand Shakespeare, are you his equal. If you see a beautiful
thought recorded and detect its beauty, it was already yours or you
would not have recognized it. It was yours before, but you never
claimed your heritage. That same thought had gone floating through your
brain, either in this life or a former one, but you failed to hold
it fast; but when it comes back from the lips of the preacher, or is
whispered to you from out pages of a great writer you say, ‘Ah yes, how
true! I have thought the same thing myself.’

“Now Shakespeare had the faculty (and a more or less mechanical one
it is) of seizing with a grasp as strong as iron and as soft as
silken cord, every sublime thought that passed through his mind. Your
troop of fancies run wild over the prairies of imagination, mine and
Shakespeare’s are harnessed and bridled. We guide or lead them where
we will; we master them, not they us. The beautiful thought you rode
on like a whirlwind yesterday, where is it now? You strive to recall
it--but no, all is dark, misty, and obscure. It has gone!

“Now under right conditions you can call up these glowing, prancing
thoughts at will, orderly, one at a time, clean and complete as race
horses where each is led before you by a competent groom; not in a
wild rush of frenzy that leaves you afterward depleted and depressed,
but gently, surely, firmly--_but the conditions must be right_. Now
what are these conditions, you ask. Well, if I describe to you the
conditions that surrounded Shakespeare from the year 1585 when he went
to London, to 1615 when he returned to Stratford, you will then know
what are the right conditions for mental growth.

“The mother of William Shakespeare, Mary Arden, was a great and noble
woman. Words elude me when I attempt to describe her! Soul secretes
body, and how can I have you see the dwelling-place of this great and
lofty spirit as I now behold it with my inward eyes? Tall, rather than
otherwise, a willowy lithe form that was strong as whalebone, yet
at first you would have thought her delicate; hair light, inclining
to auburn, wavy; her eyes heaven’s own blue, with a dreamy far-away
expression, not fixed on things of earth, but looking into the beyond.
She saw things others never saw, she heard music that came not to the
ears of others. Her face I cannot describe! Some envious women said she
was homely, for her features were rather large and irregular; but a few
saw in that face the look of gentle greatness, for the really great are
always gentle and modest. They speak with lowered voice--they hesitate.
Is it fear? They are silent when we say they should affirm--and Pilate
marveled.

“This woman bore eight children, four boys and four girls. Only one
of these attained eminence--this was her third child. The others were
born under seemingly equal favorable circumstances, but the spirit she
called to her when she conceived in that year 1563, was of a different
nature from that which prevailed with the other seven. She was then
thirty-one years old; her mind working in the direction of the Ideal;
her life calm; all of the surroundings at their best. But we must
hasten on.”

I had brought my stenographic notebook, and almost from the first I
took the words of The Man exact, as I feared I would not remember
them. We were seated on a log under the great pine-trees, and as The
Man talked slowly, I got the exact words as I give them to you in this
book. The Man continued:

“John Shakespeare was not the equal of his wife by any means, but a
good man withal, who loved his wife and feared her just a little.
She was good and gentle, yet so self-reliant in spite of her seeming
sensitiveness, that the good man could never fully comprehend her; but
he ever treated her with the awkward yet becoming tenderness of the
great, strong, hairy, simple-hearted man that he was.

“William caused his parents more trouble and sorrow than all the
other children together. They could not comprehend him at all. He was
smart, yet would not study; he was strong, yet would not work except
by spells. He would disappear from the task at which he had been set,
and be found lying on his back out under the trees, looking up through
the branches at the great white clouds floating in the sky. He had
hiding-places all his own in the woods and glens where he would spend
hours alone, and yet in the childish frolics and games of youth he
could always hold his own.

“At eighteen (I hate to think of those awful times) he married Anne
Hathaway, ten years his senior. This woman was delivered of a child one
month after her marriage. I could tell you the full details of that
affair; of how he married this ignorant and stupid woman to defend
another, but let us pass over it lightly. The world need not know the
bad, it hears too much of it now. Let us only dwell on the good, think
the good, speak the good, and we will then live the good.

“For three years Shakespeare ostensibly lived with this woman, who was
whimsical, ignorant, fault-finding, jealous--ever upbraiding and too
fond of giving advice, and a most uncleanly and slovenly housekeeper
beside. When he married her Shakespeare accepted her for better for
worse, it proved to be worse, but he was determined to endure and live
it out; but after three years of purgatory he brushed away the starting
tears, took a few small necessary things, tied them in a handkerchief,
and without saying ‘good-bye’ even to the dear mother whom he loved
(although she did not understand him), started on foot for London,
anxious to lose himself in the great throng. He arrived penniless,
ragged and footsore, and sought vainly for employment; but what
could the poor country boy do? No trade, no education, no experience
with practical things! If he had been used to the manners of polite
people he could have hired out as a servant; but, alas! he was only
a country boor, unused to city ways, and driven almost to the verge
of starvation, he hung about the entrance to the theatre, and offered
to hold the horses of visitors who went within. At this he picked up
enough to pay for his scanty food and lodging. Besides holding horses
he carried a lantern, and increased his little income by attending
people home after the play, going before carrying lantern and staff.
London streets, you know, were not lighted in those days, and robbers
were also plentiful under cover of the night, so strong young men able
to give protection were needed. Occasionally he was called into the
theatre to act as a soldier or supernumerary.

“One night he was engaged to attend a lady and her daughter from
their home to the play, and back again after the performance. This
woman was the widow of an Italian nobleman, Bowenni by name, who was
driven from his home for political reasons. He died in London leaving
the widow and daughter with an income which by prudent management
was amply sufficient for their needs. The daughter was twenty-four
years old at the time I have mentioned, a girl of most rare education
and refinement. Like all Italians she was a born linguist, and spoke
French, German, Greek and Latin with fluency. Her father was a scholar,
and for years he was the tutor and the only playmate of this daughter.
Together they studied Homer and Plato (the wonders of Greece were just
then for the first time being opened up in England), and the beauties
of the French Moralists they dissected day by day with ever increasing
delight; for the girl had that fine glad recipiency for the trinity of
truth, beauty and goodness, each of which comprehends the other. Her
father took good care that only the best of mental nourishment should
be hers. In their exile they had traveled through Egypt, spent months
in Denmark, Spain and Portugal, knew Rome, Venice and the Mediterranean
by heart, and wherever they went, the father secured the best books
of the place--for you must remember that in those days the books of an
author very seldom went out of his own country, certainly were never
offered for sale in other countries, and the works of French dramatists
were almost unknown in England.

“After our youth had left the mother and daughter at the door of their
dwelling, and they had entered, the daughter asked: ‘My mother, didst
thou notice the respectful attitude of the young man whom we engaged to
attend us?--how alert he was to see that no accident did befall us? Yet
he spoke no word, nor forced on us attention, but only seemed intent on
his duty doing.’

“‘Yes,’ said the mother, ‘a youth of goodly parts and fair to view
withal; not large in stature, but strong. He does not bear himself
pompously, and bend back as other servants do; but the manly chest--it
leads, and methinks the crown is in its proper place. We will him
engage again, for honest work well done shall ever bring its own
reward.’

“But I must hasten on, and not spend time with mere detail. Suffice it
to say, that the young man was hired to attend the noble lady and the
daughter to the theatre each Thursday night, and that after four weeks
the daughter suggested that as the young man was so gentlemanly in his
bearing, so modest, and of such comely features, that there would be no
harm for him to attend them as their friend and escort. ‘No one need
know,’ she naïvely said, and after much misgiving on the mother’s part
the plan was suggested to the young man, who only bowed with uncovered
head and said, ‘Madame, I am your hired servant, and therefore at your
service to do all that you may command, which cannot be but right.’

“So suitable raiment was purchased, and when the youth appeared the
women were much surprised to see a perfect gentleman, grave, and ‘to
the manor born.’ No longer now did he hold horses at the entrance,
but occasionally appeared on the stage in a non-speaking part, at
which times the young Italian lady saw but one figure on the stage.
The mother and the young man often when walking homeward discussed
the play, and the young man seemed to remember each part, and would
repeat entire stanzas when asked to do so, word for word; and then
with no show of egotism but frankly, say ‘It should have been thus
expressed--or thus.’ To all of which the mother and daughter made no
answer, but looked at each other in amazement to think that one who had
not traveled, and knew not the ways of courts, nor had scarcely learned
to read, could make amends to Marlowe.

“One night before the play the manager appeared and offered five and
twenty pounds as reward for the best play--all given by the Earl of
Southampton. After the play as they walked home, flushed were the
daughter’s cheeks, and fast beat her heart. Her blood ran high, as in
mad riot. She scarcely seemed to touch the earth as fast she walked and
held fast and fast and tighter still to the young man’s arm. At last he
turned his face--his eyes met hers--her voice came with a bound--

“‘The play--the play’s the thing! We’ll write it--you and I! The plot?
It’s mine already, all in a big French book, musty and hid away. Yes,
the plot we’ll borrow and give it back again if France demand. Ha--you,
William, come to-morrow night, and you shall write it out in your own
matchless words while I translate. The play’s the thing--the play is
the thing!’

“Thus spoke the impetuous Italian girl, and the mother was much
surprised at the wild outburst of her artless child, but gave assent,
and gently the mother mused in accent low as echo answers voice--‘The
play’s the thing!’ And the young man to himself, as homeward he did
stroll, did softly say, ‘The play’s the thing! The play’s the thing!’”




CHAPTER XV. SHAKESPEARIANA--“TRUTH, LORD.”


After dinner in the cabin we moved our chairs out under the trees, and
The Man said:

“Yes, I know you wish to hear more about Shakespeare, but before I
tell you more of his personal history, let us consider two or three
facts in reference to him. First, you know he was not technically a
scholar. Between him and the great ancient hearts he was to read there
intervened no frosty twilight of antiquarian lore. He had not to clip
and measure and adjust amid moth-eaten cerements and rusty armor that
he might be able to fashion forth the exterior and shell of times long
since gone by, but only to cast asunder the gates of the human heart,
that those deathless notes might be heard which are the undertone of
human emotion in all times.

“Well it was that he who was to give to our tongue that tune which it
was never to lose, whose language, exhaustless in range, in delicacy,
force and extent, taking every hue of thought or feeling, of good and
base alike, as the sky takes shade or shadow, or as the forest takes
storm or calm, was to remain forever the emblem of the multitudinous
life, as contrasted with that affected gravity and ossified
scholasticism which we so often see--was tempted by no familiarity with
ancient writing to any formal rotundity or college-professor mannerism
of diction. His audience is the world, and the numbers increase as
civilization grows--he moves to-day a broader stratum of human sympathy
than any other man who ever lived save one--and this could not have
been had he passed into that narrow chamber called a school. And yet no
four walls of a college could have held him, for he of all men would
have been least apt to prefer the poor glitter of learned paint to
God’s sunlight of living smiles. When one thinks how much learning has
done to veil genius and impede progress, it is impossible to suppress
a sense of satisfaction at the thought that the greatest author of all
mankind was not learned! His only teacher was nature, his only need was
freedom. Who gave him this?--_a woman_!

“Now do not suppose that I have no sympathy with colleges, for no man
knows their worth better than I; but it is better to build for eternity
than for a Regents’ examination. Another thing you must remember is
that Shakespeare was surrounded by no circle of admirers. Healthy,
whole-hearted, it never occurred to him to ask what precise position
he might occupy in the world of letters. He did his work for the
approbation of one alone, and she being pleased he was content.

“No jealousy, strife or contention, do you see on that smooth brow; no
hate or fear of unjust rivalry. He was monarch of one loving, truthful,
trusting heart, so what cared he for popular applause? A prophet has
said, ‘Oh, thou foul Circean draught of popular applause, thy end is
madness and the grave!’ This most subtle and deadly of all poisons
was never mingled in the cup of Shakespeare, and never can be in that
of anyone if they work only for the applause of honest love, that can
dissemble not. To work for popular applause is to court death; to
succeed in winning it, is to be carried to the pinnacle of the temple
and cast upon the stones beneath.

“If a man toil for the good-will of the multitude, there will come as
sure as fate, the time when the egotism of acquirement will render
callous day by day all of his finer perceptions, kill his delicate
sensibilities, destroy his manhood. No longer will he hold the mirror
up to nature; no longer will the ray of light shine through the prism,
reflecting the beauty of the rainbow--he is opaque, dead; and the only
sound he gives is ego, _Ego_, EGO.

“Need I give illustrations? Look about you on every hand. Where in all
the realm of books is the author free from this taint! But yes, there
are some. This century has seen a few, but you can count them on the
fingers of one hand. Hero worship is twice cursed. It bewilders the
hero into fantastic error and extravagance, and the fools who worship
accept for a time anything the man whom they have damned sets before
them and proclaim it truth. They extol his eccentricities into models,
his follies into virtues. Thus does hero worship work double harm.

“What is the cure? Is oblivion the only good? Is to do, to die? If I
achieve must my life go out like that of certain insects who die in the
act of generation? Wise men ask these questions over and over again. I
give you the answer. It is this--_Together man and woman were put out
of Eden. Only together hand in hand can they return._

“Woman’s love saved Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s love saved the woman,
although the world knows her not as yet. He never realized his power,
and if it had been told him that his name would go thundering down
the ages, the greatest literary name of all times, he would have been
staggered with incredulity; for if a man ever realizes or imagines he
is at the top, at once his head grows dizzy. But never fear, the heart
of woman can hold him firm. Duality exists throughout all nature. A man
alone is only half a man--a woman alone is only half a woman. The man
and woman make the perfect man. There is the male man and the female
man. Only where these two half spirits work together can they reach
perfection. For every woman there is somewhere on the earth, or in
the spirit realm a mate, for every man there is his other half; and
some time in this life or in another they will meet, and no priest
or justice of the peace can join what God has not ordained. But when
the right man meets the right woman and they live rightly, there is
an atmosphere formed where no poisonous draught can enter. These two
will say, ‘_Between us there must be honesty and truth for evermore._’
Then each will work for the approbation of the other; there will be no
flattery, for there is honesty; there will be commendation always when
deserved, but no fulsome praise. Neither will excel the other. Each
may be able to do certain things better than the other, so there will
ever be a friendly rivalry for good. The tendency to grow egotistical
is ever corrected, the poison is constantly neutralized, for how can
you be egotistical when you only work for the approbation of one who
has contributed to your work as much as you? There is ever a sharing of
every joy, of every exalted thought, of every acquisition; so the good
gained is fused. There is a perfect commingling. It is not ‘mine,’ nor
‘thine,’ but ‘ours.’ No selfish satisfaction can you take in your own
attainment when by your side stands another as great as yourself. You
are gentle, modest, and you two working together cannot but recognize a
higher power, a greater than you, a Source you look up to, and ever do
you say, ‘Not unto us, not unto us.’ Thus is growth attained and thus
only can perfection be reached.

“Of course I know that some men are not as able as some women; and
that some men have wives who are only echoes; and that there are
men who in their blindness desire nothing else--but a woman who can
only applaud her husband is fixing him in untruth, and they are each
dragging the other down. For we only need the applause of those who
are our equals, otherwise they will not discern but will applaud
simply because we say it. Then once having tasted blood we resort to
sophistry, trickery and device, knowing we can deceive, to win this
deadly thing our morbid souls do crave.

“Well do I know that as the highest joys of sense and soul come from
love, and sadly do I say it, love misplaced, diverted, thwarted,
causes more misery, heartaches, sickness, death, than all other causes
combined. The throes of childbirth were sent as punishment for love
wrongly used, and this awful curse can yet be cured; not in this life
perhaps, but it will come, for God did not design that life should be
sacrificed in order that others still might also have life.”




CHAPTER XVI. SIXTH SUNDAY--THE MAN CONTINUES THE TRUE STORY OF
SHAKESPEARE.


“The evening following what I have already told, the young man
presented himself at the little red house where dwelt the Lady Bowenni,
and was met at the door by Harriette, the daughter. Servant and
stranger he no longer was, but friend. The young woman’s cheeks glowed,
her eyes flashed with all the eagerness of restless purpose.

“Spread out on the table were sundry curiously-bound books and
pamphlets, some written and some in print; for the nobleman had been a
great collector, and had secured the best wherever literary treasures
were to be found. The young man was cool, composed, and had not the
slightest idea of what the work would be or where it should begin.

“‘Draw up your chair to yonder table, William, while I sit on the other
side. Now look straight at me (‘I can’t do otherwise,’ he gravely
said), and listen close while I the story tell which I have got from
three old books--two of them from Spain were brought, one from France.
I have dropped and left out this and that, and put in more, here
interpolated, there proclaimed a truth I once did hear you say. Now let
us get the plot all firmly fixed in our two hearts, and then you it
is shall write; for you do toy with words--they are your playthings.
You strive not, nor reach out, nor falter, search or look around, but
straightway you do get the thought, words, gentle words come trooping
to you like a thousand fairies, each in its own order, leading its
mate full gently by the hand. For learned men may work and strive and
sweat and never do they reach the smoothness you do bring even without
a second thought. Careless, William, you are in manner. You know no
rule, yet I might study a thousand years and could not thus express the
feeling that within me burns; but hinted once by me to you, straightway
you weave the beauteous thought into a chaplet gay, and then upon my
brow you place it, and seriously you proclaim it mine, when ’tis not
mine, nor thine, but _ours_.’

“Thus did speak this winsome girl after the story she had told, and
thoughtful sat the man and not a word he seemed to hear as still she
chatted on. When suddenly he aroused and said:

“‘The pens, my lady! An eagle’s pinion, and this story you have told
shall we give wing! But note you! three stories have you taken and
woven into two instead of one. So shall it stand. Two stories shall we
tell, the one within the other held.’[2]

“And straightway were pens and paper brought and he did write--steadily
and seemingly without thought of form or rounded sentences, but surely
without stop--and as the pen went gliding o’er the parchment, and page
on page were turned aside, the fair young girl did seize and greedily
did read, with pen in hand to make an alteration, although but slight,
and her cheeks did burn and now and then she sighed and raised her
hands. But the young man, he looked not up, but with calm face and
steady hand the work went on; and as he held the pen in his right hand,
his left hand moved, as though unknown to him, across the narrow table,
and gently did she hold it fast--and still the work went on. A few more
nights--the play was done and to the judges sent. They read aloud. Some
wondered, others sniffed the air, one said: ‘What rubbish is this sent
to us? What folly! and written by a big peasant boor!--use it to light
the fire. Here, servant, you, bring on the next so to quickly get this
horrid taste out of our mouths.’

“The young man heard the sentence, smiled softly, and to himself did
say, ‘Oh man, proud man, clothed in a little brief authority, doth cut
such fantastic tricks before high heaven as does make angels weep! Now
for myself I do not care, but the lady forsooth, whose play it is,
or was before ’twas burned--shame on them!--how can I tell her?’ And
so he wandered forth and met but who? Why, Harriette, who sought the
youth full far and wide, for she had heard the news and grieved she was
and sick, fearing the blow might prove too much for him whose play it
was. ‘I care not for myself,’ she said; ‘but how--how can I tell him?’
They met--each read full in the other’s eyes what each would say. Both
smiled and walked away.”

FOOTNOTE:

[2] It is a fact known to all students that Shakespeare was the first
dramatist who wrote the double play--that is, the first plot of high
characters with a second story worked out by the lower or comedy
characters. This peculiarity is now made use of by all writers of
plays. Note, _The Merchant of Venice_, _As You Like It_, _Comedy of
Errors_, etc.




CHAPTER XVII. THOSE TWO.


“The disappointment caused by the harsh rejection of this first play
of William Shakespeare and Harriette Bowenni was not great. Each had
had a more than speaking acquaintanceship with sorrow, and trouble is
only comparative anyway; so they looked upon the matter rather as a
thing to be expected, an amusing circumstance. _They knew the play was
better than the one accepted_, and that was enough. ‘Is not William
Shakespeare just as great as though his name _was_ on the bill board?’
the lady said. Another reason that made them look on the matter lightly
was that each read their fate in the other’s face, and as long as no
separation is threatened love not only laughs at locksmiths but at all
disaster. No awkward love-making scene had ever come between them,
no formal declaration. As he wrote that first night, the young man
unconsciously reached out his hand toward the girl. She took it, and
held it lovingly between her own. When they parted he stooped and their
lips met.

“When next they walked along the street, among other things he said, ‘I
love you, dear.’ The young woman made no sign of surprise, but when
she wrote to him the following day (strange how lovers find excuse to
write so often!), there were terms of endearment, all inserted without
apology. No wooing--no effort at winning--no affected coyness. They
loved, and true love need not be ashamed, for ’tis God’s own gift, and
given only to the worthy.

“Each day she wrote a letter to her lover--each day he wrote to her.
These messages were often in verse, and part of them are preserved in
the sonnets of Shakespeare, one hundred and fifty-four in number. These
sonnets, it will be noticed, have no special relation one to the other.
Part, it can be seen, are written by a woman to her lover. Mixed in
with these are others written by a man. You will notice that in those
written by the woman she entreats the young man to marry, and expresses
much regret and surprise that though he loves her well he will not wed.

“These sonnets were first published in 1609, and were dedicated--

  “‘_To Mr. W. H. Their onlie begetter._’

“The W stands for William, the H for Harriette. The prefix of ‘Mr.’
is a mere whimsicality, (a thing all lovers are guilty of, yet which
we are ever ready to forgive), simply to mystify the world. The first
twenty-six of these sonnets were written by Harriette during the years
1585 and 1586, before she knew that Shakespeare was already married;
and the perplexity in her ignorance of the real facts of his life can
be imagined.

“Long years after these letters were written, Shakespeare turned those
which were not already in rhyme into verse for his and her amusement,
and now that they had come to know each other perfectly and the
oneness was complete, many was the laugh they had over their youthful
trials. Anyone who will read the Sonnets, _Venus and Adonis_ and the
_Passionate Pilgrim_, and read them carefully in the light of what I
now tell, will get a clear idea of the first few years’ relations of
Shakespeare and this beautiful and accomplished young woman. I do not
attempt to defend the style or wording of these poems. They are written
in all the hot restless desire of youth where flesh is not ruled by
soul--where the earthy is not yet transmuted into the spiritual.

“Said ‘rare Ben Jonson’--‘I loved the man, and do reverence his memory
on this side of idolatry as much as any! He was honest and of an open
and free nature, had an excellent fancy, brave notions and excellent
expressions, wherein he flowed with such facility that sometimes it was
necessary he should be stopped. His wit was in his own power--would the
rule of it had been so too! but he redeemed his vices with his virtues.
There was in him ever more to be praised than pardoned. The players
have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare that in his writing
whatsoe’er he penned he never blotted out a line. My answer has been,
Would he had blotted out a thousand.’

“So with Ben Jonson I say, Oh would that these two had left unwritten a
thousand lines!--but who shall dictate to genius?

“When Shakespeare left Stratford he attempted to leave the last year’s
dwelling for the new--to steal the shining archway through--close
up the idle door. The past was to him dead. He did not hug it to
his heart, mourn over it, and attempt to kiss it back to life. He
said, ‘The past we cannot recall, the future we cannot reach, the
present only is ours.’ So with no attempt at concealment, yet with no
disclosure of his history, he said to Harriette Bowenni:

“‘That I do love you, you do know; that I do desire to wed you, you may
guess; and that I cannot is but fact. Now why should speak I more? You
put your arms about my neck and swear your faith in pretty verse, and
next you contradict this faith by still demanding _Why_? No! If I say
it is not best, is not that _Why_ enough?’

“In sonnet number twenty the appearance of Shakespeare is described at
this time. A writer says, ‘He has a lady’s face and scarce a beard.’

“Harriette urged the youth to leave his shabby lodgings, marry her, and
take up his abode with her and her mother; and in _Venus and Adonis_
we hear of the number of noble lovers that had sought her hand, and yet
she almost on her knees besought William to wed her. In a spirit of
jolly ridicule of this wooing on the part of Harriette, he wrote the
poem of _Venus and Adonis_ and presented it to her. In this poem you
will notice he represents himself as cold and unfeeling, when the real
truth is he was just as full of desire to marry as she; but the divorce
laws of England at that time were very strict, so much so that only the
rich or influential could secure a divorce at all.

“Shakespeare should have been frank with this girl and told her his
history at once, but he did not do so until over a year after their
first acquaintance. You can well imagine the surprise of mother and
daughter when he one night said, ‘Come, my history you would know.
Well, I’ll run it through, even from my boyish days, to the very moment
that you bade me tell it,’ and so he told from childhood to the time
he took one last look at the little village and set his face toward
London. The story being done she gave him for his pains a world of
sighs. She swore in faith ’twas strange, ’twas passing strange, ’twas
pitiful, ’twas wondrous pitiful! she wished she had not heard it. Yet
she wished that heaven had made her such a man. She thanked him, and
bade him if he had a friend that lov’d her, he should teach him how to
tell the story, and that would woo her. On this hint he spake:

“‘Now you do know full well why I, according to England’s law, do not
you wed--yet heaven hath decreed it so. You are my rightful mate; and
here and now, in the sacred presence of her who brought you forth, I do
declare you shall be from now henceforth my true and only wife.’

“Madame Bowenni was generous, gentle and good, a woman of most rare
and discriminating mind, great and loving. Years had not soured nor
turned to dross the great and tender heart. She knew for her daughter
to accept William Shakespeare for her husband without the consent of
England’s law, would not be the one thousandth part the sin as to see
her wed a man she did not love, although good and noble the man might
be. So Shakespeare took up his abode with this fair lady, and was a
faithful and true husband to her, and she a loving and true wife till
death called her hence.

“Harriette Bowenni died in the year 1614, leaving one child,
Shakespeare’s only son. Anne Hathaway had died some years before, and
be it said to his credit Shakespeare sent her ample funds from time
to time, and that she shared in his prosperity. It is greatly to be
regretted that Harriette died before her lover, otherwise she would
have acted as his literary executor and collected his writings in
proper form. As it is this work was done by those entirely unfitted
for it, and his papers were brought together from many sources seven
years after his death; and to-day not a single scrap of his manuscript
exists, excepting the letters I possess and the diary of Harriette
Bowenni, in which are various entries made by Shakespeare. All these
letters and the diary you shall see.

“From his grief at the death of Harriette, Shakespeare never rallied.
He left London, the scene of his mighty success, and back to his
boyhood’s home did he turn, broken in health and spirit. City men who
were once country boys, always look forward to the coming of old age,
when they can return again to their childhood’s home. In less than two
short years those simple villagers carried to its last resting-place
the worn out body of the mightiest man of thought the world has ever
known.

“When Shakespeare took Harriette Bowenni as his wife, at once they
began their life-work in earnest. Women then were never recognized
in literary work, and in fact did not ever act upon the stage, their
parts being taken by boys. Harriette knew English history probably
better than any man in England at that time, having studied it for
several years with her father, and written it out for the nobleman. The
first successful plays of Shakespeare were those of English history.
Then followed tragedy and comedy in rapid and startling succession.
Thirty-seven plays are known positively to be Shakespeare’s, all
written in the space of twenty-six years; there being scarcely any
repetition of plot or plan, all sweeping forward in that matchless and
noble diction possessed by no other writer. The source of nearly all
the plots have been well traced. Many of the plays are combinations
of two or three others. In several instances the story is taken pure
and simple from other writers, and the dialogue changed, modified,
interpolated, as if it was necessary to get the play out at a certain
time; yet the work is always nobly done, although many of the plays
show very plainly the work of two persons.

“In every one of these thirty-seven plays William Shakespeare and
Harriette Bowenni worked side by side, she supplying the plot and
historical connection and he the language. The philosophy and by-play
was worked in between them.

“Shakespeare’s conception of womanhood is higher than that of any
other dramatist, even of modern time. Generally we find the saints
and sinners pretty evenly divided between the sexes. Not so with the
Master! His women are wise, gentle and good. Look at Portia, Rosalind,
Cecelia, Viola, Jessica and others. The character of Lady Macbeth was
worked out by Harriette alone, as I will show you in her diary where
she protests against William parsing excellencies in the feminine
gender continually, and she asks leave to portray Lady Macbeth herself
alone.

“Each was constantly alert for metaphor, hyperbole, figure, trope,
philosophy or poetical expression. Nothing escaped--every thought or
fancy to which love could give birth was woven in. Neither went in
society, and the fact that Shakespeare could not present this woman
as his wife, was rather an advantage than otherwise. They had no
friends but books, and thus were not distracted, diverted or dragged
down by common-place connections, ignorant or vain people. To be with
people was to lose their relationship to the whole. They were merely
onlookers in Venice--the world knew them not. This fully accounts for
the total lack of knowledge we possess of Shakespeare’s life. It has
been stated that Shakespeare belonged to the club to which belonged
Sir Walter Raleigh, Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Donne, Selden and
others, that met at the Mermaid Tavern, but there is no proof at all
that he ever attended these meetings. How such a man lived with such
a mind and still was not known, has astounded humanity; and it is
not to be wondered at that many now doubt that he ever wrote at all,
and very plausibly prove (or think they do), that this unlettered,
untraveled and untutored man _could not_ (mark the words) have written
Shakespeare. It is not to be wondered at that they cast about for the
most learned man of his time, and pick out Lord Bacon, not knowing that
six Lords Bacon all melted into one _could never_ (_mark my words_)
equal the work of one great man and one great woman, who having put
away all society but each other, cast out all frivolity, set themselves
the task (if task it may be called) solely to assist that alchemist,
the only one who can transmute base material into good--_Love_,
undying _Love_. Love is creative. It is the one and only source of all
creation!”

       *       *       *       *       *

I had been taking the words of The Man at the rate of one hundred words
a minute. Suddenly they came faster, faster. I could scarcely keep
up. For the first time I saw The Man had lost his composure. I looked
up. The tears were streaming down his cheeks. He arose from his seat,
paused, raised his hands and exclaimed:

“This woman, Harriette Bowenni; she was my mother!!”




CHAPTER XVIII. SEVENTH SUNDAY.--THE SECRET OF SUCCESS.


I began the conversation by a protest against attributing the success
of Shakespeare so entirely to woman’s influence for “you cannot make a
statue out of basswood,” I said.

“Yes, you are right,” answered The Man, “but Shakespeare, you must
remember, won the love of this great woman, and thus proved his
capacity and ability to succeed. We succeed by means, that is by the
help of, others. Now take your pencil and paper and write what I speak--

“The word success scarcely carries the same meaning to two people, and
I will make no attempt now to a pedagogic definition of the word, but
simply a statement of facts which will not be disputed by any thinking
person.

“There are certain conditions which we see surrounding men that are
the reverse of success, and on these we are all agreed. So it might be
easier to state what success is not, than what it is.

“If we see a person whose face is filled with lines of anxious care,
proving to every passerby that the wearer of this look is nervous,
apprehensive, restless, fast losing the capacity for enjoying the good
things of life, we cannot call this person successful, though he is
a millionaire. Yet we find men whom we know are not worth a hundred
dollars, but their faces beam with the health that comes only from
right living. Their entire bodily attitude tells that they are in line
with the harmony of the universe. They are successful.

“The world is rich beyond the power of man to compute. We are just
beginning to turn the wheels of commerce with a motive power the vast
extent of which seems limitless, and which we use over and over again
without destroying its substance. The material things which go to make
life comfortable are in extent as boundless as is the oxygen which
makes the combustion that we call life possible. For do you think for
a moment that the Supreme Intelligence that quickened life into being
would make too much of this and only half enough of that, so men would
have plenty of air to breathe and plenty of water to drink, but only
half enough food or raiment?

“No, the world is rich--surpassing rich, but, alas! men are poor.

“One man gets many things more than he can use and makes himself poor,
that is, unsuccessful, by a vain attempt to keep that which in fact is
not his. He draws on the material world for more than he needs, but
fails to absorb from the world of spirit of the pure oxygen of life to
aid digestion; he is like a man who has eaten twice as much as he can
digest, he is full of fear and distrust and his life is a failure. He
is not a success.

“And we see men great and good in soul whose bodies are not properly
nourished and who shiver with the cold. This is not success.

“There is no virtue in poverty. To do without things we do not need
is both manly and right (for to do right is manly), but to deprive
ourselves of the bounties and blessings that have been provided for us,
is not only to be lacking in common sense, but it is to be guilty of
sin.

“So we say that the unsuccessful man is he who does not secure for his
_use_ all that which his being needs for its growth and advancement.

“I have spoken of the pure air we should breathe being supplied
in limitless quantities, but every physician knows that the most
prolific cause of disease is the breathing of a bad atmosphere. People
deliberately fire up the coal stove, close the drafts so that the
poison cannot escape up the chimney, shut down the windows and pray for
sweet, refreshing sleep. This is done as much out in the open country
as in the crowded city. At daylight this morning, just as the summer
sun was coming up from behind the far-away hills, I walked through the
sleeping village and noticed that in almost every house the windows
were tightly shut, blinds closed, and, of course, the doors locked to
keep out burglars, forgetful that the murderer who sought their lives
was already in the house.

“The rich in cities ride in closed carriages, breathing the same air
over and over. They are pale, yellow and despondent. The coachman rides
outside ruddy and full of life.

“Thousands upon thousands die yearly of consumption, a disease coming
entirely from improper breathing. If we use only a part of the
lungs, the rest of the cells collapse, decay and we die--die through
poverty--die through not using enough of that which is supplied so
plenteously. And, yet, air is free, but whether through ignorance or
inability (and ignorance is inability) we die, for nature takes no
thought of the individual. You must comply with her rules or suffer
from noncompliance. ‘Here are these good things,’ she says, ‘use them
freely;’ and if we do not know how to use them we suffer just as surely
as though we wilfully rebelled and knowingly said, ‘We will not use
them.’

“So if you ask me to define success, I will say that he is successful
who uses that which his well-being requires for its best development.
To fail is not to use what your physical, mental and moral well-being
demands. Whether you fail through ignorance of your needs or inability
to supply them makes no difference.

“Thus it might truthfully be said that no life is a complete success,
for no man lays hold on the forces of the universe and uses to the
fullest extent. So there are all degrees of success. Now I propose
to give a few plain and simple rules for securing to yourself that
which your body and soul demand, and when I speak of one’s ‘Being’ I
always mean body and soul--one no less than the other, for without soul
there would be no body--body is here the instrument of soul. And what
is more, I mean _worldly success_, for the world is but the sensual
manifestation of spirit. You cannot separate spirit from matter--matter
from intelligence.

“One of the worst mistakes man has made in times past has been the
attempt to separate things into two parts--the ‘sacred’ and the
‘worldly.’ All things are sacred. There is nothing above the natural.
There can be no ‘Super-Natural,’ without we say the supernatural is
natural, which is in fact the truth.

“The wheeling stars, the great sun which warms our planet into life
and light, every manifestation of beauty which we behold, man himself
with his aspirations, his longings and his unknown possibilities, are
_natural_. The natural is the all in all.

“We are here for growth, and live on the world. To achieve a success
here, is to achieve a worldly success; and the highest ambition any man
can have is to secure success, and the only success you can achieve
here is a worldly success.

“Success is the result of right thinking. ‘As a man thinketh so is he,’
and what is most encouraging to me is the thought that a gigantic brain
and a mighty grasp of mind are not at all necessary to success. The
secret is simple, and the wayfaring can comprehend it as well as the
prince. A few plain rules well followed and you are in the majority,
for all nature is on your side and working in your behalf. What need
you of influential friends? And yet the kind of thinking I am about to
describe will bring the noble and the powerful to your side. They will
seek your acquaintance, they will be your friends, and it will be their
delight to help you, for it is the way nature assists her children by
sending the love of good people. Night and day your spirit thinks. Stop
thinking now for five minutes and tell me what you thought. No, you
cannot stop. You may not remember what you thought, when you were in
your sleep, but you thought just the same. But, while you cannot stop
thinking you can direct the thought. You can control its tendency,
and in the course of time (not long either), you will think only good
thoughts--thoughts that will insure success to yourself and assist all
those with whom you come in contact.

“Success in every undertaking has come from a right mental attitude.
But your ambition must be worthy and founded on right or there can be
no success. There can be no such thing as a successful burglar, for
the act that is wrong brings a reaction that is weakness, defeat, and
disgrace--the end may be postponed for a day, but the result is no
less sure; while the reaction from a good act brings to the person an
increased self-respect, a power for good, and this is his reward.

“I will not attempt to give one plan for success in business, another
for success in religious work, and another set of rules for scholarly
attainment. We cannot separate life into parts, for there can be no
success in a business that is not right, but if your business is
honorable it affords you a most excellent opportunity for the exercise
of spiritual and mental attainment. You cannot imagine a sincere
follower of Truth being engaged in a bad business, and the personal
contact which a profession or business gives a man with other men
affords him the opportunity to let his light shine.

“The first requisite of success is to know what you desire. Misty,
uncertain hopes and changing wishes bring uncertain results. The reason
we hear so much of luck and chance in life is on account of the absence
of clear ideals. You must work out in your own mind what you wish to
achieve. Are you a clerk in a big store, and see yourself in the future
always as a clerk, you will always be one. Suppose, on the other hand,
you see yourself in imagination as the head of the establishment, and
hold this constantly in mind as you work away in your lowly position
day after day. This very thought is bringing you toward your ideal.
You will have an alertness for business, a desire to please, and the
welfare of the establishment will be constantly before you. You will
always be on time, and when there is extra work you will remain a
little later and never think of asking if you are to be paid for over
time.

“This cheerful and attentive disposition is sure to bring you
promotion, and even over the heads of older employees. When a foreman
is wanted for the head of a department you will be the one selected--no
mistake, it cannot be otherwise. The ideal you hold in your mind is
coming toward you sure. The whirligig of time, which is ever sifting,
assorting, and bringing to the top the best, is a spiritual law as
strong as fate--in fact, it is fate--and you will be the head of this
establishment, and a rich man.

“We do not say that to be the head of a big business and to be rich are
the chief ends for which to work, but as far as you prize these things,
you can only secure them in the way I have mentioned.

“If you are a country school-teacher, on a small salary, and never
expect to be invited to teach in a higher school, you never will. But
if your ambition is to be principal in a college, you can attain this
position. You will read the educational journals, and will know all
of the great teachers who now live, and all of those who have gone
before. Their names and lives will be familiar to you. You will dwell
in thought on the virtues of Roger Ascham, and Arnold of Rugby will be
your friend. You will attend the Teachers’ Institutes and take part,
too, and encourage the leader by your sympathy. You will attract to
your side all the good teachers in the neighborhood, and will soon be
in communication with the chief educators in the country, and your
promotion is sure as sunrise. As soon as you are made worthy by holding
fast to the ideal, you will be called up higher. But suppose you seek
to attain promotion by connivance and wire-pulling, your defeat is
certain. The thing to do is to be worthy and be ready to accept the
invitation promptly, and it will come.

“The necessity of this clearness of ideal which brings a calm certainty
of manner is more marked perhaps in the professions of law and healing
than elsewhere.

“We are just beginning to appreciate the fact that the good physician
heals more by his presence than his potions. A physician who believes
that man is made in the image of his Maker and that his body is the
dwelling-place of an immortal spirit, has ever before him a most lofty
ideal. To come within the atmosphere of such a man, clean in body and
pure in heart, is to absorb to a certain extent his qualities of mind,
which is a powerful force acting on the body for health. He fills the
patient with hope and faith, allays apprehension, calms the mind of
disorder, and allows the _vis medicatrix natura_ to act. A doctor of
this kind believes in his power to succeed--and he does. The lawyer who
fears the other side and is doubtful of his case and who believes the
judge is partial, has already lost his cause. But if he believes his
client is innocent and that the jury will clear him, if they can be
made to see the true state of affairs, brings judge and jury to this
way of thinking, and receives the verdict he asks for.

“To make people work against you and get the world in opposition to
you, just hold in thought that you are unfortunate and unlucky and
that no one appreciates you, and then the world is down on you sure
enough. You bring about the thing you fear. But what we want is men
who are positive without being pugnacious; men who are cheerful but
not frivolous. These are the successful men, and wherever they go they
carry help, health and healing.

“The second requisite of success is that you shall hold your thought in
the positive and not in the negative mood.

“Be on the lookout for good, and it will come to you. Avoid negation.
Shun controversy. Religious (?) disputes have hurt the cause of Truth a
thousand times more than all infidels and barbarians, for controversy
stirs up a train of thought and feeling that should never be aroused,
and which brings a reaction in the form of distrust, jealousy,
bickering and hate. The exercise of such hateful emotions disturbs the
poise of your mind and invites failure. If a man voices wrong thoughts
in your presence, do not be so vain as to imagine you can set him
straight by argument. Conversions are not made in that way. You need
not lend your assent to his wrong statements, but your silence will
be a powerful force acting on him and will tend to make him doubt his
infallibility, will set him to thinking seriously and may bring him
back into the line of Truth. If you had argued with him, the chances
are that his efforts to refute you would have sunk him deeper into his
error, for while you were talking to him he would have been thinking up
an argument to overthrow your efforts to put him right, and failure to
do so would have reacted on you and made you hot and impatient.

“Again I say, a positive and not a negative attitude are necessary to
success. Parents and teachers say to children, ‘don’t, don’t, don’t,’
thus sending to them and putting them in a negative element. Their
powers are not directed by this ‘don’t’ to secure what they need. They
drift rapidly, aimlessly from one worthless, mischievous waste of power
to another. Let the parent and teacher say ‘_do_,’ direct this force,
open a way for its use. You cannot gain force, power, by refraining
from doing. Power is gained by doing, and gained only by doing. What is
the great difference between the spirit of the Old and New Testaments?
The Old Testament is full of ‘Thou shalt nots,’ while the New is full
of positive force. Contrast Leviticus with the Sermon on the Mount,
the Ten Commandments with ‘Come unto me all ye who are weary and heavy
laden and I will give you rest.’

“Positive moods come to all in greater or less extent. If we court
them, entertain them, they remain long with us. They only go when we
send them from us. If we keep a silent demand for them they will return
to us and the visit be longer than before. Put ourselves in the right
attitude and they will cease to be visitors, but will take up their
permanent abode with us, the mood will then here become a state.

“In such state success is inevitable. Each person may have success,
should have it. Should be satisfied with nothing less than success.
We have each felt moments of success, the exultation and life coming
from it. We must have this as our state of mind, continual success,
permanent success. Success, not necessarily, as the world understands
it. Success does not need to be defined; each one knows it, none can
be deceived about it. Success brings peace and rest and that highest
state of happiness we can know here on earth--a foretaste of Heaven.
This does not come by striving nor trying, ‘Not by might nor by power
but by my spirit, saith the Lord.’ It comes by holding ourselves in a
receptive attitude, ‘Hoping all things, believing all things.’ Looking
not back, but forward, living to-day. There must be definite, high,
pure purpose.

“The positive state is the state of hope and hope is an attribute of
God Himself. Nothing in the material or spirit world can withstand the
force of this positive state. It is in accordance with the laws of the
universe, and all the forces of the universe work with and for us when
we are in harmony with nature. We are then one with the Infinite and
all things are ours.

“To recapitulate we will say--you must see in your own mind definitely
what you wish to become. Hold in your imagination the clear, strong,
hopeful ideal.

“Avoid gloomy, despondent, negative people. If the weather is
unpleasant, don’t make it your continual theme of conversation. If you
have unpleasant bodily sensations or symptoms do not tell people of
them. This will cause you to be shunned by those whose help you need,
and you draw to yourself a sickly, weakly and uncertain thought element.

“Cultivate the positive state. Take the good wherever you find it, and
let the bad go, it will die through lack of attention.”




CHAPTER XIX. EIGHTH SUNDAY--WOMAN’S LOVE.


The next Saturday was rainy the entire day, so I took the 5:30 train to
Jamison, which it will be remembered is a small country village. The
usual country loafers were about the depot, the coming of the trains
being matter of such importance to some of the residents of these
out-of-the-way places.

“There she is,” one said to another.

I saw I was an object of some attention, but merely thought it the
usual curiosity the advent of a stranger excites in a small place.
I walked across through the fields to the cabin, and found The Man
waiting supper for me. The neat pine table was covered with a clean
linen spread, and it must be stated that The Man was a good cook as
well as a good housekeeper. I mentioned these things. He smiled and
replied:

“Fortunately I have not much furniture to care for, and eating but two
meals a day, and those not very sumptuous, your remarks are not so very
flattering after all.”

“Now,” I said, when we were seated at the table, “I want to ask you
a question. That awful night I first came you spoke of your wife.
Then you paused, and said you had no woman’s clothing in the house. I
suppose your wife is away. Will she be here soon?”

“Friend,” was the answer, “she is here now in spirit, but for the
present her body is in England. She is doing a similar work there to
what I am doing here. It will be a year before I will again enfold her
in these arms, and yet I ever feel her presence. We commune by thought
transference. She speaks to me often; not in words of course, for as
we do not think in words so in the spirit realm language, so-called,
is useless. It is not necessary for you to spell the thought out to
comprehend it--it comes over you like an impulse. In fact, all thought
of spirit, whether the spirit be in body or not, causes a vibration
on the ether which the dull souls of most mortals are unable to
comprehend: just as a man in a drunken stupor requires a kick or a push
to make him open his eyes.

“I told you it was through love of this woman, my wife, that my
spiritual eyes were opened; and without her aid never could I have
arrived at knowledge. I was forty years of age when I found her in this
life, and hand in hand we walked, and together we ate of the tree of
knowledge.

“In the old fable you remember the man and woman were told not to eat
unworthily. Some accounts are imperfectly related, so as to include
a prohibition, but this is distortion made by priests in the Sixth
Century, of the real truth. To eat unworthily is to die, and you must
remember that this story is true; but under right conditions the right
man searching for truth, walking hand in hand with the right woman (and
there is one right woman for every man, and one man for every woman)
can attain perfection--that is, completeness.

“I told you something of atmosphere, and you must write this down as
one of the greatest living truths, that the male and female elements
are required to form a perfect spiritual atmosphere.

“This accounts for the slow progress the world has made. Men have lived
alone in thought and excluded women from their councils, thus depriving
themselves of the spiritual female element wherein is contained the
germ of all truth. The true sex is spiritual, not physical. Sex only
symbolizes the great truths which lie behind. When you imagine men
rushing to the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, and stuffing themselves
with the bread which represents the body of our Savior, and reeling
with drunken and maudlin hilarity from the effects of the wine which
represents His blood, you see an exact picture of what has been done
for thousands of years in this holy matter of sex. Friend, do you
wonder that Adam and Eve were turned out of the garden, and that they
were ashamed when in the presence of each other?

“To give you a slight glimpse of what a man and woman can do working
together in a mental and spiritual way, I will explain that for many
years every day my wife wrote me a letter of from one to a dozen pages
just as the spirit moved her. She wrote without special thought as to
form or matter, with no foolish fear that she would repeat herself
or say an inconsistent thing. She simply thought aloud, and wrote it
out for no eye but that ‘of her own true lover.’ As she is a woman
of lofty aspirations, with heart filled with love and a desire for
righteousness, the general tenor of those letters you may guess,
although you could not as yet fully appreciate the great and exalted
thought. Every morning on my table (for we each had a room of our own),
I found my letter, and fervently I daily pressed the message to my lips
and softly broke the seal, read the letter through once, sometimes
twice to get its full import; and if I did not seem to grasp it then,
I laid it by until the following day. But generally at once, my soul
saturated with joy--for you must never forget that the highest joys are
those of thought--I took my pen, went carefully over the letter, marked
out a word here and there, inserted another. By arrangement my wife
wrote only on every other line, and sometimes skipped several, leaving
a blank space to be filled up by me, as a hint that I should carry the
thought further and give a completeness to that which she had begun,
or to answer a question.

“There is only one source of knowledge--all other is second hand.
At the first the truth was whispered to some man (when I say man of
course I include woman, as the term always should) direct. This we
call inspiration. Moses went up into the mountain--as all men must
to receive truth; that is, they must withdraw for a season from the
distractions, ambitions and diluting influences of lower thought
currents--and there the tables of stone were delivered to him. A
beautiful allegory--and true! Jesus went up into the mountain alone,
and also with the disciples. You and I now are on the Mount of
Transfiguration, and you will never be the same woman who made the
ascent, but one transfigured--that is, changed--greater and better.

“That which was pure inspiration in her letters--and inspiration comes
only when you work for love and not for hire, and for the approbation
of one--I marked in parenthesis with red ink, meaning by this that it
should be copied by her into a book which we called ‘Our Book.’ This
book was not for publication, but for no eyes but our own. The thoughts
therein recorded were neither hers nor mine, but ours; for I had
corrected her thought or carried it further, and as she did the final
copying, the form of the thought was changed often from its original
intent. Thus neither of us could pick from this book our own thoughts,
such was the perfect commingling. The great advantage at that time of
writing out in language was that it gave precision and material form
to that which was purely spiritual; serving as basis for a better
comprehension of what at that time might in the hurry and strife of
worldly affairs have eluded our grasp--‘Thoughts that broke through
fancy and escaped,’ as the prophet has spoken.

“You must remember that each bud flowers but once, and each flower
has its own minute of perfect beauty; so in the garden of the soul,
each feeling has its flowering instant in which it bursts forth into
radiance. Now I live amid a continual blossoming of roses, and no
longer do I endeavor to imprison them in words. The exquisite joys of
personal relationship with the loved one were then ours, as they are
now, for nothing good ever grows stale or unprofitable unless misused.
In those days there was a slight impatience to grasp these exquisite
joys of thought and feeling, and this impulse you see pictured in
our writing out the thought in words; but now we have come to a full
comprehension of the fact that we are living in eternity, not time, and
there need be, must not be haste.

“So we now live apart or together, which ever seemeth best; and when
we meet it is as a bridal morning--in fact, life to us is a wedding
journey, for Heaven is ours. We each are self-reliant, as you see it
is not necessary for us to live together continually, and yet we each
depend on the other. If accident should destroy her body or mine, the
spirit of the other would also withdraw and new bodies would be formed;
and of course we would ever be together, for like attracts like.

“Thus you see how, walking hand in hand, heart to heart, each working
for the approbation of the other, all with perfect faith and trust,
though one sinned the other was only waiting to forgive; a continual
friendly strife as to who should breathe the finer atmosphere, have the
nobler aim, the purer thought; that the bad died from inanition, the
unworthy ceased to be simply through lack of exercise, and only the
good remained and its continual use gave constantly increased power and
strength; each criticising, which implies both approbation and censure.
Never arguing or belittling ourselves and the theme by controversy,
always full of hope, good cheer and love--which, remember, encompasses
in itself all the virtues--you can comprehend how life was a continual
courtship; and as fast as we were able to understand truth, it came
to us clear, limpid, transparent. Things which once seemed opaque,
dense, complex, now were clear as noonday. Gradually the fog lifted, we
breathed the pure ozone of life. Faith in each brought faith in God; so
that ‘He doeth all things well,’ was not said alone in words, but it
became a part of our lives. We studied truth--we lived truth, we became
truth.

“Do not imagine that our interchange of thought was limited to cold
written correspondence, for at times we romped through the garden and
groves adjoining our dwelling like two children. Strife and reaching
out, yearning for knowledge were put aside. We endeavored to live in a
soul-house, clear as glass, in which the ray of light coming from the
great Source of all life and light could freely penetrate to its inmost
corner. We were ever alert for the coming gleam, and ever in these play
spells, which came daily, we saw the ever-rising sun of truth.

“Why I have told you so distinctly about the daily writing of our best
thoughts, is because there is ever a border-land between truth and
error, where dwell mysticism, which is miasma to the soul. Some talk
mysticism and thus move in a circle; but by writing out and subjecting
the thought afterward to the keen analysis of the masculine and
feminine mind, any error is detected.

“Friend, it may seem strange to you, but there was once a time years
ago when I doubted the truth of the Bible; but I was brought by my
loved one out of the darkness into the light. Slowly but surely the
mist lifted and the sun came out brighter and brighter, and whereas I
was once blind I now see. Never doubt it, friend, but tell it to the
far off corners of the earth--write it in your heart in letters of
gold, that men may see _the Bible is true_. The life of my loved one,
and my life which is hers, has proved it. For love is life, and in this
love of man for woman God has pictured the true fruition--which is
perfect knowledge. For is it not plain that he who truly loves cannot
prove inconstant? and where the woman truly loves she is bound by the
law of God to constancy. They cannot fall as long as love is held
inviolate; and once loving, love cannot be violated.

“But it is growing late and you had better climb up the ladder and go
to bed. Though to-morrow is the day of rest, we will stroll through
the woods; and by the way, I have a great and important truth to tell
you. You need not write it, but I will talk as we stroll; the nature of
what I will tell is so peculiar you will remember it all and can write
it out at home. You are making progress I see. You can undress in the
moonlight, and I will place my cot out beneath the trees and sleep. I
delight to rest out under the open sky, while the stars keep vigil,
some disappearing from sight and others coming up over the horizon to
take their places. How quietly they come! How simple yet ever wonderful
are the works of God! And so it is that man will come to perfection,
for does it not say ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see
God’?”




CHAPTER XX. THE ARREST.


I climbed the ladder and looked out of the open window on the great,
serene and silent scene spread out before me. Great gulfs of shadows
lay under the trees, a gentle breeze stirred the branches, and their
upturned leaves glimmered silvery in the moonlight which covered the
sleeping earth as with a garment.

I undressed and knelt beside the little bed and prayed my first prayer.

Thirty-seven years had slipped past me--my wavy-brown hair was already
sprinkled with white; lines of care were on my face; girlhood gone; the
marks of age had come; I was reaching out toward two score, and I had
never prayed. Of course I had read the prayer-book, and in church I had
mumbled certain words; but now for the first time I fell on my knees
and buried my face in my hands. The hot tears came quick and fast, and
trickled through my fingers; but they were tears of joy, not sorrow. At
last life seemed to show a gleam of meaning! There was purpose in it
all, God’s purpose! I prayed that I might do His will. The only words
that came to my sobbing throat, and these I said over and over again,
were: “Oh, give me a clean heart and a right spirit!”

I got into bed, which never before seemed so welcome. I seemed to relax
every muscle and abandon myself to rest. I heard the far-away hooting
of a whippoorwill--the gentle murmur of the winds as they sighed
through the branches seemed to sing me a sweet lullaby. I imagined I
was again a child; so sweet and perfect was the rest; and I remembered
the gentle baritone voice of The Man as he had said, “Blessed are the
pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed----” I was asleep.

It seemed as if I had not slept ten minutes, but I found afterward five
hours had passed, when I was startled by a wild yelling, and a coarse,
grating, brutal voice that shouted:

“Now we have got ’em--pound in the door!”

Bang--crash it went, and the tramping of a score of feet I heard below.
I jumped from bed, and without a thought as to what I would do grabbed
the end of the ladder, and in a twinkling it was on the floor under my
feet.

“There, boys, didn’t I tell you? They’re up-stairs. There, Bill, why in
hell didn’t you ketch that ladder afore they pulled it up, or else go
up it?”

“What, you think that I’d go up that ladder alone and fight the two of
’em? Not much! Why, the man alone is a terror--and the woman, God help
us! she’d scratch my eyes out afore the rest and you could come up.”

“Hey, you, up thar, you old reprobate, we are on to you, don’t yer see?
Now come down peaceable or it’ll go hard with you.”

They waited for an answer, but not a word did I say. I hastily had put
on my dress, and stood with a little hickory-bottomed chair in my hands
near the opening in the floor through which I had pulled the ladder.

“Hain’t you goin’ to answer? Well, all right, don’t then! We’ll jist
make a bonfire on this yer floor and see if it singes yer manes.”

Some one of the rabble outside here fired a revolver several times,
but I rightly guessed this was only to frighten. I still stood firm.
Perhaps I was frightened, but if so it did not affect my strength,
for I was waiting for a head to appear at the opening, and I did not
have to wait long, for soon there was a whispered consultation below.
I heard a hoarse whisper say, “No, you go”--“Well then, Jake, you try
it,”--“Hell, who’s afraid! Here, you, give me a lift,” and a hand
grasped the edge of the floor.

I stepped back, gripped the chair and swung it aloft, and through the
floor by the glare of the torches I saw the face of Bilkson, the
junior. That chair was well on its errand before I caught sight of the
countenance; but no matter, I would not have stayed it if I could.
Crash--down went the man. I heard him fall like a dead weight, just as
I have seen a bale of hay tumbled out of a barn door.

“I’m shot! I’m shot! Run for a doctor, boys. I’m dying! A minister. Oh,
Judas! I’m shot through the brain,” I heard him scream.

“Shet up, ye dam fool! Yer haven’t any brains to shoot. Nobody’s shot.
They hit you wid a club--’ats all. Yer haven’t been hurt. Yes, by
George! yer smeller is broken, and yer had better spit out them teeth
afore yer swallers ’em. Gawd help him, boys, I’se glad it ain’t me.
He’s got a bad swipe. Well, it’s his bizness anyway, not ours. We jest
come ter see the funf an’ lend a hand if we was needed.”

Here I heard a voice coming from a little distance. “We got him! We got
him!” There was a sudden stampede below for the outside, and looking
out of the window I saw by the glare of the torches (the moon had gone
down and it was now quite dark), five or six of the ruffians holding
The Man. He offered no resistance, but two had seized either arm, and
two had hold of his collar from behind, and they were leading him
toward the house.

“We’ve got him! We’ve got him!” they shouted. “Now wasn’t he sharp?
Heard us a-coming, got out of the window, and carried the cot down
under a tree and pretended to be asleep. Oh yer can’t fool us, old
man--we’re on to you.”

“Why, Bilkson, you said he wore false whiskers and a wig--look here!”
and the young wretch gave a savage pull at the snowy beard, and a man
behind grabbed into his hair with a jerk that nearly threw The Man off
from his feet.

“Now wot’s the use of yankin’ of him around so?” said a tall young
fellow. “Look at that shoulder, will you. He kin lick any one of you if
you give him a show, and as long as he is decent and ain’t tryin’ to
get away, let up on him, will you now! I’ll vouch for him.”

At this they loosened their hold, but stood around; some with clubs,
several carried pitchforks, and two had revolvers which they brandished
and now and then fired in the air. All the while the yelling and
running talk filled the air, oaths and obscene jokes were bandied
about, and I saw that several carried bottles which were freely passed
around.

They stood outside for a minute, all asking questions of The Man. “Who
are you and where did you come from? Enticin’ foolish women out here,
that is fine bizness, ain’t it? We’ll show you!” and I saw a fist held
up close to that fine face.

One fellow took off his slouch hat and struck The Man with it, at the
same time saying: “See, I’m the only one in the gang what respects
you.” At this sally there was a big laugh. “He says he is a son of God.
You heard him say that, Jake, up at the store?”

“Yes,” said Jake, “he said not only he was a son of God but we all
is. Where is the gal--she hasn’t got away? The city gent says she is
up-stairs fixen her toilet so as to come down and receive the callers.”

“Go up again, Bilkson, and tell her I’m dead gone on her.”

The handkerchiefs tied around the face of the junior smothered the
reply, and still the rabble yelled and talked. Through a crack between
the logs I saw a bottle passed to the tall young fellow I have spoken
of, and I saw him take it and fling it far into the bushes, as he said
in a commanding voice: “Here, you fellers, I’ve seen enough of this.
We came out here with these two city gents to arrest the man and gal.
Now, what the devil are you doing, just standing around getting drunk
and yellin’ like fools?--You, old man, they’ve got you and air going to
take you to Buffalo, and the gal too, wherever she is. There’s another
city chap out in the bush. Now go ’long peaceable-like both of you, and
I’ll knock the senses out of any man what lays a hand to you. I will,
or my name ain’t Sam Scott.”

Up to this time The Man had not spoken, and I could not detect from the
flare of the torches that the calm had left his beautiful face. As a
lamb, dumb before the shearer, so opened he not his mouth. He turned
and looked at Sam Scott and said, quietly,

“Friend, we will go with you.” Then in a louder voice, which I knew was
for me, “Do not fear--no harm can come to you. We will go.” I hesitated
not a moment, but lowered the ladder, and in an instant I stood
among the rabble as they crowded about me, with faces full of wicked
curiosity, brutality and hate.




CHAPTER XXI. PERSECUTION.


“Oh, you didn’t know we was here or you wouldn’t have kep’ us waitin’,
would you?”--“Now, ain’t she a slick un!--and in her bare feet too.
Well, the walk through the grass will be good fer her corns.”--“Say,
now less get her drunk. She’ll be awful funny when she’s full,” and
they passed up a whisky-bottle toward me; and so the remarks flew as
the crowd of thirty or more men kept pushing closer around, anxious to
get a nearer view of me.

“I say, miss, is that the latest style of wearing hair on Canal
street?”--“Oh, you forgot your bustle!”--“You don’t feel as big as you
generally do!”--“You won’t snub us now, will you, even if we do live at
the Cross-roads?”

Sam Scott took me by the arm. “Don’t be afraid, missis--I know them
all. Let us go,” he said.

I looked into the face of this tall young man, and saw the look of
quiet determination as we moved out of the door. There are two kinds
of composure--one which speaks of calm rest and peace, the other a
calm that is so quiet it threatens. It is the hush we feel before the
storm--the composure of the couchant leopard before he springs. This
was the look on the face of this twenty years old stripling as he
pushed me not ungently before him and motioned that The Man should walk
by my side.

Bilkson led the way, his head tied up so he could not wear his hat.
Doubtless he exaggerated the severity of his wounds, hoping to get
sympathy from the crowd. But be it known this was not a sympathetic
assemblage. Scott seemed the only sober man among them, and they kept
still crowding near, and still the ribald jeering continued. Scott
walked close behind me, and I noticed that he was the only one who
carried no weapon--even Bilkson, who walked like a drum major at the
head of the procession, carried on his shoulder a fencerail.

“The band will now play the wedding-march,” shouted a loud mouthed
buffoon. “They took their wedding tower afore the ceremony, didn’t
they?” And still the awful obscenity which I dare not think of, still
less write, continued.

One man, no longer young but drunker than the rest, big, red whiskered
and burly, reeled up by my side and endeavored to put his arm around
me. “Only one kiss, my dear--just one. Now don’t be frisky,” he
hiccoughed.

I felt the nauseous hot whisky breath against my cheek. A suppressed
scream came from my lips and I started back. Suddenly I saw the right
arm of Scott shoot forward. I saw the ruffian dodge and thought Scott
had struck at him and missed his mark; but quicker than the flash of
thought the tall young man grew a foot taller, the head went back, the
chest heaved, the lungs filled, his body seemed to sway to the left and
pitch forward, the brawny left fist shot out like a thunderbolt and
caught the ruffian square on the angle of the jaw. The man seemed to
spring into the air, and as he fell in a heap ten feet away I saw blood
gush from his eyes, nose and mouth. The first right hand move of Scott
was merely a feint. As the man dodged to the left he ran square against
that terrific stroke, which was not a mere hit with the clenched hand,
but a stroke backed up by the entire weight of the body. In dodging the
blow he had rushed to meet it.

As we passed on, scarcely pausing during the incident I have described,
I heard a coarse voice behind say, “He is dead! He got that awful left
hander! He’s done for sure! What will his wife say to this?”

Some fell back to look after the man who was hurt and others dropped
off or fell behind one by one. I looked in the east and saw the great
red streaks which told of the coming of the day. The stars disappeared.
I heard the merry song of birds (how the birds do sing early in the
morning!) and when we reached the village the sun was just peering over
the far off hills. Bilkson, still with his fence rail, marched ahead.
The Man and I walked hand in hand, for my woman’s nature had began
to assert itself; although at first I felt strong and able to endure
anything, but as we entered the village my hand went out to The Man and
I felt his reassuring grasp.

This was the first time my hand had touched his, and the only time he
had come near me since the first night I saw him, when he passed his
hand over my face as I went to sleep.

The mob had disappeared, but a quarter or an eighth of a mile back,
I saw coming, jauntily swinging a cane, a high white hat on the back
of his head, the Prince Albert coat buttoned around his pompous form,
Mr. Pygmalion Woodbur, attorney and counsellor at law. Close behind me
still followed Sam Scott, dark and determined.

We entered the little tumbledown depot, and The Man and I sat down
on one of the hard benches, Sam Scott seated scowlingly between us.
Bilkson and the fencerail thought best to remain outside. Mr. Woodbur
entered and smilingly bid me “Good-morning,” stroked the high hat
and hoped I was well. He said he heard that I was in trouble; that I
had been indiscreet; and knowing my little lapses from the path of
rectitude were merely sins of the head and not of the heart, he at once
decided to befriend me, and had come out from the city to see that I
received right treatment. There I sat, hatless and shoeless, but not
friendless, for ever did I feel the serene composure of The Man, and
spread out over his bony knee I saw the great brown hand of Sam Scott.

The train was two hours late, and as we sat in the depot children came,
curiously peering in the door to see the bad man and woman whom the
officers from the city were obliged to arrest. Women came carrying
babies in their arms, and rough-whiskered but kindly-hearted men
stared at us, and carried on _sotto voce_ conversations which I could
partially hear.

“Now ain’t she a wicked-looking thing?” said a woman. “See her long
hair clear to her waist--and how brazen!” said another. “Why, if it
was me I would cry my eyes out for very shame, and there she sits pale
like and not a bit scared.”--“Ah, you Sam Scott, where did you get the
introduction?”

Sam Scott sent back a look for an answer, and the questioner sneaked
away.

I shook with the cold morning air, for I brought no wrap. One woman,
who carried a baby dressed only in its nightgown, stared at me, and
I saw her hastily throw her apron over her head and go out, running
against the door as she turned. Soon she came back. I noticed her eyes
were very red. She brought me an old pieced bed-quilt, and told me to
put it around me to keep me warm; to take it with me, and if I didn’t
have a chance to send it back I needn’t; and abruptly as she came she
rushed away.

The train arrived and we entered the smoking-car, leaving Sam Scott on
the platform. I looked at him and endeavored to speak, but the words
stuck in my throat. He guessed what I wanted to say, and stammered,

“Now, you, missis, keep still will you. I know, don’t I--how that
blamed sun does hurt my eyes!” and he began gouging one eye with the
knobby knuckles.

Arriving in Buffalo, I saw drawn up in the depot yard a patrol-wagon,
with three brass-buttoned officers seated therein. I knew they were
waiting for us, and that Bilkson had telegraphed for them, possibly to
deepen my humiliation. As we descended from the car, Bilkson called out
in the direction of the officers,

“Here they are, and you’d better look out for ’em! Just look at me
all chawed up. An awful fight we had!” And surely he looked as if he
spoke the truth, for a half dozen dirty men had contributed a dirty
handkerchief apiece to tie up his broken head. “Take no chances, or you
must run your own risks,” he continued.

At this one of the officers went back to the patrol-wagon and returned
with handcuffs.

“Here, old gal,” he said, “we’re used to sech as you--the worse you are
the better we like you! Spit and kick and scratch now all you want, but
put on the jewelry just for looks, as it is Sunday morning, you know.”

I felt the cold steel close with a snap around my wrists, we were
pushed into the wagon, Bilkson climbed on the seat with the driver, and
amid a general yell from a party of street gamins we dashed up Exchange
street. The bells were ringing, calling worshipers to church. Children
dressed out in stiff white dresses, women daintily attired, family
groups, we passed on their way to church, and they turned to look with
wondering eyes.

At Michigan street I saw coming toward us a form I knew full well,
the first and only face which I had seen--it seemed for years--which
I might truly call friend. It was Martha Heath, walking briskly
forward, going I knew to a mission Sunday-school on Perry street,
where she taught a class of grinning youngsters. She, too, looked at
the patrol-wagon with its motley load, and I saw she did not recognize
me. I thought of calling to her, but the restraining influence of the
officer’s club, who sat close to me, froze the words on my lips. Still
she looked. I held up my hands showing the handcuffs in mute appeal. I
saw the books drop from her grasp. Her hand went to her head in dazed
manner--she reeled--staggered--and grasped a friendly railing as we
whirled by.

The driver cracked his whip in the direction of a passing policeman,
and pointed over his shoulder with his thumb, and they both laughed.

“What charge?” the officer asked, as we were marched up before the high
desk at the station-house.

“Make the entry in lead pencil and call it burglary--we may want to
change it later. Oh, we’ve got it in for ’em though! Put ’em in the
freezer, and mind no one sees ’em, for we want to make ’em confess,”
said Woodbur, lowering his voice to a confidential whisper.

The next morning in the _Daily Times_ was the following item, and the
clipping now adorns my scrap book.

  BEAUTY’S BLOWOUT.

  A FREE RIDE.

  HOW ASPASIA HOBBS HOBNOBS WITH CAPTAIN KILBUCK AT NO. 10.

  Church goers yesterday morning in the vicinity of Main and Exchange
  streets were treated to the shocking sight of seeing one of Buffalo’s
  former society belles taking a ride with the genial Jimmy Smith, who
  received first prize in the recent Times contest as the most popular
  policeman in Buffalo.

  Old residents well remember Hobbs, of Hobbs, Nobbs & Porcine, who
  skipped by the light of the moon to Canada, and the fair virgin in
  the patrol-wagon was none other than Aspasia Hobbs, daughter of the
  above. Now who says there is nothing in heredity? Aspasia was attired
  in her bare feet and a blue quilt which the officers provided for her
  for decency’s sake, and looked as if she had been having a high old
  time with the elderly hayseed seated in the wagon with her.

  Well, the good book is right when it says, “There is no fool like an
  old fool.” Verily, when a woman falls she goes to depths to which
  a man can not descend. The festive Hobbs has been going it strong
  lately and as there are quite a number of charges against her,
  doubtless Judge Prince will do his duty. By the way, we hear the
  worthy judge has decided to accept the nomination for another term.




CHAPTER XXII. BY THE WAY.


Reader, pray do not be a fool and say this story is fiction. Would
that part of it was! But the treatment I received by the mob on that
terrible night is the most natural and easiest thing in the world
under the present conditions of society. It may happen to you, and
worse, anytime, in any town, village or city, from Boston to Texas--for
humanity is the same wherever you go.

Woodbur and Bilkson arrived at the village of Jamison at eight o’clock
on that Saturday evening. They called on the shoemaker, who was a
justice of the peace, showed him their warrants for the arrest of
“John Doe” and “Mary Roe,” supposed to be secreted in a log house in
a certain woods two miles away. They desired to surround the house at
three o’clock in the morning and capture the inmates, who were said to
be desperate characters.

The shoemaker J. P. put on his specs, read the warrant with a great
show of wisdom, said of course he would help make the capture, and so
would his son Tom.

Tom was called in, told the circumstances, and requested to engage the
services of two or three trusty men to go along. “But, Tom, mind you
keep the matter quiet,” wound up the shoemaker.

So Tom promised, and of course told confidentially every one he saw
that the “cranky old man and stuck up woman” they had seen, who lived
in Smith’s log house up in the clearing, were escaped murderers, and
that all who wanted to help make the capture must be at the tavern at
three o’clock Sunday morning. Now excitement is a scarce article in
country towns, and mankind is ever greedy for it; so at three o’clock
the select male population of Jamison was at the tavern--mind you not
bad people either, just good, plain, homely, honest citizens. Most of
them would have been terribly insulted if you had hinted that they were
not Christians.

I told you only one man out of fifty thinks, that the rest have no
opinions but those furnished by parents, preachers and sophistical
politicians. I do not say these opinions are error necessarily, but
that they are simply borrowed. Having received this second-hand
opinion, they will dig over the whole earth for reasons and excuses
to defend it, honestly thinking the while they are in search of
truth--mere followers of a bell-wether.

Bilkson just at this time was the aforesaid bell-wether. Someone said
this man and woman were criminals (there is the opinion); therefore
they must be--in fact, there was no proof to the contrary. Then they
began to back up the opinion which had been so skilfully injected
into them. They remembered certain blasphemous remarks of the man,
for had he not said, “I am the son of God, and all men may be if
they claim their heritage,”--“I have divine rights by reason of
heavenly parentage,”--“A church is no more sacred than a blacksmith
shop,”--“Sunday is no more holy than any other day, and a preacher’s
calling no more sacred than a farmer’s,”--“No man by dying can wipe out
the sins of others, but every man is a savior of his race who lashes
himself to the mast of righteousness” etc.?

“Just as if there is any sense,” said the blacksmith, “in lashing one’s
self to the mast except to save one’s self! He is a Catholic, too,
for didn’t he say he not only worshiped Jesus but also His mother?”
And another declared he had heard him say he not only worshiped the
Virgin Mary, but all good women who conceived good thoughts and had
high and holy aspirations. Then someone had asked him what worship was,
and he said it “was not an act of the body, like going to a church
and kneeling, but only that state of mind where the worshiper thought
of the person or being worshiped with profound respect, good-will and
love.”

The simple country people were very sure that any man who held such
heretical beliefs was a rascal or worse, and being about like other
people at the time, were honest in the belief that a man who rejects
the Trinity cannot have much respect for the Ten Commandments. So they
were glad of an opportunity to assist in ridding the community of a man
who was endangering the religious faith of the young. In short, the man
was corrupting the youth of Athens and must go.

On this particular occasion Bilkson was leader, for when a man assumes
leadership and calls in a loud voice “Fall in everybody,” he is never
without a following.

The persistent advertiser in trade is a self-appointed leader, and
if he talks big and keeps his promise passably well, he can hold his
followers for a time at least.

If you would go well-dressed, smiling, serene and confident, to the
homes of any of these mobbers, they would acknowledge your superiority;
and if you were only firm and plausible, they would grant you any favor
and lend you any assistance you desired. You are leader then--not
Bilkson. But woe betide you if cold, naked, a-hungered, you fall
famishing on their doorsteps, and at the same time some Bilkson
happens to point the finger of suspicion in your direction. You
have no “inflooence.” “Inflooence” is king not only with Straight,
superintendents of schools, and other politicians, but also in society
and church. He who subscribes the largest amount to the pastor’s
salary has the most to say in the management of the church, and if
he becomes displeased he threatens to “come out,” (the “come outers”
are numerous), and adds, “You know that if I go I do not go alone.”
Thus does he shake his “inflooence” over us as a club, and we cringe,
explain, apologize, and the fear that the big subscriber will tramp out
with heavy tread, numerous following and fierce black looks, disappears
as we see the great man placated by our abject attitude.

Fear of losing the favor of people of influence keeps men respectful
and decent when nothing else will.

“Inflooence” is first cousin to Mrs. Grundy. Inflooence is king--Mrs.
Grundy queen.

Note you how some men leave their quiet and virtuous homes where Mrs.
Grundy’s goggle eyes are on every side, and go to New York where
Mrs. Grundy is not watching them. How intent they are on seeing the
“elephant,” and how they do buy green goods and gold bricks! Great is
“Inflooence”--great is Mrs. Grundy!

A grimy tramp with thick neck and knotty club possesses “inflooence.”
His wishes in rural districts at least are often respected.

Now you are a woman. You may be free from guilt and you may not, but
if you are purity itself--sorrowfully do I say it!--in the year of
Our Lord, 1891, innocence is not a sufficient shield; and if you are
weak, weary and footsore, from the miles and miles you have come down
through years of injustice, and the crowd is pressing you close with
intent to stone you, it is a miracle if from out the mob there steps
the commanding figure of a man, and raising his hand aloft to warn them
back, says in a voice not loud but which all can hear,

“Let him who is without sin cast the first stone!”




CHAPTER XXIII. THE FREEZER.


The freezer in No. 10 police-station is a very warm place--an iron
cage set up on a platform in a large stone room; said cage being made
of iron bars, set three inches apart, with iron floor; the furniture
consisting of just two pieces, a wooden bench and an iron bucket. This
cage is open on all sides. “So as to give ventilation,” I was told by
the officer who helped me up the steps. He remarked as the grated door
swung to with a snap, “Oh, now me charmer, you will feel at home, for
you have been here many a time afore. Oh, we knows you, we do. If yer
wants anything jist tech the ’lectric bell.”

This kind of cell, I am told by those who have tried both, is much
worse to be dreaded than a dungeon. Open on all sides, the light is
glaring; and any one coming into the room, can walk around the cage,
viewing the unhappy prisoner from every side.

It was eleven o’clock Sunday morning when I was locked up, and about
every hour an officer came in and looked at me as though I were a wild
beast. Once two men came together, and stood carrying on a joking
conversation between themselves. One seemed to be a philosopher, for
as they went out I heard him say, “It beats the devil to what depths a
woman falls when she does go wrong!”

At six o’clock the captain came in, and he seemed more gentlemanly and
considerate than any of the officers I had seen. He took off his cap,
and leaning against the bars of my cage, said,

“Now, you woman, I am awful sorry for you and am going to help you out
of this scrape. I know all about you just as well or better than you
know yourself. In fact, your partner, the old man, has given the whole
thing away--made a clear confess, don’t you know--and he will have to
go down. Now if you will make a clean breast of it all, we can let you
off. We already know all about it, but want you to confess just for
a formality so as to lay the case before the judge, who is an awful
tender-hearted man and does just as I tell him. Now, lady, what do you
say? Come, now, shall I unlock that cage and take you in the office
where we can write it all out? Come, now, why don’t you speak, haven’t
you any tongue? Well, you are the queerest woman! Can’t talk--eh? Oh!
well, it’s no difference to me of course. I just wanted to do you a
favor, but you have about as much gratitude as most of the rest of the
soiled doves. All right, you needn’t say a word if you don’t want to.
Hey, you there, Murphy, don’t let anybody see this gal. Bread and water
will do, too. She ain’t any appetite. Do you hear?--I’m going now,
miss. If you have anything to say now is your time; but if you prefer
to have the cage locked for a week or so, why I ’spose you must have
your own way. We’re allus willing to oblige our guests, you know. Can’t
even say thank you, can you?” (Hesitates at the door--looks back and
goes).

Bang went the outside door and I was alone for the night--my only
company four electric lights, which made a dazzling glare. I lay down
on the bench and tried to sleep. Then I tried the floor. At last I
propped the bench against the bars, and half-seated, half-reclining,
the long hours passed as a fitful nightmare.

I have since learned that when Martha Heath saw me in the patrol-wagon
she hastened straight to the station-house, but they told her I was
not there, and showed her the blotter showing the name of “Mary
Roe”--Bilkson having explained that my right name was unknown, and
further by keeping a prisoner very close they are more apt to confess.

Martha insisted on seeing Mary Roe, who they said was asleep and must
not be disturbed. “Call to-morrow,” they said. Martha still insisted,
until the captain bawled out to the doorman, “Hey, you, have you got
a vacant cell for this crazy woman?” Martha was not to be frightened
by such a threat so she said, “All right, put me in a cell! I dare you
to! I’m no better than Aspasia Hobbs, and you have locked her up.” The
captain took the persistent Martha by the arm, and led her to the door
and showed her down the steps.

The good girl saw she was powerless, and as my mother knew nothing
about the matter she concluded to wait until Monday morning and then
stir heaven and earth if needs be to get me out.

Monday morning, bright and early, Mr. Bilkson and Mr. Woodbur walked
arm in arm down South Division street, to the cottage of Mrs. Hobbs,
and Grimes showed them into the little parlor. Mrs. Hobbs entered,
delighted to think two such eminent gentlemen should call on her; and
in her joy she forgot the time of day, and believed it was only a
social call, for on Delaware Avenue callers were constant. What is the
matter with South Division street?

Both gentlemen shook hands with the widow. Then they whispered
together. Then Woodbur said,

“Mr. Bilkson, will you please oblige the lady and also myself by
assuming a standing position?”

Bilkson obeyed.

“Mr. Bilkson, now will you further oblige us by opening your mouth?”

Bilkson’s face opened in half, and revealed to the now thoroughly
astonished woman a very lacerated set of gums and absence of front
teeth.

“That will do, Mr. Bilkson. Now your eye.”

Mr. Bilkson removed the bandage from his left eye, and revealed a
symphony in black, blue and yellow, shaded with green.

“That will do, Mr. Bilkson--be seated.”

Woodbur still remained standing in tragic attitude, with his right hand
thrust in the bosom of his buttoned coat. Suddenly raising his voice he
shouted,

“Madame, it was your daughter who done this--your daughter! Yes,
madame, your daughter! Ah, you doubt it; but I have the proof, madame,
the proof!” and he drew forth a copy of the _Morning Times_ on which
the ink was scarcely dry and read in a deep sepulchral voice the
article which I have already mentioned, “Beauty’s Blowout,” etc.

Among his other accomplishments Mr. Woodbur was an elocutionist, and
Grimes afterward told me that he read the article so effectively and
with such fierce looks directed over the top of the paper at Mrs.
Hobbs, that at the last words the good lady fell in hysterics on the
sofa, screaming:

“Oh, my daughter, my adopted daughter! why did you do this? Why did
you do it? Disgraced us! You have disgraced us! I, who before we
bust, when we lived on the avenue, furnished you a chiropodist, and
an elocootionist, and a manicure, and the best pew in the Rev. Doctor
Fourthly’s! I, who educated you, and cared for you, and never let you
go to the public but always sent you to a private school, and taught
you dancing, French and music, and gave tiddle de winks and progressive
eucher parties in your honor! Oh, why, w-w-w-h-y--d-d-did you do
i-t-t-t!”

Dr. Bolus was hastily sent for and administered morphine and whisky.
When my mother had been quieted (Woodbur and Bilkson had in the
meantime departed), the doctor called in Grimes and demanded the reason
of this row which had so unnerved Mrs. Hobbs.

“Some dam lie about ’Pasia that is in the paper,” said Grimes. “Two
devils with high hats was here--one had no teeth--and they read the
paper at Mrs. Hobbs’ head so she just throws up her hands and yells
and yells and cries and shouts and thanks God that ’Pasia ain’t her own
child. And then she cries agin and so she kep’ it up ’till you come.”

“Why, why this is queer, very strange! Two--what did you say they were
that read the paper, Grimes? Strange!--Say, you black cub” (calling to
a colored boy holding his horse at the door) “get up town, as quick as
you can and get me a _Times_. Don’t play marbles on the way, or I’ll
slice you up for a subject.”

The boy soon returned with the paper, and the doctor quickly adjusted
his glasses and read the article. He dropped the paper from his hands
and sat in amazement.

“It’s acute dementia, combined with melancholia! I knew it all
along--hereditary! Who were her parents, Mrs. Hobbs? Ah, yes, you don’t
know. That proves it--hereditary! Takes to crime like a duck to water.
Why, she’s crazy, that’s all, Mrs. Hobbs, crazy as a bed bug! Now take
these powders as I told you, Mrs. Hobbs--but then, we ought to get the
girl out though. What’s that! Great God! She killed Bilkson did you
say? Why didn’t you tell me five minutes ago that Bilkson was here? Oh,
I see; she _tried_ to kill him. That is different.”

“And it’s a pity she didn’t succeed!” broke in Grimes, who was standing
in the doorway.

“Will you shut up, you old fool!” shouted the doctor. “How impertinent
servants are getting now-a-days! Never mind, Grimesy, you don’t know
any better. I’ll be here with my double carriage at one o’clock, and
we will all go up and get Aspasia out. Oh, I say, Grimes, if the old
lady has ’em again just put the powders in the whisky and give her a
tablespoonful every ten minutes until she lets up--hear?”




CHAPTER XXIV. THE TRIAL.


  SCENE--_The freezer--enter Officer Murphy with big bunch of
  keys--unlocks door of cage._

MURPHY--Now, you there, lady, make yer toilet and fix yer finery for in
fifteen minutes the court opens and yer the first on the docket. Doctor
Bolus axed yer a lot of questions didn’t he? Lord, how scared he was
when I told him I was going to let you out of the cage! And yer old
woman sniveled too, and stood off clear to one side as if you was goin’
to make a swipe at her. Why wouldn’t you talk to ’em, my dear? You was
confidential enough with that black-eyed young woman. She knows more
than Bolus and all of ’em. She gave me a dollar and said I should get
yer a nice breakfast, and you got it too, didn’t you? Well, here’s the
dollar, I don’t want it. I don’t know nothin’ ’bout you except what the
black-eyed one said, but yer all right, I know you is. It’s all a great
big fool blunder, that’s what it is. The captain has let that Woodbur
shyster razzle-dazzle him--beg yer pardon, miss, I didn’t mean to
swear. Oh, I didn’t swear though, did I? But my feelins is so worked up
since the black-eyed one told me of you that I come dam near swearin’
right afore you. Yes, yer looks all right. Yer ain’t exact the size of
the black-eyed one, but then her close fits ye pretty fair. Come on now
and don’t be scared--see. Ye haven’t cried yet and ye mustn’t now or
I will slop over myself. The jedge tries to look awful cross, but he
isn’t half as bad as folks think he is. Don’t be scared of him, and if
he is not too full yer will get off easy.

  SCENE--_Police court--Judge Prince on throne--Officer Donahue with
  brass buttons, helmet and club, stands by side of throne--Hustler,
  Bilkson and Woodbur holding conversation--Mixed crowd of onlookers in
  the background._

[_Oyez_, _Oyez_, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera].

JUDGE PRINCE (_Reading._) “Mary Roe, right name unknown. First charge,
larceny in taking glue from factory of Hustler & Co. Second charge,
drunk and disorderly. Third charge, assault with intent to kill.”
(_Spoken_) Now, Mr. Woodbur, you represent the prosecution--which
charge are you going to try her on? Oh! I see, last first--assault.
Well, bring on your witnesses, and quick, too--here are (_counting_)
twenty-one bums on the list and the Polish church riot, besides----let
’er go, Gallagher! Bilkson, the name is--first name? Why yes, of course,
in my unofficial capacity I know your name, but the court is not
supposed to know nothing--Woodbur, can’t you let up on that chuckle?
John Bilkson--what the devil’s name is the man standing like that with
his mouth open? Why, someone might fall in. Oh, your teeth are gone!
Yes, I see. Keep the beefsteak on the peeper--it will soon be all
right. The _Express_ tried to give me a black-eye too, last ’lection.
Did they do it? Not if the court house understands itself as Shallkopp
says. Yes, she rides a bicycle--that’s right, make her out as bad as
you can--hold on, let me write that down (_writing--to the officer
standing like a statue near_) Donahue, how the devil do you spell it?
Bi----call it a b-i-k-e and let ’er go? Yes--go on. I am all ears. (_In
a roar._) Silence in the court.

You tried to make the arrest peaceably, an’ then you went up the ladder
and she hit you with an ax--not an ax though, Bilkson, come off, it
would have gone clear through your skull, thick as it is. Oh, let up!
She hit you, that is enough--with an u-n-k-n-o-w-n w-e-e-p-u-n. All
right, go on--Donahue, make the cod dab fool shut up that cavern.
Haven’t you showed me three times she knocked your teeth out?

Oh, yes, you searched the house and didn’t find any glue. Well, what
if she did carry off a package every Saturday--how do you know it was
glue? Hasn’t anyone got a right to carry a package without being jumped
on by a fool glue-maker?--Well, that is all right--let me say a word
now and then--there ain’t no proof she ever stole a cent’s worth of
glue; and what’s more, you hadn’t any business out there tryin’ to
get up in her room at three o’clock in the morning when you hadn’t
any appointment with her--(_aside_--Eh! Donahue, how’s that!!) No,
sir; and you too, Woodbur, you old stick-fast, what the devil are you
always tryin’ to get decent folks in trouble for? Haven’t women got
hard enough time to get along without being dogged by a pot-bellied
shyster, a cross between a detective and an attorney, who sports a high
white hat with a black band, which means he is in mourning for his
lost virtue?--Shut up, will you. Don’t talk back to me, Woodbur! I’m
on to you with both feet. You haven’t proved a thing against the gal
or against the man. The old fellow enticed the gal off, into the woods
did he? How do you know he did, are you a mind reader? Well, I see no
fault in him. I’ll scourge him and let him go--that is, I’ll fine him
five dollars on general principles for disorderly conduct and kick
him out. Will you shut up, you dirty blackguard! Confound you Woodbur,
who is running this court anyway, you or me? What do I care for Doctor
Bolus? To hell with Bolus! Where is he? I’ll give him thirty days. The
girl ain’t crazy. She ain’t crazy, I tell you--she has got more sense
than anyone in the court room but me--(_aside_--Eh, Donahue?) Of course
she wouldn’t answer their questions. Neither would I. Here you arrest a
man and woman on a mere groundless suspicion, or ’cause you got a spite
against them, and then the whole police department turns to and tries
to justify the arrest by blackening their characters. When you once
puts your claws on a man you turn the county upside down and wrong side
out to convict him--when you know he ain’t guilty, but you just work
to make a reputation for yourself. I’m drunk, am I, Bilkson? Here you
clerk, Mr. Bilkson is fined five dollars for contempt of court. What’s
that? I have no right to fine you? Oh, no, that’s so, I haven’t?--make
it ten, Mr. Clerk. No, sir, I won’t even fine the old man, but I’ll
fine you, Woodbur, if you give me any more of your jaw. You Balaam’s
ass--you make me weary! You say you found ’em out there together.
Well, you old reprobate, hasn’t the gal reached the age of consent?
(_Aside_--Eh--Donahue, how’s that?) _Silence in the court!!_ Git out
of here, Mary Roe alias Aspasia Hobbs. Bounce you, John Doe, and never
show up here again! You’re old enough to know better. Great Scott,
Bilkson, haven’t you shut up that cavern yet? Yes, I know she knocked
out your teeth. I’m dab glad of it. (_Aside_--Eh! Donahue?)

Next!

       *       *       *       *       *

Martha Heath took my arm as we walked down the steps from the
court-room, and The Man walked by my side. I looked at him, and on
the gentle face I saw not the slightest look of trouble, unrest or
nervous tension. While my nerves were completely unstrung by the last
three days’ experience, he looked as refreshed as if he had just come
from the quiet and restful woods. He was hatless--the same magnificent
poise of the head--calm, serene. He turned on me those wondering gentle
eyes as we stood on the walk for an instant. He did not speak. I noted
the firm chest, the strongly corded neck, the massive head with its
snow-white wavy hair, face large-featured and bronzed by the kiss of
the summer sun, lean of flesh as though chiseled by manly abstinence,
plain, but all stamped with the seal of fearless honesty, the lips
parted showing the strong white teeth, the voice came low but firm,

“If I go away I will come again,”--he turned and was lost in the crowd.


THE END.

       *       *       *       *       *

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       *       *       *       *       *

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[Illustration]

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       *       *       *       *       *

Transcriber’s Notes:

This is Elbert Hubbard’s first novel, published pseudonymously.

This book was published by J. S. Ogilvie Publishing Company, 57 Rose
Street, New York.

Footnotes have been moved to the end of each chapter and relabeled
consecutively through the document.

Illustrations have been moved to paragraph breaks near where they are
mentioned.

Punctuation has been made consistent.

The notation 1-2 for fractions has been changed to 1/2.

Variations in spelling and hyphenation were retained as they appear in
the original publication, except that obvious typographical errors have
been corrected.

p. 84: thou added (didst thou notice).